It's not just in megaprojects either. In my large, fairly dense US city, basic, easy-to-build, local infrastructure like adding a 1-mile bike lane to a straight street is impossible because a handful of NIMBYs are constantly taken seriously by local politicians.
My city has many bike lanes that are popular and well-used, as well as a bike-share program that is extremely popular. It also has a large number of cyclist deaths - including children! - due to the spottiness of existing bike infrastructure and overall lack of protected bike lanes. It seems like improving that infrastructure would be both easy, cheap, and popular, given the popularity of cycling and its existing infra, and the cheapness of plopping a concrete barrier onto a street. But no - the second anyone mentions protected bike lanes, a handful of NIMBYs write in with "but muh cars" and the politicians throw up their hands and surrender.
I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in the US in the past 50 years. It seems like at any point in history, any local project will be opposed by somebody, no matter who they are or what the project is. But previous generations seemed to be able to get over that in favor of building. For today's generation it seems like doing nothing has become better than doing something. If this were the 1900s, government would have told the NIMBYs to get bent, we're building Thing X because it's good for society and if you don't like it, tough. That's what living in city means sometimes!
The issue with NIMBYs ("Not In My Back Yard") is that they aren't really NIMBYS: They are CAVErs: Citizens Against Virtually Everything.
I promise that if you took a group of NIMBYs and proposed tearing down 5 single family homes to build a midrise apartment building they'd object. But if you also proposed—to the exact same group of people—tearing down a mid-rise to build 5 single family homes, they'd object.
If you propose to remove 50 parking spots for a bike lane, they object. If you propose to remove a bike lane to replace it with parking, they'd object too.
These people are driven by a deep cynicism that anything can be made better: they don't believe people could consciously want to make things better, and they don't believe that ungided "forces" can make things better either.
If something has an advocate, the advocate must be taking advantage. If nobody is advocating, then something unguided must be wrong. Nothing can be an improvement.
Therefore, any change must be for the worst, and they oppose everything.
There's also the topically focused ones, like with a focus on crime or property values. (I have had a lot more experience with the latter)
Case in point, Naperville, IL (quite wealthy suburb of Chicago) had a cell coverage problem in the late 90's. The NIMBY's shot down any proposal of putting up "ugly" cell towers because it could mar the view and impact property values. (I would love to know the overlap between the people complaining about cell coverage and property values)
The compromise the city came up with was designing a commemorative bell tower which sneakily could house cellular equipment. This old article describes, conveniently, that the tower was designed to hold cellular networking equipment, and by total coincidence they found a cell company interested in paying to put equipment there:
My preferred term is BANANAs - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.
Here in my country you get people objecting to projects genuinely on the other side of the country. It's becoming a bit of a problem for getting approval of major project like data centres.
>These people are driven by a deep cynicism that anything can be made better: they don't believe people could consciously want to make things better, and they don't believe that unguided "forces" can make things better either.
I believe my local council do want to make things better, unfortunately what the council leadership consider better I would generally consider to be worse - they are constantly making trying to make the area become "trendy" and divert tourists and foot traffic from the richer suburbs nearby, but at the expense of the people who actually live here.
For example, they "upgraded" a local park by adding a bunch of sheltered seating and an enclosed dog walking area, which does look quite fancy... but removed the skateboarding area and mountain bike jumps that were heavily used by the local kids as they did not "fit the image", and put the new seating and dog areas scattered around inside the park so there isn't enough contiguous area for sports.
>If you propose to remove 50 parking spots for a bike lane, they object. If you propose to remove a bike lane to replace it with parking, they'd object too.
We usually end up with the worst of both worlds and get awful combined parking / bike lane areas that force cyclists to weave between the road proper and the bike lane to avoid parked cars, and that often contain small oil leaks leftover in the parking spaces that can slip up the cyclists.
> I promise that if you took a group of NIMBYs and proposed tearing down 5 single family homes to build a midrise apartment building they'd object. But if you also proposed—to the exact same group of people—tearing down a mid-rise to build 5 single family homes, they'd object.
I suspect that you're collecting all of the people that are against things that you support into one group, when they're really multiple, often opposing groups. NIMBYs just seem to be a bag that upper-middle class millennials store their resentments in. For a similar sentiment, see "haters."
These terrible people whose deep cynicism causes them to hate everything that is new because they don't believe that anything is possible don't exist.
A more charitable description of NYMBY-ism would be that these people are mainly against the externalities that construction projects in their neighbourhood would cause, as opposed to being strongly for one end result over another.
This really rings true for me in NYC. Any project get decried by Working Family partisans as being too pro developer, insufficiently full of affordable units, likely to cause gentrification(even in predominantly white neighborhoods), or doesn’t include enough “green jobs”. If they can’t stop it in review, they appeal to their council person to veto it. Failing that they call on the sainted congresswoman, PBUH, to intercede. If she leans on city council in public, the project dies. This is exactly how a locally popular rezoning of Industry City failed.
These so called progressives are so myopic that they cement the status quo, and working people are being squeezed out of NYC as a result.
I began my career in solar system SCADA systems. My company wanted to build a solar plant in CA, it was picketed and sued by the Sierra Club. Yes, an environmental club suing to stop a solar power plant.
This won't be popular, but special interests play a far greater role in the chilling affect for modern urban infrastructure than the so called "NIMBYs" do...
. Want to build a new housing complex? How many of the units are earmarked for 'affordable' housing, and you've got to have solar
. Building a new bridge? Better ensure at least one lane is pedestrianized so that that <1% of potential traffic can use it as well
. Want to extend public transit? Maybe, but you can't raise prices as it might affect the poor
. Want to build a park? Will it be fully ADA compliant so everyone can enjoy it.
. Want to install a sidewalk on a roadway? Have you also allocated space for a fully protected bike lane... can't get started without that.
I can guarantee you that removing bike lanes to add in almost anything else will get almost zero resistance from a typical NIMBY. Until cyclists in a city reach a critical mass they have the least valued infrastructure out of any group.
There is a documentary about a guy in Michigan who had the idea to purchase all of the blighted, abandoned homes so he could tear them down and restore the area as a community farm (or something like that). The locals flipped the fuck out, apparently they didn't want anyone solving the blight and drug problems in the area. To them he was rich, and that meant he had to be stopped. Took him years to convince people that he wasn't the devil. Turns out their only real opinion was that change made them nervous.
Another way of looking at this is as, "institutions tending towards prudence" which is an after effect of inheriting the anglospheric intellectual tradition (Hume, Burke, Adam Smith). This is classic empirical conservatism-- there must be a very good reason to implement new policy if the system tends toward stability, solutions must be vetted, and new policy should be, "test-driven" at small scales before being implemented more generally.
Here's my question-- without making an appeal to, "oughts" or ideals; what part of any of this is controversial or surprising given the highly capitalist nature of American civic life? People don't want their nice neighborhoods to change. I don't see this as unreasonable.
they don't believe people could consciously want to make things better
The hard part is that often they're right, especially in California - as with the Sepulveda Pass Freeway Expansion Project, where TFA says that the commute times were actually increased.
You can argue that it's a somewhat self-fulfilling belief... but the regulatory state is where it is. The CAVErs today are dealing with what exists.
I've seen this term nimby float around a lot recently. You can tell it's the just the next wave of internet propaganda because the term is used as a subtle method of peer pressure to give advantage to whatever sugar daddy paid for all those blogposts and new articles that now reference the term.
First off, it's not a bad thing to live without evangelizing their mindset on other people, the emphasis of "only caring about their own back yard". They're allowing other people to live life the way they want to, that's gracious. Emphasizing your status quo in only your own back yard is the opposite of entitlement.
We live in a system of hierarchical social participation. Everyone has participation at the federal level, but each person's participation counts less there than anywhere else. As you move down the ladder to state, county, city/town the you have more control over what goes on in your locality. If you live in a neighborhood where you don't want something to change, you have every right to want that. Especially if you're rooted in the area while a demographic of transient transplants try introducing ground-changing legislation in the city they just moved to, and might leave within 10 years.
People and governments need to realize that trying to make city living and non-city living the same is a losing proposition. Cities should not have an obligation to be car-accessible. It's unnatural for a place with thirty thousand people per square mile. It'd probably be better for everyone if personal vehicles were outright banned in all major cities, as long as it's possible to live in a city without ever leaving it and to live outside the city without ever entering it. Half the square footage of a street being taken up by cars parked on it is utterly perverse. I say that as someone who has never ridden a bus or subway and who would rather pull my tooth with a pair of pliers than set foot in a major city.
This has increasingly been on my mind lately with the discussions around firearm laws. I grew up in a relatively rural state where firearm ownership and usage was pretty much assumed and a normal part of life because law enforcement and animal control services simply aren't available at the speed you need them in an emergency.
In an urban area there are different considerations that might weigh less heavily in favor of unrestricted access to firearms.
It strikes me that rural area firearm ownership might warrant a different treatment than urban area ownership. And if that's the case maybe there's a wide class of these sorts of things that we should address on a similar basis.
I sympathize with this sentiment, but it's not tenable without major investments in public transit. I live in Chicago, the third largest US city, and getting around by car is about twice as fast as taking public transit even when "public transit" means taking the L with no connections during rush hour (worst case scenario for car commuting). Mind you, (contrary to recent remarks by our mayor) Chicago isn't even a "car city"--we have only ~3ish arteries through the city and everything else is slow-moving side streets.
Meanwhile, most trains are pretty unpleasant--many cars wreak of piss, smoke, etc, people free-style rapping, trying to start fights (especially people of questionable sanity), etc. Buses can be better, but they're also a lot slower. If you have a family, own a dog, or have a disability, then it quickly becomes more practical to own a car, and even if we clean up public transit, police it properly, and expand it I'm not sure it would change the calculus--you would still likely be better off owning a car than relying solely on public transit and rideshare and so on.
Of course, I want Chicago to make those improvements to its public transit system if only to pull more people off the road more often, but I think there will always be a core group of people who need to own cars. I think if this is true for Chicago it will also be true for smaller US cities.
> It'd probably be better for everyone if personal vehicles were outright banned in all major cities
Why go this far when it's pretty clear that a happy medium is possible? Seems to me it's clear that a place like NYC does well enough at accommodating density, foot traffic, public transport, bicycling, and still allows a modicum of (usually inconvenient but still possible) auto traffic.
> It'd probably be better for everyone if personal vehicles were outright banned in all major cities, as long as it's possible to live in a city without ever leaving it and to live outside the city without ever entering it.
I'm sure it is a great idea to divide the people of a country in city-livers and non-city-livers. It will bring wealth and happyness in this new world. And maybee the next big civil war...
> It'd probably be better for everyone if personal vehicles were outright banned in all major cities
And then cities become prisons, with no escape even at the weekends.
The people waging war on the car rarely seem to be car-free themselves. There seems to be an attitude of 'To deal with climate change, pack all the poors into tiny apartments in megacities and take their transport away. Then the wealthy people can have the rest of the planet and its open roads!'
> I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in the US in the past 50 years. It seems like at any point in history, any local project will be opposed by somebody, no matter who they are or what the project is. But previous generations seemed to be able to get over that in favor of building.
This is the root cause. The highway overbuilding was so devastating to the people it affected that many processes were put in place so that it would never happen so undemocratically again. It‘s a pendulum.
Not just overbuilding. Also the impunity with which politicians routed highways directly through neighborhoods whose inhabitants they did not like (demolishing homes, businesses, and community centers in the process)
I half wonder if you live in my city because your description matches it to a tee, but I bet this is happening in cities all over the country.
As for why they care about NIMBYs so much - it is because our current class of politicians aim to be career politicians. Therefore, they look to remain in power at all costs, and part of that means not pissing off the most vocal members of their community.
What we need is real leadership from politicians who are willing to stake their tenure in office on pushing projects through.
In my experience - certainly in the bike lane example I gave above - the NIMBYs are a minority. A vocal one, yes - but still a minority. If a politician is only concerned about their career, surely a popular project like bike lanes would garner them more votes the next time around?
Thinking about this more, at least in my city it seems like one of the problems is that for a generation now, politicians have consistently outsourced decisionmaking to a poll of the community.
In theory, one elects a politician to be independent decisionmaker for the constituent's interests, for the length of their term; and if at the end of the term the people didn't like their decisions, they're voted out. This gave politicians latitude to do what they thought was best, with the greater good of the community in mind.
In the past half century, (and again, only in my city) this model seems to have changed to politicians being elected, and then running every decision past the community as a kind of popularity poll. Developer wants to replace an auto lot that's been abandoned for a decade with dense apartments? Better poll the community to see what they think. Adding a protected bike lane to connect two existing bike networks? Let's ask the community first. And of course when they do that, the only people who show up are the NIMBYs, and the politicians get the impression that nobody wants development.
The NIMBYs have spoken, we better leave that disused auto lot abandoned and blighted! (And this is a real example from today's news!)
> it is because our current class of politicians aim to be career politicians
I don't think that's quite fair. Look at the statistics of who actually turns up to vote. The median voting age for mayoral elections is 57 [1]. Seniors are 15x more likely to vote than those aged 18-35. If I had to guess, this would only get worse if you get into even more obscure elections like city council. Incidentally, Boomers are much less likely to bike everywhere, so you can't really blame the politicians for catering their policy to them.
