This argument assumes that we can destroy Palo Alto, rebuild it anew into something completely different, and preserve the value people ascribe to Palo Alto. This is not how it works.
If it worked this way, why do it to Palo Alto? Why not do it to Eureka, CA, or, even better, some unincorporated land with no zoning rules to speak of? Just buy it for pennies on the dollar, slap midtown Manhattan density construction on it, and reap the profits. Why are Bay Area VCs throwing billions at stupid startup ideas, yet won't stoop to pick up trillion dollars from the zoning gutter?
I'm not so sure the results are as dour as you're implying. China has many, many enviable "20-minute cities" scattered all over, all built high density from the ground up.
The answer is that there's no real difference. People object to it no matter where. California Forever is the current attempt to get this done outside the immediate Bay and I hope it succeeds.
Overall, most people just don't like change. I see this among Americans a lot. They'll complain that their lot in life is miserable but if you ask them to do something about it it's always "you expect me to just drop everything and leave for an uncertain chance at something"?
No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to whine.
But it's all right. These kinds of things don't last long. The UK did all of this before and the nation is crumbling. Most of Europe did this, too, and now it's primarily a theme park for relatively rich Americans to come visit.
The local Europeans complain about the cost of living and how their $40k job as Head of Cybersecurity for their nation pays only for a 50 m^2 home 1 he from work. But they made a bed and now we lie in it while they lie on the floor.
It is the nature of people to stall at some point. Then the ones who come after take their stuff. Online they'll complain about it but what are they going to do.
NYC became NYC in a different time and it was always the gateway to the new world
You can create a new city in the middle of nowhere but you'll be missing any authenticity or history. You won't find a bar "since 1889". Some care more about that than others.
Of course that's less of a factor in the US anyway as everything is much more recent.
Planned cities can work but I still tend to find them quite weird. Luke Canberra in Australia. Or Lelystad and Almere in the Netherlands (their whole province is reclaimed land).
A lot of ignorance in this comment. Many early American cities now big major metros were built on top of native American trading routes/trading posts. This idea of a blank slate is grounded is totally false.
I live in downtown Palo Alto, and it has a lot of mid-rise buildings and is walkable. Expanding the area that this is true for is not something completely different.
Yes, and? You cannot just point to an argument, say it’s NIMBY and call it a day. You have to actually argue against it. Slapping a derogatory label on it and dismissing it is not enough.
My idea is even more "dumber" - 12+ miles off the shore of SF. Drive a lot of pillars and pour a lot of concrete and build some similar monstrosity to that "Wall City" Saudis are planning in the desert (or that Star Trek Millennium Tower). Don't need even city charter from the state, no voter approval, etc. Fast hydroplaning taxis to SF, etc. Probably some no-work-visa loopholes.
The article posits that NIMBY-ism is a myth, and to prove it, they do a thought experiment that shows that building more density in Palo Alto would yield more value, and hence it would be the rational thing to do. But why use an unrealistic thought experiment when you have real world examples of NIMBY-ism in action?
I own a house worth single digit millions in a neighboring town to Palo Alto.
The thing is, the life is exactly the way I want it. There's no dysfunction or riffraff like you see in San Francisco. I will vote against development because I simply don't want development. I was exactly the opposite before I bought this house, now that I put over 100% of my net worth into the house I am on the opposite side of the table.
My net worth is under $10 million but I would not accept a $30m check to live in a condo on the 35th floor directly over the land that I inhabit today.
We can either have slow, incremental development that keeps up and tempers demand. Or we can let that demand build up so much that it becomes an issue in the higher political unit (in this case, the state of California). It would take literal generations for that demand to rise so much that a majority of people are on the losing side of that political position... and it has.
The YIMBYs wouldn't be a threat to the people in Palo Alto if the effects of NIMBYism hadn't grown and entrenched themselves for literally 50 years. We are now dealing with the consequences of decisions made in the late-70's and early-80s by people making the same argument that you are making today.
I feel exactly the same as you on not wanting the character of the place I live to change, in a nearby city. I made tremendous sacrifice and investment to live somewhere pleasant. Increasing density will make it exactly like the other places I did not want to live.
That said, $30m will buy a lot of freedom to live like this somewhere else.
To each their own, but I'd accept a $30m check to move to a different town in a heartbeat. With that amount of money I wouldn't have to worry about commuting distances...
Yes, you'll expend resources to protect resources, but that's not the issue.
NIMBY is always an argument about character, not price.
You live where you live -- meaning you can't avoid the influences around you.
