I do feel hopeful that the aging activist NIMBY set in DC is gradually losing its grip. These folks came of age in a time when so much that was good was destroyed and so much that was bad was built, that they can't imagine anything new could be good. But even then, it astounded me when, a decade or so, Darrell Issa, chair of the relevant House committee, proposed looking into the Heights Act. And the old NIMBYS, usually stalwart DC Statehood supporters, were dead set against even allowing the DC Council to be allowed to make modifications to the Height Act requirements. You'd think that giving more self-determination to DC's own elected government would always be a good thing, but no, the status quo of congressional paternalism was preferred.
Building off this as both a federal employee and a resident of the district, I’ve held for awhile that at a minimum height act repeal in the Federal Center Southwest/L’Enfant plaza area to allow for the consolidation of the federal workforce at the expense of the tear down of old unloved post war buildings. Do a similar thing for some of the defense and security agencies on the pentagon surface parking lots and it would juice metro and free up land in DC for housing. Of course GSA might be sad at having to sell of the census bureau and DoT buildings but I for one would appreciate not having to transfer to the gosh darn green line.
It’s politically counterproductive for Democrats to make it easier to build more housing within DC proper. Every extra person living in DC proper loses a vote for House and Senate, and DC will have 3 electoral college votes regardless of its population size under the 23rd Amendment.
Instead, Democrats should do everything in their power to upzone northern Virginia until everything from Alexandria to Tysons Corner is an actual city, with high rises and mid rises predominating in place of today’s dominant single family housing. Make Virginia a safe blue state with more representatives and electoral college votes after 2030.
Note that this is a direct trade off—people have to live somewhere, so if the population of the greater DC area remains constant, we should want to reduce the population of DC and increase the population of Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax, and Loudoun.
I’m sure having seen home prices in Vail the degree this location becomes a more popular ski resort is directly related to home prices. Yet the local are apoplectic.
My last apartment in DC before moving back to Philly was in a converted EPA building near the Wharf. Other than the one time a cop killed a guy during a DV call, it was a great place to live.
Can anyone illuminate me to the proper response to progressives who say that building market rate housing in DC is pointless bc the units just sit empty bc the developers get tax breaks when they're not filled? I hear all the time that the luxury apartments are just sitting empty.
If you're not in DC, it's worth noting that here (probably the same elsewhere, but I don't want to assume) the term 'luxury' is used quite liberally. Any apartment building built near-ish to a metro station in a median-income neighborhood is probably going to be called 'luxury apartments'. Developers do it to make the apartments sound more attractive, but I think it may have become counterproductive bc it gives more power to progressives fighting market-rate housing when they can call it fighting 'luxury apartments'.
I heard this one a lot when I lived in DC and it's still a staple of online antiYIMBYism everywhere. "Developers get tax breaks when [luxury apartments] aren't filled" is just Kramer from Seinfeld saying "they write it off." Yes, they don't pay taxes on a loss but they're still losing money. There is no mechanism whereby reporting a loss results in more money than they would if they were renting or selling for a taxable profit.
I would like MY’s take on other policy ideas that don’t involve Fed Transportation $, which seems like a political non-starter.
I am convinced of NYC/DC/SF etc having a zoning problem. Additionally, I’m not convinced that there’s a zoning problem in my hometown of Cincinnati or really in much of the country.
The apartment in Cincy that I rented for $600 / mo a little over a decade ago now goes for 3x that amount. There’s plenty of buildable land, plenty of zoned capacity, plenty of close-in greenfield opportunities. The city‘s metro population is up only 5-10%, below the national average.
I’ve read/heard various critiques on the post-great recession mortgage market (read: Fannie/Freddie) being unduly onerous on home buyers, freezing out the lower half of homeowners and forcing them into rentals. Erdmann has been out in front on this.
Private equity getting into housing tells me that there’s easy money (rents > cost of purchase + capital costs) to be made if you have the financing available.
The interest rate spikes of the last 2 years didn’t dampen homebuilder profits, at all! It all points to a really weird market that seems separated from the coastal malaise of restrictive zoning.
It’s a lot more than zoning. You’d have to look at how long it takes and how much money is needed to take 10 acres of raw land and turning it into 10 SFH - permits, public meetings, inspections, neighbor notification requirements, etc.
