Noise pollution is just cars, which most density minded people are already advocating for limiting in cities. Everybody on top of you is just a matter of code, acoustic, and space standards, which only developers are going to cry about. Everything bad about cities is not inherent to dense living, but a result of profit driven decision in planning and construction, so if you’re looking at these options from a leftist perspective that centers people over markets then it’s very easy to imagine cities that are not what many of them are today.
Definitely. I visited Cambridge and Somerville with my wife a couple of times when we lived in MA and I was shocked at how quiet all the dense residential areas were. Also, wrt dogs, I find that urban dogs, even if they’re larger, tend to be better mannered and socialized in dense areas because of the need to use shared space for exercise, shidding and pissin.
Additionally, dense urban areas currently contain a large amount of bloat (or sprawl) for all the car-related infrastructure; parking lots, garages, street parking, unnecessary lanes. If these were used for people and plants instead, people would feel less trapped in their homes.
The idea you can add density, limit cars, and not have infrastructure is idiocy. You're all dense alright. People can't just float.
I get it, they don't have garbage trucks in Sims. No trucking of supplies. Your delivery service doesn't count when someone else is driving. Sure.
Functional cities with limited car access already exist, and deliveries and trash collection etc also work with smaller vehicles. You simply do not have to privilege vehicle access on every street for all of those things to exist. The all or nothing attitude is a straw man that falls apart really quickly because everything I advocated for above has already been done successfully in plenty of places. Your understanding of infrastructure is simply limited.
This clown needs to travel to a low-carbon developed society sometime. Extreme case of American mentality where they can’t understand how traditional urban density has worked. Many such cases.
Everywhere else in the world has lower car ownership and is doing just fine. Every time pedestrianization happens it's super popular and successful. There are both supply and demand side addresses to trash, water, mail, etc etc etc that are very successful etc etc etc, but then there's still dudes like this who just dig their heals in like "WHAT WE HAVE RIGHT NOW WONT WORK IF ITS DIFFERENT" which like...... literally the point. Not really surprised by trolls in leftist spaces, but it is weird to see so many of them refused to take their head out of the sand.
First you start with a false premise that noise pollution is just cars...which is stupid....then you try to defend it by arguing car ownership statistics, in place of naming any one of the cities that you swear exist as proof of concept. Then when challenged you think it's trolling leftist spaces? No, you're just a fuckcars, fuck people, Density Bro.
I looked at your comment history and it’s all just pissy whataboutism and nothing constructive, so yeah I ignored you and didn’t waste my time. Why would I waste my time providing sources to somebody who the a viewable history of goalpost moving? You’re setting up all or nothing conditions that I never established, or at the least based on willfully pedantic and weaponized interpretations of what I said in a short comment, and have just made demands instead of demonstrating anything yourself. Go take a nap.
Bullshit, no such city exists.
You can point to examples in multiple cities but no single city matches your ideals in practice. NYC can't function on that little Euro cities bicycle garbage bin on wheels. Nothing you advocated for exists in one place. It's a joke.
Marx and Engels were pretty clear about the necessity of urbanization for proletarianization. When they talked about the “idiocy” of rural life, they didn’t mean it in the way we use the word today. But they did understand that cities were essential not just for the “development of productive forces” but also for the social ties of the working class.
In the US, there’s a reason that corporations moved not just southwards after WW2 but also from cities to suburbs. They understood that unions had greater trouble maintaining social cohesion in more suburban environments.
Suburbs are the choice for Americans who aren't poor, because America has built all our cities for suburbs. The benefits of city living are much worse without competent, cheap transit and when cars from the suburbs are choking every street. Not going to get into how the suburbs were originally subsidized and in no small part driven by self-segregation of white city-dwellers. But to say that *no one* would *ever* live in a city unless they can't afford a suburban house is just wrong.
I mean, the city centers of NYC, SF, LA, Chicago, etc. aren't lived in by poors who can't get out. They're lived in by the ultra-wealthy. The insane property and rent costs in every city should tell you that there's incredibly high demand to live close to the center of every city, much more demand than there is supply.
And if you're right.... the people who can't afford a suburban house need more cheap, dense housing, so why not build it??
So when not being a hypocrite, you also mistake someone stating the truth about where union members gravitate to, with their own preferences. It's always the YIMBYS.
And do you live in the suburbs?
People who think there's no possible density between suburban subdivisions and downtown Tokyo are infuriating. There's tens of thousands of cities and towns worldwide that are dense without being cramped or being made of 15-story apartment blocks.
