Are you saying I should buy a bigger house so someone starting out could live in mine?
Yeah, the shortages in every region added up would be a lot more than 3.8 million (since some regions where no one wants to move have surpluses).
I agree it's pretty towering. We pass zoning reforms and each individually seems to do well under what's needed. But I think at some point they're going to click together.
Here's a new Anglosphere case study where upzoning was finally massive enough to make a difference - Auckland (PDF). They haven't decreased rents in absolute terms, but held their growth lower than income growth (and, I calculated, rent growth became almost flat in real terms). Keep it up long enough, and things will be noticeably better. Plus New Zealand is so happy with the result they just passed a similar policy nationwide.
The hopeful thing in my mind is that we in the pro-housing movement have expanded our view past mostly zoning to all the different factors - land values, corporate structures, tax breaks, government-sponsored mortgage purchasers, best practices in public/social housing construction and maintenance - and coming at everything eclectically. The more we look, the more subtle, unintentionally-arrived-at barriers we can find, and the more of them we can start to break down.
Not to say that it's all technocratic fixes! Some of it may require hard decisions, like being willing to tax homeowners in high-demand areas significantly more to incentivize selling and using the land better.
(I'd be willing to defer extra taxes until sale/inheritance, so it affects the owners' lifetime net worth, but doesn't push them out directly.)
How about mass resettlement of coastal people in the scenery parts of Pennsylvania? Just go in with sufficient numbers to out vote the locals in militias.
Clearly we need to be poisoning fewer cats and more boomers
The hopeful thing in my mind is that we in the pro-housing movement have expanded our view past mostly zoning to all the different factors - land values, corporate structures, tax breaks, government-sponsored mortgage purchasers, best practices in public/social housing construction and maintenance - and coming at everything eclectically.
Yeah, I'm actually pretty optimistic that this problem can eventually be solved because it now has an active, informed political movement pushing on it from various angles. As we've discussed before, it also has a straightforward and feasible solution in a way that other big existential problems don't. That helps mobilize the political movement and drives continued incremental progress.
It seems like the reference baseline is just so hard to overcome. That thing where people's expectations are anchored in whatever a place was when they moved there (or experienced their prime years or something). 'This place was perfect when I chose it and I'm dedicating my life to keep it there.' The corollary is 'that's when it was good, why would it ever need to change?'. People do that anchoring subconsciously and it is really hard to move them off it.
I see it in myself when I think the world population should be 3B people. That's what it was when in my young adulthood.
I found the linked article interesting, but less convincing than I hoped because it seemed like the actual evidence wasn't strong enough to support the claims (that doesn't mean that it's wrong, just that it's extrapolating from fairly small bases, which means that if you aren't already convinced but if you aren't it looks like a bunch of pro-development groups talking their own agenda).
I say thinks because I was recently talking to someone who's YIMBY-skeptical and I've been looking for a good article to introduce to someone who's resistant, and I don't think that article is a good choice. Does anyone know of a better starting point?
3B people
That's cafeteria grade.
7.1: Definitely, and it's a big challenge to changing anything. But things do end up changing one way or another, and there is some space to steer those changes in a productive direction.
I haven't read the article yet. The linked article about the old lady poisoning animals put me off clicking the links here.
I don't know how to get past the ingrained belief that building housing causes gentrification and displacement. Real NIMBYs are easy to argue with -- not easy to convince of anything, but the argument makes sense. Someone on the left who thinks that building housing will make poor and unhoused people worse off, I get stuck immediately.
Pair it with policies that directly address displacement? Something something tax breaks or some assistance with staying in place? My sister's back neighbor has been in the house since her neighborhood was very low income. They don't have the wealth to do repairs, it looks like, but they can't do anything but live in a falling-apart house. If they sell, they'll never get back to the neighborhood. Explicit policies for that?
The case would be to accept their false premise and then add on stuff that would address it.
