So we have these big fights about property rights and whatnot when it’s just that the two aims are incompatible and the latter group wants the status quo (which is necessarily easier to adhere to)
Not because I have a particular interest in my house price, or want to interfere with other people, but because the plans are doing absolutely sweet FA to improve the infrastructure to cope with the additions. In general, I'd be happy for the extra apartments if they came with extra infrastructure. We'd all benefit from it.
In one case, they started planning to add hundreds of apartment blocks specifically targetting young families, and yet the way it was being done there would be zero money going towards local schools to deal with the extra influx. Usual construction requires money towards schools, but there are loopholes, and the developer was using them, and the city seemed happy to let them.
Nor were there any plans to deal with the additional cars being added. Even with good transit links to Seattle, the roads leading to the proposed site.
Nor were there plans to deal with increased sanitation or power demand on an already flaky power grid.
The list literally goes on and on. What we keep seeing around here is developers interested in doing the absolute bare minimum to build apartment blocks, and a city content to just let them overload an stretched resources.
If we let the circular dependencies stymie us at all turns, we'll never get anywhere. Gotta start somewhere, and having people to clamor for services seems like a good place to do so as any to me.
I know people who live in a newly built high rise condo in a very crowded, popular city to live in west side of US. It was built during the recent building boom.
Recently they found out that about a few dozen units in the building have filed claim against the HOA/owner due mold under carpet, that starts around laundry machine.
The outbound water pipe connecting between washer and the main outbound pipe of the building is apparently too small. When the washer is in use, it builds up too much pressures and starts a slow leak behind the washer. This is in a hard to view area and goes undetected, starting mold problem.
I was told that the builder wanted to fit in more condo units but stay below allowed outbound sewage pipe size (?), so the hack they came up with is using narrower pipe between the washer and the main outbound pipe in the condo building.
Yes, builders don't have to build/pay for roads and other infra, but indirect cost is always paid by someone else. Even the residents of the development.
Bit of a vicious circle when there are complaints about lack of infrastructure and then objections to building more transport links
Where I live condos/highrises have gone up and the very few houses that remain as neighbors...well the prices haven’t gone down because supply is up, in fact the prices of the houses have skyrocketed.
That wouldn’t be true of every location, but it would be interesting to have an interactive map to see where this type of developments have occurred/when and then resulting prices of the remaining homes. Correlation/causation and all of that but I’m sure there would be interesting patterns.
This is built into the system. More housing units means more property taxes which goes directly to schools.
renters don't organize and vote to advance their own interests
I'm not sure I understand this train of thought, can you clarify how rent control disenfranchises people?
... which is a totally reasonable and in-bounds objective for an actor in a democracy.
I might not personally vote for such a thing - I happen to think that a LOT of San Francisco should be in-filled and doubled in height - but I value democracy and local control more than I value my personal tastes in SF neighborhoods.
The predictable retort which will now appear, like clockwork, is that local control is inherently undemocratic to which I would respond: how did you vote in the Marijuana legalization ballot initiative ? Where do you stand on sanctuary cities ? Why are those local control issues palatable, but financially inconvenient ones are not ?
Democracy only really works when each individual actor is playing on the same equal playing field. When you have companies lobbying to frack on public parks or wealthier individuals taking advantage of outdated laws or AirBnB, that's not exactly something I'd consider democratic.
I would definitely prefer issues like marijuana and sanctuary to be settled on the national level if that were possible. Same goes for zoning. I don't see the paradox you seem to see; when these things are forced to be solved on the local level, I'll support my position. That doesn't stop me from thinking that sometimes the local level is part of the problem.
there's the rub. most suburban outposts of transit on the west coast just have SFH around them, which is a nice $billion entitlement to public infrastructure if you can get it. anyway THOSE people have the most to lose (neighborhood, lifestyle) from new apartments and a huge amount of political leverage over land-use in their area.
in summary, very fine grain local control of housing/transit planning is bad.
