While I think that Matt is right that part of the problem is that handling housing rules on a local rather than state basis tempts each municipality into a game of beggar-thy-neighbor, I think it’s also insane that these “cities” _exist_. Somerville, Cambridge, Medford, Arlington and quite a few others basically exist as regulatory and school district arbitrage plays against the city of Boston proper which they are in every other practical way part of, and in a sane world would have been amalgamated into the city decades ago.
Boston, like every other old city, went through a period of intense annexation in the late 1800s, ending in 1912. East Boston, Roxbury, Dorchester, West Roxbury (including Jamaica Plain and Roslindale), South Boston, Brighton, Allston, Hyde Park, and Charlestown, these were all annexed in that period. Somerville also broke off from Charlestown & incorporated itself just before this all really got going.
But when it came time for Brookline to be annexed, it’s wealthy residents refused, and won that fight, which was the beginning of the end of annexation for every US city. It took time, but annexation eventually ended nationwide due to Brookline’s example.
Since 1912, there’s been a number of plans to annex more of the Boston metro into the city itself, and I agree this would be far more functional!
Alas, people are extremely attached to their identities, and Bay Staters tend to be quite parochial about this stuff, so here we are.
It's hard to imagine annexation resuming anywhere in the US besides the big Sun Belt cities that have unincorporated land abutting the city limits. I'm not sure it's particular to Boston. I lived in West Hollywood for a couple years and I think the only people who are vigorously attached to West Hollywood as an independent municipality and form of identity are the same group of people who started the city in the 80s and/or have been on the city council for decades, and even so it's impossible to imagine WeHo getting reincorporated into LA. I'd really like to see both a Greater SF and a Greater LA that incorporate much of their respective metro areas, but it's hard to imagine any system that could make that happen.
Though my joking-not-joking proposal would be a state law that says if your municipality loses multiple lawsuits intended to stop the same regional transit project or housing plan, your municipality should automatically get its charter dissolved and be absorbed into the most populous neighboring city.
TBH, it is wild to me people would attach such identity with place. In a well functioning system, who controls your water pipes should be an obscure administrative matter you almost never think about and care about even less.
Chicago is another city with far too many suburbs - and you can bet each one of them started at a fiefdom.
Maybe it's a feeling of being able to influence what the city does, which pretty much does not exist for individuals in the biggest cities. There's a case for this.
If this were as simple as "well, I want to vote on how often streets get cleaned", sure. The problem is this too often its "I want to make sure only people I like live here". It historically was race, but today, it's as much class.
The reason people in these enclaves like having a BMR system for the little bit of affordable housing they allow in is that it allows for political control over what kind of people win the BMR lottery. Something like: "If we have to allow the poors in, at least we can make sure we make sure its poor teachers and not the dishwasher at the local restaurant who we are afraid might listen to loud rap songs".
If my memory of US urban history is correct, immigrants and other minorities were strongly against regional government during the early 1900s. They correctly surmised that the people pushing the idea didn’t have their interests at heart.
West Hollywood is a special case. Both the origins of the bars on the Sunset Strip and it’s destination as a gay haven derive from it being not subject to LAPD jurisdiction. Neither of those things still needs independence from LAPD, but the city does have this significant history.
Unsurprisingly, racism seems to have been a driving factor. By stopping annexation, the suburbs kept the dirty Irish out.
"Some communities surrounding Boston thought that by avoiding annexation they could avoid an influx of immigrants — keep yourself separate from Boston, keep yourself separate from the Irish"
See this map of "megaboston" which would have annexed as far out as Lexington and Lynn and Braintree.
Yup. We also should incorporate the five-county version of the Bay Area into an uber-city, comparable New York City. That way the city government could tell residents of the Palo Alto neighborhood of the Borough of Santa Clara that they don't get to shut out all new construction, when they have a major transit station next to a lot of highly-paid engineering jobs and a world-leading university.
And associating with the children of convicted felons, too -- real thugs who engage in mafia stuff like witness tampering in federal cases. That was after he went to the inner-city highschool where Bill Barr's dad offered shelter to notorious child predator Jeffrey Epstein .
It's a miracle that Matt turned out as well as he did, given the milieu of pervasive criminality and corruption in the institutions that housed him.
'My dorm-mate Jared Kushner' - I can't be the only one feeling sad we haven't gotten an Epic Twitter Thread out of this a la Craig Mazin's reports on Ted Cruz.
Tho I think CM shared a room or suite with TC, whereas MY shared only a dorm with JK. Less direct exposure, fewer up close and personal anecdotes about life with the Zodiac Killer.
What I take away from all of this is that there are lots of people, left and right, that want the benefits of a gated community - feeling of exclusivity, ability to control who moves in, everything short of actual, literal gates.
When you can't have that de-jure, you create it de-facto with an economic fence instead of a real one. Then... once you have that, if you are a lefty like Robert Reich in Berkeley, you can then hide behind preservationist NIMBY logic or even, ironically, gentrification rhetoric to enforce your economic fence.
Let's be clear, everyone who does this in bad faith is an asshole. Including Robert Reich himself, who now can't post on twitter without his Berkeley NIMBY screed being reposted for all the world to see.
I think lots of people, though, don't do it in bad faith. Never underestimate, first, how unintuitive basic economic concepts are for people, and second, how much people can genuinely convince themselves with motivated reasoning.
I mean, no doubt some of this is a reflection of control-freakism. If you've ever had the indignity of being in an HOA, you've surely met that class of people. They have lots of opinions about how other people should live (which is bad), but have been empowered with means to enforce, which is terrifying.
And, like, most people who live on a cozy block of 2-family homes don't really want a 10-story tower built on either side of their house! You don't need to be some sort of crypto-racist control freak to have that preference. At least make the pitch better, like "Let's reduce housing prices for families across our state by building a million new homes, and yes, that is going to mean you might have the house next to you torn down and replaced with an apartment building"
You seem to take the anti-NIMBY train of thought pretty far though.
I wonder what you'd say about my mom's neighbor, who've haven't cut their grass in a decade or more. There are weedy trees growing taller than their house, fertilized in part by their kids who used to occasionally poop in the yard when they were young for somer reason. Rats and mice seem to be finding their way into neighbors properties more and more often. The garage is slowly being covered in soil and collapsing and a junked van sits in their section of the crowded alley, making it harder for anyone else to 3 point turn or for the snow plow to be effective. I won't go into detail on the criminal stuff since there are laws about that, but it's worth mentioning because it correlates with an inability to take care of property.
At what point does any of that stop being "people should live however they want and neighbors should never complain".
And yes, if a neighbor is breaking a law, like playing loud music past quiet hours established in a locality, sure, either call in a noise complaint or sue them.
For issues like rats and such, health codes can be a factor, and that is a totally useful thing for a locality to enforce. As with fire codes.
As for things like cars and the like in the front lawn, yeah, that would suck. But at some point, there is a line where you are merely trying to legislate what is in good or bad taste. Do I get to call the neighborhood taste police if your choice of inflatable stuff you put in your front yard for halloween isn't to my liking? You mention weeds in the front yard being a problem - what if instead of weeds, I am growing tomatoes?
After living in an HOA for 8 years and finally escaping that kind of hellscape of conformity and nitpicky BS, I'd settle for the occasional car on bricks in a yard somewhere in the area as a compromise.
I've never lived in anything like an HOA so I don't have much to go on. I trust your description of nitpicky BS and I agree that nitpicky BS sucks.
I'm just trying to figure out how these lines of compromise should best be drawn. How is an HOA establishing rules all that different from a local government establishing local ordinances? In the case of my mom's house, her town is only 8,000 people. Noise and hygiene ordinances are set by the town council, elected from the 8,000 residents.
Don't HOAs work the same way? From far away from the situation, I'm trying to figure out: are HOA's really the problem? Or were you in the wrong one? Or is the culture of homeowners, at least in your area, so different from renters that there's something of a class war happening?