Here, they pulled down public housing and put in a Whole Foods and filled the area with mid-rise buildings full of $2,000/month apartments. There's now a bunch of very well-off people living where much poorer people used to live. I don't think it made anybody worse off because the status quo was not actually sustainable. But I wouldn't say that aloud if I were talking to someone who used to live there.
8. Maybe Jerusalem Demsas' article? https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/us-housing-supply-shortage-crisis-2022/672240/
14 gets at the problem with change. The other extreme (treating poor residents badly to make them leave) exists also,
https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/coverstory/code-snitching-nashvillians-are-weaponizing-metro-codes-against-undesirable-neighbors/article_5e94bd56-0c67-11ed-af4e-e3d04ad7e500.html
I think that's distinguishable as probably not building net housing -- if you're tearing down public housing to build roughly the same amount of market-rate housing, it makes perfect sense that it's not increasing the housing supply. The conversations I get stuck in are when people are objecting to building on vacant lots.
We're in the process of making it a firm baseline expectation that new housing never directly displace anyone - if it affects housing with anyone low-income, it's already California law that they get right to return at prior rent. (This most often means tearing down such housing simply doesn't pencil, but that's fine as long as we upzone other areas like owner-occupies SFHs and underutilized commercial areas sufficiently.) We talked on a recent action call about how to better enforce this, maybe add relocation assistance during construction, close loopholes like how right now it doesn't apply if you replace apartments with a hotel or something else commercial, etc.
Housing has simultaneous economic, aesthetic, and emotional aspects that create tensions not found elsewhere. I'm coming to appreciate how much of many people's world view is formed by what they see.
3 seems like a great idea to me, maybe could be combined with making Henry George's books mandatory for little free libraries?
16: Overall, the net number of housing units in the area increased a bunch. Though it took years.
Yeah, then you need to have the specific conversation about the net amount of public housing city-wide, and about where the tenants in the demolished buildings moved to. It sounds as if it's very possible, albeit not certain, that something bad did happen there, but it seems unlikely that no one thought about it when planning the project.
We're in the process of making it a firm baseline expectation that new housing never directly displace anyone - if it affects housing with anyone low-income, it's already California law that they get right to return at prior rent.
HUD also has a similar requirement for projects it funds. It's usually discussed in the context of relocation assistance rules that apply more broadly, but there's a HUD-specific provision that means you can't reduce the number of housing units on net.
... the housing we would need ... working-class people could once again live in our big coastal cities ...
Am I naive in wondering why they don't put the jobs in more affordable places? We have Internet, no? There's no logical reason why jobs, and housing, shouldn't be in Detroit, or places we've never heard of, instead of Manhatten or San Francisco. It's just misplaced snobbery, that could be addressed by a few "influencers".
Never mind, big coastal cities will be under water soon enough, as per Heebie's closing point, so why not just stay with the existential despair?
You can't ask people to live in somewhere like Michigan or Ohio. That's why I'm thinking central Pennsylvania.
Some jobs require physical presence near the employer, and that's true disproportionately of low income jobs. Big coastal cities can't be inhabited solely by people who work in the finance industry, because, e.g., sanitation workers have to be physically present in the big coastal city to pick up the trash, which means they have to live someplace close enough to make the commute possible.
20: I think mostly Wilkinsburg or Penn Hills, but that's just anecdote.
I don't wish to be combative but I am cynically suspicious that "housing" is only the latest in a lengthening line of crypto-, non- or anti-ideological attempts by liberal/progressive/leftist interest groups to formulate and foment enthusiasm for a universal solvent. I am sufficiently withered and hoary to recall similar ventures to make domestic manufacturing, health insurance and education the cure for everything wrong, all dropped when the droves didn't arrive.
I suppose that this could also be interpreted as attempts to "Organize discontent" à la post-Goldwater right wing organizing but I think the lesson of the Orange County right wing is to stick with your crazy obsessions for decades.
