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Hi NIMBY. I'm a former Seattlite millennial who's lived through the 2008 financial crash, the repercussions of a 50% divorce rate, and grew up on the internet.

Growing up in the world I have, I've come to realize physical things weigh me down and participating in consumerism makes me unhappy. Working for 50 years so i can save up enough money to retire at 65 doesn't make sense to me. Why suffer for 50 years so you can live free for a few at the end, when you're old, maybe sick.

I found minimalism, FIRE, and the idea that you ruthlessly reduce expenses for things you don't need.

It turns out... I don't need a one bedroom apartment. I certainly don't need a house. I've lived out of a school-sized backpack for months at a time. Last time i moved, I packed everything I own in 3 hours, moved in one trip in a van, and unpacked in about 2 hours.

I appreciate that you like 3-4 story buildings and your two bedroom apartments. I appreciate you like your parking.

But I don't have enough stuff to fill an apartment. I don't have a car. I don't WANT either of those things. It's okay if you do, but why force me to have them?

> "Making tiny shitty apartments does not correct any of these deep problems."

It's true tiny apartments won't fix being surrounded by lakes, but if 1800 more people can afford to live where, and how, they want... Isn't that a start?

Just curious, what is FIRE?

Financially Independent, Retired Early

I'm guessing it's something like Financial Independence Retire Early?

The work for 50 years thing is basically what happens when you have kids. Also some aren't so lucky to travel... the world today is much cheaper and accessible thanks to the internet.

> I'm a former Seattlite millennial who's lived through the 2008 financial crash, the repercussions of a 50% divorce rate, and grew up on the internet.

Oh. Poor baby :(

FWIW I'm a millennial that lives in a 600 sqft apartment and has never owned a car. I just don't think that it's justifiable to rewrite zoning laws to achieve my weird goals of absolute independence.

>It's true tiny apartments won't fix being surrounded by lakes, but if 1800 more people can afford to live where, and how, they want... Isn't that a start?

I think it's a meaningless drop in the bucket and a wasted opportunity. You don't build shit that you don't want around for at least 30 years, and preferably 100.

There is so much I don't like in this response, but I think the core is that you want people to live in small apartments for ... no good reason other than you don't like them. You can see from the exterior shot of OneOne6 (http://www.karmaresidential.com/oneone6.html) that it is four stories high---so it doesn't engage the height restriction issue you are so concerned with (and is only tangentially related to the article). It's about five minutes walk from Capitol Hill station, so no need for parking.

At least you have the insight to realise your opinion is "entirely qualitative" (i.e. entirely emotional) but apparently not the insight to recognize you should then change your opinion.

Just as a counterpoint - it's pretty easy to get emotional about a decision that you, personally, have a quarter million dollars wrapped up in. (Or in Seattle/Cap Hill's case, substantially more than that!) That's what home ownership does to people - it causes them to protect their investments.

Is it a net good? I don't know. But I think it's a huge and common misconception to interpret NIMBY-ism as a malicious action rather than a simple case of people acting in their own self interest.

The problem is that GP is deciding that the minimum cost to enter Seattle should be at least $1500 a month for everyone, and that they should all live like GP. Then they bring up halfway houses and tent cities, which says to me that they're fine with squalid living conditions. What they apparently want is for anyone in Seattle to either have a high salary or to live in a tent city with the rest of the homeless.

> What they apparently want is for anyone in Seattle to either have a high salary or to live in a tent city with the rest of the homeless.

That seems like a bit of a false dichotomy. Plus, I think it's a bit disingenuous to imply there's this big, nefarious "they". It seems more realistic (to me, at least) to view NIMBYers as a bunch of individual homeowners concerned about the value of what's likely their single biggest investment.

I also have a sneaking suspicion that the post you're referencing the "tent city" thing from was tongue-in-cheek. That's entirely personal speculation, however.

See, this is a problem with democratic decision making. Individually, you are just looking out for your own interests. Collectively, you are inadvertently choosing horrendous alternatives.

In areas like San Francisco and San Jose, there is just not enough housing to house all of the homeless people. There is not enough public funding to create housing for all of the homeless people. And the effectiveness of each dollar keeps going down, faster than inflation.

The article goes into detail, how micro-apartments can be $900 per month each in current market conditions, unsubsidized. But regulations force the cost upwards and the unit count downwards, so both the price goes up (or you do not build until median rent goes up) and the number of low-income people housed goes down.

But, hey, at least the tent city is not directly in your backyard.

