Increasing density has definite externalities. Traffic, street parking, and public spaces all get more congested. Plus a neighbor building a bigger building impacts my views and the light that falls on my property. We do need some way of balancing those concerns with development. IMHO, we've swayed too far towards one extreme. We should relax those restrictions while being cognizant that we don't swing too far back to the other extreme.

We need blanket legislation outlawing the notion that by virtue of purchasing a plot of land one is also purchasing control over everything visible from said plot at the time of purchase.

The problem with this kind of thinking is that the denser housing is, the more its livability relies on things outside of the homeowners' direct ownership and control. So long as YIMBYs keep pushing this idea that keeping access to things like sunlight cannot be a shared act, it doesn't matter how many pretty drawings of wide sunlit boulevards of townhouses or towers in parks they produce to claim that density doesn't have to mean dark, dystopian hellscape - because the moment there's money in it, someone can just slap a big tall building right in one of those crucial empty spaces, and according to the YIMBYs the people affected would have no right to complain because they didn't personally and individually own them.

In most cases this really isn’t a problem though. The fantasy of “big tall buildings” being slapped everywhere is just that. NIMBYs are fully mobilized just to stop stuff like duplexes, townhomes, or the neighbor putting a pop-up 4th story on their existing row house, not imaginary 100-story skyscrapers going up in the middle of a suburb.

Getting rid of the idea of owning the neighbors airspace entails figuring out how to fairly allocate easements that generally don't currently exist because of legacy reasons.

Rule: you can't build more than one story higher than your neighbors.

Under this rule your property will become more valuable when your neighbor builds up, because it just got upzoned for free!

Developers a profit motived and are very aware of what sells and what doesn't. There are a million mechanisms by which we can avoid having a single story house surrounded by skyscrapers.

I used to be in favour of laxer planning regulations until I moved to Melbourne. A lassez faire approach just doesn’t work.

https://uclawreview.org/2017/11/01/drones-damages-and-proper...

We already have that, in the form of urban planning. There are professionals in charge of ensuring everyone's rights are respected by defining and upholding an urban plan and construction regulation.

Otherwise a you get is a sea of shanty towns.

A proper transit network and walkable design ensures that this doesn't become a problem.

> Plus a neighbor building a bigger building impacts my views and the light that falls on my property.

People get so hung up on this, but that's just how it goes -- cities change. Just because you bought a place doesn't mean you're entitled to the exact same view forever.

While that's true, if you don't have a proper transit network, it's a real problem. And many cities aren't in a position to build a proper transit network at the drop of a hat. Don't get me wrong, I wish they did or could efficiently build one. But sometimes you have to deal with reality as it is, not as you'd like it to be, unfortunately.

Population growth creates the tax base, density, and demand required for a successful public transportation system. Demanding that the public transport comes first is simply backwards.

Listen, I am on the same page as you - I would love for it to happen. I would vote for it. I would pay taxes for it. But the reality is that it isn't going to happen, and if you densify the city without the transit, you will have these problems.

it doesnt have to be subways -- the willamette flood plain isnt great for subways anyway. portland should continue to build out its bus service and cycling infrastructure. portland is already pretty reasonable for living without a car, it will only improve with density.

How do you expect to put together a working transit network, which is very sensitive to urban planning, if you are also argue in favour of ignoring any restriction imposed by urban planners?

In practice, handing out veto powers against construction has had disastrous results for everyone not already owning homes.

Not necessarily. Just because you add a residential tower that doesn't mean you'll get a grocery store in its ground floor. If the urban plan specifies high-density residential area then all you can expect is residential buildigs.

Traffic needs system-wide reform. No argument there. Walkable neighborhoods, bike lanes, transit, etc.

Views - you don't (normally) own the views from your property. I live on a golf course; if it gets redeveloped into condos, I'm SOL.

Light - appropriate building setbacks mitigate this.

I'm not disagreeing really, just pointing out that your concerns are mostly valid, but have solutions.

Thus you could use setbacks as firebreaks, firewalls, or say something exotic like aerogel barricades.

The goal is to make it so that views of Vancouver's mountains are reasonably accessible by anyone, not just those that purchased a north facing suite in a tall condo tower.

It's pretty much the same underlying concept as why we create public parks.

