Addison, one of the things you seldom mention is the draconian height limitation inside WDC. Nothing can be more than eight stories tall so that the skyline of the city is not ruined. In a normal city, one would expect to find gigantic high rises at every subway stop, beginning with the city center and marching outward. That would do a considerable amount to make more housing available in the Washington DC Metro region.
Re: "In some ways, you could say, the public input process is not discerning NIMBYism but actually generating NIMBYism—because it makes the possibility of disruption loom large":
I've had similar thoughts about whether the administrative state treating new development as a big deal acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy. When virtually any additional housing is treated as a major event, with signs on the property, months/years-long approval processes, and individual public hearings, maybe it's not a surprise that people react to it as an existential issue.
Not to be overly simplistic and say that if governments gave people more freedom to build that it would just be something that happens in the same way that businesses move in and out of commercial spaces, but I can't help but wonder if we prime people to overreact.
I think it's more that there's very little disincentive to overreacting, even if the perceived gain from blocking development is rather small. How many of your neighbors are really going to call you on it if you predicted the end of all things and all you got was a little bit more traffic?
In previous decades apartments were often better than individual houses in lots of ways, not just avoiding repairs. Many of the older apts were built with a fine regard for privacy. Once I rented an up-down duplex built in 1920 with a crawl space between the two floors. Very little noise crossed the barrier. From the outside the building looked like a large house, not a duplex.These refinements were lost in later decades.
How does this correlate to rental regulations? I live in NYC and one of the things that horrifies me is watching Blackrock and others buy up single family dwellings across the states precisely because in an old, old city like NYC, tenant rights have been fought for and written in blood. But Salem Illinois has no rent stabilization, let alone control, and certainly no serious recourse for abused tenants.
Can you speak a bit to turning an entire caste into tenants instead of homeowners?
Addison, one of the things you seldom mention is the draconian height limitation inside WDC. Nothing can be more than eight stories tall so that the skyline of the city is not ruined. In a normal city, one would expect to find gigantic high rises at every subway stop, beginning with the city center and marching outward. That would do a considerable amount to make more housing available in the Washington DC Metro region.
Re: "In some ways, you could say, the public input process is not discerning NIMBYism but actually generating NIMBYism—because it makes the possibility of disruption loom large":
I've had similar thoughts about whether the administrative state treating new development as a big deal acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy. When virtually any additional housing is treated as a major event, with signs on the property, months/years-long approval processes, and individual public hearings, maybe it's not a surprise that people react to it as an existential issue.
Not to be overly simplistic and say that if governments gave people more freedom to build that it would just be something that happens in the same way that businesses move in and out of commercial spaces, but I can't help but wonder if we prime people to overreact.
I think it's more that there's very little disincentive to overreacting, even if the perceived gain from blocking development is rather small. How many of your neighbors are really going to call you on it if you predicted the end of all things and all you got was a little bit more traffic?
Density solves the problem!
In previous decades apartments were often better than individual houses in lots of ways, not just avoiding repairs. Many of the older apts were built with a fine regard for privacy. Once I rented an up-down duplex built in 1920 with a crawl space between the two floors. Very little noise crossed the barrier. From the outside the building looked like a large house, not a duplex.These refinements were lost in later decades.
How does this correlate to rental regulations? I live in NYC and one of the things that horrifies me is watching Blackrock and others buy up single family dwellings across the states precisely because in an old, old city like NYC, tenant rights have been fought for and written in blood. But Salem Illinois has no rent stabilization, let alone control, and certainly no serious recourse for abused tenants.
Can you speak a bit to turning an entire caste into tenants instead of homeowners?