So you pick a place with good influences, and protect them.
High density requires defenses against the combinatoric explosion of risk of bad faith actions by others. Defenses are emotionally and financially costly.
Low density - being influenced by people within the Dunbar limit of 150 people you can know - means those defenses can be shared. Every actor is disciplined by the fact that everyone knows what others are doing.
But depending on your needs, there should be enough social variety to be interesting without being threatening. It's unlikely in a monoculture town (of factory farms or government jobs), but possible in a university town, or an area of high economic diversity - Palo Alto or Manhattan.
For those with the courage and the blinders to live in the city, their neighborhood can be a kind of small town. But I suspect this can change with a traumatic experience, or if you are responsible for people who are more attacked/less defended (young, old, female, discriminated...). So people move to the suburbs, or to gated communities or to buildings with a doorman. This is just as true of the ultra-wealthy on Aspen mountain-tops as it is for the homeless who prefer certain doorways.
If home is your castle, your neighborhood is your moat - worth defending.
None of this matters if property taxes are aligned with actual value. If people want to pay the taxes to preserve their low density township, fair enough. The issue is that in CA, we've created a system where density is disconnected from land value, so there is effectively no incentives to use land efficiently. Unsurprisingly, we see vast amounts of sprawl in California.
Facilitating the development of sprawl has negligible exteralities in the short run, but is terrible externalities in the long run.
I've said this once, I've said it a hundred times. The NIMBYs are penny-smart-pound-foolish in their war against incremental density. The political model of CA's housing crisis is not a pendulum swinging back-and-forth. The housing crisis is two generations of pent up demand, finally getting the political power to do something about it. The better allusion is that of a cascade, a dam breaking. Every unit added to these intransigent cities will be occupied by a person previously blocked from home-ownership, and more likely to support more development. Every state law passed that forces these towns to add housing undermines their ability to block it further.
The NIMBYs can build the foundations of the dam, but they won't be able to control the fallout when it breaks, and it will be swift and unpleasant. Creating sustainable, incremental systems is the only way to prevent this in the long run... but that requires a concept of stewardship and common wealth, which is contrary to the NIMBY ideology.
“ let’s say we build 30 miles of subway, about what Manhattan has in that area.”
Public transportation that connects to nothing is not useful. The NY metro area has a massive public transit set of systems that extend out for a hundred miles in every direction. That’s why you can support such density.
edit: It's 665 miles of MTA track, 14 miles for PATH, 700 miles of LIRR train tracks, and 385 for Metro North tracks. Plus Amtrak and the regional buses (the new depot alone for those will cost $10 billion).
On the other hand, the fact that the Bay Area has a bunch of chronically congested freeways due to everyone driving to work is a clear symptom that we need better transportation such as rail transport or buses. For example CA 85 is clearly congested in the direction of driving towards Apple in the morning and away from Apple in the evening.
Sure but if housing density also increases then you'll just keep the existing equilibrium. NYC has the best public transit in the US with less than half the households even owning a car. Yes car traffic is famously bad.
- Palo Alto isn't in San Francisco ("Palo Alto in San Francisco")
- The value of Manhattan is because there's a large pool of people who can commute there using mass transit, while Palo Alto isn't even connected to Bart. If you ignore that, then even a random plot of land in Wisconsin could be worth one trillion
- Large scale development requires a critical mass of employable people and employers; it's unclear whether building a ton of skyscrapers and apartments would induce enough demand on both sides to make things work. This is the same problem that the new city in Solano county has.
- Since development would happen over time, there's a lot of value for a plot holder to maximize their gains by holding on as long as possible since their land value would go up as the surrounding area increases in value; if every plot owner does that, no development happens, and no increase in value is to be had by anyone. This is why the land in Solano county had to be acquired before announcing their plans to build a new city there.
Palo Alto is connected to Caltrain, which has a Bart connection up in Millipedis or so (I'm sure I spelt that wrong). It isn't connected enough to justify super high density, but a lot of Stanford students live in or around Palo Alto without cars (bikes are super common).
Palo Alto has slowly gone from being a college town to almost a retirement community. Some years ago the city government asked residents when and if they intended to move. 80% said they'd stay for the rest of their life. Turnover isn't quite that low, but it's low.
It's also 36% Asian now.
Menlo Park is a little more willing to build. East Palo Alto is very willing to build. The Whiskey Gulch problem ("Murder City USA") was solved by leveling the area and putting in a Four Seasons hotel and an office building full of lawyers. I used to live in Menlo Park near there, and heard automatic weapons fire most weekends. Which is why I don't own a house a mile from what's now Facebook HQ.
