[HN Gopher] Why America can't build
___________________________________________________________________
Why America can't build
Author : fra
Score : 209 points
Date : 2022-06-27 02:41 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (palladiummag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (palladiummag.com)
| carabiner wrote:
| Meanwhile, China is building high speed rail, roads, and bridges
| around the world, mainly in Eastern Europe and Africa. Biden has
| announced a competing initiative:
| https://www.npr.org/2022/06/24/1106979380/g7-summit-2022-ger...
| but we all know this is empty talk. The US cannot build in its
| own land; outside of the US, it is hopeless.
| caracustard wrote:
| You also forgot to mention the terms on which China does that
| and at whose cost. Also, it's one thing to "just" build
| something, but a whole other to maintain and service.
| president wrote:
| Environmental laws/regulations, Cheaper building costs, Chinese
| speed of building. Pick only 2.
| FastMonkey wrote:
| Suing contractors for the bureaucratic nightmare you create means
| that every future bid will now have a buffer to cover the expense
| of that.
| alldayeveryday wrote:
| American cities, being large and complex systems, are not
| centrally planned or managed to the extent that would allow for
| optimization of logistical concerns. The financial motivations of
| large development firms, coupled with their political power (aka
| bribery of elected officials) has resulted in cities that are
| disorganized and unoptimized for the movements of goods and
| people. These systems are very good at creating profitable
| projects for those with enough capital, however. The federal
| highway system is about the best thing one can say about America
| concerning large scale construction projects - the relic of a
| bygone era.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| The california HSR has spent 44 billion dollars over budget and
| still hasn't even gotten the first leg's real estate done?
|
| I hope most of that was for the land, which is not a sunk
| cost/lost asset.
| ruw1090 wrote:
| The total estimated cost has increased by 44 Billion. Only ~10
| billion has been spent on the project so far.
| Kaotique wrote:
| If you need to do so much work to make a single carpool lane you
| really have to think if that is the best solution in the first
| place. You already have too many cars. The obvious solution is
| reducing the existing number of cars. Open a couple extra bus
| routes and turn one of the existing lanes into a bus lane.
| bergenty wrote:
| I like cars. It's comfy and it's freedom. I don't care if you
| have the fastest, cleanest, cheapest public transport in the
| world. I don't want to ride with other people.
| akozak wrote:
| No one is arguing for that. Supporting public transportation
| for others will help you maintain your luxury driving
| experience.
| corrral wrote:
| Having a car when other methods are available is freedom.
|
| Needing to own a car because there is no way to get by
| without one, isn't freedom.
| stetrain wrote:
| Then you should be in favor of more high-density public
| transport to get the ever-increasing traffic off of the roads
| so you can still enjoy your car.
| acuozzo wrote:
| > it's freedom
|
| Freedom from...?
| kfarr wrote:
| Freedom from the emotional challenge of interacting with
| other human beings you have not met before.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| The existence of a bus doesn't force you to ride it. But if
| others do, that's less congestion for you.
|
| There are still plenty of drivers in NYC; one of the big
| plusses of the subway system is that it makes room for other
| people who want or need to drive more. Every single time the
| subway is out of service the roads totally lock up because
| the subways divert a lot of people.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Disclosure: I love driving, even across the country.
|
| That said, the freedom to drive is a publicly subsidized
| freedom, paid for at the expense of the taxpayer and enjoyed
| unevenly by the population. Society made a choice to build
| many roads. We could make the decision, too, to make rail and
| other public transit so ubiquitous, clean and affordable that
| the _need_ to have a massive, costly and pollution-generating
| asset just to get to work and get groceries could be a thing
| of the past for more people.
| diordiderot wrote:
| thats cool but you should pay the costs of the externalities
| sieabahlpark wrote:
| I'll tell you why that is a non starter. I live 25 miles away
| and I'm not riding a bus or chain of buses for 2-3 hours for
| work.
|
| I will drive myself directly to work and save myself 2 hours. I
| don't care if it's worse for the rest, you couldn't pay me to
| sit on a bus for 2-3 hours just so I can sit in an office for 8
| and then make the whole trip home at the end of the day.
|
| Sorry not sorry.
| jewayne wrote:
| You say that you won't ride a bus. But what I'm also hearing
| is that you really don't want to pay for a bus lane, either.
| That the very existence of public infrastructure that you
| will never use is a deep, personal affront to you. Am I
| hearing that clearly?
| stetrain wrote:
| More people on the bus reduces traffic for you.
|
| And your example of a poor efficiency bus system (for your
| specific commute) is common but is usually a symptom of poor
| investment rather than an inherent problem with transit
| systems.
| Hellbanevil wrote:
| elteto wrote:
| The extra bus routes are not for you, but for other drivers
| that do live closer and can trade their car commute by a bus
| ride. This, in turn, alleviates road congestion for everyone
| else, _including_ people like you who have no option but to
| drive!
|
| So, ironically, what you are complaining about (and would
| probably vote against if given the choice) is something that
| could benefit you.
|
| But hey, at least you have your freedom or something.
| sieabahlpark wrote:
| akozak wrote:
| This is really important to understand. Someone explained
| to me once how small changes (low single digit reduction)
| to cars on the road leads to huge congestion benefits. I'm
| sure someone on HN will have a good citation. Public
| transportation helps you have your luxury experience.
| jewayne wrote:
| Here's a video on the topic: ("Why Traffic Congestion
| Grows Exponentially, Why It Matters, and What To Do About
| It") https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHSCmQnGH9Q
| noahtallen wrote:
| This is a straw man argument, where you're using a worst-case
| scenario for buses. A quick rail line could get you to the
| office in under an hour, and would beat traffic if it was
| designed well. Hell, buses ought to skip traffic via
| dedicated lanes since they're carrying so many more people
| than a car.
|
| But it's important to note that only takes 2-3 hours because
| public transit doesn't get the investment it needs to be
| _good_. And even when cars _do_ get an extreme amount of
| investment, it still takes you an hour to go 25 miles.
|
| It should be clear at this point that driving is not a
| scalable, general solution for quick, effective transit in
| areas with lots of people. The pretty simple reason is that
| traffic congestion is an exponential problem
| (https://youtu.be/cHSCmQnGH9Q).
|
| As a result, investing in car infrastructure is actually not
| a good way to improve your commute time. It may seem
| backwards, but since more car infrastructure encourages more
| drivers, and since more drivers increase congestion at an
| _exponential rate_ , more car infrastructure tends to (at the
| best case) not improve the situation at all.
|
| This is why people like myself really try to push for
| investment in other forms of transit. If you have multiple,
| high-quality transit options, some people will pick the
| train, some will pick a bike, and others will pick a car.
|
| If biking and taking the train or bus is good enough that it
| gets a few drivers off the road, that makes the experience
| significantly better for you, as we are now decreasing
| congestion _at an exponential rate_. Even a handful of people
| using something else on a busy road can make a big difference
| in how long you wait at a traffic light.
|
| I'm advocating for you to have more freedom: more good
| choices and options available to you. Right now you have one
| choice, driving, and it isn't even that good because you have
| to wait in traffic. Why wouldn't it be better to have 2 or 3
| _excellent_ transit options? Even driving would be better.
| (https://youtu.be/d8RRE2rDw4k)
|
| This isn't so much about individual choice. (Though every
| driver _is_ the congestion simply by using a car.) This isn't
| so much about rural and remote areas either. This is about
| what we invest in to improve the quality of life and transit
| effectiveness in dense areas.
| Pxtl wrote:
| The NIMBYism crisis in Canada has also reached a fever pitch:
|
| https://www.tvo.org/article/by-the-numbers-the-cmhc-says-aba...
|
| That's the Ontario provincial public broadcaster.
|
| Canada currently builds a measly 286,000 homes per year, but the
| housing crisis is so severe that the government thinks we need to
| build 5.7 million homes over the next 9 years to alleviate the
| crisis. Which is basically impossible. And the municipalities are
| still crying about Character Of The Neighborhood and the
| importance of democratic local control.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| Megaprojects are mostly wasteful and don't deliver on their
| promise. They appeal to dreamers and idealists, and the GCs make
| out like bandits while residents are harmed and the promised
| benefits don't arrive. We don't build because private industry
| would rather issue buybacks to the oligarchic class in Arkansas
| and Kansas than invest in infrastructure used by the rest of too
| stupid to be born generationally wealthy with family offices.
| sschueller wrote:
| I have to disagree with you on the mega projects being
| wasteful. Here in Switzerland we dug a 57km train tunnel [1]
| which has enabled a large number or cargo to be put on rail and
| travel at much higher speed.
|
| Another large project at Zurich main station involved digging
| an additional underground station with a tunnel up through the
| mountain underneath a river. [2]. It has enabled a much tigher
| train schedule especially for intercity trains which can now
| travel through the main station instead of having to back out.
| Well worth the 2 Billion it cost.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRLA
|
| [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weinberg_Tunnel
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| Some aren't wasteful. I could have written my post more
| clearly, because I was talking about all _proposed_
| megaprojects, not just those that have been built.
|
| I think this could have used a bigger disclosure, too. The
| author, Brian Balkus, works for a major construction company,
| MasTec (which has had its issues with labor law violations).
| There is a clear editorial bias.
| patwater10 wrote:
| The costs of growing complexity cannot be exaggerated. Note
| there's a new effort to help create more effective government in
| CA that's worth checking out: https://effectivegovernmentca.org/
| nonethewiser wrote:
| What do we do when software gets too complex?
|
| We redesign and start over.
|
| That may or may not be an option with government. If it's not,
| we know the consequences. Paralysis.
|
| I remember a musing Elon Musk had on Lex Friedman's podcast. He
| noted that there was no cleansing function for laws. Something
| like that might be a step in the right direction.
| diordiderot wrote:
| > We redesign and start over.
|
| I feel like its better to do greenfield development and
| migrate.
| fireflash38 wrote:
| Frequently people forget what happens when they do that.
| People _love_ refactoring... but forget how that spaghetti
| got there in the first place.
|
| Spoiler alert: it's because _life_ is messy and doesn 't fit
| neatly into buckets & code. You throw out so much testing bug
| fixing & corner case fixes.
|
| For every reg that is abused by bad actors, there's a dozen
| that are written in blood.
| [deleted]
| bell-cot wrote:
| Why? Because successfully completing large infrastructure
| projects is - at best - a "lip service" priority for most people.
| But it is an _actual_ priority for very few people.
| Xeoncross wrote:
| litigation for every little thing + courts that move slow + large
| legal costs = America
| ruw1090 wrote:
| I stopped reading at "Incredibly, the state has not laid a single
| mile of track" for California High Speed rail, which is
| completely false. There are 119 miles under active construction
| and they've been putting down track since 2018.
| PKop wrote:
| It's hard to find evidence that his statement is false. How
| many miles of tracks have been laid, and where?
| Invictus0 wrote:
| I was able to find this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-
| Speed_Rail#/me...
| nonethewiser wrote:
| There is no "constructed" key here. Which suggests the
| furthest along is "under construction". I'm not sure what
| all that constitutes.
| secabeen wrote:
| Laying track is clearly the last part of the project; they're
| working on all the important stuff that goes under the track.
| The fact that they haven't laid track specifically is a false
| concern.
| PKop wrote:
| Then the issue was with his elevation of the claim as
| pertinent, not the claim itself. He is right then that no
| track has been laid? It seems simply a shorthand maker of
| progress of the project.
|
| >is clearly the last part of the project
|
| All that tells me is they're not really close to the "last
| part of the project" then. And this last part could be very
| far away, because "working on" sections could mean
| anything. Until track is laid (especially as you claim it
| being near the end) the project is vaporware is it not? And
| that is useful information for the general public who can
| be bamboozled by project tracker graphics documenting
| "progress" that never delivers anything.
|
| I see a few articles highlighting with pictures the
| construction of various concrete elevated platforms, that
| seem to have stopped or are abandoned. So ultimately work
| can be done for a long time and not amount to much at all.
| merpnderp wrote:
| "119 mile under active construction" does not disagree with
| "the state has not laid a single mile of track."
|
| Under active construction could simply mean the land is being
| graded and prepped, or with modern weasel wording it could mean
| a dozen different surveys are under review. But given there was
| a time with rail was laid at a mile per day, 119 miles being
| "under construction" for the last 4 years does seem to make the
| author's point.
| secabeen wrote:
| Rail was laid at about a mile a day, and a worker on said
| project died every two-four days (up to 1,000 deaths across 7
| years). We could probably build rail faster if we threw
| safety out the window too.
|
| Yes, that's not the only difference between now and then, but
| it is an important factor to include in your analysis.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| We discussing safety, or track laid?
| loudmax wrote:
| The article lays out a lot of the problems with American
| projects, but doesn't do much to explain why European projects
| are able to manage a better track record. Are their unions
| weaker, or are their goals better aligned with the projects?
|
| Also the article suggests eliminating National Environmental
| Policy Act(NEPA) provisions as a way of cutting red tape. I don't
| doubt that there's a lot of NEPA that ought to be revised, but we
| need to remember why these provisions were created in the first
| place. If we eliminate environmental impact studies rather than
| come up with a more efficient way to conduct them, we should
| expect that megaprojects will have unforseen environmental
| impacts. In some cases, local species will be driven to
| extinction, and in other cases the long term health of nearby
| people may be compromised. These risks may be worth the payoff,
| but we should be upfront about these risks and who could be
| affected.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| US unions are uniquely dysfunctional.
| notalongtimer2 wrote:
| From the article: "A common retort to the claim that union
| labor drives up costs is that other countries, especially in
| Europe, have both high union participation and lower project
| costs. But it is widely recognized in the industry that unions
| increase project labor costs by 20 to 25 percent on average in
| the U.S."
|
| The article spends alot of steam making an argument that unions
| drive up costs, then proffers data that shows it's not a solid
| argument, then just kind of waives it away by saying their
| argument is "widely recognized" to be true.
|
| This article is idealogical drivel published by Peter Thiel.
| em-bee wrote:
| part of it is probably that some things that US unions have to
| fight for are protected by law in europe. as far as i know at
| will employment doesn't exist in europe for example. i hear in
| france it is almost impossible to fire anyone at all.
|
| in germany every company with more than 50 employees has to
| form a workers council that gets a say in how certain things
| are done in the company. they deal with things like work
| conditions, safety, office benefits (do we want a rec-room or
| better food in the cantine?) without any union needed to step
| in. that reduces unions to negotiating collective pay and
| related questions like reducing work-hours or other topics that
| are relevant for a whole industry, not just one company.
|
| i also believe a german union would have a hard time to force a
| company to hire people that are not needed for a project or
| even influence who the company can hire.
|
| but apart from that, even in europe not all projects go well.
| politicians that try to profile themselves by attracting large
| projects, missmanagement, are not uncommon either.
|
| as the article says, for example germany has similar problems.
| like the Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link between germany and denmark.
| denmark ratified the plans in 2015. germany took 5 years
| longer. local communities, a few shipping companies and
| individuals sued to stop the project. one documentary made the
| joke that a project that gets done in denmark in a year, takes
| a decade in germany.
| CognitiveLens wrote:
| The article specifically points out that Germany has similar
| regulatory and cost overrun challenges, so in general it
| can't be used as a counterpoint - the example case where
| things went well for Germany is attributed to waiving
| procedural requirements mandated by the EU.
|
| Even when with guaranteed EU protections, the system can be
| inefficient.
| em-bee wrote:
| you are right, i have reworded my comment to acknowledge
| that
| mjmahone17 wrote:
| I wonder with NEPA if we could do "existing negative impact"
| studies, i.e. if this is not built, how will the environment be
| affected? And if the answer is "on net the status quo is worse
| environmentally" then permitting can proceed without further in
| depth reviews required for each sub-component. Like high speed
| electric trains should be extremely easy to pass: they remove
| car and plane traffic, so even if they hurt some local
| environments in the process of being built, the net result is
| better than the status quo so those micro problems are
| considered outweighed by the macro, unless someone can prove
| otherwise.
|
| Expanding on this, private groups should be allowed to fund
| neutral third parties who act similarly to land surveyors: they
| can provide impact studies for projects the government has not
| planned. If the status quo is worse for the environment and
| more expensive to maintain, these "impact study libraries"
| could provide off-the-shelf projects that wouldn't need extra
| regulatory approval. Advocacy groups, like say Extinction
| Rebellion, could reasonably fund "status quo" analyses for
| carbon-intensive infrastructure vs reasonable alternatives
| (mass transit, HSR, road diets, etc).
| loudmax wrote:
| I tend to agree with your notion of negative impact studies.
| We tend to favor the status quo, even if the status quo isn't
| sustainable in the long run.
|
| I do have concerns about private groups bringing in third
| parties. In practice, these third parties would have
| incentives to produce whatever results please the
| organization that hired them. It'ss tricky to arrange
| conditions such that these third parties are truly neutral.
| glmdev wrote:
| I think this is an interesting idea, though I suspect "on net
| the status quo is worse environmentally" is a hard question
| to answer w/o the aforementioned in-depth reviews (at least
| to an extent; obviously the current system has problems).
| Kharvok wrote:
| Why are bike lanes held up as the optimal solution in small
| municipalities with an aging population?
| austinl wrote:
| A friend has worked in construction project management for almost
| 40 years, mostly in Texas. A few years ago, he moved to San
| Francisco to work on the Van Ness project, which was approved in
| 2003, began construction in 2017 (!), went $40 million over
| budget, and finally completed this year. The project essentially
| added a median and some bus lanes to a two mile stretch of road
| through San Francisco and took 19 years.
|
| During his time in SF, no construction took place--so he told me
| he would essentially go into the office and do nothing while
| waiting for various city hearings to happen. After 8 months, he
| quit in frustration and moved back to Texas.
| javajosh wrote:
| If you wanted a pithy explanation this comment points to it.
| It's the speed of the justice system (of which city council is
| ultimately a part). People want to complain about the
| participants, but the system itself is so goddamn slow, and
| more and more decisions are plugged into it, that it's slowness
| is really the central cause. A working system should be able to
| handle baseless allegations and NIMBY whining; you can't expect
| people to show self-restraint.
|
| (The justice system's slowness is also at the heart of another
| critical problem, the failure of the criminal justice system.
| Again, people want to complain about the agents, but it's the
| system itself, particularly it's glacial slowness, that creates
| perverse incentives and terrible outcomes.)
|
| The justice system is, at its heart, a collaborative
| information system, and as such is ripe for disruption by
| software. And I think it's more important to fix even than the
| healthcare system! At least in part because a large fraction of
| the complexity of every other system is caused by problems in
| that most foundational system, justice.
| jeffbee wrote:
| SFMTA likes to point out that in the course of the project it
| was necessary for them to excavate and replace all the
| underground utilities along the route. Basically 100 years of
| the municipal equivalent of "tech debt" showed up on the SFMTA
| balance sheet.
| kfarr wrote:
| It's true that the tech debt of utilities was addressed as
| part of the VN BRT project, however it's also true that the
| tech debt didn't need to be included in the scope of BRT and
| it was an intentional (and I would say foolish) decision to
| do so.
| CabSauce wrote:
| "If we could just get rid of environmental and worker
| protections, costs would be lower!" - Every Company Ever
| seoaeu wrote:
| The problem is that most environmental protection laws predate
| climate change being a primary concern. So even something where
| it is blatantly obvious that it is going to be a net good for
| the environment can get bogged down in years of reviews
| rcpt wrote:
| How about actually making environmental regulations matter?
|
| Blocking infill development with CEQA? You need to say how much
| more driving will happen as a result.
| harmon wrote:
| Exactly this. Every project is going to impact the
| environment. The end goal of a risk assessment is not to
| bring the environmental risk to zero, it is to bring it down
| to an acceptable level given the benefits of the project.
| Goronmon wrote:
| _Exactly this. Every project is going to impact the
| environment. The end goal of a risk assessment is not to
| bring the environmental risk to zero, it is to bring it
| down to an acceptable level given the benefits of the
| project._
|
| I think getting at this type of issue is specifically what
| I wished the article had done more of. It's easy to say
| "Well, environmental regulations are causing the problem."
| Which I guess is good to know, but the real important part
| is what's the next step or how could things improve.
|
| Otherwise, it comes across as "The problem is that
| environmental regulations exist."
| Symmetry wrote:
| The Cape Wind project, which was going to be the US's first
| offshore wind farm, was famously killed by wealthy and
| powerful people worried about their views with environmental
| causes as a pretext. I think that bureaucratic review could
| be much better than the current case of "anybody wealthy
| enough can sue to stop the project" but that would have
| required spending money spinning up the department when the
| law was introduced and relying on lawsuits from the public
| looks free.
|
| EDIT: And of course recently fossil power interests were able
| to stop some power lines to bring hydro electricity in from
| Canada.
| rayiner wrote:
| > Incredibly, the state has not laid a single mile of track and
| it still lacks 10 percent of the land parcels it needs to do so.
| Half of the project still hasn't achieved the environmental
| clearance needed to begin construction. The dream of a Japanese-
| style bullet train crisscrossing the state is now all but dead
| due to political opposition, litigation, and a lack of funding.
|
| Among my favorite images are hulking segments of unfinished CHSR
| viaduct dominating the skyline of Central Valley towns that
| didn't want it in the first place. A man-made monument to hubris.
|
| E.g.
| https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d88bcf176aba93cb014bff7a9be14...
| thehappypm wrote:
| Why is that above grade anyway ?
| bombcar wrote:
| Likely to get over something else somewhere else (highway,
| building, roads, river) without having to climb and come back
| down. High speed rail doesn't want to climb at all if
| possible, certainly less than normal rail (and much, much
| less than light rail).