I really wouldn't mind something a bit closer to what you're complaining about on my mom's block, because a small number of "bad" homeowners are letting their properties completely fall apart and be destroyed, which seems irresponsible and wasteful. Fwiw or not worth it's also an eyesore. Tomatoes would be lovely. Weeds would look like my yard. I'm talking weeds that have grown into actual trees: like there's a boxelder maple growing off the roof of their garage.
I think there is an interesting problem of what level of government is *too local* - that is vaguely related to where lines get drawn.
I am totally not opposed to, in principle, people coming together and democratically deciding that we should maintain a semblance of aesthetic - so long as people are all aboveboard about motivations.
HOAs failure mode is that they are government to too small of a scale, allowing petty tyrants that are either super easily corrupted (i.e. captive boards that run all landscaping through non-arms length entities), super nitpicky, and often both. Nitpicky to the service of picking nits that require you do things that they profit from.
At some level of size, you are big enough to attract:
a.) more accountability - you are big enough for a meaningful press to care
b.) ability not to solve for hyper-local optima - think zoning that makes sure every town does it's share of land uses that are broadly unpopular (i.e. you can't just put the garbage dump near the poors or whomever has the least power).
Of course, the downside is you can't as easily enforce things like distressed property being fixed up. I suppose it's all in the tradeoffs you want.
Speaking of basic economics - I think the uncomfortable truth is how YIMBYs become aligned with just unfettered, Libertarian-esc RE development. At least in Chicago, the YIMBY side seems to parrots the same talking points. Might as well be sitting at the same table in the community meetings.
"To address affordable housing requirements, the developer will include 11 affordable units on site and pay a fee of $5.8 million in lieu of the remaining units."
... So in addition to going for a 40 story zoning exception, they're just going to pay the fee instead of meet the affordable housing requirement. Great work team.
As they should! Let people build what people want.
Demarcating affordable units is a very silly bugaboo to have - housing of any variety soaks up demand for housing everywhere, in much the same way that the price of used cars are dependent upon the price and production of new cars. We don’t need car manufacturers to guarantee a certain number of “affordable” cars - we let people produce what they want, and affordable cars result.
It's perhaps not surprising that the near consensus opinion of Slow Boring readers is build-what-people-want. It seems to be one of MY's core positions. It just seems so odd that in no other realm of progressive politics are interests aligned with unchecked capitalism.
Here's my personal example. It took 10 years of lobbying for the local, over-crowded elementary school annex to get built. Then within just two years it became overcrowded again as building after building were upzoned. We moved away since there was no end in sight and private school options were suboptimal but this idea that growth comes without constraining local services seems ... idk, just ignored by the YIMBY / developer crowd.
If it's that expensive to meet affordability requirements, perhaps the affordability requirements are causing problems? Sounds like they have to set aside about 10% of the units as affordable, so they're short about 30(seems like they're building 413 units)? That means they're paying almost 200k per unit they're skipping? Median house price in Chicago seems to be 300k, so can't that money be better spent on affordable stuff elsewhere?
I used to live in Somerville, but the city kicked me out for living with too many roommates! We had 7 people in a 7 bedroom. The city told us that only 4 unrelated people could live together, and also the 7 bedroom apartment was illegal. We were forced out, and the landlord was forced to de-densify the apartment.
Your landlord sounds like a scumbag, in that particular way that sketchy landlords in student-heavy cities often are, but rules on unrelated people living together are just insanity, and I'm always flabbergasted that they haven't been successfully challenged in court.
I lived in Cambridge in a house that was behind one of those 3-story 3-unit things(the house was kind of an ADU I guess?) and it had 5 bedrooms and we had at one point 6 people living in it with 2 of them sharing a room and my landlord certainly wasn't a scumbag. He lived in one of the 3-story units up front.
Curious, how did they find out? I imagine places like this have some sort of eyes network looking for too many people parking nearby, too many cars coming and going in a driveway.
Same way some places with AirBNB restrictions tell people to report when they see too many people with roller bags going in and out of a condo.
I called the fire department over a gas leak, and the fire fighters noticed that the building was not up to code. The building inspector got called in to review the heating system (per the gas leak) and he started saying "that's not up to code, that's not up to code, that's not up to code. How many people live here again?" I didn't feel like the building was unsafe or the egresses were unclear, but they did.
Apparently the landlord had a history of dishonesty with the city. After the city told our landlord they were going to get fined for renting an illegal apartment, our landlord's response was to just lie to the city and say that we had already left. The city accepted that without verifying it until my roommate went over to city hall and said "Hey, I live at [address] and I was wondering if you could give me details about the city's enforcement action against our landlord." The bureaucrat said "you live at [address] huh? Interesting. Do you live in the basement?" And my roommate said "yeah I live in the basement there, why?" Well it turned out the entire basement had been converted into bedrooms without any sort of permitting process.
Anyway it was a great apartment that allowed me to live near the T with a bunch of friends at a reasonable rent, but it could only exist illegally.
Can I ask you the landlord's name? I used to work in commercial real estate around the city, I know most of the major players who are also running shady flop housing. Could be Tony Madan, could be Dave Lewis/Avid Management, could be Ben Tuck/Lowtide Development..... Man do I have some Madan family horror stories. Obviously no worries if you don't want to reveal who it was
Yeah, I would not call the landlord a good actor in this situation either, especially if there (no idea, but maybe?) a way to come up to code in an aboveboard manner (guessing he could of, but just didn't want to go through a permitting process?)
I'm not sure there was--if there's a ban on the number of unrelated adults living together, then that apartment was illegal no matter what the landlord did. Which doesn't mean he was a good actor, but the bigger problem here seems to be with the city.
In Fairfax at the worst of this stuff, it was cheaper to pay the fine than to handle the underlying problem. Well, just fix the fines! Depending on your local and state, that might be a local matter, but it might involve the state changing a law that caps things.
That's a huge thing in Virginia, where the state Dillon Rule's the hell out of everything.
Not a Somerville resident, but the way this works in places I've lived is something about a place draws attention to itself. Lots of people coming and going, a bunch of extra cars, irritating the neighbor with loud parties. That gets called in to local code enforcement, someone with a clipboard starts poking around, you get the idea. It's both a super important thing(code enforcement) but absolutely can be weaponized by asshole neighbors with nothing better to do with their time.
The places I've lived have all had some form of regulation on the book limiting the number of non-related people living in a structure. While 7 people in a 7 bedroom getting busted seems silly, you would be amazed the stories a local fire marshal can tell. And that's the intention of many of these. In Fairfax County, we had a bit of a run of people dying in fires in illegal basement apartments because the only exit was up the stairs.
Somerville has some amazingly sketchy multi-bedroom conversions! Any time I visit friends up there I'm tracking the fire exits knowing it wouldn't be obvious in an emergency...
In order for Boston's housing prices to not be bananas, pretty much every style of development needs to shift outward; the cities like Somerville need to have tall development, the inner suburbs need to be more like cities, the outer suburbs need to be dense and commercialized, the bedroom communities need to be all the way out at 495, and people who want a really rural experience need to be way out there.
But....approximately no one who already lives somewhere wants that because it's annoying to (1) find out that the residential experience you signed up for is going to be elsewhere and (2) your commute is going to be worse.
So in the abstract if I say "hey Lincoln, you need to be more like Newton", no one's going to go "Newton's a hellhole, we can't live like that?" but they're still all gonna say "hell no" - if the people in Lincoln wanted restaurants and sidewalks and a green line stop, they'd live in Newton.
Out here in the suburbs, development is opposed based on this logic: "X is going to change the character of (insert your favorite NIMBY Boston suburb here)".
But doing nothing is changing the character anyway - see Somerville as an example. When we were looking at houses (in Natick) long time townies who did not have white collar knowledge-economy jobs (cuz you don't -need- that to live in Natick, right?) would remark that they couldn't believe the housing prices.
With high prices and the housing stock turning over, all of these communities will experience a _class_ transformation if they don't experience a land use transformation.
