You mentioned something in passing that I think is actually critical: you have an HOA presumably with a very small land area that it controls, but a high degree of control such that you do not need to worry too much about what is going on beyond your HOA boundary.
One of the reasons that Houston is such a permissive place, that allows housing supply (and development in general) much more easily than other places, is that it delegates most land use restriction to the level of the HOA. This means that people self sort. The people who cannot sleep peacefully at night with the idea that their neighbors house might get a shed in the back or be painted a different color, get to live in an extremely restrictive HOA that micromanages everything everyone can do with their house. The people who want to live and let live, have plenty of places they can pick that do not have restrictive HOA’s, or HOA’s at all. (There’s quite a spectrum of different levels of permissiveness.)
In practice, this takes the temperature of land used debates down dramatically. And as it turns out, there’s quite a large percentage of the population that likes live and let live, and is truly happy to have mutual freedom to do what they want with their property. Large enough, that Houston keeps being able to make room for more people, even as a non trivial number of neighborhoods are frozen in amber.
Great musings and I hear you 100%. I'm in very much the same situation in Annapolis as I like in what would be considered a "street car suburb" in a larger city. While fortunately we do not have any HOA (I would/could never like where there is one, they would kick me out with the amount of boat stuff I have) we do have R1 zoning despite there being a number of nonconforming duplexes and other structures since the development way predates the zoning. With that context, the way I discuss this with people is neither with a NIMBY nor a YIMBY voice, but with a Strong Towns voice of allowing organic change and I love the line "no neighborhood should undergo radical change but no neighborhood should be exempt from change. The metaphor I use is earthquakes. When the pressure builds eventually you will have a dislocation, the longer it builds, the greater it will be. With respect to neighborhood change, fighting any and every change will only last so long and when the change happens it will typically be at a large scale, paradoxically exactly what people were fighting against. When discussing this with neighbors, I try and not use loaded terms and judging language, just neutral cause and effect language. I'm not sure what the end result of that is, but if nothing else I hope it gets people thinking about this in a rational way and not just a knee jerk "they're trying to destroy our way of life" way.
And FWIW, I would be very happy to see the next increment in my neighborhood (to combat the voices that say I am a hypocrite by exposing the ideas I have and living where I live). If I were king for a day I would allow 1. smaller lot sizes with smaller setback requirements, 2. duplex/triplex/ADU by right with no "add on requirements" and 3. no minimum parking requirements. There is so much money sloshing around here, I doubt many of these relaxations of zoning would be implemented (ADU as an exception) *right now*. But as I mentioned in Chuck Marohn's piece of Celebration FL, these changes would be available if economic circumstances warrant and would allow for easy redevelopment which would make it much less fragile long term.
I will admit if I can afford owning a house on a 5-acre lot with no neighbors in sight, I will move right in. Human and traffic noises really disturb me, especially after 9 p.m. But we don't always get what we want and big cities badly need more housing to combat affordability issues. However, to convince folks that higher density is the future, city leaders must address public safety and residents willing to share space. When I was living in the city center in Amsterdam, it never felt unsafe and people really respect quiet time at night, unless you live next to a club.
When I got together with my partner I was living in an urban core, but she had lived her whole life in the suburbs, first in a typical '90s McMansion development and once she got out on her own in apartments. She just couldn't adjust to city life, particularly as she's got some sensory issues that make the sort of thudding bass coming out of cars with giant sound systems drive her insane. We moved to an old inner-ring suburb that's just over the city line and has decent transit access into the city as a compromise. I don't have a lot of conversations about the way this town should develop yet since I'm still a newbie in a town where folks have frequently lived for generations, but I do live next door to someone who works for the local small-business incubator and we talk pretty often. They're doing some pretty smart planning by doing things like hosting a Christmas fair, a summer concert weekend, and other events that showcase the kinds of things local business can bring to make a close suburb more urban. Street parking and public lots are also metered in our downtown. It's not expensive, possibly even too inexpensive (it's still only $1 an hour) but the town council is on board with making our town more bikeable. We have a fair number of steep hills that will always make that a challenge, but they also just completed the reconnection of an old trail that connects the neighborhood next to mine to the main street that can accommodate pedestrians and cyclists and get folks to shopping, city hall, and our township owned ice rink without having to go on busy car-oriented roads. I just do what I can to support these sorts of developments since we're in an area that doesn't have a lot of opportunity for infill, the houses generally already being on parcels that are less than a quarter acre and being from the 1950s or earlier.
This is kinda what I tried to get at in my Housing Pluralism piece (https://thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/housing-pluralism): there's a layer deeper than "diverse opinions" where you need to fundamentally acknowledge that facilitating the various options is a good in and of itself, and a positive sum process. But that's really hard, and there are tricky questions that don't have clean answers. Transportation is obviously a big one: many of our core systems *are* inherently negative sum, so trying to figure out "how much car" is just a valid preference and where it crosses the line into a negative imposition onto others isn't easy.
Rather than denigrate why others might choose to live in the suburbs, agitate for better transit, which is the more important thing anyway. Lower density is fine so long as there’s a metro station on your block!