I wish there were a way to subsidize good design into the planning. Like, I want my town to capitalize on the existing architecture near the train station, and when they build multi family housing, I want it to support walking and biking to the train. I'd also like a grocery store nearby, so that a family could get by with only 1 car.
I see some bigger houses being built, but I'd like to see dense cottages which blend in with the 18th and 9th century "industrial" buildings rather than triple deckers or apartment complexes. According to our MBTA communities law, We are supposed to build housing that is suitable for families, but we also need places for downsizers who want to get out of their large SFH and be less car dependent. They got money for a new Senior and Disabled complex as part of the infrastructure bill, and they are doing some work too. Are the intersection (which is by the high school) more pedestrian-friendly.
I think that requires a planning department and good architects. I think a lot of the builders have a few plans off the shelf that they use. There's a very generic "luxury apartment" design that I'd like to keep out if the core village centers. The big condo complex with tennis courts and the like is pulled back in the woods.
27: It's not exactly YIMBY-approved, but all of that is possible to require through municipal zoning codes. Actually subsidizing it monetarily is an interesting idea but would be a hard lift for a local government, of course.
29: Yep, and I think a lot of people don't want more housing especially not for families, because they don't want to be on the hook for schools. Attendance at town meeting really spiked when they talked about expanding the sewer system.
30: Right, school funding is one of the biggest political barriers to expanding housing in a context like that. This doesn't get a whole lot of attention in YIMBY circles, probably because it's a very hard problem to solve, but if people really do want to "upzone the suburbs" they're going to have to tackle it at some point.
Which is why all school funding should be statewide -- funding education locally is bad for all kinds of reasons, and the perverse housing incentive is only one. There is literally nothing good about local funding of schools unless you think letting rich areas have better schools than poor areas is good.
We just got a postcard from the AARP suggesting we look into getting an ADU. Not that it would be possibly to build one on our lot.
Which is why all school funding should be statewide -- funding education locally is bad for all kinds of reasons, and the perverse housing incentive is only one.
Agreed. You do then run into the potential issue that school funding becomes hostage to state-level political issues; we're running into this right now in Alaska, which provides a lot of school funding from the state. But that's much better than having it entirely hostage to local-level politics.
There is literally nothing good about local funding of schools unless you think letting rich areas have better schools than poor areas is good.
Sadly, many many people do in fact believe this, even if they wouldn't admit it in those terms, and they're concentrated in the very communities where it becomes a huge barrier. Funny how that happens.
30/31 is the exact opposite of the mechanism going on in Heebieville. Housing keeps getting built, but the families choose to go out-of-district for schools, because they don't like the poor, brown (and admittedly miserably-run) schools in the Heebieville district.
So the school district has an artificially inflated tax base, and ends up having to give money back to the state under the state Robinhood law, despite having an extremely impoverished set of students. Which doesn't sound that unreasonable, but my understanding is that the state school funding formula is insane, and districts serving much wealthier students end up receiving extra money from districts like ours.
That's a whole different set of perverse incentives than you usually see from this terrible system! What wonders this country contains.
35: it's about 3/4 of the town budget. The schools in my town are considered excellent. They are a major reason that it's considered desirable. Hell, there are some ugly garden apartments that were built in the 60's for the Digital employees, and now they are filled with Brazilians who pay a slight premium over comparable quality housing to get into the school district.
We also have one of the higher tax rates, because we don't have a ton of commercial stuff. My tax bill is $9500 on a modest house. The bigger houses are probably $25k. A house like mine on the Notth Shore would have a tax bill half that. Some older people move out of town to lower tax places. So, I don't know how well the town is set up to provide for elderly people. They've done some, but I bet they would love some 2-income professionals without kids who will contribute to the tax base without burdening the schools.
This comes up a lot in New Jersey, and what towns often do is encourage senior housing specifically because they won't come with kids who will burden the school system. Of course the long-term result is that the local electorate becomes dominated by old people who are even less interested in paying taxes to fund schools.
Plus, they go really slow through the aisle of the grocery store.
