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Property values are a small-to-none factor.

I don't want more noise.

I don't want more traffic.

I don't want more students at my kid's schools, which are already at a 35/1 kid to teacher ratio.

That's it for me. I think that's it for a lot of people, whether they live in cities or suburbs or far out in the country. Very few people want more crowding. The people who like living in dense cities already live there.

Blaming greed and property values is just a distraction.

Red_Leaves_Flyy 679 days ago

Traffic?

Build rail and deploy bussing like you fucking want it. Make it so good Japanese and European civil engineers ask you for help.

Noise?

That’s an engineering problem.

Teacher ratios?

Your property taxes too low for the services your community needs. Notice how I said need - it’s necessary. 20-1 is high, 30+ plus and your local governance is criminally incompetent.

You’re distracted by change and upset that you need to adapt to a world that’s moved past you. Tale older than the dirt we walk on.

HDThoreaun 678 days ago

Its easy to say "just build trains." It is much harder to actually do it. New rail costs on the order of a billion dollars a mile in American cities. It is not financially practical to expand rail service because of this. What usually ends up happening when suburban areas densify is just that traffic gets worse. It makes sense that people are worried about that when theyve seen it happen many times.

mnky9800n 675 days ago

I don't really care about how much it costs to make America look like a modern, 21st century place like the rest of the developed world. Americans deserve to live in a place that gives them services like the rest of the world has.

Red_Leaves_Flyy 678 days ago

Deploy the army Corp of engineers, tie to a massive jobs program with expedited eminent domain. Fund it by closing loopholes on wealthy tax cheats, tax unrealized gains for billionaires, tax loans against stocks, tax private jet travel 100%. And on and on.

These are all solvable problems but no one has the will because the people empowered are too fucking comfortable watching the planet get destroyed while people die deaths of exposure and despair by the millions.

HDThoreaun 678 days ago

When you say "just bring in the army corps of engineers" everyone hears "we're not going to solve the problem" because the odds of that happening are extremely low compared to the odds of everyone just putting up with things being a little bit worse. We need to rebuild faith in our government in order to undertake projects that cause change.

durumu 679 days ago

> The people who like living in dense cities already live there.

One would then think that dense cities would build more housing, but that doesn’t seem to happen. NYC, SF, and Boston are the densest cities in the country and build barely any housing compared to areas like Houston and Austin.

I also just think it isn’t true that everyone who wants to live in a dense city does. My experience is that a lot of people would absolutely love to live in NYC but can’t afford it, and I think this is primarily because there is not enough housing.

pandaman 679 days ago

That's because few really like unbound density, people who move to cities want more density than a SFH-on-an-acre and/or perhaps can tolerate more of it but they do not enjoy density per se and don't "upgrade" by moving to even more crowded conditions just for the sake of having more nuisance.

Sure, many people would love to move to NYC, but how many people would chose to move to a tiny apartment over a giant penthouse in there, if given such a choice. Say the employer pays for housing with no cost to the individual and no limit, how many people would go for the smallest place in their preferred location and how many would go for the largest? If the former group is in minority this would explain how the cities, ruled by a democratic process, do not strive to pump density.

None of those are required in cities, and actually suburbs are the main cause of traffic jams.

The main noise in most places is traffic, and traffic is usually caused caused by sprawl, low density and car oriented building.

What you’re objecting to is fixed by more density

So your assertion is that if all the open space near me was mowed down to make room for massive apartment complexes, then I would actually experience less noise and traffic.

It's a bold theory but not one I want to try out in practice.

Well since it sounds like you’re in a suburb or semi rural suburb, then you likely won’t need to speculate on that. Just wait a few years and you’ll find out.

Because instead of infill density in cities, the sprawl will keep up its creep. Low density building makes that certain.

With how it goes with new development in American suburbs, it’s going to be car oriented and increase loud traffic and make walking unpleasant. (Although it’s probably already not very walkable)

Someone on the new edge will repeat your gripe, rinse and repeat.

Right so we are in agreement - I will experience more noise and more traffic in higher density, and I have every right to complain about it. My complaints may fall on deaf ears, but that is neither here nor there.

I think you missed the forest for the trees. Because Low density car oriented building is what’s going to cause your neighborhood to turn into a concrete jungle.

wpm 679 days ago

You’ll see that it’s true once you decouple the idea that one person == one more car on the road.

Aside from lawn equipment, the noise pollution I suffer from in my streetcar suburb in a major metro is almost completely from cars and other fossil fuel motorized vehicles.

I was out in a fairly high earning suburb recently and the backyard was constantly inundated by the roar of a not so nearby highway.

Like, what exactly do you think people do to make noise?

Cars make noise. More people == more cars. This will happen whatever ideas I personally may or may not have.

fmobus 678 days ago

> More people == more cars

Counter example: Europe, Japan. It's perfectly possible for a city to grow denser of people without growing denser of cars.