This is a great idea. I would add Las Vegas as another major metropolitan area where the federal government owns huge tracts of land. The federal government could allow housing construction on the outskirts of the suburbs of Las Vegas without interference from state and local zoning regulations.
Not directly related to the topic of the post, but whenever the New York Times publishes an article about housing, the top-voted comments (all presumably from older left-NIMBYs) are all about there's no housing shortage and how private equity is to blame for high home prices and rents. Sadly the Glaeser op-ed Matt links to in the second sentence turns out to be no exception. As Matt notes often, the housing shortage is one policy failure Blue America can't pin on Red America.
I really think this is a young vs old vs red/blue thing. While it’s not a guarantee that an older homeowner is going to be a NIMBY, it’s unlikely they’re going to be a YIMBY unless they receive some immediate tangible benefit. Younger apartments dwellers or young families have very different interests and needs that middle age and older home owners and that will always come into conflict. As has been written a lot, the majority of community input of most communities(regardless of political affiliation) is against development and it’s because the incentives for homeowners and long time community members is to be NIMBY. As long as housing is seen as an asset to build wealth, rather than a place to live, the incentives for density, additional affordable housing often goes against the interests of most affluent and successful members of a community. Until the YIMBY movement gives a good reason for NIMBYS to not to be or the incentive structure is reversed, things are unlikely to change.
I think you’re wildly overestimating how much is about value preservation vs a general opposition to change. As an example you see a ton of opposition to gentrification even from homeowners who stand to benefit.
I’m not sure if you’re replying to me or Andy but it’s both. General resistance to change is a basic universal that is really hard to overcome but the value preservation is a big thing beyond economics and traffic. People complain about “changing the character of the neighborhood.” My point is people hate change generally, and unless there’s a really massive upside economically people will resist even if they benefit in some way. I think my issue is more a general critique of classical liberalism and neoliberal economics which is what YIMBYism is that based on. There’s too much put on universalism, rationalism and a desire to fix issues. From my experience people are tribal, irrational and are only willing to fix things if the economic solution has minimal or non-existent psychological and cultural tradeoffs. I just want people to realize how hard this is beyond just the economic and logistical issues.
I don't disagree with most of what you wrote, i just wish these people would be honest about their NIMBYism instead of denying the shortage exists or blaming someone else.
I agree with Matt in everything here, so I'll just provide another fun DC Zoning nugget:
For reasons known only to God and the Bureaucracy, it is the law in DC that if your property is adjacent to Rock Creek Park - an untamed forest in the heart of the city - the Commission for Fine Arts (CFA), a federal agency, gets mandatory review of your project, no matter what the project is.
This led recently to a downzoning of a new multifamily project at Walter Reed from 300+ condos to 100ish townhouses, but also screws everyday people as well. Some friends of ours live across the street from Rock Creek, and CFA took 6 months to review the facade replacement on their house that was actively crumbling from water intrusion.
To be clear, they live across the street from a forest. I guess we need the feds there to provide review to make sure the raccoons and deer aren't opposed to our friends repairing their home?
Just an insane, unnecessary government check that shouldn't exist.
My personal favorite crazy federal idea is "Post Office Towers".
Basically, the FedGov and particularly the Postal Service are immune to local zoning ordnances. They just have to purchase land, announce to the locals that they're building an office, and build it.
My idea is for a new legislation that requires every Post Office to be built with adequate housing to sustain its local workforce; we could also do some sort of requirement for "ground floor retail space flexible enough to satisfy basic needs", as well as one for "second floor admin and amenities" like gyms and rental offices. Postal workers would get first dibs on rental units in these towers, and then the rest of the units would be put up on the local market.
The next phase is where it REALLY kicks in. The legislation would direct the Post Office that as soon as a Postal Tower gets completed, if local market rents were still too high for the average postal worker to reasonably afford, then they'd have to build ANOTHER tower. Once the new one's completed, the previous one gets sold onto the private market, and the cycle repeats! The sale of each tower helps capitalize the next round of construction, all without the interference of meddlesome local zoning boards.
Two more little "extras" we could do to sweeten the pot:
1. Each building's deed could carry a "rent to own" provision. Some portion of rent paid builds up as a sort of credit that can be cashed in towards a down payment to purchase one's apartment.
