samalcorn.bsky.social
Housing. Urbanism. Zoning abolitionist. Accessibility Compliance expert. YIMBY. #OverturnEuclid
489 posts
858 followers
889 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
comment in response to
post
Never mind. Just skimmed it, and it’s an everything-bagel bill. Wouldn’t have gotten used anyway.
comment in response to
post
If you limit property taxes, of course you’re going to get perverse second- and third-order effects over the years.
And yet, somehow politicians in other states look at those 4+ decades of bad 💩 in California and say, “I want that for my state!”
comment in response to
post
Anyway, the point is that the systems are what need to change. People will naturally oppose change to the environment around them. So if you build a system to provide veto levers that anyone can pull, of course you’re not going to get an abundance of housing.
comment in response to
post
Eliminating Prop 13 would not solve every problem with California, but it’s the root of so many of our problems.
I can’t help but think eliminating it would improve SO many things about this state.
comment in response to
post
Of course, with Prop 13, there’s pretty much no incentive for munis in California to increase their population. The ghost of Howard Jarvis strikes again. Don’t do it, Texas! Don’t do it, all the other states!
comment in response to
post
Let planners plan! Let municipal governments focus on the things that would improve quality of life of their citizens, and not be opposed to having new citizens.
comment in response to
post
People in positions of power or privilege (like being able to attend a hearing in the middle of the day, or any time of the day for that matter) naturally want to maintain the status quo. Many have grown accustomed to the built environment around them remaining static.
comment in response to
post
It is the systems we have built that seem to be the problem. We have built systems to maximize anger, fear, and wasting the time of everyone involved, all to oppose change to the status quo.
comment in response to
post
The problem seems to me that these things appear to be regulated at too low a level of government. Once the state takes control of some planning issue or another, that can relieve municipal electeds and others from having to take the blame for changes to the built environment.
comment in response to
post
It’s many other things. If you talk to most of the people who voice opposition to individual projects in some other context about some other topic, you’ll generally find they’re pretty reasonable.
comment in response to
post
Which is not said to impugn the planners. They all went to planning school. They know what’s up. It’s the elected officials understandably afraid of constituents who naturally don’t want any change to their built environments. It’s the system we’ve built with a million veto points.
comment in response to
post
I've seen similar things pop up in Texas recently as well. It's as if the people making these proposals have willfully ignored the lesson California has taught us all over the last 4 decades. The perverse effects of Prop 13 explain so many of the things that are screwed up about California.
comment in response to
post
But what if they want to see simulacra of cities? I guess China has some, right? From the pictures I’ve seen, there are fantastic geological features elsewhere in the world. But it’s a real shame. Everything seems to be falling apart right now. On purpose.
comment in response to
post
WTF planet is coal clean on? Certainly not this one.
comment in response to
post
They required the applicant to have a gate with a clear opening of at least 36”, which means that the maneuvering space on the pull side has to be at least 60”W. I haven’t looked at the plans, but from the description I heard in the hearing, it sounds like that may require moving walls.
comment in response to
post
I know I feel less confident now about air safety than I did a couple of months ago.
comment in response to
post
This reverses the direction of causation, at least in most cases. Thankfully, it seems like more people are becoming able to apply Occam’s Razor here.
comment in response to
post
And yet, people make up all sorts of complicated explanations for it. Must be drugs, they say. Must be mental illness, they say.
comment in response to
post
Oh, and I forgot to mention the tent cities as another similarity between then and now. We’ve had those for years already now.
comment in response to
post
Hopefully not more than a generation. But it seems like it could be on that time scale. Plus, it’s being added on top of all the anthropogenic changes to the earth, which are on a much longer time scale than that.
comment in response to
post
It just struck me that in the history books of the future, the downturn in ‘08-‘09 might seem like the smaller depression in the early 1920s. Let’s pray the “Great Recession” continues to seem huge.
comment in response to
post
I was just thinking yesterday about the Great Depression, and many of the same outward signs are there, all jumbled up. Increased racism, sexism, authoritarianism, anti-immigration, tariffs. It feels utterly terrifying to be sprinting toward the cliff.
comment in response to
post
Looks straight out of Robocop.
comment in response to
post
Looking for that Rip Van Winkle experience?
comment in response to
post
Also, National Airport in DC, and Intercontinental Airport in Houston.
comment in response to
post
FAR has never made sense to me when combined with height limits and setbacks. Without height limits or setbacks, it seems reasonable to me, and actually preferable to those restrictions on linear dimensions.
comment in response to
post
The narrow streets of Tokyo are SO much more welcoming to humans. I went for a walk this morning here in Pasadena and couldn’t stop thinking about how our streets are like artificial rivers. Would one rather exist next to a small creek, or meters away from a big river with raging rapids?
comment in response to
post
I was thinking something like this:
comment in response to
post
But at least you can have corner stores near places people live there. Just imagine if you didn’t have to make seas of asphalt and concrete for cars! What if it were built for people?
comment in response to
post
www.houstontx.gov/planning/Dev...
comment in response to
post
And sometimes, even when you regulate land use through non-zoning regulations, those can have ill effects. Look at Houston w/r/t minimum parking requirements, for example. There’s no silver bullet for anything.
comment in response to
post
Also, democracies often install protective mechanisms for when democratic processes recognize mistakes... like impeachment, recall, or in this case, the state's Constitution. The "we can't use laws designed to protect the institution... to protect the institution" arguments are getting old.
comment in response to
post
I’m really flattered that you seem to think I not only received formal education in urban planning, but that I might do it for a living!
comment in response to
post
I’m opposed to zoning as implemented in US cities. I’m not against all land-use regulation. I’m just a guy who wants his rent to be lower and to live in a great city.
comment in response to
post
There are so many parking lots in our cities that can be built on.
comment in response to
post
I don’t think anything should be rebuilt in areas prone to wildfire. Fires have been happening regularly in this landscape for millennia, and global warming is making them more frequent and intense.
comment in response to
post
Because zoning, as implemented in most US cities, is not just about making sure people of different economic situations live far away from each other; it’s also about keeping those people dependent on driving cars by ensuring that all the places one needs to get to are far away from their homes.