My inner city neighborhood is quite calm and quiet, because the city has decent public transit with three different modes within 3 minutes walk (besides decent biking infra).

axpy 678 days ago

And this is wrong. If you build proper mixed housing/commercial with local markets, bakery, park, coffee, restaurants, etc. You will end up reducing car use to what they are best for. But for this paradigm to exist, you need density. I lived in NA almost all my life (California, Pennsylvania, Montreal and Vancouver) and I am currently in Spain and let me tell you, density != cars.

mjmahone17 679 days ago

No. In most American suburbs you can get more density by taking 2 single family homes and replacing them with one 6-plex. You’ll also have more open space, because a 6-plex takes up around one single family lot. Especially if the 6-plex can be 4-6 stories tall. Everyone can have more (private) interior and more (shared) exterior space if the neighborhood allows a little bit of density.

As a bonus having more neighbors means things like grocery stores within walking distance become good businesses, so you need a car dramatically less and less space needs to be taken up by parking lots.

You are right, and I will amend my statement. I will get more noise and traffic if the open space near me is mowed down. I will also get more noise and traffic if all the single family homes near me are replaced with 6 plexes.

I assure you that neither of those are a good outcome as far as I'm concerned.

fmobus 679 days ago

Cities aren't loud, cars are loud.

sebastos 679 days ago

An interesting side benefit of switching to electric vehicles is that cities and streets will become quieter.

shiroiushi 679 days ago

Not necessarily: it depends on the traffic speed. If all the cars are traveling at 20mph (using American units here), then sure, streets will be quieter. Over about 35mph, they don't: tire noise becomes the main noise factor at higher speeds.

gymbeaux 679 days ago

We really need more public transit, though there also exist pavements that reduce road noise (most of it comes from tires) considerably… it’s just that it’s more expensive (and more effective) than noise walls… but government mandates say noise walls are “adequate”.

shiroiushi 679 days ago

Public transit isn't economically viable when you refuse to build densely.

shiroiushi 679 days ago

I see you've never visited Tokyo, and have probably never set foot outside North America.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9Xg7ui5mLA

nec4b 678 days ago

You mean this fairy tale of of peaceful cities:

I could never understand why some people don't understand that people buy into a community because they like the community in the state when they bought into it. And that making large changes to the community would alter the community and what people liked about it will be diminished. Not to mention the practical aspects like utilities, road capacity, schools, etc. as you've pointed out.

For some reason, some people outside a community believe they should have a voice on what the actual community wants. As if a community should be expected to want to ruin what makes their space attractive so interlopers can infest it?

Some development where it makes sense - sure. But no, we aren't converting our homes and properties into multi-family dwellings.

SkyPuncher 679 days ago

I used to agree with this when I was a kid. Then I realized that it’s literally just a part of live in a modernized country.

Both my wife’s and I home were “out in the country” when we were kids. Now they’re surrounded by houses. The same pattern is basically everywhere. If you want the community of 20 years ago, move to a new one that looks like it.

It’s simply part of the constant change of life. Being bitter over it isn’t helpful or anyone.

I don’t understand your point. Every town in existence was “out in the country” at one point. The land owners/community made the choice to subdivide and develop the land. But it was their decision as a community to do this.

My town was a bucolic paradise at one time and then in the late 19th century a few of the regional villages merged and the community of land owners began to subdivide and develop the land and establish a new town. And now it’s highly desired. This was their choice to transform their holiday community into the bedroom community it is today. And now us, as the land owning community, get to decide how further development goes. Not interlopers with no skin in the game. And we do develop new things but they’re rightfully contested and very carefully decided upon because this is our home.

camel_Snake 679 days ago

I'm probably one of those people you're referring to, and quite honestly it's not that I don't realize or understand - it's that I don't care. The community you love wasn't always that way - it changed to become what you enjoy, likely to the similar anger/detriment of the previous residents who like the "old" community. I imagine racial segregationists and apartheid advocates used disconcertingly similar arguments.

jjav 679 days ago

> it's that I don't care

Ok. So hoefully you can see why people who like their homes and their town will rationally do everything possible to oppose a person who is an outsider and comes in saying they don't care about anything the residents enjoy and just wants to change it all (destroy it)?

Building turnover is such that you can’t really destroy it all to be fair. Either way its not your town, you just live there. Who builds on land? Not people who show up and say you should build on land. No, its the landowners who build on land. You don’t have claim for what other people ought to do with their land. If they think its a good business decision to build and apartment on their land, so be it. This is america, not a feudal society.

secstate 679 days ago

Your last point is very important. Zoning at a federal level would be required to clear some basic anti segregation. Would it be perfect? No. But the zoning in my town is 100% in the same spirit as redlining. No one would describe themselves as racist or classist. Maybe that's just human nature?

tourmalinetaco 679 days ago

So, if I convinced a bunch of people in nearby rural areas, none of which live in your city, to demand to your mayor to do things in a way you personally dislike, you would welcome the change with open arms? Or is your belief that all external change is good only extend as long as you personally do not receive repercussions?

