I think the proposal of the Strong Towns organization is among the best I have seen balancing between YIMBY absolutists and NIMBY absolutists.

The problem with NIMBY absolutists is obvious -- it becomes impossible to expand the housing supply in areas that need expansion.

The problem with YIMBY absolutists is also obvious -- it's probably not ideal to build a 30 story condo tower in the middle of a neighborhood of single family homes.

(Though, arguably a 30 story condo tower is better than a housing crisis, but the Strong Towns proposal is geared towards never letting a housing crisis happen in the first place)

The Strong Towns compromise is that it should always be legal to build the next increment of housing stock relative to whatever is the most common in the area. Where the increments are defined something like: single family -> duplex/triplex -> row house -> low rise apartments -> mid rise apartments -> high rise apartments. In a neighborhood with a majority of housing stock at one level, it should always be legal to build the next level.

The idea is that it allows neighborhoods to "thicken up" over a few decades.

I really don't see how this would solve anything. It'd allow existing areas of SFH to be slowly converted into duplexes. It's not like suburbia is going to line up in droves to have their house converted into a duplex.

This solves basically nothing because if there were pure market forces most of America's cities. would have ceased to be SFH long ago. Slow conversion into duplexes simultaneous pisses off the NIMBYs and doesn't really help add supply in any great deal.

The evening news quote for this would be something like "if it were up to us, we'd build the new high rise today. But the city requires us to build several buildings, have people move in, evict them, then demolish that & start over. Something has to change with this process"

Ending single family zoning in Minneapolis resulted in something to the tune of 100 permitted duplex projects.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/what-happened-when-m...

> Minneapolis had 425,336 residents as of mid-2021, the Census Bureau estimates, and 199,143 housing units as of April 2020. By my count the end of single-family zoning has so far allowed for the permitting of at most 97 new units (the above table shows numbers of buildings, not units), some of which haven’t been built yet. If things continue at this pace, ending single-family zoning will have increased the city’s housing supply by just 1% by 2040.

Minneapolis did not change the zoning sufficiently -- the new duplexes and triplexes nearly have to fit into the same footprint as the equivalent single family home. So you can have one big SFH or two half-sized duplexes, etc.

For a single family home, the footprint can't take up more than 50% of the lot. For a duplex, the footprint can't take up more than 60% of the lot. Duplex and triplex projects could be made much more compelling by loosening these restrictions.

https://minneapolis2040.com/media/1816/built-form-districts-...

That's depressing. I can imagine the same thing happening in California because people will think of every other reason they can to stop you.

I'm not trying to be sarcastic or snarky here: is this a serious suggestion that one hundred duplexes (net gain of about 100 housing units I would imagine) is a significant change? Or is there a unit error here?

The number (100 units) is very low. 1% of housing stock is still meaningful in the context of places like Boston where we don't build much at all relative to the metro size.

>> It's not like suburbia is going to line up in droves to have their house converted into a duplex.

That's just not true! People would do that in the neighborhood I live in now in Los Angeles if they could because it would allow you to make the same piece of real estate about 1.5x times as valuable.

More interestingly, in Piedmont California where I grew up, there is a lot of controversy about this. That's an area that is very desirable -- great schools, pretty, close to San Francisco -- but also really expensive. Because its been a nice area for a long time many houses are on huge lots or even have servant's houses (!) that can be built up into a pretty nice house. Of course a lot of the neighborhood hates the idea of converting a single family lot into two homes even under these posh circumstances. But the economic incentives are powerful. I see it happening on my parent very fancy street.

PS: One of the things that really bugs me (in my neighborhood and where I grew up) is when home owners argue about preserving the local character. I grew up in city where my mom and grandmother grew up. The house I grew up in was an adjacent piece of land that once had a single house. Now the neighbors would freak out if you took these large plots of land and built two houses on them or god forbid a duplex. But the truth is they haven't lived their that long and if they did they would know that the neighborhood has always been changing. I wish they could make peace with that.

The duplexes near me sell for less than the SFHs one street over. It's a bit of a worst-of-both-worlds, it seems, compared to either owning a 4+ unit building or a standalone house.

One will see if the backyard ADU end up in a similar situation over time or if the larger "main unit" gives them more value. With duplexes where both units are rentals, there's also probably a bit of a "neither of these are receiving significant owner upgrades" factor compared to an owner-occupied home.

> I really don't see how this would solve anything. It'd allow existing areas of SFH to be slowly converted into duplexes.

Twice as much housing is a lot more housing.