2. Retail spaces would lease on shorter, more reasonable terms than the private market -- 1-2 year "prove it" deals. Right now, the private market is deathly dysfunctional, and private commercial landlords keep spaces vacant because they'd rather eat the cost than sink 5-10 years into a bad tenant. This hurts flexibility; so instead, we make the retail leasing more flexible for both sides.
3. Similar to the "rent to own" thing, we could require some percentage of sales to be to housing co-op corporations. Both are good strategies for building wealth.
The fixation on height is silly. You can achieve very high levels of density without skyscrapers. And in fact DC is a great place to showcase that. We already have plenty of skyscraper cities.
It's remarkable how quickly many self-described DC YIMBYs (even ones subscribed to Slow Boring!) retreat when the Height Act is mentioned. "But Paris!" "But the monuments!" "But existing zoning!"
The question is whether being a low-rise city or viewing the monuments (something that can only be done in very specific places anyway) is worth the tradeoffs. How high must our rent prices be so that some rooftops can eke a peek at the Washington Monument? How many tents on the street are worth being low-rise? How high must our taxes be to accommodate a smaller tax base?
Some also point out that DC's Comprehensive Plan doesn't allow for building to the Height Act maximums in many areas, which is true. But locations aren't fungible. The downtown core would be a great place for taller buildings, and other locations are not. These objectors are also often opposed to redeveloping historic neighborhoods (e.g. rowhomes in Logan Circle), though altering the Plan without removing the Height Act would push redevelopment to these historic neighborhoods. You can't have it both ways. Let the market work.
I wouldn’t bet on the long term sustainability of remote work. I’m working in a project now that would have been sticking my head in someone’s office and meeting in a conference room and 8 hours total work. With everyone remote it’s now 20 people and we’ve probably already spent 100 man hours just on planning. With everyone remote everything needs to go through formal channels and be tracked.
Why can't you message or video call the person whose office you'd go to and what about remote forces 20 additional people to be involved? This sounds more like your remote process being broken, not a problem with remote in general.
If the ticket tracking system makes everyone unproductive, they should just.. not do that. Going remote doesn't force management to make other bad decisions.
Sure it does. You need to track everyone’s productivity more closely to make sure they are actually working for you. Not working another full time job or providing childcare for their triplets.
If your company sincerely needs that level of tracking or people won't do their work, then I agree, WFH is probably not right for your company.
But that has not been _my_ experience with WFH, nor have I ever heard scuttlebutt about it happening in my company.
At the end of the day, not all companies / company cultures / industries? will support WFH to the same level as each other.
I'm learning something about how bad it can be at other companies - so thank you for that, but I hope you take away that it actually does seem to work for a lot of places as well.
I feel like personal experience with remote work has a big impact on people's perceptions, so I'm pretty skeptical of claims about the future of remote work. My small law firm (less than 15 employees) has had a mix of people in office, working remote, and hybrid scheduled ever since 2020. I think it has worked out really well for us. The people who work remote have more flexibility to take care of the their kids and don't have to commute. People who want to work in office can. And I haven't noticed any significant drop in productivity - any inconvenience seems well offset by keeping everyone happy and motivated. The end result is that my sense is remote work is here to stay and fighting against it is a pointless, losing battle.
My wife's law firm is slowly forcing people back into the office and is going to loose good employees as a result. Every explanation they give for making people come back is not about productivity (by all accounts all of the necessary work is being done while working remote), but about the partners just not wanting a remote office. They're making their employees lives worse for no good reason and I think they'll regret it in the long term. My wife is also pissed because when they hired her they promised remote work and are now reneging on that promise.
Presumably the role of the law firm is training associates and sorting out those who will be making partner from those who won’t. This process is working just as well remotely? I have my doubts.
I think this is very true for small organizations (< 10-20 people).
For larger organizations, Metcalfe's Law makes it impossible to "cut through the red tape" and get stuff done by hashing it out in meetings anyway. Big orgs do not get silo'd because they want to be or because that is the best way to do business, and the only way out of silos is creating interfaces (either in the literal software sense, or in the metaphorical sense of procedures/process/documentation).