The view cones are scattered around and are usually tied to areas of heavy public pedestrian activity, such as parks.

The policy is very popular.

https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/protecting-va...

As a counter, Seattle doesn't have much comparable. You an buy "air rights" to protect your view, but there isn't a general protection for home-owners. It's fairly common for a small home to be replaced with a newer, much taller, structure, taking neighbor's views with it.

Meanwhile south of there there's about 50+ blocks of untouched single family homes.

The view cones has been no real barrier to development and unlike SF Vancouver is building constantly.

Portland has reasonable public transport and fairly good bike/ pedestrian routes.

So does endless sprawl. Arguably larger, even.

Everyone pays in life-seconds, in money, in pollution, in reduced societal interactions.

Cities exist for a reason.

Counterpoint Bay Area. Industry hotspot, liberally allows office development, aggressively fights any new residential develpment and also freezes property taxes at the time of purchase.

Now suppose somebody could knock down your million dollar three bedroom home there, put up five condos that size on the same lot and sell them each for $750K. That'd make the property itself worth more than a million dollars, right?

On top of that in CA, if you were to hold your million dollar home, your property taxes are locked in even while the asset value increases exponentially. You can even give your house to your kid, and they will pay the tax rate you paid. If you tear out your house and build 5 new condos, suddenly you are paying market rate property tax again.

Which is why the price falls from a million dollars to $750k for the same amount of square footage. But now you have five times as much square footage on the same piece of land, which is more than the decrease in price per square foot. And still would be even if the price per unit fell to $400k.

> On top of that in CA, if you were to hold your million dollar home, your property taxes are locked in even while the asset value increases exponentially.

Which is just a facet of existing local tax law. You could get to the same place by just having very low property taxes in general.

Not really. Zoning specifies density limits but demand depends of far more factors. If you replace a mansion with a low density housing project, the reason the price will go down is not due to an increase in supply.

People don’t want to leave their homes and move away from family and friends just so a city can grow.

Life isn’t just about money.

I don’t want my city to grow any larger - higher density means lower quality of life for the people who have lived here for decades - aka my actual community.

Blaming development for your changing city seems a bit passive aggressive.

It's nice that we want minimum standards of living for everyone, but removing options we find appalling didn't create the options we want everyone to have

Somehow we've decided that we shouldn't give anyone other than college students access to that type of housing.

The unfortunate reality is that mentally ill people that don't know how to take care of themselves are expensive. Think cleaning feces off of every imaginable surface, thousand room bed bug outbreaks, all the awful diseases that occur in unkempt showers or locker rooms. How will we keep so many people in confined quarters happy and busy enough to not cause massive problems?

I fully support measures to take care of every living being on earth, but let's not make perfectly avoidable mistakes in the process.

When did I ever mention housing for the mentally ill?

What I'm saying is I think consenting, functional adults should have the option of living in a dorm-style setting if they so choose.

For one, it's a great way to build community.

For two, it should be a significantly cheaper way to live, which would probably appeal mainly to the poor, but would also appeal to the same set of people that already live with multiple roommates to reduce costs.

Apartment complexes already have on-premise maintenance staff. There is no reason to expect that a dorm-style building couldn't also be staffed appropriately.

You can monetize the service offering-- I could see charging a few hundred dollars more per month for an apartment that included a meal and laundry service plan. (obviously, some tweaks and fiddling would be necessary, but there's a lot of precedent on the math from college dorm plans out there)

The design of the buildings can be economized: instead of having to give up significant square footage for full kitchens, big pantries, and laundry rooms in most/every unit, you can provide a kitchenette and more livable square footage. You can likely cut out some of the high-amperage circuits necessary for cookers and dryers, and some plumbing for laundry rooms. I wonder if it would be viable to consider as an endgame if remote work hangs around after Covid and we end up with a glut of office-tower capacity, although I suspect the cost to retrofit in enough bathrooms/showers would vastly outweigh the cost of dropping in a dishwasher and stove into each unit.

Maintenance costs likely go down, as you don't have need to install or maintain dishwashers, ovens, in-sink food disposal units, and any sort of plumbing or electrical problems they cause. You have fewer noise, weird smell, and small-fire related complaints.