But it isn't. You think all those SFH lots are just going overnight become a duplex? Why would the retired lady who walks her dogs and tends the garden care about building a duplex?

Now when her kids inherit the home & sell it to a developer, sure it'll happen then. But that is a slow, generational process.

Yeah exactly, it's a nice slow process that wouldn't piss people off by having too much rapid change.

I think the point is that it's far too slow to ever make a difference. Is there an existing city which has ever successfully "graduated" through all these levels?

I think you need to meet some of the NIMBYs where I live.

Yeah I'd be curious to know more about how they envision that slow conversion playing out. I don't love all the 30 or 40-story condo buildings that have been built a few blocks away from me in Williamsburg over the past 10-15 years, but people do need places to live in NYC. To really get the density bump in their conversion formula we'd have to demolish avenues of buildings. It's unlikely we can just convert large swaths of three story townhouses to, say, six story buildings like you see in Paris. So we end up with new 40-story buildings in places that were formally zoned for industrial.

I mean, I'm all for trying it, but we probably should have done it 30 years ago since the rent is too damn high now.

Moving the baseline like this would certainly help. It's also helpful to think about areas that are already a little denser than SFH. Replacing duplexes with small apartment buildings and medium apartment buildings with high-rises would have a much bigger impact and this proposal would make that possible as well.

The part I wonder about are provisions for mixed use. At some point some business should be allowed. I think Japanese zoning has a linear system that covers this: https://www.rahulshankar.com/zoning-in-japan/

Problems have solutions, predicaments have outcomes. SF has put themselves into a predicament.

The Strong Towns approach is not really a solution for SF -- it's an approach to prevent the predicament from forming in the first place. Cities that are on the verge of becoming the next SF (Seattle, Portland, Austin) should take heed.

NIMBY absolutists exist, and in fact are pretty common. There really are people who will oppose any new construction at all, even at the cost of destroying the livability of their city.

But do what you describe as “YIMBY absolutists” actually exist? Maybe they do, but from my perspective I don’t really see anyone arguing that everything should be buildable everywhere.

There's also BANANA (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody) which is perhaps a bit more tongue in cheek. It also sounds like the "YIMBY absolutists" mentioned in the GP.

"arguably a 30 story condo tower is better than a housing crisis"

This. It means, if you don't want your precious quality of life messed up, be nicer to all those other people you normally think you don't have to give a shit about.

If there wasn't a mass of people with no good jobs or housing, then there wouldn't be an ugly tower being built in your back yard. If your neighbor had his own food, he wouldn't need to steal yours, and you wouldn't have to live within your own private prison.

> The problem with YIMBY absolutists is also obvious -- it's probably not ideal to build a 30 story condo tower in the middle of a neighborhood of single family homes.

Very few people suggest this seriously, and in any case allowing for this in the market, it's unlikely any developer would do that. Skyscrapers make sense when the land there is particularly in demand, above and beyond what you're likely to find in a SFH neighborhood (unless it's some grandfathered-in area of Manhattan).

> it's probably not ideal to build a 30 story condo tower in the middle of a neighborhood of single family homes

You mean because then it would be in their back yard? Or why?

Because the surrounding infrastructure wasn't made for that density, and it takes way longer to retrofit than it does to throw up density, lowering the quality of life for the existing residents.

Isn't that a chicken and egg problem ?

Perhaps you'd authorize that kind of development under condition of adding sime more infra to support the additional residents, but in itself getting a tower of residents doesn't look like an issue.

You’d have to expand power grid, more water, city employees, build a new school, parking, roads, shopping for the influx of new residents, more police, more fire dept hires.

Further, no one bought and built a 7 bedroom and 9 bath room home on an acre lot to live next to a few hundred people. It’s utterly irrational and illogical.

It completely denies the role of status seeking behaviour in our societies which is a human universal. We need wealthy people enjoying all the trappings of wealth and feel special about their status because it is them who are subsidizing the vast majority of the rest of the population. If you don’t reward the golden goose, no free golden egg. Fight the right battle.

Not sure what you're referring to, but having a 7+ bedroom that sits on multiple lots in a SFH neighborhood is a single of wealth where I'm at. The fact that it sits in a dense community near a city is a bonus.

I've seen some really beautiful homes out in the country as well, but they aren't that practical unless you are retired.

If it is economical to build a 30 story condo then you can be assured the area is either a very dense city or an extremely rich suburb. I don't think either areas deserves special protection.

I suppose I would take the above proposal over the status quo if it truly eliminated local control - but otherwise seems like a very long time for a neighborhood to upzone. Its almost never going to be economical to tear down a SFH and build a triplex unless the SFH is in disrepair - which may be after 50 years from initial construction in most cases.

