'Transit-Oriented Teens' | Hacker News Reader

'Transit-Oriented Teens'

citylab.com

102 pointsmozumder53 comments

This group is awesome and for so many has sparked an interest in urban planning, transit and local politics. In many cases actually leading people to attend local council meetings, run for office, the list goes on.

This also said, it should be noted that this group has inherent biases against the tech industry due to many aspects of gentrification that tech new money represents, and the lack of recognition among said new money for their role in gentrification.

NUMTOTs idealizes city populations and social climates at the nadir of urban decay, and wishes that they could have all the infrastructure-investment trappings of contemporary global powerhouses without any of those pesky middle-class people ruining the culture and taking up space.

It's the revolutionary-socialist working class squabbling with the salaried middle class while millionaire homeowners cheer them on and pocket the home-equity gains of a "we should only build what we can publicly finance" development policy.

It holds that cities are great, but all actual examples of people internalizing this information and migrating towards urban lifestyles are crimes against humanity. It believes that people should not live in suburbs, but that development should be subject to as much local control as possible (maintaining a situation where most housing is in suburbs). These contradictions are held to be contradictions of capitalism itself, with a socialist revolution and a completely unspecified "make housing a human right" scheme as the only remedy.

It's fascinating, enthralling, maddening. I was really into it for a while and burned out.

Except for the fact that the true middle class has already been displaced from city centers already, the current debate is between those who are/were working class and those who are upper middle class/upper class (but aren't necessarily the 1%). Where historically, this population had used their same political power that they are using now to gentrify neighborhoods to systematically deny access to the suburbs to people of color and lower income people forcing them in cities.

To fight against community displacement because it's a current trend for rich people to want to live in city centers isn't a war on the middle class necessarily when it comes to the long term, because said trend could easily reverse again.

It mostly just sounds like bog-standard leftbook with an urbanist skin.

Yeah, with the caveat that moderators explictly say "this is not leftbook" and there's a fair amount of debate from the YIMBY side.

Saying this isn't leftbook means that you won't be banned from the group for having opinions that aren't highly liberal.

Are we talking about the same group? The NUMTOT I'm in is basically pure YIMBY.

Well, yes, since when you have a city (SF, in this case) zoned for ~60+% single family homes[1] and people with higher incomes are moving in to the area (by and large tech workers, in this case), something has to give: either the city needs to increase housing supply (by increasing density), or existing homes will go to those that can pay the most for them.

Tech workers, for all the influence they have in the area, really have not advocated in any organized way to update zoning laws in the city proper (with the occasional exception of Google/Facebook/BigCo subsidized housing for their own employees that is eerily reminiscent of company towns).

The bias is justified, imo. I'd consider myself a member of both NUMTOT and the tech industry, and trust me, I don't think I'm alone when I say most tech workers would also like to have cheaper rent.

[1] http://sf-planning.org/zoning-map (light yellow signifies single family dwelling)

Tech workers have organized around this, largely through YIMBY groups, which are starting to have some limited success with this.

Unfortunately, a lot of the messaging from these groups are arrogant and troll-y rather than building an even broader constituency. They don’t have any patience, and they think their opponents are naive, often calling them “stupid”

I agree, the YIMBY movement may have good intentions, but so many of the people pushing these policy positions are far less educated than the counterparts who recognize the benefits of certain types of zoning as a central aspect of modern life.

I disagree. Modern zoning is mostly unsupportable from an economic point of view. YIMBY types get that implicitly. NIMBIYs seem to lack any education in or understanding of economics. It’s all emotion and hand waving.

Oh, they understand economics all right---it's just that the only bit they care about is the bit where they get to hoard all the land use to prop up the price of what they already own.

YIMBYs do acknowledge the central role of zoning in shaping the sprawled-out, car-dominated shape of modern American life. We disagree that it ought to be preserved.

I’ve come to understand that economic-justice arguments on both sides are really ex post facto rationalizations for beliefs like “we should live in houses and drive” vs. “we should live in condos and take transit.” The houses-and-cars people have a point: an abundance of condos in the sky does nothing to help (and probably hurts) affordability for the type of housing they consider fit for human consumption.

Unfortunately we talk about boxes in the sky as “luxury” with the subtext that having your own plot of land, some of which you don’t even build on isn’t.

> I’ve come to understand that economic-justice arguments on both sides are really ex post facto rationalizations for beliefs like “we should live in houses and drive” vs. “we should live in condos and take transit.”

Yeah, unfortunately I think this is basically true. You can almost perfectly predict whether someone supports SB 827 based on whether they prefer single family homes or urban density.

