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Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

If people prefer that, they can pay for that. No reason to prohibit others from building denser. Nobody will stop you from buying a lot downtown and replacing the high-rise building with your single family home and adding a multi-car garage. On the other hand you will be stopped if you want to build a high-rise without parking even if lots of people want to live there.

Let's stop telling people what they should want and let the market build what people want. If "the market" builds what nobody wants, some folks are gonna lose some of their own money and someone else will make a profit from correcting it.

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Why does @ars have to pay for the situation they want, but you don't? If @ars wants a less dense city, and you want a more dense one, why should you be able to force it on others, but not the other way around? Why don't you move?

The fact of the matter is: many people in the US like it how it is, even if we don't.

I never said someone should subsidize dense housing. I only advocated for removal of requirements that prohibit dense housing and mandate things like parking.

Edit: If anything we currently have the reverse case, with dense areas where infrastructure is shared by many subsidizing less dense areas where roads and houses serve much fewer people while providing less tax revenue. There have been some good articles on here about this over the years.

Everyone should pay for the resources they consume. Lower density requires massively more resources per person, so the people who want it should wind up paying more.

Nobody is advocating forcing everyone to live in dense housing. Our current political/legal system massively favors and subsidizes lower density. Removing that favoritism is not unfair at all.

I'm fine with this but be aware that the catch here is that if you aren't moving dollars around you can't attach strings to those dollars. Controlling funding by gatekeeping it with specific requirements for eligibility is a large part of how the feds control the states and the states control municipalities.

If you don't fund their roads you can't tell them "but you need a sidewalk".

>If you don't fund their roads you can't tell them "but you need a sidewalk".

The Americans with Disabilities Act says you need sidewalks.

And that's exactly why I cited it.

What's the enforcement mechanism if the entity writing the rules doesn't control the purse strings? Tie them up in court for 10yr and then when you finally win they just do something marginally different to the same end (i.e. exactly what we see with civil liberties).

> if you want to build a high-rise without parking even if lots of people want to live there

Yes because those people still own cars and they park those cars in other peoples parking areas. The cars don't magically stop existing, the developer just has a better bottom line because they have been subsidized.

> they park those cars in other peoples parking areas

Isn't it already illegal to park on other people's property without permission?

And what are you going to do about it? Cops aren't coming out to do anything. You don't have the authority to tow them.

Is this a real problem that happens in reality right now? I regularly hear of entitled home owners putting up cones or other stuff to block street parking in front of their house. In fact this has become a popular meme on r/portland. I've never heard of someone parking in someone else's driveway (maybe blocking it, but parking enforcement seems to be a popular revenue stream) or front yard.

If it really is your park, there are several remote control bollard options you can install to block the space.

Also, if police cannot even be motivated to get cars off other people's property, that seems like a big problem that we should address, rather than restricting what we are allowed to build to work around the police not doing their job.

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