In the United States, zoning is controlled almost exclusively by local city councils. Voter turnout in local elections is extremely poor. The only people who vote are A. older and B. homeowners. The young and renters scarcely show up. Thus, local city councils by and large represent homeowner’s interests. These older homeowners adamantly oppose new development like apartments, bike lanes, and mass transit. They fear developments might affect the value of existing homes, change the ‘character of the neighborhood’ (read: attract the wrong type of minorities), increase traffic, compete for existing parking, etc… the list goes on. In general, homeowners are opposed to any type of change that might affect the value of their home or mildly inconvenience their lives.
Local politicians are loathe to cross homeowners. They will be voted out if they do. Further, these politicians are usually homeowners themselves and are complicit in maintaining homeowner’s best interests at the expense of the broader public.
The only solution is that cities be stripped of their absolute control over zoning and power shared at the federal and state level.
I am not from the USA and I don't live in the USA. I've read about this issue several times, and I'm not sure whether I understand why it is an issue.
> zoning is controlled almost exclusively by local city councils
What's wrong with it?
People opposing the status quo usually look to imply that every citizen of the USA should have the right to go and live where he likes the most, at the price and at the conditions it prefers.
Why should I be able to force, for example, San Francisco to build cheap homes for me to move there? If I can't afford San Francisco, I'll go live elsewhere.
Instead, if I live in San Francisco, I will participate in the local political life and vote according to my preferences.
One reason that there is pushback and needs to be pushback is that there are frequently really dumb vanity proposals because small-time politicians want to do something big.
Locally there are a couple of plans to tear up and reroute highways in a decade long project where the highways literally just finished major tear-up-and-reroute project.
There's another nonsensical proposal to tear up one of the busiest highways around and replace it with a nice boulevard because wouldn't that be lovely, except without any plan for what would happen to the rest of traffic.
There are NIMBYs but there are also people worried about projects which are trying to help won't actually make anything better and often will have real negative consequences.
>worried about projects which are trying to help won't actually make anything better and often will have real negative consequences
the worry is misplaced because stupid projects are compensated by good ones. This obsession with efficiency, which seems to be an artifact of modern economic logic is one of the culprits of why nothing gets build. Effectiveness matters, not efficiency. This is just the same logic that VC investors use. nine out of ten startups are crap, some are scams, but it doesn't matter. Better to waste some resources than to build nothing at all.
China understands this. People will laugh at empty ghost cities or wasteful vanity projects but they're compensated for by what works and tacit knowledge generated in the process. America's gilded age or new deal era or cold war military projects were no different. Better to go big and get something done than do nothing at all. And that's usually the two choices.
The problem with local input, and for that matter even the traffic engineer's input, is basic lack of thought about it.
For example, almost nobody knows about Braess' paradox, where adding roads and cause more traffic. This is not induced demand, it's simply worse traffic for the same quantity of traffic through expanded routes.
And there are tons of examples of getting rid of highways where the traffic just disappears, and everybody is happier.
Or, locally, people are advocating against a small commuter rail project, in economic grounds, while the same people are advocating for spending 10x on highway projects that carry about the same number of people.
Blame the politicians, but they are mo stupider than organized groups.
> If this were the 1900s, government would have told the NIMBYs to get bent, we're building Thing X because it's good for society and if you don't like it, tough. That's what living in city means sometimes!
Unfortunately, much of the history of that era was exploiting racial minorities in order to build.
I'm currently sitting in a neighborhood (PNW USA) that at the turn of the century was established mostly by german immigrants. They built their houses here because the more anglo population in the city proper, slightly to the south, and mostly across the river, redlined them away from those areas.
Fast forward to just after WW2, and a substantial black population moved here to work building ships for the war effort. These folks were largely setting in a racially integrated town just a bit further north from me. In the post war years, this flooded, creating a local refugee crisis. The powers that were in the city at the time did not want black families in their areas, so they decided to redline them into the germanic neighborhood and make it their problem.
Fast forward a couple decades, and my neighborhood has become the cultural and economic center for the black community in my city. City proper leadership is still openly and malignantly racists, so they go along with a scheme to use a free way expansion and building a hospital campus to snap up the land for a fraction of what it was worth under eminent domain. Culturally the neighborhood has not recovered from this. Several multi block scale plots of land remain unbuilt but owned by the hospital.
That's just my neighborhood. Robert Moses and his peers played out this story nation wide.
So, there's obviously a lot going on with the US's current failure to build civic infrastructure in a sensible and affordable way. But before we lionize what was going on in the past, we should remember a lot of what got built was at the cost of someone who's rights and economic interests were legit thwarted. It doesn't excuse modern NIMBYism from a position of privilege, but I do worry about reforms that give planning boards sharper knives.
NIMBY is the wrong term for this. What we're really talking about is eminent domain.
To get the rate of progress you're talking about requires bulldozing through neighborhoods and often buying up private property. So you have to be comfortable with personally taking away someone's property for public use.
If you aren't ready to do that, then you're distracting from the fundamental issue by substituting terms. You're also using proxy to put these moral dilemmas onto someone else, maybe an elected official. It's analogous to convincing someone of murder and then having another person pull the switch for the electric chair.
Without getting too far out into the weeds, we're seeing this problem in recent Supreme Court rulings. I've chosen for myself to use proper terminology now. I expect that from others and will be pointing out this issue in future discussions. If the people I'm debating continue to use hand waving to avoid the crux of issues, then I will make light of it and point out their inadequate communication skills. Basically questioning their leadership authority if they don't have an understanding of debate and continue to insult the intelligence of their constituents.
A huge amount of NIMBYism (although certainly not all) is about what other people can do with property they already own, or what the gov't can do with property it owns.
The GP groups eminent domain in with NIMBYism, you are grouping NIMBYism in with eminent domain. Oversimplification dilutes the conversation in the same way that substituting terms does.
His example of building a protected bike lane on a city road does not require eminent domain and in my opinion requires far less scrutiny than project where a person's property is considerably affected (as far as I'm aware most people interpret the backyard in NIMBY in the metaphorical sense rather than the literal one). I would assume that the GP feels similarly given the type of projects they want to see completed. They seem primarily concerned with local projects which usually don't need eminent domain because they have a decent level of flexibility in their location, unlike highways or train tracks.
I would go even farther, and say you'd have to be comfortable with someone taking away your property to build something you don't think should be built at all. It's easy to say "they should take somebody else's property and build something I want." Anybody can do that! But if you think of it that way it makes more sense why you get people blocking these projects.
I have to agree with your take on this. We were recently sent an 'offer' by the local water district to buy 15' of frontage along our property for a new water line that will be a major service upgrade for about 8 homes.
My issue came when I discovered that the current water line and easement is on the other side of the road, but they would have to cut down quite a few tree while it was a lot easier to dig in front of my farm. So far, I get it. Then I could out that they offered us 3 cents per square foot of frontage but the home next to us was offered 4x as much at 4 cents per square foot. And someone else offer 4 cents, and they didn't even know about the 3 new houses on our road before they even started planning.
I'm all for improving infrastructure, but it needs to be in a fair, and well planned, way. Neither of which is common with this sort of thing.
You don't need eminent domain for dense apartments to be built. You just need to rezone. Unless you the government are building the apartments (and want to build them), e.g. for public housing.
Fact is, if you want to build a megaproject (highway, HSR, whatever), you have to step on someone's toes. In the past, America did this by stepping on the toes of people with no political power, resulting in the excesses of 1960s destroying of historic areas in favor of unfortunate highway interchanges.
Now, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction -- no project can be built because no one is willing to step on anyone's toes.
> Now, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction -- no project can be built because no one is willing to step on anyone's toes.
I don't see this as a bad thing at all. We could do with fewer "megaprojects" unapologetically stepping on people's toes. Frankly, if the project isn't economical after accounting for what it would cost to buy up the necessary property at market rates--which is to say, rates the actual owners will voluntarily accept without any threat of coercion or eminent domain--then it simply isn't worth doing.
NIMBYs get taken seriously because they show up in large numbers.
I totally understand the reaction many people have to government. I fall victim to it all the time. We see that politicians get bought and paid for, and we therefore assume that nothing can change the way things work, but this proves otherwise. At the end of the day, those who show up tend to win.
If we all want change, and judging by this thread a majority do, then we need to show up. Show up at the local meetings. Call your local reps. Be annoying. Get everyone you know to also be annoying. Politicians like remaining in power, and an angry mob shouting about the roads and bike lanes... that will motivate them.
NIMBYs get taken seriously because the secondary and tertiary effects of their NIMBYism aligns with the dominant ideology of the state post-Civil-Rights-era.
John D. Rockefeller Ⅲ sez: "We have all heard[citation needed] about a population problem in the developing nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where death rates have dropped rapidly and populations have exploded. Only recently have we recognized that the United States may have population problems of its own. There are differing views. Some say[who?] that it is a problem of crisis proportions — that the growth of population is responsible for pollution of our air and water, depletion of our natural resources, and a broad array of social ills.[SUBTLE]"
There's also opposite of this problem sometimes. Some kids built a bike trail with jumps by a river in a local park. The local newspaper started running articles how these kids are destroying habitat and nature. Then followed it up with an actual altercation with some Karen and the kids. After a few more articles. The city paid for a bulldozer to go in an bulldoze the ramps the kids build. A year passes and the city awards a half a million dollar contract to local company build a trail and pump track in the same park. The newspaper raves about it. Moral of the story, no one makes money if things are left alone. Also moral of the story, don't trust your local newspaper. Moral outrage can be paid for.
> But no - the second anyone mentions protected bike lanes, a handful of NIMBYs write in with "but muh cars" and the politicians throw up their hands and surrender.
That is a damn shame. As a driver and also cyclist, I hate seeing bicycles on the car roads; I also hate being on the road when I cycle, as there are too many inattentive drivers.
And please, keep pedestrians off of cyclists lanes. Ticket them if you must.
I'm not sure NIMBYism is to blame here. Not every idea should be executed. I understand that it's a problem if projects always cave if there is resistance, because there will always be resistance, but that is not NIMBYism. That's just politics.
NIMBYs pay with their time, and they have a lot of it. This should be "taxed" at some rate. It has to be enough to provide some minimal balancing force against passivity.
This is what I think of as Consensus Paralysis. There are usually many reasons to do a thing, and many reasons not to. A sane person or organization would weigh those reasons against each other. However, in most political decision making there's an important asymmetry: any one reason to block action is sufficient, but no number or weight of reasons is sufficient to ensure its progress. In our earnest wish to avoid the tyranny of the majority by requiring full consensus (or close to it), we've handed all of the trump cards to obstructionists. Often a tiny minority, not even pretending to believe in the nominal reason for their objections, can unilaterally block any progress.
The US senate is another example of this problem BTW, both in the form of the filibuster and in the general inadvisability of huge omnibus bills that give everyone their very own excuse to oppose without consequence, but maybe that's getting a bit off topic.
I'm a NIMBY, unfortunately. Not because I'm anti-progress or whatever, but because so much of my financial life is tied to my house, and whether I like it or not, there's a lot that can adversely affect its value. So, if building a new apartment complex nearby is gonna reduce my property value by 5%, taking around $50K out of my pocket, of course I'm going to oppose it. I don't feel like that makes me a bad person. Who wants to flush $50K down the toilet?
Fifty years ago houses weren't so expensive, relative to income, and thus the risk wasn't as high. My parents bought their first house in 1969 for $17K, no student debt, no health insurance expenses, etc. So, if a highway was built in their backyard, they would've been much more concerned about the hit to their quality of life than to their finances.
In areas of economic growth and growing density high rises going in around you only leads to higher property values. Eventually the dirt under your house is worth so much a developer will make you an offer you can’t refuse.
There is basically no evidence increasing density leads to anything but higher property values for everyone.
I disagree with this outlook, but wanted to commend you for being straight about it and not trying to cloak your vested economic interest in some bullshit about "neighbourhood character" or something. It's only when we can be honest about the rationale behind these types of views that we can take steps to address the underlying issues.
5% is 50k? Wow. That is a full on mansion, compound, some cattle, a nice truck, everything where I am. Just curious, is this a fairly fancy home in your area or just one of the jones's?
I believe (though I don't have the evidence for it) that we likely see a similar phenomenon in the UK. House prices seem to have become the most important thing to the home owning class and they selfishly oppose anything that would affect them negatively, whether that be HS2 or new house building programs.
This is not current generation I might add, who I believe would be quite happy with a shake up. It's previous generation of 50 years olds and over that have brought this about.
I was interested in HS2 after seeing stuff about the Elizabeth Line, so I watched some YouTube videos about it. In my eyes it seems like a great project despite the high cost (easy for me to say since I'm not British), but holy smokes, the amount of people in the comments poo-pooing it with comments like below is absurd.
"It breaks my heart to see such needless desecration of our beautiful countryside for this catastrophe!" -- the video in question was drone footage over wholly unnatural farm fields. That will return to being farm fields once construction finishes, with a 20m strip of train tracks running through it. Of course, they didn't mention the existing motorway that was also in the shot.
