>You have to have a certain cynicism

You certainly have to be cynical to believe that somehow Seattle is not operating in its own self interest. As faults are found, we try to correct them. Some are very difficult to correct (hello I5, hello American street widths, hello North Seattle sprawl, hello West Seattle suburban wasteland, hello unlivable industrial area) and some are geographic constrains (hello hills and water).

Making tiny shitty apartments does not correct any of these deep problems.

>The form of the rules is optimised to make them appear beneficial to all,

The form of the rules isn't 'optimised' at all. It's an organic living document called "the law." You apparently think the world would be a better place if developers could make whatever size dwelling they want. I think that happened in the 19th century and the result was skid row. I am not interested in trying the experiment again. I am interested in more housing for my community, but honestly that means rezoning SFHs, not getting rid of height restrictions and parking requirements when they're justifiable.

And yes, my opinion is entirely qualitative. I like 3-4 story buildings because I like them. They have been a staple of the environment that dragged me out of adolescence and into responsible, productive adulthood. They are the good geometry.

Growing up in the world I have, I've come to realize physical things weigh me down and participating in consumerism makes me unhappy. Working for 50 years so i can save up enough money to retire at 65 doesn't make sense to me. Why suffer for 50 years so you can live free for a few at the end, when you're old, maybe sick.

I found minimalism, FIRE, and the idea that you ruthlessly reduce expenses for things you don't need.

It turns out... I don't need a one bedroom apartment. I certainly don't need a house. I've lived out of a school-sized backpack for months at a time. Last time i moved, I packed everything I own in 3 hours, moved in one trip in a van, and unpacked in about 2 hours.

I appreciate that you like 3-4 story buildings and your two bedroom apartments. I appreciate you like your parking.

But I don't have enough stuff to fill an apartment. I don't have a car. I don't WANT either of those things. It's okay if you do, but why force me to have them?

> "Making tiny shitty apartments does not correct any of these deep problems."

It's true tiny apartments won't fix being surrounded by lakes, but if 1800 more people can afford to live where, and how, they want... Isn't that a start?

Oh. Poor baby :(

FWIW I'm a millennial that lives in a 600 sqft apartment and has never owned a car. I just don't think that it's justifiable to rewrite zoning laws to achieve my weird goals of absolute independence.

>It's true tiny apartments won't fix being surrounded by lakes, but if 1800 more people can afford to live where, and how, they want... Isn't that a start?

I think it's a meaningless drop in the bucket and a wasted opportunity. You don't build shit that you don't want around for at least 30 years, and preferably 100.

At least you have the insight to realise your opinion is "entirely qualitative" (i.e. entirely emotional) but apparently not the insight to recognize you should then change your opinion.

Is it a net good? I don't know. But I think it's a huge and common misconception to interpret NIMBY-ism as a malicious action rather than a simple case of people acting in their own self interest.

That seems like a bit of a false dichotomy. Plus, I think it's a bit disingenuous to imply there's this big, nefarious "they". It seems more realistic (to me, at least) to view NIMBYers as a bunch of individual homeowners concerned about the value of what's likely their single biggest investment.

I also have a sneaking suspicion that the post you're referencing the "tent city" thing from was tongue-in-cheek. That's entirely personal speculation, however.

In areas like San Francisco and San Jose, there is just not enough housing to house all of the homeless people. There is not enough public funding to create housing for all of the homeless people. And the effectiveness of each dollar keeps going down, faster than inflation.

The article goes into detail, how micro-apartments can be $900 per month each in current market conditions, unsubsidized. But regulations force the cost upwards and the unit count downwards, so both the price goes up (or you do not build until median rent goes up) and the number of low-income people housed goes down.

But, hey, at least the tent city is not directly in your backyard.

I think we have some common ground in that we both think the best solution is not have a tent city in the first place. Homelessness comes with a whole host of other problems that microhousing can't actually solve - like the fact that most homeless people have a hard time applying for housing by virtue of the fact that they have no prior address.

So, maybe the better question is: how do we do that?

Between walking, bike, bike share, car2go, uber, lyft, zipcar, busses, and the light rail, and upcoming self driving car services... Why do i need a car again?

No, but I can expect them to suffer if they do have one. Our current car system is unsustainable, and is a luxury. We really need to get rid of it long-term. I'd love to have a boat in my front yard, but it's too hard to find a place to park it. Should boat-owners have the right to a boat spot?

The problem, and the reason why parking requirements exist, is because people externalize that "suffering" on others. They decide they need a car anyway, and then they park that car on other streets, or they park overnight illegally on private property, etc.

It's not like parking requirement laws fell from the sky one day on a bunch of stone tablets. They didn't exist a hundred years ago, but were created and became ubiquitous across the U.S. as cars became more popular because there were such problems when parking is in short supply.

Now, maybe there are some alternative solutions -- maybe you could get people to sign some sort of blood oath that they'll never own a car while living at a particular address, or maybe we could pass laws that prohibit cars from being registered to addresses that lack parking...? (Maybe we could require that in order to register a car, you have to prove you have the right to a place to park it, and stop treating parking as a public good?) But until there's some better solution, the underlying problem that parking requirements were created to solve still exists.