If the apartments threaten to block the sun for your garden, is it really totally irrational to care?
You might think gardens are stupid, but you've got to admit gardens generally require sunlight!
Pro tip: you are a very smart person, but not even you are good at reading the minds of everyone else. Not only that, there are people who live in houses with gardens who share your opinion.
It goes beyond that. Transit enables density that car dependent infrastructure cannot. Now that job security is a thing of the past, people need to live near a high density of jobs so they don't have to uproot themselves and their families when it's time to change gigs.
Moving out to far flung areas with only a handful of big employers makes that tough. Changing jobs might mean adding a half hour or an hour to your already long commute. Jobs in transit-rich areas, however, give you a lot more opportunity without having to substantially alter your non-work life to match.
(It's also, I believe, a factor in why people move less often around the country now; it's hard to find two optimal jobs in any potential destination.)
The advantage is that I have never had to suffer from expensive housing or a long commute. My worst commute was 20 minutes by car, and my current one is 3 minutes unless I walk. For people making this choice, housing is cheaper by a factor of 5 to 10, not even counting the extra land we get.
Even if I insisted on staying in one area though, I really don't need the density of jobs found in a megacity. If you fit the local industry well, there are usually several employers doing roughly the same thing.
If 101 were as free flowing as it was in the mid 90s ...
arteries like 280, 101 in the SF bay area... are perennially clogged
Go back to 4 all-purpose lanes and 1 true carpool lane (2+ licensed drivers) and throughput would be way better.
I don't mind driving for personal errands or vacations, but for daily commuting transit is much better in so many ways. I find the California car culture obsession to be one of the most idiotic things about this place. It's got some of the nicest weather in the country, so if anything this should be where you want to be walking and outside not crammed into a car huffing exhaust. It's so unbelievably ridiculous.
Now I'm commuting via car to an office just outside I95, it takes less time, is much less stressful, costs $150 less per month and is far more reliable.
How is that different from "talent wants transit"?
[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/30/millennials-like-buying-cars...
Its unlikely the gaslighting would ever work in, for example, rural Ohio.
You're framing it as a "man, suburbs suck" argument when it's more like "man, choosing a job really bloody far from home really sucks".
I find San Francisco claustrophobic, and I can't think of a more miserable commute than walking to, waiting for, and riding public transportation in the rain or heat with a crowd of other people. I've turned down jobs in the city for that reason.
I don't pay any more for the house I'm renting than a decent apartment would cost in the city, and I have a small yard and a quiet neighborhood to live in.
I don't know how you city people do it.
I was commuting from Seattle to Bellevue, a distance of about 11 miles. On a really perfect day, it could take 15 minutes. On a normal day it would take between 30-60 minutes. On a bad day it could take up to 2 hours. There were enough bad days that I had to plan everything around that 2 hour commute.
After switching to a job in the city, I knew the longest it would ever take me to get home was about an hour and 15 minutes, and that was if I walked.
I find car driving to be claustrophobic in comparison to being outdoors. I can't think of a more miserable commute than trying to be entirely attentive to driving in traffic when not awake yet. I've turned down jobs in the south bay / SoCal for that reason.
I don't pay any more for the house I'm renting than a decent apartment would cost in the south bay, and I have a small yard and a quiet neighborhood to live in.
(downtown is, after all, only a very small part of SF)
In a train or an uber I can put on my noise cancelling headphones, sit, read and not have to focus on a road. If the train is full, I can still read standing up. It's like the standing desk :)
Not all of us, I feel, really have this luxury. Each time I've had a job change, the overwhelming majority of fish biting are in SF. Not all of my changes have been voluntary, and I've seen numerous people imply that switching too often is a huge flag. I'd love something in the South Bay, but I feel like it's mostly FAANG down here, and if you're looking for something smaller, and perhaps more meaningful…
So I hop on the terrible public transit and keep looking for jobs — outside of CA, because the entire Bay Area is frankly never going to pull its collective head out of the ground and fix the housing crisis.