That said, if they did change the regulatory environment such that this could happen, it's not like it would happen all that quickly. You don't remake entire cities quickly -- especially in America. People wouldn't blink and find that the residential experience they signed up for had changed.
It depends on how far down the counterfactual we go. Are we somehow imagining a world in which there is essentially NO planning/approvals process, or merely one in which there is less ability to completely veto projects?
My wife's work is in affordable housing, and their expectation is that (successful, non-blocked) projects will take a minimum of five years to go from concept to built.
If you did something like, "Make it much less onerous to build in one small area of a metro region," like if just Somerville suddenly loosened its restrictions on building while the rest of greater Boston metro stayed the same, I could imagine it would be significantly remade in that time. If all of great Boston went to a realistically looser, but not just "hey do whatever" building regime, then between the fact that you'd be spreading the building out over a large area, the low elasticity of construction supply, and the fact that projects are going to be on a multi-year timeframe anyway, you wouldn't see dramatic changes in the next decade.
Yup. Can't freeze a city in amber. If people want to maintain their current lifestyle they could sell and move outward but we need some external mandate to break the stalemate. Prop 19 passed in California to effectively pay seniors to do this (via our broken property tax system).
Up here in Salem (a 30 minute commuter train ride north of Boston), the latest argument from the NIMBYs is just like in this piece: “why should SALEM host all the new construction? Why won’t the surrounding communities do their part?”
But Salem is the place with the walkable neighborhood core, the thriving restaurant & tourist scene, the commuter train to Boston, the former industrial sites within walking distance of the train station and downtown getting transformed into residential… it’s the place to put new construction apartments, and the YIMBY mayor is all for it. The zoning and design review process makes it challenging, but it’s still happening.
It's a fair question - being NIMBY isn't the answer, but any single town (and no town is that big) that embraces development would be taking one for the team compared to your neighbors.
I understand why MY is bringing up Somerville because of the population stats and how strong its gentrification arc has been over the last fifty years. But I look at the redevelopment of Assembly Square and then I look out at the suburbs and think "what inner ring suburb has done anything like that?"
For sure. Nonetheless, we should lead, esp. with the Green Line Extension finally becoming real.
So should Cambridge, but they continue to be slouches on embracing change, so let’s outshine them & be an example for embracing growth & harnessing it to help avoid displacement.
Oh, I agree 100%. And I suspect that areas that embrace growth will end up turning out to be nice places to live after the fact, and people won't be full of buyer's remorse.
How much of a problem is the American refusal to allow suburbs to be swallowed up by cities, or put some of these question to higher-level entities? My impression is that when suburbs get too big cities either grow (e.g. the Toronto 'Megacity' amalgamation) or establish some sort of supra-municipal entity (e.g. Greater London) to make things work. In the US this seems to combine with the abandonment of city centres to create some truly horrendous policy.
A lot of it is that. If you look at Massachusetts, none of the munis were great, but Boston was a lot better than the surrounding suburbs. Though of course the best evidence against this idea is NYC, where the 50 city member city council colludes to NIMBY every single neighborhood.
Yeah, NYC managed, as sadly usual, to have the worst of both worlds. We amalgamated the non-Manhattan cities, but we kept a ghost version of their local governments intact as otherwise-useless patronage mills, and then learned the exact wrong lesson from the Robert Moses years and decided to give unlimited veto power to unelected neighborhood councils composed 100% of retired busybodies and cronies of the local electeds. So we get all of the veto points of a collection of tiny municipalities, but all of the corruption opportunities of a big, hard-to-manage city.
This is largely a 20th century phenomenon here that we haven't figured out how to break. Even Los Angeles, the epitome of sprawl, annexed a ton of cities early on, most famously the San Fernando Valley in 1915 by using aqueduct water.
At least in California, establishing a statewide policy is our best bet, especially since our major cities don't border other states. Giving counties control over cities would also work but that ain't happening. Instead, cities annexing unincorporated county land is functionally a one-way valve.
"The perceived link between building and gentrification tends to generate very counterproductive local backlash politics when what’s really needed is a bigger and more regional approach."
Exactly. I remember having some fun clashes with some student musicians/activists at Georgia Tech on this issue in 2016. They strongly believed (at the time) that new housing in Midtown Atlanta was at the root of all working class problems in the area, and that I was a "corporate clown", their words, for suggesting otherwise.
(I think they all voted for Jill Stein, or Mickey Mouse, or Ed Asner's Ass Pimple, in both of Trump's elections. Good times. :/ )
But it's worth noting: As this issue gets regionalized, it will get nationalized--and as that happens, it will polarize along partisan lines. Trump states will become NIMBY states, and non-Trump states will become YIMBY states.
Right-wing identity in America is already centered on "keeping the wrong people out". It will extend to "keeping the wrong people out" on a neighborhood level. And it will soon treat expensive, unaffordable housing as an unalloyed *good*, for culture war reasons, as sure as we're all standing here. Mark my words.
Well, if it does fully nationalize, it will likely cost the party that takes the YIMBY side a good share of votes. NIMBY is a much more natural pattern of human thought than YIMBY is. If Democrats are going to be the party of YIMBY they better work hard on their messaging and message discipline.
I live right at the edge of Somerville, technically in Charlestown. The density of small homes and nearly complete absence of towers/buildings is really noticeable. Of course, I love walking around and enjoying the small yards and eclectic mix of houses, but it's clearly a huge loss that there isn't more housing stock.
There's also, at least by me, a noticeable absence of stores and restaurants. Apart from the major cross-cutting streets (like Broadway and Washington), there is hardly anything commercial inside the residential areas.
I actually see a fair number of empty or for sale homes that look ripe for renovation and condo-ificiation. I don't think that solution scales -- it's not a 15 story tower -- but it helps with the 'people per house' problem a bit.
I'd love to see so much construction around here. It's a great place and would be even better with more people and a few more places to shop and eat. But, unfortunately, the mayoral run off is down to two progressive candidates. Good luck getting them to support anything that would be good for the long-term future of the Latino community being priced out of east Somerville by insufficient development.
But at least the state of massachusetts is spending billions of dollars to drive the Green Line Extension through those miles of 2-story houses without getting the obvious zoning concessions that you would want in return for it, so that's....nice.
Yeah, the year I lived in Somerville the shopping and eating options nearby weren't fantastic – I ended up walking to Cambridge a lot, which was more often convenient than waiting for the 86 bus, despite the not incredibly friendly pedestrian infrastructure in my part of town (I was pretty close to McGrath Highway). New housing would probably be better insulated than where I lived too.
Zoe’s is def. really great Chinese. Other favs: Sugidama, Spoke, Pini’s Pizza, Op Opa Yee-Ro, Tenoch, The Burren, Highland Kitchen, Celeste, Bronwyn, everything at Bow Market
Saying the benefits of more housing are extremely diffuse undersells the problem. The benefits of not-more-housing are extremely concentrated for everyone who owns property.
If a home-owner owns their home and is leveraged via a mortgage, then from a strictly financial standpoint "more housing to help combat soaring housing prices" is not a feature. The bug is profitable.
It can be, but often isn't. Buy a house for 100k in 2010. In 2020, its worth 200k. In theory, you've made 100k in asset increases, but for most people, their house isn't primarily an asset, its their home. So if they sell, they have to buy another home and almost all the houses in the area have experienced the same increase so they don't gain anything. Further, if they were paying 1% property tax in property taxes in 2010, they are now paying double in nominal terms.
So for most people, its only a significant gain if they plan on selling and going to a lower cost area.
I don't entirely buy that - it absolutely is their home, and yes, as long people are moving during their primary earning years, they have to make a like for like substitution - it's hard to cash out. Felix Salmon likes to say everyone is born short housing.
But then you retire and you can down-size and then you do get to cash out. So I'd argue the "asset" part of a house is a retirement savings vehicle - home equity may be the biggest savings vehicle for a lot of people.
