You know what? If you were watching this video on Nebula, where it was available several days early, you wouldn't even be TEMPTED to scroll down to the comments -- because on Nebula, there aren't any! Imagine how much of your life you'll get back when you...just...stop reading comments. Use my link to get 40% off an annual subscription. It's a ridiculous value, and it really does help the channel. go.nebula.tv/citynerd Bonkers Lifetime deal still available too! go.nebula.tv/lifetime?ref=citynerd
The comments on your channel are generally interesting and worth a read, though! Also, as an environmental scientist, I think of NIMBYism as being about things like wind turbines, landfills etc., not about housing specifically. It's funny to think of people in low-density 'burbs complaining about more housing as housing inevitably is put between them and the perimeter of the urban area. If they went for high-density housing, they might have less area of suburbs to drive though.
As a wisconsinite idk whats up with madison as i dont live there but like a lot of rustbelt cities punch above their weight in urbanism even if a lot of them have been stagnant or in decline
As an Oakland resident, I'm so happy that you dragged the Bay Area. For all the "progressive" rep the Bay Area has, its housing policy is terribly regressive. It's disgusting.
Oakland really should have more aggressively pursued attracting development from 2014-2020. Were way behind on municipal taxes because we dragged our feet. Now we’re missing out on new projects with the adverse market conditions.
@@williamdrum9899 left wing people in California want more affordable housing. You underestimate how many wealthy right wing conservatives are in California controlling the housing supply
I grew up in San Leandro, I think we (and Hayward) thought we were above dragging because the Peninsula gets more of the attention. Glad to see we aren’t.
For the bally-hooing about California as a liberal/progressive hotspot, but at the end of the day, people here are just as guilty of the selfishness of other, more politically conservative places. Like, the surface level says "Coexist" and then in small print it says "just not around me though"
@@justthecoolestdudeyo9446 liberal/progressivism tends to be extremely selfish. So it shouldn't be surprising a hotspot for that philosophy has a lot of selfishness.
@justthecoolestdudeyo9446 Maybe it's not surprising, considering it's the home of Big Tech and Hollywood. Not surprised these are entitled sorts of people
There are so many people educated by the California public universities that have to leave because of the NIMBY mindset. It is a long term generational loss. The other western states don’t mind gaining that human capital. We need it here in Phoenix.
In the early 2000s a proposal by Peet's Coffee & Tea to construct a small bump-out in front of their store in Berkeley was met with vocal neighborhood opposition. The neighborhood is composed of mostly single-family housing from the 1920s. The bump-out would remove a single parking spot, plant a tree, and allow for four to six small tables and chairs. The entire upper Solano Avenue commercial block had ZERO outdoor seating at the time. Some of the NIMBY comments at the time were amazing. "IT WILL RUIN THE NEIGHBORHOOD" "IT'S GOING TO ATTRACT OUTSIDERS AND THEY'll PARK THEIR CARS IN FRONT OF OUR HOUSES" "WHAT'S THE BENEFIT?" The plan was ultimately passed and in the years since, the neighborhood hasn't imploded and it's the homeowners themselves that congregate there in the morning for coffee and pastries while watching the world pass them by.
For decades, Berkeley has been nimby-central. But, lately, downtown Berkeley is unrecognizable with the amount of mid and high rise housing being built. My image of the city is changing. Tried to find stats, but read this in an article: “Since the pandemic, Berkeley has added 1,403 housing units, outpacing the rate of housing development between 2010 and 2020 (Berkeleyside).
@@lorenzod9575 I believe that's because there are no "traditional" home owners there in single-family houses. The opposition to proposed high-rise housing at the North Berkeley BART station is very vocal. That's a neighborhood of mostly single-family one-story homes.
All of the supervisors and managers at the Peet's Coffee I worked at in Portland were from LA and the Bay Area, and two of them had worked at the Berkeley Peet's. They couldn't afford to live in Berkeley, Oakland, etc., so moved to Portland :/.
The California state government has finally interceded and passed legislation that requires local governments to permit a certain level of development, and those that don't lose the right to restrict development entirely, allowing developers to just build whatever size of project they want.
I used the housing app to look at my cities units permitted per year and you can totally see when that law got passed. The number of units more than doubled.
@@planecrashcorner7283 The details are findable with Google, but the tl;dr is they effectively "banned" R1 zoning in most areas - ie most areas can now build ADUs, duplexes, or small apt buildings. However, cities are finding work-arounds to continue the NIMBYism - like non-market parking minimums that make it impossible to actually build a small apt building without building underground parking (massively expensive).