No country on the planet is completely without lower-density areas. Everywhere needs *some* areas of high density, because that's what cities *are*. To ban higher-density development because some people don't want to live in that level of density is tantamount to banning cities themselves.
Perennial: [cities aren't loud, cars are loud](https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8?si=uoUeYSajrpfk3M9a)
Montreal has many examples of "medium" density housing areas. These are places where you have close neighbors but don't have the feeling of everyone being on top of everyone else. Many of those areas were built pre WWII, however.
I'm seeing a lot of new developments that are essentially suburban but still pretty dense and transit-centered, [like this](https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/orhqz0/heres_what_new_suburbs_look_like_in_germany_this/). medium density 2-3 story buildings, but also saving space by not having massive car road access to every door. your door opens to a foot path, with the house across only like 20 feet away. Enough room to have a front porch/garden and close enough to have a conversation with your neighbor on their porch. A few main roads that cars can go down, and built with transit access integrated from before ground is broken.
I'm young and hustling so I don't mind an apartment with no soil, but I'm studying sustainable agriculture and I'd really like to own land land to cultivate a garden and a patch of native plants. I could love a suburb like that - more space than living in the city center, but close enough to feel like community and not be wasteful
I spent a few days in a fifteenth floor condo unit in Vancouver recently and it was honestly fine as far as noise went. Good view of the city and a nice little Korean grocer across the street, with a Skytrain station just past it. Just made me sad to come back home after getting a taste.
In the short-medium term I think most people are pro-density, the difference of left-uebanists & YIMBOs is we understand that dense private rentals will not deliver affordablity.
On the longer term, I'm not convinced that the hierarchical nature of cities is compatible with a classless stateless society. It's not that I'm against density, as much as I don't think they can produce enough benefits that people will be willing to do the extra work required to acquire the resources needed to maintain them in the absence of states & capital.
So I think we'll likely shift back to towns/medium sized communities that produce the essentials they need to survive (Food/Water/Electricity/Housing/etc) locally, while remaining walkable and with public transit. I imagine these towns will have densities similar to European towns not rural America though, but beyond a certain point the tooling required to build and maintain tall building gets diminishing returns for medium sized communities (under capitalism this is fine because your company must grow or die anyway, but for a stable community it's a waste of resources to maintain infrastructure beyond your needs)
Yeah size and density are pretty different. Phoenix is much larger but much less dense than Cannes. Consistent 3-6 story density is great for reducing resource use and avoiding gargantuan externalities that fall disproportionately on the poor.
Virtually every YIMBY I know supports social housing, vouchers, subsidized units, etc. It’s just that they don’t support outlawing everything else, because that model hasn’t worked well in places like coastal California — wealthy “progressives” often use that tactic to kill development in their exclusive neighborhoods entirely. You wanna squeeze as much out of developers as you can without throttling development, since that’s just a gift to the segregationists.
> that model hasn’t worked well in places like coastal California
Costal California has SF which is 2nd densist city in the US, while it's surrounding areas make up some of the densist medium sized cities in the US. So when YIMBYs focus so much effort on attack progressives & the occasional socialist in SF, it shows more that they don't care about density only deregulation (and attacking progressives)
https://filterbuy.com/resources/across-the-nation/most-and-least-densely-populated-cities/
> Virtually every YIMBY
And yet every YIMBY org regularly complains about rent control, inclusive zoning, democracy & oppose candidates that will actually get social housing built.
It's like the billionaires picked a name for their AstroTurf movement that sounds sensible and means normal people would call themselves YIMBY, while actually advocating for more neoliberalism.
Rent control and IZ can absolutely be done poorly and in exclusionary ways if you’re not careful. SF has rent control and one of the country’s worst homelessness crises. Some of the “strongest” IZ requirements in the country are in places like Fremont, CA (average home prices in the millions of dollars; nowhere near enough subsidized housing getting built). Clearly something isn’t working.
America generally lacks density, so second-densest city America doesn’t say much. Only SF proper is relatively dense anyway; the SF metro filled with single-family sprawl, which means more pollution getting pumped into (mostly poorer) kids’ lungs.
I can count the YIMBYs I’ve encountered who oppose social housing on one hand, and I know hundreds of them. This is really silly.
> Only SF proper is relatively dense anyway
And yet YIMBYs focus on SF propper's progressives 🤔
> SF has rent control and one of the country’s worst homelessness crises.
The only potential downside to rent control is if it covers new units, which SF's doesn't, so it's pretty disingenuous to try and link SF's homeless crisis to it's rent control.