I'm not saying it's right. I'm saying it's explainable, and that it's complex, and that it's driven by real incentives rather than blind malice. I also think there would be a much better chance of making the changes to allow microhousing if you understood where the opposition was coming from. It's hard to convince someone to your point of you by bashing them over the head with "you're wrong!"

I think we have some common ground in that we both think the best solution is not have a tent city in the first place. Homelessness comes with a whole host of other problems that microhousing can't actually solve - like the fact that most homeless people have a hard time applying for housing by virtue of the fact that they have no prior address.

So, maybe the better question is: how do we do that?

There is always a need for parking. You may think that there isn't but the people moving in will have cars because you need a car in Seattle, this isn't New York. Except now they don't have anywhere to park it so they overcrowd any side streets and block driveways. If you are going to build a building with no parking you should not allow any cars to be registered to that address, and don't rent/sell to anyone that has a car. Then when the building is 75% empty you will realize that actually you needed parking all along because car ownership is pretty much required in Seattle.

I lived in Seattle for five years without a car. Enjoyed every second of it.

Between walking, bike, bike share, car2go, uber, lyft, zipcar, busses, and the light rail, and upcoming self driving car services... Why do i need a car again?

You don't need a car, but you are also in the minority. You can't reasonably expect that none of your neighbors have a car as well. And yet this is exactly what builders propose when building a high density apartment building with no parking.

> You can't reasonably expect that none of your neighbors have a car as well.

No, but I can expect them to suffer if they do have one. Our current car system is unsustainable, and is a luxury. We really need to get rid of it long-term. I'd love to have a boat in my front yard, but it's too hard to find a place to park it. Should boat-owners have the right to a boat spot?

is a luxury

I take it you haven't spent much time in non-downtown Seattle?

I spend a good majority of my time in non-downtown seattle. I don't have a car, and can get by just fine.

> No, but I can expect them to suffer if they do have one.

The problem, and the reason why parking requirements exist, is because people externalize that "suffering" on others. They decide they need a car anyway, and then they park that car on other streets, or they park overnight illegally on private property, etc.

It's not like parking requirement laws fell from the sky one day on a bunch of stone tablets. They didn't exist a hundred years ago, but were created and became ubiquitous across the U.S. as cars became more popular because there were such problems when parking is in short supply.

Now, maybe there are some alternative solutions -- maybe you could get people to sign some sort of blood oath that they'll never own a car while living at a particular address, or maybe we could pass laws that prohibit cars from being registered to addresses that lack parking...? (Maybe we could require that in order to register a car, you have to prove you have the right to a place to park it, and stop treating parking as a public good?) But until there's some better solution, the underlying problem that parking requirements were created to solve still exists.

People are very, very good at sharing their suffering with everyone else and society is typically worse off for it. It takes a lot of work to prevent that from happening.

> But until there's some better solution, the underlying problem that parking requirements were created to solve still exists.

But that problem is still a luxury problem. It's not some fundamental right for people to own a car. If you want luxury benefits, you should have to pay luxury pricing. I'm not saying you shouldn't have the right to own a car, just that, like any luxury good, it shouldn't be cheap.

In Seattle there are many public transportation options. Sure, it could be much better, but it's still available and quite feasible to use.

Parking laws did, pretty much, fall from the sky one day on a bunch of stone tablets, usually reflecting terrible data. if you want to read 750 pages on the topic, read Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking.

They usually are designed to produce neighborhoods where no one ever needs to spend any time searching for a free parking space— which leads to a great deal of suffering for anyone not in an automobile, since such neighborhoods have vast expanses of surface parking that are completely inhospitable to human beings, and are very difficult to serve with public transit.

They also often require an amenity that is very expensive to produce (parking spaces, especially structured spaces) be provided for free, which incentivizes people to own cars and drive everywhere— exactly what we don't want in urban areas, since cars pollute a lot, are dangerous, and require huge amounts of scarce land to store and transport.

We are not talking about free surface parking lots. We are talking about assigned parking in a parking garage for any new high density construction. It isn't free, it's paid by the builder and included in the sale/rental of the units. And you can build it below your building so it doesn't take up any additional surface space.

And, often, such assigned parking spots can be sublet to others if you don't need them yourself.

This assumes all kinds of access to capital, good credit, business acumen, and other expectations of the owner/renter. For those affected by a shortage of affordable housing, buying/renting bigger and then subletting parking is most definitely not an option.