I think you have several good points here in that people CAN downsize and cash out and people DO use home equity as their biggest savings vehicle.
My point is that many(most?) people having lived somewhere for 20+ years often decide they don't want to cash out and move somewhere else because everyone and everything they know is there. There is a reason that the average person is much less likely to move as they get older. Which means that cashing out to downsize isn't the big positive it could be. It also makes it harder to access their biggest savings vehicle. Finally it means all the increased property taxes they paid on an more expensive asset lead that asset to become a net negative.*
*Their inheritors on the other hand probably greatly appreciate being able to sell an appreciated asset and profit the gains with limited taxation.
True, but that means someone in their 30s shouldn't care. I'm kind of miffed that prices are skyrocketing right now, not just because of taxes but also if I want to upgrade at some point, the delta in price is *also* commensurately greater.
I think analyses like these are really helpful for people who are change-resistant but haven't gone full head in sand. I was at a community meeting this weekend in Atlanta and once I described our Somerville (just a neighborhood) that had seen significant displacement of Black households, significantly increased home prices, and a decreased total population something clicked for people. I think it made it clear that once the conditions are such that the would be "gentrifiers" are on the way, the question is how to accommodate them, not whether to accommodate them, short of some level of intervention in buying/selling homes that everyone loses interest in once they understand they wouldn't be exempt.
Thank you Matt. I live in Somerville, and this nails a debate I've had with other readers on previous YIMBY-related comment threads (eg here https://www.slowboring.com/p/houses-not-zoning/comments#comment-2540106 ). I think it's additionally hard because when housing prices are high, any new development you allow that doesn't require affordable housing will be "luxury" apartments -- it will seem like more of the problem, rather than where the solution. (E.g., city counselors I generally like opposed a Davis Square dorm-style apartment building proposal, saying "the last thing we need is additional luxury housing.") You need an immense amount of regional development to start making a perceptible dent in rent/housing costs.
I'm curious if there are ways to hack this from a policy perspective on the local level. The most obvious and commonly used tool is requiring that a percentage of apartments be affordable, but I imagine economists have demonstrated that that just shifts costs elsewhere. One thing you might do is require that apartments be small and have small bedrooms; that would necessarily pack more people into a given building, though it might also just make some of the apartments be empty investments or second apartment pied a terres. You could also require that the developer operate the building on a rental basis only and not sell units as condos, since rent is relatively lower than has in costs on a historical basis. But I suspect in the scheme of things, any such rules depress the desirability of building more housing in the first place, and so any benefits would be canceled out by decreased development.
The number of people who pivot from the need to act locally on Climate change to we can't do anything about housing supply because it's a regional problem in a single conversation here is pretty incredible.
Sounds like you get the common rejoinders to those local policies you recommend. For the inclusionary zoning, someone in Portland literally did the math to show how the cost shift makes the non-subsidized units even more expensive and possibly impractical to build. This can be overcome with a very generous density bonus, if the marginal unsubsidized units can cover the loses on the subsidized units. https://sightline-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/infill-prototypes-cost-detail.pdf
I've actually only heard of the opposite on unit size, requiring 3-bedrooms (I think in Vancouver, BC) because low-and-moderate income families tend to get squeezed pretty hard once bands of yuppie roommates are competing for the same units as them. And those units tend to be uncommon in new build apartments.
The rent/own is tricky, at least down South the opportunity to build wealth through homeownership is at least an important talking point if not substantively important to people. And I do like to say "a mortgage is like rent-control for homeowners" so for any given price its probably better to have some ownership opportunities along with rental opportunities. Down here, almost all the new tower construction is rental, so that might be why the push is towards somewhere closer to 50/50.
Yeah, the issue with statutory minimums in terms of number of units (or height etc.) is that as you say, if the market for it doesn't exist, then developers just won't build anything there. But presumably there are minimum unit size constraints that could be loosened to *allow* smaller units and that would have the effect of causing some such units to exist.
I suggest all those on Matt's site whining about the ills of America move to France, where my wife is from and still owns a country house. The housing outside central Paris and the Cote d-Azur is incredibly cheap. You can own a chateau with your own vineyards for the price of a 2BR in Brooklyn, the country has an amazing number of beautiful cities with cheap housing, and good restaurants and shops walkable from your front door. I'd recommend LeMans, where my wife is from, a 55-minute fast rail ride to Paris, Nantes, St Malo, Caen, Rennes, Deauville, Bordeaux, Lyons, Nimes, Avignon, Aix-en-Provence, Albi, La Rochelle, Toulouse and Montpelier. These are just those I've visited in recent years; I'm sure there are many others, Dijon and Dole which I visited 50 years ago come to mind. Of course you'll have to learn French, a bug to most Americans, but a feature to me. The upside is you'll get cheap housing, a great rail network, the best medical care in the world, a longer life, much better food and wine, free child care, all the things Matt pontificates about. Move now. You won't regret it. Of course, when we've all moved to a better life, it won't promote Matt's goal of a billion Americans. But, hey, there are costs and benefits to millions of people making decisions about what's best for them.
How do you get work authorization? If the 2020 elections had gone bad, I was looking at Portugal -- green card-like status if you spend $400k on a house. Ireland requires 1m euros in an investment fund.
No idea about France. Helps having a French spouse. My understanding is though if you get green-card-like status in Portugal or Malta, you can live and work pretty much anywhere in the EU. Don't take this as legal advice, may just be an urban legend.
Staggering levels of taxation? I'm sure there are Germans and French who find any tax staggering, but I can tell you my wife pays a pittance in tax on her country property compared to what she'd pay in the US.
FYI Recently a development was proposed for additional housing right next to the Supreme Liquors where you got busted, but it looks like the local planning board will shoot it down because the proposal doesn't include parking. This is despite the fact that the building is literally next to the t-stop (subway).
Eastern Massachusetts (like all blue metros in the US) in general is pretty bad. But Cambridge, at least, has managed to grow its population over the last several decade. So it's gotten denser. I think it's now at or near its all time peak population.
Cambridge has had some high profile missed opportunities, but the population grew 12.5% over the last decade and is now about 2k residents below its 1950 peak. Somerville at its peak had roughly the population density of New York City today, hard to imagine it getting all the way back to that point - although with ongoing Assembly and GLX development maybe there's a chance?
It's interesting to see Gateway cities absorb some of this demand. Lynn, Brockton, Quincy, and New Bedford's populations all rose above 100k in the latest Census. If the "quaint-er" E-Mass towns want to limit development, they should pay into a regional infrastructure fund that will support Regional Rail and other projects for cities that are shouldering the population growth.
While I think that Matt is right that part of the problem is that handling housing rules on a local rather than state basis tempts each municipality into a game of beggar-thy-neighbor, I think it’s also insane that these “cities” _exist_. Somerville, Cambridge, Medford, Arlington and quite a few others basically exist as regulatory and school district arbitrage plays against the city of Boston proper which they are in every other practical way part of, and in a sane world would have been amalgamated into the city decades ago.
Boston, like every other old city, went through a period of intense annexation in the late 1800s, ending in 1912. East Boston, Roxbury, Dorchester, West Roxbury (including Jamaica Plain and Roslindale), South Boston, Brighton, Allston, Hyde Park, and Charlestown, these were all annexed in that period. Somerville also broke off from Charlestown & incorporated itself just before this all really got going.
But when it came time for Brookline to be annexed, it’s wealthy residents refused, and won that fight, which was the beginning of the end of annexation for every US city. It took time, but annexation eventually ended nationwide due to Brookline’s example.
Since 1912, there’s been a number of plans to annex more of the Boston metro into the city itself, and I agree this would be far more functional!
Alas, people are extremely attached to their identities, and Bay Staters tend to be quite parochial about this stuff, so here we are.