People are very, very good at sharing their suffering with everyone else and society is typically worse off for it. It takes a lot of work to prevent that from happening.

They usually are designed to produce neighborhoods where no one ever needs to spend any time searching for a free parking space— which leads to a great deal of suffering for anyone not in an automobile, since such neighborhoods have vast expanses of surface parking that are completely inhospitable to human beings, and are very difficult to serve with public transit.

They also often require an amenity that is very expensive to produce (parking spaces, especially structured spaces) be provided for free, which incentivizes people to own cars and drive everywhere— exactly what we don't want in urban areas, since cars pollute a lot, are dangerous, and require huge amounts of scarce land to store and transport.

But that problem is still a luxury problem. It's not some fundamental right for people to own a car. If you want luxury benefits, you should have to pay luxury pricing. I'm not saying you shouldn't have the right to own a car, just that, like any luxury good, it shouldn't be cheap.

In Seattle there are many public transportation options. Sure, it could be much better, but it's still available and quite feasible to use.

Inadequate parking does have a negative impact on a neighborhood, and it's not the only way to nudge society in the direction of driving less.

Sure, there are better ways to push people, and that's now why I want less parking, that's just a pain-point we shouldn't be trying to fix.

> Unsustainable or not, most people do have a car, and it is a major nuisance when there is inadequate parking around housing.

So? A nuisance that those people can avoid if they chose too. Sure, they have a right to own a car, but there's not right to avoid nuisance.

EDIT: Are you able to reply to my other post now? I think HN has a timer that limits how often you can reply, but I could be wrong.

I take it you haven't spent much time in non-downtown Seattle?

If people can't even store a bike anywhere, that's a problem. And as the business case for these pods is that they're for people who can't afford a bigger place, they're unlikely to want to pay for an uber that regularly.

I've lived in Seattle since 1991. I've lived without a car since 2005. It was harder then than now. These days we have Zipcar, Car2Go, Uber, Light Rail, marginally better Metro. Walking and biking are always options. It's getting to the point in Seattle, as in other cities, where having a car is a cultural choice rather than a necessity.

Zipcar is great for the days or evening where you need to be in the car culture. It's way cheaper than actually owning one in Seattle, and you have a lot of models to choose from including some nice Audis, BMWs, etc.

This doesn't describe everyone but lots of people who live in cities like Seattle tend to want to get out of the city pretty regularly.

And to your broader point. Right. Developers can't build housing without parking on the grounds that people don't really need to have a car in Seattle. And good luck renting apartments that can't have a car registered to them. (Though people would just find a way to cheat I suppose.)

The fact that the city of Seattle has legislated a need for off-street parking in new construction does not mean that the market actually demands it in any way. Further, the skyrocketing price of housing in Seattle shows pretty clearly that folks will take whatever they can get, parking or no.

Pity it's not shared.

The solution to unaffordable housing certainly begins with building a lot more housing.

[1] http://www.metro.tokyo.jp/ENGLISH/ABOUT/HISTORY/history03.ht...

What I do see is a lot of what amounts to saying that "those people" should just go somewhere else. As long as that somewhere else isn't one where I have to notice their homelessness.

But yes. We have to build upwards. In cities where building vertically benefits the well-off (as in NY), and where it's profitable to do so, it happens. But note that it only generates high-end and expensive housing stock (excluding rules that require including "affordable" housing, which based on the examples I've seen seems to mean "affordable to a family making $120k/yr instead of the $500k you need to afford the market rate units in this development".)

Will adding more housing stock at the top decrease prices at the bottom via market effects? Yes and no. If the availability does trickle down, it takes a very long time.

Here in downtown Brooklyn there's a temporary glut of high-end housing added in the last 5 years. But compared to the number of people added to what was already a tight rental (and sales) market in the city 10-15 years ago, the number of units added is laughable. We're talking almost a million more people living in the city but something like 20-30,000 units (enough to house 50-100k people) having been added.

So what happens? This oversupply will likely last about 5 years. The only real effect will be 1-2 year 10-15% concessions on rent in the new rental buildings until they can fill them up. People looking for high-end rentals will be able to take 24 hours instead of 3 minutes to commit to a specific apartment after viewing it, and might be able to get it if they wait an hour or two to apply instead of contacting the management company within 5 minutes of the listing going live. In a couple years, the high end rental market will go back to its normal cut-throat self.

Maybe the gentrification of Crown Heights will be delayed by a couple years, but I doubt it. This trickle of new housing at $2500-4000 per person per month isn't nearly enough to keep up with the constantly expanding demand for units under $1200 per person per month.

The for-sale units in the crazy high-end buildings will sit vacant until enough new Chinese billionaires are minted who want to park their money outside the country, and then they'll continue to sit vacant indefinitely anyway because they're investments rather than homes. The ones in only normally high end buildings will also sit vacant for a year or so and then generate a tiny bit less profit than the developers were hoping for. But sales don't really factor into the affordable housing market here anyway. If you're having trouble affording rent, buying is unimaginable.