This mentality is the same one that’s leading California and New York to ruin, by the way. :D

> it's that I don't care.

Can you understand why a community would want to exclude you? That antisocial attitudes like this are shunned accordingly and projects that would attract them are avoided. We actively select to avoid these kinds of antagonistic attitudes getting a foothold because we know what makes our community attractive. Certainly it isn't people that "don't care" about what the community values. You'll need to find somewhere lower rent for that.

> The community you love wasn't always that way - it changed to become what you enjoy, likely to the similar anger/detriment of the previous residents who like the "old" community.

How do you know this? Likely even? Communities do change, of course. But there's a reason why the most highly sought after places continue to be the most highly sought after places and it isn't because they gleefully rip down the very things that make them sough after. Especially so "don't cares" can move in and not care about the place.

> I imagine racial segregationists and apartheid advocates used disconcertingly similar arguments.

What does that have to do with a community wanting to limit and select what they consider appropriate development in the modern age?

RealityVoid 679 days ago

> That antisocial attitudes like this are shunned accordingly and projects that would attract them are avoided.

I don't find them antisocial whatsoever. Especially since, to my reading, the wider society is _ better_ because of the change. New communities take root and a better place arises.

Regardless, the community will change wether you want it or not. I find it rare that people wanting to stop something from happening get what they want. It's rather the people that want to build something that actually get stuff done.

Never said anything about not wanting to build something but rather the community determines the terms. This is how it goes and will in any non-tyrannical society. The stakeholders are the key constituents when it comes to decision making. Not outside interlopers.

ryandrake 679 days ago

But there is so much inefficiently-used land and so many cities that you don't have to deliberately go into an existing town and change its nature head to toe.

There are plenty of already-urban areas that have poorly-used lots that could benefit from building more urban housing. Why not start there? Keep like housing styles together: If you're the one single family house in the middle of a city surrounded by dozens of apartments, then yea, that lot should probably be re-developed into an apartment. The single family home is out of place and the neighborhood is already set up for dense living.

But if you're in a small town that's all single family houses, it doesn't make sense to re-develop a random sampling of them into apartment buildings. 1. They'd look out of place and 2. These small towns don't have the infrastructure to suddenly 3X-10X their populations. They'd need more schools, transportation, electric capacity, water/sewer capacity, trash collection, retail, industry, everything.

> For some reason, some people outside a community believe they should have a voice on what the actual community wants. As if a community should be expected to want to ruin what makes their space attractive so interlopers can infest it?

I don't understand the notion that that community exists in a vacuum where they're entitled to be insulated from the world changing around them.

sokoloff 679 days ago

I don't think that it's entitled to be insulated from the world changing around it, but I do think that the residents of, say, Palo Alto, should have more say about the planning and permitting in Palo Alto than I do (living 3000 miles away from there), no matter how much "some people outside a community believe they should have a voice on what the actual community wants."

I don't live there; I shouldn't have any say on their policies (except via federal law-making, limited by the 10th Amendment delegation of powers).

Why letting each city have the entire say on its planning is very obviously going to end badly for society. it’s not hard to see it’s a prisoners dilemma or tragedy of the commons type fiasco.

I have a hard time believe that people aren’t aware of that. Especially since we tried it for decades and the obvious happened - it has gone horribly.

Of course the average current home owners in Palo Alto doesn’t want it to change. But Palo Alto doesn’t exist on an island or something. Why would the nearby towns have different views? Mountain View doesn’t want to change! San Mateo doesn’t want to change!

Wowza! How about that, now the entire bay won’t change if left to each town.

And you know what, for decades that’s what we did and we can see what happened. All we got for it was a massive housing shortage.

We tried letting towns set their policy. It went horribly, as it obviously would.

It’s like Kant, would the outcome be acceptable if all the similar actors took this action? No? Well why shouldn’t they if this town does it.

medvezhenok 679 days ago

They should have some say, but they should not be able to act as a cartel and prevent permitting altogether. And I say that as a new homeowner.

General zoning policy should be decided at a state level (or federal) - like in Japan. Otherwise, no individual community wants more development (of course), but it's a bitter pill that they have to swallow together if we want to solve the housing problem.

mike50 678 days ago

Anyone who lives in a area with hundreds of competing jurisdictions sees this problem everyday. One tiny village says yes the neighboring tiny village files a lawsuit. The smaller the jurisdiction the more desperate the government is for funding and tuft.

Residents do have say. They are the ones selling or developing their land. Clearly a certain percentage don’t care.

coev 678 days ago

> I could never understand why some people don't understand that people buy into a community because they like the community in the state when they bought into it.