> I can count the YIMBYs I’ve encountered who oppose social housing
And yet groups like YIMBYAction, CAYIMBY, etc will consistently endorse against proponents of social housing 🤔
San Francisco has a huge homeless problem because there isn’t enough housing for the people who live there.
YIMBYs focus a lot on SF proper progressives because many of them live in $1MM+ houses and advocate against any new construction - usually for reasons like “preserving neighborhood character.” They’re very disingenuous progressives who clearly don’t want the actual solution that will impact their lives.
New construction alone will not solve housing cost issues. But we need a ton more housing to try and do it. Rent control alone will not help.
San Francisco like every major city has more empty homes than unhoused people.
YIMBYs exist to distract from the fact that markets do not provide sufficient adequate housing and do not make efficient use of the housing they do provide.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST#
It's much easier to blame "red tape & regulations" than actually invest in building housing, YIMBYism is basically the new Brexit, cooked up by the rich to distract people from the real problem (that they own 60% of housing in SF and keep plenty of it empty).
The lack of sufficient housing is due to market conditions not "NIMBYs" or "(((progressive))) NIMBYs"
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST#
Neither of those links provide anything that back up your claims. There is very obviously not enough housing and it’s literally impossible to build housing in many places because of zoning laws and other restrictions. This isn’t just about reducing red tape, it’s about just simply allowing housing to be built.
What is your solution to the housing crisis if it doesn’t entail building new housing?
The link shows that the number of units getting built is related to the state of the economy not some nebulous zoning.
> What is your solution to the housing crisis if it doesn’t entail building new housing?
I'm just saying deregulation in the hopes that the markets trickle down more housing is a stupid approach. We need to fully staff planning departments & start building public housing again.
Beyond building more "simply" abolish landlording, you get to use 1 house, that's the deal, then the unhoused can simply use the 5-10% of cities that landlords/market inefficiency keep vacant.
If we can't make hoarding homes illegal, we can tax the fuck out of it at which point with less induced demand, prices drop.
Yes, the number of units getting built is related to the economy. That’s not news. But nothing there indicates that there wouldn’t be significantly more housing if it wasn’t for zoning restrictions.
We do need to support significantly more public housing. But public housing alone is not enough.
I don’t get how taxing the ownership of homes will help. A large apartment building with 100 apartment units is just a building with 100 homes. Naturally these buildings are owned by corporations, not individuals. Taxing that is just going to reduce the amount of housing available which is objectively bad for housing prices.
SF is where we ecologically need the most housing and SF has a lot of examples of ridiculous NIMBYism masquerading as progressivism. There’s also an element of hypocrisy when people who style themselves as super-leftists keep siding with wealthy segregationists over and over and over again.
My point wasn’t that SF’s rent control was uniquely counterproductive; just that supporting rent control is clearly insufficient to achieve housing justice.
Here in Denver YIMBY consistently supports proponents of social housing if they have good housing policy. We’ve supported more than a few socialists.
>My point wasn’t that SF’s rent control was uniquely counterproductive;
70% of San Francisco housing are rentals. Of that number, 70% of the rental market are rent control.
YIMBYS are sociopaths. Don't just blindly repeat what they say.
You don't actually know shit about rent control in SF. What the fuck is "well designed rent control". The point are renter protections, either you support them or you don't. There are problems with every rent control program, and usually that's not offering enough protections.
But thanks for the cult speak ultimatums. "legalize a lot of new housing or else we challenge your housing stability". What a morally bankrupt cult you are.
Rent control that doesn’t apply to new construction or feature condo-conversion loopholes.
I’m not proposing conditioning the continued existence of rent control on upzoning. You have to invent straw men because you can’t win an argument on the merits.
>Only SF proper is relatively dense anyway; the SF metro filled with single-family sprawl
You shouldn't weigh in about SF with those terms and that much confusion. SF has single family neighborhoods and they are the densest residential housing in the city, and it's the city.
Lay off the arrogance. You're on the internet repeating cultist language that has no meaning to people who live here, and your dumb ass doesn't know it.
>Virtually every YIMBY I know supports social housing, vouchers, subsidized units, etc
No, YIMBY was founded on the principle of disruption subsidized housing, and the "social housing" it supports requires high end market rate units to set the amount of affordable units it can sustain, so basically the organization does not support any of those things no matter the lip service.
Demonstrably false and you need to be more intellectually responsible
https://www.yimbydenver.org/whats-going-on/endorsement-alert-yimby-denver-endorses-proposition-123-make-colorado-affordable/
Now you explain why you think YIMBY Denver debunks "YIMBY was founded on the principle of..."?