> The idea is that it allows neighborhoods to "thicken up" over a few decades.

Which doesn't seem a bad idea.. but where does the level of employment and services factor into this? If an area expands economically, you're going to need to expand housing options, regardless of what was traditionally there.. if the area does not produce a lot of economic activity, then allowing more low density housing is ostensibly not a problem.

If property owners have the option to convert single family homes into duplexes, they can do that. Then if there's not enough demand for their units, they lower the rent until they fill the units. If demand is really high, then more property owners will start converting. If demand remains high, eventually those duplexes will be cleared out for some modest apartment complexes.

For areas that don't have a lot of economic activity, I think very few homeowners will go through the expense of converting their properties because they won't be able to make the money back on rent. In those areas it would be more efficient to build new SFHs on vacant lots.

Either way, with byzantine zoning rules out of the picture, the pricing and incentives to build, sell, or rent will match the local area much better.

This is a perfectly fine idea if you currently have an okay housing market.

But a lot of cities are so far behind that they need a lot more very quickly. You need more radical rezoning to actually help people soon for that.

Of course, the most likely outcome is politicians hemming and hawing some more, putting forth grossly inadequate solutions, and passing the buck to the next generation, as is tradition.

> single family -> duplex/triplex

Duplex gives almost no advantage in housing density, but adds more complications due to shared parts of constructions.

They did not decide “arbitrarily”. If you read it you’d have read the neighborhood got involved and were calling out the size, ecological impact.

Current residents have private property rights too. Both sides arguing in defense of their rights under the law is exactly how our “rule of law” works.

Rule of law does not give you special say over these proceedings. Clearly for good reason; you seem keen to rush ahead without considering the rights of others with an established investment under law. When you can’t you’ll call everyone else arbitrary even though an established process and precedent were utilized.

The arbitrariness is that the standards applied were the rule of a mob, not the application of objective standards.

Human society is not built on objectivity. It’s built on determining a “winner”.

Private property creates subjective use of property. What objective social good is coming from private monopoly and erosion of local ecology?

You see arbitrariness but relative to me I see a subjective perspective.

Y’all should really sit and meditate on how flimsy and quickly inverted human language semantics are.

The person seeking to build the house has an objective of subjective behavior that impacts others. You don’t exist in the vacuum you can conjure in your head.

It is difficult to truely own something in the ideal sense of the word. Most people pay a yearly fee to “own” their land. You cannot do whatever you want with your land i.e. you don’t really own it, but instead you own a lifetime tradeable lease. When you die, the land remains.

One definition of ownership I like is “can you freely destroy it without legal consequences?”.

Even “your” body: there are many laws about what you may and may not do with it (alive and dead).

There is even a grey area for whether you own your own thoughts? Maybe you rationally believe you can believe whatever you like, but actually your thoughts bleed through subconsciously into your actions which can have severe consequences. And unless you brought yourself up without human contact, it is very hard to discern the boundary between your own beliefs and those that belong to your society.

> The idea that local municipalities get to decide, arbitrarily and subjectively, what is "compatible with the neighborhood," means that property rights do not exist.

I have a hard time reconciling this. Because I also can’t help but think local governments deciding what they want for their neighborhood is the most direct form of democracy and overriding that at higher levels of government seems to be not ideal. Given that we agree that some level of laws and regulations must exist, it seems that we’re just adjusting our goal posts. If you’re a property my rights absolutist then you have to also accept edge cases, like Trump flags and 4x4s tearing through someone’s backyard, or someone painting their house in pink stripes since it’s “their house”. What kind of NIMBY are you to deny someone selling their home to someone who wants to open an auto repair shop? You have to accept these the same as you accept a new condo tower. You can’t pick and choose here and then go back and claim “well this is reasonable and this other thing is not” because people can equally claim a condo tower isn’t reasonable. In the case of particularly desirable places I think it’s just a case of too bad, that’s life. Nobody is entitled to live anywhere in particular at an affordable rate regardless of their priors. The alternative that you would believe this is the case means someone can endlessly complain that they can’t live in Vancouver with a view of the sea for $500/month.

Now on the more reasonable spectrum you can ok I’m not talking about all of that, I’m talking about a new high-rise in a downtown area. Sure, and that’s more likely to actually happen to so I’m not sure what the problem is.

“But teachers and wage workers will be priced out”. Yep. And either wages will rise and residents will be paying $70 for a latte, or they won’t get to have those things because of their anti-development NIMBY points of view and they’ll either accept that life or they’ll give in to change.