Once you've gotten to the size/stage where most things require formal process to get done anyway, the vast majority of the work is remote-friendly. If I'm working at Amazon and need to take a meeting with someone in another building (or another campus), me being in the office doesn't really facilitate any productivity.
> If I'm working at Amazon and need to take a meeting with someone in another building (or another campus), me being in the office doesn't really facilitate any productivity.
The fact that your example is about meeting with someone who is *remote* to you is kind of telling that you're not responding honestly. The people you work with day-to-day are not going to be in another building or another campus.
My husband is forced to be in the office 3 days a week and NONE of the people he works with day-to-day are in his building or even on his campus(and it's not because they're WFH). (Not Amazon, but a different large corporation)
I didn't say it couldn't happen. I said, if your example of why working remotely is superior is that sometimes you have to go to another building for a meeting, perhaps you aren't being sincere in your responses.
Have you worked at Amazon? I have. Taking meetings with people in other office buildings is not even a remotely uncommon (yes, pun intended). Same for Microsoft.
Corporations with tens of thousands of employees don't operate like Dunder Mifflin. I'm not the one being dishonest here. There is a reason that Amazon bought several city blocks' worth of buildings in Seattle -- it increased productivity vs. the old days when people would hop in a shuttle bus to get to a meeting across town in another building.
“Once you've gotten to the size/stage where most things require formal process to get done anyway”
I’ll give you an example.
Hi Patrick (at Amazon) I need a report of all third party sellers with sales volumes between $5 million and $10 million who primarily sell to customers between 18-28….
Sure, click click clicky click here you go.
Formal - use the idea portal to create an idea ticket that is routed to the intake manager who rejects it because you included the wrong cost center. Start a new one with the correct cost center. This one is closed as it’s been routed to the wrong team even though you included the right team in the request…
Even very large organizations can, when they are running well, handle a lot of things informally. One of the great downfalls of large organizations is when they think they need elaborate processes for everything and even worse when the think the process is the product.
What you described is not in any way a remote vs. in person problem
If someone cannot respond to a slack thread that says "Hi Patrick I need a report of all third party sellers with sales volumes between $5 million and $10 million who primarily sell to customers between 18-28", then walking up to them and saying it isn't going to make them do it faster, either
And by the way just because I can do something for you quickly doesn't mean I should stop everything else I am doing to do it for you. That would be true if your thing is more important than my thing (or the thing of the person who needs my thing). I think "write a ticket so we can prioritize it" is a perfectly reasonable response, and better than "cool, I'll keep that in the back of my mind for after I do this other thing, because I am sure there's no way I could possibly forget about it, and you certainly are the only other person asking me for a thing"
If walking up to them makes them do it faster then the downside you're ignoring is that they were busy with something else and your looming presence is giving _you_ more priority at the expense of whatever they were doing.
That will undoubtedly be good _for you_, but that doesn't make it good for the other person.
Now, this can be solved with good culture - "Only walk up to someone's door for truly urgent things, use slack (and expect a delay) for slightly less urgent things, but that's equally true of in-person _or_ remote - the culture helps.
Oh my god so much this. I’m about to quit my remote job in favor of a mostly in office one because I can’t stand this. The “tracking through formal channels” thing especially, and it’s worse because every stakeholder has a different method of tracking. Not to mention how much longer everything takes when your team is spread across timezones (someone please tell me how I am supposed to effectively work with people in California and India at the same time from the east coast).
get federal workers back and put up tall buildings. let's go.
I do feel hopeful that the aging activist NIMBY set in DC is gradually losing its grip. These folks came of age in a time when so much that was good was destroyed and so much that was bad was built, that they can't imagine anything new could be good. But even then, it astounded me when, a decade or so, Darrell Issa, chair of the relevant House committee, proposed looking into the Heights Act. And the old NIMBYS, usually stalwart DC Statehood supporters, were dead set against even allowing the DC Council to be allowed to make modifications to the Height Act requirements. You'd think that giving more self-determination to DC's own elected government would always be a good thing, but no, the status quo of congressional paternalism was preferred.