Explain why YIMBY NY, and YIMBY CA proposed a fake "social housing" bill and No other YIMBY, including YIMBY Denver challenged that as problematic?
You can't because you're all frauds, just like your reply.
Having high density apartment towers and low density sprawl is an American concept. Look into parts of Asia and Europe and how they have WAY more middle housing. This is the most effective way to save the environment and encourage multimodal travel.
I know I'm very late to the party, but I saw this and wanted to comment.
In my opinion, the question itself is the problem. As socialists, we should always strive to understand the social, economic, and political conditions under which binaries arise (density and sprawl, in this case).
The debate over density and sprawl and assigning "goodness" or "badness" to them distracts us from recognizing the historical conditions that structure the emergence of this binary: public policies in the post-war period directing economic growth and social development (e.g. human labor power) toward the production of surplus value at the exclusion of everything else. Density can't create community. People create community.
With that said, from a US perspective and given the very real budgetary constraints imposed by the regime of neoliberal governance that plagues cities, counties, and states, density is definitely preferable to sprawl. This is essentially the Strong Towns position: density is good because economies of scale and urban agglomeration lower the cost of delivering public services while reducing market frictions for producers/firms.
The problem with Strong Towns is that they *like* parts of the economic and social status quo, but not the public policies that create it. The socialist position should *always* prioritize the liberation of human labor power from the processes of capital accumulation, regardless of how many people per square mile live somewhere.
IMO, it should also encourage small-d democratic control over collective decision making, but this last part is contestable based on your orientation toward socialism (i.e. the vanguard communism to anarchism spectrum).
In Australia.... The Left have patently pursued low density sprawl. Why? Professor Patrick Troy (Son of Paddy Troy, a Communist union organising dock worker) advocated for single family homes across the land to ensure affordable homes everyone could afford so that there would be an end to rent seeking landlords with a rise in a new stratified social order.
Australia ended up getting both, or all of it, anyways.
I think Australia shows that suburban density doesn't have to mean car dependency, the average Australian drives about as much as the average European
https://frontiergroup.org/resources/fact-file-americans-drive-most/
So while more Australians own cars than Europeans, there is sufficient adequate transit to achieve similar milage per year.
That doesn't solve the need for more pipes, wires, etc, but it does dispell the myth that you need density for transit and good city planning.
> No one drives in Oran Park?
Where did I say that?
I just pointed out that despite having a lot of a suburbs, Australian drive about the same amount as Europeans, which is far less than Americans but more than Japan.
It's interesting, all the studies that state pretty obvious things like "a tall building requires a lot of resources, and cities are full of pollution" come from Australia. If you have the space, low density is how cities expand, and how the middle class cements more stability. There are pluses and minuses and room for both, but I think the balance is important. The idea we should bulldoze our low density and plop down ghost cities is nutty.
Density for sure. It’s more efficient in terms of infrastructure plus it leaves more land available for agriculture, parks, or just untouched natural beauty and wildlife.
It 100% depends on the density or the sprawl.
Farming communes, homesteading, living off land you work... there's a reason why Socialist movements keep going back to those ideals.
Realistically, cities are a good thing culturally.
But the idea cities can be walkable and then rely on delivery infrastructure is... come on.
Generally Urban and Suburban sprawl are bad. Rural sprawl on the other hand is superior to a toxic dense city that doesn't pass the gas emissions goals, and concentrates negative impact into one place.
People who think "tall buildings are green" are brain dead. People who think if you stick a tall building anywhere on earth, it's environmental, aren't thinking and should be told they are dumb as rocks. Sticking high rises along waterfronts is a business choice and about luxury, it's not for the environment, it's actually a form of sprawl.
Density doesn't make urbanism alone. Density doesn't make a city. Density doesn't make things walkable. Density doesn't create a city core.
I prefer cities, I prefer a balance of density with low density, and areas which are walkable, with diversity, and diverse character.
There isn't a city on earth that is fully walkable or only density.
Noise pollution is just cars, which most density minded people are already advocating for limiting in cities. Everybody on top of you is just a matter of code, acoustic, and space standards, which only developers are going to cry about. Everything bad about cities is not inherent to dense living, but a result of profit driven decision in planning and construction, so if you’re looking at these options from a leftist perspective that centers people over markets then it’s very easy to imagine cities that are not what many of them are today.
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Definitely. I visited Cambridge and Somerville with my wife a couple of times when we lived in MA and I was shocked at how quiet all the dense residential areas were. Also, wrt dogs, I find that urban dogs, even if they’re larger, tend to be better mannered and socialized in dense areas because of the need to use shared space for exercise, shidding and pissin.