Local control here is so problematic, and there are so many race issues.
There's affordable housing going vacant that's near towns with black folks that have shortages, because they don't advertise it where the black people would learn about it. Good podcast about this here.
https://commonwealthmagazine.org/podcast/suburbs-stymie-new-housing-growth/
State-wide funding would be way better, but I have to say that my experiences with state bureaucracy are almost always bad, whereas town (as opposed to city) government is great.
Possibly that will improve under your shiny new Democratic governor who belongs to a party that isn't ideologically committed to not providing government services? Even moderate Republicans are still Republicans.
The other thing is that we are currently meeting our affordable housing requirement. If we build more market-rate housing, we need to up our affordable housing or else builders can come in and get out of local zoning rules.
The who,e thing is really screwy. If you build affordable stuff for buyers, the builder gets credit for number of affordable units built. If it's rentals and some are affordable, all of the rentals count toward the quota.
41: I have some hope for her. Patrick was really not great. I think, sadly, that Romney was a better manager, and I know a lot of Dems who were government employees who say that. Healey's office is the exception to my comment. They were great. She's not as liberal as I'd like, but I'm glad to see Baker go.
42: Yeah, Massachusetts is actually known for having a relatively good system for forcing local governments to build affordable housing (as is New Jersey), but the structural logic of vesting so much power in hundreds of tiny local governments leads to weird outcomes that don't necessarily improve affordability.
41: And actually, when it came to healthcare, Baker's government was committed to improving mental health and our Medicaid program's services for people with disabilities. Even Don Berwick, NHS promoting liberal, thought Baker was pretty thoughtful about healthcare. Our new waiver allows us to provide Medicaid to 65 plus folks w/disabilities who have been on our common health program for 10 years without the spend-down crap.
Basically, MassHealth allows people with disabilities who are working to buy in so that they get the services they need, particularly long-term community supports like PCAs. That's been pretty bipartisan.
Am I naive in wondering why they don't put the jobs in more affordable places? We have Internet, no?
I moved to one of those affordable places 3 years before everyone else did. The problem is that, while some of the people on this thread would likely salivate at how low housing costs are, the influx of people coming in and buying them and working remotely (or buying them as second homes) has driven prices well beyond what local people on local salaries can afford.
Lots of people want to live in a charming-ass New England town where they can work remotely, and now that there is (finally!) enough broadband to go around, they can. But if you've lived here for years and work at a machine shop, its now become quite difficult to compete with remote workers when bidding on a house.
Yeah, as long as the housing supply is so constrained moving people and/or jobs to lower-cost areas just spreads the problem to them.
46: but what about Detroit? They need the tax revenue, and the houses are falling down.
Detroit would be great - or even in New England there are places like Holyoak, MA or Berlin, NH that have had drastic population reductions over time. But its going to take a whole lot of lead abatement and asbestos removal to turn the housing there into place where people want to live.
The other thread is the linguistics thread, but the use of "hosed" in the title makes me wonder if that is still current slang.
Probably this is impossible, but if I were some crazy billionaire I would try to buy up a bunch of land somewhere and just start a new high-density city. Of course the trick is finding a good location, but there seem to be a lot of places along major highways in the east coast which don't have a several-million person city but could. As far as I can tell only China does this (and they've gone off the rails building cities that people buy as investments but no one lives in). In California there's genuine space constraints that are hard to work around, but elsewhere in the country you could just build a new city without too much trouble.
I think both Australia and Brazil did that "new city" thing.
But a long time ago.
And also both of them did stupid shit, I just want a nice normal city with normal tall buildings and density, not some weird loop-de-loop "futuristic" car-centric design that looks dated in a decade.
Columbia, Maryland comes to mind, except think "stupidly designed exclusively for cars" rather than "dense."
I'm not saying there aren't constraints of different kinds everywhere, but I'm pretty sure the East Coast is more densely populated than California already.
