Posted by mji 7 hours ago
My take is you build it, and THEN they come. Put in some GOOD transit. Make sure the utilities are in place. Developers will then flock to the place. This whole thing is using inside-out logic. Have a real plan first.
The problem is, that costs money that, for a few years at the very least, will not be recouped. Not many politicians have the ability to push such efforts through regardless of profitability, especially not when the topic in question will be abused by the opposition in their usual culture war bullshit.
https://oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2025/07/29/gov-kotek-sign...
I got to play a small part in that, going to Salem to say my piece in favor:
https://oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2025/03/04/oregon-gov-kot...
She liked my hoodie!
https://bsky.app/profile/tinakotek.bsky.social/post/3lkea36k...
That said, what her bills have accomplished is a bit different than CA: rather than larger buildings close to transit, we legalized 4-plexes and a variety of other housing types that use land more efficiently, throughout cities.
https://www.theurbanist.org/2025/05/27/seattle-just-rezoned-...
To be clear, I'm strongly in favor of more development. But when we solve the problems of bad legislation by adding more legislation instead of removing legislation, we are just kicking the can down the road.
Politicians are bound to the interests of property owners not those who can't afford it. Besides high density bring high crimes, and high concentrated poverty
Probably, but there is a lot of money on the table for developers and so I think capitalism will be aligned with denser housing for a bit of time. Developers with deep pockets aren't interested in maintaining property values for single family homes, they will want to buy up land cheap and build station/commercial complexes for dense housing to build up around.
That's my view anyway. The upside of dense living is the affordability for individuals, one of the downsides is that it can favour big corporate developers. Shared ownership structures are really important to help mitigate that for residential developments.
In a society that works together this can be symbiotic, and really efficient way to build. For a country that lets the rich eat the poor, there is potential for exploitive scenarios to arise without the right regulation in place.
It should be a net positive if it doesn't die in the courts for every single proposal.
It's also not enough by itself but Rome wasn't built in a day.
* The approvals are designed to be "ministerial", meaning there is no discretion on whether to approve or not. If the project meets the objective criteria spelled out in the law, it must be approved.
* If the city doesn't approve in a limited time window, it's deemed "approved" by default.
* Ministerial approval protects the project from CEQA lawsuits. CEQA requires the government to consider the environment when making decisions. When the approval is ministerial, the government doesn't make any decisions, so there is no CEQA process to sue against.
Frankly, this strategy seems to be a good one considering what a winning streak CA YIMBYs have been on.
I don't understand this narrative that California has been pushing the last few years - basically, "There's a bus stop in the neighborhood, therefore we can add a bunch of new housing without doing any other infrastructure upgrades." I just don't see it. What I do see after new housing is added is insufferable traffic and no parking - and empty buses.
You also do now understand people in urban areas and their desires. For example look at Seattle, which has added a lot of population, but only added 1 car per 30 new people:
https://www.theurbanist.org/2025/09/07/while-seattle-populat...
For a few generations, 99% of housing that was built was car dependent. That's not what the market wants. So when options are provided that allow living without a car, people flock to it.
Those who move to cities and can live without cars have far higher incomes than median, and because they are not burning the average of $700/month on a car, they accumulate wealth far faster.
If I have misunderstood your assumption, please correct me, but the "only poor people don't have cars" fallacy is the only way I can make sense of your comment, and the only people I have heard express it are deeply out of touch with the modern world.
There are a FEW things that decline with greater wealth, like number of children, that buck intuition, but it’s not super clear what the cause and effect is. Suffice it to say, if what you were saying is true, which is improbable - I’m not saying impossible, just really improbable - we would be talking about it way more.
Now why you have to go and call me out of touch and all these big harrowing names, I don’t know. I’m just trying to talk about what is likely to be occurring. People make less money and cars are more expensive so fewer people own cars: that shouldn’t be a controversial POV.
This discussion is and has always been centered around the housing crisis in urban centers, where it's been illegal to build density for decades. This has caused issues where those urban centers can't afford for people to provide critical services ( like teachers, laborers, medical staff, social services workers, etc) because housing simply doesn't exist at a price they can afford. Unless the suggestion is to make do with crumbling community services, housing reform is mandatory.
This is what I was referring to, in terms of HN’s attitudes on this topic. Why should a “major metro area” change to accommodate newcomers? It should just stay serving its current residents, who may want it to stay the size it is. The ones desiring to live there at a price they can afford are the entitled ones. They could be the ones to choose to live “anywhere they want outside major metro areas”. Major metro areas also don’t just come in one size. There are larger cities and smaller ones, denser ones and less dense ones. And it is perfectly valid to want a smaller one.
https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/teachers-str...
Are you arguing that large urban areas shouldn't have schools and vet offices? Because that's where we've been heading absent meaningful housing reform.
Normally, this situation would result in wages rising, but there's a few issues.
1) The scale of the shortage is so severe that demand far outstrips supply, which means price-based solutions simply result in high wage earners taking all of the available supply.
2) Prices are rising faster than wages.
3) These industries don't have the cost basis to compete with high wage earners. Are you happy with your local vet prices? Are you willing to triple or quadruple the education taxes you currently pay?
4) Even adjusted wages still cause fewer people to enter these industries from other parts of the US, or switch into more lucrative careers. That's socially problematic.
Whether good or bad, it's important to realize this is not true in California, with regard to these laws. They apply everywhere, not only in urban centers.
So if there are people who want small towns without dense development, that option has been taken away entirely.
I live in a tiny town (population < 10K) surrounded by forest, far from any urban center. An d even here some of the wooded areas are being clearcut to build dense apartments due to these laws.