It's hard to imagine annexation resuming anywhere in the US besides the big Sun Belt cities that have unincorporated land abutting the city limits. I'm not sure it's particular to Boston. I lived in West Hollywood for a couple years and I think the only people who are vigorously attached to West Hollywood as an independent municipality and form of identity are the same group of people who started the city in the 80s and/or have been on the city council for decades, and even so it's impossible to imagine WeHo getting reincorporated into LA. I'd really like to see both a Greater SF and a Greater LA that incorporate much of their respective metro areas, but it's hard to imagine any system that could make that happen.
Though my joking-not-joking proposal would be a state law that says if your municipality loses multiple lawsuits intended to stop the same regional transit project or housing plan, your municipality should automatically get its charter dissolved and be absorbed into the most populous neighboring city.
Indeed, it’s hard to imagine annexations happening again. The 1880s–1920s was an unusual period in our history in terms of political power.
TBH, it is wild to me people would attach such identity with place. In a well functioning system, who controls your water pipes should be an obscure administrative matter you almost never think about and care about even less.
Chicago is another city with far too many suburbs - and you can bet each one of them started at a fiefdom.
Maybe it's a feeling of being able to influence what the city does, which pretty much does not exist for individuals in the biggest cities. There's a case for this.
If this were as simple as "well, I want to vote on how often streets get cleaned", sure. The problem is this too often its "I want to make sure only people I like live here". It historically was race, but today, it's as much class.
The reason people in these enclaves like having a BMR system for the little bit of affordable housing they allow in is that it allows for political control over what kind of people win the BMR lottery. Something like: "If we have to allow the poors in, at least we can make sure we make sure its poor teachers and not the dishwasher at the local restaurant who we are afraid might listen to loud rap songs".
If my memory of US urban history is correct, immigrants and other minorities were strongly against regional government during the early 1900s. They correctly surmised that the people pushing the idea didn’t have their interests at heart.
West Hollywood is a special case. Both the origins of the bars on the Sunset Strip and it’s destination as a gay haven derive from it being not subject to LAPD jurisdiction. Neither of those things still needs independence from LAPD, but the city does have this significant history.
Unsurprisingly, racism seems to have been a driving factor. By stopping annexation, the suburbs kept the dirty Irish out.
"Some communities surrounding Boston thought that by avoiding annexation they could avoid an influx of immigrants — keep yourself separate from Boston, keep yourself separate from the Irish"
See this map of "megaboston" which would have annexed as far out as Lexington and Lynn and Braintree.
https://archive.is/Nl7Af
Ohhhh yeah. People were even more blatant in their racist views back then, and Italians, Irish, and Jews had yet to be viewed as “white”.
For more details overall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston%E2%80%93Brookline_annexation_debate_of_1873
Yup. We also should incorporate the five-county version of the Bay Area into an uber-city, comparable New York City. That way the city government could tell residents of the Palo Alto neighborhood of the Borough of Santa Clara that they don't get to shut out all new construction, when they have a major transit station next to a lot of highly-paid engineering jobs and a world-leading university.
Am I the only one who wants more posts about Matt's spotty youth, including smoking cigarettes and using a fake ID?
And associating with the children of convicted felons, too -- real thugs who engage in mafia stuff like witness tampering in federal cases. That was after he went to the inner-city highschool where Bill Barr's dad offered shelter to notorious child predator Jeffrey Epstein .
It's a miracle that Matt turned out as well as he did, given the milieu of pervasive criminality and corruption in the institutions that housed him.
'My dorm-mate Jared Kushner' - I can't be the only one feeling sad we haven't gotten an Epic Twitter Thread out of this a la Craig Mazin's reports on Ted Cruz.
I did not know him well. But I do remember him on his flip phones in the dining hall making deals.
Tho I think CM shared a room or suite with TC, whereas MY shared only a dorm with JK. Less direct exposure, fewer up close and personal anecdotes about life with the Zodiac Killer.
What I take away from all of this is that there are lots of people, left and right, that want the benefits of a gated community - feeling of exclusivity, ability to control who moves in, everything short of actual, literal gates.
When you can't have that de-jure, you create it de-facto with an economic fence instead of a real one. Then... once you have that, if you are a lefty like Robert Reich in Berkeley, you can then hide behind preservationist NIMBY logic or even, ironically, gentrification rhetoric to enforce your economic fence.
Let's be clear, everyone who does this in bad faith is an asshole. Including Robert Reich himself, who now can't post on twitter without his Berkeley NIMBY screed being reposted for all the world to see.
I think lots of people, though, don't do it in bad faith. Never underestimate, first, how unintuitive basic economic concepts are for people, and second, how much people can genuinely convince themselves with motivated reasoning.
I mean, no doubt some of this is a reflection of control-freakism. If you've ever had the indignity of being in an HOA, you've surely met that class of people. They have lots of opinions about how other people should live (which is bad), but have been empowered with means to enforce, which is terrifying.
And, like, most people who live on a cozy block of 2-family homes don't really want a 10-story tower built on either side of their house! You don't need to be some sort of crypto-racist control freak to have that preference. At least make the pitch better, like "Let's reduce housing prices for families across our state by building a million new homes, and yes, that is going to mean you might have the house next to you torn down and replaced with an apartment building"
You seem to take the anti-NIMBY train of thought pretty far though.
I wonder what you'd say about my mom's neighbor, who've haven't cut their grass in a decade or more. There are weedy trees growing taller than their house, fertilized in part by their kids who used to occasionally poop in the yard when they were young for somer reason. Rats and mice seem to be finding their way into neighbors properties more and more often. The garage is slowly being covered in soil and collapsing and a junked van sits in their section of the crowded alley, making it harder for anyone else to 3 point turn or for the snow plow to be effective. I won't go into detail on the criminal stuff since there are laws about that, but it's worth mentioning because it correlates with an inability to take care of property.
At what point does any of that stop being "people should live however they want and neighbors should never complain".
I mean, sure, neighbors can complain.
And yes, if a neighbor is breaking a law, like playing loud music past quiet hours established in a locality, sure, either call in a noise complaint or sue them.
For issues like rats and such, health codes can be a factor, and that is a totally useful thing for a locality to enforce. As with fire codes.
As for things like cars and the like in the front lawn, yeah, that would suck. But at some point, there is a line where you are merely trying to legislate what is in good or bad taste. Do I get to call the neighborhood taste police if your choice of inflatable stuff you put in your front yard for halloween isn't to my liking? You mention weeds in the front yard being a problem - what if instead of weeds, I am growing tomatoes?
After living in an HOA for 8 years and finally escaping that kind of hellscape of conformity and nitpicky BS, I'd settle for the occasional car on bricks in a yard somewhere in the area as a compromise.
I've never lived in anything like an HOA so I don't have much to go on. I trust your description of nitpicky BS and I agree that nitpicky BS sucks.
I'm just trying to figure out how these lines of compromise should best be drawn. How is an HOA establishing rules all that different from a local government establishing local ordinances? In the case of my mom's house, her town is only 8,000 people. Noise and hygiene ordinances are set by the town council, elected from the 8,000 residents.
Don't HOAs work the same way? From far away from the situation, I'm trying to figure out: are HOA's really the problem? Or were you in the wrong one? Or is the culture of homeowners, at least in your area, so different from renters that there's something of a class war happening?
I really wouldn't mind something a bit closer to what you're complaining about on my mom's block, because a small number of "bad" homeowners are letting their properties completely fall apart and be destroyed, which seems irresponsible and wasteful. Fwiw or not worth it's also an eyesore. Tomatoes would be lovely. Weeds would look like my yard. I'm talking weeds that have grown into actual trees: like there's a boxelder maple growing off the roof of their garage.
I think there is an interesting problem of what level of government is *too local* - that is vaguely related to where lines get drawn.
I am totally not opposed to, in principle, people coming together and democratically deciding that we should maintain a semblance of aesthetic - so long as people are all aboveboard about motivations.
HOAs failure mode is that they are government to too small of a scale, allowing petty tyrants that are either super easily corrupted (i.e. captive boards that run all landscaping through non-arms length entities), super nitpicky, and often both. Nitpicky to the service of picking nits that require you do things that they profit from.