There's clearly a marketable business around "I'm waaaaay too busy doing Important Business Stuff/Living My Extreme Life/Some Other Self-Aggrandizing Fantasy to worry about the nuts and bolts of living" (See products like Soylent and Huel for people who find preparing food and eating a challenge) and this is just another step on the continuum.

Your casual use of "consenting functional adults" is overly simplistic. It is a fact that desperate people make desperate decisions. If you're only allowing such people then we should set an income floor so the poor cannot be preyed upon. Say, the true cost of living in the city? Anyone making less is not in a fair position to consent to such living conditions.

>Apartment complexes already have on-premise maintenance staff. There is no reason to expect that a dorm-style building couldn't also be staffed appropriately.

Hah. Maybe the ones you live in. Can't tell you how many apartments I've lived or been in that had mold, roaches, faulty wiring, dangerous appliances, and the like that went without repair despite repeated complaints over months and years.

So while in theory it's not a bad idea. In practice, because of the same societal problems that make this a serious consideration, projects like this are doomed to fail without massive community support and budgets that would probably rival just giving each tenant a custom ordered bare minimum trailer in a park packed like sardines.

1. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/mental-illness.sh...

Removal of high-density housing isn't solving that problem, it's just forcing those people into more desperate circumstances.

Honestly, great. Let the young catch it to act as firebreaks for the more vulnerable.

If you are going to college in person right now, you have already judged the risks and deemed them acceptable.

The thing I think is ridiculous is the number of universities shutting down completely at the first whiff of an outbreak.

What did they think would happen? Have the backbone to let it burn through.

Minimum standards are a necessary thing for long term sustainability of cities and are especially important as things pertain to public health. Anti tenement laws became popular during the spanish flu outbreak for a reason.

Consider that tenements also haven't gone away, and sometimes several family units are packed into a single 1br apartment in LA or in other high COL places as we speak. I've seen bunks for rent that look like they came out of a prison on my local craigslist, asking for $500 a month.

Cheap and communal housing would solve so many ills that currently exist for the working class simply because we refuse to build this sort of housing anymore. Housing that used to dominate cities like LA and gave opportunity to the working poor who couldn't afford a better situation. Housing that we sorely lack, and the lack of which push people into real tenement conditions today, or even on the street, while they work part or full time trying to make ends meet.

False dichotomy, and a gross misrepresentation of the problem. Homelessness is not caused by low purchasing power, and there are also other factors at play such as mental health issues. You don't fix homelessness even if you start to give away apartments like confetti.

- Purchase old home or lot.

- Tear down old structure.

- Build new 4-plex or 6-plex.

- Sell/Rent 4-6 units on a plot.

Example: "ABC" owns rancher on a single plot. Rents out rancher for $4000/mo. Current revenue is $48000/yr. "ABC" turns rancher into modern 6-plex on the same plot. Rents out each of the 6 units for $2000/mo. New revenue is $144000/yr.

Of course, capital required to build a new structure will erode returns for initial years, but as long as the demand to live in Portland is still high, it seems like a more profitable strategy longterm?

Unless I am totally off-base with these assumptions.

If your goal is to avoid benefitting developers, you will have a hard time encouraging housing.

I would argue it's a good thing because it reduces sprawl and uses present land more efficiently.

It's better than bulldozing hectares of land to build new developments in these isolated pockets.

Generally, buyers would rather have something new where they don't have to worry about the repairs/maintenance/annoyance that comes from owning older houses, where it ends up being a money pit for future value (not including historical/charming old homes). It's like choosing: would you rather drive a 1990 or 2018 Toyota sedan?

IDK, maybe this is an opportunity for a "home rebuilding" tax credit incentive or some kind of higher tax on developing new land instead of current land?

As someone who moved to the US, I think one realization why this has not really taken effect is that there is just so much land, there is seemingly always more to build on. Thinking about smaller, denser nations, that is just not a feasible strategy.

Accordingly the "value" that one gets for their dollar decreases. While before one may have paid 1.2M for an house and full lot, now suddenly 1.2M can't buy a full lot, but 900k can buy a 1000sqft apt part of that lot.

There's an upside for someone that needed more room and could never afford a 1.2M house, or a renter that just wants more apt options, but there's a downside for someone who could afford an entire house but is now seeing the price of an entire house go up.