And the guy who bought 10 years before you hates you, the newcomer, changing their neighborhood and ruining its character.

nemo44x 678 days ago

Probably not since I haven’t tried to force dramatic changes to the character of the town. And I’ve poured quite a bit of money into renovating my home making the neighborhood even more desirable.

In essence I found a neighborhood I liked and I’ve made sure I fit in rather than an interloper that is trying to make a quick buck at the towns long term expense.

yimmothathird 678 days ago

I could never understand why people expect everything to be static and never change.

Its usually from a lack of understanding history and nuance

m_fayer 679 days ago

Asking people to sacrifice for the greater good requires that they trust their leaders and systems to do everything possible to maximize the benefits and ameliorate the harms. Absent that, it’s every man for themselves.

Asking people to sacrifice for the greater good is generally a non-starter and I'm not just taking about housing. It's certainly not something to consider when planning public policies.

red-iron-pine 678 days ago

that's a false dichotomy -- everyone goes full-on communist, or else anything goes. real world governments and leadership is far more complicated.

chgs 679 days ago

Presumably double the density you also double the size of the school and double the teachers.

If you don’t, the problem isn’t the density.

jjav 679 days ago

> Presumably double the density you also double the size of the school and double the teachers.

It's not that easy. If you doubled the density, maybe there is nowhere left to go for the school to expand, or the land is now so expensive there is no way for the town to afford expanding the school.

My town is an example. The middle school had two quite large empty lots on two sides.

Those lots have now multi-story apartment buildings in construction. Presumably those apartments will attract younger families who might have kids going to middle school. But if that school ever needs to expand, it is now boxed in by housing on all sides. Time will tell how it goes.

mjmahone17 679 days ago

Couldn’t the school just build taller too?

wpm 679 days ago

Or just build another school on the other side of town? Who says the catchment areas don’t shrink once population increases past a certain point?

oerdier 679 days ago

Won't solve the worse than 35/1 student/reacher ratio problem of ancestor post if those extra classrooms won't have teachers in them. Seems like increasing teacher shortage is a problem in the US as well as here in the EU.

Jensson 678 days ago

Teacher shortage mostly happens in sparse communities not dense ones since it is easy to find teachers where lots of people live.

'just' is doing a lot of work there. No one 'just' adds more stories onto existing buildings.

There are a lot of problems, none of which are going to be addressed if the only focus is property values.

A school was knocked down in my neighborhood to build a pricey apartment complex. The district and the developers made a bunch of promises about how current schools would be expanded and more resources would be available. Those were all lies, of course. Apartment complexes make money, public schools do not. Guess which one wins.

> No shortage of land in the US, but everyone wants to live in the same few places

It's not enough to have land, though. The land needs access to water and electricity, not to mention roads, or it's a nonstarter, especially if you want to build a bunch of homes on the land. And the new homeowners will need access to food and supplies, i.e., stores. You need an entire community.

xnx 679 days ago

Very true. There are many areas in the US (Detroit for example) that have lost population over the past 50 years that wouldn't have to start from scratch with new development.

The homes from detroits population high did not sit vacant and maintained over the decades. They rotted apart and many were razed. Much of inner city detroit really would be like starting from scratch considering the amount of vacant greenfield land available.

xnx 678 days ago

The neighborhoods definitely aren't turnkey, but roads, pipes, and power lines give you a good head start.

kjkjadksj 676 days ago

Assuming infrastructure serving vacant lots were maintained by a famously insolvent city budget is a big one to make. Sometimes replacement or retrofit are vastly more expensive than greenfield development.

ghaff 679 days ago

That's a bit of a strawman though. There are plenty of cities and towns that have infrastructure and have stores at some level that have much lower costs. (They may or may not have good local jobs.) It's not a choice between NYC/SF/etc. and the wilds of Wyoming.

I'm not sure what exactly you think is a straw man?

When the OP said "everyone wants to live in the same few places", I didn't interpret that to mean specifically NYC/SF, because that's plainly false. I interpreted it to mean urban vs. rural/undeveloped areas in general.

But the problem is that home builder cartels exist all across the country, and they own a lot of the desirable land around the urban areas. For example, in my own area of Madison, Wisconsin, we have a company Veridian Homes that owns giant tracts of land all around the outskirks of the Madison area. They're the dominant home builder here.

ghaff 679 days ago

It was in reference to: The land needs access to water and electricity, not to mention roads, or it's a nonstarter, especially if you want to build a bunch of homes on the land.

(The comment may indeed be true--sort of by definition to at least some degree--for new construction, although getting that access can be pretty straightforward, to the degree anything involving construction is straightforward. It's more that housing prices are an issue in popular places where a lot of people want to live. And, yes, vibrant college towns fall into that category although not to the same degree as elite cities.)

Fair enough, it would be possible to scale up smaller towns, much smaller than Madison. However, I'm not sure that's practical, at least to the extent required to meet the housing shortage, for several reasons. First, the reason you already mentioned: "They may or may not have good local jobs." Second, there may not be enough home builders available in smaller towns. The builders themselves have to come from somewhere, and they're likely to be somewhat scarce the smaller and more remote the town.

