[jeffbee]

As a yimby, I am required by consistency and good taste to applaud this outcome. Cities with their own local environmental rules is a recipe for disaster. It is the reason why American construction is paralyzed. You can say that these environmental regulations included air and water rules, but mainly what they've been used to do is to stop the construction of housing. The fact that Austin was able to enforce its development regulations outside of its own city limits is pretty ridiculous honestly.

[swozey]

Ironically the Governor of Texas hates Austin because he (knowingly, he was AG at the time) chopped down a row of Austins very coveted pecan/cedar/heritage trees which is a huge deal to Austinites who love and value the ecosystem of their city, and was sued.

And he has been trying to get the ordinance repealed for years.

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2017/06/13/gov-greg-abb...

Austin also has to protect its Aquafier, which has been under constant attack for decades.

https://www.texastribune.org/2013/11/10/drought-abbott-keeps...

Austin has been under attack by out-of-city politicians for its entire existence. It goes back to the 1800s.

Anything Austin does, the State tries to negate.

> In January 2015, a few weeks before taking office as governor and four months before selling his Central Austin home, Abbott blasted tree ordinances as part of the “patchwork quilt” of local bans hurting the state.

> “Texas is being Californianized and you may not even be noticing it,” Abbott told a 2015 conference hosted by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, an influential think tank. “It’s being done at the city level with bag bans, fracking bans, tree-cutting bans. We’re forming a patchwork quilt of bans and rules and regulations that is eroding the Texas model.”

[blackeyeblitzar]

> The fact that Austin was able to enforce its development regulations outside of its own city limits is pretty ridiculous honestly.

Is it really that ridiculous? Texas has ETJs (extra territorial jurisdiction), which is what let Austin have some control over unincorporated land around it. This doesn’t seem that strange to me - functionally it’s not very different from a county imposing laws. More info on that in this article about Tesla avoiding environmental rules (https://electrek.co/2024/04/22/tesla-skirts-austins-environm...). On the other hand I can see how people who want to live under less control may dislike that.

> Cities with their own local environmental rules is a recipe for disaster.

I disagree with this. As an example, Seattle has historically protected trees and the environment with lots of city level regulations. Those requirements have been significantly undone by the development (construction) lobby in the last 10 years, mostly by amplifying this notion that there is a housing “crisis”. But the city’s old regulations were what made the city attractive in the first place. Now there is an absurd situation where there are different rules that apply to everyday homeowners, who face lots of restrictions on their land, versus developers who can cut down old trees and “replace” them by planting a new (young) tree somewhere else (which is obviously not the same). I’ve already seen this erosion of city regulations result in numerous neighborhoods losing trees and green spaces that were previously protected for decades, and it’s really sad.

[sbuttgereit]

> On the other hand I can see how people who want to live under less control may dislike that.

So the people subject to extra-territorial jurisdiction also get to participate in Austin elections? Do they have representation in the city government? I guess that's a form of "less control" for sure.

[jeffbee]

You have aptly, if inadvertently, perfectly illustrated the absurdity of local environmental regulations. The no-growth ordinances of Seattle are undoubtedly responsible for destroying millions of trees outside the city of Seattle.

[cryptonector]

Besides, trees can be planted, so if a developer wants to cut down a bunch of trees to make room for some buildings, and they can set aside some land to re-grow new trees, why not?

[blackeyeblitzar]

That’s like saying the US should have no environmental regulations because there are other countries with less protection. Also, calling the previous set of regulations in Seattle “no growth” is (factually incorrect) editorialization. I’ve seen this type of misinformation from the “yimby” crowd frequently, as a political tactic. Why stretch the truth? It makes it harder to find common ground.

The surrounding cities also had similar rules for what it’s worth. But stepping back, I don’t get the point of trying to concentrate density in a small area and creating problems for the environment and quality of life. In the end you get a concrete landscape of big apartment blocks with all the habitats for small animals, birds, fish destroyed. That’s not a great place to live. It seems healthier to make use of our country’s land and have development that fits in with its area, and it would mean better living conditions for people as well.

[dmoy]

> That’s like saying the US should have no environmental regulations because there are other countries with less protection.

It's not the same. The US has (nominally) some measure of keeping people out of the country. Cities in the US can't keep people from other parts of the US from moving there. We don't have internal population control like say China internal residence permits (I'm sure there are other examples, that's just what I know about).

So people are gonna move to cities whether you want them to or not, and we need to build places for them to live. Unless you want to drastically restrict freedom of movement.

> But stepping back, I don’t get the point of trying to concentrate density in a small area and creating problems for the environment and quality of life

From an environmental perspective, it is the better way if you don't push people back into pre-industrial era.

Dense cities use drastically less energy per capita, and pollute less exhaust/etc.

[blackeyeblitzar]

> Dense cities use drastically less energy per capita, and pollute less exhaust/etc.

I feel like the arguments for density being environmentally friendly are often focused on a few aspects to tell this narrative, but ignore other aspects. Traffic is higher in dense areas and contributes to concentrated pollution and mental health issues that have other effects further on. Constructing giant concrete buildings is more polluting than small wooden buildings (if sustainably harvested). And so on. A comprehensive analysis of all the aspects doesn’t seem to exist. But I’ve not searched very much either, I’ll admit.

[psunavy03]

The old regulations still won't do squat against the rise in crime and the hordes of drugged-out homeless camps everywhere. THAT is what makes Seattle unattractive these days. And I say that as a King County resident.

[badrequest]

What about YIMBYism obligates you to cheer for anything unrelated to increasing housing supply?

[jeffbee]

As I mentioned, the Austin ETJ has mainly been used to stop housing projects.

[JohnFen]

Yeah, we wouldn't want local communities to make decisions about how to protect themselves and their environment. That's madness! They'd probably decide to interfere with some business' god-given right to plunder the commons.

[Analemma_]

Correct, we do not. We tried giving local communities the ability to "make decisions about how to protect themselves" and it has been an unmitigated disaster, with spiraling housing costs that are now an existential threat to the country re: cratering birth rates because nobody can buy a house to have a family in. "Local communities" had a privilege and couldn't use it responsibly, so it's being taken away.

[JohnFen]

We have differing opinions on so much! Fair enough. We simply disagree.

I don't think that the spiraling housing costs across the country can be attributed to local environmental laws.

I don't think that the decreased birth rate can be largely attributed to the housing issue.

I don't think that the decreased birth rate is anything like an existential crisis for the US.

I think that when it comes to laws that address harms your neighbors might inflict on you, the more local those laws are decided, the better (generally speaking).

[tstrimple]

This is a false dichotomy. You don't have to enable building factories with environmental externalities next to suburbs to increase the supply of housing. Surely your argument isn't that we can't have enough housing unless Tesla is allowed to dump waste in the Colorado river is it?

[jeffbee]

No, my argument is that the state is the right level of government at which to regulate the environment. As we see here, most states have the power to abrogate city regulations, to dissolve and combine cities, and so forth. If the state of Texas permits Tesla's battery factory to dump waste into rivers, the state should fix that in state law.

There is not an analogy here between states of the nation and cities of the states. In the federal system, states have all the powers. Within the state, states also have all the powers.

[Retric]

The states are a terrible choice for managing the environment. Pollution trivially crosses state borders, but often the impact is very local. IE the smell from a paper mill or sewage treatment plant doesn't spread across 1,000 miles.

So local control makes sense for local issues, and federal control makes sense for widespread issues like runoff.

[dpkirchner]

I remember way back when the right wing was all about local control and individual responsibility. What ever happened to that? (I ask rhetorically. We all know those were lies all along, of course.)