I know that resupply is harder on the Pacific Crest Trail than on the Appalachian Trial and I think that's the reason.
There just isn't very much land in coastal California, and the land that's there is very expensive. I think it'd be much harder to say buy up land near Santa Barbara to build a city than to do the same in somewhere like Lancaster county PA.
The big difference is that you can go inland 80 miles from the East coast and the weather isn't much different than on the coast.
The population density of my home county was like 4 people per square mile. And we were always thinking at least we didn't live somewhere really rural.
Wait, I thought "just build a city somewhere" was how Fresno-Clovis happened. So, expand Bakersfield too?
Southern Virginia along the 95 corridor is empty and pointless, and could probably fit a major city. The difficulty would be getting people to want to live there.
49. Waterbury, CT. "A fine city"- Arthur Miller. Now apparently derelict; nobody wants brass any more.
59. Does Milton Keynes count as what? As the butt of more bad jokes than any other large town or city in England? Certainly. Apparently there are quite agreeable bits on the outskirts, beyond the reach of the lunatic mid 20th century designers.
There was a huge process to get an apartment complex approved that borders the denser mill town next door. I think it is zoned for industrial use there, so you needed to upgrade the water or something. I don't love the plans and the towns wanted to have paths which allowed greater community access to the riverfront. It's approved, but the property has been listed by the initial developer and hasn't found a buyer.
https://www.redfin.com/MA/Acton/2-12-Powder-Mill-RD-01720/home/175419254
68.2: I was asking if it counted as "some weird loop-de-loop "futuristic" car-centric design that looks dated in a decade." I'll take your comment as it does.
Absolutely. Apart from a few fanatical loyalists who live there and love it, people regard it as an awful warning. But it's worth remembering that the few fanatical loyalists exist.
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I have a minor gripe that will not extend beyond this blog.
Jammies' dad wrote a nice christmas letter. There's a short paragraph about each of his four kids and their families. The other three spouses have a sentence about their jobs.
Ours is:
Jammies, Heebie and their 4 kids remain in Heebieville, where he teaches high school math. The kids are 13, 12, 10*, and 8, and are busy with dance, piano, and soccer.
It's partly just jarring to see "teaches math" and have it not refer to me. It also super, super does not matter. I am still momentarily annoyed.
*he means 9, I'm sure
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I remain skeptical on how almost any set of regulations or governmental approval can result in prettier buildings with any reliability. Design review commissions are a joke, no matter how many criteria they're given to review. City councils rejecting everything discretionarily until they feel like something looks pretty enough - hopelessly vulnerable to NIMBY-motivated reasoning, and even if it were all 100% being done in good faith, it would probably result in camels too. Designing something that stands out tends to annoy at least one member of any given group of people.
Regulating floor area ratio has some benefits, so everything isn't cheek by jowl with everything else. Other than that, I think the method with the best track record is to make small-lot construction unconstrained and let small builders, baugruppen, etc. converge on new vernaculars. That's how we got brownstones, triple deckers, etc.
and even if it were all 100% being done in good faith, it would probably result in camels too.
And camel toe.
My mom sent a Christmas letter with her annual card. Having had decades of experience with her letters I discarded it unread.
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Well, that don't beat the Dutch. But a good run for what's still a minor footballing nation, at least in the men's game.
Pelé appears to be dying.
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Based on my own overconfidence and the shitty driving of someone else, I'm about to take off the inner panel of my car's door to see if I can attach the new mirror.
71: to quote Terry Pratchett, "Note for Americans and other sliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live.
"Many Britons find this amusing."
73: I loathe triple deckers.
Also, you need some planning as far as making sure people can get yo a grocery store.
The new King has spent decades trying to persuade everybody to build in pseudo-18th century styles. Hopefully his in tray will now be too full of other stuff for him to remain obsessed with this.
1: you joke, but in the before times, our family would have been expected to move out of our starter home. But the gap between what we have and what I'd want is more mortgage than I want to take on.
