Reminds me of that lady in SF who opposed a housing development recently because she said it blocked the sunlight to her zucchini garden. Now many YIMBY groups are adopting the zucchini as their logo...

I mean I empathize with the YIMBY point of view -- I make about $56,00 a year as staff at a state university. That's right on the edge in the bay area. There will come a time when I can no longer afford to live here. I'm OK with that. That's how the market works. I don't think you have a right to live in San Francisco, or Malibu, or Los Gatos, etc. if you can't afford to live there. Everyone can't own a Ferrari. Everyone doesn't get to live where they want to.

"It is ironic to tell service workers that, in the name of democracy, they can’t vote for the councils who decide the zoning in any of the cities where they spend their economic lives because they happen to live across a town border."

I don't think this is a problem at all. These people are pursuing a very rational arbitrage strategy between place of work and place of living - and it is paying off for them. It is not the "service workers" who are clamoring for less regulation in trendy housing markets - it is overeducated, underemployed hipsters whose self identity is tied to living in a certain type of place and whose life script no longer accommodates the steps their parents took to climb up the housing ladder.

If fancy coffee and cute stores are so important that one would sacrifice the basic building blocks of wealth building and family stability then so be it - but I am not giving up the progressive wins of the past[1] to enable this (bad) strategy.

[1] Which, in my neighborhood, are quite profound. The Pt Reyes National Seashore, the Mt. Tam watershed and accompanying open spaces, agricultural zoning throughout west marin, etc. Remember that all of these were all achievements of the progressive left.

I agree that parkland should be preserved. But communities that preserve a lot of park land should be even more eager to upzone residential land to accommodate regional growth needs. If a city wants to preserve land from development but refuses to upzone to make the remaining housing accessible, then this is indistinguishable from an exclusive gated community and I don’t think I would call it progressive.

Edit: Also, I don’t think I agree with your “very rational arbitrage strategy” point. If my city provides jobs, amenities, and increasingly upscale housing while a town an hour away provides housing for the service workers, I don’t think the existence of the arbitraging town would reduce the moral responsibilities of the city in any way.

I'm not so much referring to upzoning which, in general, I am in favor of.

I am referring to the much more general notion that I deserve to live anywhere at prices that preserve my relaxed lifestyle and refined tastes. This is false.

I am open minded about housing being a basic human right. However, I am flabbergasted by the ridiculous notion that anyone deserves to live in any particular place.

"If a city wants to preserve land from development but refuses to upzone to make the remaining housing accessible, then this is indistinguishable from an exclusive gated community and I don’t think I would call it progressive."

You're correct. It is an exclusive community and it's not necessarily progressive in that manner. There is a place for exclusive communities and they are not necessarily negative.

This kind of thinking is what leads to insulated wealthy neighbourhoods with good schools, amenities and low pollution. If everyone with access to nice stuff thinks this way, they just push poor people into the only other areas which are left, like down near the local power plant, where the air and water and soil have been ruined.

This sort of shit is how Flint happens and how "bad neighbourhoods" stay bad neighbourhoods for generation upon generation. That is, until some investor sees an opportunity to gentrify and pushes the poor people to a new and shittier part of town if not completely out of town altogether.

I dont think i saw anyone argue that. Do you have a source?

>> (I live in Marin County, in the SFBA, and I employ quite a few service workers from Sonoma/CC/Napa counties)

How long are some of your service workers commutes?

Now image if the people living where the pipes come along, decided not to have them in their backyard..... because of democracy, they vote to tear them away.

No water for you....

Democracy can't exist without limits, otherwise you run the risk of 51% controller what the other 49% do in every way...

Zoning laws are restriction on the rights of what can be build in a property, and they should exist in a Macro scale,

Otherwise, your neighbors might decide against water pipes to come in your house, because democracy...

That's just not how the world should work. Every major city in the country gets its water and power from other areas outside their town boundry.

I presume you feel the same about power? Again, I looked up my closest major power source, and it's a nuclear plant about 30 miles away the other direction.

You realize that unless you're getting your water from a well in your backyard it's being piped from somewhere?

