The luxury goes the other way. If you live within a 20min drive or 30min transit ride of the center of a major city, why would you expect to live in a neighborhood of exclusively detached houses? That would be nice, but should there really be laws to enforce that luxury. Maybe if you don't want to see any apartment buildings, you should move further out of town.
I think this is basically correct - not so much in the sense of turning the allegation the other way, but in the sense that those who insist on artificially arresting the process of urban growth bear the burden of proof, and not those who merely want to allow a natural process to proceed.
I think that the sanewashed version is not that everyone should be able to afford every neighborhood in Manhattan, but that everyone should be able to afford to live IN Manhattan.
Like the 95-sqft Tokyo apartments, there should be enough building and diversity of options that there's an option for everything.
I liken this all to cars. Housing should be like cars, IMO. Even now since the used-car market has gone insane, it's still vastly more affordable to buy a used car than a new one. Some people prefer new cars, so they pay extra. Some people prefer luxury cars, so they pay INSANELY extra. Some people DGAF and they just ride out $500 hoopties every year or so until they break down.
But most people just buy what they can afford with some mix of features they need/want, and tolerate the lack of features they can't afford. I really wanted a sunroof on my current car, but I couldn't find any coupes with one on the time frame I was looking for, especially since my old car's registration was expiring. So I put up with not having one!
The point of building the supply isn't to magically give everyone a house. [Ed: Carmakers don't give everyone free cars just because we allow them to clear the market!] Rather, the point is to give people *options*.
Generally speaking, the auto industry tries to build as many cars a year as people will buy. They dedicate entire teams of economists to estimating that number, and they spend vast sums on advertising and relentless improvement of features in order to capture as much of that number as possible. They separate into dozens of production lines, even multiple badges, just to make sure they're catering to every single possible taste. [Ed: At no point are they doing ANY of this for charity, even when they're making "affordable" options! They simply know that their market is free enough that there is a profit to be made EVEN off of selling cheap cars to poor people.]
At one point, that more or less was the approach of the homebuilding industry. I think going back to that isn't conservative or liberal, progressive or libertarian, and doesn't even inherently necessitate "YIMBYism" -- _except_ to the extent that NIMBYs forced YIMBYism into existence in the first place...
I think the auto industry analogy makes it ESPECIALLY clear that no one's asking for entitlements or handouts here. I don't think I'm entitled for WANTING to hand a couple hundred thousand dollars to some developer, lol.
I just want to have price points available where I can decide on my tradeoffs and start building up some housing equity instead of paying off my goddamned landlord's mortgage for the 14th year in a row.
And like you get at, part of the issue is that all of this is subjective: I consider my ask of being able to live somewhere that I can drive once a week or less and walk to my doctor, dentist, library, my son's school, and if not groceries at least a convenience store or pharmacy to be perfectly reasonable. It was the normal way of things for decades!
But to someone who follows the normal pattern of just driving 15/20 minutes for each of those, my ask sounds entitled. Even though their experience requires a massive top-down program of highway subsidy and housing policy intentionally designed to make their lifestyle the "default" at the expense of folks who prefer or have to live in other ways.
I'm trying to be consistent with framing my advocacy as "Housing Pluralism" rather than "Urbanism" per se: I do think there's a completely valid place for normie suburban living for those who prefer it. They just need to accept that they won't get all of the subsidies/support they're used to, and they may have to give up some things they take for granted (like highway access to the very middle of every city center where they can park in front of every individual shop, etc). I also think it's currently reasonable to expect them to "pay back" some portion of the dramatic benefits they've been given: we need road taxes to increase pretty significantly to not only cover all maintenance, but also some of the costs they impose on those around the roads. And I do fundamentally resist the claim that my position here is entitled, even if from their perspective it seems like it is.
To me, this suggests that perhaps we should embrace remote work and encourage it. Many people living in the DC MSA would actually prefer to live in smaller cities or more rural areas outside of it - and while that isn’t your preference, its appeal has been vividly illustrated in the upsurge of remote work since the pandemic.