All this being said, in practice it is arguable whether the land values do increase that much. The fact that these changes are being applied city wide at once may limit the effect.

Hopefully, this will change in time. But I think that it'll be large developers building in neighborhoods with homeowners. The equity will end up in the hands of large real estate trusts, and not small time operators.

Slums are usually the result of government restricting or failing to build enough housing (of the right kind) which forces people to build their own permanent housing without any permits at all. Because slum residents have to pay for the entire building upfront and build it themselves you can expect the quality of the buildings to be very low.

There are slums in San Francisco. Those so called "tent cities". You get rid of slums by fulfilling housing demand.

Your conspiracy theory makes no sense at all. The role of a government, if any, is to stop people from building shanty towns. That's what building regulation does: stop anyone from building sub-par housing. It makes absolutely no sense to claim that slums pop up because a government stops people from building slums.

And cities were awful due to that, I'm afraid.

> Our auto-friendly culture and the desire of landowners to keep poor people off their block has led to increasingly draconian restrictions on private property use.

There's no need to pull out emotional conspiracy theories. Restrictions are in general due to the need to impose an urban plan that meets the urban planner's established goals for the community and also complies with environmental restrictions, such as traffic and noise levels.

> but legislation and restrictions on things like whether I have a second building on my property and a separate driveway for each one are government overreach.

Letting people freely build "second buildings on their property" is an euphemism for wanting to build shanty towns with no regard to living conditions or environmental restrictions.

Each plot is defined based on a zoning expectation,which reflects real-world restrictions and an urban plan. If you want higher density construction then just work with your city to rezone and review the urban plan for your neighborhood.

Expecting to be able to just build "houses" in your backyard is how you get firetrap shanty towns that violate environmental and safety restrictions.

Just because you don't know why a fence is placed somewhere, that doesn't mean it has no purpose.

Well, can we come up with a more constructive and friendly way of doing this? It's not unreasonable for normal middle-class folks to not want to have to live in a problematic, crime-ridden, situation with high personal-security risks and property crime. That's why we pay for police, after all.

That's what the article is doing. Lots of people commit crime because they are homeless, or in financial struggle. If you allowed for zoning that would bring down the cost of rent, and therefore the cost of living, more people could get themselves off the street, and more people would have more money (from spending less of it on rent). That in turn should lower crime.

I think this is a very different approach from subsidised housing and other such strategies by the way. Because those just concentrate poverty in one area, without actually lowering cost of living. Instead it can make things worse, by keeping people who can't afford the area living in it.

Lowering the cost of living is probably a good idea, you're not wrong, but there are some people for whom it will never matter how much the rent is, because they're not with-it enough to organize themselves to be able to pay it or to be a reasonable tenant. Mental health programs are the only hope I have for dealing with that, but they're too underfunded and frankly too voluntary presently to make the real difference we seek.

I went to PDX often before the lockdown and I was struck by the lack of housing. I met with mostly contractors and construction people and they either lived in campers or an hour north in Washington. These people were middle class and couldn’t afford that city. I can only imagine how awful it would be to have low income in a place like that.

There is no shortage of land though. It is not Manhattan.

But Appalachia bucks a lot of statistical trends, so make of that what you will.

You can call it cold, and it is, but it's also entirely rational.

if you want to move to a poor neighborhood with high crime in order to help save it then more power to you. However, I don't fault anyone wanting to avoid it either.

We could even take the money we put into an increasingly militarized, dangerous, and expensive police force and put it into the things that reduce crime by making it a lot harder for someone to fall to the point where the consequences of crime are less than the consequences of being absolutely broke.

We could raise taxes on the tiny fraction of people and corporations who hold the vast majority of the money in the West, and especially the US, and send it back out into the system at the bottom with a basic income scheme, with the actual numbers on these tightly coupled with an assortment of cost-of-living indicators. If companies want to leave places that start taxing them, let them - they'll have to leave all their physical equipment behind, and we can institute a system of grants to help workers form a union and start using that stuff to fulfill people's needs for whatever they were making, with the profits being shared among the workers.

"But that sounds like socialism! Or even communism!", some will protest. Why, yes, yes it does. The people and corporations who want to accumulate huge amounts of money and power have been telling us that everything that sounds nice is "socialism" for my entire lifetime, and to be quite honest I have been at the point where they are making "socialism" sound pretty good compared to the capitalist hellscape they've turned the world into.