The trouble is the low density generally doesn't provide the tax base or ridership necessary to support transit. I've heard the number "8 dwellings per acre" thrown around as a rough baseline to what level of population is needed to support transit, but that's obviously a bulk statistic. Still, it can be useful to give an idea of viability, and that's well above most American towns, where 3-4 dwellings per acre is more often the norm. And that's not even getting to how the labyrinthine street layouts of most modern suburbs also make transit non-viable.
Generally, when you try to run transit in suburbs, you just end up with "Why are we paying for something nobody rides?" syndrome, and with it eventual budget cuts.
Yeah you just need to make everything driverless, get Japan to build it out for cheap, and pay rail transit providers like utilities where there’s incentives to build out ill used capacity. Ideally you would put Robert Moses builder types in charge, too.
I live in a suburb of a city with ~100k population, about 2.5 miles from the downtown. The city is working to restore/improve the urban nature of the downtown, since for a long time it was a thoroughfare and bedroom community for the nearby major metropolitan area.
It would be absurd to consider my neighborhood as somehow separate from or in opposition to its city. I'd much rather it be its own functioning city than simply a suburb of the major metro.
"We housing and urbanist people often think of NIMBYism as a viewpoint or ideology. But it is just the expectation most regular people have that neighborhoods and places can be counted on to more or less be a certain way, in general."
Certainly it's reasonable to understand NIMBYism as an expectation of stability, and some scholars characterize it in this way. I think I can safety name-drop Marc Weiss, Robert Fogelson, Dolores Hayden, and Robert Fischel here. But it's not JUST that. It makes far more sense understood as an ideological and cultural phenomenon. As a counterpoint that I have explored a little, there's reason to believe that property owners in the nineteenth century did not have an expectation of neighborhood stability.
I live in an old streetcar suburb that was platted in 1910 around an interurban line that never got built. It filled up slowly and gradually over the years, so every block has houses of varying sizes and styles and ages, from 1910 to 2021. We;re accustomed to variety of income and occupation and color, so there's not much justification for serious NIMBYs.
Urbanists have been FORCING unnatural changes to serve abstract theories of Gaia and Sustainability. Most of the changes make life harder for walkers and bikers, and more expensive for maintainers.
Those pits look an awful lot like the levees and ditches that divert storm runoff in my mom’s neighborhood in Memphis’ low density Mississippi McMansion suburbs, like the least urbanist place in the US. They sure can fill up fast after a storm though.
You mentioned something in passing that I think is actually critical: you have an HOA presumably with a very small land area that it controls, but a high degree of control such that you do not need to worry too much about what is going on beyond your HOA boundary.
One of the reasons that Houston is such a permissive place, that allows housing supply (and development in general) much more easily than other places, is that it delegates most land use restriction to the level of the HOA. This means that people self sort. The people who cannot sleep peacefully at night with the idea that their neighbors house might get a shed in the back or be painted a different color, get to live in an extremely restrictive HOA that micromanages everything everyone can do with their house. The people who want to live and let live, have plenty of places they can pick that do not have restrictive HOA’s, or HOA’s at all. (There’s quite a spectrum of different levels of permissiveness.)
In practice, this takes the temperature of land used debates down dramatically. And as it turns out, there’s quite a large percentage of the population that likes live and let live, and is truly happy to have mutual freedom to do what they want with their property. Large enough, that Houston keeps being able to make room for more people, even as a non trivial number of neighborhoods are frozen in amber.
Great musings and I hear you 100%. I'm in very much the same situation in Annapolis as I like in what would be considered a "street car suburb" in a larger city. While fortunately we do not have any HOA (I would/could never like where there is one, they would kick me out with the amount of boat stuff I have) we do have R1 zoning despite there being a number of nonconforming duplexes and other structures since the development way predates the zoning. With that context, the way I discuss this with people is neither with a NIMBY nor a YIMBY voice, but with a Strong Towns voice of allowing organic change and I love the line "no neighborhood should undergo radical change but no neighborhood should be exempt from change. The metaphor I use is earthquakes. When the pressure builds eventually you will have a dislocation, the longer it builds, the greater it will be. With respect to neighborhood change, fighting any and every change will only last so long and when the change happens it will typically be at a large scale, paradoxically exactly what people were fighting against. When discussing this with neighbors, I try and not use loaded terms and judging language, just neutral cause and effect language. I'm not sure what the end result of that is, but if nothing else I hope it gets people thinking about this in a rational way and not just a knee jerk "they're trying to destroy our way of life" way.
And FWIW, I would be very happy to see the next increment in my neighborhood (to combat the voices that say I am a hypocrite by exposing the ideas I have and living where I live). If I were king for a day I would allow 1. smaller lot sizes with smaller setback requirements, 2. duplex/triplex/ADU by right with no "add on requirements" and 3. no minimum parking requirements. There is so much money sloshing around here, I doubt many of these relaxations of zoning would be implemented (ADU as an exception) *right now*. But as I mentioned in Chuck Marohn's piece of Celebration FL, these changes would be available if economic circumstances warrant and would allow for easy redevelopment which would make it much less fragile long term.
