[toomuchtodo]

Yes, those rights. If you’re a newcomer, buy where the community aligns with your development and density desires. Otherwise, go elsewhere. Don’t expect the community to change for you because you think your ideas are “better”.

This isn’t meant to sound combative, these are just facts.

[yazaddaruvala]

I’m genuinely curious what you think we should do about getting stuck in local optimums?

Allowing buildings to be 2x the height means, lower home prices in general but also the oldest owners have the worst views/property prices in the neighborhood. So optimizing locally, people should not want more homes built.

Meanwhile, 2x taller buildings mean, 2x the people can sleep at night and work in the morning boosting the economy without the inefficiency of a long commute, traffic, CO2, etc. I.e. long term improvements for a larger set of humans.

In the name of progress/innovation shouldn’t the calculation be based on ROI for humanity/environment/etc and not based on a locally popular vote?

[toomuchtodo]

One person’s progress and innovation is another person’s theft or deprivation of value and enjoyment. Provide economic incentives for upzoning, and if the community doesn’t bite (which is their right), move on.

Electrification of mobility and transport makes the environmental argument a moot point.

Disclaimer: I live in suburbia.

[yaacov]

> Electrification of mobility and transport makes the environmental argument a moot point.

I disagree. Electric cars are more efficient than IC, but they still use electricity which mostly comes from fossil fuels. Add in all the massively increased infrastructure spending and emissions per capita that are needed for suburbs, and urbanization is a no-brainer from an environmental perspective.

[toomuchtodo]

A million EVs are sold every six months, and the time to sell a million EVs is shortening. Hundreds of GWs of renewables come online each year.

Urbanization is like nuclear power, financially and politically untenable. It is not a reasonable path to success.

[ericd]

How is urbanization financially untenable? IIRC, it’s been shown that suburbia generally isn’t paying its way when it comes to infrastructure, which is optimistically built with debt, and then isn’t self-sustaining from property taxes of just those served. Because there’s a lot more infrastructure to maintain per person to have people so spread out, and the values aren’t correspondingly higher.

[toomuchtodo]

Urban infrastructure costs are lower (less roads, small land area to cover with police, fire, etc), but the real estate costs quickly balloon (dense real estate in desirable locations is more expensive). Do I care if my single family home is $1k-2k/year more in tax costs than urban areas if my house is $100k-300k cheaper than a condo in the city (these numbers are pulled directly from the Chicago housing market)? I do not. I would even pay much more to not live in the city (my taxes could double, and I would still come out ahead living in the 'burbs over my lifetime), but that's an argument for another thread about the continuing willingness of the debt markets to provide cheap capital for municipalities who need to pay for sprawl. Misallocated capital is the bane of many a social ill.

Are you able to convince large populations of people they should pay much higher real estate costs for lower local taxes when they're still going to pay more (total monthly housing or lump sum payment) than in the suburbs? I do not believe that argument will fly.

[landryraccoon]

I’m afraid this reasoning totally falls flat for the SF bay area and other tech hubs. It can’t simultaneously both be the case that Google, Facebook, Uber, Apple and Microsoft are permitted to have outsized global influence and massive impact on communities everywhere AND Sf bay/seattle/wherever else gets to tell every other community to mind their own business because local communities should control their own culture.

Those companies themselves create the conditions that force tech workers everywhere to look for jobs in a few select cities.

That is the height of hypocrisy. The moment Google and Facebook stake out massive cultural monopolies is the moment the community they reside in has to give up a little bit for the well being of the larger national and global community.

[toomuchtodo]

I agree that tech companies are the problem, and the only solution is regulation to force them to decouple geography from their jobs. Those jobs could be done remotely or relocated to other communities, yet they dump the externalities on local communities. And this is the result.

[closeparen]

What is “the community”? There are plenty of people with interest in / demand for urbanism, just not in a spatial distribution that confers zoning power. For now. Greater awareness might create that interest (most people are surprised to learn that the strip malls they loathe are exactly as required by law). Or zoning power might be limited from a higher level of government where spatial fragmentation is less important. But a big set of people interested in urban living does exist. Why do you think it’s so expensive?

These people are a) a market opportunity, and b) a set that might grow dramatically given the right technology catalyst. I personally think e-bikes will play a large role in getting people out of the cars-competing-for-space mindset at the root of so much NIMBYism, while preserving much of the convenience of personal transport over buses.