There are, of course, many ways this can go wrong. Utopia's not easy. But the present system sure isn't working either.

But in reality, there's plenty of countries who've done it for a long time and had great success with it: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Finland, Iceland, Belgium, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, India, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong for example.

Let's be honest: the only reason people in the US are scared of "socialism" is the fact that they've been immersed inanti-socialism propaganda throughout all their life.

Meanwhile, you can pretty much look at any European country to see how millions of people really feel about socialism.

Unless you confuse capitalism with an extremist Ann Rayndian neoliberal framework, and in that sense you can pretty much look at countries such as the Netherlands.

Capitalism is an economic system based on private property on the means of production, and collection of economic rents on the basis of ownership. All European countries have that. The fact that they also tax those rents and redistribute that wealth into welfare makes it welfare capitalism, not socialism.

> basic income scheme

Paying people who don't contribute so that they can continue to not contribute is not going to get you out of this problem.

Your ideas are nice, you sound like a good person who wants good things for the world, but also somewhat naive and sheltered - somehow the socialist version of the libertarian shouting "bootstraps".

> they'll have to leave all their physical equipment behind, and we can institute a system of grants to help workers form a union and start using that stuff

It's just as likely to be burned to the ground in protest, these days. Much as the computer is more the OS than it is the hardware, the factory is more the business processes + engineering than it is the raw assembly line. Take that magic smoke out and even the nicest equipment will produce nothing. You expect squatters to move in and just resume producing widgets?

How many businesses exist because someone had time to fuck around making a thing that nobody wanted, until suddenly they got it right and it was a thing a lot of people wanted? Basic income would grant that kind of time to everyone.

> Your ideas are nice, you sound like a good person who wants good things for the world, but also somewhat naive and sheltered - somehow the socialist version of the libertarian shouting "bootstraps".

dude we are living in the most extreme age of income inequity the US has ever seen, and you think me saying "what if we actually had the social safety net that I have watched corporate owned disaster capitalism systematically dismantle for my entire life" is "naive and sheltered"? ok, w/e

> You expect squatters to move in and just resume producing widgets?

No, I expect some of the people who were being severely underpaid to make the widgets to say "well, the boss is gone, but there sure does still seem to be a demand for widgets, let's keep making them and distribute the boss' pay more fairly".

Yup. Anyone who has Amazon Ring notifications turned on knows this very well. You can pretty much see all the implicit geographic boundaries within which people are posting videos of property crime with far greater frequency.

Queen Anne where I used to live in Seattle is a good example. Tons of ring cameras, yet very very few videos of property crime posted on the hill itself. As you move down the hill slope to areas with lower income housing, the number of property crime videos increases dramatically.

In my new neighborhood, Leschi, it is the same. You go down the hill towards Lake Washington where neighborhoods are nicer and safer and the quantity of property crime videos is very low. You head towards downtown and the quantity of property crime videos posted goes up.

It's 100% rational to not support policies that lead to an increase in nuisances like having your packages stolen or car broken into with greater frequency.

Your solution is basically, hide the dirt under a rug. Yes, this is a rationale solution, and I do that sometimes when I have visit over, I just throw all the crap in my bedroom out of sight. But I have not cleaned the clutter, I have just moved it where my guests cannot see it.

So one must ask themselves, why are the crimes being commited in the first place? And how can we address that.

Because as someone well off, you can afford to escape trouble but only for so long. Once the clutter gets out of hand, there will be nowhere to hide it.

Low intelligence, high aggression, high time preference. Mostly heritable. Sad but true. Wish it was different.

> how can we address that

Robust defense of private property (including protecting your community from incursion by criminals) or some way of reducing the number of criminals (most of which are politically untenable in the US, like eugenics, or no longer relevant, like extremely strict immigration restrictions).

No, my solution is keep the dirt physically out of my house.

> So one must ask themselves, why are the crimes being commited in the first place?

Poor upbringing and values. It has nothing to do with being poor. Even poor people behave ethically and rich people commit crimes. The common denominator between poor people that commit crimes and rich people that commit crimes is poor upbringing and values.