In Virginia, the result has been growth in smaller cities, growth in exurbs especially in Central Virginia, and we’re starting to see some revitalization of frankly rural areas. Long term, that should reduce political division as well.
That frees up space within the bigger core metro areas for the people who want to be there, and improves the quality of life for the escapees who don’t.
There is no productivity advantage to commuting to a DC office to work remote with computers and people who are scattered all over the country, versus staying home and doing the exact same work. A Zoom call isn’t more productive in an office. I really feel like an underrated element of the housing crisis is the contribution of economic policy pushing people where they don’t necessarily want to be.
The "YIMBY" position is that we should reform land use rules and building costs to allow and not prevent more people from living in dense walkable (and short drivable) neighborhoods. One measure of the benefit of doing so would be that property owners, builders, businesses near new developments, and city governments would have more income. And somewhere in the world (but not necessary in the jurisdiction doing the reform) the cost of housing will be lower (but not necessarily "affordable") than it would have been w/o the reforms.
Addison has preferences such that HE would benefit from those reforms, but one should favor them even if their preference is to live in a cabin in the woods or 20 minute drive from the grocery store.
Also wanted to ask, are these huge metros really that job rich to justify unlimited expansion? The unemployment rate in the DC MSA is higher than the state average for both Virginia and Maryland, the states that surround it. Several rather nice smaller cities in Virginia have lower unemployment levels than DC.
People in Virginia who want a reasonably cheap house in an area with low unemployment have multiple cities to pick from outside of NoVa, and telecommuters can obviously pretty much pick anywhere.
Yes for all the good points of YIMBYism (and I have some issues), it overlooks the fact that some resources are finite. Yes, you can build more apartments in the Boston area. No, you cannot magic up more Victorian brownstones. Likewise, you cannot create more housing lots that are on the beach. These are items with a fixed supply. Their price isn't coming down as long as there are people who want them.
I’ve been leaning towards we guarantee a basic humane level of housing, then people who want to up level can up level within reason. We also need to loop in schools and public services into that guaranteed level and this is where we run into racism and classism and even sexism along with your ageism
When places like Montgomery County, Maryland complain about people living on the street - all you need to know about character is - they refuse to create housing for low income, returning citizens or those with mental illness. They’d rather put people in overcrowded jails @$30k plus a year than spend $10k in community services or retool office buildings that will never again be used for offices. Definition of Insanity is an amazing documentary on how it can be done a better way. www.doifilm.com
The other argument I am fond of is that if more people want to live in a place /like Manhattan/, the solution is not only to build more housing in Manhattan, but to build more places /like Manhattan/. When people decry the “Manhattanization” of San Francisco I say:
1) that’s a fear-monger slippery-slope argument because San Francisco is a long, LONG way from being anywhere close to the density of Manhattan, and
2) actually, SF is a very sensible place to “Manhattanize,” due to the abundance of jobs, desirable climate, good public transportation, etc.; and obviously lots of people would choose to live in a “Manhattanized” San Francisco, would love life there, and it would be good for the entire national economy to capitalize more on the agglomeration effects of the Bay Area.
Some might say that 1 and 2 contradict each other (“don’t worry it’s not happening/but it should totally happen”), but the point is that anyone alive today arguing against Manhattanization will be dead by the time we get there. We should build with coming generations in mind. And in the meantime, the Brooklynization of San Francisco is not so scary.
Brooklyn is basically twice as dense as SF though.
Part of it is that, until you reach Manhattan level densities, you can always lower housing costs overall by building more housing. Manhattan being absurdly expensive is (mostly) reasonable - the entire island is filled with skyscrapers. You get diminishing returns on affordability when you hit skyscrapers. Central Tokyo is expensive (relatively) too.
What is absurd is that Brooklyn is as expensive as it is. That Queens is as expensive as it is, or the Bronx. And that's only the case because those places are so low density, and because Long Island refuses to reach even Brooklyn/Queens levels of density.