Unsustainable or not, most people do have a car, and it is a major nuisance when there is inadequate parking around housing. If there isn't parking near a restaurant where you want to eat, you might just choose to eat somewhere else. But if there's no parking near your home, you're likely to park illegally/block someone's driveway/generally step on your neighbors' toes.

Inadequate parking does have a negative impact on a neighborhood, and it's not the only way to nudge society in the direction of driving less.

> Inadequate parking does have a negative impact on a neighborhood, and it's not the only way to nudge society in the direction of driving less.

Sure, there are better ways to push people, and that's now why I want less parking, that's just a pain-point we shouldn't be trying to fix.

> Unsustainable or not, most people do have a car, and it is a major nuisance when there is inadequate parking around housing.

So? A nuisance that those people can avoid if they chose too. Sure, they have a right to own a car, but there's not right to avoid nuisance.

Replying to CaptSpify: The trouble is that the nuisance is not just for the person "choosing" to have a car, it is for everyone in the area.

Only because it's a luxury good that everyone thinks they deserve. Cities that don't expect you to have a car (NY, cities in Europe, most of Seattle) don't really have the same problem, because nobody has a car. And it's not like this doesn't have any precedent. We've mostly car-less cities work before many times.

EDIT: Are you able to reply to my other post now? I think HN has a timer that limits how often you can reply, but I could be wrong.

Kids.

Lots of people don't have kids, and aren't planning on it in the next few years...

Public transit, ride sharing, and a bike trailer are more than sufficient for most activities.

One of the things criticised in the original article was a city requirement that they needed to build at least one bike stand for every four micro-apartments.

If people can't even store a bike anywhere, that's a problem. And as the business case for these pods is that they're for people who can't afford a bigger place, they're unlikely to want to pay for an uber that regularly.

+1

I've lived in Seattle since 1991. I've lived without a car since 2005. It was harder then than now. These days we have Zipcar, Car2Go, Uber, Light Rail, marginally better Metro. Walking and biking are always options. It's getting to the point in Seattle, as in other cities, where having a car is a cultural choice rather than a necessity.

Zipcar is great for the days or evening where you need to be in the car culture. It's way cheaper than actually owning one in Seattle, and you have a lot of models to choose from including some nice Audis, BMWs, etc.

living in the uk, and having lived/worked in america a few times, this is one of the things I could not get used to. I'm definitely not a fan of having to have a car, but america seems to make it a requirement if you want to live in any city.

Not any city. But definitely most cities. You can easily get by without a car in New York. And depending on where you live/work and your family situation you may get away with it in New York, San Francisco and Seattle but you are definitely in the minority in those cases.

And in Seattle, given it's the current subject, if you head out to the mountains or wherever many weekends (as many people in Seattle are wont to do--indeed, it's why many people like Seattle), dealing with rental cars every weekend gets old after a while. And it's hard to put your kayak on that rental car.

This doesn't describe everyone but lots of people who live in cities like Seattle tend to want to get out of the city pretty regularly.

And to your broader point. Right. Developers can't build housing without parking on the grounds that people don't really need to have a car in Seattle. And good luck renting apartments that can't have a car registered to them. (Though people would just find a way to cheat I suppose.)

There is plenty of legacy rental housing and owned homes/condos in the city that don't have parking and they are not facing record vacancy rates. Further, you can buy new homes in the city that do not include a parking space - several in my new complex did not include off-street parking. They were sold within a week of listing.

The fact that the city of Seattle has legislated a need for off-street parking in new construction does not mean that the market actually demands it in any way. Further, the skyrocketing price of housing in Seattle shows pretty clearly that folks will take whatever they can get, parking or no.

>At least you have the insight to realise your opinion is "entirely qualitative" (i.e. entirely emotional)

Pity it's not shared.

The endless suburban sprawl you complain about is caused in part by your opposition to higher density housing in central neighborhoods. Where else do you expect people to go?

Seriously. Why is housing in Tokyo consistently affordable? Because the zoning rules allow high-density housing to grow with housing demand. Somehow in America we have convinced ourselves that if we stop high-density development in the cities that absolutely need it, we can make up for it by legislating prices lower.

The solution to unaffordable housing certainly begins with building a lot more housing.

It also doesn't hurt that the Tokyo population has been growing rather slowly--about 0.5% per year.

Yes, but it is also one of the largest, densest cities in the world, a place it arrived to by growing quickly and expanding its housing stock to match its growth.

