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In a scenario of limited supply, as we are in, limiting supply by limiting potenatil build sites is absolutly relevant to the issue.
Stop ignoring facts. We have massive swaths of available build sites with either the zoning already in place or simple changes from industrial/commercial to multi-family. That is not what is causing whatever issue you are raising your blood pressure over.
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"Tons" does not mean enough. Especially since we've been adding people to the metro, and specifically more jobs than housing since 2012. The ARC states that "[a]ll counties in metro Atlanta are experiencing the a decline in housing inventory", and that "[h]ome prices rising significantly – faster than wages – due in large part to dwindling supply".
But, maybe the folks at the ARC just don't get it either?
Just because it's not being built doesn't mean it can't be built, that there's nowhere to build it, or that areas of the city must give up their space for it. It just means it's not being built.
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We've been through this dance plenty now. You should know the answers, since they haven't changed: parking minimums, mandatory setbacks, limits on multi-family housing, low default height limits, low default floor-area ratios, and low default residency allowances all play into shaping the developments.
So, Fuqua's project conforms to all this, but other projects were stymied because of it? Yeah, not buying it. Apartment buildings all over town are wall-to-sidewalk. They have no issues with setbacks. Fuqua's project appears to be 11 stories, hardly a low limit. These buildings have hundreds of sub-1000 square foot apartments...hardly too big.
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God forbid a new business open! How will you ever recover from such a thing! How will you be able to stand the convienience of having an auto-repair shop within walking distance?! How can you suffer through the indignity of being able to drop your car off at the shop and walk home?!
I lived with a business on our building's bottom floor for most of my childhood, and with businesses a 5 minute walk in either direction from our mult-family apartment building in Virginia Highland. They do not spook me, and they just so happen to exist in one of the very areas you want to encase in amber, yet that neighborhood is happier for them. Good thing most of them were in place before the very restrictions you want to keep in place were codified.
That's great., I'm glad you don't care. That is not normal. You need to realize this. It is not normal for people to not care if a business or building is plopped down in the middle of their neighborhood.
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And yet, when I proposed tolls, you had quite a lot of hate for the idea.
Re-read what I said. I would be against tolls while also paying a fuel tax, or if those tolls were burdensome ($2.50 every time I cross the perimeter). But, if you want to charge me $300 per year, with everything else gone, sure. But, you're just moving from one funding source to another, and likely going to see other taxes (which you will pay) to cover the rest.
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A source on percentages. Just throwing google-earth links at me isn't an actual source. It's noise with not enough context to be made useful.
Yeah, I'm not going and pulling up every land-use statistic for the past 15 years. If you are going to be so hard-headed as to think that we weren't using our dense areas 13 years ago, while countless large buildings have been built in those areas since, still leaving empty lots in large numbers, I cannot begin to help you. You are determined to ignore reality.
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After all, how many of those locations weren't even zoned for high-intensity use in 2005? Even then, it doesn't matter if new stuff was upzoned, if we are adding more people than we are upzoning. How do you know if those areas are enough? How do you know that, by building them up, they'd solve anything? How do you know that they don't have some fatal flaw that's keeping them from being built up right now (like overly restrictive zoning laws that raise the barrier of development too high to turn a profit)?
Most of them were parking lots or empty fields in the center of Midtown and Downtown. What the hell else would they be zoned for?
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Even then, why does their vacancy dictate not opening up zoning even more? You can't just bar all new construction because a few locations haven't yet been improved. You won't fix anything that way, and infact just make things worse as you continue to build up unmet demand waiting for projects that may never come.
I'm not even sure what this means. Their vacancy for 15 years during a supposed period of "massive pent-up demand crisis" appears to show that opening up other areas serves no purpose. If no one is building dense housing in the dense areas ripe for more density, what point is there to open up our established neighborhoods for it? Answer: there is none. Zero. The more you post, the more I think there is something else at play here...some sort of personal mission against a perceived past wrongdoing.
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That, and I have it good from one this past round's city council candidates that developers would love to have things like no parking minimums. Things which rather get in the way of turning 'quick, easy profit' by raising the barrier of entry on a project to make it profitable in the first place. I have no doubt that, if we continue to styfle supply, demand will rise high enough to make those areas more profitable, and we'll see a flurry of activeity.
I'm betting that the "no parking minimums" is a drop in the bucket. But, I would be fine with removing parking minimums in Midtown and Downtown and highly enforcing illegal parking. It would probably stop a lot of people from visiting, but that's no big deal, right?
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Says someone who, when asked "So, what you're telling me is... 'feels before reals'?", responded with "Was that not obvious?"
Uh, yeah...that's the reality I speak of. Actual people acting like people. Not data-driven robots. People who live in established neighborhoods are going to fight to maintain their neighborhoods based on how they feel about their neighborhoods, not what some Excel spreadsheet claims is the answer to a city-wide need for housing.
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They don't have to give their property to dense development, but they shouldn't have the right to keep their neighbor from doing so. Especially when that 'dense development' isn't much higher than 5 floors, with one of them being a shop or resturaunt.