I just don't think the conspiracy that the OP postulated, "We all want our properties to increase in value so we collectively conspire to suppress supply" is a very plausible explanation when applied in general to the entire country. For example, again in the Madison area, most of the home building is occurring not in the city proper but rather out in the suburbs and exurbs, which are independently governed. Indeed, in a fast-growing suburb, the property values can actually increase as homes are built and the town becomes a more desirable place to live.

The neat thing about capitalism is that stores will be built to serve the community if there's a market for it. We don't need to centrally plan the whole community up front. We do need zoning laws that ALLOW those stores to be built though.

https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/topics/food-and-hunger

This is not borne out by the evidence.

https://www.propublica.org/article/food-desert-grocery-store...

Those are about rural communities. It makes perfect sense that a very low-density community doesn't generate enough demand for a robust grocery store. The 2nd article mentions that the community used the newly built grocery store for a while, before going back mostly shopping at a Walmart 30 miles away. My guess is that those people were going to that Walmart anyway for this or that in many cases. So at that point, why drive to two locations, esp for most people in the rural area, that grocery store isn't actually that much more convenient, and can't compete on price with Walmart?

Qworg 679 days ago

Food deserts also exist in urban areas, particularly poor and historically disadvantaged communities. No magic to capitalism - the local communities don't get a grocery because they can't pay (and, of course, other reasons), even if the population density is high.

jbellis 679 days ago

"Food deserts" are a demand problem, not a supply problem. https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2019/decemb...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/walmart-clo...

You said:

> The neat thing about capitalism is that stores will be built to serve the community if there's a market for it.

I am pointing out that this is not a given, magic that will just happen. Capitalism is not always efficient nor reliable, based on the evidence.

> before going back mostly shopping at a Walmart 30 miles away. My guess is that those people were going to that Walmart anyway for this or that in many cases. So at that point, why drive to two locations, esp for most people in the rural area, that grocery store isn't actually that much more convenient, and can't compete on price with Walmart?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/05/what-...

> I am pointing out that this is not a given, magic that will just happen. Capitalism is not always efficient nor reliable, based on the evidence.

I said 'if there's a market for it'.

The simple fact is that these rural communities are just not as economically viable as they used to be. Most rural communities exist around 'base input' types of industries that made money by exporting stuff extracted from the land. Farming, mining, logging, etc. The community existed because extracting those resources required a lot of labor, and that labor wanted to buy services after work. When you had 100 people who worked in the fields all day, they'd come back to town and patronize local bars, stores etc. However, farming, like mining, has continued to become less and less labor intensive because of better automation. There isn't 100 people coming back from the fields in most cases now. There's 1 dude who was driving a combine harvester all day. Or a planter, etc. And more recently, its one guy who was monitoring a dozen combine harvesters that were self-driving based on GPS.

Editing in a reply to below comments bc depth limit.

> This is why I'm very pro remote work for the broader economy. > It's much easier for remote workers who want to live in rural areas to patronize these local bars, stores, etc, when they're not already commuting to places with a much larger collection of services.

I'm also pro-remote work, but even if every job that is do-able remote becomes remote, that won't revitalize every rural community. No one is moving to North Dakota just because they got a remote job. The US is just too big and the number of remote-able jobs is too small. Sure, some rural communities, with particularly nice outdoors, etc will be winners. But you need actual 'large' numbers of people to sustain those local bars/stores. A few software developers moving to a dying mining town is just not going to be enough patrons to sustain a bar, stores, schools, etc. Even if they all keep their 500k Google paychecks, they can still only drink so much beer at once.

> In which case, that reminds me:

> The neat thing about central planning is that it can invest in things-- like rural electrification-- which are cost prohibitive for a market-based solution, if/when that need arises.

> So would you agree they are both neat in their own way?

Yes, they are both neat in their own way. I like that the post office has to deliver mail to everyone.

Central planning can react faster than the market, if the central planners have good foresight. But they can't see into the future either. If you have some rural mining community that could sustain a population of 5,000 in 1970, it made a lot of sense to electrify it. But then 40 years later, the mine is more productive than ever before, but only needs 20% of the labor because of advances in automation. It kinda sucks that you built an electric system sized for a population of 10,000, right? Cuz now you have a town of 5,000 where unemployment is extremely high.

Though I'd argue that rural electrification at this point (or in the next few years) is probably best by a home-solar-battery combo.

> The neat thing about capitalism is that stores will be built to serve the community if there's a market for it. We don't need to centrally plan the whole community up front.

There's a chicken-and-egg problem here, though. Would you buy a new home and move in with no groceries or other stores in the area yet? If there's an existing community, then yes, stores will be built eventually, but that can't just happen overnight, so how do homeowners survive in the meantime?