The crazy thing is that you can prefer to live in a SFH yourself and still be in favor of letting the market add density. If you already have a SFH, no one will make you move.

Well, unless you're renting the home and your landlord evicts you to make room for a condo building. This would be an uncommon situation, but evicting low-income tenants of low-density apartments to make room for higher-end high-density condos is a related, and legitimate, concern. The bill should probably continue to be amended to make sure this doesn't happen.

Note that this concern is basically irrelevant to all the Bay Area suburbs like Palo Alto that have virtually no low-income tenants to begin with, as well as San Francisco, which is essentially completely gentrified at this point.

Or if your land gets up-zoned and suddenly is worth 3x as much, and your property taxes go up accordingly (if you don't live in CA at least).

The number of times I've seen YIMBYs say things like "Abolish All Zoning" is rather high. Zoning is a far more complicated thing than just restricting density, it prevents industrial manufacturing from happening right next to an elementary school, and it allows cities to make sure that sidewalk space in front of buildings are publicly accessible.

YIMBYs come out to support apartment buildings, not factories. The big YIMBY upzoning bill increases permitted housing density while not interfering with sidewalks. This sort of reply is pedantic. “Zoning” to YIMBYs means single-family and low-rise caps on residential density, and sometimes the separation of shops/offices from residential neighborhoods.

Are you saying that the failure of YIMBY to understand counterpoints are what is making disagreements between tech workers and TOT?

I think it's the opposite. When YIMBY ignore counterpoints, that's a core point of agreement with TOT. Because TOT ignore counterpoints even harder.

This statement is so vague as to be meaningless. Many YIMBY groups aren't willing to concede the benefits that exist, instead of making the better argument that the damages outweigh the benefits.

"Certain types of zoning" could mean:

- density regs,which I think are environmentally destructive garbage

- commercial/residential segregation, which I think lead to shitty suburb-type cities that you neeed to drive around

-PDR/residential ratio regs, which I think are reasonable (usually)

- heavy-industrial/residential segregation. I'm personally in favor of those.

The concern I'm expressing is there are a large number of people saying the phrase "abolish all zoning". That last point you made is rather important, additionally things like mandated setbacks allow cities to require there to be things like sidewalks around buildings. Other zoning includes not allowing features that could easily fall on people when walking along those sidewalks.

You could go through this list for a long time, and keep finding aspects of why zoning is a good thing. Yes using zoning as a tool to prevent diversity/mixed commercial use is a bad thing, but for essentially any other reason that zoning is used, it's usually a good thing.

The overwhelming majority of zoning’s actual function in the cities in question is to reserve most land exclusively for single-family homes and parking spaces. This isn’t a minor abuse of a mostly-good concept. It is the concept.

Still, I think it would be beneficial to reframe the YIMBY position as “upzoning” or “legalize apartment buildings” because the “deregulation” spin invokes a bunch of right-wing baggage unnecessarily. Relatively few of us want complete deregulation. We want different regulations.

Yeah, my city supervisor recently wrote me to say that SB87 is “supply-side, failed Ronald Reagan” economics. You have to make an argument that wins in CA and you do that by focusing on the benefits to middle class and working class people, which are numerous.

I love that "explicitly capping supply leads to shortages" is Reaganomics now.

> Unfortunately, a lot of the messaging from these groups are arrogant and troll-y rather than building an even broader constituency. They don’t have any patience, and they think their opponents are naive, often calling them “stupid”

Nothing on the YIMBY side holds a candle to the NIMBY group Gay Shame's vandalism of city property, doxxing, harassment, threats of violence, and assault.

I agree that Gay Shame behaves badly, but it doesn't really change my point. Even the most measured YIMBY spokespeople do a bad job communicating with people who aren't relatively well-off. YIMBY movements won't succeed until we convince poor renters that THEIR lives will also be better in a denser, more affordable city.

>YIMBY movements won't succeed until we convince poor renters that THEIR lives will also be better in a denser, more affordable city.

If that simple truth isn't immediately obvious to poor renters, then it seems like they're beyond hope.

This is not how you get things done in a society - you can’t just say “they don’t agree with me already, they must be stupid”. You have to actually talk to them.