Building off this as both a federal employee and a resident of the district, I’ve held for awhile that at a minimum height act repeal in the Federal Center Southwest/L’Enfant plaza area to allow for the consolidation of the federal workforce at the expense of the tear down of old unloved post war buildings. Do a similar thing for some of the defense and security agencies on the pentagon surface parking lots and it would juice metro and free up land in DC for housing. Of course GSA might be sad at having to sell of the census bureau and DoT buildings but I for one would appreciate not having to transfer to the gosh darn green line.
It’s politically counterproductive for Democrats to make it easier to build more housing within DC proper. Every extra person living in DC proper loses a vote for House and Senate, and DC will have 3 electoral college votes regardless of its population size under the 23rd Amendment.
Instead, Democrats should do everything in their power to upzone northern Virginia until everything from Alexandria to Tysons Corner is an actual city, with high rises and mid rises predominating in place of today’s dominant single family housing. Make Virginia a safe blue state with more representatives and electoral college votes after 2030.
Note that this is a direct trade off—people have to live somewhere, so if the population of the greater DC area remains constant, we should want to reduce the population of DC and increase the population of Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax, and Loudoun.
Interesting article with which to respond to claims that people only oppose development out of concern for their home values.
https://www.sfgate.com/renotahoe/article/palisades-tahoe-development-scraps-water-park-19753089.php
I’m sure having seen home prices in Vail the degree this location becomes a more popular ski resort is directly related to home prices. Yet the local are apoplectic.
My last apartment in DC before moving back to Philly was in a converted EPA building near the Wharf. Other than the one time a cop killed a guy during a DV call, it was a great place to live.
Can anyone illuminate me to the proper response to progressives who say that building market rate housing in DC is pointless bc the units just sit empty bc the developers get tax breaks when they're not filled? I hear all the time that the luxury apartments are just sitting empty.
If you're not in DC, it's worth noting that here (probably the same elsewhere, but I don't want to assume) the term 'luxury' is used quite liberally. Any apartment building built near-ish to a metro station in a median-income neighborhood is probably going to be called 'luxury apartments'. Developers do it to make the apartments sound more attractive, but I think it may have become counterproductive bc it gives more power to progressives fighting market-rate housing when they can call it fighting 'luxury apartments'.
I heard this one a lot when I lived in DC and it's still a staple of online antiYIMBYism everywhere. "Developers get tax breaks when [luxury apartments] aren't filled" is just Kramer from Seinfeld saying "they write it off." Yes, they don't pay taxes on a loss but they're still losing money. There is no mechanism whereby reporting a loss results in more money than they would if they were renting or selling for a taxable profit.
I would like MY’s take on other policy ideas that don’t involve Fed Transportation $, which seems like a political non-starter.
I am convinced of NYC/DC/SF etc having a zoning problem. Additionally, I’m not convinced that there’s a zoning problem in my hometown of Cincinnati or really in much of the country.
The apartment in Cincy that I rented for $600 / mo a little over a decade ago now goes for 3x that amount. There’s plenty of buildable land, plenty of zoned capacity, plenty of close-in greenfield opportunities. The city‘s metro population is up only 5-10%, below the national average.
I’ve read/heard various critiques on the post-great recession mortgage market (read: Fannie/Freddie) being unduly onerous on home buyers, freezing out the lower half of homeowners and forcing them into rentals. Erdmann has been out in front on this.
Private equity getting into housing tells me that there’s easy money (rents > cost of purchase + capital costs) to be made if you have the financing available.
The interest rate spikes of the last 2 years didn’t dampen homebuilder profits, at all! It all points to a really weird market that seems separated from the coastal malaise of restrictive zoning.
It’s a lot more than zoning. You’d have to look at how long it takes and how much money is needed to take 10 acres of raw land and turning it into 10 SFH - permits, public meetings, inspections, neighbor notification requirements, etc.
since you brought it up here: is it at all possible to repurpose some of the unused commercial real estate into hotels and or apartment buildings?
edit: sorry, hadn't finished reading the article when i posted this...
This is a great idea. I would add Las Vegas as another major metropolitan area where the federal government owns huge tracts of land. The federal government could allow housing construction on the outskirts of the suburbs of Las Vegas without interference from state and local zoning regulations.