And the backyard well option is used virtually nowhere in the developed world, and vanishingly few places with robust economic opportunity.

They don't have natural gas lines either. Or sewer lines. You'd be quite surprised how things still are in some places.

San Francisco itself has next to no indigenous lakes or (fresh)waterways. Lake Merced, Laguna Honda, and Mountain Lake. A handful of springs. Already in the 19th century, water was in limited supply and brought in from the Peninsula. Much of San Francisco (the Richmond and Sunset districts) were sand dunes. The part that wasn't was in large part wetlands (Marina, Financial District, SoMa, Bayview).

Rainfall ranges from about 12 in (30 cm) in a dry year to about 30 in (75 cm) in wet, but that's strongly concentrated in the winter months, meaning you need a large amount of water storage for the summer (and, again: no lakes).

If you look at a population density map of the U.S., or one with higher levels of detail showing urbanisations, you note that the pattern devolves from very regular in the east to almost a desert-island scattering in the west. Much of that is accounted for by water availablility, and the water shadow of cities. Look at the map below, which shows the Colorado River, and realise that Los Angeles's watershed reaches very nearly to Denver. In many ways, it is effectively preventing any other cities from emerging throughout that region (not that several haven't tried).

http://www.ancientrails.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/US_Po...

A precipitation average map shows very nearly the same distribution. (Not precisely, of course, but close.)

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/88/51/cc/8851cc3ed4f7e048b217...

in SFBA it's almost entirely either unaffordable and/or dangerously crime infested and the semi-affordable options that aren't require an insane commute.

While there are some topological issues, the main differences between NYC and SFBA are transit infrastructure + density.

SFBA[0]: 8.75m people at 859/square-mile density.

Greater NYC[1]: 23.7m people at 1,781.3/square-mile density.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area

When Google/Facebook moved into Santa Monica and Playa Vista, house prices in near by cities shot up like 100% to 150% in about 4 - 5 years.

https://www.google.com/amp/www.ocregister.com/2017/06/23/how...

So many aspects of our society seem forced to either-or situations when some compromise would benefit all parties more.

Land value tax, please.

Granny gets to stay in her house and the market isn't distorted by perverse incentives. A win for everyone!

Moreover, granny might be a paper millionaire based on the current valuation of a principal asset but otherwise be eating cat food.

Why doesn't she just cash out? I think the below linked blog post has some insight into how each asset of a person isn't an isolated atom but represents a structure of complements.

For example, maybe Granny can't drive and walks down to the community center every day to help immigrant kindergarteners learn to code. If she moved maybe she loses exercise and a reason to live and her lives and those of others are negatively impacted in ways money from selling a house can't fix. Or maybe, since Halloween is coming up, she is a sadistic cat killer and if she sells her house and moves the whole neighborhood is overrun with feral felines reducing everyone's property value due to fears of cat scratch fever.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/10/sel...

> Your feelings don’t matter

They do when the argument begins and ends with tugging at my heart strings. And I honestly don’t see these Jarvis arguments from the 70s holding up for much longer. Not when everyone else is hurting.

1) an empty lot, 2) a single family home, and 3) a 30 floor residential tower,

presuming they're equally-sized lots with equal land value.

If granny's taxes are high, the answer is to put her land to productive use like by adding rental units instead of growing zucchini. Or sell and buy better land for hobby zucchini gardening (or grow it on the roof of her new tower).

Regulations don't allow her to add rental units? Then it's the regulations that are bad, and finally land value taxes are aligning land owners' and renters' interests instead of dividing them.

Faux compassion for granny is how prop 13 got passed though, so sure, people fall for this shit.

Perhaps not in California, but it's worth noting that some places, England being among the forefront in this[0], do recognize the right to light is an important property right.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_light

For Georgia: https://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/2010/title-44/chapter-9...

For a well-functioning market that doesn't get bothered by protests and other political machinations, the government needs to provide an easy mechanism to pay for whatever it is you care about. Any market which is restricted to folks who can afford high-cost lawyers and custom legal contracts, that market will be inefficient. Saying, "put a building-height covenant on it" in effect means "let's spend money and time on political advertisements and protests so neither of us are happy."