At the end of the day it’s all arbitrary and subjective. I think it’s arbitrary that we build highways for cars and subjectively believe that it’s a huge waste of money. That’s messy democracy.

On the other hand if you have absolutely no zoning laws at all you end up with a sprawling urban agglomeration like metro Houston.

Houston is a disaster. Used car dealerships inside of neighborhoods. Semi trucks on every conceivable road, because there is a factory behind the elementary school. A metroplex that takes hours to traverse, without accounting for traffic. It’s the only place I’ve encountered completely stopped traffic while trying to go to the grocery store down the road. I lived in Houston for a few years and couldn’t bear it.

Houston did/does have laws that are in effective zoning laws. Parking space requirements, setbacks, etc.

Also transit systems may be required. I imagine a place with truly no zoning laws and a transit system would have a lot of development near stops

God forbid your city becomes like Houston. Nobody wants to live there, everyone’s getting out of there and moving to California.

I can sense the snark from here, but from an outside-of-texas perspective Houston seems to be alternating between being underwater/flooded by a hurricane (Harvey), or frozen and lacking in basic electrical services because the grid can't meet the demand.

California sure has a lot of problems as well but people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

California has power outages way more often than Texas has, in fact it has widespread rolling blackouts right at this very moment. If Texas is a glass house, then California is really a soap bubble.

But this is beyond the point: none of this have anything to do with the topic of conversation, that is, zoning and urban planning. The truth of the matter is that, despite the Houston being widely panned for this on HN, people nevertheless flock into there en masse.

"Free market" is a propagandistic phrase, not a meaningful one. Markets have rules. You're free to follow them.

Subjective and arbitrary is exactly how the law works.

> means that property rights do not exist. As property rights are the basis of free markets, it's important that we understand there is no free market

Surprise! The libertarian dream of free market property rights and doing whatever you want doesn't really exist in many ways, such as, randomly chosen:

a) you need a drivers license to operate a car on public roads

b) if you build a new house or office building, its electrical wiring needs to be done by a licensed/bonded contractor and meets standards of your local city or county electrical inspection and the NEC

c) if you build gas lines in the same place it also gets inspected and needs to meet certain standards

d) that new toyota you bought from the local dealer is subject to a whole host of federal vehicle safety regulations before its manufacturer is allowed to sell in the the usa

e) the entire electrical grid in your area is likely regulated by some state and federal level entities that have an interest in it not falling over on its face, like the texas-regulated energy grid during their major winter storm event a while back.

f) the burger you ate for lunch came from a local food-health/safety inspected restaurant and the beef from a supplier that's also subject to regulations and inspection

g) no, just because you own the land doesn't mean you can start a leather tannery or fat rendering/reduction industrial operation on a small scale in your suburban house's back yard, stinking up the neighbors.

I could go on...

a) Getting one is a routine process that requires objective standards be met, and costs nearly nothing.

b) Again, these are statewide and nationwide standards that are not subject to local administrative bodies' whims. If your wiring meets standard, you're allowed to do it. You don't have to apply to the county and have them decide that the rest of the neighborhood uses Romex, so your MC armored cable won't "fit".

c) Again, these are uniform standards. No subjectivity or rigourous meetings required for each installatino

d) See my responses above. All manufacturers are playing on the same field, and don't have to get permission for every single aesthetic change. If Toyota decides they're offering fuchsia as a color option next year, then can just do that. So long as the clearly-defined standards are met.

e) See my responses above

f) But the county doesn't get to dictate which ingredients can be paired together. If my local hipster burger joint wants to offer a peanut butter and sardines burger, they can just do that. No government review required on how tasty it will be.

g) Agreed! Free market ideologies are not the same as anarchism, but many people on seem to conflate the two. For a market to be free, there needs to be a minimum of information asymmetry and a minimum of uncertainty. All participants should ideally know the rules of the game as they enter. If I buy a property, I should have full confidence that I can build A or B or C, and also be clear that X, Y, or Z will be prohibited.

A free market doesn't mean an unfettered one. It just means that pricing is transparent, rules are objective (and known!), and the so called "playing field" is level. There are a minimum of case-by-case decisions, or rules that favor one class over another.

OP is not presenting a libertarian dream of unregulated markets, though. They're merely saying that whatever restrictions on the acquisition and use of property exist, they must be predictable, and they must apply to everyone equally, which is impossible when there are rather arbitrary subjective factors such as "compatibility with the neighborhood" in the process.