"An obscene use of fossil fuels, environment, and money for something we don't really need." -- About a train that will use zero fossil fuels and will lessen demand for cars. Really.
Also, a bunch of people saying it's useless because it won't have a station in their town. It's a high-speed line, of course not! The whole point is to make local services faster and more frequent by removing express services from the existing over-crowded lines.
It's the same in a lot of US cities, but to play devils' advocate: this generation was basically told that their home was their savings and in many cases their entire capability to retire or take care of their health and other needs in old age is tied to the value of their home equity.
We dug a very, very deep hole by treating housing as an investment instrument and it's going to be hard to dig out.
> This is not current generation I might add, who I believe would be quite happy with a shake up. It's previous generation of 50 years olds and over that have brought this about.
I have my doubts. I suspect in 25yrs time it will be the same old story with the current generation becoming the previous generation.
I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in the US in the past 50 years.
Don't discount that your elected officials may be NIMBYs themselves, or well-funded by NIMBYs. Consider this if you still have an upcoming primary election or when you go to the polls in November.
> I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in the US in the past 50 years.
Could it be these are the only voices local politicians are hearing? 99.99% of residents being okay with new builds doesn't always translate into a political will that a politician can exploit.
This is the real issue. Almost nobody pays attention to or votes in local elections in the US. The 5% of the population that are NIMBYS may be >= 50% of the voters.
This is not a US specific thing... people here in slovenia build a house at the end of the by-the-street village, and then complain when someone else does the same, claming the the village is getting too large.
My daughter’s school bought a failing golf course in a nearby subdivision to build an athletic facility. We’re not talking Texas football here, but a track and some tennis courts for a school where theater is a bigger deal than sports. The neighbors tied us up in litigation for close to six years. (It only took about a year to build the facility itself.)
> It's not just in megaprojects either. In my large, fairly dense US city, basic, easy-to-build, local infrastructure like adding a 1-mile bike lane to a straight street is impossible because a handful of NIMBYs are constantly taken seriously by local politicians.
And it is not just about public infrastructure projects either. Basic private projects are also bureaucratically difficult to pull off, simple things like tearing down an old house and building a small multi-unit low rise in its place, needs an army of lawyers and consultants to approve. With that, only big companies have the bureaucratic resources to do it, so "regular people" are locked out of the opportunity to redevelop their own home, and the city gets less variety of developments as the few able players keep copying and pasting the same stuff, focused only on the same target market.
From my experience NIMBYs are typically local property owners who don't want their view, neighborhood, etc. to change. These folks could be better off financially than their YIMBY counterparts who maybe don't own all that same property.
If there's a group of people with money and a group with less debating the same issue, I would expect the politician to support the party most likely to make large campaign contributions.
I have no data to support this idea and should not be taken seriously in this context.
If you have a society with stagnant wages and the only route to a decent retirement and some generational wealth is rising home prices, then you will do everything to protect that investment. Even if that results in, long term, making your city an overall worse place to live.
In other words it's hard to blame individuals for making rational decisions in their own self-interest in a fundamentally broken system.
This is basically the root of so called cancel culture. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. The problem is that once a minority opinion gets an outsized amount of attention others will join it to get some of that attention. We have developed a culture of any press is good press where certain people are highly motivated by getting attention from others. These people will seek any outlet for attention and join in with many contrarian viewpoints simply because the attention ratio works in their favor.
This isn't entirely new and Ben Franklin had a solution for it that allowed much of the American revolution to take place.
Secret societies. Many many very small interconnected secret societies, much like an MLM scheme but where you only know your immediate downline and your single sponsor. Everyone was member of at least two secret societies, each with 6 members. The first they were invited to join and the second they created themselves. They just enabled the exchange of pamphlets, but in this fashion ideas gained wide dispersal and support before ever truly becoming public.
> I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in the US in the past 50 years. It seems like at any point in history, any local project will be opposed by somebody, no matter who they are or what the project is.
The basic cause of this is there were a lot of government projects in the 60s that were bad and activism successfully stopped them. That's "urban renewal", the Embarcadero highway, etc - city planners would basically knock down black neighborhoods just for the joy of building highways over them even if nobody used the result.
So the government was taken over the people who stopped things and rebuilt to make it very easy to stop things, and impossible to actually do them.
Another part of this is that era's environmentalism (under some names like "cities as growth engines") basically thought that doing things = bad for the environment and not doing things = good for the environment. That gets you national parks but also suburban sprawl, which is less "intense" than cities, and so more "natural".
This is a many year process:
to bring into public office people who care, willing to change laws, or city ordinances, and department values and priorities (street / public works) and budget money for the new priorities, and to flex the electoral muscle by the organizing (an increasingly important and larger number) of voters to pay attention.
Like it or not that is the game you are in. If you are not playing to change the game, you are doomed to play by the same rules you complain about.
The handicapped / wheelchair access to sidewalks, now visible nation wide in the US, started with zero curb cuts everywhere in the 1960s, and wheelchair non-accessbility to many essential services, such as grocery stores, post offices, other public buildings, including schools, court houses, social services, and municipal governmental offices. Hospitals had figured this out, mostly, but not entirely, by that time.
We have NIMBY here is Switzerland too but we try to find a solution most of the time if we see a need for it. In the end it's usually a compromise everyone can live with but sometimes a project can also fail. Like the subway that was proposed in the 70s to run under Zürich. The subway station at HB was even built but then people voted against the whole project later. Today that station runs a regular train (S4 and S10) not a subway. There is also another tunnel with station that was supposed to be part of the subway which was built (near tierspital) but is now a standard tram line. What's interesting is that there is almost no room for the tram. The tracks are as low as they can be and the trams pantograph gets almost completely compressed. [1]
…and the trams need to switch sides when entering/exiting the tunnels, because those stations are the only ones in the city with center platforms.
The biggest NIMBY opposition these days is against the new soccer stadium, which is supposed to both warm up the area too much and throw too much of a shadow.
It's easy to vilify NIMBY, but those are ALSO the people stopping developers from tearing down historical buildings just to put up parking lots or worse.
Then again, there's also a vocal minority who thinks the government should spend as little as possible, and new projects are even worse.
Americans need to start realizing that a 100 year old building isn't historical; it's just old and may have outlasted it's useful life. That said, we also need to start modeling our cities based on the success we see outside America, because you're right, a lot of the new projects are much worse.
In the words of the Joni Mitchell:
"They paved paradise and put up a parking lot"
I always end up qualifying as a NIMBY, because all of the projects proposed are endless 4-on-1s that look exactly the same as everywhere else with no parking, or godawful commercial real estate. If there was any taste in development, I'd be a YIMBY.
> due to the spottiness of existing bike infrastructure and overall lack of protected bike lanes
> But no - the second anyone mentions protected bike lanes, a handful of NIMBYs write in with "but muh cars"
That's your problem right here. Adding 1 mile of bike lane is counterproductive. It does not really help biking and at the same time it potentially hurts other modes of transportation. You need commute network.
What you need is a robust, modeled plan for end result and transitionary period. Building a 1 mile stretch of bike lane and building 100 miles of bike lanes in 1 mile increments are entirely different things. One is more subject to both populism by politicians and opposition from society.
There's no shortage of Atlantic and New Yorker sob stories about how some abutting farmers are taking it in the ass over some new development.
This isn't an America problem.
It's a people "wealthy enough to have so few real problems they have spare fucks to give about what their neighbors are building" problem.
If the "HN Class" of people (very roughly speaking) would actually give a F about other people's property rights this problem would evaporate overnight. Cities and private developers could buy what they want and develop what they want. But nope, enforcing conformity and having veto power over the next big box store or freight terminal is more important so that means no new anything gets built.
Local politics here is run by real estate interests and government does little. A local business wanted an underground garage, and had its curb open up onto a crosswalk. This kind of thing happens all the time. There is too little resident input into construction, and too little government oversight of it, not too much.
I have seen this in my city with changes to the schools. No matter what changes are suggested, a group of people gets upset. I suspect they want to make all changes difficult just in case there is a change one day that they actually don't like.
It makes them feel important. They could get the same result by pushing for beneficial development, but that's much more difficult. Mostly because of everyone opposing it to feel important.
The reason NIMBY types are taken so seriously is because they also are the types to mobilize and vote at the local level. So a local politician is taking a nontrivial risk to their employment by going against those groups.
In the UK, at least, local councils are continuously trying to shoe-horn high density housing into unsuitable rural areas, ignoring urban brown field sites.
It's simple, money rules everything in the US. Homes are investment vehicles above all else and property rights trump all. This is one reason good public transit can't be built and when there are big public works projects, the contractors who win have political connections either through campaign contributions or politicians owning stock. They also know how to game the system and milk the city for money causing massive budget overruns and go way over completion date. See Tutor Perini in California.
Auto manufacturers and oil companies have had massive political influence, they've prevented good public transit from being built and they've bought public transit and ripped up the lines or bought bus companies and shut them down.
Capitalism, shareholder value, and profit rule everything in the US. And don't even get me started on our foreign policy.
It often seems to be used by people who demand that others make sacrifices for others and that’s a bad sign, a sign of coercion and exploitation. This is distinguished from considerations about the common good which entail considering the impact on others and how they might be compensated (eg responsible eminent domain), or crotchety curmudgeons who hate things that would even be to their own benefit simply because they’re resentful of everyone. Calling someone a NIMBY seems too often to be a way of demeaning someone who refuses to agree to give something up so you can have something you want.
I mean, a portion of the population probably just simply disagrees with your ideas. They'd rather the car infrastructure actually be improved and expanded to meet the demands of increased population, rather than continuously crippled in every possible way. They're not very interested in having yet another lane of travel removed so that an average of 2 bikers an hour can ride down the road.
One of the things I love about Palladium (and closely related, Samo Burja's newsletter) is the depth of research.
Like the detail that one of the most egregious episodes from California HSR involved a Spanish company that performed excellently on rail projects in Spain. Overall, this piece makes a strong case that the problem is specifically NIMBYism and loss of government institutional capacity.
I think the million dollar question is how government organizations can hire and retain better. The current situation looks dire. Obviously a charismatic leader with a broad anti-NIMBY mandate would go a ways at getting competent people to want to work in government. You saw that succeed on a small scale with orgs like US Digital Service.
The elephant, after that, is merit-based pay and promotion. Someone needs to sell this to the public. RN literally random cops and plumbers make mid six figures thru overtime while the directors of $100b mega-project are low-energy lifers making less than that. That's not gonna work.
I'm very much anti-NIMBY, but I've had a hard time getting involved with YIMBY organizations. It feels like a lot of YIMBY stuff is good but it always feels like there's a side of it driven by real estate developers wanting to deregulate in ways that hurt residents. Am I wrong, or would it just be better to create more housing in ways that created affordable housing (rent control, public housing, and so forth) instead of trying to see if "market" forces of supply / demand fix the issue?
Also please correct me if I am wrong, I haven't dug too deep into YIMBY aside from surface level digging.
> Am I wrong, or would it just be better to create more housing in ways that created affordable housing (rent control, public housing, and so forth) instead of trying to see if "market" forces of supply / demand fix the issue?
I think you're probably wrong, yes. Having lived in cities with rent control, what I've observed is people who get into a rent-controlled apartment simply NEVER leave it. They pass it down to family members. They unofficially sublet it for years. They are not particularly poor, they just are paying below market for rent so why would they ever give up that sweet deal? And therefore one rental unit is off the market, and the rest of us are competing for the remaining apartments and subsidizing the low rental unit. I would prefer we let rents equalize based on supply and demand, and the government just supplement the rent of low income individuals.
I think there needs to be a lot more nuance with the word "deregulate" because there are many regulations and some should be gotten rid of and some shouldn't. We shouldn't compromise on building quality so those regulations should stay in place, but we should soften zoning rules and remove parking minimums for example. Also, specifically the state of california needs to rework CEQA and limit neighborhood input to projects.
I'd also point out that areas that encourage more construction have been growing and becoming attractive places to live. Emeryville for example has been building aggressively and its becoming a nice place to live (minus the highway nearby). Some parts are surprisingly walkable and it even has free public transit (the emery-go-round). Compare this to SF which has blocked housing (especially apartment buildings); its becoming increasingly unaffordable and suburban feeling compared to east bay. Density also leads to more diversity.
> Am I wrong, or would it just be better to create more housing in ways that created affordable housing (rent control, public housing, and so forth) instead of trying to see if "market" forces of supply / demand fix the issue?
Rent control doesn't "create" any housing. It simply puts a cap on the price of housing. I'm a part-time Real Estate investor, and I would never invest in a city that had a rental cap, since the point of investments is to make money, not start a charity. Public housing has the same problem. You end up putting a bunch of poor people in one building, who statistically end up being associated with crime and drug use. This drives down real estate values in the adjoining neighborhood and makes real-estate less attractive to investors and you wind up creating a slum.
Want to promote more affordable housing? Keep the government far away. The market has its fair share of issues and inefficiencies, but it's still more efficient than affordable housing programs dreamed up by government bureaucrats.