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| America can build if it wants to. It's just got to want to.
|
| It is good to want things if they are good for you! There is
| merit in wanting what is right! And little kids can't do anything
| but want what they want to want. Just want.
|
| Concomitantly with my Idealistic Christianity, let me share the
| Atheistic perspective running in parallel: I developed an
| algorithm that can solve any problem in a math textbook, but it
| can't want anything. And I'm not going to automate that, that
| must always be left to someone in flesh and bone.
|
| Seek, and ye shall find.
| davesque wrote:
| People generally call out NIMBY-ism as though it's just some sort
| of irrational bias that people have, but I don't think that
| always explains it. Sure, in a lot of cases, people are
| overprotective of their neighborhoods or communities. But where
| did that attitude come from? I'd argue it came from decades of
| corporate greed and government dysfunction that bred a general
| distrust of large institutions. It's not like people have no
| reason to feel like big business doesn't have their best
| interests in mind.
|
| Another commenter gave the construction of highways as an
| example, saying that people used to look at large infrastructure
| projects like that with a positive attitude. Well, I'd say look
| where that got them. The way highways were built in this country
| completely wrecked communities (especially poor ones located in
| less desirable parts of town) and eventually led to the uniquely
| American aesthetic of the urban and suburban wasteland.
|
| If large organizations in this country want to undertake large
| projects, they have to first work to regain the trust of the
| average person by acting like they actually give a damn and
| really want to the world to be a better place for their efforts.
| caracustard wrote:
| "...people are overprotective of their neighborhoods or
| communities." Me: huh, people seem to finally get why NIMBY is
| a thing! "...it came from decades of corporate greed and
| government dysfunction..." Me: nevermind...
|
| NIMBY is simply people wanting the things to be as they always
| were. That's about it. Say you lived in the area for 10 years,
| you've made friends there, you're used to things. Suddenly
| someone comes by and says that it's time to build something
| that you don't really care about. What would your reaction be
| other than NIMBY? You like everything as it already is, there
| is no need to change anything, now let me watch my game in
| peace and then i'll go fishing.
|
| "... look where that got them. " A system that allowed for
| easier travel, transportation of goods, a system that created a
| brand new (for the time) travel culture? I can go on and on,
| but mind you that railways weren't exactly the most community-
| friendly (whatever it means) thing either.
|
| "...urban and suburban wasteland." Lesson learned: don't build
| roads or connect states of a huge country, allowing people to
| travel wherever they want in the comfort of their vehicle,
| otherwise in the future you'd be ostracized for the actions of
| those who came long after you and decided not to innovate in
| the infrastructure industry.
| carapace wrote:
| In SF people could read up on the history of the Embarcadero
| Freeway. It took a half a century and the Loma Prieta
| earthquake to work through all that.
|
| https://medium.com/@UpOutSF/old-san-francisco-a-look-at-befo...
|
| https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/visuals/san-franci...
| MrMan wrote:
| we need planning, not just building
| seoaeu wrote:
| The interesting thing about planning is that NIMBYs will
| insist that a years long planning process is required, right
| up until the point one is completed saying how a bunch more
| housing can be added. Then all of a sudden they insist that
| the plan was flawed and the whole process needs to go back to
| the drawing board
| pitaj wrote:
| Planning (specifically urban planning around cars over the
| last century) is a giant failure. Hopefully you can
| understand why people like myself would be skeptical.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Tried that. Didn't work.
|
| We need building. We've done enough planning for 10
| lifetimes, and all it got us was a crushing housing crisis.
| paulpauper wrote:
| I think a major reason is simply is that it's not a high priority
| by voters.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| The US needs dramatic, progressive change, but instead we're
| failing and regressing in so many ways and places. I expect
| cascading failures to continually compound.
| dcposch wrote:
| One of the things I love about Palladium (and closely related,
| Samo Burja's newsletter) is the depth of research.
|
| Like the detail that one of the most egregious episodes from
| California HSR involved a Spanish company that performed
| excellently on rail projects in Spain. Overall, this piece makes
| a strong case that the problem is specifically NIMBYism and loss
| of government institutional capacity.
|
| I think the million dollar question is how government
| organizations can hire and retain better. The current situation
| looks dire. Obviously a charismatic leader with a broad anti-
| NIMBY mandate would go a ways at getting competent people to want
| to work in government. You saw that succeed on a small scale with
| orgs like US Digital Service.
|
| The elephant, after that, is merit-based pay and promotion.
| Someone needs to sell this to the public. RN literally random
| cops and plumbers make mid six figures thru overtime while the
| directors of $100b mega-project are low-energy lifers making less
| than that. That's not gonna work.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| > I think the million dollar question is how government
| organizations can hire and retain better.
|
| Simple: offer salaries that compete with the private sector. Of
| course, this involves raising tax revenues which is incredibly
| unpopular politically. But we get what we pay for and as long
| as public sector pay remains a joke compared to the private
| sector, we are always going to have this problem.
| WalterBright wrote:
| In Washington State, teacher salaries were raised
| substantially, with no change in educational results.
|
| The thing is, just giving everyone raises doesn't work. It
| needs to be based on _merit_.
|
| I've proposed a system where teachers get a base salary, plus
| a substantial increment for every student in their class that
| meets grade level expectations at the end of the school year.
| panzagl wrote:
| Cool, so no one will ever teach anywhere except a rich
| suburb.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Same as now.
| xur17 wrote:
| > The thing is, just giving everyone raises doesn't work.
| It needs to be based on merit.
|
| Agreed - to me it seems like paying teachers more is a
| tool. This enables you to offer incentives to improve
| student performance, but it also enables you to raise the
| bar (in some way) when hiring to get better teachers. If
| you just raise existing salaries across the board, you'll
| see no immediate change other than more people applying to
| be teachers. In theory if you have a good way of filtering
| for the "best", you might be able to then slowly overtime
| replace your existing teachers with (on average) better
| teachers.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Once hired, good people _still_ need incentives to
| perform. This is well understood in the private sector.
| [deleted]
| bombcar wrote:
| That last has been basically tried, and you end up everyone
| always "exceeding expectations" unless you tie it to some
| sort of standardized testing (which has its own issues).
|
| Your best bet may be removing the obstacles that people who
| _want_ to do a good job encounter (for example, the best
| teachers seem to often leave _higher paid_ public teaching
| jobs to go to private schools that pay less - investigate
| why?).
| WalterBright wrote:
| There are always going to be issues around evaluating
| student achievement. But by and large, compensation based
| on results works very well in the marketplace. And we
| certainly see the results in the public schools of no
| merit pay. It's hard to see how it could be worse.
|
| BTW, MIT has gone back to SATs. The reason is simple -
| despite all the controversy about SAT validity, when the
| rubber meets the road the SAT does a better job than
| anything else at evaluating candidates.
| softwarebeware wrote:
| > In Washington State, teacher salaries were raised
| substantially,
|
| Can you cite where you saw this data, what time period it
| refers to, what "substantially" actually means, and include
| a comparison against inflation, please?
|
| > ... plus a substantial increment for every student in
| their class that meets grade level expectations at the end
| of the school year.
|
| I think basing teacher pay on merit is a great idea in
| theory but I have some problems with it. Most of all,
| student performance is influenced to a greater degree by
| things outside the teacher's control like the student's
| socioeconomic status, their attendance (or lack thereof),
| their parent's education, and even the air quality in their
| school.
|
| I also don't know how "teacher" raises based on "meeting
| grade level expectations" would work past elementary school
| when students are cycling through seven teachers a day?
| Just because one child excels at math do you give the math
| teacher a greater raise?
|
| Finally, what if a student does NOT meet grade level
| expectations, but shows the greatest improvement year-over-
| year against any other student. Do you fail to recognize
| the achievement of the teacher who improved this student's
| outcome because the student does not meet grade-level
| expectations?
|
| These are just some of the problems which make this a much
| thornier issue and worth greater consideration. It sounds
| good when you say teacher pay should be based on merit, but
| it oversimplifies things quite a bit.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Can you cite where you saw this data
|
| Not offhand. It was the topic of the Seattle Times for
| months.
|
| Let's take a look at the private sector. Pay is based on
| accomplishing goals. It works well. Sure it is imperfect.
|
| > it oversimplifies things quite a bit.
|
| It would be hard to be worse than the current system,
| which simplifies merit as "has a masters degree". I
| answered your other points in other replies in this
| thread.
| TimPC wrote:
| So all the teachers want to work in rich suburban schools
| where students perform above grade level and no one wants
| to work in poor inner-city schools where they don't? The
| only reasonable thing you can base merit pay on is a delta.
| You test a performance difference between incoming and
| outgoing students. If a student starts a year at grade
| level and makes no progress you shouldn't reward the
| teacher for having them at grade level.
| WalterBright wrote:
| All the teachers want to work in a rich suburban school
| already.
|
| Basing the bonus on the increment is probably a good
| improvement.
| TimPC wrote:
| Plenty of teachers are willing to work in an environment
| where they feel they could make the biggest impact. My
| mother spent her whole career working in schools that
| could be classified as inner city with high percentages
| of new immigrants. Not everyone wants the easiest job
| possible in their field, some people see rewards in being
| able to make a bigger difference in people's lives.
| WalterBright wrote:
| That doesn't seem to line up with your previous post?
| ejb999 wrote:
| >>plus a substantial increment for every student in their
| class that meets grade level expectations at the end of the
| school year
|
| Don't be surprised when all of a sudden almost every
| student magically 'meets grade level expectations' and
| teachers get their large bonuses, and yet many of the
| students can't actually read when they graduate.
| Unfortunately, this is just an incentive to inflate grades
| and fudge results to make them look better.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Naturally, the teacher won't be in charge of evaluating
| their own students.
| ejb999 wrote:
| But there is no real firewall between teachers and
| administrators - most administrators are former teachers
| - it's a pretty cozy club in most schools.
|
| I am not opposed to the idea in theory, but don't see any
| way to honestly make it work. Also fairly certain almost
| every teachers union will oppose it - and I say that as
| someone who has the experience of negotiating teacher's
| union contracts from the other side of the table.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Do what other organizations do. Have a separate
| organization to the evaluations.
|
| > Also fairly certain almost every teachers union will
| oppose it
|
| Of course they will. Those unions are absolutely,
| irrevocably committed to the idea that teacher merit is
| totally determined by length of service and having a
| master's degree.
| idontpost wrote:
| And of course the people who are won't have any conflicts
| of interest of their own.
| WalterBright wrote:
| There are well known techniques to deal with this. It's
| hardly a new problem.
| zehaeva wrote:
| Great Idea!
|
| We just tell the teacher that "hey you'll get a bonus if
| everyone in your class gets an A"!
|
| Who's in charge of giving their students grades again?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Grade inflation has been around a long time under the
| current system. It's also why the teachers union tries so
| hard to get rid of all testing.
| citizenkeen wrote:
| There are factors other than teacher's merit that affect
| outcome. You're saying that a teacher who gets two
| learning-disabled students (who need to be paired due to
| sibling issues) is less deserving than their peer who
| didn't have the disruption of two learning-disabled
| students?
|
| The moment you tie income to results, you incentivize
| teachers leaving behind students who won't perform.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The idea is to randomly assign the students to teachers.
| Sometimes teachers will get students who will never reach
| grade level, and sometimes students who will effortlessly
| achieve. By being random, it evens the opportunity out.
| glmdev wrote:
| The concept sounds good in theory, but I think it's going
| to be nigh unworkable in practice. The NCLB/high-stakes
| testing era exposed many problems with tying educator pay
| to student outcomes -- chief among them that student
| outcomes didn't improve.
| WalterBright wrote:
| As I recall they had the teachers themselves grade those
| tests, so naturally they cheated.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's amusing (and sad) that almost everyone involved with
| a school can quickly point out the best and worst
| teachers there, but there's no way to "programmatically"
| encode it so that the bureaucracy can do something about
| it.
| troupe wrote:
| Imagine a system where of 500 teachers, 25 that have a
| track record of doing much worse than average are let go.
| You then roll the dice to get new teachers.
|
| Could you pay more to attract better teachers in that
| situation and get better overall value for the kids being
| taught?
|
| So how do you identify poor teachers? I would guess that
| if you let each member of the faculty vote for the 25 top
| teachers and then have parents do assessment of their
| children's teachers and then average the results over 3
| years, you could come up with something that has virtual
| no false positives as to who the worst teachers were.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Evaluating teacher quality is difficult and impossible to
| do perfectly. Even a simple effort to evaluate quality
| would be vastly superior to the current state where
| quality isn't even a consideration.
|
| I agree with the ensemble of evaluations approach -
| student tests at the start and end of year show student
| attainment, student and parent feedback, peer feedback,
| and administrator feedback. Come up with a weighted
| average and experiment with it. Retain average and better
| teachers, reward rockstars, train underperformers, and
| let the bottom ranks and those who don't improve with
| training go.
| idontpost wrote:
| Because it's not that hard to measure teacher quality.
| But once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a
| good measure. It gets gamed and manipulated. When it was
| just a measure, no one bothered to game it, so it wasn't
| that hard to tell who was good and who wasn't.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Yeah, I've noticed that, too. It's the same in every
| office in every organization.
| seoaeu wrote:
| The worst part is that it wouldn't even require any
| noticeable increase in tax revenue! The salaries of the dozen
| or so government employees managing a billion dollar contract
| are a rounding error in the total cost
| arghnoname wrote:
| I've known people who work for various government agencies,
| some that pay well for their respective fields. It seemed to
| be a pattern where someone would accrue a large salary
| through time on the job, internal patronage, etc, but then be
| totally incapable or uninterested in doing their job well.
| They'd just hire someone else to do this person's job and
| shuffle titles around.
|
| No one gets fired for non-aggressive incompetence. Merit is
| below two or three other things when considering promotion
| and salary hikes. At least in the cases I'm familiar with,
| it's an incredibly frustrating experience. Increasing top-
| level salary would not fix this, but probably just increase
| the lack of fairness by over-paying to a greater extent the
| embedded poor performers.
| jcims wrote:
| I don't think it's just that simple to be honest.
|
| Government organizations are going to be held to the highest
| standard for equity, transparency and governance (and ideally
| security, but...). Building a product with artifacts that
| demonstrate and/or attest to all of these things creates
| incredible friction. I'm just coming out of a seven year
| stint at one of the largest banks in the world, and despite
| loving the people I work with I couldn't take it any more.
| I've on the other side of the summit in my career and I don't
| really want to have navigating bureaucracy be a major
| component of my professional efforts for the remainder of it.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| Not to make you feel old or anything, but this sounds a lot
| like what happened with my dad. I'm 6 years into my career
| and he's mostly through his. His highest-income years were
| doing software development in the law department of one of
| the big oil companies. It basically broke him to learn what
| they were doing. Now he's trying to find the motivation to
| do contract work in his 50's because he doesn't want to
| deal with corporations ever again...
| jcims wrote:
| lol nothing you can do to make me feel older than i
| already do :)
|
| Give your dad a fistbump for me, it's tough, but once he
| finds the right customer he'll be off to the races. I've
| been there before and I've been thinking about doing the
| same myself.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| We could shift the model from guaranteed pensions to employee
| contribution retirement funds, and shift the savings to
| salary. We'd get better pay for civil servants, remove the
| incentive for bad ones to stay, and make cities and states
| more financially sound all in one shot.
| _uy6i wrote:
| Citation please? Everything I've seen implies public sector
| employees in California make massively more than their
| private sector counterparts.
| loudmax wrote:
| The article doesn't:
|
| "Instead of hiring staff, the Authority relied heavily on
| outside consultants. These consultants were well paid, with
| the primary consultant compensation for HSR at $427,000 per
| engineer, compared with the Authority's in-house cost of
| $131,000 per engineer. This structure creates a principal-
| agent problem where they are incentivized to maximize their
| billable hours."
| _uy6i wrote:
| I mean that public sector employees are underpaid.
| Comparing consultants and in-house cost is always going
| to to result in 2-3x disparity (you're paying a premium
| for swing capacity). I'm willing to bet the state
| employee is overpaid Vs his private sector non-consultant
| counterpart. You then have ask why hire a consultant and
| I think the answer is that it's some combination of not
| being able to fire state employees after the project, or
| that those employees are actually
| ineffectual/incompetent.