That works with some stuff, but the example given was so plainly obvious that if a significant number people disbelieve it, it's really a lot like the inhabitants of 1600s Salem believing in witchcraft: they're just so mired in stupid thinking that I don't think you're going to convince them. It's very simple: you can only fit so many people into a given space depending on the housing type (e.g., single-family houses vs. high-rise condos), and the laws of supply and demand apply: if more people want to live in a place, the prices are going to go up, so the only way to mitigate that is to build denser housing. If demand is increasing, there simply is no way to keep housing affordable if everyone demands to hang onto less-efficient types of housing. This isn't a difficult concept. I realize this isn't quite as simple as "water is wet", but still, it's pretty easy and if people don't accept it after a 2-minute explanation (which I assume they've heard, otherwise they wouldn't be expending so much energy trying to oppose new construction), then it seems hopeless they'll ever accept it.

> YIMBY movements won't succeed until we convince poor renters that THEIR lives will also be better in a denser, more affordable city.

A denser city may have more affordable rents per square foot of living space, but it is not obvious that it would be more affordable otherwise. Building taller buildings in SF will make living space cheaper, but as those fill up it's not going to make food, water, or other necessities more.locally abundant, it's not’s going to make transit or parking cheaper, etc.; without lots of money and time for infrastructure improvements, it's going to make all those things more expensive. And even if developers pay for all the costs directly, those costs are going to get passed on to buyers and, from the new landlords, to renters.

> a lot of the messaging from these groups are arrogant and troll-y rather than building an even broader constituency

I don’t consider YIMBY “organisation” for this reason. It’s an emotional outlet, seldom a political block. Technology workers are notoriously unwilling to put in the work political advocacy takes.

Scott Wiener did get elected. 827 is a major flashpoint rather than obviously DOA.

Not only that, SB 35 actually passed. Additionally, London Breed is the front runner for SF mayor.

I also find the group is just generally has a lot of "living college liberal caricature" types and can be on a hair trigger.

There was one post with Bill Gates talking his usual vaccines and demography. 1 in 10 comments were to the effect of "Bill is just another rich white dude therefore he's evil". Really leaves a sour taste in ones mouth.

I guess this is the "racism and emotional labor" the mods are fletching about.

> the lack of recognition among said new money for their role in gentrification

This is where you jumped the shark. How does one "recognize their role" in gentrification? I know I'm probably a gentrifier, but I don't have much of a choice do I?

By not calling yourself middle class like many single tech workers making 200k a year in the bay area do. The upper middle class (really the top 30% of earners) have continued to see gains in income growth where the rest of the economies wage growth has largely stagnated.

200k/year tech workers can’t achieve home ownership and are therefore working class.

That's not part of the definition of middle class for most stats you'll see - http://money.cnn.com/infographic/economy/what-is-middle-clas...

The only place $200k a year tech workers can’t afford a house is the SFBA. Literally everywhere else it’s doable with a commute (a shorter one than SFBA at least!)

But the reason they're making $200k a year is because they're in SFBA... right out of college I briefly considered an offer to be an "administrative assistant" at Facebook - a job that normally nets you about $40K/year anywhere else. At Facebook it was $90K.

My point is you can't easily land that same tech job somewhere else in the country and keep that inflated salary, too.

Exactly. A $200k salary will let you buy a palatial home in Omaha, but you're not going to get a programming job paying $200k in Omaha.

Adjusted for an equivalent tech job in another city, $200k/year in San Fancisco would still probably put you in the uppermost tax brackets in a place with cheaper housing.

I guess I don't understand why token statements like that are important. It doesn't lessen my impact on the local economy. It also doesn't mean I can't be unhappy with the city's socioeconomic landscape.

I'm not saying any of these things aren't fine. I'm just saying it's important that higher income people actually recognize that they are higher income, where for any economic issues they may be facing, others have it much worse.

Anecdotally, one of the biggest problems I've seen long time urban residents have with gentrifiers is they don't make any effort to get along with the existing residents, and participate in the long time culture of the neighborhood. Through recognizing one's wealth, they would better understand that they are in the position of power, and should be more of their responsibility to integrate with the existing community than the other way around.

Can I use that as a quote in my city simulator?

Also has to do with tech folk reinventing things that work perfectly fine such as buses, hyperloops, etc.

I love NUMTOT and honestly it was one of the things that made it really hard to get off Facebook

It's rather ironic that they wouldn't exist, or at least be nearly as popular, without the 'tech industry' that they lothe.

'We should improve society somewhat.'

... by eliminating the class of people who work on technology so that they no longer make money or contribute to demand for space. The criticism stands.

We could use them in Brisbane. State and city governments slogging it out over a metro (rubber tired trackless bendy buses) vs tunnel thing. Brisbane transport has been up in the air since Patrick Geddes day. It's a mess

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