From my interactions it's mostly frustrated renting millenials rather than developers in the movement. And that aside, I don't see why people think developers are evil. Someone built the place you're living in.
Personally (as just a homeowner) I feel like the crux of our problem is constraints, and while the YIMBYs are working that problem, they're also contributing new constraints like rent control, inclusionary zoning, anti-displacement measures, etc that negatively offset the gains made elsewhere.
Rent control doesn't create affordable housing. It benefits existing residents at the cost of everyone else who wants to move into the city. It is a classic example of why price caps don't work: in practice, in order to win the application for rent controlled units, you slip the landlord a few hundred $, security deposits balloon in size, and the quality of the units declines precipitously. In NYC the bribe is more like a few thousand dollars.
Public housing is its own problem. It creates de facto ghettos, which is a major reason why locals oppose construction of public housing. It turns out that landlords' financial incentive to screen prospective tenants generally does a good job of weeding out trashy people who destroy the unit and surrounding area.
Because one only need to look at history in past times of housing crisis in our history. The response and solution to times of housing shortages and high prices has always been to build out more supply. There was a housing crisis in the 1940s due to decades of stagnation of building homes from the great depression and WWII, and homes were unaffordable, until the 1950s brought on supply that was not generated by government intervention but by private developers and even the Sears catalogue. About all the government did was stimulate the private market by providing capital in the form of the GI bill, and coupled with the available zoned capacity surrounding cities, developers were able to build and meet demand that now had capital to afford supply which was able to be built thanks to the available zoned capacity.
Since the 1960s however, we've slashed our potential to add capacity (1), and prices have soared in markets like Los Angeles that were historically more affordable to wage earners.
YIMBY organizers still get a lot of criticism from its early days where they would show up to support housing wherever it was being built, and in the mid-2010s that typically meant low-income, minority neighborhoods that were already experiencing a lot of displacement pressure. This gave them a bad reputation among equity organizations which supported alternatives like rent control and moratoriums on new construction. Some YIMBYs still think that policies like rent control are like a metaphorical wrench in the housing market machine which reduce the incentive to supply more housing but even more still realize that the machine is already full of wrenches like apartment bans, onerous parking requirements, and single-family-only zoning, excessively long discretionary review processes, etc [1].
The latest in the movement for new public housing in California is actually supported by YIMBY organizations [2]. AB 2053, The Social Housing Act is making its way through the state legislature right now. While just about every YIMBY organization supports it, it's opposed by NIMBY orgs like Livable California, the League of California Cities, and even the California Association of Realtors. Meanwhile, the orgs which have long talked about supporting social housing are taking either no position or support-if-amended stances on the bill because they don't like that the way it generates subsidy for below market housing is by building market-rate housing to cross-subsidize it. They strongly believe that any new market-rate housing causes displacement but don't want to be on the wrong side of history when this bill succeeds.
Two thoughts,
1) it will be impossible to get out of our current housing hole without making developers rich.
2) We are so far into the hole that any availability will be gobbled up by those with money or those with connections.
I have a townhome and in our complex one had to be sold as a low-income unit. The person who got it was well connected to the developer, "My Aunt has known him for 30+ years".
You should try to drop in to one of our meetings. It is a very big tent here. You have people not only involved on making it easier to build more housing, but also ensuring that we build affordable housing and that we keep tenant protections.
I am of the idea that 90% of the problem could be solved by streamlining housing of all types (e.g. remove zoning, making permitting a 30 day process, by-right building, etc.) and the last 10% can be covered via government intervention (e.g. public housing, housing vouchers, rent control, etc.).
But you can find folks within YIMBY Action that think the mix is 50% / 50% or 20% / 80%. And you will see that our endorsements and activism reflects that! We are as often promoting removing barriers for building housing as we are ensuring that we protect those that need it the most.
We all agree, however, that you _need_ to build housing, that the problem is a problem of supply, and that the culprit is Byzantine regulation and NIMBYism.
You are probably just getting too much anti-YIMBY propaganda from the high level overview. The problem is that developers built nearly everybody's home, yet people want to hate developers.
Think about how much money a developer makes on building something, versus how much more money homeowners make by blocking housing, and you'll be astounded. A developer makes 5%-20% returns for a one-time project, that houses people. This is modest versus annual, compounded investment returns 5%-10% for homeowners/landlords, and those unearned profits also continually take homes out of reach of more and more people. So you can see why landlords and homeowners are so anti-developer, because it puts their gravy train at risk.
That sounds like it's "pro-developer" propaganda, but it's actually just anti-NIMBY propaganda. And perhaps they are the same.
There are two problems with the "affordable housing" strategy, IMO.
One is that many (most?) advocates for this are actually being dishonest. It's a cudgel that can be used to stop just about any development project, because nothing is ever affordable enough. Any proposal that involves a mix of market-rate and subsidized housing should have more subsidized housing. Any proposal that's 100% affordable housing should be bigger and better. (I kid you not, I've seen people say that apartments that are being provided to the homeless for free should have granite countertops or GTFO). Non-market rents are too high, unless they're in existing apartments, in which they can never ever be raised. And so on. The result is that people who're only casually involved in city politics basically sign up for a total ban on construction, because "affordable housing" sounds reasonable.
The other is that economically, it's basically price controls, and that never has good results. The fact is, the housing crisis is a simple lack of housing. We need a lot more housing in most cities. The population has grown and industrialization/post-industrialization has shifted economic opportunity away from small towns and cities toward the largest cities. Housing is expensive because demand has gone up, but we've artificially restricted supply by not allowing construction. The affordable housing "solution" is to keep restricting housing supply, but shield a select group from the consequences of that. Who qualifies is subject to debate, but it's always a small number of people, and everybody else is SOL. So either you bought a long time ago, you're rich enough to buy now, or you're part of the protected class. Everyone else is SOL, and that includes a lot of people that spend a good chunk of their lives commuting because they can't afford to live where they work. Heck, it also includes a lot people in the protected class that would like to move but can't afford to lose their subsidy.
YIMBYs typically are in favor of public housing and tenant protections. On rent control it’s more divided; some are in favor and some aren’t. It doesn’t seem likely to solve the housing affordability problem but may add some stability, so I’m generally I’m favor of it personally, but only in tandem with building more as well.
But that said, more market rate housing is good too! Provided it’s not replacing subsidized units, anyway. We need housing to not be scarce in general; it’s not an either/or thing.
You say that you are anti-NIMBY, but you are concerned about people who want "to deregulate in ways that hurt residents"? You don't see the problem here?
While the replies are jumping onto rent control (which is bad) the other parts of your suggestions bare a much better solution imo: public or for-public housing. My native germany also fucks this one up, but the best thing would he to use some form of eminent domain to kick out stratefically located villas and old homes, tear them down/renovate them and build up public housing in small-but-cheap apartmenta that can then be given to resident coops or other democratic-but-not-the-state entities. Vienna does this (public housing, not evicting millionaires or old-settles-residents) and it works quite well because it addresses the demand side. Induced demand for housing of this type is limited I think (it's a big decision and people don't generally choose cities only because od the price) and you could even adress the "granny loses her old house" to some degrew by offering evicted tenants extra-nice apartments as a reimbursement on top of the eminent domain reimbursment (at least in germany this one exists, government cannot simply take your land).
Like this you drop the prices in the "normal people" segment without rent control
I feel like if we just limited the number of homes any one person or company can own (to like 4 max), it would solve a lot of issues. Also no foreign investors. Also make building easier. If developers get rich so be it.
"a side of it driven by real estate developers wanting to deregulate in ways that hurt residents"
A side of it? I would guess more than half of it is astroturfing developer groups, aka paid liars. It is such a disservice because it is a real problem that they are selfishly exploiting. They aren't interested in sustainable development, just cashing in and leaving a problem behind for the local taxpayers to clean up decades later. They exploit otherwise well meaning idealists - like the ones that are so common here - with amazing skill.
Yeah I hear you though note that given how backwards, arcane, obsolete and convoluted the way we plan for and agree upon future urban development is, there's really a TON of opportunity to BOTH better listen to residents and actually get things built.
See my friends startup InCitu.us for a great example of the opportunity for win/wins in the space: https://www.incitu.us/
> I think the million dollar question is how government organizations can hire and retain better.
Simple: offer salaries that compete with the private sector. Of course, this involves raising tax revenues which is incredibly unpopular politically. But we get what we pay for and as long as public sector pay remains a joke compared to the private sector, we are always going to have this problem.
Government organizations are going to be held to the highest standard for equity, transparency and governance (and ideally security, but...). Building a product with artifacts that demonstrate and/or attest to all of these things creates incredible friction. I'm just coming out of a seven year stint at one of the largest banks in the world, and despite loving the people I work with I couldn't take it any more. I've on the other side of the summit in my career and I don't really want to have navigating bureaucracy be a major component of my professional efforts for the remainder of it.
In Washington State, teacher salaries were raised substantially, with no change in educational results.
The thing is, just giving everyone raises doesn't work. It needs to be based on merit.
I've proposed a system where teachers get a base salary, plus a substantial increment for every student in their class that meets grade level expectations at the end of the school year.
I've known people who work for various government agencies, some that pay well for their respective fields. It seemed to be a pattern where someone would accrue a large salary through time on the job, internal patronage, etc, but then be totally incapable or uninterested in doing their job well. They'd just hire someone else to do this person's job and shuffle titles around.
No one gets fired for non-aggressive incompetence. Merit is below two or three other things when considering promotion and salary hikes. At least in the cases I'm familiar with, it's an incredibly frustrating experience. Increasing top-level salary would not fix this, but probably just increase the lack of fairness by over-paying to a greater extent the embedded poor performers.
Not really. If you brought on vastly more competent people and digitized+automated government like the private sector, you wouldn't need to hire so many people, so you can afford to pay the competent people more. Of course, this means stepping on the toes of a bunch of incompetent lifers who are just there for the 9-5 chill life and pension, so it will never happen.
You've gotta ask yourself: if private sector style pay would cost more, then wouldn't that imply the private sector is vastly more inefficient than the government? But that's clearly not the case, so we come to the conclusion that private sector pay and hiring standards must result in much greater output per dollar.
The worst part is that it wouldn’t even require any noticeable increase in tax revenue! The salaries of the dozen or so government employees managing a billion dollar contract are a rounding error in the total cost
We could shift the model from guaranteed pensions to employee contribution retirement funds, and shift the savings to salary. We’d get better pay for civil servants, remove the incentive for bad ones to stay, and make cities and states more financially sound all in one shot.
It may depend on the author, as some articles in the publication are inconsistent with the characterization of “in-depth research.” Previously, the publication wrote about “Stanford’s War on Social Life,” but made some omissions that misrepresented some key facts used as evidence of Stanford’s supposed demise.[1]
Two key things pointed out by our fellow HN readers included the (1) failure to acknowledge the association of the defunct fraternity, wistfully characterized as emblematic of campus social life, with the Brock Turner rape; and (2) the mischaracterization of Lake Lagunita as a beloved campus waterfront neglected by Stanford, when it was in fact an artificial pond created by a dam that the municipality stopped servicing.[2]
These may or may not necessarily be important for a casual audience, but for a publication that presents itself in the self-appointed realm of “governance futurism” there is a lack of rigor and a palpable sense of linguistic license. Take it for what you will.
The Stanford article rings true to me as an alum. The justification for KA losing their housing was entirely unrelated to the Brock Turner case. He was not a member, he just happened to be attending the party.
My time predates most of the events of this article but the war on fun was well underway. Sentiment was that the frats in trouble at the time (kappa sig and SAE) largely deserved it, especially SAE, but there was a sense that anyone else could be next. The university values conformity over social life or even safety. The abrupt removal of the European theme houses without any justification pretty much confirms the former, the banning of hard alcohol and end of the "open door" drinking policy confirms the latter. The coops are probably next on the chopping block.
EDIT- Unrelated fun fact, there is tunnel underneath lake lag that the endangered salamanders and other wildlife can just to get to the other side of the road. This also creates an ambush point for local raccoons and coyotes to eat what comes out.
My impression of Burja is that he’s better at the writing - there are always interesting details - than average but not generally a superior analyst.
For example: https://brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/modern-russia-can-fight... has interesting and useful details but I think has been demonstrably and obviously short of similar analysis from experts in the field who are less certain but more reliable vis-a-vis outcomes.
I've enjoyed Burja's work but he does enter patterns that I would categorize as just needlessly contrarian. I believe he once used the number of ships to say the US navy is slipping, rather than by tonnage - by numbers the north Koreans should be really powerful, and they are right?
On top of all that, You also have to solve for the structural inefficiency of public sector pay and benefits. Public sector employees make tons more than than private sector counterparts when you account for pensions and benefits, but those only really accrue if you “put in your 20” - making government service basically a non-starter for someone that doesn’t want to be a lifer…
People generally call out NIMBY-ism as though it's just some sort of irrational bias that people have, but I don't think that always explains it. Sure, in a lot of cases, people are overprotective of their neighborhoods or communities. But where did that attitude come from? I'd argue it came from decades of corporate greed and government dysfunction that bred a general distrust of large institutions. It's not like people have no reason to feel like big business doesn't have their best interests in mind.