Not directly related to the topic of the post, but whenever the New York Times publishes an article about housing, the top-voted comments (all presumably from older left-NIMBYs) are all about there's no housing shortage and how private equity is to blame for high home prices and rents. Sadly the Glaeser op-ed Matt links to in the second sentence turns out to be no exception. As Matt notes often, the housing shortage is one policy failure Blue America can't pin on Red America.
I really think this is a young vs old vs red/blue thing. While it’s not a guarantee that an older homeowner is going to be a NIMBY, it’s unlikely they’re going to be a YIMBY unless they receive some immediate tangible benefit. Younger apartments dwellers or young families have very different interests and needs that middle age and older home owners and that will always come into conflict. As has been written a lot, the majority of community input of most communities(regardless of political affiliation) is against development and it’s because the incentives for homeowners and long time community members is to be NIMBY. As long as housing is seen as an asset to build wealth, rather than a place to live, the incentives for density, additional affordable housing often goes against the interests of most affluent and successful members of a community. Until the YIMBY movement gives a good reason for NIMBYS to not to be or the incentive structure is reversed, things are unlikely to change.
I think you’re wildly overestimating how much is about value preservation vs a general opposition to change. As an example you see a ton of opposition to gentrification even from homeowners who stand to benefit.
I’m not sure if you’re replying to me or Andy but it’s both. General resistance to change is a basic universal that is really hard to overcome but the value preservation is a big thing beyond economics and traffic. People complain about “changing the character of the neighborhood.” My point is people hate change generally, and unless there’s a really massive upside economically people will resist even if they benefit in some way. I think my issue is more a general critique of classical liberalism and neoliberal economics which is what YIMBYism is that based on. There’s too much put on universalism, rationalism and a desire to fix issues. From my experience people are tribal, irrational and are only willing to fix things if the economic solution has minimal or non-existent psychological and cultural tradeoffs. I just want people to realize how hard this is beyond just the economic and logistical issues.
I don't disagree with most of what you wrote, i just wish these people would be honest about their NIMBYism instead of denying the shortage exists or blaming someone else.
I agree with Matt in everything here, so I'll just provide another fun DC Zoning nugget:
For reasons known only to God and the Bureaucracy, it is the law in DC that if your property is adjacent to Rock Creek Park - an untamed forest in the heart of the city - the Commission for Fine Arts (CFA), a federal agency, gets mandatory review of your project, no matter what the project is.
This led recently to a downzoning of a new multifamily project at Walter Reed from 300+ condos to 100ish townhouses, but also screws everyday people as well. Some friends of ours live across the street from Rock Creek, and CFA took 6 months to review the facade replacement on their house that was actively crumbling from water intrusion.
To be clear, they live across the street from a forest. I guess we need the feds there to provide review to make sure the raccoons and deer aren't opposed to our friends repairing their home?
Just an insane, unnecessary government check that shouldn't exist.
DC resident and didn't know that. fascinating.
My personal favorite crazy federal idea is "Post Office Towers".
Basically, the FedGov and particularly the Postal Service are immune to local zoning ordnances. They just have to purchase land, announce to the locals that they're building an office, and build it.
My idea is for a new legislation that requires every Post Office to be built with adequate housing to sustain its local workforce; we could also do some sort of requirement for "ground floor retail space flexible enough to satisfy basic needs", as well as one for "second floor admin and amenities" like gyms and rental offices. Postal workers would get first dibs on rental units in these towers, and then the rest of the units would be put up on the local market.
The next phase is where it REALLY kicks in. The legislation would direct the Post Office that as soon as a Postal Tower gets completed, if local market rents were still too high for the average postal worker to reasonably afford, then they'd have to build ANOTHER tower. Once the new one's completed, the previous one gets sold onto the private market, and the cycle repeats! The sale of each tower helps capitalize the next round of construction, all without the interference of meddlesome local zoning boards.
+1
Check the "extras". The Postal Tower Construction Service would be an incredible accelerator lol. I'd make one hell of a Postmaster General.
I would have hit "like", but you've blocked me for some reason. hence the +1
Unblocked.
Two more little "extras" we could do to sweeten the pot:
1. Each building's deed could carry a "rent to own" provision. Some portion of rent paid builds up as a sort of credit that can be cashed in towards a down payment to purchase one's apartment.