> In 1992, [East Palo Alto] had the country's highest per-capita murder rate, with 42 murders for 25,000 residents. In 2023, the city had no murders, the first time in its history. --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Palo_Alto,_California
Pretty cool! I guess the Ikea also contributed to the improvement.
I encourage the author to spend an afternoon and evening in Palo Alto as well as in SF and SJ downtown. Please tell us afterwards where you and your family would rather live.
Dangers of Car-Dependent Suburbs: How Urban Planning Affects Parenting
In this segment, the speaker highlights the stark contrast between the freedom and independence of Dutch children versus the restrictive upbringing in car-dependent suburbs of North America. By comparing their own childhood in London, Ontario, to their current experiences in Amsterdam, the speaker argues that the Dutch city's design and culture enable children to develop autonomy and independence, whereas North American suburbs lack the necessary infrastructure and social norms to allow children to thrive without excessive parental supervision
I may be biased since I lived in San Jose for a while, but definitely San Jose. Palo Alto sometimes has that small college town thing where everywhere can be unexpectedly busy (like why is a sit down restaurant bar absolutely packed with 22 year olds doing shots? Because the college bars are too full to even enter). San Jose is a little dull, but charming. I’m thinking northside, like around backesto park. Palo Alto’s proximity to both SF and all that state park/open space preserve to the west is really nice, and I think it might stay a bit cooler than San Jose, which occasionally gets toasty, but still, I’d pick SJ.
I've spent an afternoon in downtown Manhattan; it's rather a nice place. The world could use more places like that, preferably close to existing population centers.
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If it worked this way, why do it to Palo Alto? Why not do it to Eureka, CA, or, even better, some unincorporated land with no zoning rules to speak of? Just buy it for pennies on the dollar, slap midtown Manhattan density construction on it, and reap the profits. Why are Bay Area VCs throwing billions at stupid startup ideas, yet won't stoop to pick up trillion dollars from the zoning gutter?
China has been running a real life Monte Carlo simulation on this for two decades and the results are eerily quiet. Your point is accurate.
Overall, most people just don't like change. I see this among Americans a lot. They'll complain that their lot in life is miserable but if you ask them to do something about it it's always "you expect me to just drop everything and leave for an uncertain chance at something"?
No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to whine.
But it's all right. These kinds of things don't last long. The UK did all of this before and the nation is crumbling. Most of Europe did this, too, and now it's primarily a theme park for relatively rich Americans to come visit.
The local Europeans complain about the cost of living and how their $40k job as Head of Cybersecurity for their nation pays only for a 50 m^2 home 1 he from work. But they made a bed and now we lie in it while they lie on the floor.
It is the nature of people to stall at some point. Then the ones who come after take their stuff. Online they'll complain about it but what are they going to do.
You can create a new city in the middle of nowhere but you'll be missing any authenticity or history. You won't find a bar "since 1889". Some care more about that than others.
Of course that's less of a factor in the US anyway as everything is much more recent.
Planned cities can work but I still tend to find them quite weird. Luke Canberra in Australia. Or Lelystad and Almere in the Netherlands (their whole province is reclaimed land).
Then using the trillion, buy Palo Alto and turn it into a nature reserve. Win/win!
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What’s dumb about it? As someone who heard about 5 minutes ago, and did 5 minutes of research, it doesn’t look that dumb
The article posits that NIMBY-ism is a myth, and to prove it, they do a thought experiment that shows that building more density in Palo Alto would yield more value, and hence it would be the rational thing to do. But why use an unrealistic thought experiment when you have real world examples of NIMBY-ism in action?
This article makes no sense at all.
The thing is, the life is exactly the way I want it. There's no dysfunction or riffraff like you see in San Francisco. I will vote against development because I simply don't want development. I was exactly the opposite before I bought this house, now that I put over 100% of my net worth into the house I am on the opposite side of the table.
My net worth is under $10 million but I would not accept a $30m check to live in a condo on the 35th floor directly over the land that I inhabit today.
The YIMBYs wouldn't be a threat to the people in Palo Alto if the effects of NIMBYism hadn't grown and entrenched themselves for literally 50 years. We are now dealing with the consequences of decisions made in the late-70's and early-80s by people making the same argument that you are making today.
That said, $30m will buy a lot of freedom to live like this somewhere else.
NIMBY is always an argument about character, not price.
You live where you live -- meaning you can't avoid the influences around you.