Another commenter gave the construction of highways as an example, saying that people used to look at large infrastructure projects like that with a positive attitude. Well, I'd say look where that got them. The way highways were built in this country completely wrecked communities (especially poor ones located in less desirable parts of town) and eventually led to the uniquely American aesthetic of the urban and suburban wasteland.
If large organizations in this country want to undertake large projects, they have to first work to regain the trust of the average person by acting like they actually give a damn and really want to the world to be a better place for their efforts.
"...people are overprotective of their neighborhoods or communities."
Me: huh, people seem to finally get why NIMBY is a thing!
"...it came from decades of corporate greed and government dysfunction..."
Me: nevermind...
NIMBY is simply people wanting the things to be as they always were. That's about it. Say you lived in the area for 10 years, you've made friends there, you're used to things. Suddenly someone comes by and says that it's time to build something that you don't really care about. What would your reaction be other than NIMBY? You like everything as it already is, there is no need to change anything, now let me watch my game in peace and then i'll go fishing.
"... look where that got them. "
A system that allowed for easier travel, transportation of goods, a system that created a brand new (for the time) travel culture? I can go on and on, but mind you that railways weren't exactly the most community-friendly (whatever it means) thing either.
"...urban and suburban wasteland."
Lesson learned: don't build roads or connect states of a huge country, allowing people to travel wherever they want in the comfort of their vehicle, otherwise in the future you'd be ostracized for the actions of those who came long after you and decided not to innovate in the infrastructure industry.
In SF people could read up on the history of the Embarcadero Freeway. It took a half a century and the Loma Prieta earthquake to work through all that.
Planning is pretty much one of the worst failures of the past century.
It's hard to think of a single place where planning has created an amazing city. Maybe, Vancouver, maybe, but that's mostly a success because it enables a small number of towers in the downtown core.
Despite the huge amount of construction over the past century, the best parts were made when there was the least of contemporary planning methods.
I think a lot of it comes down to the planning for required cars. But the entire field is a complete failure, once you look into how it practices itself in the US.
And if you talk to planners and call them out of the failure of the field as a whole, and for the particular projects they are in, they will say "it's not up to us it's up to the politicians." Which is rather revealing. "Planning" isn't planning but instead a thin veneer over politicians following the whims of NIMBYs.
We'd be better off without the entire field. Let's start from scratch.
Planning (specifically urban planning around cars over the last century) is a giant failure. Hopefully you can understand why people like myself would be skeptical.
The interesting thing about planning is that NIMBYs will insist that a years long planning process is required, right up until the point one is completed saying how a bunch more housing can be added. Then all of a sudden they insist that the plan was flawed and the whole process needs to go back to the drawing board
Exactly! We have a small amount of carbon budget left before we exceed 2C. Using it needs planning. If anything, global warming is a sign that we have basically failed at planning as a species. We glorify our past ability to build but we fail to see that we have overbuilt to the detriment of our future.
A friend has worked in construction project management for almost 40 years, mostly in Texas. A few years ago, he moved to San Francisco to work on the Van Ness project, which was approved in 2003, began construction in 2017 (!), went $40 million over budget, and finally completed this year. The project essentially added a median and some bus lanes to a two mile stretch of road through San Francisco and took 19 years.
During his time in SF, no construction took place—so he told me he would essentially go into the office and do nothing while waiting for various city hearings to happen. After 8 months, he quit in frustration and moved back to Texas.
If you wanted a pithy explanation this comment points to it. It's the speed of the justice system (of which city council is ultimately a part). People want to complain about the participants, but the system itself is so goddamn slow, and more and more decisions are plugged into it, that it's slowness is really the central cause. A working system should be able to handle baseless allegations and NIMBY whining; you can't expect people to show self-restraint.
(The justice system's slowness is also at the heart of another critical problem, the failure of the criminal justice system. Again, people want to complain about the agents, but it's the system itself, particularly it's glacial slowness, that creates perverse incentives and terrible outcomes.)
The justice system is, at its heart, a collaborative information system, and as such is ripe for disruption by software. And I think it's more important to fix even than the healthcare system! At least in part because a large fraction of the complexity of every other system is caused by problems in that most foundational system, justice.
SFMTA likes to point out that in the course of the project it was necessary for them to excavate and replace all the underground utilities along the route. Basically 100 years of the municipal equivalent of "tech debt" showed up on the SFMTA balance sheet.
It's true that the tech debt of utilities was addressed as part of the VN BRT project, however it's also true that the tech debt didn't need to be included in the scope of BRT and it was an intentional (and I would say foolish) decision to do so.
NIMBY-ism is just an example of people not caring for one another in our country. Everyone in the last 20 years or so seems only out for themselves. I remember when the interstate was being built through my town as a kid and people would say it's going to be great. Nowadays I feel every new report about new construction projects only reflect the negative impacts like cost, environment etc. It's just as if everywhere I look all I see is negative outlook from society. And take from that how people's first response is how they can protect themselves.
You can easily look out for you own interests and not go out of your way to shit in the pool. Most of the NIMBY-ism is see in NYC is old busy-bodies interfering in things that probably won't effect them at all.
I don't think I'd put it that way. For the average NIMBY their friends and social circle are often suffering or benefiting from the same projects as them and from the inside it feels more like protecting their community than protecting themselves. But of course a community is just as much defined by who is outside it as who is inside.
However, in the typical case suffering means "The view from my window changes". And somehow that's a valid reason to stop a housing project for hundreds of people.
The article lays out a lot of the problems with American projects, but doesn't do much to explain why European projects are able to manage a better track record. Are their unions weaker, or are their goals better aligned with the projects?
Also the article suggests eliminating National Environmental Policy Act(NEPA) provisions as a way of cutting red tape. I don't doubt that there's a lot of NEPA that ought to be revised, but we need to remember why these provisions were created in the first place. If we eliminate environmental impact studies rather than come up with a more efficient way to conduct them, we should expect that megaprojects will have unforseen environmental impacts. In some cases, local species will be driven to extinction, and in other cases the long term health of nearby people may be compromised. These risks may be worth the payoff, but we should be upfront about these risks and who could be affected.
From the article:
"A common retort to the claim that union labor drives up costs is that other countries, especially in Europe, have both high union participation and lower project costs. But it is widely recognized in the industry that unions increase project labor costs by 20 to 25 percent on average in the U.S."
The article spends alot of steam making an argument that unions drive up costs, then proffers data that shows it's not a solid argument, then just kind of waives it away by saying their argument is "widely recognized" to be true.
This article is idealogical drivel published by Peter Thiel.
part of it is probably that some things that US unions have to fight for are protected by law in europe. as far as i know at will employment doesn't exist in europe for example. i hear in france it is almost impossible to fire anyone at all.
in germany every company with more than 50 employees has to form a workers council that gets a say in how certain things are done in the company. they deal with things like work conditions, safety, office benefits (do we want a rec-room or better food in the cantine?) without any union needed to step in. that reduces unions to negotiating collective pay and related questions like reducing work-hours or other topics that are relevant for a whole industry, not just one company.
i also believe a german union would have a hard time to force a company to hire people that are not needed for a project or even influence who the company can hire.
but apart from that, even in europe not all projects go well. politicians that try to profile themselves by attracting large projects, missmanagement, are not uncommon either.
as the article says, for example germany has similar problems. like the Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link between germany and denmark. denmark ratified the plans in 2015. germany took 5 years longer. local communities, a few shipping companies and individuals sued to stop the project. one documentary made the joke that a project that gets done in denmark in a year, takes a decade in germany.
The article specifically points out that Germany has similar regulatory and cost overrun challenges, so in general it can't be used as a counterpoint - the example case where things went well for Germany is attributed to waiving procedural requirements mandated by the EU.
Even when with guaranteed EU protections, the system can be inefficient.
> I also believe a german union would have a hard time to force a company to hire people that are not needed for a project or even influence who the company can hire.
A German union has to make sure that it doesn't negotiate anyone into uncompetitiveness. If you negotiate for too high a pay, or absurd things like useless jobs, the company gets outcompeted and all those jobs vanish. In the US some unions seem to get around that by either being big enough to cover enough companies (construction), or the companies themselves are local monopolies (e.g. railway). That doesn't work for most European projects because Unions usually don't span borders, but you can always get a construction company from anywhere else in the EU.
I wonder with NEPA if we could do “existing negative impact” studies, i.e. if this is not built, how will the environment be affected? And if the answer is “on net the status quo is worse environmentally” then permitting can proceed without further in depth reviews required for each sub-component. Like high speed electric trains should be extremely easy to pass: they remove car and plane traffic, so even if they hurt some local environments in the process of being built, the net result is better than the status quo so those micro problems are considered outweighed by the macro, unless someone can prove otherwise.
Expanding on this, private groups should be allowed to fund neutral third parties who act similarly to land surveyors: they can provide impact studies for projects the government has not planned. If the status quo is worse for the environment and more expensive to maintain, these “impact study libraries” could provide off-the-shelf projects that wouldn’t need extra regulatory approval. Advocacy groups, like say Extinction Rebellion, could reasonably fund “status quo” analyses for carbon-intensive infrastructure vs reasonable alternatives (mass transit, HSR, road diets, etc).
I tend to agree with your notion of negative impact studies. We tend to favor the status quo, even if the status quo isn't sustainable in the long run.
I do have concerns about private groups bringing in third parties. In practice, these third parties would have incentives to produce whatever results please the organization that hired them. It'ss tricky to arrange conditions such that these third parties are truly neutral.
I think this is an interesting idea, though I suspect "on net the status quo is worse environmentally" is a hard question to answer w/o the aforementioned in-depth reviews (at least to an extent; obviously the current system has problems).
> Incredibly, the state has not laid a single mile of track and it still lacks 10 percent of the land parcels it needs to do so. Half of the project still hasn’t achieved the environmental clearance needed to begin construction. The dream of a Japanese-style bullet train crisscrossing the state is now all but dead due to political opposition, litigation, and a lack of funding.
Among my favorite images are hulking segments of unfinished CHSR viaduct dominating the skyline of Central Valley towns that didn't want it in the first place. A man-made monument to hubris.
HSR is the biggest fucking joke ever. We now have one of the most expensive train systems that literally goes nowhere (fresno - bakersfield). SF and LA aren't even on the table yet. Most of the people who voted for it probably won't see the original plan completed in their lifetimes. If there's any dig to be made at democratic leadership & dysfunction, its the HSR project.
Not sure about this specific stretch, but there is at least one stretch where they elevated the track to get over a stubborn farmer's land who refused to sell.
Apparently eminent domain can take a really long time if the landowner is dead-set on mucking up the process with lawyers, so they just went over his land instead of dividing it, mainly to send a message to any potential future holdouts. (i.e. He could've just accepted the generous offer, but instead got paid nothing.)
Likely to get over something else somewhere else (highway, building, roads, river) without having to climb and come back down. High speed rail doesn't want to climb at all if possible, certainly less than normal rail (and much, much less than light rail).
Because that photo is part of the section that has to cross over a preexisting freight railroad.
Transcontinental freight railroads have insane godlike legal powers. Immune to eminent domain, property taxes, even get to ignore the IBC when they build buildings.
> Like Germany, the U.S. regularly shows that its current stall is ultimately a political choice. In February 2017, heavy rain damaged the nation’s tallest dam, Oroville Dam, creating the risk of catastrophic and deadly flooding in the Sacramento valley. Over 180,000 people living downstream along the Feather River in Northern California were evacuated from their homes. As in the current German case, the risks posed by inaction necessitated a bypassing of the usual rules.
>
> Within 10 days of the damage incident, Kiewit was awarded a contract. A little over two weeks later Kiewit’s team and equipment were fully mobilized at the site. After only 165 days Kiewit had brought the dam’s main spillway into working condition. It then completed a second phase where it built a 1.2 million square foot spillway—an area so large that 25 NFL regulation-sized fields could fit inside it. The combined project was completed in only 18 months.
Same company, two different bureaucratic contexts. The US legal and bureaucratic system is a legacy codebase. It’s done well and continues to work but is vastly inefficient. Now, how to reboot America with a new codebase? That’s the real question…
Dan Carlin has a podcast episode in "Hardcore History" where he describes the US as a "schizophrenic giant" (though I think he is quoting someone). Essentially he describes the US as being ineffective at making decisions, but when they do, they move quickly and with great force.
The Covid vaccine is a great recent example. A truly astonishing amount of scientific work was done in an incredible time-frame when the need for the vaccine became clear.
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My city has many bike lanes that are popular and well-used, as well as a bike-share program that is extremely popular. It also has a large number of cyclist deaths - including children! - due to the spottiness of existing bike infrastructure and overall lack of protected bike lanes. It seems like improving that infrastructure would be both easy, cheap, and popular, given the popularity of cycling and its existing infra, and the cheapness of plopping a concrete barrier onto a street. But no - the second anyone mentions protected bike lanes, a handful of NIMBYs write in with "but muh cars" and the politicians throw up their hands and surrender.