22: In some places, brain drain. Urban decay might be cheap but if you have to import all your skilled labor, you're stuck trying to attract people who already have good options in more established places.
82: yeah. I don't want that, but there's a particular style of apartment that I hate and I don't think they're conducive to walkabity.
There was a council somewhere in England they got around Thatcher's rules and built a new council Estate housing with passivhaus tech that looked great.
84.1: We were assuming we'd only be here for five years or so, but various things kept coming up starting with the housing crash.
81: Planners act like their work is decreeing what businesses will go where in the best possible pattern, but they're just laying out what's legal to put where. They don't actually bring the businesses.
What most reliably brings grocery stores? Density.
The government could just build a lot of houses. Especially when interest rates were low. you just issue bonds, build housing and collect rents. There are a lot of people who don't want this to happen but it isn't an intractable problem.
87: That requires mixed-use zoning which the town planners have pushed for, but doesn't always go over well.
Also, there are people who live in the garden apartments on the busy road who walk to the supermarket in a strip plaza that is clearly designed for cars. There is a neat little section of an old,ER part of town where they built a little complex and incorporated a couple of old buildings in a denser part of town. There is parking with a bit of a covered garage and parallel parking in the front. It's accessible to drivers, but you don't have to walk through a parking lot. That's a pretty dense part of town, because there used to be a train station there, so there isn't really room for new construction. A few blocks down there would be space for apartments if we could build on top of the 1-story independent businesses.
About to go under the knife for my fucked up knee
Good luck. Hope you recover quickly.
91: Sending you healing thoughts!
Successful operation and quick recovery, Barry!
Thanks all. In pain and groggy af but still here
Best of luck, Barry!
Good looking effort by the French team.
Yay, Barry, for being out of surgery. Fingers crossed for a smooth recovery.
89: Yes, mixed-use zoning takes effort as does multifamily zoning, and they're absolutely a common push. We tentatively got one big city, much of whose residential zones are mixed use in theory but not in practice, to allow grocery stores without a CUP in food deserts, and to allow everywhere restaurants, coffee shops, retail without a CUP if it takes up no more than 600 sq ft - e.g., Accessory Commercial Units.
Thanks all!
Missed the earlier game but watching the England Senegal one now
Did they make you get up and walk around yet?
If Barry had been able to play, US would have beaten the Netherlands for sure!
Minivet and other paged-in Californians: how are you feeling about builder's remedy?
109: It's certainly positive; will probably advance the cause but only to a middling extent similar to other bills passed. The only places it's been used and is likely to be used are especially high-land-value places like Santa Monica, which have not been approving any housing in recent years so developers see no harm in alienating them. Those places, after builder's remedy projects crowd in, have shown themselves able to come back into compliance with the state within a couple months. It's also possible they will be able to pull some CEQA shenanigans and block the housing in the end. The housing that makes it through that small window will be a big deal, but not in the volume that changes the market. But it is definitely a great goad to everyone to complete proper housing elements, which makes a difference more long-term. It draws attention to how arbitrary and exclusionary local zoning power really is, & lets imagine a world without zoning (and the massive activity it unlocks) and the ways we foster affordability in that world.
Obviously schadenfreude levels: off the scale
Although it was a bit of a gut punch to learn that the biggest project in San Leandro, 2000 units on Nebraska Avenue of which 800 affordable, would have at least as many parking spaces as units, despite it not being required at all, and despite being 0.4 mi from a metro station. I knew that car culture lives outside our zoning codes too, especially in developer and investor preferences, but I guess it was a good reminder.
There's a Nebraska Avenue in Santa Monica? Is there a colony of emigrants?
The gap's full name is actually Nebraska Emigrant Gap.
Probably emigrants who went through Nebraska then. That's too old to be related to Dust Bowl emigrants from Nebraska.
At least half the states in the Union are honored by avenues somewhere in Santa Monica. Arizona runs right between Wilshire and Santa Monica Blvd and we got stuck on it trying to get to the beach.
