Inland Empire is a kind of existence proof that population an be steered to new places, but it’s terribly done, still under the spell of the greatest mistake in history, the SFH-and-car-centered vision of the American dream. 1/

Condense it into even bus-connected Euro-style districts and you’d have something interesting. /fin

Brownfield is a form of greenfield. It just has to be greened first. The contrast is between greenfield and infill, and greenfield is much, much, much easier to develop at scale. 1/

See the history of San Francisco, or Houston for that matter. You get fast, near-in growth for as long as there are near-in greenfields. Then, suddenly, it stops. 2/

You are left with sprawl dominating, because infill is hard and we unfortunately don’t regulate to ensure that outward expansion is dense. Eventually sprawl self-limits, as distance overwhelms the pull of urban amenity, and even the Houstons stop growing. /fin

I know YIMBYs love to imagine there is nothing sympathetic about NIMBYism, it’s some cabal of bloodless but bloodthirsty financial parasites, but what local governments are responding to is largely the intense preferences of their most enfranchised constituents, homeowners, yes, neighbors. 1/

Sure, there are wrinkles. Prop 13 reinforces at the local government level the already intense preferences of homeowners. That sucks! But people highly levered into places they carefully chose and committed themselves to really do work to “protect” — meaning largely to “conserve” — them. /fin

California Forever is a debacle only because it can’t be built. It would do fine. It can’t be built because its proponents adopted a foolish, deceptive, forgiveness-not-permission approach to siting and acquiring land for the project.

It depends on the region. The demand in and around the SFBA is so intense, and the work requirements so varied, that you can get prosperous neighborhoods of even the shittiest design way out towards Dublin + Livermore. De novo districts at a distance can be debacles, or can be successes. It depends.

the question is always relative. yes, "NIMBY"-ism fights everything. nevertheless, it is much, much easier on a per-unit basis to succeed in developing greenfield than infill. 1/

(per-unit meaning not "one unit", but comparing the bulk of housing you successfully place in eg San Francisco Bayview relative to trying to build the same quantity infill elsewhere in the city.) 2/

people have all these stories intended to flatten really obvious distinctions. but even though, yes, there are the same forces everywhere, there intensity, the quantity and likelihood of overcoming resistance at scale differs a very great deal. 3/

re buses and distance and commutes and all of that, another defensive mechanism of overstuck YIMBYs is to presume that all shards of urbanity need to be an easy commute to SF or Santa Clara. 4/

but if you create any kind of high-quality urban district, anywhere on the penninsula, or in Marin or even north of Marin, towards Petaluma, there's a population of people willing and eager to live and be integrated by G-bus style transit. 5/

the desire for living in the region is intense. the slow ferries from Larkspur to downtown SF are well utilized. not everyone in the region needs an everyday commute, and people with greater remoting flexibility will sort themselves into more remote districts. 6/

if their only trade-distance-for-price-and-space choices are SFH developments, they'll fill them, as they are already (tragically) on parts of Mare Island. 7/

but if we build nice, dense, Eurostyle districts, integrated by upscale bus, if we let @holz-bau.bsky.social work with future residents to design living spaces for communities, people would pour into those in preference to what Lennar or DR Horton are endlessly building. /fin

Transit can mean buses, including upscale buses like the Google buses or intercity buses in Mexico. 1/

It’d be great if the US had trains everywhere and a capacity to build out more, but it doesn’t and won’t for at least a while. That doesn’t mean new districts can’t be built and integrated with surrounding communities by transit, if we are flexible and creative about forms of transit. 2/

As a person who lived almost 9 years in SFBA, this claim that there’s nowhere to build in high-priced US metro areas strikes except super contentious infill directly in someone’s neighborhood strikes me as laughable. 3/

Much of the valley from San Mateo through Santa Clara is undeveloped outside of the 101/Camino Real corridor. The coast from Pacifica to Half-Moon Bay to Santa Cruz as well. Plus tons of land in Marin, Napa, Solana, and around the bay. 4/

Sure, there’s always a reason why it can’t be done there or isn’t good enough. The commute would be too long, it’s important for nature, the terrain isn’t right, wildfires. 5/

But nowhere is perfect, every piece of land has stakeholders that will object to changes. Quantity and intensity matter. Yes, people will object to developing a nearby greenfield, fearing traffic, parking, etc. 6/

But the number and intensity of objections declines with direct proximity to people’s homes and single, overwhelming, highly levered financial assets. 7/

These things are not the same, as much as YIMBYs with sunk psychological investment in fighting on the most costly and difficult front possible might find it comforting to tell themselves it is. /fin

at a local level, lots of activists believe “we” don’t need more housing, new housing should be built elsewhere. and yeah, somw of those activists suggest even elsewhere no new housing is needed, after all fading Nebraska towns have plenty of vacancy. 1/

but that’s a group motivated fundamentally by “protecting” their locality from new housing. broadly, the policy community, across most spectrums, acknowledges that more housing is necessary if we mean to relieve the incredible stress housing now imposes on American lives. 2/

the claim that social housing requires land-use reform too is mostly a kind of misdirection. it might, but not the same land-use reform sought after to make it easier for private parties to build in settled neighborhoods over local opposition. 3/

one of the main reasons to promote social housing is to promote the development of new districts, neighborhoods, microcities, in places that are not already settled, established, desirable. 4/

that just involves an entirely different set of problems than disinheriting neighbors of their capacity to block development to which they object. 5/

the (yglesian) claim that social housing requires the same reforms as infill in sought after neighborhoods is both false and disingenuous, a way of pretending there is no alternative to existing (imho largely misguided) YIMBY tactics proponents of social housing can advocate. /fin

They are of a very different character. They would be overtly populist, many potential homeowners vs relatively few well-connected stakeholders. 1/

It'd depend upon how — you'd not want to Manhattanize the whole Presidio! But a neighborhood of homeowners is a different kind of opponent than some wealthy golfers, if you could organize things in those terms. /fin

Manhattanize Mare Island! They have a frigging ferry to Downtown SF!

(The Presidio is in the commute shed. Marin headlands are in the commute shed. Three giant golf course inside SF. Lots of open land south of SF. We get into arguments about wildfire susceptibility, but that can be a function of design, not everywhere has to be built like Paradise CA.)

I think the only way you will override NIMBYism is not by fighting people tooth and nail over their neighborhoods and highly leveraged financial assets, but by changing circumstances so they are no longer NIMBYs. You'll win not by fighting, but by rendering moot the fight. 1/

As always, I have to point out that YIMBYs have succeeded more than I thought they would, so take my judgment with a grain of salt. Builder's remedy is an extraordinary thing, if it actually manages to overcome other forms of sand in the gears. 2/

But for all the (often surprising to me!) YIMBY successes, the scale of success in the approach of powering over hostile incumbent homeowners I think has been and will continue to be an order of magnitude beneath the scale of the problem. /fin

To some degree. I mean, since time immemorial people have wanted to build something in an existing prosperous neighborhood and neighbors have objected, so sure. 1/

But I think that building in settled, existing prosperous neighborhoods has pretty much never been the source of bulk housing growth, and it won't be. It's the opposite of smart pragmatism, from my perspective, to try to make it so. /fin