Besides there's a difference between fighting a highway that would 100% be as backed up as the rest of the system, and which has known issues of fiscal sustainability, pollution, and social inequality, and keeping your neighbor from building a small apartment building on their land.
Either way, it's changing the neighborhood for what many perceive as worse...and that's what people don't want.
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Why though? That's a rediculous thing to insist on. Either make it an active investment, or treat it like the gamble that we treat every other passive investment as.
It just is. Always has been, always will be. A few fringe urbanists are not going to change that any time in the next few generations.
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If I had my personal preference, I'd be saying we should all build victorian homes, wear suits with top-hats, and have increadible steam-powered machines with far too many gears on them everywhere. Also more zepelins using the Bank of America building as a mouring post a-la the Empire State building.
So, you are aware that you are living in the past and are trying to apply a reality of 150 years ago to today. It appears that you are just living in the wrong century.
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Well, there is one U.S. city that is doing better, though not exactly correct, and it's listed in that exact article I posted. Maybe if you'd go actually read it, you'd have seen that.
I'll answer to this after I quote evannole...
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Then again, when nearly the whole U.S. is running with the same basic ideas that were set in motion 60 years ago, at the federal level, it's not surprising to see that things haven't been fixed, especially with people like you who insist on ignoring the data for their feelings.
Well, don't know what to tell you. You're going at it wrong. You're trying to fight a fight that you will never win, instead of taking a far more reasonable approach to it. You are trying to push everyone to go all in, and that will never happen. By your own sources, we were meeting nearly half the demand in 2005 while using only 10% of our land for dense urban spaces. Yet, somehow, you think we need the entire city to be available for those spaces in order to fix the supposed problem. People who present ideas like this almost never get received well because they just aren't grounded in the slightest amount of reality.
By the way...that City Observatory link you post all the time oddly has the same article posted twice, two months apart, by two different authors. It's hard to take seriously when one of them writes things like "I'm giving a short talk about why Chicago's land use laws are ruining your life and contributing to economic segregation and gentrification/displacement and lots of other terrible things". Sorry, but I just cannot take that seriously.
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Originally Posted by evannole
You post a lot of articles, and most of us don't have time to read them all, but the one you seem to post more than any other praises Boston as a model of urbanism, and I am guessing that's the one you're referring to. It's a wonderful place. I love it. But it's also not a bastion of affordable housing. Pull up Redfin or whatever your favorite real estate app is. I just did. I zoomed all the way out so that pretty much all of Central Boston was on the map, all the way out to Brookline and Somerville. Do you know how many properties I found that are listed at $250k or under? Three. In an area that measures roughly 7 miles by 7 miles, there are three such properties. I don't know that things are working as well there for those who would like to have "affordable" housing as you think is the case.
Correct. There are three properties for sale under $250k anywhere in Boston city center currently. One of them is a single parking space. The second is a parking space. And the third...is a parking space. By contrast, there are over 70 properties currently in Downtown/Midtown Atlanta or within a few minutes which meet that criteria.
If you want to look at the ITP area, Boston has roughly 30 properties within an area slightly smaller than Atlanta's perimeter. Conversely, Atlanta has so many, I stopped counting around 500.
In Atlanta, there are hundreds of properties for under $100k ITP. In Boston? Six. Two are parking spots, three are deemed unbuildable, and the sixth is an as-is short sale.
Boston should not be your model for how density equals affordability.
Sam, you need to stop applying your wants and expectations to how everyone else to lives their lives. These zoning laws that prevent and drive-up costs of urban living need to go away. Suburban sprawl is fine for those that want it but should not be forced on most of the metro with the force of law.
As you guys well know, you can't make all of the people happy all of the time. That'll never happen. However, our lawmakers should come up with a compromise- encourage density as well as protect our single family home neibghborhoods. It does have to be either / or decision.
As you guys well know, you can't make all of the people happy all of the time. That'll never happen. However, our lawmakers should come up with a compromise- encourage density as well as protect our single family home neibghborhoods. It does have to be either / or decision.
Unfortunatly this system onlt allows 25% of the city's land for meaningful growth and expansion. It's a better plan than what's in place now, but it's by no means a good final answer. Not given the known existing, and projected future demands.
Unfortunatly this system onlt allows 25% of the city's land for meaningful growth and expansion. It's a better plan than what's in place now, but it's by no means a good final answer. Not given the known existing, and projected future demands.
Why don't we fill up these growth areas first? Aren't they getting most of the infrastructure money?
Sam, you need to stop applying your wants and expectations to how everyone else to lives their lives. These zoning laws that prevent and drive-up costs of urban living need to go away. Suburban sprawl is fine for those that want it but should not be forced on most of the metro with the force of law.
I'm not applying MY wants. I'm applying what I suggest is what most people want for their own neighborhoods. You and your band of misfit urbanist die hards should not be able to tell them that their neighborhood cannot be saved because you and the newcomers want it to be different. A neighborhood should be able to decide if they want to be broken up for "urban fabric".