And Tokyo also has a great urban transit system etc. On the other hand, a lot of the population growth occurred between 1945 and 1965. [1] So it was starting from an historically low population and housing stock point for obvious reasons and had something of a clean slate.

[1] http://www.metro.tokyo.jp/ENGLISH/ABOUT/HISTORY/history03.ht...

I don't see a lot of people suggesting we can legislate our way out of housing prices without building more housing stock.

What I do see is a lot of what amounts to saying that "those people" should just go somewhere else. As long as that somewhere else isn't one where I have to notice their homelessness.

But yes. We have to build upwards. In cities where building vertically benefits the well-off (as in NY), and where it's profitable to do so, it happens. But note that it only generates high-end and expensive housing stock (excluding rules that require including "affordable" housing, which based on the examples I've seen seems to mean "affordable to a family making $120k/yr instead of the $500k you need to afford the market rate units in this development".)

Will adding more housing stock at the top decrease prices at the bottom via market effects? Yes and no. If the availability does trickle down, it takes a very long time.

Here in downtown Brooklyn there's a temporary glut of high-end housing added in the last 5 years. But compared to the number of people added to what was already a tight rental (and sales) market in the city 10-15 years ago, the number of units added is laughable. We're talking almost a million more people living in the city but something like 20-30,000 units (enough to house 50-100k people) having been added.

So what happens? This oversupply will likely last about 5 years. The only real effect will be 1-2 year 10-15% concessions on rent in the new rental buildings until they can fill them up. People looking for high-end rentals will be able to take 24 hours instead of 3 minutes to commit to a specific apartment after viewing it, and might be able to get it if they wait an hour or two to apply instead of contacting the management company within 5 minutes of the listing going live. In a couple years, the high end rental market will go back to its normal cut-throat self.

Maybe the gentrification of Crown Heights will be delayed by a couple years, but I doubt it. This trickle of new housing at $2500-4000 per person per month isn't nearly enough to keep up with the constantly expanding demand for units under $1200 per person per month.

The for-sale units in the crazy high-end buildings will sit vacant until enough new Chinese billionaires are minted who want to park their money outside the country, and then they'll continue to sit vacant indefinitely anyway because they're investments rather than homes. The ones in only normally high end buildings will also sit vacant for a year or so and then generate a tiny bit less profit than the developers were hoping for. But sales don't really factor into the affordable housing market here anyway. If you're having trouble affording rent, buying is unimaginable.

I'm also a New Yorker, and the examples you cite illustrate the problem. Why is it only profitable for developers to build dense housing in high-end neighborhoods right now? In large part because of our complex, draconian zoning rules - it's a huge economic hurdle to climb for developers, and contributes to making it not worth their while to build in cheaper neighborhoods.

The affordable housing rules you mention are an example of an attempt to legislate our way out of the problem, and obviously they haven't worked. I'd say the reason they haven't worked is because they don't address the real issue: to have cheaper housing we need to reduce the barriers to building more housing.

At least that's my personal view. I'm not an economist or a city planner or any kind of expert, just a rando on the Internet. :)

Is it really a zoning issue or is it simpler than that? I'd assume that in this market where debt is cheap, people with high income can leverage more and thus pay net higher prices. This results in a certain type of housing increasing in price/sqft whereas low income housing would not see as much of an increase due to limited ability of low income people to borrow as much.

Net result is that a developer can profit quite a bit more from luxury housing than affordable housing. If you are a developer (which presumably means a for-profit business) and have a choice between the two, you naturally decide to go after the higher profit option. Can't say I'd blame them either.

This is where incentives need to be provided to balance the profit equation. If they could make the same amount of profit, or gain other business benefits, I imagine the problem would start solving itself.

> If you are a developer (which presumably means a for-profit business) and have a choice between the two, you naturally decide to go after the higher profit option.

That may be true if the limiting factor is the number of developers - they will only develop the highest-value properties. But in a city like New York the limiting factor is not developer capacity, at least not that I have ever heard. Developers are effectively constrained by the number of profitable building sites, not their capacity to put up new buildings. And, in turn, the number of profitable building sites is dependent on not just the cost of labor and materials, but the cost of navigating city planning, obtaining permits, etc.

