Speaking of the SF Bay Area, we are subdivided into small interconnected towns who have the incentive to underbuild housing (https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/). 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. It’s more appropriate, and more democratic, to make land-use capacity planning at the regional level where more members of the economy can vote. (https://pedestrianobservations.com/2016/06/18/a-theory-of-zo...)

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

"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 think “overeducated, underemployed hipsters” would cover activists of many different political stripes. But I disagree that upzoning is desired mainly by people who want to live here due to their urban identity. Many of the people who stay in the Bay Area do so because their family is here. Many of the people who migrate to the Bay Area come for economic opportunities. And if you tell people to follow their parents’ “housing ladder,” I think it is also fair to recognize and fix the ways in which the ladder has stopped working in the Bay Area.

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 think “overeducated, underemployed hipsters” would cover activists of many different political stripes. But I disagree that upzoning is desired mainly by people who want to live here due to their urban identity."

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.

> 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.

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 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 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?

A city/town/neighborhood is part of a state and doesn't live in isolation. If you live in SF, your water comes from.... drum roll, Hetch Hetchy damn, which is a 3 h 49 min (177.7 mi) away.

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...

I think the lesson here is don't live in the desert... So your neighbors don't have to violate your rights

Expanding it, you're saying "If you can't self-sustain your residence from within an arbitrary municipal boundry, it's your own fault if others won't pipe water to you".

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 just looked up where my water supply is sourced from, and it's 30 miles. I don't live in a desert, or anything close to it.

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.

Right...

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.

My parents, less than an hour from where I live, the center of Atlanta, have well water. They live on a street that no ISP will service, unless you consider <50KBps and 50% packet loss for 60 dollars a month reasonable, if it decides to connect at all that day.

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

I live in upstate NY, USA. Lots of people have well water and septic tanks around here. Growing up in NH, USA lots of people there had wells and septic tanks, too.

I seriously doubt there's enough well/aquifer water in the US to sustain the entire US population for very long. As I understand it, many aquifers are being depleted right now and/or at serious risk of salination due to over usage. If you moved everyone else who gets their water from reservoirs to well/aquifers, there would be no chance.

Right, and the other side of that is that cities couldn't exist at all if we relied on well water alone. There isn't enough concentrated in one place, even if it were clean enough to avoid continuzous cholera outbreaks. Even in relatively wet parts of the country. New York for instance uses billions of gallons daily, piped in from upstate - and has had to for over a hundred years.

Upstate New York is in no danger of drying out - they get plenty of rainwater from lake effect storms and snows.

The point isn't that the area can't supply its own water, nor that upstate NY can't supply enough water for NYC. The point is that even in a water-rich region, a city like NYC (or even one the size of Albany) cannot support its population off well water. Thus the existence of modern economic centers is dependent on piping in water. Telling city dwellers that they should get their water from wells so as to avoid dependence on their neighbors for their water is an absurdity.

<raises hand> We have a well here in Montana. You need 10+ acres of land to do it that way though.

Well water is still common.

What? Many suburban homes in the US have wells on their property.

SF is not in the desert.

In terms of locally-available water, it really pretty much is. As is almost all of the U.S. starting a couple hundred miles west of the Mississippi River and the Pacific, the Northwest excepted.

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...

The problem is that its not just San Francisco - in a city like New York (which none would accuse of being affordable) you still have fairly decent options of living outside the city in at least somewhat affordable areas within halfway reasonable commute to jobs.

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

Problem is the problem is not limited to "San Francisco, or Malibu, or Los Gatos".

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.

A better compromise might be to put the counties in control over this rather than cities/towns or the state itself. County governments sit close enough to local to be more in-tune with local needs, while at the same time having a broad enough jurisdiction for its decisions to benefit the region as a whole rather than a specific city/town.

I agree with you - but we are increasingly moving toward a state where no community wants to grow or change esp in the Bay Area... which is not offering much for the next generation. Last I saw it’s something like 40% of those under 30 in CA live with their parents. Does it have any room to go up?

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

I mostly agree. But our system of government should also have checks and balances. I agree the locals should have a say, but they should not have complete unchecked power.

Japan has national housing policy and it works quite well. The problem with local control is that it's often easier for special interests to undermine democracy.