At some level of size, you are big enough to attract:
a.) more accountability - you are big enough for a meaningful press to care
b.) ability not to solve for hyper-local optima - think zoning that makes sure every town does it's share of land uses that are broadly unpopular (i.e. you can't just put the garbage dump near the poors or whomever has the least power).
Of course, the downside is you can't as easily enforce things like distressed property being fixed up. I suppose it's all in the tradeoffs you want.
At a point far more extreme than the median homeowner would accept
Speaking of basic economics - I think the uncomfortable truth is how YIMBYs become aligned with just unfettered, Libertarian-esc RE development. At least in Chicago, the YIMBY side seems to parrots the same talking points. Might as well be sitting at the same table in the community meetings.
Here's a great example: https://chicagoyimby.com/2021/02/residential-tower-set-to-rise-515-feet-at-640-w-washington-boulevard-in-west-loop-gate.html
"To address affordable housing requirements, the developer will include 11 affordable units on site and pay a fee of $5.8 million in lieu of the remaining units."
... So in addition to going for a 40 story zoning exception, they're just going to pay the fee instead of meet the affordable housing requirement. Great work team.
As they should! Let people build what people want.
Demarcating affordable units is a very silly bugaboo to have - housing of any variety soaks up demand for housing everywhere, in much the same way that the price of used cars are dependent upon the price and production of new cars. We don’t need car manufacturers to guarantee a certain number of “affordable” cars - we let people produce what they want, and affordable cars result.
Counterpoint B ... the unsustainable mess that is Houston's flood water drainage network.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/investigations/harvey-urban-planning/
It's perhaps not surprising that the near consensus opinion of Slow Boring readers is build-what-people-want. It seems to be one of MY's core positions. It just seems so odd that in no other realm of progressive politics are interests aligned with unchecked capitalism.
Here's my personal example. It took 10 years of lobbying for the local, over-crowded elementary school annex to get built. Then within just two years it became overcrowded again as building after building were upzoned. We moved away since there was no end in sight and private school options were suboptimal but this idea that growth comes without constraining local services seems ... idk, just ignored by the YIMBY / developer crowd.
https://blockclubchicago.org/2019/02/25/skinner-wests-16-6-million-annex-opens-brings-22-more-classrooms-to-west-loop-school/
If it's that expensive to meet affordability requirements, perhaps the affordability requirements are causing problems? Sounds like they have to set aside about 10% of the units as affordable, so they're short about 30(seems like they're building 413 units)? That means they're paying almost 200k per unit they're skipping? Median house price in Chicago seems to be 300k, so can't that money be better spent on affordable stuff elsewhere?
I used to live in Somerville, but the city kicked me out for living with too many roommates! We had 7 people in a 7 bedroom. The city told us that only 4 unrelated people could live together, and also the 7 bedroom apartment was illegal. We were forced out, and the landlord was forced to de-densify the apartment.
Your landlord sounds like a scumbag, in that particular way that sketchy landlords in student-heavy cities often are, but rules on unrelated people living together are just insanity, and I'm always flabbergasted that they haven't been successfully challenged in court.
How so a scumbag?
I lived in Cambridge in a house that was behind one of those 3-story 3-unit things(the house was kind of an ADU I guess?) and it had 5 bedrooms and we had at one point 6 people living in it with 2 of them sharing a room and my landlord certainly wasn't a scumbag. He lived in one of the 3-story units up front.
Read Andrew's reply downthread -- he goes into more detail.
Curious, how did they find out? I imagine places like this have some sort of eyes network looking for too many people parking nearby, too many cars coming and going in a driveway.
Same way some places with AirBNB restrictions tell people to report when they see too many people with roller bags going in and out of a condo.
I called the fire department over a gas leak, and the fire fighters noticed that the building was not up to code. The building inspector got called in to review the heating system (per the gas leak) and he started saying "that's not up to code, that's not up to code, that's not up to code. How many people live here again?" I didn't feel like the building was unsafe or the egresses were unclear, but they did.
Apparently the landlord had a history of dishonesty with the city. After the city told our landlord they were going to get fined for renting an illegal apartment, our landlord's response was to just lie to the city and say that we had already left. The city accepted that without verifying it until my roommate went over to city hall and said "Hey, I live at [address] and I was wondering if you could give me details about the city's enforcement action against our landlord." The bureaucrat said "you live at [address] huh? Interesting. Do you live in the basement?" And my roommate said "yeah I live in the basement there, why?" Well it turned out the entire basement had been converted into bedrooms without any sort of permitting process.
Anyway it was a great apartment that allowed me to live near the T with a bunch of friends at a reasonable rent, but it could only exist illegally.
Can I ask you the landlord's name? I used to work in commercial real estate around the city, I know most of the major players who are also running shady flop housing. Could be Tony Madan, could be Dave Lewis/Avid Management, could be Ben Tuck/Lowtide Development..... Man do I have some Madan family horror stories. Obviously no worries if you don't want to reveal who it was
Yeah, I would not call the landlord a good actor in this situation either, especially if there (no idea, but maybe?) a way to come up to code in an aboveboard manner (guessing he could of, but just didn't want to go through a permitting process?)
I'm not sure there was--if there's a ban on the number of unrelated adults living together, then that apartment was illegal no matter what the landlord did. Which doesn't mean he was a good actor, but the bigger problem here seems to be with the city.
In Fairfax at the worst of this stuff, it was cheaper to pay the fine than to handle the underlying problem. Well, just fix the fines! Depending on your local and state, that might be a local matter, but it might involve the state changing a law that caps things.
That's a huge thing in Virginia, where the state Dillon Rule's the hell out of everything.
Not a Somerville resident, but the way this works in places I've lived is something about a place draws attention to itself. Lots of people coming and going, a bunch of extra cars, irritating the neighbor with loud parties. That gets called in to local code enforcement, someone with a clipboard starts poking around, you get the idea. It's both a super important thing(code enforcement) but absolutely can be weaponized by asshole neighbors with nothing better to do with their time.
The places I've lived have all had some form of regulation on the book limiting the number of non-related people living in a structure. While 7 people in a 7 bedroom getting busted seems silly, you would be amazed the stories a local fire marshal can tell. And that's the intention of many of these. In Fairfax County, we had a bit of a run of people dying in fires in illegal basement apartments because the only exit was up the stairs.
Somerville has some amazingly sketchy multi-bedroom conversions! Any time I visit friends up there I'm tracking the fire exits knowing it wouldn't be obvious in an emergency...
In order for Boston's housing prices to not be bananas, pretty much every style of development needs to shift outward; the cities like Somerville need to have tall development, the inner suburbs need to be more like cities, the outer suburbs need to be dense and commercialized, the bedroom communities need to be all the way out at 495, and people who want a really rural experience need to be way out there.
But....approximately no one who already lives somewhere wants that because it's annoying to (1) find out that the residential experience you signed up for is going to be elsewhere and (2) your commute is going to be worse.
So in the abstract if I say "hey Lincoln, you need to be more like Newton", no one's going to go "Newton's a hellhole, we can't live like that?" but they're still all gonna say "hell no" - if the people in Lincoln wanted restaurants and sidewalks and a green line stop, they'd live in Newton.
Out here in the suburbs, development is opposed based on this logic: "X is going to change the character of (insert your favorite NIMBY Boston suburb here)".
But doing nothing is changing the character anyway - see Somerville as an example. When we were looking at houses (in Natick) long time townies who did not have white collar knowledge-economy jobs (cuz you don't -need- that to live in Natick, right?) would remark that they couldn't believe the housing prices.
With high prices and the housing stock turning over, all of these communities will experience a _class_ transformation if they don't experience a land use transformation.
That said, if they did change the regulatory environment such that this could happen, it's not like it would happen all that quickly. You don't remake entire cities quickly -- especially in America. People wouldn't blink and find that the residential experience they signed up for had changed.