I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in the US in the past 50 years. It seems like at any point in history, any local project will be opposed by somebody, no matter who they are or what the project is. But previous generations seemed to be able to get over that in favor of building. For today's generation it seems like doing nothing has become better than doing something. If this were the 1900s, government would have told the NIMBYs to get bent, we're building Thing X because it's good for society and if you don't like it, tough. That's what living in city means sometimes!
I promise that if you took a group of NIMBYs and proposed tearing down 5 single family homes to build a midrise apartment building they'd object. But if you also proposed—to the exact same group of people—tearing down a mid-rise to build 5 single family homes, they'd object.
If you propose to remove 50 parking spots for a bike lane, they object. If you propose to remove a bike lane to replace it with parking, they'd object too.
These people are driven by a deep cynicism that anything can be made better: they don't believe people could consciously want to make things better, and they don't believe that ungided "forces" can make things better either.
If something has an advocate, the advocate must be taking advantage. If nobody is advocating, then something unguided must be wrong. Nothing can be an improvement.
Therefore, any change must be for the worst, and they oppose everything.
There's also the topically focused ones, like with a focus on crime or property values. (I have had a lot more experience with the latter)
Case in point, Naperville, IL (quite wealthy suburb of Chicago) had a cell coverage problem in the late 90's. The NIMBY's shot down any proposal of putting up "ugly" cell towers because it could mar the view and impact property values. (I would love to know the overlap between the people complaining about cell coverage and property values)
The compromise the city came up with was designing a commemorative bell tower which sneakily could house cellular equipment. This old article describes, conveniently, that the tower was designed to hold cellular networking equipment, and by total coincidence they found a cell company interested in paying to put equipment there:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1999-12-23-991223...
The project, initially termed "The Millenium Bell Tower" (later "The Carillon"), become known locally as "The Millenium Cell Tower".
Here in my country you get people objecting to projects genuinely on the other side of the country. It's becoming a bit of a problem for getting approval of major project like data centres.
I believe my local council do want to make things better, unfortunately what the council leadership consider better I would generally consider to be worse - they are constantly making trying to make the area become "trendy" and divert tourists and foot traffic from the richer suburbs nearby, but at the expense of the people who actually live here.
For example, they "upgraded" a local park by adding a bunch of sheltered seating and an enclosed dog walking area, which does look quite fancy... but removed the skateboarding area and mountain bike jumps that were heavily used by the local kids as they did not "fit the image", and put the new seating and dog areas scattered around inside the park so there isn't enough contiguous area for sports.
>If you propose to remove 50 parking spots for a bike lane, they object. If you propose to remove a bike lane to replace it with parking, they'd object too.
We usually end up with the worst of both worlds and get awful combined parking / bike lane areas that force cyclists to weave between the road proper and the bike lane to avoid parked cars, and that often contain small oil leaks leftover in the parking spaces that can slip up the cyclists.
I suspect that you're collecting all of the people that are against things that you support into one group, when they're really multiple, often opposing groups. NIMBYs just seem to be a bag that upper-middle class millennials store their resentments in. For a similar sentiment, see "haters."
These terrible people whose deep cynicism causes them to hate everything that is new because they don't believe that anything is possible don't exist.
These so called progressives are so myopic that they cement the status quo, and working people are being squeezed out of NYC as a result.
I began my career in solar system SCADA systems. My company wanted to build a solar plant in CA, it was picketed and sued by the Sierra Club. Yes, an environmental club suing to stop a solar power plant.
But replacing with an apartment? Not in MY backyard!
. Want to build a new housing complex? How many of the units are earmarked for 'affordable' housing, and you've got to have solar . Building a new bridge? Better ensure at least one lane is pedestrianized so that that <1% of potential traffic can use it as well . Want to extend public transit? Maybe, but you can't raise prices as it might affect the poor . Want to build a park? Will it be fully ADA compliant so everyone can enjoy it. . Want to install a sidewalk on a roadway? Have you also allocated space for a fully protected bike lane... can't get started without that.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke
Here's my question-- without making an appeal to, "oughts" or ideals; what part of any of this is controversial or surprising given the highly capitalist nature of American civic life? People don't want their nice neighborhoods to change. I don't see this as unreasonable.
The hard part is that often they're right, especially in California - as with the Sepulveda Pass Freeway Expansion Project, where TFA says that the commute times were actually increased.
You can argue that it's a somewhat self-fulfilling belief... but the regulatory state is where it is. The CAVErs today are dealing with what exists.
First off, it's not a bad thing to live without evangelizing their mindset on other people, the emphasis of "only caring about their own back yard". They're allowing other people to live life the way they want to, that's gracious. Emphasizing your status quo in only your own back yard is the opposite of entitlement.
We live in a system of hierarchical social participation. Everyone has participation at the federal level, but each person's participation counts less there than anywhere else. As you move down the ladder to state, county, city/town the you have more control over what goes on in your locality. If you live in a neighborhood where you don't want something to change, you have every right to want that. Especially if you're rooted in the area while a demographic of transient transplants try introducing ground-changing legislation in the city they just moved to, and might leave within 10 years.
In an urban area there are different considerations that might weigh less heavily in favor of unrestricted access to firearms.
It strikes me that rural area firearm ownership might warrant a different treatment than urban area ownership. And if that's the case maybe there's a wide class of these sorts of things that we should address on a similar basis.
Meanwhile, most trains are pretty unpleasant--many cars wreak of piss, smoke, etc, people free-style rapping, trying to start fights (especially people of questionable sanity), etc. Buses can be better, but they're also a lot slower. If you have a family, own a dog, or have a disability, then it quickly becomes more practical to own a car, and even if we clean up public transit, police it properly, and expand it I'm not sure it would change the calculus--you would still likely be better off owning a car than relying solely on public transit and rideshare and so on.
Of course, I want Chicago to make those improvements to its public transit system if only to pull more people off the road more often, but I think there will always be a core group of people who need to own cars. I think if this is true for Chicago it will also be true for smaller US cities.
Why go this far when it's pretty clear that a happy medium is possible? Seems to me it's clear that a place like NYC does well enough at accommodating density, foot traffic, public transport, bicycling, and still allows a modicum of (usually inconvenient but still possible) auto traffic.
I'm sure it is a great idea to divide the people of a country in city-livers and non-city-livers. It will bring wealth and happyness in this new world. And maybee the next big civil war...
And then cities become prisons, with no escape even at the weekends.
The people waging war on the car rarely seem to be car-free themselves. There seems to be an attitude of 'To deal with climate change, pack all the poors into tiny apartments in megacities and take their transport away. Then the wealthy people can have the rest of the planet and its open roads!'
This is the root cause. The highway overbuilding was so devastating to the people it affected that many processes were put in place so that it would never happen so undemocratically again. It‘s a pendulum.
"Milennials/GenZ rule the online space, boomers rule the meat space."
Your angry tweet means fuck all.
As for why they care about NIMBYs so much - it is because our current class of politicians aim to be career politicians. Therefore, they look to remain in power at all costs, and part of that means not pissing off the most vocal members of their community.
What we need is real leadership from politicians who are willing to stake their tenure in office on pushing projects through.
Thinking about this more, at least in my city it seems like one of the problems is that for a generation now, politicians have consistently outsourced decisionmaking to a poll of the community.
In theory, one elects a politician to be independent decisionmaker for the constituent's interests, for the length of their term; and if at the end of the term the people didn't like their decisions, they're voted out. This gave politicians latitude to do what they thought was best, with the greater good of the community in mind.
In the past half century, (and again, only in my city) this model seems to have changed to politicians being elected, and then running every decision past the community as a kind of popularity poll. Developer wants to replace an auto lot that's been abandoned for a decade with dense apartments? Better poll the community to see what they think. Adding a protected bike lane to connect two existing bike networks? Let's ask the community first. And of course when they do that, the only people who show up are the NIMBYs, and the politicians get the impression that nobody wants development.
The NIMBYs have spoken, we better leave that disused auto lot abandoned and blighted! (And this is a real example from today's news!)
How do we change the system?
I don't think that's quite fair. Look at the statistics of who actually turns up to vote. The median voting age for mayoral elections is 57 [1]. Seniors are 15x more likely to vote than those aged 18-35. If I had to guess, this would only get worse if you get into even more obscure elections like city council. Incidentally, Boomers are much less likely to bike everywhere, so you can't really blame the politicians for catering their policy to them.
[1] http://whovotesformayor.org/
Real leadership is to do what politicians are already doing because most people who pursue high-level leadership positions do it for selfish reasons.
In the United States, zoning is controlled almost exclusively by local city councils. Voter turnout in local elections is extremely poor. The only people who vote are A. older and B. homeowners. The young and renters scarcely show up. Thus, local city councils by and large represent homeowner’s interests. These older homeowners adamantly oppose new development like apartments, bike lanes, and mass transit. They fear developments might affect the value of existing homes, change the ‘character of the neighborhood’ (read: attract the wrong type of minorities), increase traffic, compete for existing parking, etc… the list goes on. In general, homeowners are opposed to any type of change that might affect the value of their home or mildly inconvenience their lives.
Local politicians are loathe to cross homeowners. They will be voted out if they do. Further, these politicians are usually homeowners themselves and are complicit in maintaining homeowner’s best interests at the expense of the broader public.
The only solution is that cities be stripped of their absolute control over zoning and power shared at the federal and state level.
> zoning is controlled almost exclusively by local city councils
What's wrong with it?
People opposing the status quo usually look to imply that every citizen of the USA should have the right to go and live where he likes the most, at the price and at the conditions it prefers.
Why should I be able to force, for example, San Francisco to build cheap homes for me to move there? If I can't afford San Francisco, I'll go live elsewhere.
Instead, if I live in San Francisco, I will participate in the local political life and vote according to my preferences.
Locally there are a couple of plans to tear up and reroute highways in a decade long project where the highways literally just finished major tear-up-and-reroute project.
There's another nonsensical proposal to tear up one of the busiest highways around and replace it with a nice boulevard because wouldn't that be lovely, except without any plan for what would happen to the rest of traffic.
There are NIMBYs but there are also people worried about projects which are trying to help won't actually make anything better and often will have real negative consequences.
the worry is misplaced because stupid projects are compensated by good ones. This obsession with efficiency, which seems to be an artifact of modern economic logic is one of the culprits of why nothing gets build. Effectiveness matters, not efficiency. This is just the same logic that VC investors use. nine out of ten startups are crap, some are scams, but it doesn't matter. Better to waste some resources than to build nothing at all.
China understands this. People will laugh at empty ghost cities or wasteful vanity projects but they're compensated for by what works and tacit knowledge generated in the process. America's gilded age or new deal era or cold war military projects were no different. Better to go big and get something done than do nothing at all. And that's usually the two choices.
For example, almost nobody knows about Braess' paradox, where adding roads and cause more traffic. This is not induced demand, it's simply worse traffic for the same quantity of traffic through expanded routes.
And there are tons of examples of getting rid of highways where the traffic just disappears, and everybody is happier.
Or, locally, people are advocating against a small commuter rail project, in economic grounds, while the same people are advocating for spending 10x on highway projects that carry about the same number of people.
Blame the politicians, but they are mo stupider than organized groups.
Unfortunately, much of the history of that era was exploiting racial minorities in order to build.
I'm currently sitting in a neighborhood (PNW USA) that at the turn of the century was established mostly by german immigrants. They built their houses here because the more anglo population in the city proper, slightly to the south, and mostly across the river, redlined them away from those areas.
Fast forward to just after WW2, and a substantial black population moved here to work building ships for the war effort. These folks were largely setting in a racially integrated town just a bit further north from me. In the post war years, this flooded, creating a local refugee crisis. The powers that were in the city at the time did not want black families in their areas, so they decided to redline them into the germanic neighborhood and make it their problem.
Fast forward a couple decades, and my neighborhood has become the cultural and economic center for the black community in my city. City proper leadership is still openly and malignantly racists, so they go along with a scheme to use a free way expansion and building a hospital campus to snap up the land for a fraction of what it was worth under eminent domain. Culturally the neighborhood has not recovered from this. Several multi block scale plots of land remain unbuilt but owned by the hospital.
That's just my neighborhood. Robert Moses and his peers played out this story nation wide.
So, there's obviously a lot going on with the US's current failure to build civic infrastructure in a sensible and affordable way. But before we lionize what was going on in the past, we should remember a lot of what got built was at the cost of someone who's rights and economic interests were legit thwarted. It doesn't excuse modern NIMBYism from a position of privilege, but I do worry about reforms that give planning boards sharper knives.
Curious, what city is this?
To get the rate of progress you're talking about requires bulldozing through neighborhoods and often buying up private property. So you have to be comfortable with personally taking away someone's property for public use.
If you aren't ready to do that, then you're distracting from the fundamental issue by substituting terms. You're also using proxy to put these moral dilemmas onto someone else, maybe an elected official. It's analogous to convincing someone of murder and then having another person pull the switch for the electric chair.
Without getting too far out into the weeds, we're seeing this problem in recent Supreme Court rulings. I've chosen for myself to use proper terminology now. I expect that from others and will be pointing out this issue in future discussions. If the people I'm debating continue to use hand waving to avoid the crux of issues, then I will make light of it and point out their inadequate communication skills. Basically questioning their leadership authority if they don't have an understanding of debate and continue to insult the intelligence of their constituents.