So you pick a place with good influences, and protect them.
High density requires defenses against the combinatoric explosion of risk of bad faith actions by others. Defenses are emotionally and financially costly.
Low density - being influenced by people within the Dunbar limit of 150 people you can know - means those defenses can be shared. Every actor is disciplined by the fact that everyone knows what others are doing.
But depending on your needs, there should be enough social variety to be interesting without being threatening. It's unlikely in a monoculture town (of factory farms or government jobs), but possible in a university town, or an area of high economic diversity - Palo Alto or Manhattan.
For those with the courage and the blinders to live in the city, their neighborhood can be a kind of small town. But I suspect this can change with a traumatic experience, or if you are responsible for people who are more attacked/less defended (young, old, female, discriminated...). So people move to the suburbs, or to gated communities or to buildings with a doorman. This is just as true of the ultra-wealthy on Aspen mountain-tops as it is for the homeless who prefer certain doorways.
If home is your castle, your neighborhood is your moat - worth defending.
Facilitating the development of sprawl has negligible exteralities in the short run, but is terrible externalities in the long run.
I've said this once, I've said it a hundred times. The NIMBYs are penny-smart-pound-foolish in their war against incremental density. The political model of CA's housing crisis is not a pendulum swinging back-and-forth. The housing crisis is two generations of pent up demand, finally getting the political power to do something about it. The better allusion is that of a cascade, a dam breaking. Every unit added to these intransigent cities will be occupied by a person previously blocked from home-ownership, and more likely to support more development. Every state law passed that forces these towns to add housing undermines their ability to block it further.
The NIMBYs can build the foundations of the dam, but they won't be able to control the fallout when it breaks, and it will be swift and unpleasant. Creating sustainable, incremental systems is the only way to prevent this in the long run... but that requires a concept of stewardship and common wealth, which is contrary to the NIMBY ideology.
Public transportation that connects to nothing is not useful. The NY metro area has a massive public transit set of systems that extend out for a hundred miles in every direction. That’s why you can support such density.
edit: It's 665 miles of MTA track, 14 miles for PATH, 700 miles of LIRR train tracks, and 385 for Metro North tracks. Plus Amtrak and the regional buses (the new depot alone for those will cost $10 billion).
The only way you could swing that kind of government heft is to reincorporate the Bay Area into a similarly singular entity.
Otherwise, as is now, all problems in the Bay are the fault and responsibility of the next city over.
I really wish this would happen, the city boundaries are so small and arbitary
- Palo Alto isn't in San Francisco ("Palo Alto in San Francisco")
- The value of Manhattan is because there's a large pool of people who can commute there using mass transit, while Palo Alto isn't even connected to Bart. If you ignore that, then even a random plot of land in Wisconsin could be worth one trillion
- Large scale development requires a critical mass of employable people and employers; it's unclear whether building a ton of skyscrapers and apartments would induce enough demand on both sides to make things work. This is the same problem that the new city in Solano county has.
- Since development would happen over time, there's a lot of value for a plot holder to maximize their gains by holding on as long as possible since their land value would go up as the surrounding area increases in value; if every plot owner does that, no development happens, and no increase in value is to be had by anyone. This is why the land in Solano county had to be acquired before announcing their plans to build a new city there.
It's also 36% Asian now.
Menlo Park is a little more willing to build. East Palo Alto is very willing to build. The Whiskey Gulch problem ("Murder City USA") was solved by leveling the area and putting in a Four Seasons hotel and an office building full of lawyers. I used to live in Menlo Park near there, and heard automatic weapons fire most weekends. Which is why I don't own a house a mile from what's now Facebook HQ.
City census stats: [1]
[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/paloaltocitycal...
Pretty cool! I guess the Ikea also contributed to the improvement.
Percentage of black people:
* 1980 - 68%
* 1990 - 43%
* 2000 - 23%
* 2010 - 17%
* 2023 - 13%
[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/eastpaloaltocit...
[2] http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/cities/EastPaloAlto70.htm
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Dangers of Car-Dependent Suburbs: How Urban Planning Affects Parenting
In this segment, the speaker highlights the stark contrast between the freedom and independence of Dutch children versus the restrictive upbringing in car-dependent suburbs of North America. By comparing their own childhood in London, Ontario, to their current experiences in Amsterdam, the speaker argues that the Dutch city's design and culture enable children to develop autonomy and independence, whereas North American suburbs lack the necessary infrastructure and social norms to allow children to thrive without excessive parental supervision
Deleted Comment