|
| (As an aside I'm willing to bet the #'s aren't apples to
| apples with the consultant being a fully loaded coast,
| and the in-house not including pension benefits etc)
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| Not really. If you brought on vastly more competent people
| and digitized+automated government like the private sector,
| you wouldn't need to hire so many people, so you can afford
| to pay the competent people more. Of course, this means
| stepping on the toes of a bunch of incompetent lifers who are
| just there for the 9-5 chill life and pension, so it will
| never happen.
|
| You've gotta ask yourself: if private sector style pay would
| cost more, then wouldn't that imply the private sector is
| vastly more inefficient than the government? But that's
| clearly not the case, so we come to the conclusion that
| private sector pay and hiring standards must result in much
| greater output per dollar.
| xh-dude wrote:
| My impression of Burja is that he's better at the writing -
| there are always interesting details - than average but not
| generally a superior analyst.
|
| For example: https://brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/modern-
| russia-can-fight... has interesting and useful details but I
| think has been demonstrably and obviously short of similar
| analysis from experts in the field who are less certain but
| more reliable vis-a-vis outcomes.
| fleetwoodsnack wrote:
| It may depend on the author, as some articles in the
| publication are inconsistent with the characterization of "in-
| depth research." Previously, the publication wrote about
| "Stanford's War on Social Life," but made some omissions that
| misrepresented some key facts used as evidence of Stanford's
| supposed demise.[1]
|
| Two key things pointed out by our fellow HN readers included
| the (1) failure to acknowledge the association of the defunct
| fraternity, wistfully characterized as emblematic of campus
| social life, with the Brock Turner rape; and (2) the
| mischaracterization of Lake Lagunita as a beloved campus
| waterfront neglected by Stanford, when it was in fact an
| artificial pond created by a dam that the municipality stopped
| servicing.[2]
|
| These may or may not necessarily be important for a casual
| audience, but for a publication that presents itself in the
| self-appointed realm of "governance futurism" there is a lack
| of rigor and a palpable sense of linguistic license. Take it
| for what you will.
|
| [1]https://palladiummag.com/2022/06/13/stanfords-war-on-
| social-...
|
| [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31732944
| m-ee wrote:
| The Stanford article rings true to me as an alum. The
| justification for KA losing their housing was entirely
| unrelated to the Brock Turner case. He was not a member, he
| just happened to be attending the party.
|
| My time predates most of the events of this article but the
| war on fun was well underway. Sentiment was that the frats in
| trouble at the time (kappa sig and SAE) largely deserved it,
| especially SAE, but there was a sense that anyone else could
| be next. The university values conformity over social life or
| even safety. The abrupt removal of the European theme houses
| without any justification pretty much confirms the former,
| the banning of hard alcohol and end of the "open door"
| drinking policy confirms the latter. The coops are probably
| next on the chopping block.
|
| EDIT- Unrelated fun fact, there is tunnel underneath lake lag
| that the endangered salamanders and other wildlife can just
| to get to the other side of the road. This also creates an
| ambush point for local raccoons and coyotes to eat what comes
| out.
| fleetwoodsnack wrote:
| Not an alum so I can't speak to the first person
| experience, and the quirks of Stanford are not interesting.
| My comment's purpose is limited to that of a discriminating
| reader seeking to become more informed.
|
| I think these observations would have been fine
| independently but the context is important, if only for the
| sake of refuting it. The failure to acknowledge it, and the
| license taken with respect to other facts is what is
| unsettling.
| m-ee wrote:
| I agree that context is important, but context here is
| that they were put on probation four years later for
| something completely unrelated. Criticizing its omission
| without pointing that out might mislead people.
|
| The quirks of Stanford may not be interesting to you but
| it is literally an article about Stanford social quirks.
| If there's any criticism to be made of the article it's
| not acknowledging why SAE or Sigma Chi were removed from
| campus as their behavior was far more abhorrent (a
| targeted harassment campaign against a sorority member
| and a roofie incident by a non student friend of the
| fraternity members.
| fleetwoodsnack wrote:
| I think that's a worthwhile discussion, and readers would
| have definitely appreciated a discussion of, "Does
| reputational damage precipitate organizational
| dissolution in the context of college associations?"
|
| It would have been enlightening and gotten to the heart
| of the nominal issue with respect to both the theme
| houses and the fraternity houses, I think.
|
| That was not what the article was, however, and I think
| we can acknowledge Stanford's failures and the failure of
| authorship in the article-publication in the same breath.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| mhh__ wrote:
| > depth of research
|
| I've enjoyed Burja's work but he does enter patterns that I
| would categorize as just needlessly contrarian. I believe he
| once used the number of ships to say the US navy is slipping,
| rather than by tonnage - by numbers the north Koreans should be
| really powerful, and they are right?
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| NIMBYs don't cause the gross mismanagement of funds on existing
| rail lines.
| 49531 wrote:
| I'm very much anti-NIMBY, but I've had a hard time getting
| involved with YIMBY organizations. It feels like a lot of YIMBY
| stuff is good but it always feels like there's a side of it
| driven by real estate developers wanting to deregulate in ways
| that hurt residents. Am I wrong, or would it just be better to
| create more housing in ways that created affordable housing
| (rent control, public housing, and so forth) instead of trying
| to see if "market" forces of supply / demand fix the issue?
|
| Also please correct me if I am wrong, I haven't dug too deep
| into YIMBY aside from surface level digging.
| ironman1478 wrote:
| I think there needs to be a lot more nuance with the word
| "deregulate" because there are many regulations and some
| should be gotten rid of and some shouldn't. We shouldn't
| compromise on building quality so those regulations should
| stay in place, but we should soften zoning rules and remove
| parking minimums for example. Also, specifically the state of
| california needs to rework CEQA and limit neighborhood input
| to projects.
|
| I'd also point out that areas that encourage more
| construction have been growing and becoming attractive places
| to live. Emeryville for example has been building
| aggressively and its becoming a nice place to live (minus the
| highway nearby). Some parts are surprisingly walkable and it
| even has free public transit (the emery-go-round). Compare
| this to SF which has blocked housing (especially apartment
| buildings); its becoming increasingly unaffordable and
| suburban feeling compared to east bay. Density also leads to
| more diversity.
| Clubber wrote:
| >I think there needs to be a lot more nuance with the word
| "deregulate" because there are many regulations and some
| should be gotten rid of and some shouldn't.
|
| I think that's the core issue with most of our political
| dialog. "Regulations are bad." The person saying it is
| thinking A, B, and C and is probably right. The person
| hearing it is thinking D, E, and F and is also probably
| right. They aren't even talking about the same thing. It's
| no wonder they can't come to common ground.
|
| "Socialism is bad," and "Don't touch my social security,"
| can be uttered by the same individual because when he
| thinks about socialism he thinks Castro nationalizing all
| US industry in Cuba, not Social Security Insurance,
| Medicare and Medicaid.
|
| To your point, words certainly matter.
| leetcrew wrote:
| > "Socialism is bad," and "Don't touch my social
| security," can be uttered by the same individual because
| when he thinks about socialism he thinks Castro
| nationalizing all US industry in Cuba, not Social
| Security Insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.
|
| or the person may see the contradiction clearly and
| oppose the _idea_ of social security benefits, while also
| being opposed to having it clawed back after they 've
| spent their entire working life paying into the system.
| ruined wrote:
| Social security is not an account you individually pay
| into and then draw from later, it is a wealth transfer
| program that taxes presently working individuals to
| support presently retired individuals.
| leetcrew wrote:
| yes and no. that is how it's actually implemented, but
| from the outside it does look similar to a defined
| contribution plan. you pay into it during your working
| years and then receive a monthly payment in retirement.
| the payment amount is related (albeit not directly
| proportional) to the amount you paid in.
|
| in any case, I feel pretty confident saying that most
| people see social security as a deal where they pay in
| now to receive benefits later during retirement. they may
| or may not think very hard about the fact that they might
| be far better off if they had the option to put the money
| in a 401k/IRA instead, but they surely would not be happy
| to pay now without the expectation of getting something
| later.
|
| that's all just to say that it's not a "haha gotem"
| moment when you find someone close to retirement who
| "opposes socialism" but doesn't want to see social
| security go away (for them).
| Clubber wrote:
| >that's all just to say that it's not a "haha gotem"
| moment when you find someone close to retirement who
| "opposes socialism" but doesn't want to see social
| security go away (for them).
|
| It wasn't an attempt at a "haha gotem," sorry if it came
| out that way. It was more of an example of the irony of
| being for and against the same concept by having
| different understanding of the meaning than someone else.
|
| SSI was probably a bad example, anything useful will fit.
| "Socialism bad," but "please fix the potholes in my road,
| pick up my trash, put bad guys in jail, put out that
| forest fire, keep the shipping lanes clear, etc. etc."
| All those a person could like and they are socialistic,
| but ask that same person what their opinion on socialism,
| he thinks Castro nationalizing US industry in Cuba, not
| all the service he finds infinitely useful day to day.
|
| I guess that's the complicated way of saying we should
| talk about political ideas in a much more narrow sense,
| like "lets lower the medicare age to 55; we're already
| paying for the most expensive demographic," rather than
| "Socialism good."
| nybble41 wrote:
| You are correct. Nonetheless, those paying in to the
| system today acquiesced to the plan under the assumption
| that they would one day be able to take their place as
| beneficiaries. They gave up significant amounts of money
| which could have been invested toward their own
| retirement to pay those SS taxes. Simply ripping it away
| without compensation is neither fair nor realistic.
| jlhawn wrote:
| YIMBY organizers still get a lot of criticism from its early
| days where they would show up to support housing wherever it
| was being built, and in the mid-2010s that typically meant
| low-income, minority neighborhoods that were already
| experiencing a lot of displacement pressure. This gave them a
| bad reputation among equity organizations which supported
| alternatives like rent control and moratoriums on new
| construction. Some YIMBYs still think that policies like rent
| control are like a metaphorical wrench in the housing market
| machine which reduce the incentive to supply more housing but
| even more still realize that the machine is already full of
| wrenches like apartment bans, onerous parking requirements,
| and single-family-only zoning, excessively long discretionary
| review processes, etc [1].
|
| The latest in the movement for new public housing in
| California is actually supported by YIMBY organizations [2].
| AB 2053, The Social Housing Act is making its way through the
| state legislature right now. While just about every YIMBY
| organization supports it, it's opposed by NIMBY orgs like
| Livable California, the League of California Cities, and even
| the California Association of Realtors. Meanwhile, the orgs
| which have long talked about supporting social housing are
| taking either no position or support-if-amended stances on
| the bill because they don't like that the way it generates
| subsidy for below market housing is by building market-rate
| housing to cross-subsidize it. They strongly believe that any
| new market-rate housing causes displacement but don't want to
| be on the wrong side of history when this bill succeeds.
|
| [1] https://www.tiktok.com/@planetmoney/video/709917153557088
| 183... [2] https://www.californiasocialhousing.org/
| colinmhayes wrote:
| > rent control and moratoriums on new construction.
|
| Literally the worst way to make housing more equitable. All
| rent control does is give long term residents a handout at
| the expense of everyone else while increasing commute times
| due to being unable to move and lowering the quality of the
| housing stock.
| zbrozek wrote:
| St. Paul enacted rent control and saw -80% permit
| application rates. Minneapolis (immediately adjacent) saw
| permit applications rise in the same time. It should be
| plainly obvious that reducing the utility of housing units
| reduces the demand to build them.
|
| https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2022/03/in-first-
| months-s...
| jlhawn wrote:
| St. Paul's rent control does go pretty far. Personally, I
| think it's a mistake to have it apply to new
| construction. If you remember California Prop 21 from
| 2020, even that would have only allowed rent control on
| buildings which are at least 15 years old.
| zbrozek wrote:
| I see almost all of our housing problems as direct
| descendants of the original sin of making it too hard to
| build and use structures. Any form of rent control is
| another form of NIMBYism, just this time with a
| progressive coat of paint.
|
| This article has a bunch of cringeworthy prose, but has
| some worthwhile graphs of data showing that price-fixing
| isn't the answer:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-02/ber
| lin...
|
| See also numerous Planet Money stories about rent
| control:
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/05/700432258/t
| he-...
|
| https://www.npr.org/2022/01/31/1077086398/is-it-time-to-
| cont...
|
| https://www.npr.org/2019/03/29/707908952/the-evidence-
| agains...
|
| Note that even very-progressive Jerusalem Demsas was once
| against rent control and has only switched sides as a
| palliative measure because fixing the root cause of the
| problem is proving too difficult.
|
| Freakonomics also did a show on the topic:
|
| https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-rent-control-doesnt-
| wor...
| [deleted]
| jboy55 wrote:
| Two thoughts, 1) it will be impossible to get out of our
| current housing hole without making developers rich. 2) We
| are so far into the hole that any availability will be
| gobbled up by those with money or those with connections.
|
| I have a townhome and in our complex one had to be sold as a
| low-income unit. The person who got it was well connected to
| the developer, "My Aunt has known him for 30+ years".
| imachine1980_ wrote:
| In general a mix of both, public housing + private
| development, in less restricted zoning.
| cwp wrote:
| There are two problems with the "affordable housing"
| strategy, IMO.
|
| One is that many (most?) advocates for this are actually
| being dishonest. It's a cudgel that can be used to stop just
| about any development project, because nothing is ever
| affordable _enough_. Any proposal that involves a mix of
| market-rate and subsidized housing should have more
| subsidized housing. Any proposal that 's 100% affordable
| housing should be bigger and better. (I kid you not, I've
| seen people say that apartments that are being provided to
| the homeless for free should have granite countertops or
| GTFO). Non-market rents are too high, unless they're in
| existing apartments, in which they can never ever be raised.
| And so on. The result is that people who're only casually
| involved in city politics basically sign up for a total ban
| on construction, because "affordable housing" sounds
| reasonable.
|
| The other is that economically, it's basically price
| controls, and that never has good results. The fact is, the
| housing crisis is a simple lack of housing. We need a _lot_
| more housing in most cities. The population has grown _and_
| industrialization /post-industrialization has shifted
| economic opportunity away from small towns and cities toward
| the largest cities. Housing is expensive because demand has
| gone up, but we've artificially restricted supply by not
| allowing construction. The affordable housing "solution" is
| to keep restricting housing supply, but shield a select group
| from the consequences of that. Who qualifies is subject to
| debate, but it's always a small number of people, and
| everybody else is SOL. So either you bought a long time ago,
| you're rich enough to buy now, or you're part of the
| protected class. Everyone else is SOL, and that includes a
| _lot_ of people that spend a good chunk of their lives
| commuting because they can 't afford to live where they work.
| Heck, it also includes a lot people in the protected class
| that would like to move but can't afford to lose their
| subsidy.
| patwater10 wrote:
| Yeah I hear you though note that given how backwards, arcane,
| obsolete and convoluted the way we plan for and agree upon
| future urban development is, there's really a TON of
| opportunity to BOTH better listen to residents and actually
| get things built.
|
| See my friends startup InCitu.us for a great example of the
| opportunity for win/wins in the space: https://www.incitu.us/
| Ma8ee wrote:
| You say that you are anti-NIMBY, but you are concerned about
| people who want "to deregulate in ways that hurt residents"?
| You don't see the problem here?
| bombcar wrote:
| Most everyone is YIMBY in theory but NIMBY in practice.
| telchar wrote:
| You're just describing a NIMBY - someone who may be pro-
| development in theory but not in their backyard. YIMBY is
| an explicit rejection of that. In fact few people are
| YIMBY in theory.
| gkop wrote:
| Indeed. When somebody is a true YIMBY it's major news:
| https://piedmontexedra.com/2019/07/piedmont-resident-
| terry-m...
| mindcrime wrote:
| How is it a problem to recognize that in Real Life things
| are rarely as binary as they are made out to be on the
| Internet? Shade of grey and all that... most things exist
| on a continuum that ranges between the extremes, and not
| only as a binary dichotomy.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| The person you're responding to never said or implied
| there is no spectrum. But if someone says "I'm very much
| anti-NIMBY" and then goes on to point out his hypocrisy,
| it's fair to call him out for it. Especially since said
| someone specifically asked for criticism and seems open
| to a conversation.
|
| Everybody wants to change the world but nobody wants to
| change themselves.
| 49531 wrote:
| Sorry, by residents I mean the general population of a
| given area, not homeowners specifically. When the issue is
| people finding an affordable and safe home to live in my
| mind doesn't automatically go to "how will this affect
| house prices in this area".
|
| What I mean by being concerned with deregulation that could
| hurt residents I mean things like gentrification,
| legislative reduction in rent-controls / tenants rights,
| relaxing safety laws / codes around what is considered a
| livable space. If that's NIMBYism then I am all sorts of
| confused :P
| zbrozek wrote:
| I definitely think that's NIMBYism because it stifles
| construction, and lack of supply is _the_ problem.
| 49531 wrote:
| Which is what I hear from the YIMBY crowd a lot, that if
| you're not pro de-regulate home builders and landlords
| then you're automatically a NIMBY. I think building more
| is good but I am not convinced pure market supply/demand
| economics is the main way to get people into affordable
| and safe housing. The way you describe it sounds like it
| will solve for a very specific group of people: folks who
| are _almost_ able to buy homes but priced out by market
| forces. Maybe my concern is outside the YIMBY / NIMBY
| dichotomy if it's just a fight for middle-class folks.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| Consider that as house supply increases, house prices
| should keep dropping, towards the cost of construction -
| right now supply is so constructed prices are limited by
| buyer ability to pay rather than sellers cost of
| construction.
|
| So supply will allow much more than just the few people
| on the edge of ability to buy - it will also help
| everyone else at lower price points.
| zbrozek wrote:
| I bet a lot of how applicable you feel the labeling is
| will depend on where you are. SF Bay Area and NYC are
| probably the US epicenters of this problem and will see a
| bit more polarization on that front. California in
| particular is estimated to represent the lion's share of
| the ~4M housing unit shortage, so it's _very_ acute
| there. With remote work the shortage is increasingly
| being felt across the rest of the country, and most folks
| want to blame anybody but themselves for the problem. It
| 's developers! It's foreign speculators! It's
| institutional investors! But the data never supports
| those accusations.
|
| I'm in the SF Bay Area. Very few people under 35-40 can
| afford a home even if they're well-paid tech workers, and
| the age of affordability seems to creep up almost in
| real-time. It's a huge problem and we need millions of
| homes built to fix it. Small patches like subsidies for
| the very poor work fine if you only need to deploy them
| on a small minority of cases but fall apart miserably
| when a 90th-percentile earner still needs your help.
| Overturning Euclid v. Ambler, a constitutional amendment
| to create some basic right to build housing on your own
| land, or something similarly drastic is needed to turn
| this tide.
|
| I'm one of the luckiest ones. A combination of good
| professional fortune and generational wealth have led me
| to own a home in a highly exclusive community. And now
| I'm hoping to open that community up to more people.
