[plughs]

> School superintendent: Actually we've run the numbers, we have plenty of capacity and we welcome the additional tax revenue.

"we've run the numbers" is a poor response. Our local school has a playground covered with "temporaries" and a class size of 25-30 per teacher. School overcrowding is not a hypothetical concern.

Homeowners want their home prices to rise in the way anyone wants any investment's value to rise. But it doesn't mean they don't have other reasonable concerns.

[davidw]

> Homeowners want their home prices to rise in the way anyone wants any investment's value to rise. But it doesn't mean they don't have other reasonable concerns.

I'd like my car's value to rise by restricting people from bringing new cars to town too.

If you read the special report and associated opinion piece, a major point of it is that treating a home that you own as an 'investment' rather than something that you consume has been a colossal problem for many places.

[jbay808]

If a city of 1 million people 50 years ago could afford at the time to build a school fit for 1000 students, why couldn't that city afford to upgrade that school to comfortably fit 2000 students today when it has doubled in population density?

You'd need to hire more teachers, yes, but not more teachers per taxpayer...

[pchristensen]

You get hit several times by the same problem:

Land was much more available 50 years ago, cheaper, and less complex to develop (fewer teardowns, existing infrastructure, etc). A school district that has only developed 20 acre greenfield campuses will have to develop new expertise and capabilities to develop a tighter infill school, and it might cost 5x or more for the same capacity.

Decreased housing affordability means that the price of every employee is much higher, so you either stretch them farther or do without. This is fine for high margin industries like tech and finance; low margin industries either pay lower real wages or improve efficiency with systems. Two big industries where those do not apply are health and education, which have (not coincidentally) inflated at a higher rate than real estate. Lots of specialized labor that's not automatable - expensive.

Then, because school districts are of varying quality (real and perceived), and usually assigned by geographic districts, changing ANY boundaries, especially in high demand areas, can have real effects on property values (again, real and perceived). Enough people will vocally object to boundary changes, even if it means a new school, that it's an annoying headwind to any attempt to increase school capacity.

It's a chicken and egg problem. If the the schools are at capacity, you can't responsibly add more housing, but if you're not adding more housing, why would you add school capacity? Schools are possibly the most local of local interests, and it's easier for any given community to shunt the problem elsewhere, especially if their houses are increasing in value while they stall.

[jbay808]

I don't entirely disagree with you, but I don't think that this fully captures it. I'm not talking about a new school, I'm talking about making an existing school bigger. There's no reason that a schoolhouse has to be just two stories.

Replacing a 2-storey school building with a 4-storey school building should not require purchasing new land, so the cost of land shouldn't matter much. (The temporary school closure would be a problem, but not insurmountable - it happens). The boundaries would be unchanged. A 4 storey building might cost somewhat more than twice a 2-storey building, but that should be more than offset by the fact that in addition to the number of taxpayers having doubled, they've also gotten much wealthier over the last several decades, so there's plenty of funds available.

Each teacher would need a cost of living bonus to offset the higher price of the area, but that's equally the case in a high-price low-density neighbourhood as in a high-price high-density neighbourhood. If your 3000 taxpayers can afford to pay 100 teachers enough to live in an expensive low-density neighbourhood, then your 6000 taxpayers can afford to pay 200 teachers enough to live in that same neighbourhood when it has higher density. And if the added density reduces land values, as many complain it will, then it will only get more affordable per-teacher than it is now.

[zip1234]

Perhaps schools should just be built with temporaries? It seems like there are no schools that are ever the right size. They either close the 100m school that was built 10 years ago because they don't need it or they need 100m to build a new one.

[maxsilver]

> It seems like there are no schools that are ever the right size.

Maybe every city shouldn't be chasing constant huge growth? And that for cities that do chase constant huge growth, they should plan and build the infrastructure for it before inviting a bunch of people and property developers in?

We have lots of schools here that are the "right size". But that's in-part because we have ~0.3% population growth year-over-year, instead of say the 3.0+% YoY pop growth that somewhere like Seattle often sees. Population growth isn't a bad thing, but it should be built and planned for, not just dumped into a place and expected for everything to "just work out OK".

> Perhaps schools should just be temporaries

That's a really unsafe idea, for a whole host of reasons : https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/nyregion/pushing-to-rid-n...

[zip1234]

Schools don't need to be the crappy temporary trailers. However, do schools need fancy immense structures or can they just lease office space?

[pchristensen]

It's not a bad idea, but due to zoning, there's usually not office space near neighborhoods, and schools are usually the most durable and identifiable parts of a community. Just like people that own 2 cars take fewer Ubers, a school district that already owns and operates a bunch of real estate has an incentive to either expand it or use it more intensively vs taking on temporary obligations with unknown future budgetary consequences.

[homonculus1]

After they get rid of all their lunches, lockers, libraries, laboratories, music programs, theater programs, shop programs, and athletic programs. Also after finding a landlord willing to comingle enterprise tenants with hundreds of loud children, and superimposing a school zone over an office building through regulatory alchemy.

[gowld]

> a class size of 25-30 per teacher.

That has nothing to do with housing or school buildings and everything to do with teacher funding. A classroom with 30 kids can have 3 teachers if the district chooses, with no impact on housing issues.