Speaking of Redwood City, a fire this week destroyed half of an affordable housing complex that was under construction. The project has been under construction for over a year, and is the result of almost a decade of community planning.
Maybe don't build your cities out of wood oil and glue. Wahh our shitty cheap buildings keep lighting on fire because we don't want to spend money on actual materials wahhh.
Blame GM and Atlantic Richfield, along with other conspirators. They illegally sabotaged mass transit, from LA to Baltimore from the 1920s through the '40s, and they got away with it. Our non-free enterprise system and our non-democracy did what they do best.
Same here, sometimes I'll watch a video and I'll go down to the comments and there will be counterpoints I hadn't considered with sources cited that I hadn't heard of. It's a worthwhile feature, in my opinion, especially if Nebula is selling itself as a more intellectual youtube
The lack of comments and the player itself (I like the YT controls, speed, skipping, playlists, etc.). I have a Nebula account but forget to go there... RUclips is comfy. I tend to go visit Nebula when someone like Ray mentions it... I go make note of cool shows... then never watch them lol.
I'm flabbergasted that a platform where people have to pay doesn't have comments. Are people really going to burn that much a month to troll paywalled content???
BC just passed a law in the fall that should help undercut NIMBYism. It does away with parking minimums and allows for higher density development near transit hubs.
@@bgabriel28But there's a provincial election coming up and the new BC Conservatives have made mutterings about getting rid of most of the current government's housing policies and changes if elected, because "municipalities know best" or some nonsense along those lines.
@@flargus7919 Yup. The BC Conservative leader doesn't believe there is even a housing crisis (his own words) and plans to get rid of all the NDP's housing policies if elected. What sucks is the BC Conservatives are gaining momentum off the back of the Federal Conservatives, a completely different party that doesn't share the same values. Here's hoping the NDP somehow pull out a win.
Given that Canadian home loan interest rates reset after 5? years you guys are doomed. No way non-rich people can live when their interest rate doubles or triples.
@@richardarriaga6271 Canada has substantial stress tests in place for mortgages, so even "non-rich" people will survive in the short term. That said, most Canadians don't have much spending money these days as all our income goes towards housing or towards saving a house. While we may avoid a crash in the short term, in the long term our economic outlook is screwed.
We deserve it on this topic. I love it here, but my god do we have to do better. When you add hundreds of thousands of jobs and barely any housing to accommodate those people moving here, this is a predictable result.
MADISON MENTIONED!!!! I moved there in August last year, and it's the best choice I've ever made. Started living car-free, really putting on that American city-slicker image without the high cost of it. About our housing, we do have a nimby problem here, but the city really is doing everything within its ability here. The only thing holding us back is development companies and NIMBYs, if we had our way our housing would be perfect. Love seeing Madison mentioned in your videos, it's such a great place.
Thanks for this Ray. The great third rail of American politics is that a 64% majority of American households own property and thus benefit directly from a housing shortage. High rents are a feature for them. A housing crisis inflates the value of their homes and makes them feel wealthier, even if they face the same problem everyone else does when it's time to move. Renters as a class in America need to organize around this bitter reality.
This is not true at all. In some states the property tax and even insurance has gone up with the value of the home, making it a lot less affordable for home owners and buyers. These people are essentially trapped in their homes because they are unable to sell and downsize with an affordable interest rate. Appreciation cannot be actualized unless the home owner sells.
This is not an open class struggle, it’s a problem of status quo bias and economic illiteracy. Renters are just as likely to oppose development than home owners. A third of people polled don’t believe increasing the housing stock with bring down housing prices. People automatically just have a negative view of developers in general. You can look up polls where they ask how open someone is to a new development project and support absolutely plummets if they show the exact same development but include the fact the developer will make a lot of money when completing the project. Most people including renters believe that developers are pillaging a community by tearing something down and putting something new in its place.
@@TurnRiverWhat you’re saying is true but the irrational belief of rising home prices is still a myth that a lot of homeowners believe in. As you said, this actually limits current homeowners and all the equity gained is essentially dead equity. There is not benefit to rising home prices but some still do think it’s good for them.
@@TurnRiver Equity growth feels real to homeowners, no matter the thorny issues they might face in realizing it. But yeah, for a lot of homeowners the plan is to cash out and move out, to someplace cheaper. Witness the exodus of NIMBY-fattened Californians flooding the rest of the West, driving up home prices with their all cash purchases. You don't need to worry as much about interest rates when you are walking away with hundreds of thousands in cash.