| Maybe my less-fortunate tech-worker friends will be able
| to stay nearby rather than be forced to move elsewhere.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| Rent control doesn't create affordable housing. It benefits
| existing residents at the cost of everyone else who wants to
| move into the city. It is a classic example of why price caps
| don't work: in practice, in order to win the application for
| rent controlled units, you slip the landlord a few hundred $,
| security deposits balloon in size, and the quality of the
| units declines precipitously. In NYC the bribe is more like a
| few thousand dollars.
|
| Public housing is its own problem. It creates de facto
| ghettos, which is a major reason why locals oppose
| construction of public housing. It turns out that landlords'
| financial incentive to screen prospective tenants generally
| does a good job of weeding out trashy people who destroy the
| unit and surrounding area.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| Public housing can be made properly like in Vienna. You
| have to build a lot, build nice, and worry about having
| many different socio-economical tenants in the apartments,
| though.
|
| And be ready to kick trashy people of course.
|
| IMO public housing is the best tool, but it seems that in
| many places they just want to set up some buildings and
| forget about it, and that way it will never work.
|
| It seems like for many people it's just a naive idea of
| getting problematic people out of the streets, but that
| shouldn't be the main idea. The main idea is to get the
| most modal income people out of the offer/demand cut, so
| they can save more money and use their increased disposable
| income locally.
|
| If you build enough and make private developments easy
| enough everyone benefits.
|
| In fact, Vienna is starting to have problems because their
| conservative government (I think they have a coalition now)
| doesn't want to spend money on the program and private
| developments have a set of restrictions that allow price
| gauging.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > And be ready to kick trashy people of course.
|
| Not going to happen in US cities. Literally every person
| actually living in a city knows this, which is why many
| people protest having public housing built anywhere near
| them.
|
| Many Americans claim to like European welfare state, but
| they they don't seem to be aware as to what it takes to
| get there. One most obvious thing would be to
| tremendously raise taxes on middle class (who bear the
| brunt of the tax burden, unlike in US, where tax is
| mostly paid by the wealthy), but another thing is more
| ruthlessness in enforcing social norms. Nowhere in Europe
| you can just sit on the sidewalk and shoot up heroin:
| you'll be arrested, put in rehab, and if you persist,
| jailed. Psychotic mentally ill who scream obscenities at
| passer-byes are involuntarily committed. Tent campers are
| arrested and forced into shelters. None of this is
| happening in many UD cities, which claim that their
| policies of looking the other way, or subsidizing the
| underclass lifestyle, is "harm reduction", and continue
| to repeat that as number of people living this lifestyle
| is not reduced, to the contrary it keeps growing.
| andrekandre wrote:
| > One most obvious thing would be to tremendously raise
| taxes on middle class (who bear the brunt of the tax
| burden, unlike in US, where tax is mostly paid by the
| wealthy)
|
| interesting, because thats the opposite of what i
| thought...
|
| any good charts/data for that?
| xyzzyz wrote:
| See eg. https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/growingunequalincome
| distributio... which states that the United States has
| the most progressive tax system among developed
| countries. It has not fundamentally changed since 2008.
| deepakhj wrote:
| CA is working on mixed income public housing. I think it
| will avoid the faults of the previous projects we built.
| See AB 2053.
| bombcar wrote:
| The main way to make affordable housing is to make more
| housing so there's enough dwelling units where people want
| to dwell.
|
| But - in areas where there is already very high density,
| you need transportation that lets people live cheaper but
| still get to work. You don't need to worry about housing a
| bank VP in New York; but housing for the people working at
| the bodegas is needed.
|
| Rent control and other "limited" things basically make
| company housing with a middle-man added.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| Rent control disincentivizes landlords from building high
| density housing. Take a look at two cities in Minnesota
| [1] which approached rent control in very different ways.
| Rent control caused new housing starts to decline 80% in
| one of the cities, primarily because the city decided it
| needed to apply rent control to all units including new
| construction.
|
| > housing for the people working at the bodegas is needed
|
| Building more housing solves this problem. NYC is not
| even close to "very high density". I suggest you visit
| China - even the US's densest cities still have a 10x
| factor to go before they reach practical limits on
| density. We need more high rises and less height
| restrictions.
|
| > Rent control and other "limited" things basically make
| company housing with a middle-man added.
|
| No, rent control creates a black market for housing and
| destroys the quality of housing stock available on the
| market. If you live in the Bay or NYC and rent this is
| very obvious. It's very common to slip some extra $ or
| have a shittily maintained unit if it's rent controlled.
| I have rented units with mouse infestations, splinters in
| floorboards, and black mold growing out of pipes in the
| floor, none of which were fixed.
|
| [1] https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2022/03/in-first-
| months-s...
| oceanplexian wrote:
| > Building more housing solves this problem. NYC is not
| even close to "very high density".
|
| High density is a terrible way to live. I thought we
| learned from the pandemic that high density living is
| unsanitary and promotes the proliferation of disease, and
| that a 600 square foot box is a really depressing place
| to be when you're stuck inside working from home.
|
| The solution that the current generation loves to hate is
| to go back to a more suburban lifestyle. But it's
| possible to do suburbia without making it completely car-
| dependent. Look at planned cities like Portland, OR,
| where they have a lot of mixed use development paired
| with good public transportation and bicycle
| infrastructure well into the more suburban parts of the
| city. In a country like the United States where we have
| vast expanses of land, it makes a lot more sense to
| spread out than develop vertically.
| bombcar wrote:
| Single-family homes can get surprisingly dense, depending
| on how you move the numbers and sizes around.
|
| But more importantly, _all_ towns and most cities were at
| "suburban" densities years ago (check the "old towns" of
| most towns, etc) - the key was "travel to services" was
| limited by walking or sometimes subways, etc.
|
| If instead of one Walmart every 30 miles you have smaller
| stores every 2-5 miles, suddenly density isn't as
| mandatory for livable cities.
|
| Mixed usage and transit backbones are the key - you could
| design "pods" that are about two miles in diameter
| centered on train stations that would be entirely
| walkable/bikable - then you can even have the massive
| city centers.
|
| People having cars isn't a problem _if they don 't use
| them for commuting_, and some small changes in city
| design can lead to that.
| caracustard wrote:
| The reason that the current generation hates suburbia to
| me seems like a result of a cultural process that can be
| considered borderline indoctrination and the fact that
| for whatever reason suburbia doesn't move on with the
| times. I can understand those who are dissatisfied with
| the current state of suburbia (e.g. lack of entertainment
| options, lack of public spaces that don't look like a
| repurposed commercial property), though many of those
| issues may be attributed to the scale of the land as a
| whole, but you'd be surprised that the idea of moving to
| an apartment block from say a generic suburban home is
| not viewed as a downgrade by some. Another thing is that
| classic suburbia often has a uniform look, which might
| negatively contribute to the entire perception of
| suburban housing, but then again, same people who
| complain about it have no problem with same-looking
| generic apartment blocks.
| flyandscan88 wrote:
| I feel like if we just limited the number of homes any one
| person or company can own (to like 4 max), it would solve a
| lot of issues. Also no foreign investors. Also make building
| easier. If developers get rich so be it.
| bombcar wrote:
| The only reason people bother owning multiple dwelling
| units is because they're a "good investment" because
| there's more demand than supply.
|
| Let supply outstrip demand and suddenly they're not a good
| investment anymore, so people go back to owning them for
| living in.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| What about renters? People who own multiple residences
| usually don't let them sit empty; they rent them out, and a
| robust rental stock is important in any city. Look at
| Montreal, for example. Most people rent, but someone has to
| own the buildings.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| By "homes" do you mean buildings here or housing units?
| Because if it's the latter, doesn't that preclude most
| apartment buildings?
| missedthecue wrote:
| NZ banned foreign investors and average home prices are up
| about 50% in the couple of years since that happened.
|
| Foreign buyers just don't make up enough of the market, and
| neither do people with 5+ residences.
| Chilko wrote:
| The lack of any capital gains tax plays a big role in
| this case
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| _" a side of it driven by real estate developers wanting to
| deregulate in ways that hurt residents"_
|
| A side of it? I would guess more than half of it is
| astroturfing developer groups, aka paid liars. It is such a
| disservice because it is a real problem that they are
| selfishly exploiting. They aren't interested in sustainable
| development, just cashing in and leaving a problem behind for
| the local taxpayers to clean up decades later. They exploit
| otherwise well meaning idealists - like the ones that are so
| common here - with amazing skill.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| YIMBYs typically are in favor of public housing and tenant
| protections. On rent control it's more divided; some are in
| favor and some aren't. It doesn't seem likely to solve the
| housing affordability problem but may add some stability, so
| I'm generally I'm favor of it personally, but only in tandem
| with building more as well.
|
| But that said, more market rate housing is good too! Provided
| it's not replacing subsidized units, anyway. We need housing
| to not be scarce in general; it's not an either/or thing.
| zbrozek wrote:
| From my interactions it's mostly frustrated renting
| millenials rather than developers in the movement. And that
| aside, I don't see why people think developers are evil.
| Someone built the place you're living in.
|
| Personally (as just a homeowner) I feel like the crux of our
| problem is constraints, and while the YIMBYs _are_ working
| that problem, they 're also contributing new constraints like
| rent control, inclusionary zoning, anti-displacement
| measures, etc that negatively offset the gains made
| elsewhere.
| Amasuriel wrote:
| I don't know what they are like in California, but where I
| live in Canada developers are generally disliked because
|
| 1) They tend to build houses not communities, for example
| it's rare a developer will include parks, community spaces
| like markets, bike lanes, plant trees, or do anything else
| to make the housing tracts livable
|
| 2) They don't tend to expand infrastructure to match, so
| you get developers getting approved to put 10000 houses on
| a 1 lane each direction road, or housing going in without
| adequate medical service or other necessities, which puts
| strain on the existing community resources
|
| 3) they are constantly lobbying local government to let
| them build in forests, wetlands and other natural habitat,
| so if you care about that at all you generally have a bad
| view of developers
|
| Combine all this with generally extremely poor build
| quality results in people viewing developers as adversaries
| for the most part.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| > Am I wrong, or would it just be better to create more
| housing in ways that created affordable housing (rent
| control, public housing, and so forth) instead of trying to
| see if "market" forces of supply / demand fix the issue?
|
| Rent control doesn't "create" any housing. It simply puts a
| cap on the price of housing. I'm a part-time Real Estate
| investor, and I would never invest in a city that had a
| rental cap, since the point of investments is to make money,
| not start a charity. Public housing has the same problem. You
| end up putting a bunch of poor people in one building, who
| statistically end up being associated with crime and drug
| use. This drives down real estate values in the adjoining
| neighborhood and makes real-estate less attractive to
| investors and you wind up creating a slum.
|
| Want to promote more affordable housing? Keep the government
| far away. The market has its fair share of issues and
| inefficiencies, but it's still more efficient than affordable
| housing programs dreamed up by government bureaucrats.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| > Public housing has the same problem. You end up putting a
| bunch of poor people in one building, who statistically end
| up being associated with crime and drug use.
|
| This is not necessarily the case. Social housing in Vienna
| has both low-income residents who are subsidized and
| higher-income residents who are not. We haven't done it as
| well as they do historically here in the US, but we could!
| uncomputation wrote:
| > I'm a part-time Real Estate investor, and I would never
| invest in a city that had a rental cap
|
| Good. It is real estate "investors" like you that have
| contributed to the Bay Area, and California in general,
| pricing people out and becoming a rent-only housing economy
| where only the rich of the rich can even dream of buying a
| fairly modest house. Housing should not make you
| investment-style returns like the stock market. You're
| profiting by rent-seeking, arbitrary zoning requirements,
| and NIMBYism driving up the price of housing constantly
| just so you can make a nice "investment." Housing and
| shelter are for people to live, not to extract money for
| real estate investors.
|
| > You end up putting a bunch of poor people in one building
|
| Have you considered that poor people also need a place to
| live and maybe that doesn't involve you leaching every
| percent of profit you can?
|
| > Want to promote more affordable housing? Keep the
| government far away
|
| Section 8 housing in LA - as house prices have surged to
| multi-million two-bedroom homes since COVID - can lower
| prices at least as low as $400/mo after the voucher. You
| are simply and transparently lying for your own benefit and
| it is shameful.
| pitaj wrote:
| It's a lack of development of new housing for decades
| that caused the high prices we see in places like the Bay
| Area.
| pixelatedindex wrote:
| And the ones that do get built are promoting "luxury
| living" when people just want "basic living". None of the
| new construction is no-frills apartments, they're all
| glitz and glam with stupid high rents - 2br is about 5K
| in some of these places. That's ridiculously high.
| There's even an apartment complex that advertises a
| redwood grove in the center - that's just extra cost that
| could have been saved and passed on to the renters.
| pitaj wrote:
| You need to fill out the highest tier, as that opens up
| mid-tier housing for lower paying renters. Otherwise it
| pushes the highest-paying renters into the mid-tier
| housing stock, raising the prices for all below.
| pixelatedindex wrote:
| I really don't understand this logic. Just income-cap the
| rentals, so high paying renters aren't eligible for the
| low-tier housing. Only filling out highest tier means
| that only high tier housing gets built.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Government housing _can_ work, but it needs large,
| sustained amounts of funding, which is not really a reality
| with cash-strapped local and state governments and
| extremely low federal appetite for such a program.
|
| There isn't a realistic path to a solid, pro-public housing
| bloc of 60 senators.
| 49531 wrote:
| I think this comment pretty much sums up my issue with
| these movements.
|
| > I'm a part-time Real Estate investor, and I would never
| invest in a city that had a rental cap, since the point of
| investments is to make money, not start a charity.
|
| This mindset is where these issues come from in the first
| place. Housing as become more and more an investment, and
| groups of people (immigrants, disabled folks, poor people)
| are not as good of investments, so they're avoided by
| private investors.
|
| At the same time, private investors and builders are
| pushing back on tools that make the lives of these less
| profitably people easier (rent control, public housing).
|
| From what you're saying, if I want to promote more
| affordable housing, I keep you away from it. Where's a
| profit in cheap housing/low rents?
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| If you want to promote affordable housing, you shouldn't
| demonize the people who are going to increase the housing
| supply. You'll leave behind blustering politicians, and
| no capital - public or private - to develop anything.
| pixelatedindex wrote:
| The problem is the ones wanting to increase the housing
| supply are for-profit investors, and affordable housing
| shouldn't be about profit. That's my takeaway of this
| deadlock. Perhaps the government should directly build
| housing, or subsidize the cost and have it be owned and
| operated by the city.
| _uy6i wrote:
| On top of all that, You also have to solve for the structural
| inefficiency of public sector pay and benefits. Public sector
| employees make tons more than than private sector counterparts
| when you account for pensions and benefits, but those only
| really accrue if you "put in your 20" - making government
| service basically a non-starter for someone that doesn't want
| to be a lifer...
| softwarebeware wrote:
| Doesn't this article display a classical fallacy when it attempts
| to equate vastly different construction projects (building an
| additional highway lane vs. building a factory, for example)?
| kraig911 wrote:
| NIMBY-ism is just an example of people not caring for one another
| in our country. Everyone in the last 20 years or so seems only
| out for themselves. I remember when the interstate was being
| built through my town as a kid and people would say it's going to
| be great. Nowadays I feel every new report about new construction
| projects only reflect the negative impacts like cost, environment
| etc. It's just as if everywhere I look all I see is negative
| outlook from society. And take from that how people's first
| response is how they can protect themselves.
| Symmetry wrote:
| I don't think I'd put it that way. For the average NIMBY their
| friends and social circle are often suffering or benefiting
| from the same projects as them and from the inside it feels
| more like protecting their community than protecting
| themselves. But of course a community is just as much defined
| by who is outside it as who is inside.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| You can easily look out for you own interests and not go out of
| your way to shit in the pool. Most of the NIMBY-ism is see in
| NYC is old busy-bodies interfering in things that probably
| won't effect them at all.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Has anyone in the Congress proposed NEPA reform?
| Linda703 wrote:
| elzbardico wrote:
| PANIC: 666 - ERRTOOMANYLAWYERS
| tester756 wrote:
| do construction workers in US have reputation of working under
| the influence too?
|
| those who work on those "simple" projects like renovation of
| homes and stuff
| MAGZine wrote:
| depends. drywalling is notoriously a stoner job in north
| america. other professions, like electrician, not so much since
| you could end up dead.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Painters and roofers too. All that I know are borderline or
| actual alcoholics. I don't know how the roofers manage to be
| drunk on a roof and not fall off, but they do.
| bluedino wrote:
| Roofers are easily the roughest crowd. Not sure where they
| find those guys.
| jhgb wrote:
| > drywalling is notoriously a stoner job in north america
|
| I thought dry _masonry_ was a stoner job? (OK, I 'll show
| myself out...)
| a9h74j wrote:
| From what I have heard, something of the opposite problem on
| the office side of civil service. It is hard to find applicants
| who have _not_ exposed themselves to weed in the last two years
| (still a requirement for many jobs), greatly reducing the
| talent pool for hire.
| wollsmoth wrote:
| Uh, I don't think so. It's a hard job and often involves heavy
| machinery. One of my cousins works construction and does enjoy
| drinking but always after hours afaik.
| rpmisms wrote:
| Contractors who work in the home, not really. Construction
| workers might crack a beer at work, but it's nowhere near the
| "builders" stereotype the UK has.
| danhor wrote:
| Regarding just the Public-Private-Partnerships: Alon Levy doubts
| it's benefical (at least for transit), partially due to high
| ongoing costs
| https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/01/15/friends-dont-l...
| king-geedorah wrote:
| What are peoples thoughts on palladium? I've found their articles
| and podcasts to be a refreshing analysis on modern socio-
| political issues with minimal culture war or partisan
| interference. Any other podcasts of similar quality and rigor
| anyone is listening to?
| timmytokyo wrote:
| Wary. See this article about its founders.
|
| https://splinternews.com/leaked-emails-show-how-white-nation...
| g8oz wrote:
| Yikes
| [deleted]
| TedShiller wrote:
| Where's Pete?
| favflam wrote:
| Brightline is being built and it is a private railroad. The local
| highway authorities are attempting a shake down.
|
| Perhaps policies should tie transportation, rezoning, and real
| estate to incentivize private construction of transportation
| infrastructure.
| stetrain wrote:
| I think the general trend of giving "highways" their own
| departments, agencies, and budgets is a big part of the issue.
|
| In many cases there's no agency with the authority to say that
| spending $2b on transit infrastructure would have a better
| traffic outcome than spending $2b on a giant road widening
| project.
|
| The highways department has a budget and whaddaya know they
| spend it on expanding highways.
|
| This if often used as a positive and accountable outcome for
| tax payers, ie "my gas/road tax should only be used for roads
| not other projects!"
|
| And especially once that is tied into privately operated toll
| roads, you have entities which stand to lose out if that budget
| is redirected to things that aren't highways.
| mattnibs wrote:
| We really need this generation's Robert Moses or Lyndon Johnson.
