From the article: "“Low-income people tend to own cars that are in disrepair and ride motorcycles adding to the noise of a ‘lights out at 8 p.m. community,’” Marylyn Rinaldi, a neighboring condominium owner, wrote in 2011 in a letter to the City Council that was later cited in a lawsuit over the project." Nimbyism at its finest.

It may be, but there is a behavioral difference in different economic environments —though even within lower income communities many people who are forced to live there “put up with” these quality of life issues because they don’t have the ability to afford to live in communities that observe these standards. Not all that different from people complaining about the loudness of living next to college student rentals on Friday’s and weekends.

Truth be told I had a loud muffler back when I could barely afford my share of a three way apt rental. Nowadays I would find it hard to tolerate the noise I caused back then. But that was a diff neighborhood and it was accepted.

Declaring that low-income people won't obey noise ordinances is extremely classist in my view. Yes, tell residents before they move in that the area has strict noise ordinances, and then hand out tickets for violators. But don't block affordable housing simply because it "might happen".

I'd like to agree -and in principle I do, just not in practice. In my case, I didn't have a loud muffler because I liked it. It was rusted through and I could not afford the repair. It had to wait. Ordinance or not didn't influence my choice. That's different from the guy who opens the throttle on his wannabe Harley as he accelerates from every stop sign on the street at 10 and 11PM... He does it just because... he's an...

Still, you must concede that the parade of "rusty muffler" arguments are a silly compared to a legitimate housing crisis. Not everything our neighbors/family/friends do makes us happy. And hey, they might have a rusty muffler, but maybe they're less snobbish and more friendly. So while it's totally reasonable to be worried about traffic and school crowding, I feel people should at least try a bit harder to shrug their shoulders about the little things and give it a chance.

I can see a system where you build where land is affordable, you bring transit there and you have buckets of units. Units for families, units for college kids, units for singles and you stratify the units so that like people end up with like people. Those who like quiet get quiet neighbors, those who like noise get noisy neighbors. Mix climbers with climbers and losers with other losers. You don't need groups that drag down others dragging down people who have a chance and you want climbers helping others.

This won't work in the US for various reasons, but it may work in other places where they can move people accordingly.

People disapprove of everything that involves "segregation" of different sub-cultures, even when that segregation is mutually beneficial. The American ideal is a spatially-uniform melting pot.

I’m not so sure people in Eastern Europe or parts of Africa and Asia would have an issue with this kind of stratification, but you may be right, it might go against cultural norms.

Motorbike noise is quite real. Hopefully electric motorbikes will grow more common over time and cut down on this widespread nuisance.

Stock motorcycles aren't noisy. Crack down on the fools who install straight pipes and insist on gunning it through neighborhoods at night.

Just a thought, but several of my motorbike-owning friends tell me the noise generated from the bike reminds those in larger vehicles of their presence.

"loud pipes save lives"

I don't necessarily agree with it, but that's the common refrain yes.

Why shouldn't a community be able to decide that they want quiet nights?

It's more the sneering, condescending tone of the comment that I thought was jaw-dropping. Sure, noise ordinances are reasonable. But labeling poor people as loud - and thus undesirable - is not okay. I can't believe I even had to explain this to be honest.

what percent of "low-income people" own motorcycles? what would the occupants of 10 apartments have to do such that a small city would no longer be said to be able to have "quiet nights" that could not be enforced against by any method other than excluding the apartments completely?

ooh, I'm gonna go with "a lot". Because motorcycles are a lot cheaper to buy, own, and maintain that cars. And a lot of them don't even require licenses in the US (49cc and smaller, if I'm not mistaken).

It’s the expensive Harley’s that are the most expensive AND loud, not the little scooters.

If you think scooters aren't loud then you've probably only heard the ones ridden by hipsters and software developers.

In a quiet neighborhood you can often clearly hear a 50cc 2-stroke within about a mile range.

motorcycle owners are wealthier on average (this is really easy to google). I don't see really any motorcycles or scooters at all in poor neighborhoods. They generally have beater cars or no vehicle at all.

A cheap used car provides a lot more utility than an equivalently priced used motorcycle so that's what most people tend to buy if they can only have one vehicle.

Cars do have more utility than motorcycles, but where I live (college town in American midwest) there are many poor people who drive small, cheap motorcycles. Speculation on why:

<50cc scooters are subject to different -- usually lower -- registration, insurance, inspection, and licensing requirements than cars.

State-minimum insurance for my cheap (KBB ~$1000) used (+200K miles) car would be about $700/year. Similarly minimal insurance for a 2010 Honda Ruckus would be $100/year. (I just checked Geico.)

Small motorcycles consume a lot less gasoline than cars, especially old, cheap ones being driven in-city.

Spare parts for scooters can be purchased and shipped cheaply, and assembled in a minimum of space with cheap hand tools.

