[orange_county]

The fact that we need tech companies to build housing on behalf of the city is a huge policy failure.

The city should have just rezoned many parts of the city a long time ago for mixed used. But instead the city and its residents has always fought against new housing. It’s only because of new RHNA mandates that they are required to zone for new housing. This is going to be a win for NIMBYs.

I hope the cities involved will rezone other areas especially in single family neighborhoods such that we can get more housing when interest rates drop. There is a lot of demand still for housing and there are policy tools that can be leveraged to encourage more housing to be built.

[4death4]

> But instead the city and its residents has always fought against new housing.

Isn’t that how a democracy is supposed to work? If the residents don’t want the changes, where does one derive the (moral) authority to override their desires?

[bendmorris]

On a larger scale, people want more housing, vote for it, and vote for politicians that pass appropriate legislation. On a local level most people don't want it next to them, although they don't actually own the land in question. Developers that do own the land would love to build more housing but are opposed by their neighbors. How do we reconcile the different interests? Whose goals are considered "democracy" here?

[kbenson]

Because "residents" is a group defined by perspective. If the residents in a city don't want something, but the residents of a neighborhood do, which has authority? What about residents of a city compared to a state?

How does this idea interact when the things being decided include whether other people can become members of the deciding group? If a neighborhood has authority over themselves, and votes for no new housing and no sales (bear with me for the thought experiment), have they then effectively locked that land down from the rest of the public that might want to live there?

What about when it's restricting things based kn race or income class? It's just the extreme of the above, so allowing a community to control the area absolutely would definitely lead to situations like that in the absence of larger jurisdictions with laws that override the local ones.

[fishtoaster]

One role of representative democracy (vs direct democracy) is to balance competing desires. Eg everyone wants good roads, but no one wants higher taxes. If you allow people to directly vote on each, people vote for higher costs and less revenue. So instead, we elect representatives to take a mix of popular (give us things) and unpopular (take things from us to pay for those things) positions at the same time.

Housing policy is the same thing. People widely support "cheaper housing" as a concept. If you magically halved the cost of all houses in the bay area, a lot of people would jump for joy and move to larger/nicer houses. On the other hand, roundly reject the things necessary to accomplish that - eg big housing complexes next door to them. It's the role of elected representatives to balance those desires.

That's where the moral authority to override a specific local desire comes from.

[callalex]

In this case the democratic model doesn’t really work because the people who need the development to happen are people who will need a house in about 20 years. Most of those people are too young to vote, so are not represented by the democratic process.

If people don’t want their neighborhood to expand and become “too crowded” with “too much traffic” then they must take a vow of celibacy, or build housing in smarter ways. There are no other options.

[crazygringo]

Because we live in a country and state, not just a city.

And very often that requires city policy that is the opposite of what current residents want, but is what other people across the country/state want.

E.g. if current residents don't want growth, but lots of other people want to live there, there's nothing about democracy that says the current residents' preferences take precedence over people who want to be residents.

The entire point of a nation is that it's able to coordinate and redistribute internally, for the good of the country, often against the wishes of a small minority (e.g. the current residents of a city).

Can you imagine if every neighborhood and town and city had veto power over everything? Where would you put landfills? Everyone needs them, but nobody wants them nearby to them.

So the moral authority comes from country-level democracy, and state-level, being able to rightly supersede local level.

[nologic01]

The city's residents don't live in autarky in an island or some remote planet, they benefit greatly and in countless ways from being part of a nation state (and even more abstractly, the human collective comprising other nations etc).

Unravelling that complex web of dependencies is not easy, but pretending it does not exist is not viable moral stance either.

[tikhonj]

Residents of small administrative districts carefully designed to segregate by social class (and, implicitly, race) do not want to new construction. Residents who live slightly farther away do.

Since housing prices and construction have a significant effect on both immediate residents and the rest of the population, it's up to higher levels of the (still democratically elected!) government to resolve the tension—which is exactly what's happening with state-level regulation like RHNA mandates!

[brvsft]

I think that's a good question. What do you mean by (moral) authority?

I'd say that local representatives could ignore the residents' wishes in the case that housing costs are too high, coupled with a desire to have a city where younger people can move in and raise families to also expand their tax base. But it's a tenuous argument with a lot of assumptions attached to it.

That said, I am skeptical that many of these cities in the Bay Area are actually representing the residents' wishes. Or perhaps the residents have too much power to stall housing development at local hearings where they are allowed input into what developers do on their own land. And the residents who exercise this power don't always represent the broader consensus in the city. But, I'll admit I am pretty ignorant about how things actually work at this level of local politics, and I know it's going to operate differently in every city and county.

[catlover76]

"democracy" can mean a range of things, and, in addition, it's not really clear who the relevant group of people are whose collective will we should care about.

