[dionidium]

This is why I think we need to be absolutely upfront and clear about our priorities here. Too many people, too often try to quell these fears about parking, or shadows, or traffic, or whatever.

I propose total, brutal honesty and transparency: more density means more housing, more people, more traffic, more shadows, and less parking.

It also solves one of the largest issues facing our cities: affordable housing.

Let's just be entirely clear that that's a more important outcome than the impacts on your free parking spot, the shadows on your garden, the number of people crowding up your favorite parks and cafes, and on and on an on -- even on the loss of existing home values.

I hear your objections. I don't think you're wrong to have them. They are perfectly rational.

They're just less important than the alternative.

This is an enormous country. There is room out there for your single-family housing. But not in our most urban areas. There are policy goals that vastly outweigh anybody's desire to live in a bucolic country ranch minutes from skyscrapers.

[sliverstorm]

not in our most urban areas

That's half the problem; these aren't urban areas. Now people that don't live there want to urbanize them, and the people that do live there don't.

There is room out there for your single-family housing

Somewhat of an ironic statement, given there was plenty of room for their house when it was built.

[dionidium]

1) They clearly are urban areas today, no matter how intensely you want to ignore that reality.

2) The Valley used to be perfect for single-family houses and peach-tree orchards or whatever. And at one point in very recent history the island of Manhattan was a dense forest.

Who cares?

Neither fact has literally anything to do with the maximally beneficial housing and zoning policies we should be pursuing in those places today.

[sliverstorm]

I have ethical hangups over telling people to get out because I want to urbanize their property & neighborhood, and that they should have moved to a more rural area (it was when they moved there). Smacks of the old sins of colonialism to me. We roll in, decide it's all ours now, and the original inhabitants can take a hike if they don't like it.

I don't mind converting neighborhoods so much after the original inhabitants have moved on, but there are still countless people around who moved there & bought when it was all peaches and single-family homes were entirely reasonable. I'm not really OK with evicting them.

[dionidium]

The language of gentrification (and of housing in general) is deliberately emotionalized in this way and I think it’s a real impediment to thinking clearly on the subject.

I don’t want to evict anybody. I want people to make the totally banal and normal year-over-year decision about where to live that literally every human being has made for all of human history.

We don’t “roll in” and make them leave. We roll in and make them a market offer that they can accept or decline.

And, crucially, I’m proposing the sort of development that makes rents lower, not higher. (Incumbents always win this game, anyway. Don’t feel sorry for incumbents.)

What you don’t get to do is stop progress because of nostalgia. Short of that, I have no desire to make anybody live anywhere.