Not overnight no. But for some locales, if you really removed the restrictions, I suspect it would change dramatically in a decade or less.
It depends on how far down the counterfactual we go. Are we somehow imagining a world in which there is essentially NO planning/approvals process, or merely one in which there is less ability to completely veto projects?
My wife's work is in affordable housing, and their expectation is that (successful, non-blocked) projects will take a minimum of five years to go from concept to built.
If you did something like, "Make it much less onerous to build in one small area of a metro region," like if just Somerville suddenly loosened its restrictions on building while the rest of greater Boston metro stayed the same, I could imagine it would be significantly remade in that time. If all of great Boston went to a realistically looser, but not just "hey do whatever" building regime, then between the fact that you'd be spreading the building out over a large area, the low elasticity of construction supply, and the fact that projects are going to be on a multi-year timeframe anyway, you wouldn't see dramatic changes in the next decade.
Yup. Can't freeze a city in amber. If people want to maintain their current lifestyle they could sell and move outward but we need some external mandate to break the stalemate. Prop 19 passed in California to effectively pay seniors to do this (via our broken property tax system).
Up here in Salem (a 30 minute commuter train ride north of Boston), the latest argument from the NIMBYs is just like in this piece: “why should SALEM host all the new construction? Why won’t the surrounding communities do their part?”
But Salem is the place with the walkable neighborhood core, the thriving restaurant & tourist scene, the commuter train to Boston, the former industrial sites within walking distance of the train station and downtown getting transformed into residential… it’s the place to put new construction apartments, and the YIMBY mayor is all for it. The zoning and design review process makes it challenging, but it’s still happening.
It's a fair question - being NIMBY isn't the answer, but any single town (and no town is that big) that embraces development would be taking one for the team compared to your neighbors.
I understand why MY is bringing up Somerville because of the population stats and how strong its gentrification arc has been over the last fifty years. But I look at the redevelopment of Assembly Square and then I look out at the suburbs and think "what inner ring suburb has done anything like that?"
For sure. Nonetheless, we should lead, esp. with the Green Line Extension finally becoming real.
So should Cambridge, but they continue to be slouches on embracing change, so let’s outshine them & be an example for embracing growth & harnessing it to help avoid displacement.
Really, embarassing Cambridge is its own reward.
Oh, I agree 100%. And I suspect that areas that embrace growth will end up turning out to be nice places to live after the fact, and people won't be full of buyer's remorse.
California has a Housing Element process to try preempt this, and make sure each region their fair share of growth, at a minimum.
It's amusing to watch some municipalities throw shade at others for blocking development, thus causing spillover.
As a family values guy, why cant more families live together in one dwelling.
Sounds like you're advocating for... fuller houses?
RIP Norm, Bob. Condolences.
“state of Massachusetts” obligatory it’s a Commonwealth, that my fellow Bay Staters will understand
Glad I scrolled down before commenting! It stuck out so much that I thought it was a troll.
People's Republic, but .... yeah.
How much of a problem is the American refusal to allow suburbs to be swallowed up by cities, or put some of these question to higher-level entities? My impression is that when suburbs get too big cities either grow (e.g. the Toronto 'Megacity' amalgamation) or establish some sort of supra-municipal entity (e.g. Greater London) to make things work. In the US this seems to combine with the abandonment of city centres to create some truly horrendous policy.
A lot of it is that. If you look at Massachusetts, none of the munis were great, but Boston was a lot better than the surrounding suburbs. Though of course the best evidence against this idea is NYC, where the 50 city member city council colludes to NIMBY every single neighborhood.
Yeah, NYC managed, as sadly usual, to have the worst of both worlds. We amalgamated the non-Manhattan cities, but we kept a ghost version of their local governments intact as otherwise-useless patronage mills, and then learned the exact wrong lesson from the Robert Moses years and decided to give unlimited veto power to unelected neighborhood councils composed 100% of retired busybodies and cronies of the local electeds. So we get all of the veto points of a collection of tiny municipalities, but all of the corruption opportunities of a big, hard-to-manage city.
This is largely a 20th century phenomenon here that we haven't figured out how to break. Even Los Angeles, the epitome of sprawl, annexed a ton of cities early on, most famously the San Fernando Valley in 1915 by using aqueduct water.
At least in California, establishing a statewide policy is our best bet, especially since our major cities don't border other states. Giving counties control over cities would also work but that ain't happening. Instead, cities annexing unincorporated county land is functionally a one-way valve.
A little bit, but there isn't nearly enough construction in central cities either.
"The perceived link between building and gentrification tends to generate very counterproductive local backlash politics when what’s really needed is a bigger and more regional approach."
Exactly. I remember having some fun clashes with some student musicians/activists at Georgia Tech on this issue in 2016. They strongly believed (at the time) that new housing in Midtown Atlanta was at the root of all working class problems in the area, and that I was a "corporate clown", their words, for suggesting otherwise.
(I think they all voted for Jill Stein, or Mickey Mouse, or Ed Asner's Ass Pimple, in both of Trump's elections. Good times. :/ )
But it's worth noting: As this issue gets regionalized, it will get nationalized--and as that happens, it will polarize along partisan lines. Trump states will become NIMBY states, and non-Trump states will become YIMBY states.
Right-wing identity in America is already centered on "keeping the wrong people out". It will extend to "keeping the wrong people out" on a neighborhood level. And it will soon treat expensive, unaffordable housing as an unalloyed *good*, for culture war reasons, as sure as we're all standing here. Mark my words.
I can't wait for libertarians to be a Democratic faction.
Well, if it does fully nationalize, it will likely cost the party that takes the YIMBY side a good share of votes. NIMBY is a much more natural pattern of human thought than YIMBY is. If Democrats are going to be the party of YIMBY they better work hard on their messaging and message discipline.
No argument here. Trump intuited this during the 2020 campaign. He was just a little too ahead of his time. :/
I live right at the edge of Somerville, technically in Charlestown. The density of small homes and nearly complete absence of towers/buildings is really noticeable. Of course, I love walking around and enjoying the small yards and eclectic mix of houses, but it's clearly a huge loss that there isn't more housing stock.
There's also, at least by me, a noticeable absence of stores and restaurants. Apart from the major cross-cutting streets (like Broadway and Washington), there is hardly anything commercial inside the residential areas.
I actually see a fair number of empty or for sale homes that look ripe for renovation and condo-ificiation. I don't think that solution scales -- it's not a 15 story tower -- but it helps with the 'people per house' problem a bit.
I'd love to see so much construction around here. It's a great place and would be even better with more people and a few more places to shop and eat. But, unfortunately, the mayoral run off is down to two progressive candidates. Good luck getting them to support anything that would be good for the long-term future of the Latino community being priced out of east Somerville by insufficient development.
But at least the state of massachusetts is spending billions of dollars to drive the Green Line Extension through those miles of 2-story houses without getting the obvious zoning concessions that you would want in return for it, so that's....nice.
Yeah, the year I lived in Somerville the shopping and eating options nearby weren't fantastic – I ended up walking to Cambridge a lot, which was more often convenient than waiting for the 86 bus, despite the not incredibly friendly pedestrian infrastructure in my part of town (I was pretty close to McGrath Highway). New housing would probably be better insulated than where I lived too.
Interesting! I think all the really great food is in Somerville, not Cambridge :)
Jeff, what are your favorites? Zoe's Chinese fan over here :)
Zoe’s is def. really great Chinese. Other favs: Sugidama, Spoke, Pini’s Pizza, Op Opa Yee-Ro, Tenoch, The Burren, Highland Kitchen, Celeste, Bronwyn, everything at Bow Market
Saying the benefits of more housing are extremely diffuse undersells the problem. The benefits of not-more-housing are extremely concentrated for everyone who owns property.
If a home-owner owns their home and is leveraged via a mortgage, then from a strictly financial standpoint "more housing to help combat soaring housing prices" is not a feature. The bug is profitable.