That's why most new housing is built in the suburbs around existing cities. All of the amenities needed by homeowners are already nearby, or at least within reasonable driving distance. Starting a new community in the middle of nowhere would be extremely difficult, and would certainly cost a lot more money to the home builders, reducing profit.

ekez 679 days ago

If "we" all got together and reduced permitting costs, "our" homes would be much more valuable because a developer can build a highrise where the house is.

The fix is to enshrine remote work for jobs that can be remote (labor regulation and whatnot), enabling labor mobility to where housing is affordable, but the ideological challenges prevent that. So, instead, we gnash teeth and say there is no solution while we slowly build more housing stock and hope that'll catch us up eventually. It will, eventually, as immigration slows, and the death rate exceeds the birth rate and household formation (see: Japan), but that will take time.

To destroy housing values to increased affordability, you must destroy locality as a value factor.

Aurornis 679 days ago

> The fix is to enshrine remote work for jobs that can be remote (labor regulation and whatnot), enabling labor mobility to where housing is affordable,

Not really a fix. When people's location becomes free from their jobs, they don't move to remote locations where land is cheap. They move to cities they want to live in, or cities where they have friends and family.

The subset of people who prefer to move to the middle of nowhere and prioritize the cheapest housing above all else is very small (and probably overrepresented online)

https://www.yardikube.com/blog/remote-workers-leading-the-mi...

Can you provide a citation with data demonstrating this? Here's mine:

https://www.wcnc.com/article/money/charlotte-north-carolina-...

https://www.fanniemae.com/media/48891/display

https://www.americanexperiment.org/study-finds-that-remote-w...

https://web.archive.org/web/20230127175520/https://www.rural...

(also, I said where housing is affordable, not the middle of nowhere)

galdosdi 679 days ago

But they're a lot more willing to choose outer exurbs or nearby towns that have a lot more space, or if they really prefer city life, are more willing to consider cities with good lifestyle/affordability but second-rate job opportunities. This rebalancing is still overall good for everyone.

ghaff 679 days ago

And some move to established mountain towns and the like. But, yeah, in general there are a lot of good reasons to move to the periphery of decent-sized cities if you don't care much about city amenities day to day. That doesn't help you much with housing prices in the Bay Area necessarily but it does in a lot of places.

Why wouldn’t a remote worker be good for a city? They pay taxes but use a fraction of infrastructure and services as a commuter. They don’t need a second job site reserved elsewhere in the city. Its like a free bingo square for the city.

ssimpson 679 days ago

In the US, per state employment regulations can hamper this as well.

dnissley 679 days ago

I feel like I need to make this point again and again: It's not about increasing the value of properties for most (after all, allowing apartments to be built in your neighborhood would increase the value of the remaining SFHs). It's about keeping the character of the neighborhood the same as it is now (SFH vibes), and all that comes with that ("family friendliness", etc).

hackermatic 679 days ago

I think people in the US overestimate how much upzoning "has to" affect most neighborhoods, especially infill development or removing default single-family home zoning. I used to live in Minneapolis, which has lots of century-old duplexes and fourplexes mixed in with single-family homes on similar lot sizes. Traffic, activity/noise, appearance, and overall "niceness" were almost the same as on single-family-only blocks -- but the bump in density supported lots of corner stores and restaurants in walking distance that made people want to live there or visit the neighborhood for the day.

Part of the apprehension might be caused by the difficulty of rezoning itself. The only people with the determination and money to get a zoning variance are big developers who need a big building to make it worthwhile. That's how you get 50- or 100-unit apartments going up in single-family neighborhoods, and a "missing middle" of density and affordability.

ndriscoll 679 days ago

Is it not contradictory to say that traffic/activity/noise are almost the same, but it'd support lots of corner stores and restaurants and people would want to visit the neighborhood? The entire point of living in a suburb is that people who don't live here have no reason to be here. I actively do not want a restaurant or a bar or a coffee shop a block away from my home.

hackermatic 679 days ago

As counterintuitive as it seems, that was my experience living in one of those neighborhoods and visiting others over several years. A handful of small stores on one block or corner every half-mile really doesn't induce that much traffic. It's an entirely different scale from a commercial district or even a car-oriented strip mall.

aorloff 679 days ago

Everyone wants to keep the character of their neighborhood.

Forget that ! When you go to a dense city like Barcelona where every block is nearly 4 story high rise apartments, its wonderful.

Change is beautiful, people enhance neighborhoods

ndriscoll 679 days ago

Lots of people who want to live in suburbs have in fact visited or even lived in large, dense cities. They're well aware of the tradeoffs.

sokoloff 679 days ago

People who think it's wonderful to live in a place where every block is 4-story apartments should feel free to move to such a place.

That place doesn’t practically exist in most of the US.

sokoloff 679 days ago

It doesn't exist in most of Spain/Catalonia either; it's in a few of the largest cities.

com 678 days ago

Even in small cities in Spain, central areas are high density with three or four storey mix residential buildings.