I will admit if I can afford owning a house on a 5-acre lot with no neighbors in sight, I will move right in. Human and traffic noises really disturb me, especially after 9 p.m. But we don't always get what we want and big cities badly need more housing to combat affordability issues. However, to convince folks that higher density is the future, city leaders must address public safety and residents willing to share space. When I was living in the city center in Amsterdam, it never felt unsafe and people really respect quiet time at night, unless you live next to a club.
When I got together with my partner I was living in an urban core, but she had lived her whole life in the suburbs, first in a typical '90s McMansion development and once she got out on her own in apartments. She just couldn't adjust to city life, particularly as she's got some sensory issues that make the sort of thudding bass coming out of cars with giant sound systems drive her insane. We moved to an old inner-ring suburb that's just over the city line and has decent transit access into the city as a compromise. I don't have a lot of conversations about the way this town should develop yet since I'm still a newbie in a town where folks have frequently lived for generations, but I do live next door to someone who works for the local small-business incubator and we talk pretty often. They're doing some pretty smart planning by doing things like hosting a Christmas fair, a summer concert weekend, and other events that showcase the kinds of things local business can bring to make a close suburb more urban. Street parking and public lots are also metered in our downtown. It's not expensive, possibly even too inexpensive (it's still only $1 an hour) but the town council is on board with making our town more bikeable. We have a fair number of steep hills that will always make that a challenge, but they also just completed the reconnection of an old trail that connects the neighborhood next to mine to the main street that can accommodate pedestrians and cyclists and get folks to shopping, city hall, and our township owned ice rink without having to go on busy car-oriented roads. I just do what I can to support these sorts of developments since we're in an area that doesn't have a lot of opportunity for infill, the houses generally already being on parcels that are less than a quarter acre and being from the 1950s or earlier.
This is kinda what I tried to get at in my Housing Pluralism piece (https://thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/housing-pluralism): there's a layer deeper than "diverse opinions" where you need to fundamentally acknowledge that facilitating the various options is a good in and of itself, and a positive sum process. But that's really hard, and there are tricky questions that don't have clean answers. Transportation is obviously a big one: many of our core systems *are* inherently negative sum, so trying to figure out "how much car" is just a valid preference and where it crosses the line into a negative imposition onto others isn't easy.
Rather than denigrate why others might choose to live in the suburbs, agitate for better transit, which is the more important thing anyway. Lower density is fine so long as there’s a metro station on your block!
The trouble is the low density generally doesn't provide the tax base or ridership necessary to support transit. I've heard the number "8 dwellings per acre" thrown around as a rough baseline to what level of population is needed to support transit, but that's obviously a bulk statistic. Still, it can be useful to give an idea of viability, and that's well above most American towns, where 3-4 dwellings per acre is more often the norm. And that's not even getting to how the labyrinthine street layouts of most modern suburbs also make transit non-viable.
Generally, when you try to run transit in suburbs, you just end up with "Why are we paying for something nobody rides?" syndrome, and with it eventual budget cuts.
Yeah you just need to make everything driverless, get Japan to build it out for cheap, and pay rail transit providers like utilities where there’s incentives to build out ill used capacity. Ideally you would put Robert Moses builder types in charge, too.
I live in a suburb of a city with ~100k population, about 2.5 miles from the downtown. The city is working to restore/improve the urban nature of the downtown, since for a long time it was a thoroughfare and bedroom community for the nearby major metropolitan area.
It would be absurd to consider my neighborhood as somehow separate from or in opposition to its city. I'd much rather it be its own functioning city than simply a suburb of the major metro.
"We housing and urbanist people often think of NIMBYism as a viewpoint or ideology. But it is just the expectation most regular people have that neighborhoods and places can be counted on to more or less be a certain way, in general."
Certainly it's reasonable to understand NIMBYism as an expectation of stability, and some scholars characterize it in this way. I think I can safety name-drop Marc Weiss, Robert Fogelson, Dolores Hayden, and Robert Fischel here. But it's not JUST that. It makes far more sense understood as an ideological and cultural phenomenon. As a counterpoint that I have explored a little, there's reason to believe that property owners in the nineteenth century did not have an expectation of neighborhood stability.
I live in an old streetcar suburb that was platted in 1910 around an interurban line that never got built. It filled up slowly and gradually over the years, so every block has houses of varying sizes and styles and ages, from 1910 to 2021. We;re accustomed to variety of income and occupation and color, so there's not much justification for serious NIMBYs.
Urbanists have been FORCING unnatural changes to serve abstract theories of Gaia and Sustainability. Most of the changes make life harder for walkers and bikers, and more expensive for maintainers.
http://polistrasmill.blogspot.com/2016/03/boulevard-pits.html
Those pits look an awful lot like the levees and ditches that divert storm runoff in my mom’s neighborhood in Memphis’ low density Mississippi McMansion suburbs, like the least urbanist place in the US. They sure can fill up fast after a storm though.