The luxury goes the other way. If you live within a 20min drive or 30min transit ride of the center of a major city, why would you expect to live in a neighborhood of exclusively detached houses? That would be nice, but should there really be laws to enforce that luxury. Maybe if you don't want to see any apartment buildings, you should move further out of town.
I think this is basically correct - not so much in the sense of turning the allegation the other way, but in the sense that those who insist on artificially arresting the process of urban growth bear the burden of proof, and not those who merely want to allow a natural process to proceed.
I think that the sanewashed version is not that everyone should be able to afford every neighborhood in Manhattan, but that everyone should be able to afford to live IN Manhattan.
Like the 95-sqft Tokyo apartments, there should be enough building and diversity of options that there's an option for everything.
I liken this all to cars. Housing should be like cars, IMO. Even now since the used-car market has gone insane, it's still vastly more affordable to buy a used car than a new one. Some people prefer new cars, so they pay extra. Some people prefer luxury cars, so they pay INSANELY extra. Some people DGAF and they just ride out $500 hoopties every year or so until they break down.
But most people just buy what they can afford with some mix of features they need/want, and tolerate the lack of features they can't afford. I really wanted a sunroof on my current car, but I couldn't find any coupes with one on the time frame I was looking for, especially since my old car's registration was expiring. So I put up with not having one!
The point of building the supply isn't to magically give everyone a house. [Ed: Carmakers don't give everyone free cars just because we allow them to clear the market!] Rather, the point is to give people *options*.
Generally speaking, the auto industry tries to build as many cars a year as people will buy. They dedicate entire teams of economists to estimating that number, and they spend vast sums on advertising and relentless improvement of features in order to capture as much of that number as possible. They separate into dozens of production lines, even multiple badges, just to make sure they're catering to every single possible taste. [Ed: At no point are they doing ANY of this for charity, even when they're making "affordable" options! They simply know that their market is free enough that there is a profit to be made EVEN off of selling cheap cars to poor people.]
At one point, that more or less was the approach of the homebuilding industry. I think going back to that isn't conservative or liberal, progressive or libertarian, and doesn't even inherently necessitate "YIMBYism" -- _except_ to the extent that NIMBYs forced YIMBYism into existence in the first place...
... no, it's just *sane*.
Great comment!
Thanks! Check out the edits, too!
I think the auto industry analogy makes it ESPECIALLY clear that no one's asking for entitlements or handouts here. I don't think I'm entitled for WANTING to hand a couple hundred thousand dollars to some developer, lol.
I just want to have price points available where I can decide on my tradeoffs and start building up some housing equity instead of paying off my goddamned landlord's mortgage for the 14th year in a row.
And like you get at, part of the issue is that all of this is subjective: I consider my ask of being able to live somewhere that I can drive once a week or less and walk to my doctor, dentist, library, my son's school, and if not groceries at least a convenience store or pharmacy to be perfectly reasonable. It was the normal way of things for decades!
But to someone who follows the normal pattern of just driving 15/20 minutes for each of those, my ask sounds entitled. Even though their experience requires a massive top-down program of highway subsidy and housing policy intentionally designed to make their lifestyle the "default" at the expense of folks who prefer or have to live in other ways.
I'm trying to be consistent with framing my advocacy as "Housing Pluralism" rather than "Urbanism" per se: I do think there's a completely valid place for normie suburban living for those who prefer it. They just need to accept that they won't get all of the subsidies/support they're used to, and they may have to give up some things they take for granted (like highway access to the very middle of every city center where they can park in front of every individual shop, etc). I also think it's currently reasonable to expect them to "pay back" some portion of the dramatic benefits they've been given: we need road taxes to increase pretty significantly to not only cover all maintenance, but also some of the costs they impose on those around the roads. And I do fundamentally resist the claim that my position here is entitled, even if from their perspective it seems like it is.
To me, this suggests that perhaps we should embrace remote work and encourage it. Many people living in the DC MSA would actually prefer to live in smaller cities or more rural areas outside of it - and while that isn’t your preference, its appeal has been vividly illustrated in the upsurge of remote work since the pandemic.
