Comment by dev_dull | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dev_dull | Hacker News Reader

If Seattle is not careful they’re going to end up on the same situation as the Bay Area: extremely expensive building projects due to red tape that take forever to complete and only house the rich.

Yeah you can build here, but have you completed all your environment impact studies? And posted notice of tree removal with requisite public comment period? And have you set aside 30% of the units for low income and raised the price on the rest of the the units to make up for it? And are you ready to comply with rent control laws? And are you supplying 2 parking spaces per tenant as required by law? And is your business chartered in CA with requisite taxes and fees? Did your bidding process include businesses owned by historically underrepresented groups? Have you kissed the ring of your local union leaders? Did you make sure your exterior design complies with neighborhood matching decor laws? Oh my god you're not going to cut down that 50-year-old redwood are you??

Wait why aren’t we building more apartments again?

This comment is completely non-responsive to the article. The article describes a move in the opposite direction from increased regulation and red tape.

Meanwhile, Seattle has already been vastly better than SF at building new housing units over the last decade. SEPAs have existed during that entire period and are used by NIMBY groups to attempt to slow down growth, but ultimately they have not succeeded at stifling development the way SF's NIMBYs have.

The heart of their effort is lowering the amount of time for certain appeals. It's not about addressing the real concern (the onerous regulation and red tape that allows everybody to slow down building unless it satisfies their particular social justice issue, whether that's environmental, aesthetic, cost, etc).

Cities and state governments want this regulation. They crave it and create it endlessly because it forces developers to come to them for permission.

Or it's because those with money to build property are inherently exploitative of those living there.

If using money to buy property is "exploitative", you've redefined that word into meaninglessness.

It’s better that chunk of land stays an empty lot and we all pay more and more for rent. Otherwise we’d be getting exploited!

And the best way to fuel that exploitation is to give the existing set of landowners an effective monopoly by disallowing new construction. If we instead encouraged new construction (via less red tape and other means) we should expect rents to go down as the supply expands - or at least for them to rise less.

Pretty much every city in North America is like this to varying degrees.

I've always wondered how Toronto manages to build a hundred giant buildings while most cities only have a few going at a time, with a few exceptions (note NYC has 3x the population of Toronto): https://www.remonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Diagram...

I'd imagine if there wasn't this sort of arrangement basically every growing city would be developing 10x more buildings than they currently are (at least).

If that chart is accurate it seems that Canadian cities across the board are building more high-rises. I wonder why.

For whatever reason, Canadians seem to be more open to multifamily high-rise living. As a child in the 1970s it always seemed off to me when we'd visit relatives in smallish towns in Canada which had midrise buildings while in the southern US where we lived much larger cities had few recent buildings of similar heights. This is simply my recollection of things but it seemed like even a small town of 20,000 in Ontario had good odds of having a residential building at least ten stories tall. Perhaps it was a difference in government policy in how it built social housing?

Reduced heating costs perhaps? Heating from -40 to room temp is much, much more expensive than, say, air conditioning in the southern US. If you are not averse to sharing some walls, it makes sense.

Personally, I don't think I could go back to apartment living, but I will also readily admit that I am not a good candidate for "normal" in most regards.

While Seattle still has a ton of work to do, is much more progressive on these issues than they Bay Area, and it’s getting better, not worse.

I would not call getting rid of these regulations as progressive. They exist to protect the environment and enrich the lives of the residents. We just need better, cheaper solutions to construction even if it's something as far fetched as robot labor.

> enrich the lives of the residents

Mostly, it’s retaining residents’ property values. By not building any new housing.

That's literally Elizabeth Campbell's entire motivation. She doesn't want to have to look at the poors in her neighborhood.

It sounds good in theory that "They exist to protect the environment and enrich the lives of the residents". Then I'm reminded that environment protection laws have been used to build larger freeways (because we don't want to have cars idling too long!)

WA still has a libertarian bent that despises red tape. We have no state income tax due to that.

As a former resident, I hope you can see the tides are shifting rapidly. How long can you keep things that way? Didn’t Seattle elect a socialist? Their policies are the opposite of libertarian.

Councilwoman Sawant is a single city councilperson; she isn't a majority of city government (who are mostly pro-business) and definitely isn't representative of the state as a whole, which is pretty purple. Outside of Seattle, especially on the east side of the state but also in some of the smaller metro areas, folks tend to be extremely libertarian. (Not to say there aren't libertarians in Seattle as well, it just skews left of the state average.)

The Seattle metro is a weird microcosm of the state in that it's so vastly bigger than any other metro in the state. Seattle and surrounding metro have about 4 million of the state's 7.5 million residents. So yes, Seattle has a big influence, but it's far from the only voice in Washington.

> progressive

I really don't want to get deep into this topic on HN of all places, but limiting the government's ability to interfere with new construction is not progressive.

And in before someone says that the opposite is "conservative" because "NIMBYs" want to "conserve" the status quo, such a transparent abuse of language. People figured out that supply/demand applies to housing too and now want to pretend that allowing markets to lower the price is somehow progressive because progressive means good.

It's almost bordering on "Orwellian", where a word can become nearly meaningless, you can just start calling anything progressive to justify the policy rather than thinking about the functional principle of what is being done--limiting the government's interference in the market, in this case, and that's not to say that is always a good thing.

However you want to define progressive, its certainly not progressive to have skyrocketing 4k+ USD a month rents and groups making it essentially impossible to build more housing.

I think you're replacing "progressive" with "good" again.

'progressive' usually is the opposite of enriching wealthy entrenched interests, to the detriment of basically everyone else.

> Yeah you can build here, but have you completed all your environment impact studies? And posted notice of tree removal with requisite public comment period?

This stuff really matters in the entire region because nearly everything is a landslide hazard.

>Wait why aren’t we building more apartments again?

Have you seen the Seattle skyline in the last 4 years? Lol.

I feel like this is a canned rant of yours that doesn't necessarily have a basis in this actual situation.

While you raise a fair point, the fact that Seattle is building a lot doesn't mean that Seattle is building enough. IIRC the net inflow is ~50 people/day. Seattle would need something like a new apartment building every week to break even.

That doesn't sound bad at all. Someone with the millions of dollars it takes to build apartment blocks isn't going to be held up with those minor issues.

All those things sound completely reasonable.

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