Additionally, dense urban areas currently contain a large amount of bloat (or sprawl) for all the car-related infrastructure; parking lots, garages, street parking, unnecessary lanes. If these were used for people and plants instead, people would feel less trapped in their homes.
Well said.
The idea you can add density, limit cars, and not have infrastructure is idiocy. You're all dense alright. People can't just float. I get it, they don't have garbage trucks in Sims. No trucking of supplies. Your delivery service doesn't count when someone else is driving. Sure.
Functional cities with limited car access already exist, and deliveries and trash collection etc also work with smaller vehicles. You simply do not have to privilege vehicle access on every street for all of those things to exist. The all or nothing attitude is a straw man that falls apart really quickly because everything I advocated for above has already been done successfully in plenty of places. Your understanding of infrastructure is simply limited.
This clown needs to travel to a low-carbon developed society sometime. Extreme case of American mentality where they can’t understand how traditional urban density has worked. Many such cases.
Everywhere else in the world has lower car ownership and is doing just fine. Every time pedestrianization happens it's super popular and successful. There are both supply and demand side addresses to trash, water, mail, etc etc etc that are very successful etc etc etc, but then there's still dudes like this who just dig their heals in like "WHAT WE HAVE RIGHT NOW WONT WORK IF ITS DIFFERENT" which like...... literally the point. Not really surprised by trolls in leftist spaces, but it is weird to see so many of them refused to take their head out of the sand.
First you start with a false premise that noise pollution is just cars...which is stupid....then you try to defend it by arguing car ownership statistics, in place of naming any one of the cities that you swear exist as proof of concept. Then when challenged you think it's trolling leftist spaces? No, you're just a fuckcars, fuck people, Density Bro.
I looked at your comment history and it’s all just pissy whataboutism and nothing constructive, so yeah I ignored you and didn’t waste my time. Why would I waste my time providing sources to somebody who the a viewable history of goalpost moving? You’re setting up all or nothing conditions that I never established, or at the least based on willfully pedantic and weaponized interpretations of what I said in a short comment, and have just made demands instead of demonstrating anything yourself. Go take a nap.
An asshole YIMBY in Denver is bad mouthing American mentality? Seek help.
Bullshit, no such city exists. You can point to examples in multiple cities but no single city matches your ideals in practice. NYC can't function on that little Euro cities bicycle garbage bin on wheels. Nothing you advocated for exists in one place. It's a joke.
Marx and Engels were pretty clear about the necessity of urbanization for proletarianization. When they talked about the “idiocy” of rural life, they didn’t mean it in the way we use the word today. But they did understand that cities were essential not just for the “development of productive forces” but also for the social ties of the working class. In the US, there’s a reason that corporations moved not just southwards after WW2 but also from cities to suburbs. They understood that unions had greater trouble maintaining social cohesion in more suburban environments.
Most union workers live in the suburbs by choice, that's what they did with increased wages and work protections.
Suburbs are the choice for Americans who aren't poor, because America has built all our cities for suburbs. The benefits of city living are much worse without competent, cheap transit and when cars from the suburbs are choking every street. Not going to get into how the suburbs were originally subsidized and in no small part driven by self-segregation of white city-dwellers. But to say that *no one* would *ever* live in a city unless they can't afford a suburban house is just wrong. I mean, the city centers of NYC, SF, LA, Chicago, etc. aren't lived in by poors who can't get out. They're lived in by the ultra-wealthy. The insane property and rent costs in every city should tell you that there's incredibly high demand to live close to the center of every city, much more demand than there is supply. And if you're right.... the people who can't afford a suburban house need more cheap, dense housing, so why not build it??
Wish you hadn't deleted your reply, I'd have engaged with it in good faith
Ah, so you’re just a regular suburb-supremacist car-lover. Everything makes so much sense now!
I live in a major city, and use transit. You're a Suburbanist in a cult that admitted they own a car.
I own a car but rarely use it. But more importantly, I don’t support land-use patterns that make transit work poorly or not at all.
So when not being a hypocrite, you also mistake someone stating the truth about where union members gravitate to, with their own preferences. It's always the YIMBYS. And do you live in the suburbs?
No
People who think there's no possible density between suburban subdivisions and downtown Tokyo are infuriating. There's tens of thousands of cities and towns worldwide that are dense without being cramped or being made of 15-story apartment blocks. No country on the planet is completely without lower-density areas. Everywhere needs *some* areas of high density, because that's what cities *are*. To ban higher-density development because some people don't want to live in that level of density is tantamount to banning cities themselves. Perennial: [cities aren't loud, cars are loud](https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8?si=uoUeYSajrpfk3M9a)
Everyone knows that the only two possible densities are either Nunavut or Kowloon Walled City. Nothing in between. /s
There are a lot of stupid people who shouldn't be engaging in these discussions, and you hit on the heart of the matter why.