| Someone with the ambition and political saavy for cutting through
| layers of bureaucracy, though maybe today's setup would be too
| much for even them.
| Animats wrote:
| _" This takes time, with the average EIS taking 4.5 years to
| complete. Some have taken longer than a decade. A cottage
| industry of consultants is devoted to completing these documents,
| earning themselves millions in fees."_
|
| Now there's an opportunity for a startup. Make the process
| paperless. Go out with drones, phone apps, and ground-penetrating
| radar, tie all the info to location. Hook this up to AR goggles,
| so the people involved can see all the data when on-site. Much of
| the environmental paperwork could be generated automatically.
|
| Drone-based ground penetrating radar is now available.[1] It's a
| lot cheaper than finding pipes and cables during construction.
|
| [1] https://integrated.ugcs.com/gpr
| liuliu wrote:
| It seems from outside the problem is not the process itself
| took long. People take advantages of some procedure loop-holes
| to effectively delay this forever for NIMBY reasons (there are
| some limitations on how long it should take, but there are
| loop-holes such that the EIS didn't kick off entirely,
| bypassing the time limit requirements).
| ren_engineer wrote:
| getting government contracts isn't about competence/efficiency,
| it's about connections. You could make the best solution in the
| world but it wouldn't matter. In many cases these processes are
| created for the exclusive purpose of legally funneling millions
| of dollars to people
|
| there's no incentive currently for the US government to be
| efficient. The only people I know who support large government
| initiatives are people who have never worked in or with the
| government
| ejb999 wrote:
| >>there's no incentive currently for the US government to be
| efficient.
|
| This is also true in many large corporations - I have worked
| for a few - and the inefficiencies and waste is mind-boggling
| to someone that mostly works for small and mid-sized business
| that actually like to watch their pennies. If you are a
| manager, and you are given a budget, you make dam sure you
| spend 100% of it by the end of the year, even if you have to
| basically throw it away on some useless spend. There is
| _zero_ incentive to save money - if you do, you will see your
| budget cut for the next year too, or criticized /penalized
| for having asked for more than you needed. Last thing you
| want to do is bring in your project under budget; wouldn't
| have believed it if I haven't seen it played out this way
| time and time again.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| Filling out the paperwork is not why you pay consultants $$$,
| their knowledge of how to write the application to appeal to
| whoever's reading it is. It's just like lobbying in Congress.
| deanebarker wrote:
| >Now there's an opportunity for a startup. Make the process
| paperless.
|
| There's some precedent: the enterprise content management
| company Documentum was started as "DocPharma" -- a software
| system specifically design to shepherd the documentation
| required to get drugs approved by the FDA. After they saturated
| that market, they generalized it beyond the original purpose.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| You can't tech your way out of fetid politicians.
| mhh__ wrote:
| "build" has turned into one of those zero-entropy words like
| "content". Let's build back better our ability to build because
| [insert massively simplified view of society] means we can't
| build.
| sieabahlpark wrote:
| mikece wrote:
| The title is misleading. Why something cannot be built on time or
| on budget in Los Angeles versus the rest of the country is apples
| and oranges. Given the complications inherent in LA I'm surprised
| the project is actually finished.
| justinzollars wrote:
| You get sold on Global Warming, Healthcare for All, and Social
| Justice and end up with a Byzantine System 57 bureaucratic layers
| deep, mountains of paperwork, legal problems, and grift whose
| total government size is 44% of the GDP - with big plans to grow.
| Good luck building anything.
| acabal wrote:
| It's not just in megaprojects either. In my large, fairly dense
| US city, basic, easy-to-build, local infrastructure like adding a
| 1-mile bike lane to a straight street is impossible because a
| handful of NIMBYs are constantly taken seriously by local
| politicians.
|
| My city has many bike lanes that are popular and well-used, as
| well as a bike-share program that is extremely popular. It also
| has a large number of cyclist deaths - including children! - due
| to the spottiness of existing bike infrastructure and overall
| lack of protected bike lanes. It seems like improving that
| infrastructure would be both easy, cheap, and popular, given the
| popularity of cycling and its existing infra, and the cheapness
| of plopping a concrete barrier onto a street. But no - the second
| anyone mentions protected bike lanes, a handful of NIMBYs write
| in with "but muh cars" and the politicians throw up their hands
| and surrender.
|
| I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in the
| US in the past 50 years. It seems like at any point in history,
| any local project will be opposed by _somebody_ , no matter who
| they are or what the project is. But previous generations seemed
| to be able to get over that in favor of building. For today's
| generation it seems like doing nothing has become better than
| doing something. If this were the 1900s, government would have
| told the NIMBYs to get bent, we're building Thing X because it's
| good for society and if you don't like it, tough. That's what
| living in city means sometimes!
| redtexture wrote:
| It takes politics to change politicians.
|
| This is a many year process: to bring into public office people
| who care, willing to change laws, or city ordinances, and
| department values and priorities (street / public works) and
| budget money for the new priorities, and to flex the electoral
| muscle by the organizing (an increasingly important and larger
| number) of voters to pay attention.
|
| Like it or not that is the game you are in. If you are not
| playing to change the game, you are doomed to play by the same
| rules you complain about.
|
| The handicapped / wheelchair access to sidewalks, now visible
| nation wide in the US, started with zero curb cuts everywhere
| in the 1960s, and wheelchair non-accessbility to many essential
| services, such as grocery stores, post offices, other public
| buildings, including schools, court houses, social services,
| and municipal governmental offices. Hospitals had figured this
| out, mostly, but not entirely, by that time.
| 7952 wrote:
| More and more these are culture war arguments rather than
| NIMBYism.
| zackmorris wrote:
| NIMBY is the wrong term for this. What we're really talking
| about is eminent domain.
|
| To get the rate of progress you're talking about requires
| bulldozing through neighborhoods and often buying up private
| property. So you have to be comfortable with personally taking
| away someone's property for public use.
|
| If you aren't ready to do that, then you're distracting from
| the fundamental issue by substituting terms. You're also using
| proxy to put these moral dilemmas onto someone else, maybe an
| elected official. It's analogous to convincing someone of
| murder and then having another person pull the switch for the
| electric chair.
|
| Without getting too far out into the weeds, we're seeing this
| problem in recent Supreme Court rulings. I've chosen for myself
| to use proper terminology now. I expect that from others and
| will be pointing out this issue in future discussions. If the
| people I'm debating continue to use hand waving to avoid the
| crux of issues, then I will make light of it and point out
| their inadequate communication skills. Basically questioning
| their leadership authority if they don't have an understanding
| of debate and continue to insult the intelligence of their
| constituents.
| SteveGerencser wrote:
| I have to agree with your take on this. We were recently sent
| an 'offer' by the local water district to buy 15' of frontage
| along our property for a new water line that will be a major
| service upgrade for about 8 homes.
|
| My issue came when I discovered that the current water line
| and easement is on the other side of the road, but they would
| have to cut down quite a few tree while it was a lot easier
| to dig in front of my farm. So far, I get it. Then I could
| out that they offered us 3 cents per square foot of frontage
| but the home next to us was offered 4x as much at 4 cents per
| square foot. And someone else offer 4 cents, and they didn't
| even know about the 3 new houses on our road before they even
| started planning.
|
| I'm all for improving infrastructure, but it needs to be in a
| fair, and well planned, way. Neither of which is common with
| this sort of thing.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I would go even farther, and say you'd have to be comfortable
| with someone taking away _your_ property to build something
| you don 't think should be built at all. It's easy to say
| "they should take somebody else's property and build
| something I want." Anybody can do that! But if you think of
| it that way it makes more sense why you get people blocking
| these projects.
| _greim_ wrote:
| > I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in
| the US in the past 50 years.
|
| Could it be these are the only voices local politicians are
| hearing? 99.99% of residents being okay with new builds doesn't
| always translate into a political will that a politician can
| exploit.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in
| the US in the past 50 years.
|
| You already explained it yourself. They write in. They probably
| also vote. Their representatives do what they're told.
| pas wrote:
| Yep, they're overrepresented.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| There's no shortage of Atlantic and New Yorker sob stories
| about how some abutting farmers are taking it in the ass over
| some new development.
|
| This isn't an America problem.
|
| It's a people "wealthy enough to have so few real problems they
| have spare fucks to give about what their neighbors are
| building" problem.
|
| If the "HN Class" of people (very roughly speaking) would
| actually give a F about other people's property rights this
| problem would evaporate overnight. Cities and private
| developers could buy what they want and develop what they want.
| But nope, enforcing conformity and having veto power over the
| next big box store or freight terminal is more important so
| that means no new _anything_ gets built.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| I'm a NIMBY, unfortunately. Not because I'm anti-progress or
| whatever, but because so much of my financial life is tied to
| my house, and whether I like it or not, there's a lot that can
| adversely affect its value. So, if building a new apartment
| complex nearby is gonna reduce my property value by 5%, taking
| around $50K out of my pocket, of course I'm going to oppose it.
| I don't feel like that makes me a bad person. Who wants to
| flush $50K down the toilet?
|
| Fifty years ago houses weren't so expensive, relative to
| income, and thus the risk wasn't as high. My parents bought
| their first house in 1969 for $17K, no student debt, no health
| insurance expenses, etc. So, if a highway was built in their
| backyard, they would've been much more concerned about the hit
| to their quality of life than to their finances.
| [deleted]
| warning26 wrote:
| Fact is, if you want to build a megaproject (highway, HSR,
| whatever), you have to step on someone's toes. In the past,
| America did this by stepping on the toes of people with no
| political power, resulting in the excesses of 1960s destroying
| of historic areas in favor of unfortunate highway interchanges.
|
| Now, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction -- no
| project can be built because no one is willing to step on
| _anyone_ 's toes.
| nybble41 wrote:
| > Now, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction -- no
| project can be built because no one is willing to step on
| anyone's toes.
|
| I don't see this as a bad thing at all. We could do with
| fewer "megaprojects" unapologetically stepping on people's
| toes. Frankly, if the project isn't economical after
| accounting for what it would cost to buy up the necessary
| property at market rates--which is to say, rates the actual
| owners will voluntarily accept without any threat of coercion
| or eminent domain--then it simply isn't worth doing.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| You don't need to do anything of the sort. Housing is one
| of the most tightly regulated form of capital expenditure
| in the US.
|
| Most of the US is zoned to SFH-only zoning. What this means
| is that real-estate developers and property owners are _not
| allowed by law_ to build anything other than a single-
| family home. This is accompanied by mandates to achieve
| certain minimum lot sizes (lots have to be at least a
| certain size), maximum FAR (Floor-Area Ratio), and minimum
| setbacks (a residence has to be set back from the street by
| a minimum number of feet). You cannot build low-impact
| businesses in these areas like corner stores or barber
| shops /salons. These rules result in the suburban American
| homogeneity that you see throughout many neighborhoods in
| America. This doesn't even cover the role of HOAs which are
| additional local bureaucracy which control what residents
| are or are-not allowed to build when and where on their
| property.
|
| Relax (but don't get rid of) zoning and other mandates
| around US building and empower property owners to make the
| changes themselves. If they don't want to, they don't have
| to either. But give them the choice.
| causi wrote:
| People and governments need to realize that trying to make city
| living and non-city living the same is a losing proposition.
| Cities should not have an obligation to be car-accessible. It's
| unnatural for a place with thirty thousand people per square
| mile. It'd probably be better for everyone if personal vehicles
| were outright banned in all major cities, as long as it's
| possible to live in a city without ever leaving it and to live
| outside the city without ever entering it. Half the square
| footage of a street being taken up by cars parked on it is
| utterly perverse. I say that as someone who has never ridden a
| bus or subway and who would rather pull my tooth with a pair of
| pliers than set foot in a major city.
| wwweston wrote:
| > It'd probably be better for everyone if personal vehicles
| were outright banned in all major cities
|
| Why go this far when it's pretty clear that a happy medium is
| possible? Seems to me it's clear that a place like NYC does
| well enough at accommodating density, foot traffic, public
| transport, bicycling, and still allows a modicum of (usually
| inconvenient but still possible) auto traffic.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I sympathize with this sentiment, but it's not tenable
| without major investments in public transit. I live in
| Chicago, the third largest US city, and getting around by car
| is about twice as fast as taking public transit even when
| "public transit" means taking the L with no connections
| during rush hour (worst case scenario for car commuting).
| Mind you, (contrary to recent remarks by our mayor) Chicago
| isn't even a "car city"--we have only ~3ish arteries through
| the city and everything else is slow-moving side streets.
|
| Meanwhile, most trains are pretty unpleasant--many cars wreak
| of piss, smoke, etc, people free-style rapping, trying to
| start fights (especially people of questionable sanity), etc.
| Buses can be better, but they're also a lot slower. If you
| have a family, own a dog, or have a disability, then it
| quickly becomes more practical to own a car, and even if we
| clean up public transit, police it properly, and expand it
| I'm not sure it would change the calculus--you would still
| likely be better off owning a car than relying solely on
| public transit and rideshare and so on.
|
| Of course, I _want_ Chicago to make those improvements to its
| public transit system if only to pull more people off the
| road more often, but I think there will always be a core
| group of people who need to own cars. I think if this is true
| for Chicago it will also be true for smaller US cities.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Meanwhile, most trains are pretty unpleasant--many cars
| wreak of piss, smoke, etc, people free-style rapping,
| trying to start fights (especially people of questionable
| sanity), etc.
|
| The problem is not public transport, the problem is not
| homeless people, the problem is not mentally unwell people.
| The problem is _poverty_ and there is a solution: housing
| first policies and healthcare for everyone.
| seoaeu wrote:
| The problem is that some folks insist that "we can't
| inconvenience automobile users until public transit is
| perfect" and others say "we can't justify investing in
| transit unless way more people start using it".
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I'm pretty adamantly of the opinion that the only
| politically viable way to increase public transit usage
| is positive incentives. If you just try to punish drivers
| (as many in the anti-car crowd are want to do, even if it
| means punishing bus riders too), you will end up creating
| a bunch of political opposition. I think you really need
| to convince people that investment in transit will beget
| more ridership, and if you can't make that case then more
| public transit may not be appropriate.
| seoaeu wrote:
| The problem is that drivers consider practically any
| changes to the status quo to be "punishment". Replace
| several street parking spaces (in a neighborhood with
| hundreds of spots) to put in a bike lane? Punishment. Cut
| ten minutes off bus travel time by installing a dedicated
| bus lane, at the expense of a minute or two extra for car
| traffic? Punishment. Make drivers pay money to store
| their cars on public streets? Punishment
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I guess what I had in mind was stuff like "removing one
| of three highway arteries in the third largest US city
| thereby pushing tons of traffic onto side streets (where
| pedestrians and cyclists are) and removing all of the bus
| routes that depend on said artery just to spite drivers".
|
| > Replace several street parking spaces (in a
| neighborhood with hundreds of spots) to put in a bike
| lane? Punishment.
|
| Drivers in general aren't going to object to a particular
| bike lane, although obviously drivers who park on that
| block probably will (and understandably so). Also, "with
| hundreds of spots" isn't significant if there are
| hundreds more drivers than spots in that neighborhood.
|
| > Cut ten minutes off bus travel time by installing a
| dedicated bus lane, at the expense of a minute or two
| extra for car traffic?
|
| I don't know. I would be open minded if you could
| convince me that the bus lane is _actually_ going to move
| more people (yes, the capacity is greater, but that doesn
| 't guarantee that the throughput will be greater, for
| example if there aren't enough buses running to saturate
| capacity or if the buses aren't full or etc).
|
| > Make drivers pay money to store their cars on public
| streets? Punishment
|
| Well, they are _public_ streets, which suggests that
| everyone pays for them. But at least in my major city, we
| do pay to park our cars on public streets, once in the
| form of a city sticker, once through taxes, and (in many
| cases) again through meters. We could talk about drivers
| paying _more_ for parking, which will of course be
| unpopular among drivers, but it 's not like cyclists are
| going to line up to finance bike lanes nor are public
| transit users likely to support a rate increase to
| finance improvements to buses and trains. Everyone wants
| the public to pay for the infrastructure they use, but
| public financing of infrastructure they _don 't_ use is
| less popular.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >Meanwhile, most trains are pretty unpleasant--many cars
| wreak of piss, smoke, etc, people free-style rapping,
| trying to start fights
|
| Important note, these kind of "only the bums use public
| transit" problems will go away if and only if non-bums
| start using public transit.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Bums will not leave public transit just because non-bums
| start using it more often. Only practical mechanism here
| to achieve the effect you predict is that non-bums are
| angry about terrible conditions in public transit they
| are dependent on using, and force the government to kick
| the bums out. If this is viable, why won't the
| government, you know, kick out the bums _now_? That it
| does not do so, I take as evidence that it won't do it in
| future either.
| nicoburns wrote:
| The most viable (and likely cheapest overall) option,
| would be to give the bums access to housing, healthcare,
| etc. Then there would be far fewer bums in the first
| place. It's a win-win, but alas tends to be politically
| unpopular. Especially in the US.
| orangepurple wrote:
| I increasingly get the feeling that the only winning move
| is to not play. I have no idea how we got to this point
| either.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| NYC kicked the bums out of Manhattan in the 80s and kept
| them out through the early 00s. It worked really well.
| Wealthy people used public transit to get to their wall
| street jobs, and many people walked home alone at night.
| Fast forward to today, and it's not progressive to go
| after the bums any more. Now the subway is extremely
| dangerous and smelly, and nobody but the desperate takes
| it. The streets are a lot less safe than they used to be.
|
| You can take the bums off the street (and put them in
| shelters) and your city will get a lot better. It's just
| very unpopular with progressives, who happen to be the
| voting base in big cities.
|
| Eventually, things will get bad enough that the
| progressives leave, and then the streets can get cleaned
| up again.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| I agree with you, but I only have one lifetime, and by
| the time it plays out in its entirety, I'll be long
| retired. Point is, government needs to _first_ clean
| things up, and then the civil society will move back in,
| not the other way around.
| xhevahir wrote:
| > You can take the bums off the street (and put them in
| shelters)
|
| There's your problem, I think. In the US, at least, the
| elements of our polity that favor "taking the bums off
| the street" are mostly unwilling to pay for things like
| shelters and mental hospitals.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I'm a moderate liberal and I would love for my tax
| dollars to go to pay for shelters and mental hospitals.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| The dearth of mental health institutions is not
| (directly) because "elements of our polity" don't want to
| pay for them. It's a legacy of actively closing them in
| the 70's-80's due to inhumane conditions and civil
| libertarian concerns around institutionalizing people
| against their will.
|
| Now - we certainly aren't having a very productive public
| conversations about the obvious negative outcomes of that
| policy shift.
| deanCommie wrote:
| You're so obsessed with turning "progressive" into a
| derisive term that you're not being consistent with it.
|
| > You can take the bums off the street (and put them in
| shelters) and your city will get a lot better. It's just
| very unpopular with progressives,
|
| Progressives are absolutely for building more low income
| housing, and making it available to street bums.
|
| It's conservatives who fight 1/ building low
| income/subsidized housing, 2/ putting that housing in any
| neighbourhood where they might be in.
|
| I don't know what happened in the 80s, or where the bums
| went. Maybe they all were shipped off to California,
| where it's warm, and now HN posters complain about IT'S
| progressive policies.
|
| Maybe they all died and nobody in the 80s cared but now
| they do.
|
| Either way, the economic forces that led to them being
| created in the first place never were fixed, so there is
| a steady supply of new bums throughout America. Why? What
| is Europe able to do to keep those people at bay that
| America isn't?