The GP groups eminent domain in with NIMBYism, you are grouping NIMBYism in with eminent domain. Oversimplification dilutes the conversation in the same way that substituting terms does.
His example of building a protected bike lane on a city road does not require eminent domain and in my opinion requires far less scrutiny than project where a person's property is considerably affected (as far as I'm aware most people interpret the backyard in NIMBY in the metaphorical sense rather than the literal one). I would assume that the GP feels similarly given the type of projects they want to see completed. They seem primarily concerned with local projects which usually don't need eminent domain because they have a decent level of flexibility in their location, unlike highways or train tracks.
My issue came when I discovered that the current water line and easement is on the other side of the road, but they would have to cut down quite a few tree while it was a lot easier to dig in front of my farm. So far, I get it. Then I could out that they offered us 3 cents per square foot of frontage but the home next to us was offered 4x as much at 4 cents per square foot. And someone else offer 4 cents, and they didn't even know about the 3 new houses on our road before they even started planning.
I'm all for improving infrastructure, but it needs to be in a fair, and well planned, way. Neither of which is common with this sort of thing.
Now, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction -- no project can be built because no one is willing to step on anyone's toes.
I don't see this as a bad thing at all. We could do with fewer "megaprojects" unapologetically stepping on people's toes. Frankly, if the project isn't economical after accounting for what it would cost to buy up the necessary property at market rates--which is to say, rates the actual owners will voluntarily accept without any threat of coercion or eminent domain--then it simply isn't worth doing.
I totally understand the reaction many people have to government. I fall victim to it all the time. We see that politicians get bought and paid for, and we therefore assume that nothing can change the way things work, but this proves otherwise. At the end of the day, those who show up tend to win.
If we all want change, and judging by this thread a majority do, then we need to show up. Show up at the local meetings. Call your local reps. Be annoying. Get everyone you know to also be annoying. Politicians like remaining in power, and an angry mob shouting about the roads and bike lanes... that will motivate them.
See also: the 1970 Congressional report from the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED050960.pdf#page=10 (copy and paste URL to avoid HTTP Referer check)
John D. Rockefeller Ⅲ sez: "We have all heard[citation needed] about a population problem in the developing nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where death rates have dropped rapidly and populations have exploded. Only recently have we recognized that the United States may have population problems of its own. There are differing views. Some say[who?] that it is a problem of crisis proportions — that the growth of population is responsible for pollution of our air and water, depletion of our natural resources, and a broad array of social ills.[SUBTLE]"
You may know the above as "WTF Happened in 1971?" https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
That is a damn shame. As a driver and also cyclist, I hate seeing bicycles on the car roads; I also hate being on the road when I cycle, as there are too many inattentive drivers.
And please, keep pedestrians off of cyclists lanes. Ticket them if you must.
NIMBYs pay with their time, and they have a lot of it. This should be "taxed" at some rate. It has to be enough to provide some minimal balancing force against passivity.
The US senate is another example of this problem BTW, both in the form of the filibuster and in the general inadvisability of huge omnibus bills that give everyone their very own excuse to oppose without consequence, but maybe that's getting a bit off topic.
Fifty years ago houses weren't so expensive, relative to income, and thus the risk wasn't as high. My parents bought their first house in 1969 for $17K, no student debt, no health insurance expenses, etc. So, if a highway was built in their backyard, they would've been much more concerned about the hit to their quality of life than to their finances.
There is basically no evidence increasing density leads to anything but higher property values for everyone.
This is not current generation I might add, who I believe would be quite happy with a shake up. It's previous generation of 50 years olds and over that have brought this about.
"It breaks my heart to see such needless desecration of our beautiful countryside for this catastrophe!" -- the video in question was drone footage over wholly unnatural farm fields. That will return to being farm fields once construction finishes, with a 20m strip of train tracks running through it. Of course, they didn't mention the existing motorway that was also in the shot.
"An obscene use of fossil fuels, environment, and money for something we don't really need." -- About a train that will use zero fossil fuels and will lessen demand for cars. Really.
Also, a bunch of people saying it's useless because it won't have a station in their town. It's a high-speed line, of course not! The whole point is to make local services faster and more frequent by removing express services from the existing over-crowded lines.
We dug a very, very deep hole by treating housing as an investment instrument and it's going to be hard to dig out.
I have my doubts. I suspect in 25yrs time it will be the same old story with the current generation becoming the previous generation.
Don't discount that your elected officials may be NIMBYs themselves, or well-funded by NIMBYs. Consider this if you still have an upcoming primary election or when you go to the polls in November.
Could it be these are the only voices local politicians are hearing? 99.99% of residents being okay with new builds doesn't always translate into a political will that a politician can exploit.
And it is not just about public infrastructure projects either. Basic private projects are also bureaucratically difficult to pull off, simple things like tearing down an old house and building a small multi-unit low rise in its place, needs an army of lawyers and consultants to approve. With that, only big companies have the bureaucratic resources to do it, so "regular people" are locked out of the opportunity to redevelop their own home, and the city gets less variety of developments as the few able players keep copying and pasting the same stuff, focused only on the same target market.
You already explained it yourself. They write in. They probably also vote. Their representatives do what they're told.
If there's a group of people with money and a group with less debating the same issue, I would expect the politician to support the party most likely to make large campaign contributions.
I have no data to support this idea and should not be taken seriously in this context.
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In other words it's hard to blame individuals for making rational decisions in their own self-interest in a fundamentally broken system.
This isn't entirely new and Ben Franklin had a solution for it that allowed much of the American revolution to take place.
Secret societies. Many many very small interconnected secret societies, much like an MLM scheme but where you only know your immediate downline and your single sponsor. Everyone was member of at least two secret societies, each with 6 members. The first they were invited to join and the second they created themselves. They just enabled the exchange of pamphlets, but in this fashion ideas gained wide dispersal and support before ever truly becoming public.
The basic cause of this is there were a lot of government projects in the 60s that were bad and activism successfully stopped them. That's "urban renewal", the Embarcadero highway, etc - city planners would basically knock down black neighborhoods just for the joy of building highways over them even if nobody used the result.
So the government was taken over the people who stopped things and rebuilt to make it very easy to stop things, and impossible to actually do them.
Another part of this is that era's environmentalism (under some names like "cities as growth engines") basically thought that doing things = bad for the environment and not doing things = good for the environment. That gets you national parks but also suburban sprawl, which is less "intense" than cities, and so more "natural".
This is a many year process: to bring into public office people who care, willing to change laws, or city ordinances, and department values and priorities (street / public works) and budget money for the new priorities, and to flex the electoral muscle by the organizing (an increasingly important and larger number) of voters to pay attention.
Like it or not that is the game you are in. If you are not playing to change the game, you are doomed to play by the same rules you complain about.
The handicapped / wheelchair access to sidewalks, now visible nation wide in the US, started with zero curb cuts everywhere in the 1960s, and wheelchair non-accessbility to many essential services, such as grocery stores, post offices, other public buildings, including schools, court houses, social services, and municipal governmental offices. Hospitals had figured this out, mostly, but not entirely, by that time.
[1] https://youtu.be/RUoiUAsLZM0
The biggest NIMBY opposition these days is against the new soccer stadium, which is supposed to both warm up the area too much and throw too much of a shadow.
Then again, there's also a vocal minority who thinks the government should spend as little as possible, and new projects are even worse.
In the words of the Joni Mitchell: "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot"
That's your problem right here. Adding 1 mile of bike lane is counterproductive. It does not really help biking and at the same time it potentially hurts other modes of transportation. You need commute network.
What you need is a robust, modeled plan for end result and transitionary period. Building a 1 mile stretch of bike lane and building 100 miles of bike lanes in 1 mile increments are entirely different things. One is more subject to both populism by politicians and opposition from society.
This isn't an America problem.
It's a people "wealthy enough to have so few real problems they have spare fucks to give about what their neighbors are building" problem.
If the "HN Class" of people (very roughly speaking) would actually give a F about other people's property rights this problem would evaporate overnight. Cities and private developers could buy what they want and develop what they want. But nope, enforcing conformity and having veto power over the next big box store or freight terminal is more important so that means no new anything gets built.
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That x 1000 !
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Auto manufacturers and oil companies have had massive political influence, they've prevented good public transit from being built and they've bought public transit and ripped up the lines or bought bus companies and shut them down.
Capitalism, shareholder value, and profit rule everything in the US. And don't even get me started on our foreign policy.
It often seems to be used by people who demand that others make sacrifices for others and that’s a bad sign, a sign of coercion and exploitation. This is distinguished from considerations about the common good which entail considering the impact on others and how they might be compensated (eg responsible eminent domain), or crotchety curmudgeons who hate things that would even be to their own benefit simply because they’re resentful of everyone. Calling someone a NIMBY seems too often to be a way of demeaning someone who refuses to agree to give something up so you can have something you want.
Like the detail that one of the most egregious episodes from California HSR involved a Spanish company that performed excellently on rail projects in Spain. Overall, this piece makes a strong case that the problem is specifically NIMBYism and loss of government institutional capacity.
I think the million dollar question is how government organizations can hire and retain better. The current situation looks dire. Obviously a charismatic leader with a broad anti-NIMBY mandate would go a ways at getting competent people to want to work in government. You saw that succeed on a small scale with orgs like US Digital Service.
The elephant, after that, is merit-based pay and promotion. Someone needs to sell this to the public. RN literally random cops and plumbers make mid six figures thru overtime while the directors of $100b mega-project are low-energy lifers making less than that. That's not gonna work.
Also please correct me if I am wrong, I haven't dug too deep into YIMBY aside from surface level digging.
I think you're probably wrong, yes. Having lived in cities with rent control, what I've observed is people who get into a rent-controlled apartment simply NEVER leave it. They pass it down to family members. They unofficially sublet it for years. They are not particularly poor, they just are paying below market for rent so why would they ever give up that sweet deal? And therefore one rental unit is off the market, and the rest of us are competing for the remaining apartments and subsidizing the low rental unit. I would prefer we let rents equalize based on supply and demand, and the government just supplement the rent of low income individuals.
I'd also point out that areas that encourage more construction have been growing and becoming attractive places to live. Emeryville for example has been building aggressively and its becoming a nice place to live (minus the highway nearby). Some parts are surprisingly walkable and it even has free public transit (the emery-go-round). Compare this to SF which has blocked housing (especially apartment buildings); its becoming increasingly unaffordable and suburban feeling compared to east bay. Density also leads to more diversity.
Rent control doesn't "create" any housing. It simply puts a cap on the price of housing. I'm a part-time Real Estate investor, and I would never invest in a city that had a rental cap, since the point of investments is to make money, not start a charity. Public housing has the same problem. You end up putting a bunch of poor people in one building, who statistically end up being associated with crime and drug use. This drives down real estate values in the adjoining neighborhood and makes real-estate less attractive to investors and you wind up creating a slum.
Want to promote more affordable housing? Keep the government far away. The market has its fair share of issues and inefficiencies, but it's still more efficient than affordable housing programs dreamed up by government bureaucrats.
Personally (as just a homeowner) I feel like the crux of our problem is constraints, and while the YIMBYs are working that problem, they're also contributing new constraints like rent control, inclusionary zoning, anti-displacement measures, etc that negatively offset the gains made elsewhere.
Public housing is its own problem. It creates de facto ghettos, which is a major reason why locals oppose construction of public housing. It turns out that landlords' financial incentive to screen prospective tenants generally does a good job of weeding out trashy people who destroy the unit and surrounding area.
Since the 1960s however, we've slashed our potential to add capacity (1), and prices have soared in markets like Los Angeles that were historically more affordable to wage earners.
1. https://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-3717
The latest in the movement for new public housing in California is actually supported by YIMBY organizations [2]. AB 2053, The Social Housing Act is making its way through the state legislature right now. While just about every YIMBY organization supports it, it's opposed by NIMBY orgs like Livable California, the League of California Cities, and even the California Association of Realtors. Meanwhile, the orgs which have long talked about supporting social housing are taking either no position or support-if-amended stances on the bill because they don't like that the way it generates subsidy for below market housing is by building market-rate housing to cross-subsidize it. They strongly believe that any new market-rate housing causes displacement but don't want to be on the wrong side of history when this bill succeeds.
[1] https://www.tiktok.com/@planetmoney/video/709917153557088183... [2] https://www.californiasocialhousing.org/
I have a townhome and in our complex one had to be sold as a low-income unit. The person who got it was well connected to the developer, "My Aunt has known him for 30+ years".
You should try to drop in to one of our meetings. It is a very big tent here. You have people not only involved on making it easier to build more housing, but also ensuring that we build affordable housing and that we keep tenant protections.
I am of the idea that 90% of the problem could be solved by streamlining housing of all types (e.g. remove zoning, making permitting a 30 day process, by-right building, etc.) and the last 10% can be covered via government intervention (e.g. public housing, housing vouchers, rent control, etc.).
But you can find folks within YIMBY Action that think the mix is 50% / 50% or 20% / 80%. And you will see that our endorsements and activism reflects that! We are as often promoting removing barriers for building housing as we are ensuring that we protect those that need it the most.