But as long as demand at the high end is unmet the people with money will outbid everyone else and drive up the price of "affordable" housing if that's the only thing they can find. Nobody wants to pay $2,000 for a shitty apartment. But the price of shifty apartments will well rise north of $2,000 if that's the only thing you can find walking distance to Amazon.

I think there is so much pent up demand for housing close to work that you can double housing stock and still not make a dent in prices, so it's easy to conclude that simply building more does not lower costs. I think we need to build a LOT more if we are ever going to have truly affordable housing near city centers.

The affordable housing rules you mention are an example of an attempt to legislate our way out of the problem, and obviously they haven't worked. I'd say the reason they haven't worked is because they don't address the real issue: to have cheaper housing we need to reduce the barriers to building more housing.

At least that's my personal view. I'm not an economist or a city planner or any kind of expert, just a rando on the Internet. :)

What do you do when land prices and the obstacles to construction posed by high density (such as not being able to store large quantities of raw materials or keep a bunch of trucks on site) make development costs prohibitive for affordable housing? What do you do about the NIMBYs who are afraid the new skyscraper will block their view?

And why would a developer choose to build in a cheap area for lower rents when they can get higher ROI on everything but the land costs if they build luxury housing in an expensive area?

I'm not convinced that the biggest obstacles to affordable housing in the city are about zoning or safety regulations. (Some of which, btw, ARE necessary for the sake of, yanno, people not dying.)

I would argue this is a false choice: very few developers have the capital to build luxury housing in expensive areas.

For example, I know a guy who builds lower-end housing in Philadelphia (among other places). He would never consider building anything in Manhattan, simply because he can't afford to tie up the capital it would take to build even a townhouse-scale project. Lower-end is his game, period - only a small handful of mega-developers get to make the kind of choice you propose.

By the way, he lives in New York, and logically/logistically it would make more sense for him to build in New York than Philadelphia, but the economics of lower-end development in New York are prohibitive. Once in a while a good opportunity will come along here, but to pay the bills and not be idle he has to look elsewhere.

> I'm not convinced that the biggest obstacles to affordable housing in the city are about zoning or safety regulations. (Some of which, btw, ARE necessary for the sake of, yanno, people not dying.)

Yes, I totally agree on safety regulations (I don't think I cited them as an issue, did I?). I don't think they are a primary driver of the cost of building in New York vs. other cities. Logistics of operating in the nation's densest city, yes; safety regulations unique to New York, probably no.

Zoning, on the other hand... I think it's a bigger restriction than most people realize. My favorite illustration of the zoning issue is this article: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-p...

Net result is that a developer can profit quite a bit more from luxury housing than affordable housing. If you are a developer (which presumably means a for-profit business) and have a choice between the two, you naturally decide to go after the higher profit option. Can't say I'd blame them either.

This is where incentives need to be provided to balance the profit equation. If they could make the same amount of profit, or gain other business benefits, I imagine the problem would start solving itself.

That may be true if the limiting factor is the number of developers - they will only develop the highest-value properties. But in a city like New York the limiting factor is not developer capacity, at least not that I have ever heard. Developers are effectively constrained by the number of profitable building sites, not their capacity to put up new buildings. And, in turn, the number of profitable building sites is dependent on not just the cost of labor and materials, but the cost of navigating city planning, obtaining permits, etc.

Don't forget that land is cheaper to acquire in less desirable neighborhoods, and it is also generally cheaper to build there due to lower existing density (which eases logistics by making it easier to get equipment in and out, allows more on-site storage, etc.). The development that maximizes returns is not always the development that maximizes revenue - cost and time also matter. And there are more developers who can handle building a 10-story building in the Bronx than can tackle an 80-story mega-project in Manhattan. Plus, a "cheap" neighborhood in NYC is often as expensive as an "expensive" neighborhood in most US cities, so if developers are willing to build in Milwaukee or Cleveland, they should be willing to build in the Bronx.

But in a world where the administrative cost of starting a relatively small project is overwhelming vs. the potential returns, then those smaller projects in lower-price neighborhoods simply won't get built.

Your moral priorities are screwed up. It's the ultimate "let them eat cake" moment of local housing policy. "Well, if they don't want to spend an extra $500/month on a mandatory car parking space, they should just live in a cardboard box on the street."

That goes hand in hand with how another poster above commented about how regulations are written to look like they are for the common good but are only good for those writing the laws. And when you exist in a system where money buys politicians and the will of the people has no effective influence on politics, you end up using regulation to stop competition.

I want to see one city who bucks the profiteering and greed and just dezones everything and just lets people build. Yes, you would need to be more responsible as someone moving there to know if the building is safe or not, but really you have always paid for that through taxes and increased home prices, so paying someone to appraise your potential properties or more likely having general agencies that organically do it would be so much more preferrable to just preventing any innovation in the space at all in the name of NIMBYisms and market capture.

My personal favorite example is around the general population's opposition to school choice / voucher programs while based on the status quo the only people who have that choice now are the people with higher incomes.