In Virginia, the result has been growth in smaller cities, growth in exurbs especially in Central Virginia, and we’re starting to see some revitalization of frankly rural areas. Long term, that should reduce political division as well.
That frees up space within the bigger core metro areas for the people who want to be there, and improves the quality of life for the escapees who don’t.
There is no productivity advantage to commuting to a DC office to work remote with computers and people who are scattered all over the country, versus staying home and doing the exact same work. A Zoom call isn’t more productive in an office. I really feel like an underrated element of the housing crisis is the contribution of economic policy pushing people where they don’t necessarily want to be.
The "YIMBY" position is that we should reform land use rules and building costs to allow and not prevent more people from living in dense walkable (and short drivable) neighborhoods. One measure of the benefit of doing so would be that property owners, builders, businesses near new developments, and city governments would have more income. And somewhere in the world (but not necessary in the jurisdiction doing the reform) the cost of housing will be lower (but not necessarily "affordable") than it would have been w/o the reforms.
Addison has preferences such that HE would benefit from those reforms, but one should favor them even if their preference is to live in a cabin in the woods or 20 minute drive from the grocery store.
Also wanted to ask, are these huge metros really that job rich to justify unlimited expansion? The unemployment rate in the DC MSA is higher than the state average for both Virginia and Maryland, the states that surround it. Several rather nice smaller cities in Virginia have lower unemployment levels than DC.
People in Virginia who want a reasonably cheap house in an area with low unemployment have multiple cities to pick from outside of NoVa, and telecommuters can obviously pretty much pick anywhere.
Yes for all the good points of YIMBYism (and I have some issues), it overlooks the fact that some resources are finite. Yes, you can build more apartments in the Boston area. No, you cannot magic up more Victorian brownstones. Likewise, you cannot create more housing lots that are on the beach. These are items with a fixed supply. Their price isn't coming down as long as there are people who want them.
I’ve been leaning towards we guarantee a basic humane level of housing, then people who want to up level can up level within reason. We also need to loop in schools and public services into that guaranteed level and this is where we run into racism and classism and even sexism along with your ageism
When places like Montgomery County, Maryland complain about people living on the street - all you need to know about character is - they refuse to create housing for low income, returning citizens or those with mental illness. They’d rather put people in overcrowded jails @$30k plus a year than spend $10k in community services or retool office buildings that will never again be used for offices. Definition of Insanity is an amazing documentary on how it can be done a better way. www.doifilm.com
The other argument I am fond of is that if more people want to live in a place /like Manhattan/, the solution is not only to build more housing in Manhattan, but to build more places /like Manhattan/. When people decry the “Manhattanization” of San Francisco I say:
1) that’s a fear-monger slippery-slope argument because San Francisco is a long, LONG way from being anywhere close to the density of Manhattan, and
2) actually, SF is a very sensible place to “Manhattanize,” due to the abundance of jobs, desirable climate, good public transportation, etc.; and obviously lots of people would choose to live in a “Manhattanized” San Francisco, would love life there, and it would be good for the entire national economy to capitalize more on the agglomeration effects of the Bay Area.
Some might say that 1 and 2 contradict each other (“don’t worry it’s not happening/but it should totally happen”), but the point is that anyone alive today arguing against Manhattanization will be dead by the time we get there. We should build with coming generations in mind. And in the meantime, the Brooklynization of San Francisco is not so scary.
Brooklyn is basically twice as dense as SF though.
Part of it is that, until you reach Manhattan level densities, you can always lower housing costs overall by building more housing. Manhattan being absurdly expensive is (mostly) reasonable - the entire island is filled with skyscrapers. You get diminishing returns on affordability when you hit skyscrapers. Central Tokyo is expensive (relatively) too.
What is absurd is that Brooklyn is as expensive as it is. That Queens is as expensive as it is, or the Bronx. And that's only the case because those places are so low density, and because Long Island refuses to reach even Brooklyn/Queens levels of density.