2. Retail spaces would lease on shorter, more reasonable terms than the private market -- 1-2 year "prove it" deals. Right now, the private market is deathly dysfunctional, and private commercial landlords keep spaces vacant because they'd rather eat the cost than sink 5-10 years into a bad tenant. This hurts flexibility; so instead, we make the retail leasing more flexible for both sides.
4. Bonus points if we create a Postal Tower Construction Service, a workforce who would require even MORE housing!
3. Similar to the "rent to own" thing, we could require some percentage of sales to be to housing co-op corporations. Both are good strategies for building wealth.
The fixation on height is silly. You can achieve very high levels of density without skyscrapers. And in fact DC is a great place to showcase that. We already have plenty of skyscraper cities.
It's remarkable how quickly many self-described DC YIMBYs (even ones subscribed to Slow Boring!) retreat when the Height Act is mentioned. "But Paris!" "But the monuments!" "But existing zoning!"
The question is whether being a low-rise city or viewing the monuments (something that can only be done in very specific places anyway) is worth the tradeoffs. How high must our rent prices be so that some rooftops can eke a peek at the Washington Monument? How many tents on the street are worth being low-rise? How high must our taxes be to accommodate a smaller tax base?
Some also point out that DC's Comprehensive Plan doesn't allow for building to the Height Act maximums in many areas, which is true. But locations aren't fungible. The downtown core would be a great place for taller buildings, and other locations are not. These objectors are also often opposed to redeveloping historic neighborhoods (e.g. rowhomes in Logan Circle), though altering the Plan without removing the Height Act would push redevelopment to these historic neighborhoods. You can't have it both ways. Let the market work.
Who are these DC yimbys? I have never met or seen a single DC yimby who holds the 1910 Height Act as sacrosanct, much less many of them.
That famous YIMBY sacred cow, the Height Act! All YIMBY hypocrisy shall be revealed by its very mention!
I wouldn’t bet on the long term sustainability of remote work. I’m working in a project now that would have been sticking my head in someone’s office and meeting in a conference room and 8 hours total work. With everyone remote it’s now 20 people and we’ve probably already spent 100 man hours just on planning. With everyone remote everything needs to go through formal channels and be tracked.
Why can't you message or video call the person whose office you'd go to and what about remote forces 20 additional people to be involved? This sounds more like your remote process being broken, not a problem with remote in general.
Because they will say, “Do you have a ticket.” Why the sudden demand for tickets? To track productivity when everyone is remote.
If the ticket tracking system makes everyone unproductive, they should just.. not do that. Going remote doesn't force management to make other bad decisions.
Sure it does. You need to track everyone’s productivity more closely to make sure they are actually working for you. Not working another full time job or providing childcare for their triplets.
How did your company track productivity pre-WFH? Ass in seats?
Informally.
If your company sincerely needs that level of tracking or people won't do their work, then I agree, WFH is probably not right for your company.
But that has not been _my_ experience with WFH, nor have I ever heard scuttlebutt about it happening in my company.
At the end of the day, not all companies / company cultures / industries? will support WFH to the same level as each other.
I'm learning something about how bad it can be at other companies - so thank you for that, but I hope you take away that it actually does seem to work for a lot of places as well.
I feel like personal experience with remote work has a big impact on people's perceptions, so I'm pretty skeptical of claims about the future of remote work. My small law firm (less than 15 employees) has had a mix of people in office, working remote, and hybrid scheduled ever since 2020. I think it has worked out really well for us. The people who work remote have more flexibility to take care of the their kids and don't have to commute. People who want to work in office can. And I haven't noticed any significant drop in productivity - any inconvenience seems well offset by keeping everyone happy and motivated. The end result is that my sense is remote work is here to stay and fighting against it is a pointless, losing battle.
My wife's law firm is slowly forcing people back into the office and is going to loose good employees as a result. Every explanation they give for making people come back is not about productivity (by all accounts all of the necessary work is being done while working remote), but about the partners just not wanting a remote office. They're making their employees lives worse for no good reason and I think they'll regret it in the long term. My wife is also pissed because when they hired her they promised remote work and are now reneging on that promise.
Law firms also make it much easier than most places to track productivity as it's easy to track how much you billed.
This IMO makes remote vs in-person much less significant in many cases.