Scooters don't require a full parking space to store. They can be stashed against signs, at bike racks, next to doors, in tiny alleys, or any other free spot. Living with other people? You don't need to worry about blocking the driveway, or being blocked yourself. Work downtown? You can get away without buying a pass at a parking garage.

The number of places in the US where the situation you mentioned is reasonable and public transit is not also good enough to go car-less is very small. Carrying groceries on a moped is doable but a pain. Commuting on one in the winter isn't exactly fun either. Carrying kids on a scooter is a great way to meet every cop in every place you drive through. I wish mopeds were more practical but there's a bunch of little reasons that add up to them not working as well as a cheap car.... which is why pretty much nobody around me except a bunch of single people under the age of about 25 rides them.

Everything you have said is generally true. My point is that there are scooters driven where I live, that most of them are driven by low-income people who are in the presumably-uncomfortable position of a scooter being their best option, and that noise regulations would be an indirect regressive tax against them.

I admit I don't know much about the affordable housing efforts, but I don't know why anyone would put a lot of work into building affordable housing in Solana Beach.

https://goo.gl/maps/X1MN673Pwc57eS2C9

It's a tiny ( by CA standards ) town right on the beach and most non-service jobs are a crowded commute away. I don't object to having affordable housing everywhere, but if I wanted to build some in San Diego county, it's about the last place I would go.

Yes this feels a bit like clickbait. The town definitely seems to have gentrified in the past 2 decades. Its like trying to build affordable housing in an area where everyone wants to live.

It'd be the equivalent to trying to build affordable housing next to Central Park in NYC or Waikiki in Hawaii. Its great to try but don't make a big fuss when it is expensive.

> ... the last place I would go.

A slight exaggeration. The Pearl site is only a 5-minute walk from the train station. Other than that yes, grossly uneconomical. As to your question "why": State of California mandate enforced on all incorporated cities, waste of money or no.

And this is why other ritzy areas have no interest in incorporating as cities proper. Rancho Santa Fe has a "Covenant" that performs usual city functions to the maximum extent legally possible e.g. private security guards, while dodging State mandates.

A friend of mine lived in the bay area for a bit and ended up leaving because he couldn't handle the virtue signaling. From his experience a significant amount of people would talk about helping low socioeconomic folk, oppression, or any other in vogue topic but never actually do anything. These would then be the loudest voices lobbying against having a methadone clinic in their neighborhood. He's living in Denver now which has a similar problem but on a palatable scale, according to him.

My summary of civic philosophy in the Bay Area: "Think liberally. Act conservatively."

In addition to San Francisco I've lived in the US South, the Northeast an in Europe. And out of all those regions I feel the Bay Area has been the most conservative and discordant. It's really a shame how a combination of the Byzantine legal processes and small cadres who know and shape the system have created a tyranny of the minority in the Bay Area and San Francisco in particular.

The culture is fairly different between the South Bay vs. San Francisco. South Bay is largely full of immigrants living the American dream: they work hard at a FANG during the day, buy an expensive suburban house to go home to at night, take their kids to parks and cultural attractions on the weekends and do their best to make sure they get into a good college, and otherwise mind their own business. Basically like the rest of America but less white. SF has many more people who like to stick their nose in other people's business to enact radical social change. It also has more genuine diversity and weirdness. SF is where people like to do large-scale social experiments, the South Bay largely sticks to large-scale technical experiments.

This same distinction also applies to the type of startup that gets founded in each place. South Bay attracts more companies that are capitalizing on a technical change in the world - Google, Apple, Netflix, hardware companies like NVidia and Memorex, drone startups, large scale enterprise software like Cloudera or Palantir. San Francisco attracts more companies that are capitalizing on a social change: AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, Stripe, Zynga, Bird, Lime, Twitter, Medium, etc. Notable exceptions are Facebook (social change but in the South Bay, though they've also built a top-notch technology org) and DropBox (technical, but in SF).

Very true, just go on Nextdoor in the Bay area. The same person who "fights" for social justice for the oppressed is the person who posts "How do I get rid of the homeless tents in front of my house?".

How would you know this?

I'm genuinely curious how you are seeing Nextdoor activity outside of your own Nextdoor neighborhood, given that How Nextdoor limits participants by neighborhood and verifies addresses before you can even read postings. I can't even find an option to see other neighborhoods. As my mom was dying and I was helping to find resources and later sell her stuff, the only way I could get access was to register with her address and then wait for the coded postcard.

Absolutely crazy. 53 parking spaces for 10 units? Every unit gets 3 spaces and 2 guest spaces?

It's for public use...which was originally supposed to be paid(to help make the apartments affordable), but got turned into free parking. It was an odd turn of words, but was explained later on.

It makes a lot more sense when you realize the entire "environmental movement" arose as the justifiable/defensible workaround for the Fair Housing Act in 1968: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=environmentali...

e: I can't get the direct link to work properly, but press the blue "Search lots of books" button and it will work.