I chose a random small city in northern Catalonia called Vielha and viewed it on Goggle Maps, there they are. They look different to Eixanple apartment buildings, but they are there in the centre. Population less than 6k.

Chose another, Gironella, a bit further south; population around 4k. One less floor on the multi family apartment buildings in the old centre, and a much higher ratio of SFDs to MFDs in the settlement as a whole, but still there.

How many should I sample to convince you?

dnissley 679 days ago

I agree, and I think even the folks who are against that would actually end up enjoying it more. But people hate change, especially when it means changing something that has been that way for generations at this point. My main point though is that people who think this is about money are simply wrong. Trying to argue numbers with these folks will not move them an inch. It has everything to do with emotion.

> I agree, and I think even the folks who are against that would actually end up enjoying it more

That's a pretty remarkable belief. Many of us happy suburbanites have lived in large dense cities in our younger days. We are not ignorant of the joys of city living, we've just changed priorities.

dnissley 679 days ago

The neighborhoods I have in mind here aren't "true suburbs" but rather "pre-war suburbs" that are already fairly dense. Think west SF, Fremont/Ballard in Seattle, etc.

chgs 679 days ago

Barcalona is a terrible place to live due to mass tourism that the intenet has enabled.

aorloff 679 days ago

Yup I hear nobody goes there anymore because its so popular.

chgs 679 days ago

Tourists go. That doesn’t mean it’s a good place to live.

The extreme example is of course Venice.

TulliusCicero 679 days ago

Translation: keep out them poors.

Zoning that mandates low densities is used to economically segregate areas. They're invisibly gated communities enforced by the government. "Can't live here unless you can afford to buy/rent this much land."

One of the things I noticed while living in Munich was that the differences in apparent neighborhood prosperity in different parts of the city were vastly less extreme than in major US cities. Almost every neighborhood looked kind of vaguely middling, it was rare for a place to look obviously well-to-do or obviously run down.

And it makes that it's harder to get extreme differences there if at least medium density dwellings are allowed just about everywhere. Working class people may not be able to afford a whole house, but they may be able to afford an apartment in a given neighborhood.

netbioserror 679 days ago

Land and homes also make for excellent inflation hedges; thus, property owners become advocates for money printing and suppressed interest rates.

jauntywundrkind 679 days ago

One thing DC had some well half a century ago was housing coops.

Take a bunch of folks across a block of area & convince them to band together & build big. Create a housing coop that collectively owns the building, is the people who will live there.

Right now every property owner is sort of in it for themselves. Figuring out ways to enable development while retaining ownership, without forcing owners to sell of their stake, while enfranchising future owners, worked really well. But it feels like we aren't trying to replicate this clear success.

Opportunity comes at scale Figuring out how to make that scaling possibly accessible by residents (versus someone else getting to capture the value of redevelopment) requires some legal can do willingness we haven't been seeing.

xnx 678 days ago

Interesting. I'm reading about co-ops, and I don't see much functional difference from condo associations.

[0]: https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/08/13/20b-bay-area-housing-...

smcin 679 days ago

This on the same day that the SF Bay Area pulled its $20 billion housing bond from the November ballot [0], after objectors claimed the published costings were inaccurate. (SJMercuryNews: "The total cost, including principal and interest on the bond, is estimated at $48.3 billion and would take more than 50 years to pay off.")

Another relevant project is the Solano County ("California Forever") proposal [1], which is being dropped from the 2024 ballot but is still active (presumably for March 2026 ballot, when there will be gubernatorial primary and high turnout).

Also, after 2024 CA Proposition 5 ("Lower Supermajority from 66.67% to 55% for local bond measures to fund housing projects and public infrastructure")[2] has been voted on. (It's also being challenged by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.)

We will be able to compare timelines/costs/delays between the two development proposals and get answers on whether costs/delays in CA homebuilding are primarily due to the homebuilder, the city/county, CA state, the development process in general, or nearby residents' objections. The Solano County proposal is more greenfield and seems to have more supporters and fewer existing homeowners to object, so this outcome should be interesting and informative. (Of course, it's a distinct possibility that both proposals get killed politically, which would also give us the answer that it's not really about costs or timelines, and that a vocal minority of existing homeowners/landowners can game the process to pretty much kill any proposal, regardless how antisocial that might be.)

[1]: KQED Forum "What’s Next for California Forever’s Proposal to Build a New City in Solano County" https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101906729/whats-next-for-cali...

[2]: Ballotpedia: CA Prop 5 https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_5,_Lower_Supe...

1986 679 days ago

Did you know that a third of the US population lives in a rental property?

xnx 679 days ago

I didn't. Unfortunately, renters vote at a lower rate and don't vote with the same focus as property owners.