Compromises can only be found where all parties are to gain something. If one group are to gain something - housing in this case - and whatever they can offer will reduce negative impact to others - local residents - there is simply no compromise to be found because whatever the state of neighborhood was when they moved in, it was the best compromise in their view.

But the radius within which homeowners gain is wider than the radius in which homeowners bear inconveniences (e.g. shade on their garden). So of course it's rational for a homeowner to be pro commercial development in their city and near their neighbourhood (as it would increase demand for housing, and hence increase property value), but against commercial development near enough to affect traffic and noise levels.

While increasing property value may seem rational to probably the majority, but given certain circumstances, preferences and goals the opposite can be easily argued to be rational. With modern metropolis lifestyle of changing home every some years based on workplace location, family size, etc. one is always in the market and increased real property value is quite favorable economically. For some groups changes in property value are seen as irrelevant in face of non-economic values.

OT, but:

"Taking actions toward increasing property value are only rational with intention to put the property into market"

No, even if you intend to die in your current home, increasing property values are great if (i) you can borrow against the value, to fund current expenditure and (ii) property taxes don't go up as a result (yay California).

"lifestyle of changing home every some years based on workplace location, family size, etc. one is always in the market and increased real property value is quite favorable"

I think that depends on whether you're trading up or trading down. If you want to buy a place double the size of your current one (e.g. to raise a family), then you'd want prices to be lower. As the differential between the sale price of your existing home, and the purchase price of the new one, would be lower.

Exactly, certain things can be argued to be either advantageous or disadvantageous, depending on mindset/worldview, focus duration (long-term vs short-term goals), focus population (single individual vs average/median of population), etc. and these are core to public policy making.

And that is my point: attempts to maximize quality of life for a single individual/family for a few years naturally lead to NIMBYs. And they are not inherently wrong - annoying with different focus (e.g. median citizen after few decades), but not wrong.

Almost all the jobs I see in Topeka are in retail "Sales Associates" = glorified title for minimum wage jobs. https://www.google.com/search?q=Topeka,+KS+jobs&oq=Topeka,+K...

How does this cabbie intend to make a good wage so he can continue to live in his huge house? Or does he not care, since he bought a HUGE house for $ 95K -- assuming it was all cash. If not, he has a mortgage to pay like everyone else, once a month.

Lawrence is the home of the University of Kansas, and is only 30 minutes down the road from Topeka. Quite a few opportunities there, including startups. Kansas City is about 40 minutes away down the turnpike with the opportunities of a 2+ million metro area.

No, he's not going to make the sort of money you do in California, but he's not moving to some economic wasteland either. He won't have too much trouble pulling in 50-70,000 in some white collar job and, considering the cost of living, he'll be quite comfortable. Probably more comfortable than a 100k job in SF or LA.

This was an Uber driver... you think Uber drivers are making 100k? You really think an Uber driver is gonna find a 50-70k white collar job in Kansas?

Also, you can't honestly believe that the ONLY jobs in Topeka are "Sales Associate" jobs. Your extensive 10 second google search was probably not all encompassing.

For a double income family that’s right around the federal minimum wage.

Now minimum wage jobs don’t actually support a house of that price due to health care, child care, crap hours, etc. but the idea that there aren’t jobs that allow you to easily buy that house in Topeka is ridiculous. To the point where I want to say “leave California” to you.

I was more expecting "number of job openings available" to be the problem, rather than the pay for any given job opening.

Though, admittedly, I don't live in the US and don't know its geography very well, so until I looked it up just now I was assuming Kansas was part of the infamous US "rust belt" where towns were depopulating and there were fewer job openings than people. I guess that's only happening toward the east coast?

I'm an Australian, and the American midwest/countryside is quite appealing to me. (Cities... not so much.)

This is probably why your company can't retain starting grads. Sure, the CoL may be lower, but the vast majority of young grads want something with more hustle and bustle.