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > It's conservatives who fight 1/ building low
| income/subsidized housing, 2/ putting that housing in any
| neighbourhood where they might be in.
|
| That's why, I presume, cities that are thoroughly
| controlled by Democrats, like San Francisco or Seattle,
| have no trouble building low income housing and putting
| it all around the city, right? I mean, conservatives have
| no government representation in those cities whatsoever,
| so the Democrat politicians are simply listening to the
| wishes of their constituents, and as a result, low income
| housing projects sail through, and housing prices are
| low, correct?
| codyb wrote:
| Extremely dangerous might be a bit much. I ride the
| subway a fair amount. And there's been an uptick in crime
| (all over the US), but I wouldn't really call the subway
| dangerous.
|
| NYC houses something like 95% of its homeless as well,
| which is why we have a lot less people on the streets
| than in places like LA or SF.
|
| But shelter conditions are pretty miserable as I
| understand it so you can sort of understand the hold
| outs.
|
| And we may just not have enough space. But yea, NYC's a
| big city, there's definitely some homeless, but I'm not
| sure my lived experience here is as dire as you make it
| sound.
|
| That being said, some areas are certainly worse than
| others, and there's definitely some aggressive mentally
| ill people you'll see here and there.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| _NYC houses something like 95% of its homeless as well,
| which is why we have a lot less people on the streets
| than in places like LA or SF._
|
| This is true, and is the most clear example of how
| immoral the "housing first" policies in California are.
| It is a pipe dream that creates a horror show of homeless
| misery on the streets in LA and SF.
|
| _The vast majority of the city's approximately 50,000
| homeless people live in shelters -- about 30,000 in
| family shelters, and about 18,000 in shelters for single
| adults._
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/30/nyregion/nyc-homeless-
| eri...
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Chicago definitely doesn't have an "only the bums use
| public transit" problem.
| asdff wrote:
| The problems do not go away, they just become more
| present for more people. I commute in the mornings and
| evenings on the redline subway in LA, and I've seen just
| about every substance you can smoke smoked on the
| platforms or in the traincars. It doesn't let up when the
| traincars are full of people commuting to work either
| (which despite the car centric image, many people
| actually do use the trains in LA to get to work), it just
| gets more sweaty and hot inside and more noisy as more
| portable speakers compete with eachother.
|
| These are societal problems. More people using transport
| doesn't make people with issues simply poof into thin air
| or suddenly en masse take up private transport to go
| places to free up public transport for the sane. More
| asylums would certainly improve the situation getting
| unwell people into care and safety, along with better
| drug treatment programs for the addicted, but these
| aren't transit department problems to solve. Even if
| security got harsh on the train platforms and meth users
| were readily kicked out of the train, it would just
| amount to kicking the can down the road without having a
| mechanism to institutionalize more people or force people
| who don't want to change their lifestyle into care.
| bogomipz wrote:
| >"I commute in the mornings and evenings on the redline
| subway in LA, and I've seen just about every substance
| you can smoke smoked on the platforms or in the
| traincars."
|
| People actually smoke in the train cars? I'm curious is
| this a common occurrence then?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| People smoke weed and cigarettes on the train in Chicago
| too.
| orangepurple wrote:
| I stopped using buses and trams in the US out of fear for
| my personal safety. I'm not going to wear a bulletproof
| vest and carrying a handgun concealed just to get around
| town. Now I drive between safer areas to do things and
| meet people and don't have to put myself in danger by
| exposing myself in the in-between areas. A metal box goes
| a long way to prevent an assault. The whole situation is
| just pathetic.
| siquick wrote:
| Where do you live? As an outsider it's crazy that anyone
| in the US can think like this.
| asdff wrote:
| I just can't imagine living life in this much fear, and I
| ride transit in LA county. The things I've seen would
| probably send you to some bubblewrapped environment in
| the midwest, but at the end of the day they are just
| things that I've seen and not things that have personally
| affected me at all. Someone smoking meth on the platform
| ultimately doesn't affect me. Someone selling loose
| cigarettes doesn't affect me. Two crazy people getting
| into a fight over nothing also doesn't affect me. A guy
| tagging MS-13 on the schedule map similarly doesn't
| affect me.
|
| You don't make eye contact and keep to yourself, and
| nothing happens to you. If something does happen, every
| single train car has an intercom tied to EMS, and every
| single bus has a driver who is trained on how to deal
| with these situations when they do inevitably come up
| (pull over and call EMS). If you got beat up I'm sure
| you'd have a case against the city and the city attorney
| would probably be happy to settle and pay you versus deal
| with a lawsuit and potentially more seriously have to
| address something. The odds of you getting killed are
| just too low to even seriously consider, you are probably
| a lot more likely to die crossing the street to get to
| the bus stop than you are to die on the bus involved in
| some situation.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I take transit a lot and many times of the day and while
| I've seen all of these things, most of the time you see
| harmless stuff. Mostly it's teens (kids who can't drive
| yet), doing dumb things like drawing graffiti on a map or
| putting silly stickers on things. Occasionally someone
| smelling like booze and weed ends up on the train.
| Someone who hasn't showered in... days gets on. Sometimes
| you notice a person who is obviously not fully there and
| talks to themselves a lot or mumbles and shouts with no
| pretext. Occasionally you see a person with untreated
| visible medical conditions (like an abscess). If you have
| headphones in or have a book in your face, you probably
| won't even notice what's happening. The numbers back
| these up as it's statistically much safer to take transit
| in most places than drive. I do have friends in the
| suburbs though, so I know there are folks who find safety
| and comfort in appearances. And for some folks they find
| genuine solace in their car which is fine.
|
| You don't even _know_ who you're driving next to on a
| freeway. The driver next to you may be driving home dead
| tired, "microsleep"ing along the way. They could be very
| drunk, trying desperately to get home and crawl into bed.
| Maybe they got fired at their workplace cause they were
| on meth. Someone driving might have a seizure and lose
| control of their vehicle. You can just look at traffic
| crash statistics; the US is the worst developed country
| for traffic incidents by far. Just because you can't see
| them doesn't mean their conditions don't actually exist.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see America pay actual
| attention to the folks with these physical and medical
| conditions, and the fact that we don't is terrible. But
| stuffing them into cars or forcing them to an underclass
| where they can't drive isn't the answer. And it's not
| particularly unsafe to take transit.
| runesofdoom wrote:
| >I just can't imagine living life in this much fear
|
| >You don't make eye contact and keep to yourself, and
| nothing happens to you.
|
| This sounds like you are living your life in fear.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I'm not a hardcore anti-car person, but realistically
| you're safer taking buses and trains and so on in the US
| than you are driving on the highway. Of course, if you're
| just taking trips across town a car _might_ be safer?
| Ideally though major cities would police public transit
| better, but we really reversed course on policing in this
| country beginning circa 2014 and crime has risen
| commensurately.
| bombcar wrote:
| Which could be pretty easily done in some locations by
| making more expensive copies of the same transit (think
| "express" busses that are double the cost vs the once an
| hour bus that is cheap or free).
|
| Then the people who care about it (read: not poor) will
| pay to ride the bum-free version, and then more people
| will use it, and it will begin to improve.
|
| Of course, that cannot be done because then it's called
| "making the poor version crappy" and so everyone is
| forced to use the crappy version and it remains crappy
| forever.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| This has increasingly been on my mind lately with the
| discussions around firearm laws. I grew up in a relatively
| rural state where firearm ownership and usage was pretty much
| assumed and a normal part of life because law enforcement and
| animal control services simply aren't available at the speed
| you need them in an emergency.
|
| In an urban area there are different considerations that
| might weigh less heavily in favor of unrestricted access to
| firearms.
|
| It strikes me that rural area firearm ownership might warrant
| a different treatment than urban area ownership. And if
| that's the case maybe there's a wide class of these sorts of
| things that we should address on a similar basis.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I grew up in a relatively rural state where firearm
| ownership and usage was pretty much assumed and a normal
| part of life because law enforcement and animal control
| services simply aren't available at the speed you need them
| in an emergency.
|
| > In an urban area there are different considerations that
| might weigh less heavily in favor of unrestricted access to
| firearms.
|
| Law enforcement isn't available at the speed you need it in
| an emergency, anywhere. This is often recognized in the
| statement "when seconds count, the police are only minutes
| away". Law enforcement's job is to enforce the laws after
| the fact.
|
| Animal control may be available at the required speeds just
| because animal-related emergencies generally allow for more
| time. If you have a mountain lion hanging around outside
| your door, you can just not go outside until it's gone.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| >Law enforcement isn't available at the speed you need it
| in an emergency, anywhere. This is often recognized in
| the statement "when seconds count, the police are only
| minutes away". Law enforcement's job is to enforce the
| laws after the fact.
|
| While this is certainly true, we're talking about the
| difference between minutes and hours out in the country.
| I am reasonably comfortable walking around town unarmed
| because, whether it's accurate or not, I feel like there
| are enough police and people around that i'm not on my
| own. I do not have the same level of comfort 10 miles
| into the mountains.
|
| >If you have a mountain lion hanging around outside your
| door, you can just not go outside until it's gone.
|
| This might not be obvious to someone who hasn't dealt
| with this problem before but the issue is not just seeing
| one outside your house, it's coming across a moose with
| cubs or a bear on a hike 10 miles from home. That is a
| situation where being able to make a lot of noise best
| case or using deadly force worst case are the different
| between you living or not.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Unless the mountain lion is attacking your children or
| farm animals out in the yard.
|
| Humans are extremely slow runners compared to most
| dangerous large animals. Even black bears, who really
| only attack to protect their cubs, can sprint a hell of a
| lot faster than humans.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Really well put. The reason I'm making this Reddit-style
| comment is because I believe this sort of nuanced
| perspective is exceedingly rare in any venue that actually
| matters. There is little to not attempt to understand or
| empathize with the "other side" in these sorts of debates,
| usually.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's also combined with years, decades, of trying to
| "solve problems at the highest level" which is the
| federal government, and those often end up being heavy
| handed or failures entirely.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Australia's gun laws allow pump/lever/bolt action rifles
| for hunting along with shotguns for rural home defense
| (primary producers and farm workers can buy pump shotguns).
| Pistols and anything semiautomatic are mostly restricted to
| occupations that require them. There's also exceptions for
| sport shooters, so rural people can start an organized gun
| club and actively train in order to own shotguns or pistols
| (a "well-regulated militia"?). This means, though, that an
| 18 year old is only going to be able to buy a bolt action
| rifle without coming under some extra scrutiny of having to
| join a sport shooting club.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Which makes me wonder if putting state level structure
| around "militias" (open entry for anyone over 18, govern
| some aspects of sport shooting and training) would be an
| effective entry to reducing the number of semiautomatic
| weapons in circulation (though the numbers there are so
| staggering that it feels somewhat pointless).
| idiotsecant wrote:
| FYI this isn't super different from how it's culturally
| done in certain circles in the US (although it's not
| universal). When I was a young teen I took a hunter's
| education course that covered ethical hunting, firearm
| safety, first aid, basic wilderness survival, etc. I
| would support making that sort of requirement for owning
| firearms universal, but I would anticipate that a lot of
| people would view this as a registry which is not a very
| attractive prospect for a lot of people.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| This is my experience as well. I grew up in a small
| midwestern town. I continue to shoot and do a little bit
| of hunting, but T he temperature around firearms and gun
| ownership really took a turn in the 90's. Lots of wild
| conversations happening down at the conservation club.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| If getting a firearm is as easy as driving forty-five
| minutes outside of town, then access may as well be
| unrestricted.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| > I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in
| the US in the past 50 years. It seems like at any point in
| history, any local project will be opposed by somebody, no
| matter who they are or what the project is. But previous
| generations seemed to be able to get over that in favor of
| building.
|
| This is the root cause. The highway overbuilding was _so_
| devastating to the people it affected that many processes were
| put in place so that it would never happen so undemocratically
| again. It's a pendulum.
| fleddr wrote:
| I saw somebody on Twitter express it as follow:
|
| "Milennials/GenZ rule the online space, boomers rule the meat
| space."
|
| Your angry tweet means fuck all.
| seoaeu wrote:
| Not just overbuilding. Also the impunity with which
| politicians routed highways directly through neighborhoods
| whose inhabitants they did not like (demolishing homes,
| businesses, and community centers in the process)
| yadaeno wrote:
| And its one of the best investments the government ever
| made. 600% ROI transforming the American economy,
| connecting communities.
|
| The amount of displacement caused by a national rail system
| or bike lanes would be minuscule in comparison but have a
| similar impact. Politics nowadays seems too risk averse to
| pull large infra projects. Sometimes you have demolish some
| homes but nobody is brave enough to make these tough
| decisions anymore.
|
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/infrastructurereportcard.org/h
| a...
| nonameiguess wrote:
| It's kind of hilarious that that's your takeaway from
| this. Where I live in Dallas, all of downtown is walled
| off by elevated and sunken highways with only one or two
| bridges across them, all but guaranteeing adjacent
| neighborhoods are completely cut off for pedestrians, to
| prevent them from ever becoming larger communities. There
| was no reason for this whatsoever except the east, south,
| and west side neighborhoods were all predominantly black
| and planners wanted to keep them out.
|
| We're still suffering from these decisions today, with
| all manner of proposal to make the area walkable dead in
| the water due to the expense that would be entailed by
| rerouting or rebuilding highways.
|
| There is no return on investment anyone got from this
| that couldn't have been gotten from highways moved
| another mile or two away into the purely industrial
| districts where they wouldn't have disrupted anybody.
| dionidium wrote:
| The Interstates _between_ cities are a modern marvel
| whose impact can barely be overstated; the Interstates
| _within_ cities were an unnecessary, destructive mistake.
| xienze wrote:
| Are interstates just supposed to end once you reach a
| city, and in order to continue on you're supposed to
| navigate a series of roads that take you to the other
| edge of town, where the interstate starts again? Seems
| less than ideal.
| jdsully wrote:
| This is traditionally accomplished with ring roads that
| go around the city. Take Minneapolis for example, you'd
| be crazy to take I-94 through the heart of the city. If
| your driving through on your way out west your going to
| take the 694 bypass.
| kragen wrote:
| Circumnavigating the cities would be a reasonable
| alternative, and the Interstate system has incorporated
| many such "belt roads" since its inception. In retrospect
| this would have been a much better option than running
| them through downtowns.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Correct, interstates are not supposed to directly visit
| every home and business in the country.
| myself248 wrote:
| The system was engineered to incorporate both loops and
| spurs, and it's encoded in the numbering system:
|
| I think most folks know that 2-digit interstates with an
| even first digit are east-west, and with an odd first
| digit are north-south.
|
| But 3-digit interstates exist too. An even first digit
| means it's a loop around a city (like I-475 around
| Flint), and an odd first digit means it's a spur into
| downtown. (I-375 into Detroit). These numbers can be
| reused, for instance there's another I-375 in Florida.
|
| I think the argument here is that the _default_ should've
| been to loop around cities.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Going around is an option.
| dionidium wrote:
| We could have built the interstates _around_ urban cores
| and connected them to existing thoroughfares within
| cities. Most of our urban cores have expanded out to
| where those highways would have been built then, anyway.
| There was no need to go _right through_ existing
| neighborhoods.
| Anarch157a wrote:
| Every city in the path of an Interstate should have a
| ring road around it, instead of cutting the city in two
| or more parts. Basically, a giant roundabout.
| kbenson wrote:
| It's possible there are far more negative externalities
| than you're accounting for. What's 600% ROI if it turns
| out it contributed significantly to inequality, both for
| income and race? How negatively has that effected the
| nation, or even just the economy, over decades?
|
| It's important to note that the argument is not as simple
| as "highways or no highways", but more nuanced, as
| perhaps 10% harder to accomplish yields a 50% reduction
| in problems. Finding that sane middle ground is hard, but
| we should be careful not to reduce the problem to such
| simplicity that the many of the important parts of the
| solution are no longer even assessed.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Highways certainly boost ROI, but there's devil in the
| details.
|
| The interstates that linked up major cities certainly
| boosted investment. But Europe also built a network of
| such highways; the major difference is that they built
| their system to go mostly around cities, whereas the US
| just plowed them straight through cities. (The reasoning
| being that you don't really want to subject traffic
| passing through to high levels of commuter congestion,
| you want to minimize impacts to high concentrations of
| people and businesses, land acquisition is cheaper
| outside cities than inside, etc.) Because they did not
| impact nearly as many people to the same degree, Europe
| didn't experience the same overcorrection in terms of
| public process. (There is NIMBY-ism in Europe, to be
| sure, but they are definitely more successful at actually
| building things and keeping costs low compared to the
| US.)
|
| There is also the subject of diminishing returns. Cutting
| travel time between the coasts from weeks to days is
| certainly a huge return on investment. Today most
| expansion projects look like "let's cut 30 seconds of
| waiting at this traffic light" at a cost of hundreds of
| millions of dollars at times. The report you linked is
| from ASCE, which is not exactly a neutral party for
| infrastructure development. Here's a critique of an
| earlier report from the same organization:
|
| > Consider the following from the report:
|
| > ASCE estimated the "costs to households and businesses"
| from transportation deficiencies in 2010 to be $130
| billion. (page 3)
|
| > ASCE estimated the cumulative losses to businesses will
| be $430 billion by 2020. (page 5)
|
| > ASCE estimated the cumulative losses to households will
| be $482 billion by 2020. (page 5)
|
| > If you add these together, the total cost to households
| and businesses is $1.042 trillion. Well, ASCE states that
| to reach "minimum tolerable conditions" (a pretty sad
| standard) would take an investment of $220 billion
| annually. Over 10 years, that's $2.2 trillion. Yeah, you
| read that right. The American Society of Civil Engineers
| wrote a report suggesting that over the next decade we
| spend $2.2 trillion so we can save $1.0 trillion.
| mindslight wrote:
| Have you ever visited an urban area that has been cut up
| by a highway? I've never seen one that wasn't a dodgy
| neglected hellhole, even in traditionally denser east
| coast cities. The affected communities end up
| disconnected rather than connected to elsewhere, and the
| outlying areas that do end up being connected could just
| as well have been connected by a highway routed around
| the urban area.
|
| There's an argument to be made for cut and cover
| construction and then putting in a park or newer homes or
| something, but surface highways through cities are not a
| goal to strive for.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| It's interesting that the pendulum has swung, and yet it's
| still mainly impacting the same group of people.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| That's because these marginalized people generally still
| have no political power.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Imagine playing sim city, except you don't get terrain
| shaping, bulldozer, or rezoning.
| seoaeu wrote:
| The difference is that SimCity is a _game_ , while real
| life city planning has material impacts on people's lives
| and livelihoods. It shouldn't be easy to demolish
| someone's home or to establish a heavy industrial zone
| near a residential area just because the folks in charge
| feel like it. Conversely, if there's an actually
| justifiable reason to seize property or rezone an area,
| that shouldn't be impossible either
| solveit wrote:
| I have a justifiable reason, you have a respectable
| argument, they just feel like it.
|
| What I'm saying, of course, is that you're obviously
| right but our problem isn't because anyone disagrees with
| your position, but because we can't agree on what
| constitutes a justifiable reason in individual cases.
| mindslight wrote:
| Maybe this is the real explanation for why we're
| presently being overrun by churches.
| usrn wrote:
| OpenTTD simulates some of this. If you piss of localities
| they stop letting you do certain things (including
| bulldozing, building new infrastructure etc.)