Presumably the role of the law firm is training associates and sorting out those who will be making partner from those who won’t. This process is working just as well remotely? I have my doubts.
I think this is very true for small organizations (< 10-20 people).
For larger organizations, Metcalfe's Law makes it impossible to "cut through the red tape" and get stuff done by hashing it out in meetings anyway. Big orgs do not get silo'd because they want to be or because that is the best way to do business, and the only way out of silos is creating interfaces (either in the literal software sense, or in the metaphorical sense of procedures/process/documentation).
Once you've gotten to the size/stage where most things require formal process to get done anyway, the vast majority of the work is remote-friendly. If I'm working at Amazon and need to take a meeting with someone in another building (or another campus), me being in the office doesn't really facilitate any productivity.
> If I'm working at Amazon and need to take a meeting with someone in another building (or another campus), me being in the office doesn't really facilitate any productivity.
The fact that your example is about meeting with someone who is *remote* to you is kind of telling that you're not responding honestly. The people you work with day-to-day are not going to be in another building or another campus.
My husband is forced to be in the office 3 days a week and NONE of the people he works with day-to-day are in his building or even on his campus(and it's not because they're WFH). (Not Amazon, but a different large corporation)
It can absolutely happen.
I didn't say it couldn't happen. I said, if your example of why working remotely is superior is that sometimes you have to go to another building for a meeting, perhaps you aren't being sincere in your responses.
Have you worked at Amazon? I have. Taking meetings with people in other office buildings is not even a remotely uncommon (yes, pun intended). Same for Microsoft.
Corporations with tens of thousands of employees don't operate like Dunder Mifflin. I'm not the one being dishonest here. There is a reason that Amazon bought several city blocks' worth of buildings in Seattle -- it increased productivity vs. the old days when people would hop in a shuttle bus to get to a meeting across town in another building.
"not uncommon" is not the same as "it's literally all you do", like it is when your whole company is remote like mine.
“Once you've gotten to the size/stage where most things require formal process to get done anyway”
I’ll give you an example.
Hi Patrick (at Amazon) I need a report of all third party sellers with sales volumes between $5 million and $10 million who primarily sell to customers between 18-28….
Sure, click click clicky click here you go.
Formal - use the idea portal to create an idea ticket that is routed to the intake manager who rejects it because you included the wrong cost center. Start a new one with the correct cost center. This one is closed as it’s been routed to the wrong team even though you included the right team in the request…
Even very large organizations can, when they are running well, handle a lot of things informally. One of the great downfalls of large organizations is when they think they need elaborate processes for everything and even worse when the think the process is the product.
lol
What you described is not in any way a remote vs. in person problem
If someone cannot respond to a slack thread that says "Hi Patrick I need a report of all third party sellers with sales volumes between $5 million and $10 million who primarily sell to customers between 18-28", then walking up to them and saying it isn't going to make them do it faster, either
And by the way just because I can do something for you quickly doesn't mean I should stop everything else I am doing to do it for you. That would be true if your thing is more important than my thing (or the thing of the person who needs my thing). I think "write a ticket so we can prioritize it" is a perfectly reasonable response, and better than "cool, I'll keep that in the back of my mind for after I do this other thing, because I am sure there's no way I could possibly forget about it, and you certainly are the only other person asking me for a thing"
“ then walking up to them and saying it isn't going to make them do it faster, either”
Yet working a hybrid week has proven you wrong.
If walking up to them makes them do it faster then the downside you're ignoring is that they were busy with something else and your looming presence is giving _you_ more priority at the expense of whatever they were doing.
That will undoubtedly be good _for you_, but that doesn't make it good for the other person.
Now, this can be solved with good culture - "Only walk up to someone's door for truly urgent things, use slack (and expect a delay) for slightly less urgent things, but that's equally true of in-person _or_ remote - the culture helps.
Or, far more likely, they are goofing off on the internet. Not that anyone here would ever do something like that.
Oh my god so much this. I’m about to quit my remote job in favor of a mostly in office one because I can’t stand this. The “tracking through formal channels” thing especially, and it’s worse because every stakeholder has a different method of tracking. Not to mention how much longer everything takes when your team is spread across timezones (someone please tell me how I am supposed to effectively work with people in California and India at the same time from the east coast).