For example, why draw the circle around these residents instead of thinking that the CA state legislature, as reps of the people of the state, should be entrusted with making all zoning decisions and such with a bird's eye view of what benefits the whole state? You can make a reasonable case why that's suboptimal, but at that point, we wouldn't be talking of "moral authority"

"Moral authority" doesn't really seem compelling to me, personally, as like a concept for judging government actions, and to the extent it does, I don't share the normative premise that "democracy" is supposedly an intrinsic or unadulterated good such that the most "democratic" proposition should win over others.

[tech_ken]

But it's not all residents, or even most residents. It's _some_ residents who are overrepresented in city governance. Many, many people in the Bay Area want more homes built.

[rnk]

The us is in desperate shape with the housing policies that we have leading to a tremendous lack of housing availability in many large cities in the west where it's harder to spread out. California but also Seattle is another city. There's a shortage of housing, the housing that exists gets more expensive because there's more competition to get in, people are pushed farther out, the high prices push many to eventually living in cars, there's no place for low income people to go. This contrasts with Chicago where there's apparently a lot of low income housing.

This high price of living is also another cause of lower birthrates among young people today, because everything is harder and more expensive.

[mihaic]

Nobody wants to pay taxes as well, but unfortunately we need a government to solve coordination issues, where not all parties can be satisfied.

When the results are so bad, maybe the system needs some tweaking, don't you agree?

[itake]

Homeowners are more politically active than renters.

It isn't that the residents don't want the changes, it is that they are not as politically active as their competition.

[ajross]

> Isn’t that how a democracy is supposed to work? If the residents don’t want the changes, where does one derive the (moral) authority to override their desires?

From the same place the "residents" derive it? Governments act for the good of the governed and via their consent. Those towns are in the State of California, the United States, etc... There's no absolutist principle that says that the "most local enclosing government" wins (in fact the Federal constitution clearly says the opposite).

[esalman]

High-income, low-density suburban areas are actually economically sustained and subsidized by low-income, high-density downtown areas. This is why residents of such areas should not be the sole voice of democracy here.

Source: https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=KWdMMY0Tnf46H6Oy

[anigbrowl]

The residents who own property exert a far greater say on policy than those who don't, which is more a plutocracy than a democracy.

[Kerrick]

The same place one derives the (moral) authority to override any tyranny of the majority.

[xvector]

Democracy is a terrible model for many things, and civil development is one of them.

[mupuff1234]

Being elected in a democratic way doesn't necessarily make something moral.

[greenie_beans]

there's a power imbalance between the homeowners and the renters. i'd be curious to see the makeup in the bay area of city council members who own vs rent. also there's discretionary zoning in the bay area which is a large driver of the problem imo.

the developers are another interesting dimension in that power imbalance.

[KptMarchewa]

I don't believe in giving power to local governments to do that.

[boeingUH60]

No problem about that. But they should never complain about homelessness and congestion after voting against the solutions.

[Clubber]

>If the residents don’t want the changes, where does one derive the (moral) authority to override their desires?

This really. My mid sized city has had an influx of covid restriction refugees and it's just too many people. Traffic is awful, everything is super crowded all the time. Inflation is out of wack and higher than other places. People really need to consider both sides of the coin.

[Dig1t]

The people on the zoning board are homeowners in the city! Of course they are going to zone things so that their neighborhood never changes. This is how it works in 99% of cities in the US and it’s terrible.

[mdgrech23]

It's weird b/c in most parts of our day to day lives we have no say. We live in a democracy but for the most part none of us can vote on anything meaningful but in this one particular area everyday citizens have a ton of power and they're voting to protect their owns means. I don't know man I look at the decisions made by politicians and they piss me off but when everyday citizens get a chance to make policy if you will they do shitty stuff like this blocking affordable housing. If I come across as bitter it's b/c I am. My town tried to build affordable apartments and NIMBYs blocked it.

[eitally]

I'm a homeowner and I want more housing built. But I also want improvements to transit and for both bike & car commuting. It's great that a lot of the current crop of apartments are being built along Caltrain & light rail corridors, but those still mostly only keep people who work along those corridors off the roads, creating more congestion for everyone. 87, 880, 101, 85, and 280 (until you get past Cupertino) are all already basically parking lots during rush hours, and it's because people can't live near where they work. This was the entire point of companies like Google & Meta including residential development in their broader campus development plans in Menlo Park, Mountain View, and San Jose ... and if it doesn't happen, then which municipalities are going to pick up the slack to incentivize developers to build near those campuses?

[wwweston]

If someone (in this case Google + RE developer, but it's irrelevant who specifically) was going to build these additional units but decided not to based off the economics, then it's hard to see how the issue here was zoning or NIMBYism.

[fragmede]

zoning and NIMBYism costs money to fight against. which directly figure into the economics of a thing. If they didn't need to spend the resources fighting them, it would be $X billion cheaper to build. this goes for all markets.

[shadowgovt]

Maybe it would be best for Google to just go build them somewhere else.

There's no actual rule that says we have to stack every human being in the country in Silicon Valley. Software engineering in particular is a business that lends itself being done from anywhere.