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _I don 't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in
| the US in the past 50 years._
|
| Don't discount that your elected officials may be NIMBYs
| themselves, or well-funded by NIMBYs. Consider this if you
| still have an upcoming primary election or when you go to the
| polls in November.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| > But no - the second anyone mentions protected bike lanes, a
| handful of NIMBYs write in with "but muh cars" and the
| politicians throw up their hands and surrender.
|
| That is a damn shame. As a driver and also cyclist, I hate
| seeing bicycles on the car roads; I also hate being on the road
| when I cycle, as there are too many inattentive drivers.
|
| And please, keep pedestrians off of cyclists lanes. Ticket them
| if you must.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| I'm not sure NIMBYism is to blame here. Not every idea should
| be executed. I understand that it's a problem if projects
| always cave if there is resistance, because there will always
| be resistance, but that is not NIMBYism. That's just politics.
| pas wrote:
| The problem is there's just no cost to passivity.
|
| NIMBYs pay with their time, and they have a lot of it. This
| should be "taxed" at some rate. It has to be enough to
| provide some minimal balancing force against passivity.
| overboard2 wrote:
| Tax political involvement?
| phaistra wrote:
| What is your concrete solution? Create a fine for not-
| voting in local elections and local initiatives?
| el_nahual wrote:
| The issue with NIMBYs ("Not In My Back Yard") is that they
| aren't _really_ NIMBYS: They are CAVErs: Citizens Against
| Virtually Everything.
|
| I promise that if you took a group of NIMBYs and proposed
| tearing down 5 single family homes to build a midrise apartment
| building they'd object. But if you also proposed--to the exact
| same group of people--tearing down a mid-rise to build 5 single
| family homes, they'd object.
|
| If you propose to remove 50 parking spots for a bike lane, they
| object. If you propose to remove a bike lane to replace it with
| parking, they'd object too.
|
| These people are driven by a deep cynicism that anything can be
| made better: they don't believe people could _consciously_ want
| to make things better, and they don 't believe that ungided
| "forces" can make things better either.
|
| If something has an advocate, the advocate must be taking
| advantage. If nobody is advocating, then something unguided
| must be wrong. Nothing can be an improvement.
|
| Therefore, _any_ change must be for the worst, and they oppose
| everything.
| rcpt wrote:
| Beverly Hills routinely approves single family home teardowns
| as long as you replace with another single family home.
|
| But replacing with an apartment? Not in MY backyard!
| asdff wrote:
| And even those teardowns are subject to people trying to
| get the balloon framed single family home designated as a
| historical entity and preserved for all of time
| avar wrote:
| A more charitable description of NYMBY-ism would be that
| these people are mainly against the externalities that
| construction projects in their neighbourhood would cause, as
| opposed to being strongly for one end result over another.
| RajT88 wrote:
| That's one flavor of NIMBY anyways.
|
| There's also the topically focused ones, like with a focus on
| crime or property values. (I have had a lot more experience
| with the latter)
|
| Case in point, Naperville, IL (quite wealthy suburb of
| Chicago) had a cell coverage problem in the late 90's. The
| NIMBY's shot down any proposal of putting up "ugly" cell
| towers because it could mar the view and impact property
| values. (I would love to know the overlap between the people
| complaining about cell coverage and property values)
|
| The compromise the city came up with was designing a
| commemorative bell tower which sneakily could house cellular
| equipment. This old article describes, conveniently, that the
| tower was designed to hold cellular networking equipment, and
| by total coincidence they found a cell company interested in
| paying to put equipment there:
|
| https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-
| xpm-1999-12-23-991223...
|
| The project, initially termed "The Millenium Bell Tower"
| (later "The Carillon"), become known locally as "The
| Millenium Cell Tower".
| the_only_law wrote:
| We got that issue here to mixed in with a bit of anti-5G.
|
| It pisses me because I can barely get LTE signal. For some
| reason, most carriers except version are dead where I live,
| which is odd because I live inbetween suburbs and a busy
| road. It's not like I'm in the middle of nowhere. Even with
| version the signal strength is crap.
| tshaddox wrote:
| That sounds like nothing more than a very straightforward
| description of conservatism.
| el_nahual wrote:
| Agreed! Except in american (and increasingly global,
| english-influenced) vernacular the words "conservatism" and
| "liberalism" have begun to stray so far from their
| "original" meanings that they can no longer be trusted to
| accurately convey meaning.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > Except in american
|
| What? In America _liberal_ is very much displaced from
| its "original meaning".
| tremon wrote:
| > [alas], in american vernacular, and hence also
| increasingly global, the words [..] have begun to
| stray...
|
| Except is used more like an interjection there (agreed,
| except that...). They didn't mean to except the american
| vernacular from the rest of the sentence, just to clarify
| why they didn't write "conservative" in the first place.
| daenz wrote:
| These sound like hypothetical scenarios. Do you have some
| real world examples?
| wk_end wrote:
| There's a completely bland, ugly, brutalist movie theatre
| in the downtown of my city [1]. Probably from the 80s?
| There was talk about tearing it down and replacing it with
| a much nicer looking (IMO) modern mid-rise [2]. A local
| news organization posted about it, and the comments were
| flooded with old people who live in the suburbs moaning.
| One just posted a link to a YouTube video of Joni
| Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" ("they paved paradise/and put
| up a parking lot"), absurdly.
|
| [1] https://www.google.com/maps/@48.4255478,-123.3621296,3a
| ,75y,...
|
| [2] https://www.cheknews.ca/officer-tower-proposed-for-
| capitol-6...
| mattm wrote:
| Kind of funny using Victoria as an example. Having lived
| in Victoria on and off for the last 20 years I can
| remember the "tall-building ordinance" that finally got
| removed to allow for the construction of taller condos in
| the downtown area. Up above is also someone posting the
| lack of progress for bike lanes in their city but
| Victoria has been pretty good about that with the mayor
| going ahead with them even despite significant outcry
| about them. I think Victoria could be faster at adjusting
| to change but when I think about the changes over the
| past 2 decades, there has been significant development.
| bigtex88 wrote:
| This literally sounds like American "Conservatism".
| rhacker wrote:
| Most city democrats are actually conservatives. They just
| don't believe it. They'll still vote "democrat" but
| typically the most conservative ones.
| sylens wrote:
| I half wonder if you live in my city because your description
| matches it to a tee, but I bet this is happening in cities all
| over the country.
|
| As for why they care about NIMBYs so much - it is because our
| current class of politicians aim to be career politicians.
| Therefore, they look to remain in power at all costs, and part
| of that means not pissing off the most vocal members of their
| community.
|
| What we need is real leadership from politicians who are
| willing to stake their tenure in office on pushing projects
| through.
| Aunche wrote:
| > it is because our current class of politicians aim to be
| career politicians
|
| I don't think that's quite fair. Look at the statistics of
| who actually turns up to vote. The median voting age for
| mayoral elections is 57 [1]. Seniors are 15x more likely to
| vote than those aged 18-35. If I had to guess, this would
| only get worse if you get into even more obscure elections
| like city council. Incidentally, Boomers are much less likely
| to bike everywhere, so you can't really blame the politicians
| for catering their policy to them.
|
| [1] http://whovotesformayor.org/
| seoaeu wrote:
| Part of the reason is that cities frequently hold off cycle
| elections which drastically reduces turnout. If mayor/city
| councilors were chosen with the same ballot as presidential
| candidate, the things would be very different
| acabal wrote:
| In my experience - certainly in the bike lane example I gave
| above - the NIMBYs are a _minority_. A vocal one, yes - but
| still a minority. If a politician is only concerned about
| their career, surely a popular project like bike lanes would
| garner them _more_ votes the next time around?
|
| Thinking about this more, at least in my city it seems like
| one of the problems is that for a generation now, politicians
| have consistently outsourced decisionmaking to a poll of the
| community.
|
| In theory, one elects a politician to be independent
| decisionmaker for the constituent's interests, for the length
| of their term; and if at the end of the term the people
| didn't like their decisions, they're voted out. This gave
| politicians latitude to do what they thought was best, with
| the greater good of the community in mind.
|
| In the past half century, (and again, only in my city) this
| model seems to have changed to politicians being elected, and
| then running every decision past the community as a kind of
| popularity poll. Developer wants to replace an auto lot
| that's been abandoned for a decade with dense apartments?
| Better poll the community to see what they think. Adding a
| protected bike lane to connect two existing bike networks?
| Let's ask the community first. And of course when they do
| that, the only people who show up are the NIMBYs, and the
| politicians get the impression that nobody wants development.
|
| The NIMBYs have spoken, we better leave that disused auto lot
| abandoned and blighted! (And this is a real example from
| today's news!)
| efitz wrote:
| NIMBY is just one kind of activist. We live in the age of
| the "tyranny of the tiny minority" where a small number of
| passionate people have their already-loud voices so
| amplified by the media that they drown out everything else.
| Social media tends to make extremes go viral, and
| traditional media looks for controversy and amplifies it.
|
| Nuanced messaging and debate is a thing of the past. It
| doesn't fit in tweets and sound bites. Now, if you disagree
| with me, easier for me just to say you're evil than try to
| rebut your points. And this in turn feeds the media
| amplification effect. Who has the most emotionally
| compelling narrative? Who can parade out the most
| horrifying pictures? It doesn't matter if they're from a
| completely unrelated incident two years ago (and were
| staged), or that the "victims" are paid activists.
|
| "Politician" is now a career. This means perverse
| incentives for such people; instead of ONLY considering
| what is best for constituents. They must also think about
| getting reelected.
|
| Bureaucracies and government careers make decision-makers
| risk-averse, and most people react to having to make risky
| decisions by wanting more study before deciding. So the
| politicians and the bureaucrats only have up-side to
| accepting delays (they would call it "listening to
| constituents"), and suffer a huge risk of down-side if they
| green-light something that ticks off some noisy NIMBY or
| activist. And they rarely have the skill set or incentives
| to write contracts that result in the best outcomes.
|
| The article talks about the perverse incentives associated
| with unions; these are only made worse with public sector
| unions.
|
| Finally, our courts don't have loser pays and no longer are
| "speedy" by any reasonable definition. So you can tie
| things up for years with an activist lawyer on your staff,
| and make your opponent spend millions in legal fees to
| respond to all your noise. Plus, if you get lucky with a
| jury of people who don't understand the science of your
| issues and just buy the narrative, then you can win really
| big.
|
| We need a lot of reforms in our republic. Most of them
| center around removing perverse incentives and
| externalities.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| IMO the problem is that "politician" is a career. Now the
| municipal government is just one rung on the ladder, and
| the worst thing is not getting elected (getting fired).
| There is no incentive for career politicians to do
| anything other than what will help in the next election
| cycle.
|
| Politics used to be a hobby for the already successful
| who wanted to give back. These people were bound by a
| sense of what was right. Elitist as hell, yes, but at
| least they weren't trying to climb the corporate ladder.
| nybble41 wrote:
| Crazy suggestion: Bar politicians from owning property or
| having any income (including gifts of goods or services)
| apart from the stipend for their appointed position. For
| life. Everything owned beforehand has to be given away as
| a condition of holding political office. They can retain
| a small allotment of personal items officially owned by
| the government but left in their care for their own
| personal use. No stocks, bonds, mutual funds, or any
| other investments. A pension for retirement is included,
| of course, provided they manage to avoid being convicted
| of any malfeasance during their tenure.
|
| See how many career politicians you get under those
| conditions.
| krapp wrote:
| Literally no one would ever seek public office for any
| reason, at any level, if it meant losing everything they
| own and any ability to own property or gain income apart
| from a presumably meager stipend for the rest of their
| lives (so _definitely_ no young politicians with fresh
| ideas) and then lose their retirement if (I assume, given
| the tone of this premise) they get so much as a parking
| ticket.
|
| I know Americans hate politicians but we treat mass
| murderers better than that. We definitely treat
| billionaires who are far more corrupt and have far more
| power than most politicians better than that. Why not go
| full Thomas Jefferson as well and just hang all the
| politicians every 20 years?
| nybble41 wrote:
| No one _with a profit motive_ would be interested, which
| is the whole idea. You 'd get idealists and people
| seeking to make a name for themselves instead. (I'm not
| saying this is a perfect system BTW. I even called it a
| "crazy suggestion".)
|
| > I know Americans hate politicians but we treat mass
| murderers better than that.
|
| The point is not to _punish_ politicians but rather to
| ensure that there can be no conflicts of interest, or at
| least none rooted in a quest for material gain.
|
| > if (I assume, given the tone of this premise) they get
| so much as a parking ticket.
|
| "Malfeasance" goes a bit beyond parking tickets. What I
| had in mind was more along the lines of bribery or
| corruption, not simple mistakes.
| solveit wrote:
| It's a terrible idea to give all the power to idealists
| (even granting this is possible). Corrupt cynics can be
| bargained with. The damage idealists can do is unbounded.
| refurb wrote:
| Politicians listen to the people who talk to them. NIMBY's
| are highly organized and politically active, so politicians
| listen. Generally there isn't a counter group or they are
| poorly organized and don't hold much political weight.
|
| You'd be surprised what you can accomplish if you're
| organized. A prof I worked with was able to introduce a
| bill to congress (that he wrote with the congressmen's
| staff) simply because he built a relationship and then
| proposed something the congressmen liked.
|
| The issue is the vast majority of voters do nothing more
| than vote.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| NIMBYs are a minority, but they consistently vote and are
| involved in political action. My city has elections in
| February when no one goes outside, because corruption. City
| council members win with 5,000 votes, routinely less, even
| though they have 100,000 constituents. Not pissing off the
| loudest people is like the whole job of local politicians.
| jeromegv wrote:
| From what I've seen in Toronto and after having spoken with
| a local councillor, the thing is that those NIMBY show up
| to all consultation meetings.
|
| Any new bike lane require a community consultation (which
| is a problem in itself!, but let's forget that for a
| minute)... but who comes to those? The working class
| families that have to take care of their kids in the
| evening? Or older folks that have no other plans on a
| random week night? Before COVID all those meetings were in
| person at some community center. Of course for any cyclist
| to get there, they'd need to bike on a street with no bike
| lanes. So who shows up? People in cars!
|
| Things are slightly easier now because lots of those
| meetings moved online with Zoom, making it more accessible
| to a bunch of new people. But I'd recommend (if you're not
| doing it already!) to keep showing up to all consultation
| meetings, because that's the only way things get done.
|
| Concillor was telling me it was hard to make a case to the
| civic servant that they should keep pushing for bike lanes
| when ALL consultations kept only getting opposition. Even
| thought they all knew it was likely more popular, but it's
| hard to argue with the "democratic" process.
| pas wrote:
| How is that democratic? At best it's a farce.
|
| If there was no vote then it's just some arbitrary
| evaluation of that consultation. I mean what's the
| procedure to calculate the for-against of a public
| comment?
|
| Isn't the elected officials (supervisors, councilors)
| elected to do the campaign based on what they think their
| voters would want?
|
| Isn't there a bike club or some other token NGO they
| ought to invite? :o
| acabal wrote:
| IMHO, the core of the problem is that _elected
| politicians are asking constituents in the first place_.
| I elected a politician to represent my interests for X
| years so I can get on with my life. I didn 't elect a
| politician so they can constantly ask me if it's OK for
| them to build Thing X, then Thing Y, then Thing Z...
|
| I wonder how much more a politician could accomplish if
| they simply stopped asking? Like, do the job they were
| elected to do, and not constantly be going to the
| popularity poll, where it's going to be nobody but NIMBYs
| filling out 'nay' forms?
|
| Just do it! If it truly upsets the community, they can
| always knock it down at the next election, right?
| xienze wrote:
| > IMHO, the core of the problem is that elected
| politicians are asking constituents in the first place.
|
| Those constituents are the ones paying for said projects,
| so yeah it's kind of important that everyone is on board
| before committing money.
| mediaman wrote:
| Why not just do statistically valid polling?
|
| The problem is that politicians run this weird highly
| skewed sampling method of "community input" and then
| think they've got the pulse of the community, where in
| fact they've just heard from loudmouths with too much
| time on their hands.
|
| A statistical poll would at least show what the actual
| constituency wants, not the loud, bored subset.
|
| The subset problem is also why we see much more extreme
| politics in cities among elected positions that have less
| visibility: city council members tend to be much more
| extreme than mayors, because the latter has greater voter
| participation.
| bluGill wrote:
| You need to get a poll of people who will vote in the
| next election should this pass, and a different poll for
| people who will vote in the next election should this
| fail to pass. Note that different people will show up
| should this pass vs not pass, and it is people who turn
| up on election day that matter (show up means their
| ballot is counted, absentee ballots count as showing up)
|
| This is very different from statistical polling.
| mediaman wrote:
| This sounds like objecting to something much better than
| the awful practice today because it's not theoretical
| perfection.
| solveit wrote:
| Also, politicians actually are supposed to represent
| _all_ of their constituents, not just the ones that vote.
| There is no incentive to do so of course, but that is
| what they are supposed to do.
| bombcar wrote:
| Polling is what you do to provide evidence to support
| doing what you already want done.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| No politician ever was embroiled in a scandal because
| they asked for _too much_ feedback from their
| constituency. Expecting them to act counter to their
| interests is not very realistic, especially when you
| consider that the same NIMBYs who attend these meetings
| are the ones that vote in hugely disproportionate
| numbers. They might be a minority, but they have the time
| and the resources to use their political power and as
| such are very influential in modern policy.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| I agree and disagree. I think it is valuable to get input
| from constituents, especially on infrastructure, but it
| also doesn't need to be the sole dictating thing. I think
| getting input to be able to nail down the pros vs cons is
| reasonable. Especially since, in a city, the project may
| be in a part of town they are rarely in or do not live
| in. But for sure, it should not be the full deciding
| factor but a way to get a scope of the full pros vs cons.