Source: I was a young grad who lived & worked in a small town about an hour from the nearest interstate, but moved to a metro area after a year in that area.

Manufacturing used to be concentrated in these areas because it was cheaper to ship raw materials (especially heavy and bulky ones like coal or iron ore) in and manufactured goods out over water to the ports and population centers that at the time were heavily concentrated on the east coast.

As an added bonus, the region was conveniently (and thus inexpensively) close to the coal producing regions of Appalachia that produced the fuel that powered the factories.

Once railways augmented the port network, the Great Lakes port towns were some of the first and best connected to the rail system because they were already so important economically, and rail connections reinforced their position.

Especially because even with rail you would save days and dollars getting your goods from Chicago to NY compared to the time it would take to ship them from Topeka to NY - and the same applied to acquiring raw materials.

Rail also allowed towns in the region that weren't directly on the Great Lakes or the Ohio or Mississippi rivers to participate in the boom by building spur lines. Since steel production in particular was concentrated in the region, industries that relied on steel had incentive to concentrate there, near their suppliers.

The de-emphasis of boat and rail for shipping, and their replacement by trucks in the second half of the 20th century wasn't the deciding factor in the collapse of these towns' economies, but it didn't help either because it eroded their existing advantages.

Edited to add (though this is already long): the erosion of job opportunity in the US for the past couple decades has been occurring everywhere other than a few major cities such as New York and SF (and a few outliers like Pittsburgh, which was one of the hardest hit rust belt cities but has recently rebounded as a center for the medical and bioengineering industries).

Cities outside the rust belt (including those in Kansas) have also seen an erosion in opportunity as manufacturing and other mid-skill jobs have left the country or been automated away or further concentrated in the major coastal cities.

The rust belt was just the first region to be hit visibly by the problem, as much as 20 years before the impact became obvious in the rest of the country. It had farther to fall, too, being not just a stable economic region but a powerhouse.

My life is exponentially better. I hate the politics here but I hated them in SF as well. Seems there's no middle ground for someone that's moderate, just extremes on both sides.

My mortgage is roughly the same as a parking space in SF, and yes I have to live in Oklahoma. I'll cry myself to sleep on my yearly european vacations, rental properties, retirement accounts and working every other year at most while doing my own self funded startups.

Does derefr really think that there are no jobs in the capital city of Kansas that pay enough to afford a house under 100k? Not a single job?

Lol.

Edit: Ha ha downvotes for pointing out that high paying jobs exist outside of California. Nice.

Derefr didn't imply that in the slightest, and it's rather uncharitable of you to point it out as "coastal elitism."

The question asked was, "but what do jobs in Topeka pay, and how many of them are there?," which to me sounds quite a reasonable question.

So that's why I downvoted you.

And you didn't actually contribute anything of value with that comment; of course 100k jobs exist outside of California.

>"Affordable housing" implies that there is a job at the destination that can pay a wage that can pay the mortgage

seems to imply disbelief that people can live well outside major cities. I'd prefer to be charitable, as the GP has stated elsewhere that they are not American and didn't know, but I've seen that line of thought here enough to understand why the parent could get defensive.

Take Kansas. If in theory I'm making 100k and we're playing the "low taxes" game I'd probably be fine financially, but I think it would come at the cost of... well, a few things. School quality, for one- if I have kids are they going to be better educated in NJ/NY (where I am now) than Kansas?

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education (note the sortable columns in the table)

Of course I'm happy to point out that Nebraska ranks higher than Kansas on either scale.

Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, and yes Kansas

Sounds like the issue is that our cities aren't liveable in the first place.

Wait till you have kids. Turns out it doesn't matter whether you can see a post-alt-rock band in a small venue, it's past bedtime anyways, and spongebob on youtube works everywhere.

People with kids and responsibilities have different concerns from those who don't. Whether what I ate or what entertainment I consume are fashionable enough doesn't even hit the radar -- I'm happy if I can eat anything in peace or get any downtime whatsoever for entertainment. You'll be there one day.