We all agree, however, that you _need_ to build housing, that the problem is a problem of supply, and that the culprit is Byzantine regulation and NIMBYism.
Come join us!
Think about how much money a developer makes on building something, versus how much more money homeowners make by blocking housing, and you'll be astounded. A developer makes 5%-20% returns for a one-time project, that houses people. This is modest versus annual, compounded investment returns 5%-10% for homeowners/landlords, and those unearned profits also continually take homes out of reach of more and more people. So you can see why landlords and homeowners are so anti-developer, because it puts their gravy train at risk.
That sounds like it's "pro-developer" propaganda, but it's actually just anti-NIMBY propaganda. And perhaps they are the same.
One is that many (most?) advocates for this are actually being dishonest. It's a cudgel that can be used to stop just about any development project, because nothing is ever affordable enough. Any proposal that involves a mix of market-rate and subsidized housing should have more subsidized housing. Any proposal that's 100% affordable housing should be bigger and better. (I kid you not, I've seen people say that apartments that are being provided to the homeless for free should have granite countertops or GTFO). Non-market rents are too high, unless they're in existing apartments, in which they can never ever be raised. And so on. The result is that people who're only casually involved in city politics basically sign up for a total ban on construction, because "affordable housing" sounds reasonable.
The other is that economically, it's basically price controls, and that never has good results. The fact is, the housing crisis is a simple lack of housing. We need a lot more housing in most cities. The population has grown and industrialization/post-industrialization has shifted economic opportunity away from small towns and cities toward the largest cities. Housing is expensive because demand has gone up, but we've artificially restricted supply by not allowing construction. The affordable housing "solution" is to keep restricting housing supply, but shield a select group from the consequences of that. Who qualifies is subject to debate, but it's always a small number of people, and everybody else is SOL. So either you bought a long time ago, you're rich enough to buy now, or you're part of the protected class. Everyone else is SOL, and that includes a lot of people that spend a good chunk of their lives commuting because they can't afford to live where they work. Heck, it also includes a lot people in the protected class that would like to move but can't afford to lose their subsidy.
But that said, more market rate housing is good too! Provided it’s not replacing subsidized units, anyway. We need housing to not be scarce in general; it’s not an either/or thing.
Like this you drop the prices in the "normal people" segment without rent control
A side of it? I would guess more than half of it is astroturfing developer groups, aka paid liars. It is such a disservice because it is a real problem that they are selfishly exploiting. They aren't interested in sustainable development, just cashing in and leaving a problem behind for the local taxpayers to clean up decades later. They exploit otherwise well meaning idealists - like the ones that are so common here - with amazing skill.
See my friends startup InCitu.us for a great example of the opportunity for win/wins in the space: https://www.incitu.us/
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Simple: offer salaries that compete with the private sector. Of course, this involves raising tax revenues which is incredibly unpopular politically. But we get what we pay for and as long as public sector pay remains a joke compared to the private sector, we are always going to have this problem.
Government organizations are going to be held to the highest standard for equity, transparency and governance (and ideally security, but...). Building a product with artifacts that demonstrate and/or attest to all of these things creates incredible friction. I'm just coming out of a seven year stint at one of the largest banks in the world, and despite loving the people I work with I couldn't take it any more. I've on the other side of the summit in my career and I don't really want to have navigating bureaucracy be a major component of my professional efforts for the remainder of it.
The thing is, just giving everyone raises doesn't work. It needs to be based on merit.
I've proposed a system where teachers get a base salary, plus a substantial increment for every student in their class that meets grade level expectations at the end of the school year.
No one gets fired for non-aggressive incompetence. Merit is below two or three other things when considering promotion and salary hikes. At least in the cases I'm familiar with, it's an incredibly frustrating experience. Increasing top-level salary would not fix this, but probably just increase the lack of fairness by over-paying to a greater extent the embedded poor performers.
You've gotta ask yourself: if private sector style pay would cost more, then wouldn't that imply the private sector is vastly more inefficient than the government? But that's clearly not the case, so we come to the conclusion that private sector pay and hiring standards must result in much greater output per dollar.
Two key things pointed out by our fellow HN readers included the (1) failure to acknowledge the association of the defunct fraternity, wistfully characterized as emblematic of campus social life, with the Brock Turner rape; and (2) the mischaracterization of Lake Lagunita as a beloved campus waterfront neglected by Stanford, when it was in fact an artificial pond created by a dam that the municipality stopped servicing.[2]
These may or may not necessarily be important for a casual audience, but for a publication that presents itself in the self-appointed realm of “governance futurism” there is a lack of rigor and a palpable sense of linguistic license. Take it for what you will.
[1]https://palladiummag.com/2022/06/13/stanfords-war-on-social-...
[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31732944
My time predates most of the events of this article but the war on fun was well underway. Sentiment was that the frats in trouble at the time (kappa sig and SAE) largely deserved it, especially SAE, but there was a sense that anyone else could be next. The university values conformity over social life or even safety. The abrupt removal of the European theme houses without any justification pretty much confirms the former, the banning of hard alcohol and end of the "open door" drinking policy confirms the latter. The coops are probably next on the chopping block.
EDIT- Unrelated fun fact, there is tunnel underneath lake lag that the endangered salamanders and other wildlife can just to get to the other side of the road. This also creates an ambush point for local raccoons and coyotes to eat what comes out.
For example: https://brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/modern-russia-can-fight... has interesting and useful details but I think has been demonstrably and obviously short of similar analysis from experts in the field who are less certain but more reliable vis-a-vis outcomes.
I've enjoyed Burja's work but he does enter patterns that I would categorize as just needlessly contrarian. I believe he once used the number of ships to say the US navy is slipping, rather than by tonnage - by numbers the north Koreans should be really powerful, and they are right?
Whats interesting is that it was the “parent” company ACS Grupo that was successful. (They bought a decisive stake in Dragados)
Seems like old school corruption=>incompetence=>credential laundering to me.
https://www.vozpopuli.com/economia_y_finanzas/empresas/acs-f...
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Another commenter gave the construction of highways as an example, saying that people used to look at large infrastructure projects like that with a positive attitude. Well, I'd say look where that got them. The way highways were built in this country completely wrecked communities (especially poor ones located in less desirable parts of town) and eventually led to the uniquely American aesthetic of the urban and suburban wasteland.
If large organizations in this country want to undertake large projects, they have to first work to regain the trust of the average person by acting like they actually give a damn and really want to the world to be a better place for their efforts.
NIMBY is simply people wanting the things to be as they always were. That's about it. Say you lived in the area for 10 years, you've made friends there, you're used to things. Suddenly someone comes by and says that it's time to build something that you don't really care about. What would your reaction be other than NIMBY? You like everything as it already is, there is no need to change anything, now let me watch my game in peace and then i'll go fishing.
"... look where that got them. " A system that allowed for easier travel, transportation of goods, a system that created a brand new (for the time) travel culture? I can go on and on, but mind you that railways weren't exactly the most community-friendly (whatever it means) thing either.
"...urban and suburban wasteland." Lesson learned: don't build roads or connect states of a huge country, allowing people to travel wherever they want in the comfort of their vehicle, otherwise in the future you'd be ostracized for the actions of those who came long after you and decided not to innovate in the infrastructure industry.
https://medium.com/@UpOutSF/old-san-francisco-a-look-at-befo...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/visuals/san-franci...
It's hard to think of a single place where planning has created an amazing city. Maybe, Vancouver, maybe, but that's mostly a success because it enables a small number of towers in the downtown core.
Despite the huge amount of construction over the past century, the best parts were made when there was the least of contemporary planning methods.
I think a lot of it comes down to the planning for required cars. But the entire field is a complete failure, once you look into how it practices itself in the US.
And if you talk to planners and call them out of the failure of the field as a whole, and for the particular projects they are in, they will say "it's not up to us it's up to the politicians." Which is rather revealing. "Planning" isn't planning but instead a thin veneer over politicians following the whims of NIMBYs.
We'd be better off without the entire field. Let's start from scratch.
We need building. We've done enough planning for 10 lifetimes, and all it got us was a crushing housing crisis.
During his time in SF, no construction took place—so he told me he would essentially go into the office and do nothing while waiting for various city hearings to happen. After 8 months, he quit in frustration and moved back to Texas.
(The justice system's slowness is also at the heart of another critical problem, the failure of the criminal justice system. Again, people want to complain about the agents, but it's the system itself, particularly it's glacial slowness, that creates perverse incentives and terrible outcomes.)
The justice system is, at its heart, a collaborative information system, and as such is ripe for disruption by software. And I think it's more important to fix even than the healthcare system! At least in part because a large fraction of the complexity of every other system is caused by problems in that most foundational system, justice.
Also the article suggests eliminating National Environmental Policy Act(NEPA) provisions as a way of cutting red tape. I don't doubt that there's a lot of NEPA that ought to be revised, but we need to remember why these provisions were created in the first place. If we eliminate environmental impact studies rather than come up with a more efficient way to conduct them, we should expect that megaprojects will have unforseen environmental impacts. In some cases, local species will be driven to extinction, and in other cases the long term health of nearby people may be compromised. These risks may be worth the payoff, but we should be upfront about these risks and who could be affected.
The article spends alot of steam making an argument that unions drive up costs, then proffers data that shows it's not a solid argument, then just kind of waives it away by saying their argument is "widely recognized" to be true.
This article is idealogical drivel published by Peter Thiel.
It's not hard evidence that Thiel publishes or funds the project, though.
in germany every company with more than 50 employees has to form a workers council that gets a say in how certain things are done in the company. they deal with things like work conditions, safety, office benefits (do we want a rec-room or better food in the cantine?) without any union needed to step in. that reduces unions to negotiating collective pay and related questions like reducing work-hours or other topics that are relevant for a whole industry, not just one company.
i also believe a german union would have a hard time to force a company to hire people that are not needed for a project or even influence who the company can hire.
but apart from that, even in europe not all projects go well. politicians that try to profile themselves by attracting large projects, missmanagement, are not uncommon either.
as the article says, for example germany has similar problems. like the Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link between germany and denmark. denmark ratified the plans in 2015. germany took 5 years longer. local communities, a few shipping companies and individuals sued to stop the project. one documentary made the joke that a project that gets done in denmark in a year, takes a decade in germany.
Even when with guaranteed EU protections, the system can be inefficient.
A German union has to make sure that it doesn't negotiate anyone into uncompetitiveness. If you negotiate for too high a pay, or absurd things like useless jobs, the company gets outcompeted and all those jobs vanish. In the US some unions seem to get around that by either being big enough to cover enough companies (construction), or the companies themselves are local monopolies (e.g. railway). That doesn't work for most European projects because Unions usually don't span borders, but you can always get a construction company from anywhere else in the EU.
Expanding on this, private groups should be allowed to fund neutral third parties who act similarly to land surveyors: they can provide impact studies for projects the government has not planned. If the status quo is worse for the environment and more expensive to maintain, these “impact study libraries” could provide off-the-shelf projects that wouldn’t need extra regulatory approval. Advocacy groups, like say Extinction Rebellion, could reasonably fund “status quo” analyses for carbon-intensive infrastructure vs reasonable alternatives (mass transit, HSR, road diets, etc).
I do have concerns about private groups bringing in third parties. In practice, these third parties would have incentives to produce whatever results please the organization that hired them. It'ss tricky to arrange conditions such that these third parties are truly neutral.
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Among my favorite images are hulking segments of unfinished CHSR viaduct dominating the skyline of Central Valley towns that didn't want it in the first place. A man-made monument to hubris.
E.g. https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d88bcf176aba93cb014bff7a9be14...
Apparently eminent domain can take a really long time if the landowner is dead-set on mucking up the process with lawyers, so they just went over his land instead of dividing it, mainly to send a message to any potential future holdouts. (i.e. He could've just accepted the generous offer, but instead got paid nothing.)
Transcontinental freight railroads have insane godlike legal powers. Immune to eminent domain, property taxes, even get to ignore the IBC when they build buildings.
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> Like Germany, the U.S. regularly shows that its current stall is ultimately a political choice. In February 2017, heavy rain damaged the nation’s tallest dam, Oroville Dam, creating the risk of catastrophic and deadly flooding in the Sacramento valley. Over 180,000 people living downstream along the Feather River in Northern California were evacuated from their homes. As in the current German case, the risks posed by inaction necessitated a bypassing of the usual rules.
>
> Within 10 days of the damage incident, Kiewit was awarded a contract. A little over two weeks later Kiewit’s team and equipment were fully mobilized at the site. After only 165 days Kiewit had brought the dam’s main spillway into working condition. It then completed a second phase where it built a 1.2 million square foot spillway—an area so large that 25 NFL regulation-sized fields could fit inside it. The combined project was completed in only 18 months.
Same company, two different bureaucratic contexts. The US legal and bureaucratic system is a legacy codebase. It’s done well and continues to work but is vastly inefficient. Now, how to reboot America with a new codebase? That’s the real question…
The Covid vaccine is a great recent example. A truly astonishing amount of scientific work was done in an incredible time-frame when the need for the vaccine became clear.