| Then evaluate if the points brought up were valid, then
| finally if the pros outweigh the cons.
| vanviegen wrote:
| If you really want to know what the locals want, make it
| easy for everyone to voice their opinions.
|
| An admittedly straightforward example: in my city, each
| street gets to decide for themselves if they want paid
| parking or not. (Residents and businesses can get a
| permit for a reasonable yearly fee.) A vote can be
| requested by any resident at most once every two years,
| in which case every house in the street receives a letter
| with information, a voting form, and a return envelope.
|
| I think this is a lot better than basing decisions on the
| opinions of what's likely to be a vocal minority that
| shows up on consultation meeting.
| scythe wrote:
| >Any new bike lane require a community consultation
| (which is a problem in itself!, but let's forget that for
| a minute)... but who comes to those? The working class
| families that have to take care of their kids in the
| evening? Or older folks that have no other plans on a
| random week night? Before COVID all those meetings were
| in person at some community center. Of course for any
| cyclist to get there, they'd need to bike on a street
| with no bike lanes. So who shows up? People in cars!
|
| I wonder if you could have something like jury duty for
| these meetings, where a dozen people from the community
| are selected to comment each week or something.
| orwin wrote:
| Pseudo randomly selected, then informed for like 3 days
| about the issues, discuss it themselves for a day then
| vote.
|
| And we should do this for each issues
| bluGill wrote:
| NIMBYs will just lobby these people. I've seen it happen.
| nybble41 wrote:
| That's easily solved: Just don't announce who was
| selected until after the vote.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| How many political positions in contemporary democratic
| world are actually majoritarian or _were_ majoritarian when
| they achieved their critical momentum?
|
| Green Deals? Rainbow flags? Swings in abortion policies?
| Current levels and composition of immigration flows, be it
| in the US, Sweden or Greece?
|
| A few of them perhaps, but the typical prime mover of
| politics is an active and loud minority which cares a lot -
| and whose cohesion and initiative puts pressure on
| politicians.
|
| The NIMBYs are no exception.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > What we need is real leadership from politicians who are
| willing to stake their tenure in office on pushing projects
| through.
|
| Real leadership is to do what politicians are already doing
| because most people who pursue high-level leadership
| positions do it for selfish reasons.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| What we need is real leadership from politicians who
| are willing to stake their tenure in office on
| pushing projects through.
|
| Easy to say, but our current system proves that it selects
| for politicians of exactly the opposite ilk.
|
| How do we change the system?
| gkop wrote:
| Maybe by getting younger people to vote more? (I know this
| has been tried since forever, but have we tried
| everything?)
|
| And, holding public comment hearings outside of traditional
| working hours so that non-retired people have a fair shot?
|
| IDK seems pretty hopeless..
| bbarnett wrote:
| You know what I hear in this thread? Combined, posts have
| said that NIMBYs, a tiny minority, who always vote, show up
| to council meetings, and politicians listen to them, and
| yet everyone here trying to figure out what is broken.
|
| Well, nothing is broken, except non-NIMBYs dont care enough
| to do the same!
|
| The answer is simple. Show up to council meetings and vote!
| If you don't, you don't care as much as the NIMBYs, and the
| result is clear.
|
| Nothing is broken, it is called democracy.
| bluGill wrote:
| > except non-NIMBYs dont care enough to do the same! Show
| up to council meetings and vote!
|
| The zoning meeting for my city is the same night as my
| kid has scouts. This is why I don't show up: I have other
| things going on in my life. Even if they did pick a night
| where there is nothing else, I really want to get into my
| shop and build something and this meeting is taking that
| time away from me.
|
| There is another problem: the people showing up for
| school board and causing problems are not the same as
| showing up for zoning and causing problems. And there is
| also the library and parks board, each either their own
| meetings I could show up for. Different groups show up
| for each, and I cannot counter them all.
| bombcar wrote:
| And it happens and it works, I've seen YIMBY groups "win"
| but it has taken them years of continually working on the
| same thing to finally get it through.
|
| Sometimes it ends up going all the way to Congress:
| http://www.startribune.com/obama-gives-his-approval-to-
| bridg...
|
| You can't YIMBY generic things like "more bike paths" or
| "better roads" you have to identify particular projects
| and build a group that will support it, and work on it
| for years sometimes. For lots of things, there are groups
| that can help out there, you just have to find them. And
| part of that "working" at it is _listening_ to the NIMBYs
| so you can understand their concerns (even if the
| leadership of a NIMBY group is batshit, the people "on
| their side" at least resonate with some of them) and work
| to mitigate/solve them.
|
| And be prepared to take advantage of disasters to push
| your side forward.
| seoaeu wrote:
| That's not true. There's lots of ways that things are
| rigged in favor of NIMBYs. For example, environmental
| review laws enable a NIMBY minority to file bogus
| lawsuits that add years of delays (during which time
| developers still have to pay mortgages on property that
| aren't allowed to start developing).
| muad_dib_4ever wrote:
| The problem is not just that a vocal minority us opposed.
| Our political ruthlessness and acumen is so high, that
| project that is longer than a politician's term will leave
| them open to sound bites they can't recover from. It puts
| them in a position at reelection time of having all the
| cost, and none of the payoff. And more than likely, the
| project is harder and more costly than planned. And by the
| way, the party can't afford to not control that seat going
| into the national election.
|
| Neither side can tackle anything that can't be roi positive
| by election time. Most of those projects are "deck chairs
| on the titanic" value propositions.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| This is not a US specific thing... people here in slovenia
| build a house at the end of the by-the-street village, and then
| complain when someone else does the same, claming the the
| village is getting too large.
| sschueller wrote:
| We have NIMBY here is Switzerland too but we try to find a
| solution most of the time if we see a need for it. In the end
| it's usually a compromise everyone can live with but sometimes
| a project can also fail. Like the subway that was proposed in
| the 70s to run under Zurich. The subway station at HB was even
| built but then people voted against the whole project later.
| Today that station runs a regular train (S4 and S10) not a
| subway. There is also another tunnel with station that was
| supposed to be part of the subway which was built (near
| tierspital) but is now a standard tram line. What's interesting
| is that there is almost no room for the tram. The tracks are as
| low as they can be and the trams pantograph gets almost
| completely compressed. [1]
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/RUoiUAsLZM0
| [deleted]
| Patrol8394 wrote:
| > is impossible because a handful of NIMBYs are constantly
| taken seriously by local politicians.
|
| That x 1000 !
| [deleted]
| ekkeke wrote:
| I believe (though I don't have the evidence for it) that we
| likely see a similar phenomenon in the UK. House prices seem to
| have become the most important thing to the home owning class
| and they selfishly oppose anything that would affect them
| negatively, whether that be HS2 or new house building programs.
|
| This is not current generation I might add, who I believe would
| be quite happy with a shake up. It's previous generation of 50
| years olds and over that have brought this about.
| api wrote:
| It's the same in a lot of US cities, but to play devils'
| advocate: this generation was basically told that their home
| was their savings and in many cases their entire capability
| to retire or take care of their health and other needs in old
| age is tied to the value of their home equity.
|
| We dug a very, very deep hole by treating housing as an
| investment instrument and it's going to be hard to dig out.
| antod wrote:
| _> This is not current generation I might add, who I believe
| would be quite happy with a shake up. It 's previous
| generation of 50 years olds and over that have brought this
| about. _
|
| I have my doubts. I suspect in 25yrs time it will be the same
| old story with the current generation becoming the previous
| generation.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| I was interested in HS2 after seeing stuff about the
| Elizabeth Line, so I watched some YouTube videos about it. In
| my eyes it seems like a great project despite the high cost
| (easy for me to say since I'm not British), but holy smokes,
| the amount of people in the comments poo-pooing it with
| comments like below is absurd.
|
| "It breaks my heart to see such needless desecration of our
| beautiful countryside for this catastrophe!" -- the video in
| question was drone footage over wholly unnatural farm fields.
| That will return to being farm fields once construction
| finishes, with a 20m strip of train tracks running through
| it. Of course, they didn't mention the existing motorway that
| was also in the shot.
|
| "An obscene use of fossil fuels, environment, and money for
| something we don't really need." -- About a train that will
| use zero fossil fuels and will lessen demand for cars.
| Really.
|
| Also, a bunch of people saying it's useless because it won't
| have a station in their town. It's a high-speed line, of
| course not! The whole point is to make local services faster
| and more frequent by removing express services from the
| existing over-crowded lines.
| ekkeke wrote:
| Yup, exaclty. We seem to have become a nation of landlords
| seeking to turn a profit without an ounce of effort, rather
| than the industrious country we once were.
| BirAdam wrote:
| NIMBYs get taken seriously because they show up in large
| numbers.
|
| I totally understand the reaction many people have to
| government. I fall victim to it all the time. We see that
| politicians get bought and paid for, and we therefore assume
| that nothing can change the way things work, but this proves
| otherwise. At the end of the day, those who show up tend to
| win.
|
| If we all want change, and judging by this thread a majority
| do, then we need to show up. Show up at the local meetings.
| Call your local reps. Be annoying. Get everyone you know to
| also be annoying. Politicians like remaining in power, and an
| angry mob shouting about the roads and bike lanes... that will
| motivate them.
| Lammy wrote:
| NIMBYs get taken seriously because the secondary and tertiary
| effects of their NIMBYism aligns with the dominant ideology
| of the state post-Civil-Rights-era.
|
| See also: the 1970 Congressional report from the Commission
| on Population Growth and the American Future:
| https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED050960.pdf#page=10 (copy
| and paste URL to avoid HTTP Referer check)
|
| John D. Rockefeller III sez: "We have all heard[citation
| needed] about a population problem in the developing nations
| of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where death rates have
| dropped rapidly and populations have exploded. Only recently
| have we recognized that the United States may have population
| problems of its own. There are differing views. Some
| say[who?] that it is a problem of crisis proportions -- that
| the growth of population is responsible for pollution of our
| air and water, depletion of our natural resources, and a
| broad array of social ills.[SUBTLE]"
|
| You may know the above as "WTF Happened in 1971?"
| https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
| jeffbee wrote:
| If you scratch a NIMBY you'll find a fan of Ehrlich
| underneath. You have no idea how quickly a Berkeley zoning
| board meeting devolves from ordinary discourse into
| Malthusian debates about whether young people are entitled
| to exist. Of course Ehrlich was a gigantic racist, as are
| his followers, which was recently covered very well at http
| s://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/population...
| colechristensen wrote:
| One reason that there is pushback and _needs_ to be pushback is
| that there are frequently really dumb vanity proposals because
| small-time politicians want to do something big.
|
| Locally there are a couple of plans to tear up and reroute
| highways in a decade long project where the highways literally
| just finished major tear-up-and-reroute project.
|
| There's another nonsensical proposal to tear up one of the
| busiest highways around and replace it with a nice boulevard
| because wouldn't that be lovely, except without any plan for
| what would happen to the rest of traffic.
|
| There are NIMBYs but there are also people worried about
| projects which are _trying_ to help won 't actually make
| anything better and often will have real negative consequences.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >worried about projects which are trying to help won't
| actually make anything better and often will have real
| negative consequences
|
| the worry is misplaced because stupid projects are
| compensated by good ones. This obsession with efficiency,
| which seems to be an artifact of modern economic logic is one
| of the culprits of why nothing gets build. Effectiveness
| matters, not efficiency. This is just the same logic that VC
| investors use. nine out of ten startups are crap, some are
| scams, but it doesn't matter. Better to waste some resources
| than to build nothing at all.
|
| China understands this. People will laugh at empty ghost
| cities or wasteful vanity projects but they're compensated
| for by what works and tacit knowledge generated in the
| process. America's gilded age or new deal era or cold war
| military projects were no different. Better to go big and get
| something done than do nothing at all. And that's usually the
| two choices.
| correlator wrote:
| From my experience NIMBYs are typically local property owners
| who don't want their view, neighborhood, etc. to change. These
| folks could be better off financially than their YIMBY
| counterparts who maybe don't own all that same property.
|
| If there's a group of people with money and a group with less
| debating the same issue, I would expect the politician to
| support the party most likely to make large campaign
| contributions.
|
| I have no data to support this idea and should not be taken
| seriously in this context.
| fallingknife wrote:
| I think it's less likely the donations and more likely that
| the politician is a member of the well off property owner
| group.
| VictorPath wrote:
| Local politics here is run by real estate interests and
| government does little. A local business wanted an underground
| garage, and had its curb open up onto a crosswalk. This kind of
| thing happens all the time. There is too little resident input
| into construction, and too little government oversight of it,
| not too much.
| notacoward wrote:
| This is what I think of as Consensus Paralysis. There are
| usually many reasons to do a thing, and many reasons not to. A
| sane person or organization would weigh those reasons against
| each other. However, in most political decision making there's
| an important asymmetry: any one reason to block action is
| sufficient, but no number or weight of reasons is sufficient to
| ensure its progress. In our earnest wish to avoid the tyranny
| of the majority by requiring full consensus (or close to it),
| we've handed all of the trump cards to obstructionists. Often a
| tiny minority, not even pretending to believe in the nominal
| reason for their objections, can unilaterally block any
| progress.
|
| The US senate is another example of this problem BTW, both in
| the form of the filibuster and in the general inadvisability of
| huge omnibus bills that give everyone their very own excuse to
| oppose without consequence, but maybe that's getting a bit off
| topic.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| > If this were the 1900s, government would have told the NIMBYs
| to get bent, we're building Thing X because it's good for
| society and if you don't like it, tough. That's what living in
| city means sometimes!
|
| Unfortunately, much of the history of that era was exploiting
| racial minorities in order to build.
|
| I'm currently sitting in a neighborhood (PNW USA) that at the
| turn of the century was established mostly by german
| immigrants. They built their houses here because the more anglo
| population in the city proper, slightly to the south, and
| mostly across the river, redlined them away from those areas.
|
| Fast forward to just after WW2, and a substantial black
| population moved here to work building ships for the war
| effort. These folks were largely setting in a racially
| integrated town just a bit further north from me. In the post
| war years, this flooded, creating a local refugee crisis. The
| powers that were in the city at the time did not want black
| families in their areas, so they decided to redline them into
| the germanic neighborhood and make it their problem.
|
| Fast forward a couple decades, and my neighborhood has become
| the cultural and economic center for the black community in my
| city. City proper leadership is still openly and malignantly
| racists, so they go along with a scheme to use a free way
| expansion and building a hospital campus to snap up the land
| for a fraction of what it was worth under eminent domain.
| Culturally the neighborhood has not recovered from this.
| Several multi block scale plots of land remain unbuilt but
| owned by the hospital.
|
| That's just my neighborhood. Robert Moses and his peers played
| out this story nation wide.
|
| So, there's obviously a lot going on with the US's current
| failure to build civic infrastructure in a sensible and
| affordable way. But before we lionize what was going on in the
| past, we should remember a lot of what got built was at the
| cost of someone who's rights and economic interests were legit
| thwarted. It doesn't excuse modern NIMBYism from a position of
| privilege, but I do worry about reforms that give planning
| boards sharper knives.
| notinfuriated wrote:
| > City proper leadership is still openly and malignantly
| racists
|
| Curious, what city is this?
| throwaway_bub wrote:
| Portland OR:
| https://www.portlandoregon.gov/phb/article/655460
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Portland, Oregon. Note I was referring to a period in the
| 1970s when the hospital and freeway stuff happened. This
| city had a very different reputation just 50 years ago, and
| Oregon as a whole had defacto sundown towns until quite
| recently.
|
| As you might expect from headlines of recent years, things
| still aren't exactly great in terms of black Portlander's
| trusting the city will protect their interests, but
| progress has happened, mostly due to stubborn people
| pushing on it.
|
| No easy answers to this kind of problem, but there is a
| pretty clear moral compass pointer imo.
|
| If you'd like more about my neighborhood specifically:
| http://kingneighborhood.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2015/03/BLEED...
| larrik wrote:
| It's easy to vilify NIMBY, but those are ALSO the people
| stopping developers from tearing down historical buildings just
| to put up parking lots or worse.
|
| Then again, there's also a vocal minority who thinks the
| government should spend as little as possible, and _new_
| projects are even worse.
| quacked wrote:
| I always end up qualifying as a NIMBY, because all of the
| projects proposed are endless 4-on-1s that look exactly the
| same as everywhere else with no parking, or godawful
| commercial real estate. If there was any taste in
| development, I'd be a YIMBY.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Yeah that's the problem. If taste is important enough an
| objection that you block infrastructure that could save
| lives or house folks on the edge of homelessness, then do
| we really need to take the objection seriously? As a GP
| said, there's always a list of pros and cons. We can't let
| any tiny con, namely something as subjective as taste, get
| in the way of building life-saving infrastructure.
| quacked wrote:
| Ah, get real. None of that infrastructure is life-saving,
| most building is happening in rapidly growing areas, and
| most rapidly-growing areas are filled with moneyed
| transplants who are coming for local industry jobs.
| That's who new development is for: people who will make
| rent that will cover the loans that were taken out to
| finance the property.
|
| No one seems to understand this: developers develop when
| they predict an increase in housing prices. Their builds
| will accompany a massive increase in demand. The number
| of people who need their "lives saved" will only grow as
| a city grows in popularity and density, and the rent only
| goes up.
|
| If you want to look at what continuous "life-saving" no-
| taste development looks like, go to Houston, or Chicago,
| or SF, or really anywhere that's very populous. The
| people still need their lives saved, but everything is
| disgusting and falling down after ten years anyway.
|
| If you want to get serious about housing people in
| America, you need to think about supporting policies that
| would slow down the 200K-1M people we add to the US every
| year, each of who needs housing.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > most building is happening in rapidly growing areas,
| and most rapidly-growing areas are filled with moneyed
| transplants who are coming for local industry jobs
|
| If you don't build for them, they're going to buy up
| whatever property they can, raise rents, and destroy
| existing communities instead. Or you can somehow stop...
| them from moving in? America has never blocked freedom of
| movement so this seems unlikely.
|
| > If you want to get serious about housing people in
| America, you need to think about supporting policies that
| would slow down the 200K-1M people we add to the US every
| year, each of who needs housing.
|
| No I don't think I need to stop population growth for
| building aesthetics, sorry I don't like to count my
| cityscape in lives blocked to maintain it ("ah that
| genteel cul-de-sac was worth 300 people #blessed").
| Unless you can make a convincing argument as to why this
| very moment in history is when America needs to add
| blocks to development, as opposed to the development of
| the trans-American railroad, the creation of Route 66, or
| the establishment of the Interstate Highway System, then
| I'm going to say you're just the garden variety NIMBY
| that everyone else seems to think you are.
| blobbers wrote:
| Americans need to start realizing that a 100 year old
| building isn't historical; it's just old and may have
| outlasted it's useful life. That said, we also need to start
| modeling our cities based on the success we see outside
| America, because you're right, a lot of the new projects are
| _much worse_.
|
| In the words of the Joni Mitchell: "They paved paradise and
| put up a parking lot"
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