Linking to a ngrams graph that shows "environmentalism" graphed against "civil rights" as evidence that environmentalism is just a fig leaf for segregation is beyond flimsy. Surely this must be the arch example of correlation ≠ causation.

Of course there's so much more to it, but there isn't really a single source I can link you that makes this argument. One example I can easily show is the history of planned freeways in the Bay Area that were canceled due to environmental concerns. Take a look at what areas the canceled freeways would have connected, then take a look at the demographics of those areas. Notice in particular how no freeway (or rail!) connection to the Golden Gate was ever allowed, since that would have connected Marin to the Bay Area megalopolis.

https://www.kurumi.com/roads/3di/sanfran.html

http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?bayarea

Robert Moses was criticized for doing similar things in New York City (making overpasses too low so buses couldn't go through, etc). Have you read The Power Broker by Robert Caro?

Yep, I have. I'm not saying freeways would be all roses, but I generally believe that connecting people can only be an overall good thing. It's absolutely true that viaduct structures, for example, are visible separations between low-lying neighborhoods, but they weren't intended to stay low-lying neighborhoods. The original planning documents for e.g. the Embarcadero Freeway talk about the proposed developments that would complement it.

I also think the common framing as freeways "cutting a path through neighborhoods" is exactly the wrong way to look at it. San Francisco's, for example, were based on this 1935 traffic study. The whole point was to get already-existing traffic up off the streets and keep neighborhoods livable: https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/5409261018/in/album-...

There's (unfortunately) a real-world example I can point to showing this still holds up in the 21st Century. The northernmost part of the Central Freeway carried more than 50% crosstown (non-neighborhood) traffic in San Francisco but was torn down in the very early 2000s and replaced with the horrible Octavia Blvd that keeps killing cyclists and has made neighborhood traffic worse in every way, even necessitating crosswalk closures. Here's the full study on before and after the "Freeway Removal" (now there's a dogwhistle for ya!) https://www.sfcta.org/sites/default/files/2019-03/Final%20Re...

"In the absence of meaningful improvements to travel improvements, the reduction in automobile capacity has not been accompanied by noticeable mode shift. Instead, the neighborhood has been challenged to effectively deal with high peak‐period traffic levels and resulting congestion"

The canceling of those planned freeways for environmental concerns is not problematic in itself - the failure to deliver the planned rail alternative is. [1]

1 - https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5057/5423961825_2d5af7cef4_o.... (Proposed rail lines for BART, 1961)

Freeways vs rail is a false dichotomy. The best transit systems are multi-modal for different needs, and those things do serve different needs. What we're really talking about is establishing rights of way. Once you have those it's usually no harder (politically) to build one type of artery alongside the other, like how BART's Concord and Dublin lines were built in the medians of the existing CA-24 and I-580, respectively.

powerful forces aren't able to block decentralized developments dotting the country, but they're able to gather enough momentum to pass centralized and controversial regulations? that doesn't pass the smell test.

that said, CEQA challenges have become a de facto tool in the nimby arsenal in CA.

More like "forces seeking to block development lend their backing to environmentalists because they realize that they share some common ground" but I agree that the blanket characterization of environmentalism is an exaggeration.

A lot of local governments were overtaken by the anti-growth environmental crowd at the time. Marin County in particular had their 1968 growth plan revoked and a famously anti-growth plan replaced it in 1971:

http://www.sausalitohistoricalsociety.com/new-blog/2018/3/7/...

'The decisive blow against growth was initiated in 1971 with the issuance of a Marin Planning Department report that proposed preserving Marin's lands except along the Highway 101 corridor. Entitled "Can the Last Place Last?" the report took its theme from Lew Welch's 1969 poem "The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings" The poem lamented the "hordes" that were "now piling up" and contained a refrain that captured perfectly the sentiment in Marin: "This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go."'

The city of Bolinas is notorious for vandalizing signs that point to it, to ensure outsiders can't find their way there. And they have a Bolinas Border Patrol, in a "ha, ha, only serious" kind of xenophobic way.

https://www.belle-aurore.com/mike/2013/05/bolinas-vigilante-...

yes, marin is a bastion of nimbyism (it's also quite pretty) but that's not the "entire environmental movement". the objection is to the exaggeration.

Fair, sorry for my histrionic wording. The "roots of the environmental movement" is more like what I'm getting at. Put it this way: I care about the environment more than ever but no longer consider myself an Environmentalist™ after learning more of its history :)

no worries, labels like "environmentalist" don't matter nearly as much as intent and action.

In 1968 the number of books on 'environment movement' here rockets up. It will be more compelling if there is a link between events related to housing regulations and the other massive upswing in 1985, and then the downswing in 1997.

Obligatory plug: https://yimbyaction.org/about/

Loving seems these orgs operating!

Until the state starts preempting these idiotic local laws and push builders to build, nothing will change. They have the power. Do they have the votes?