VancouverMan 679 days ago

It's a similar situation in Canada, but with the added problem of horribly flawed immigration policies that have flooded the country with a huge number of foreigners each year. While this has been going on for decades now, it has really intensified over the last nine years.

The equivalent of a large (by Canadian standards) city's worth of people is being added each year, but there is nowhere near that much residential construction taking place in total.

https://www.tvo.org/article/ontarios-housing-crisis-is-becom...

doubled112 679 days ago

As long as Canadians live 4 to a bed, the housing situation is keeping up.

Maybe it can be like hot desking at the office. Just have to make sure you and your roommates work opposing shifts.

onemoresoop 679 days ago

Why does everyone want to live in the same few places? Because all ways to make money and a living are there! Give people the option to work remotely and they can live wherever they want, and that is not in crowded expensive cities most of the time.

stouset 679 days ago

We have made an enormous shift in that direction post-COVID and it turns out that: [drumroll] people still largely prefer to live in cities when financially viable. The price tag of cities is itself evidence of this. San Francisco isn’t expensive in a vacuum. If there wasn’t demand for housing at these prices, they would fall. And yet people continue to willingly pay an enormous premium for the privilege of living here.

I can walk across the street to get my groceries. I have at least fifty restaurants within walking distance. My doctor is four blocks away and a large hospital is six. I have access to a large park three blocks away.

There is a streetcar that goes straight downtown one block away and three buses that go throughout the city are right at the end of my block. I can bike to virtually anywhere I want to go if walking is too far or transit is annoying.

And all of this keeps us healthy. It’s no secret that obesity is approaching near universality in areas of the country where driving is the only option to reach basic amenities. It also correlates with reduced energy use and therefore to reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

Making cities cheaper goes a lot further than trying to make cheap but fundamentally broken suburbs and exurbs less hostile. And part of that is precisely what this article highlights: the rentier class siphoning away the profits of workers while providing little to no value themselves. And I say this as a homeowner (and therefore landowner) myself.

linguae 679 days ago

Even with remote work, it may still be beneficial to live in or near a large metro area. From an American point of view, large metro areas generally offer many amenities such as a variety of cultural events (concerts, exhibits, festivals), a variety of shops and restaurants, international airports, a populace that is diverse and is more accepting of people from diverse backgrounds, expanded opportunities for education, and much more. Even if one chooses not to live in the Bay Area or New York City due to housing costs, there are still other desirable metro areas in the United States that offer these amenities and have lower (though definitely not low) housing costs. To add, if one could afford the housing costs of the Bay Area and New York City, there are many reasons to live in those places.

mulmen 679 days ago

There’s a lot more to life than a job. Most jobs can’t be done remotely. How do you convince a barista to move to New Billings? Is there anything to do there after work?

bluGill 679 days ago

There is a lot to do there, but it might not to be to your liking. If you don't like guns the fact that you can safely shoot off your deck is f no value. Meanwhile you get one musical in town per year and they expect you to be in it (that is not very high quality).

TulliusCicero 679 days ago

That's part of it, yes. But some areas can be more desirable for other reasons, too.

It'd be better overall for society if we just got rid of exclusionary zoning and made it easier for people to live where they wanna live.

Aurornis 679 days ago

> Give people the option to work remotely and they can live wherever they want, and that is not in crowded expensive cities most of the time.

COVID dramatically increased the opportunities for remote work. Yet housing prices in major cities went up, not down.

Anecdotally, my friends who moved during COVID remote work all moved to cities they wanted to live in. I knew more people leaving mid-sized towns to move to Seattle, NYC, and the Bay Area than the opposite.

bratwurst3000 679 days ago

i work remote and i live in an expensive city. why? because I was raised here and have many friends and there is much cultural events going on. work aint everything

nomel 679 days ago

You missed a costly part of grabbing a chunk of land: utilities. Getting them onto your land, so you can live with modern creature comforts, some of them dictated by law, is often prohibitively expensive. You can DIY with the alternative being a well (hit or miss), a septic system, and setting up a solar/battery farm, which isn't cheap either.

whartung 679 days ago

> You missed a costly part of grabbing a chunk of land: utilities.

There is a 15 acre lot down the street. A good spot for another small housing development.

But one issue with it is that it has legacy utility and power poles on the periphery. Anyone wanting to develop that space is obliged to route all of that underground, which easily add several M$ to the project.

Eventually, someone will bite, buy the lot, and develop it.

But it's going to be low on the list because all of that cost will notably bounce up the new home costs. Cheaper places to build elsewhere.

bluGill 679 days ago

What is wrong with powar poles? They are reliable and work well.

[1] https://pdi2.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/51-EdisonElectIn...

nomel 679 days ago

Above ground is ugly, and less reliable, in terms of frequency (about half) and total duration (about 20% more, since underground takes around 1.6x longer per outage) [1]. But, underground is so expensive that they end up being a net social loss, at least in NY [2].

[2] https://dps.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2023/09/final-repo...