I think that was the same outing where I got misgendered at a taqueria and temporarily lost my mind. It is a land of contradictions, Santa Monica.
Not sure what 122 was about, but it is correct.
112 is a good take on builder's remedy. It's been in place in some east coast states for a long time and has had positive but modest impacts on housing supply and affordability.
124: What's its name there? Is that the Mount Something ruling in New Jersey? I thought that worked differently?
It's also called "builder's remedy." It is indeed used as an enforcement mechanism for the Mount Laurel decision, but it's a convoluted process with a lot of litigation involved (the developer has to sue the municipality) so its practical impacts have been limited. Massachusetts has a version as well which I know less about.
Oh, interesting, thanks. I guess the circa 1990 builder's remedy here came from somewhere.
Yeah, per Wikipedia (which has a pretty minimal page on this but with the basic details) the Massachusetts version was enacted in 1969. The Mount Laurel ruling was in 1975. That was actually just the first ruling; it continued to wind its way through the courts for years and years and the supreme court issued another ruling like ten years later trying to give it more teeth.
I once worked for a builder with so many missing teeth it was really gross watching him smoke. I never saw him eat.
It's interesting the NJ SC has been so activist on this subject, compared to other northeastern states. I suspect New Jersey having for a long time had its collective economic sights on housing as its primary achievable economic function, as opposed to commerce/industry, helped.
It's also that the other branches of government are much more responsive to the interests of local governments, which hate the Mount Laurel Doctrine and the idea of affordable housing in general. NJ has a ridiculous number of incorporated municipalities and it causes all sorts of weird political pathologies of which this is one.
Also important is that unlike many states, NJ doesn't have any large cities to counterbalance the suburban interests. There are communities that are urban in physical form, but they're not necessarily larger than many of the suburbs around them. Edison is bigger than New Brunswick.
But all that seems like reasons why New Jersey would be one of the NIMBYest states in the country. So what counteracts those tendencies?
The Supreme Court, as you correctly noted.
With limited success, I should note. It's still one of the NIMBYest states and housing is very expensive in most of it.
Another countervailing force on some issues, though not so much on housing AFAIK, is a sort of alliance between the poorer, more urban communities and corporate/finance interests in NYC to push back against suburban hegemony. This is Cory Booker's whole deal and why he ended up as both an experienced mayor of an impoverished city and a corporate sellout.
Where there have been successful efforts at increasing the housing supply it's mostly been through local governments that decide they want to encourage development and liberalize their zoning voluntarily, rather than through successful builder's remedy lawsuits. The standout example is Jersey City, which has very liberal zoning and has built a ton of housing over the past twenty years.
Yes, that part I've heard about. (I heard a lot of the movement in Jersey City was through the mayor, and he used some questionable means to bypass the council to implement some good policies, including removing off-street parking requirements.)
The Mount Laurel judicially led approach has been interesting in a lot of ways but I wouldn't say it's exactly been a success story for actually increasing the housing supply. That's why I was happy to see the measured approach to the builder's remedy concept in 112. I've seen a lot of triumphalism on Twitter about it, but it's best seen as a more modest tool and it'll be very worthwhile for California to look at the NJ experience as a cautionary example as you move forward with it.
Isn't New Jersey just people who don't want to or can't afford to live in NYC paired with people who don't want to live in Philadelphia. Plus like a rounding error-size smattering of others.
Thanks for the discussion, all. Glad it helps, especially in areas for maximum schadenfreude, boo that it won't be enough.
Moby, while playing Victoria 3, I got a mostly-randomly-generated warning about "Irish people immigrating en masse to Nebraska" and it made me think of you.
140: Yes. Specifically people who "left The City to get away from those people," as they will gladly tell you when you propose building affordable housing in their community.
141.2: Was their leader an O'Neill?
Lawrence, Kansas has state-named streets as well, and IIRC, they're ordered in the order that they joined the union, for easy reference.