[millimeterman]

There's nothing inherently impossible about building a dense, thriving city on "a tiny dot of land". I fail to see how the issue is overpopulation and not an abject failure to construct housing in line with the number of people who want to live there.

[throw8383833jj]

I've wondered about this myself, many many times. It's either a complete failure to understand the basic supply/demand equation which underpins all resource scarcity OR somehow voters feel it's in their interest to not change things.

[millimeterman]

> voters feel it's in their interest to not change things

I mean, in a sense it is. NIMBY-dominated suburbia might be a disaster for the environment, economic growth, and the well-being of newer and poorer residents, but it does an excellent job of keeping homeowners' property values sky-high.

[bombcar]

The problem is the people who live and vote there want the city to remain as it is - certainly it would be a successful city if it were as dense as Paris, but it wouldn’t be Santa Cruz anymore, but Paris West or something.

[millimeterman]

> The problem is the people who live and vote there want the city to remain as it is

There's no good reason that Santa Cruz should specifically stay the way it was 50 years ago or whatever. Personally, I would have liked for Santa Cruz to remain the way it was before people came and tore up all the nature to build a bunch of suburbs, but I can't get what I want either. Culture is inherently ever-changing; Santa Cruz may be _different_ in 50 years if densification and growth was allowed but I don't see how it would be somehow not be Santa Cruz.

There are real, severe economic effects from trying to freeze a city in an arbitrary point in time. At some point the well-being of real actual people needs to be prioritized over the aesthetic preferences and property values of a few NIMBYs. Especially when those aesthetic preferences essentially boil down to hating multi-story apartments and public transit.

[bombcar]

Which brings us full circle to the whole question of government and local government in particular; Californians in general and certainly Santa Crucians would be directly opposed to Texas voting to redevelop Santa Cruz into a highrise metropolis - so who has the say and who gets to make that decision? Obviously the people who want to live there don't live there, but should it be a county decision? State? Federal? World?

Even many of the people who are rabidly pro-transit will be at least mildly against "transit right through my bedroom"; most people don't like being eminently domained.

This usually results in the solution being "motion" of some sort; a city that is run down or out of the limelight begins to modernize and upgrade, and it becomes the new center, and the towns that don't chance ossify and eventually die off.

It may be that the "California problem" is solved because everyone eventually moves away.

[millimeterman]

Why should development be a matter of formal voting and government mandates? Why should it be any more complex than private entities buying land and then constructing what they want on that land? (Within reason - zoning is still important to keep housing away from industrial waste or garbage dumps. But the externalities of disallowing dense and mixed-use development are profoundly negative.)

[bombcar]

That's likely to be involved in at least part of the solution, but you could still have the situation where everyone refuses to sell to developers (or enacts HOA-like contracts that forbid it).

[millimeterman]

> you could still have the situation where everyone refuses to sell to developers

There's nothing wrong with this - no one is obligated to sell their land to developers. But considering that NIMBYs have to fight hard and continuously to block new development that would have otherwise proceeded, clearly that's not the case.

[rcpt]

Right. You could drop the center of Barcelona right on top Santa Cruz and have a vastly improved city.