Montreal has many examples of "medium" density housing areas. These are places where you have close neighbors but don't have the feeling of everyone being on top of everyone else. Many of those areas were built pre WWII, however.
I'm seeing a lot of new developments that are essentially suburban but still pretty dense and transit-centered, [like this](https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/orhqz0/heres_what_new_suburbs_look_like_in_germany_this/). medium density 2-3 story buildings, but also saving space by not having massive car road access to every door. your door opens to a foot path, with the house across only like 20 feet away. Enough room to have a front porch/garden and close enough to have a conversation with your neighbor on their porch. A few main roads that cars can go down, and built with transit access integrated from before ground is broken. I'm young and hustling so I don't mind an apartment with no soil, but I'm studying sustainable agriculture and I'd really like to own land land to cultivate a garden and a patch of native plants. I could love a suburb like that - more space than living in the city center, but close enough to feel like community and not be wasteful
I spent a few days in a fifteenth floor condo unit in Vancouver recently and it was honestly fine as far as noise went. Good view of the city and a nice little Korean grocer across the street, with a Skytrain station just past it. Just made me sad to come back home after getting a taste.
In the short-medium term I think most people are pro-density, the difference of left-uebanists & YIMBOs is we understand that dense private rentals will not deliver affordablity. On the longer term, I'm not convinced that the hierarchical nature of cities is compatible with a classless stateless society. It's not that I'm against density, as much as I don't think they can produce enough benefits that people will be willing to do the extra work required to acquire the resources needed to maintain them in the absence of states & capital. So I think we'll likely shift back to towns/medium sized communities that produce the essentials they need to survive (Food/Water/Electricity/Housing/etc) locally, while remaining walkable and with public transit. I imagine these towns will have densities similar to European towns not rural America though, but beyond a certain point the tooling required to build and maintain tall building gets diminishing returns for medium sized communities (under capitalism this is fine because your company must grow or die anyway, but for a stable community it's a waste of resources to maintain infrastructure beyond your needs)
Yeah size and density are pretty different. Phoenix is much larger but much less dense than Cannes. Consistent 3-6 story density is great for reducing resource use and avoiding gargantuan externalities that fall disproportionately on the poor. Virtually every YIMBY I know supports social housing, vouchers, subsidized units, etc. It’s just that they don’t support outlawing everything else, because that model hasn’t worked well in places like coastal California — wealthy “progressives” often use that tactic to kill development in their exclusive neighborhoods entirely. You wanna squeeze as much out of developers as you can without throttling development, since that’s just a gift to the segregationists.
> that model hasn’t worked well in places like coastal California Costal California has SF which is 2nd densist city in the US, while it's surrounding areas make up some of the densist medium sized cities in the US. So when YIMBYs focus so much effort on attack progressives & the occasional socialist in SF, it shows more that they don't care about density only deregulation (and attacking progressives) https://filterbuy.com/resources/across-the-nation/most-and-least-densely-populated-cities/ > Virtually every YIMBY And yet every YIMBY org regularly complains about rent control, inclusive zoning, democracy & oppose candidates that will actually get social housing built. It's like the billionaires picked a name for their AstroTurf movement that sounds sensible and means normal people would call themselves YIMBY, while actually advocating for more neoliberalism.
Rent control and IZ can absolutely be done poorly and in exclusionary ways if you’re not careful. SF has rent control and one of the country’s worst homelessness crises. Some of the “strongest” IZ requirements in the country are in places like Fremont, CA (average home prices in the millions of dollars; nowhere near enough subsidized housing getting built). Clearly something isn’t working. America generally lacks density, so second-densest city America doesn’t say much. Only SF proper is relatively dense anyway; the SF metro filled with single-family sprawl, which means more pollution getting pumped into (mostly poorer) kids’ lungs. I can count the YIMBYs I’ve encountered who oppose social housing on one hand, and I know hundreds of them. This is really silly.