Don't forget that land is cheaper to acquire in less desirable neighborhoods, and it is also generally cheaper to build there due to lower existing density (which eases logistics by making it easier to get equipment in and out, allows more on-site storage, etc.). The development that maximizes returns is not always the development that maximizes revenue - cost and time also matter. And there are more developers who can handle building a 10-story building in the Bronx than can tackle an 80-story mega-project in Manhattan. Plus, a "cheap" neighborhood in NYC is often as expensive as an "expensive" neighborhood in most US cities, so if developers are willing to build in Milwaukee or Cleveland, they should be willing to build in the Bronx.

But in a world where the administrative cost of starting a relatively small project is overwhelming vs. the potential returns, then those smaller projects in lower-price neighborhoods simply won't get built.

The current building boom is indeed partially in response to a rezoning to allow residential development in the area. (It's also in response to surrounding neighborhoods having become very desirable for other reasons.)

What do you do when land prices and the obstacles to construction posed by high density (such as not being able to store large quantities of raw materials or keep a bunch of trucks on site) make development costs prohibitive for affordable housing? What do you do about the NIMBYs who are afraid the new skyscraper will block their view?

And why would a developer choose to build in a cheap area for lower rents when they can get higher ROI on everything but the land costs if they build luxury housing in an expensive area?

I'm not convinced that the biggest obstacles to affordable housing in the city are about zoning or safety regulations. (Some of which, btw, ARE necessary for the sake of, yanno, people not dying.)

> And why would a developer choose to build in a cheap area for lower rents when they can get higher ROI on everything but the land costs if they build luxury housing in an expensive area?

I would argue this is a false choice: very few developers have the capital to build luxury housing in expensive areas.

For example, I know a guy who builds lower-end housing in Philadelphia (among other places). He would never consider building anything in Manhattan, simply because he can't afford to tie up the capital it would take to build even a townhouse-scale project. Lower-end is his game, period - only a small handful of mega-developers get to make the kind of choice you propose.

By the way, he lives in New York, and logically/logistically it would make more sense for him to build in New York than Philadelphia, but the economics of lower-end development in New York are prohibitive. Once in a while a good opportunity will come along here, but to pay the bills and not be idle he has to look elsewhere.

> I'm not convinced that the biggest obstacles to affordable housing in the city are about zoning or safety regulations. (Some of which, btw, ARE necessary for the sake of, yanno, people not dying.)

Yes, I totally agree on safety regulations (I don't think I cited them as an issue, did I?). I don't think they are a primary driver of the cost of building in New York vs. other cities. Logistics of operating in the nation's densest city, yes; safety regulations unique to New York, probably no.

Zoning, on the other hand... I think it's a bigger restriction than most people realize. My favorite illustration of the zoning issue is this article: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-p...

Builders will build the housing stock that is expected to sell and maximize their profit. As long as there is a never ending stream of professionals with six figure salaries moving to an area (such as people moving to Seattle for tech jobs) then builders will continue to target that demographic. If that cools down they will build cheaper housing if it makes sense (based on the price of the land, building costs, and zoning requirements that will restrict how many units they can get per lot they buy). If you want builders to build affordable housing at the same time then a) you need to have the zoning laws allow it to happen, and b) force them to do it as a condition of allowing them to build the luxury housing.

But as long as demand at the high end is unmet the people with money will outbid everyone else and drive up the price of "affordable" housing if that's the only thing they can find. Nobody wants to pay $2,000 for a shitty apartment. But the price of shifty apartments will well rise north of $2,000 if that's the only thing you can find walking distance to Amazon.

I think there is so much pent up demand for housing close to work that you can double housing stock and still not make a dent in prices, so it's easy to conclude that simply building more does not lower costs. I think we need to build a LOT more if we are ever going to have truly affordable housing near city centers.

The problem is that adding high density housing to an area not built for it has a chicken and egg problem. When you add a massive high rise a lot of people move in. They all need to commute somewhere. Except now the streets can't accommodate the car traffic and the public transit system is also inadequate. And it will take a decade to catch up. So in the meantime everyone around the new high rise gets to suffer for the next 10 years, and it's understandable why they aren't particularly excited about it. On the other hand you can't build up the infrastructure first because you don't have any money to do so pre-emptively.

They're not talking about a massive high-rise in this article. They're talking about a four-story apartment building that has 10% more units than a conventional studio apartment building, and is on high-frequency transit lines with good bicycle access.

You support homeless tent cities but oppose micro housing because it doesn't mandate enough parking?

Your moral priorities are screwed up. It's the ultimate "let them eat cake" moment of local housing policy. "Well, if they don't want to spend an extra $500/month on a mandatory car parking space, they should just live in a cardboard box on the street."