We feel the same about you. :)
Additionally, a lot of people have tons of anxiety around driving, and being in a city can completely get rid of that. I'd imagine self driving cars would return some of the interest back into the suburbs.
so, you work locally in the south bay?
there is no place north of the south bay within a 30 minute drive during commute times (which extend to 10:30 if you're talking about MTV)
OF COURSE almost every commutes to downtown Chicago by transit, because parking costs are insane.
I'm not saying I'm not pro-transit; I am. Very much so. But these stats don't capture how many of the 97% hated commuting by car but had to, and how many of the 90% "non-automobile" commutes are being done by people grudgingly (or AFTER driving a car to a train station, paying for parking, waiting for a train, and wishing they had a nice big free parking lot at their destination).
See how that feels?
> live in Manhattan
You and I have had very different experiences with the subway over the last year.
> But these stats don't capture how many of the 97% hated commuting by car but had to
> 97 percent of our folks were arriving by themselves in a car
Emphasis mine. Cars carrying just one person to and from work every day is a waste.
How big is the percent of population in Chicago live so far from the downtown that they need a transport to commute?
The population of the Chicago metropolitan area i.e. "Chicagoland" is 9.5 million (almost the size of Michigan). So 6.7 million people are technically not in the city.
A significant fraction of them commute to downtown Chicago for work.
I chose my next job because it was accessible via the Ballona Creek bike path and buses (though the 2 buses made a 20 min drive take an 1hr+).
My current job is a shorter bus trip and a shorter bike ride. I'm not willing to drive 1-2 hrs one-way to work. I want time to be a part of my community, to have hobbies, to do more than drive, eat, sleep, work and to get that time I need a short commute.
If a long commute limits my existence to drive, eat, half hour couch potato, and sleep than the job is not worth it.
Roads are highly redundant. You can route around almost anything.
Also, why not move to the job? That is the huge win for shortening a commute.
Then there'd presumably be a bus replacement service for the few days until they got it running again? I don't remember any of Dublin's mass transit systems going down for more than a couple of days.
Track maintenance, incidentally, is normally done on weekends and/or late at night to minimise disruption.
Life happens with autos too, there are accidents, flats, running out of gas/engine won't start, road closures, one time my apt garage door was broken and I couldn't get my car out.
I am all about moving closer to jobs. In fact, I do live close. From my apt to my old office in SM it was 6.5 miles, to drive that could be an hour. Gridlock is awful within cities even in short distances.
> why not move to the job? That is the huge win for shortening a commute.
it is, but it's a huge loss as far as making your kids change schools and make new friends.
1. Densify population centres.
2. Rehouse people from single family houses into highrise appartments.
3. Improve ground level infrastructure.
4. Transition to mixed development policy.
5. Abolish zoning in favour of universal sanitary codes.
I classify three that are well recognised around:
1. Standalone towers with chic small apartments - those are more oriented towards bachelor living for upper working class. Think of them in a "starbucks vs a restaurant" comparison.
2. Apartment complexes - these are city block sized developments, with more or less fully managed amenities, some times including daycare, playgrounds, mini-strip malls. These do avail for family living.
3. Shitty box apartments - for everybody else, the cheapest option.
> but attempting a 40 story apartment in Mountain View would be by howls of protests from environmental groups.
I think 40 storey's will not do it in such expensive neighbourhood. It can be economically feasible with 50 storey with modern construction technology, and 60 if you can make it look "high-end" enough.
I don't want transit, I want a relatively short commute that doesn't kill my soul. Ideally not working from the office all the time, IDEALLY NOT WORKING EVERY DAY.
"Combined with other data, the continuing tale-of-two-cities story suggests large numbers of lower-income African-Americans are fleeing Chicago while somewhat lesser numbers of better-educated and higher-earning whites, Asian-Americans and blacks are coming in. That's leaving the city better off in some ways than it was a decade ago, but smaller."
https://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20171004/BLOGS02/171...