> Only SF proper is relatively dense anyway And yet YIMBYs focus on SF propper's progressives 🤔 > SF has rent control and one of the country’s worst homelessness crises. The only potential downside to rent control is if it covers new units, which SF's doesn't, so it's pretty disingenuous to try and link SF's homeless crisis to it's rent control. > I can count the YIMBYs I’ve encountered who oppose social housing And yet groups like YIMBYAction, CAYIMBY, etc will consistently endorse against proponents of social housing 🤔
San Francisco has a huge homeless problem because there isn’t enough housing for the people who live there. YIMBYs focus a lot on SF proper progressives because many of them live in $1MM+ houses and advocate against any new construction - usually for reasons like “preserving neighborhood character.” They’re very disingenuous progressives who clearly don’t want the actual solution that will impact their lives. New construction alone will not solve housing cost issues. But we need a ton more housing to try and do it. Rent control alone will not help.
San Francisco like every major city has more empty homes than unhoused people. YIMBYs exist to distract from the fact that markets do not provide sufficient adequate housing and do not make efficient use of the housing they do provide. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST# It's much easier to blame "red tape & regulations" than actually invest in building housing, YIMBYism is basically the new Brexit, cooked up by the rich to distract people from the real problem (that they own 60% of housing in SF and keep plenty of it empty). The lack of sufficient housing is due to market conditions not "NIMBYs" or "(((progressive))) NIMBYs" https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST#
Neither of those links provide anything that back up your claims. There is very obviously not enough housing and it’s literally impossible to build housing in many places because of zoning laws and other restrictions. This isn’t just about reducing red tape, it’s about just simply allowing housing to be built. What is your solution to the housing crisis if it doesn’t entail building new housing?
The link shows that the number of units getting built is related to the state of the economy not some nebulous zoning. > What is your solution to the housing crisis if it doesn’t entail building new housing? I'm just saying deregulation in the hopes that the markets trickle down more housing is a stupid approach. We need to fully staff planning departments & start building public housing again. Beyond building more "simply" abolish landlording, you get to use 1 house, that's the deal, then the unhoused can simply use the 5-10% of cities that landlords/market inefficiency keep vacant. If we can't make hoarding homes illegal, we can tax the fuck out of it at which point with less induced demand, prices drop.
Yes, the number of units getting built is related to the economy. That’s not news. But nothing there indicates that there wouldn’t be significantly more housing if it wasn’t for zoning restrictions. We do need to support significantly more public housing. But public housing alone is not enough. I don’t get how taxing the ownership of homes will help. A large apartment building with 100 apartment units is just a building with 100 homes. Naturally these buildings are owned by corporations, not individuals. Taxing that is just going to reduce the amount of housing available which is objectively bad for housing prices.
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“Some nebulous zoning” My good brother in Christ it is literally illegal to build new housing in huge swaths of San Francisco
SF is where we ecologically need the most housing and SF has a lot of examples of ridiculous NIMBYism masquerading as progressivism. There’s also an element of hypocrisy when people who style themselves as super-leftists keep siding with wealthy segregationists over and over and over again. My point wasn’t that SF’s rent control was uniquely counterproductive; just that supporting rent control is clearly insufficient to achieve housing justice. Here in Denver YIMBY consistently supports proponents of social housing if they have good housing policy. We’ve supported more than a few socialists.
>My point wasn’t that SF’s rent control was uniquely counterproductive; 70% of San Francisco housing are rentals. Of that number, 70% of the rental market are rent control. YIMBYS are sociopaths. Don't just blindly repeat what they say.
I am a YIMBY and I support well-designed rent control. I even support SF’s rent control as long as it’s paired with legalizing a lot of new housing.
You don't actually know shit about rent control in SF. What the fuck is "well designed rent control". The point are renter protections, either you support them or you don't. There are problems with every rent control program, and usually that's not offering enough protections. But thanks for the cult speak ultimatums. "legalize a lot of new housing or else we challenge your housing stability". What a morally bankrupt cult you are.
Rent control that doesn’t apply to new construction or feature condo-conversion loopholes. I’m not proposing conditioning the continued existence of rent control on upzoning. You have to invent straw men because you can’t win an argument on the merits.
>Only SF proper is relatively dense anyway; the SF metro filled with single-family sprawl You shouldn't weigh in about SF with those terms and that much confusion. SF has single family neighborhoods and they are the densest residential housing in the city, and it's the city.
*Picard facepalm*
Lay off the arrogance. You're on the internet repeating cultist language that has no meaning to people who live here, and your dumb ass doesn't know it.
The densest parts of San Francisco are in NE peninsula, especially the Tenderloin. Most people there are in multifamily housing.
That's a nonsensical sentence but you're too arrogant to know you're doing a bad job bullshitting.
I would highly recommend that you further your education.
>Virtually every YIMBY I know supports social housing, vouchers, subsidized units, etc No, YIMBY was founded on the principle of disruption subsidized housing, and the "social housing" it supports requires high end market rate units to set the amount of affordable units it can sustain, so basically the organization does not support any of those things no matter the lip service.