It can be, but often isn't. Buy a house for 100k in 2010. In 2020, its worth 200k. In theory, you've made 100k in asset increases, but for most people, their house isn't primarily an asset, its their home. So if they sell, they have to buy another home and almost all the houses in the area have experienced the same increase so they don't gain anything. Further, if they were paying 1% property tax in property taxes in 2010, they are now paying double in nominal terms.
So for most people, its only a significant gain if they plan on selling and going to a lower cost area.
I don't entirely buy that - it absolutely is their home, and yes, as long people are moving during their primary earning years, they have to make a like for like substitution - it's hard to cash out. Felix Salmon likes to say everyone is born short housing.
But then you retire and you can down-size and then you do get to cash out. So I'd argue the "asset" part of a house is a retirement savings vehicle - home equity may be the biggest savings vehicle for a lot of people.
I think you have several good points here in that people CAN downsize and cash out and people DO use home equity as their biggest savings vehicle.
My point is that many(most?) people having lived somewhere for 20+ years often decide they don't want to cash out and move somewhere else because everyone and everything they know is there. There is a reason that the average person is much less likely to move as they get older. Which means that cashing out to downsize isn't the big positive it could be. It also makes it harder to access their biggest savings vehicle. Finally it means all the increased property taxes they paid on an more expensive asset lead that asset to become a net negative.*
*Their inheritors on the other hand probably greatly appreciate being able to sell an appreciated asset and profit the gains with limited taxation.
Right - the property taxes can be a huge issue - see also CA and prop 78 (I think) or MA and prop 2.5.
True, but that means someone in their 30s shouldn't care. I'm kind of miffed that prices are skyrocketing right now, not just because of taxes but also if I want to upgrade at some point, the delta in price is *also* commensurately greater.
Right - if you're still a little bit short, it sucks. Rising prices pit the older against the younger.
And you have an asset you can use as collateral for other stuff too.
I think analyses like these are really helpful for people who are change-resistant but haven't gone full head in sand. I was at a community meeting this weekend in Atlanta and once I described our Somerville (just a neighborhood) that had seen significant displacement of Black households, significantly increased home prices, and a decreased total population something clicked for people. I think it made it clear that once the conditions are such that the would be "gentrifiers" are on the way, the question is how to accommodate them, not whether to accommodate them, short of some level of intervention in buying/selling homes that everyone loses interest in once they understand they wouldn't be exempt.
Thank you Matt. I live in Somerville, and this nails a debate I've had with other readers on previous YIMBY-related comment threads (eg here https://www.slowboring.com/p/houses-not-zoning/comments#comment-2540106 ). I think it's additionally hard because when housing prices are high, any new development you allow that doesn't require affordable housing will be "luxury" apartments -- it will seem like more of the problem, rather than where the solution. (E.g., city counselors I generally like opposed a Davis Square dorm-style apartment building proposal, saying "the last thing we need is additional luxury housing.") You need an immense amount of regional development to start making a perceptible dent in rent/housing costs.
I'm curious if there are ways to hack this from a policy perspective on the local level. The most obvious and commonly used tool is requiring that a percentage of apartments be affordable, but I imagine economists have demonstrated that that just shifts costs elsewhere. One thing you might do is require that apartments be small and have small bedrooms; that would necessarily pack more people into a given building, though it might also just make some of the apartments be empty investments or second apartment pied a terres. You could also require that the developer operate the building on a rental basis only and not sell units as condos, since rent is relatively lower than has in costs on a historical basis. But I suspect in the scheme of things, any such rules depress the desirability of building more housing in the first place, and so any benefits would be canceled out by decreased development.
The number of people who pivot from the need to act locally on Climate change to we can't do anything about housing supply because it's a regional problem in a single conversation here is pretty incredible.
Sounds like you get the common rejoinders to those local policies you recommend. For the inclusionary zoning, someone in Portland literally did the math to show how the cost shift makes the non-subsidized units even more expensive and possibly impractical to build. This can be overcome with a very generous density bonus, if the marginal unsubsidized units can cover the loses on the subsidized units. https://sightline-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/infill-prototypes-cost-detail.pdf
I've actually only heard of the opposite on unit size, requiring 3-bedrooms (I think in Vancouver, BC) because low-and-moderate income families tend to get squeezed pretty hard once bands of yuppie roommates are competing for the same units as them. And those units tend to be uncommon in new build apartments.
The rent/own is tricky, at least down South the opportunity to build wealth through homeownership is at least an important talking point if not substantively important to people. And I do like to say "a mortgage is like rent-control for homeowners" so for any given price its probably better to have some ownership opportunities along with rental opportunities. Down here, almost all the new tower construction is rental, so that might be why the push is towards somewhere closer to 50/50.
Yeah, the issue with statutory minimums in terms of number of units (or height etc.) is that as you say, if the market for it doesn't exist, then developers just won't build anything there. But presumably there are minimum unit size constraints that could be loosened to *allow* smaller units and that would have the effect of causing some such units to exist.
I suggest all those on Matt's site whining about the ills of America move to France, where my wife is from and still owns a country house. The housing outside central Paris and the Cote d-Azur is incredibly cheap. You can own a chateau with your own vineyards for the price of a 2BR in Brooklyn, the country has an amazing number of beautiful cities with cheap housing, and good restaurants and shops walkable from your front door. I'd recommend LeMans, where my wife is from, a 55-minute fast rail ride to Paris, Nantes, St Malo, Caen, Rennes, Deauville, Bordeaux, Lyons, Nimes, Avignon, Aix-en-Provence, Albi, La Rochelle, Toulouse and Montpelier. These are just those I've visited in recent years; I'm sure there are many others, Dijon and Dole which I visited 50 years ago come to mind. Of course you'll have to learn French, a bug to most Americans, but a feature to me. The upside is you'll get cheap housing, a great rail network, the best medical care in the world, a longer life, much better food and wine, free child care, all the things Matt pontificates about. Move now. You won't regret it. Of course, when we've all moved to a better life, it won't promote Matt's goal of a billion Americans. But, hey, there are costs and benefits to millions of people making decisions about what's best for them.
One Billion Americans (Living in France)
How do you get work authorization? If the 2020 elections had gone bad, I was looking at Portugal -- green card-like status if you spend $400k on a house. Ireland requires 1m euros in an investment fund.
No idea about France. Helps having a French spouse. My understanding is though if you get green-card-like status in Portugal or Malta, you can live and work pretty much anywhere in the EU. Don't take this as legal advice, may just be an urban legend.
As someone who lived in Belgium for a while, I remember French people and Germans moving in to avoid staggering levels of taxation.
Staggering levels of taxation? I'm sure there are Germans and French who find any tax staggering, but I can tell you my wife pays a pittance in tax on her country property compared to what she'd pay in the US.
Okay
FYI Recently a development was proposed for additional housing right next to the Supreme Liquors where you got busted, but it looks like the local planning board will shoot it down because the proposal doesn't include parking. This is despite the fact that the building is literally next to the t-stop (subway).
Cambridge is being really bad with this - also just shut down a new apartment building with affordable housing at the Porter Square T stop
Eastern Massachusetts (like all blue metros in the US) in general is pretty bad. But Cambridge, at least, has managed to grow its population over the last several decade. So it's gotten denser. I think it's now at or near its all time peak population.
Cambridge has had some high profile missed opportunities, but the population grew 12.5% over the last decade and is now about 2k residents below its 1950 peak. Somerville at its peak had roughly the population density of New York City today, hard to imagine it getting all the way back to that point - although with ongoing Assembly and GLX development maybe there's a chance?
It's interesting to see Gateway cities absorb some of this demand. Lynn, Brockton, Quincy, and New Bedford's populations all rose above 100k in the latest Census. If the "quaint-er" E-Mass towns want to limit development, they should pay into a regional infrastructure fund that will support Regional Rail and other projects for cities that are shouldering the population growth.