I can better and more safely prevent myself from being the victim of a white collar crime by performing due diligence. After a crime has been committed, there's often a paper trail and it's easier to seek retribution through the justice system.

The only way to protect myself from street crime and property crime when it already has a foothold in my neighborhood is more policing and vigilantism. The former is difficult right now because a bunch of misguided people think the police are bad and want to defund them. They don't realize that the safety they take for granted is a sign that the police are doing their job. They've never lived in a country with bad policing. With the latter (vigilantism), I place myself and my family at risk. It's easier and far more effective to keep the violence and property crime dirt our of my house and just deal with the white collar dirt.

Multiplex homes also run a greater risk of falling into disrepair over the long term if you have a situation of split ownership.

The solution to our housing crisis cannot be more "missing middle" it needs to be larger scale projects with 50+ units each with strict standards around building quality.

Even these, IMO, are government overreach. Instead the government should require you have insurance to pay damages to third parties incase a fire/collapse/flood happens caused by your property. Then leave it up to the insurance company to decide what standards will lower your premium.

One insurance company might decide "look at Switzerland - they have very safe houses. Build everything to Swiss regulations, and we'll give you a 90% discount on the insurance price".

Over time, safety and environmental standards, as well as costs to meet them, will get much better much quicker than current layers of government bureaucracy.

The insurance should also cover for things like environmental spills on your land, the cost of pulling the building down and making the site nature again if the insurance is ever not renewed, etc.

> Instead the government should require you have insurance to pay damages to third parties incase a fire/collapse/flood happens caused by your property.

I don't want any F*ing insurance requirements.

our failure is in trying to pawn off all responsibility to remote agencies and institutions, raher than the parts best-suited for them (bureaucracies are reasonably good at following rules and doing the same thing over and over), and accepting that we can't each absolve ourselves from some of that responsibility.

we want some best-suited regulation, the minimum needed to achieve reasonable safety, and no less, but also no more. regulation isn't good for every tiny tail risk we can imagine, as we see with the housing crisis (in major cities).

A key difference in this bureaucracy is their speed of change. Companies can react rapidly to new technology, new scenarios, and they do so on an economic model.

Gov'ts move slowly and lag technology or current events, they do so on a popularity/political power model.

bigger governments create more rent opportunities.

https://www.libertarianism.org/blog/introduction-rent-seekin...

Additionally- companies can react intentionally slowly to squander and choke new technologies and scenarios, also doing so on an economic model.

If the government requires an unnecessarily burdensome design, you're screwed.

If they do so then said technologies were not real opportunities. If they're opportunities then competitors will generate more value and/or less cost.

No amount of compensation can bring someone back if they've been lost to a fire, a deck collapse, a sinkhole, an electrical issue, etc.

The use of lead paint causes irreversible damage to nervous tissue, and lead contamination can lie undetected in soils for years after a property removes all the lead from the buildings.

Why would we want to invest a massive amount of effort into figuring out, e.g., the actual insurance risk of poorly built structures rather than saying, "No, you cannot use highly flammable plastic cladding on your highrise."

Especially if insurance companies can go bankrupt or refuse to pay out. How do victims get made well if the insurance company refuses to pay on some technicality? The last thing I want to deal with is more insurance companies.

Wouldn't the insurance company say the same thing? Or rather they would say "we won't insure that thing". Which amounts to "You cannot build that thing if insurance is a requirement".

Who are those insurers beholden to, what are their incentives to represent the consumer in any way?

Some people would like to see more things like that.

Their incentives to represent the consumer are rooted in the fact that the consumer can switch to another insurance company. Which means that if one has overly strict requirements without charging correspondingly lower premiums, nobody will use them. Then you get the incentives you want: People prefer both lax requirements and low premiums and the insurance companies have the incentive to find a better balance than competing insurance companies.

Two follow ups:

1) Isn't this inefficient? E.g. insurance is most efficient the larger the pool is. Doesn't this system introduce inefficiencies (and therefore risk) into the market?

2) Do you feel like there are adequate tools to choose between different insurers today, and do you expect that everyone who owns or improves property should be reasonably expected to make an informed decision about which insurance company to go with? It's hard enough now to insure my car, let alone all the individual decisions that go into building a house. (From materials to design decisions to occupancy rates to the health of the occupants, etc.)