Dallas and Austin are absolutely booming with tech jobs, and we're about as non-transit-oriented as possible. And most of the tech growth is in the suburbs, not the cities.
I'm kind of surprised it's only half actually...where is there Chicago office space more than half a mile from a Metra or CTA station?
Seattle has started seeing sustained rent drops after a housing boom (and then oversupply) coinciding with the Amazon boom.
Telecommuting fits this as well, if the job allows for it.
For example - When I first worked at my current job, it was a 45-90 min drive over interstate. A year later, I moved closer and now it's a 15-30 min drive over regular streets.
Upsides: Lower commuting stress - even when my current drive home looks fubar, I can tolerate it long enough to either get home or find a pub and wait it out over a brew.
Downsides: My housing costs tripled.
My previous job was a 30-60 min drive, but later took a shuttle bus that had a stop right in front of my job.
Upsides: After 30+ years of interstate commuting, taking my hand off the wheel for a couple of years was a godsend.
Downsides: The bus stop was basically a street corner with no shade or rain protection, so waiting for the bus on some afternoons was a bit challenging.
Urban development will be one of the biggest challenges of 21st century.
This issue deserves both more money, and talent being directed to solving it.
And Californian people, your issues are truly severe. I met Chinese people who ventured to SF and Silicon Valley, and called it an urban hell.
I live in Minneapolis, for awhile I used to work in the southern suburbs. On a good day the drive was 30 minutes during rush hour. On a bad day you were talking 1-2 hours.
Now I live 10 minutes from work, and I can't imagine doing anything else. Even when I speak to recruiters I increase my salary ask and tell them it's for the commute. I get laughed at.
Meanwhile I talk to people that live 45-60 minutes away just so they could "get more house for the money" and constantly complain about their time to get to work/get home.
However, the earlier comment about job density is probably the most relevant thing I haven't thought of.
We have two big crises: people can't afford to live near jobs (with insufficient new housing being built in top cities), and transit infrastructure near jobs is crumbling, neglected, or nonexistent, depending on the city.
Local municipalities don't want to build more housing because, in the grand scheme of things, a single municipality can't fix the housing crisis, but allowing new construction in inner-city neighborhoods or low-cost-but-desirably-located towns is a guaranteed path to gentrification, so most choose to opt out. Richer neighborhoods don't want new housing because it would damage their picture-perfect neighborhood character, affect their schools and infrastructure, etc. So, neighborhoods near the city stay frozen in place, save a few luxury developments at the prime locations in the city because these developments can bankroll getting past municipal blockades.
The federal government can fix both of these by cooperating with states. Offer money earmarked for public transit to states that meet guidelines promoting large-scale (and, hopefully, equitable across rich & poor neighborhoods) upzoning efforts near their job centers. Subsidize transit-friendly dense developments on a large scale, instead of subsidizing suburbs as we have since WWII.
The good & bad would probably be:
-Good for the environment, as suburban sprawl is greatly damaging to the environment (and necessitates a car-centered lifestyle).
-Good for companies that can more easily attract workers to their headquarters in cities.
-Good for workers who wanted to live in the city but couldn't afford it, or workers who spend a large percentage of their budget on housing because they have a job in the city.
-Good for government budget in the long run (probably) because the cost of infrastructure per capita is cheaper in city than in sprawl
-Good for the economy in the long run? No one really knows on this one, but I would argue current trends show cities are going to be big on capitalizing on 21st century economic opportunities (hence why companies want to relocate near transit).
-Bad for current suburban homeowners, one may expect suburban homes to decrease in price.
-Good or bad, depending on location, for current urban property owners. Urban home prices will (by design) go down with this policy thanks to an influx of housing, but landowners may still make a big profit (for example, if you own a single family home or duplex near a transit line, and it gets upzoned, you could sell it at a premium to a developer who wants to build a midrise or highrise on the land. On the other hand if you own a condo in an existing highrise, it will probably go down in value with a glut of new housing on the market)