The set of people living in the burbs with families are generally living for their kids first and themselves a distant second. Consuming more interesting culture is great and all but it's still just consumption. Even if you're producing art or music, that's something for people with a lot of time for it unless they're doing it professionally. (and lots of great music has been created by bored suburban kids, FWIW).

The parent poster is right: most of the USA is cultural wasteland. It's also largely an entrepreneurial wasteland. New value creation is concentrated in the same hot spots as new culture creation.

This is always true everywhere to some extent but it's gotten much worse over my life time. I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio and I remember being a teen and an early twenty something there. You knew you weren't New York but there was a sense that things were possible. I worked on some pretty cutting edge software stuff around web and Internet there in the late 90s. Today it's an opium addiction ward and everyone who wants to do anything leaves. Meanwhile the "alpha cities" are experiencing uncontrollable real estate hyperinflation since everyone who wants to do anything must move there. This real estate hyperinflation problem is a symptom of something much larger.

The majority of the USA (by land area) is in a permanent malaise and has been since ~2000-2001. I quite frankly find it terrifying. It's a precursor to fascism, totalitarian socialism, or dissolution.

Teens do drugs and play video games even in your shining coastal beacons of civilization.

>It's also largely an entrepreneurial wasteland ... Meanwhile the "alpha cities" are experiencing uncontrollable real estate hyperinflation since everyone who wants to do anything must move there If you're trying to become a millionaire making trash like Uber for banana hammocks, sure. Small businesses do just fine outside of dying small rural towns. Midwestern cities have plenty of work in my experience, it's just not the sexy "let's trick ourselves into thinking we're changing the world with our app" kind of work.

I mean, you're not wrong that there's a malaise going around the country in a seriously troubling way. We live in an era where remote work is very doable for many of us and there's no good reason we have to all live in coastal cities. My reflex is to blame the VCs for this, but there's plenty of other businesses that also don't do it for whatever reason. IMO this mindset needs to change, and quickly.

I agree about VCs. In my experience the coastal cities do not have a monopoly on talent but they do have a strong monopoly on investment capital for new businesses.

I think it's a branding thing too. If you were an angel and saw a company on AngelList would you be more likely to fund them if they were from:

(a) Mountain View, California

(b) Los Angeles, California

(c) New York, New York

(d) Cincinnati, Ohio

(e) Louisville, Kentucky

I bet you picked (a).

Uhh, I think we live in very different realities. Drugs and video games are proper subcultures in their own right. It has nothing to do with where you live and more to do with your identity.

Source: I bought a house in one of these neighborhoods recently because it was so cheap. While there was absolutely nothing near me to do, going downtown still only took 15 minutes, so I had absolutely no problem with life there. I had my silence and my work-from-home office in my comedically large, cheap house and then if I wanted to catch a show or get dinner I would hop in the car and go downtown to meet up with friends.

I actually live in Boston now and am paying twice as much as my mortgage for a third of the space. Not an exaggeration. And it actually takes me twice as long to get out and do some things because Boston is so congested with traffic. Sadly, I think by the time I ever return to Austin, I'm sure it will have seen enough growth that it will be much the same cost to get culture from my suburban house.

I would find it very hard not to have a supermarket or a corner shop nearby for when I run out of this or that and it isn't time for the weekly shopping. And I would think it's an excellent small business opportunity.

For others that have existed for longer, sometimes the zoning seems to just be residential forever so sometimes you have to drive for a bit to get to the nearest "stuff". I think that's pretty standard for suburbia.

And then for yet others sometimes they're just too far out and too small of developments to make building a supermarket just for them financially viable.

So the question is, how do you make the best of what you've got to work with? My wife and I moved from downtown DC to just outside the Annapolis city limits. We probably do more culture/community stuff now, because thanks to Uber and a low cost of living, we can easily justify trying those things out.

If I could find a comparable job in Topeka, I'd totally try that out. Yuppie cultural amenities are everywhere these days. Yeah, it won't be New York, but only New York is New York, but somehow the rest of the country manages to get by with their second-string versions of things.

The 1,500 mile commute sounds like rather a pain, though.