You can't say that a little curb cut or a 10' wide parking space kills walkability, but dropping an apartment building into a SFH neighborhood actually makes it better. No one is buying that nonsense.
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Originally Posted by fourthwarden
Unfortunatly this system onlt allows 25% of the city's land for meaningful growth and expansion. It's a better plan than what's in place now, but it's by no means a good final answer. Not given the known existing, and projected future demands.
So, if 10% of the city's area which wasn't even close to fully developed was meeting 50% of the demand, 25% of the city won't be able to do it? Your math is flawed.
Why don't we fill up these growth areas first? Aren't they getting most of the infrastructure money?
Let's say you are standing out in the snow without much on (crazy to think of in Atlanta, but I'll assume you've been to places with real snow). Maybe just a jeans, t-shirt, and sneakers set up. You've been there for a while, and, at first, the remnants of body heat were enough to keep you comfortable. You're slowly loosing that, though, and getting colder. You ignore that discomfort because, hey, you can handle a bit of chill. So what if you're a bit cold?
Still you stand, getting colder, loosing heat. Well, eventually you start to feel really cold. So, you begin to think maybe you should wear a bit more clothing? No need to get carried away, though, since you don't want to get too hot! So, you put on mittons.
Well, that doesn't do much, and you keep getting colder. As you do, you, every now and then, put on a bit more clothing. A hat. A long-sleeve shirt. Maybe an extra layer of long-johns.
The problem, though, is that these clothes are cold. They require time for your body to heat them up. They often require more than just themselves to create any noticable increase in warmth at all. In fact, it may very well feel like these clothes are just making thigns worse, because you're still getting colder, even if they're keeping you from getting even colder than without them.
If you're too slow about things, say because you're worried about overheating, you won't have enough body heat or energy left to warm up what you're wearing, and you'll just keep getting colder until you freeze, clothes or not.
See, these kinds of policies take time, on the order of decades, to reach matureaty. Stalling action on them for prolonged periods means you hurt their ability to be effective, while the problems continue to pile up. If you wait too long, say on under-targeted gestures like allocating only 25% of the city's area to growth, the problems may very well reach a critical point that is near-impossible to come back from. I certainly don't want us repeating the problems that are, today, causing affordibility crises in California, Washington, and New York, but to avoid those we must act before we fall too far into our own affordibility crisis.
You're suggesting we put on mittons - maybe a beany - , when really we should be putting on a heavy jacket and ski-pants.
So, if 10% of the city's area which wasn't even close to fully developed was meeting 50% of the demand, 25% of the city won't be able to do it? Your math is flawed.
That was 10% of the metro's land, which includes much more than the city. Keep in mind, that 10% of the metro's area is 838 square miles, which is over 6 times as much area as the city itself.
So, assuming a linear relationship of land-area to satisfying density preferences (a bad assumption, but oh well), we'd need to have had 20% of the metro dedicated to urban living in 2005, or 1,675 sq miles. That's ~12.5 times the area of the City of Atlanta, all dedicated to fairly dense, urban living to meet demand.
Also, our metro only had 4,250,000 people in 2005. In 2017 we had 5,900,000 people, an increase of 1.65 Million people. So, to meet the same percentage, we'd need to dedicate even more land, else we'd actually be meeting a smaller percentage of demand.
Now, according to that same study, only 30% of respondents across the metro said they prefered some form of urban living, and only ~50% actually lived in such an area. For the metro's 2005 population, that's 637,500 people satisfied by 837.6 square miles. If we add no more land from the metro into that urban mix, and assume a similar preference responce percentage today, then those 637,500 people only represent 36% of the urban living demand met.
If we were to try to maintain a 50% demand-met point, we'd need to have added 4% urban area to make it work, a land area equivalent to 2.5 times the entirety of the City of Atlanta.
If we were to try and satisfy 100% of the urban demand, we'd need 28% of the total metro land area dedicated to the prospect of urban living, representing 17.4 times the entirety of the City of Atlanta.
But sure, setting asside a mere 25% of the City of Atlanta, itself, for meaningful growth will be enough to handle demand in the city.
Even if you want to bring in possible unmet potentials of zoned areas, which is fair enough, you can not ignore that we're looking at needing an increase in land area much larger than the city itself reguardless to even meet some additional demand. Besides, the reality is that we'll never get our zoned area to 100% live up to its potential zoned capacity. We just won't. Seattle's learning that the hard way. The fact that we haven't really fixed the same bad policies from 2005 that were leading to us only meeting 50% of demand only means we'll make even worse use of our land's potential.
The city design plan does not call for nothing new to be build in the green areas. It just calls for it to be more limited to the duplex / quadruplex level (along with things like more historically contextual setbacks and reduction / elimination of parking minimums) so neighborhoods can still keep their character.
Agree with your metahore and we need drastic change to stay ahead on affordable housing with all the demand coming our way. But this seems like a fair steep in my opinion, more like putting on one entire layer of clothing at once. We just need to make even this happen still. We are still standing in the snow with just a tee shirt right now.
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