To give you some concrete examples; in Mountain View, adding a new unit of housing requires about $80k in impact fees and permit fees from the city, and the permits require bending over backward, since they're sometimes self conflicting. We've now banned natural gas, so homes have to be electric. The only way to heat electrically efficiently is heat pumps, but those are affected by noise ordinances, so it's tricky to place them. Solar panels are mandatory, but you need to pay for a permit to install them. Electric car chargers are mandatory. The fire code, city code, and state building codes conflict at times, so you sometimes have the fire inspection, then change stuff around for the city inspector, etc.
Everybody knows how broken it is, so everyone cheats, and inspectors sign off on temporary kludges, knowing full well they'll be changed right after inspection, but the i's must be dotted, and the t's must be crossed. But hey, "we're" doing something!
Sheesh. I wish tar and feathering of politicians made a return to modern political discourse.
Renters and people who appreciate density need to show up if we’re going to counteract that.
The local residents show up in droves to oppose housing, particularly the home owners, with the arguments being "the infrastructure can't take any more". They never hold the city to its responsibility or providing infrastructure, instead, use the bad infrastructure as an excuse to stifle development.
It's a backwards, topsy turvy world here. City governments are meant to serve people, not rule over them.
> The local residents show up in droves to oppose housing
If renters are the majority, why are they not voting out city government representatives who don't support upvoting and density?
In general the story is broad and diffuse support for more housing, tightly concentrated and intense opposition to particular projects. There are many more NIMBYs than BANANA.
Wait, really? Just for heat or also in the kitchen? Electric stove tops fucking suck. Ugh.
Inductive cooktops are pretty good - I’ve grown to prefer it over gas.
One neat thing at my girlfriend’s place was that there was an inductive circle with two possible diameters of heat which seems neat for a gigantic stock pot.
But switching quickly between heats seems like it’d require you to have two “burners” going at once.
At the end of the day I’m not sure if it’d really affect my cooking which I love to do but probably isn’t three Michelin stars or anything, but it’s the first I’ve heard of a preference for electric.
Remember when doctors used to smoke during your exam? That’s how future generations are going to look back at our fossil fuel use.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/11/10/climate-chang...
Natural gas is used quite a bit for cooking and home heating, and we need to phase it out where ever possible.
Which means it's only an emissions win if the electricity is carbon neutral or the multiplier for a heat pump compensates for the generation/transmission losses.
However, the city regulators, like I said above, are stupid, so you often can't get a permit for a heat pump, because of noise ordinances. These things sound like an A/C compressor, so you can only install it if there is enough distance to your neighbors, and that's usually not possible in newer, denser developments, precisely the kinds where natural gas is banned, so you are now forced to use resitive heating, which uses 3-4x as much power as a heat pump, and costs more than 3x as much, due to our tiered electric prices (additional units cost more than early units)
You can't blame the older generation for voting in the interest of maximizing their home values and low taxes for themselves. But you also have to admit how unfair that is to the younger generation who have difficulty finding affordable housing and have to take on a greater property tax burden.
> Sheesh. I wish tar and feathering of politicians made a return to modern political discourse.
Why blame the politicians for doing what their voters wanted? Why not tar and feather the voters?
What we should think about is whether it's a legitimate use of power to limit what an entire city can do with its property. The nice, dense areas of the world didn't start out that way, they grew over time as new replaced old. We've stopped that cycle here, and the politicians are trying to freeze things as they are. We do indeed have a lot of home owners resistant to all change, but those aren't the majority. I'm a grey haired home owner here, and I go to council meetings to support increased density, increased property rights, etc.
New Step 1 - Have a multiplier for property taxes based on the number of properties owned. If you own and live in 1 property, you pay the base rate. If you live in one property and own x properties (where x > 1), you pay the base rate * x
Step 2 - Profit for municipalities, affordable housing for citizens
What a shitshow...
Freezing rents or property taxes just delays the negative effects and perversely make it harder to implement a long lasting solution. Frozen property taxes lead to high house prices which lead to high property taxes on the next assessment. At some point the theoretical property taxes become so large it is no longer possible to unfreeze property taxes because home owners cannot afford them. The threat of high property taxes would force NIMBYs to optimize for variables other than their home value. The goal would be to provide as much housing as is necessary to prevent yourself from being priced out of your neighborhood.