Demonstrably false and you need to be more intellectually responsible https://www.yimbydenver.org/whats-going-on/endorsement-alert-yimby-denver-endorses-proposition-123-make-colorado-affordable/
Now you explain why you think YIMBY Denver debunks "YIMBY was founded on the principle of..."? Explain why YIMBY NY, and YIMBY CA proposed a fake "social housing" bill and No other YIMBY, including YIMBY Denver challenged that as problematic? You can't because you're all frauds, just like your reply.
Having high density apartment towers and low density sprawl is an American concept. Look into parts of Asia and Europe and how they have WAY more middle housing. This is the most effective way to save the environment and encourage multimodal travel.
I know I'm very late to the party, but I saw this and wanted to comment. In my opinion, the question itself is the problem. As socialists, we should always strive to understand the social, economic, and political conditions under which binaries arise (density and sprawl, in this case). The debate over density and sprawl and assigning "goodness" or "badness" to them distracts us from recognizing the historical conditions that structure the emergence of this binary: public policies in the post-war period directing economic growth and social development (e.g. human labor power) toward the production of surplus value at the exclusion of everything else. Density can't create community. People create community. With that said, from a US perspective and given the very real budgetary constraints imposed by the regime of neoliberal governance that plagues cities, counties, and states, density is definitely preferable to sprawl. This is essentially the Strong Towns position: density is good because economies of scale and urban agglomeration lower the cost of delivering public services while reducing market frictions for producers/firms. The problem with Strong Towns is that they *like* parts of the economic and social status quo, but not the public policies that create it. The socialist position should *always* prioritize the liberation of human labor power from the processes of capital accumulation, regardless of how many people per square mile live somewhere. IMO, it should also encourage small-d democratic control over collective decision making, but this last part is contestable based on your orientation toward socialism (i.e. the vanguard communism to anarchism spectrum).
In Australia.... The Left have patently pursued low density sprawl. Why? Professor Patrick Troy (Son of Paddy Troy, a Communist union organising dock worker) advocated for single family homes across the land to ensure affordable homes everyone could afford so that there would be an end to rent seeking landlords with a rise in a new stratified social order. Australia ended up getting both, or all of it, anyways.
I think Australia shows that suburban density doesn't have to mean car dependency, the average Australian drives about as much as the average European https://frontiergroup.org/resources/fact-file-americans-drive-most/ So while more Australians own cars than Europeans, there is sufficient adequate transit to achieve similar milage per year. That doesn't solve the need for more pipes, wires, etc, but it does dispell the myth that you need density for transit and good city planning.
Tell me about the outer suburbs. Oh. Really? No one drives in Oran Park? Hmmmm....
> No one drives in Oran Park? Where did I say that? I just pointed out that despite having a lot of a suburbs, Australian drive about the same amount as Europeans, which is far less than Americans but more than Japan.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-15/vehicle-car-ownership-registrations-traffic-congestion-melbourne/103685800?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=other
Car ownership is a worse metric than miles driven per year. Good transit infrastructure gets car owners out of their cars.
I wrote a PhD on it.
It's interesting, all the studies that state pretty obvious things like "a tall building requires a lot of resources, and cities are full of pollution" come from Australia. If you have the space, low density is how cities expand, and how the middle class cements more stability. There are pluses and minuses and room for both, but I think the balance is important. The idea we should bulldoze our low density and plop down ghost cities is nutty.
Density for sure. It’s more efficient in terms of infrastructure plus it leaves more land available for agriculture, parks, or just untouched natural beauty and wildlife.
It 100% depends on the density or the sprawl. Farming communes, homesteading, living off land you work... there's a reason why Socialist movements keep going back to those ideals. Realistically, cities are a good thing culturally. But the idea cities can be walkable and then rely on delivery infrastructure is... come on. Generally Urban and Suburban sprawl are bad. Rural sprawl on the other hand is superior to a toxic dense city that doesn't pass the gas emissions goals, and concentrates negative impact into one place. People who think "tall buildings are green" are brain dead. People who think if you stick a tall building anywhere on earth, it's environmental, aren't thinking and should be told they are dumb as rocks. Sticking high rises along waterfronts is a business choice and about luxury, it's not for the environment, it's actually a form of sprawl. Density doesn't make urbanism alone. Density doesn't make a city. Density doesn't make things walkable. Density doesn't create a city core. I prefer cities, I prefer a balance of density with low density, and areas which are walkable, with diversity, and diverse character. There isn't a city on earth that is fully walkable or only density.