The NIMdex. Amazing. Just amazing. Please publish a paper and make this real academic diction. Edit: I love all of the irony you create by saying one thing and showing another without insisting on explaining the irony.
The fact that NINE of the TEN cities on this list are in the Bay Area of California, and the other one is another California city... and all twelve other cities meeting the threshold criteria are also Californian... I don't want to hear people complain about California being "too far left" ever again. That is an absolute embarrassment.
If you live in California you know people that have in this house we believe sign in front of their 2 million dollar house they bought for 8 goats in 1972. They just don’t get it
This isn't really a left or right issue. Some of the issues are adjacent to left/right because of culture war stuff, but none of the actual values for left vs right has NIMBYism as a focus. Plus, California being the liberal bastion/punching bag of the country is a recent thing relatively, stuff like Prop 13 and redlining that enabled all this decades ago were when we were a much more right-leaning state.
@@ficus3929 I have a family member who owns his house in SF. Today worth close to $2M. Purchased in 1972 for $35K. Pays under $1000 in property taxes annually because of Prop 13.
I have lived in the SF Bay Area for almost my entire life, and I knew what this video was going to be like before watching a single second of it 😭 I grew up in Fremont (and still live here), and it's a tragedy how the development panned out around the South Fremont BART and South Fremont overall. It's just massive parking lots with no mixed use. The YIMBY movement here is growing (I even talked with my City Council member about it), but it's slow and there's so much opposition. When you bought in at $1 million or above and your home is 90% of your net worth, you are naturally going to be the fiercest NIMBY to ever NIMBY to protect your investment. This greed is really really hard to solve for as California gives way too much power to local schmucks who have 0 idea or interest in how to run a healthy society.
I'm a transplant living in Fremont and jfc it is bleak out here. Basically planned on moving far far away as soon as I arrived. Where I live, I'm sure the average house is at least $3mil and the neighborhood opens up to a stroad. I need to drive at least 15min for groceries, public transportation is less than an afterthought, bike lanes are abundant but bizarre. I'm surprised I haven't had an accident with a cyclist yet. You'd think with the huge cost of living and the crazy taxes they collect they'd at least make the place more fun to live in....
I'm also in Fremont. I'm interested in the YIMBY movement you mentioned. Or some sort of Strong Towns discussion or something. If you know anything trying to make progress here, LMK
I rolled my eyes when they named that area the "Innovation district" and literally named one of the streets "Synergy st." The sea of Parking near BART stations is puzzling as it would be the easiest way for BART to literally build up it's ridership post COVID.
@@noxyburd BART has plans to convert some of its parking lots into housing, but those plans don't extend into Union City or Fremont yet www.bart.gov/about/business/tod
I was a member of the Madison Plan Commission from 2006-2008. The planning staff was great, and led by a man named George Austin, who guided a rezoning of the Isthmus and downtown. The chair was the executive director of the Sierra Club, and she liked densification. All these things helped.
I’m a little surprised Boulder, CO didn’t make the list. The people voted a building permit limit of only 450/yr for a city of 100k years ago. They voted against allowing water and other services above a certain altitude to prevent houses on the hills. And we bought up 100k acres around the city to prevent others from building too close. Average rent for a two bedroom is $2,400/mo. The FHA said 80301 had the largest increase in home value between 1990 and 2017 in the country. They had to be forced by state law to allow ADUs, allow for more building permits and increase the legal number of renters in a house. Median house price is $1.4 million.
I drive from Centennial to Boulder several times a week for classes and have for a couple years now, I graduate soon but I had such a good deal on my place here combined with the issue that my rent would double to triple and sometimes even quadruple depending on where i looked in and around Boulder.
No wonder the place is called "Boulder" -- the people there who vote in favor of said laws are such conservatives that they may as well be considered boulders themselves.
Old Lyme, CT, population 7,366, deserves an honorable mention. The train route from NYC to Boston could be 25 minutes quicker but a bunch of super old & wealthy NIMBYs showed up to the town hall and rallied against it. The photo of the meeting is hilarious and also sad. It’s literally a group of almost exclusively 70+ year old people there to stop a railway project that would benefit the entire northeast
You should see the north shore of Long Island in New York. Those old rich NIMBYS constantly block a plan for a bridge or tunnel to CT or anywhere in New England
I’m proud of my town - redmond Washington. It’s a small town outside of seattle but they are taking very seriously the need for more housing over the next 30 years. 5 over 1 apartments are going up all over town, and they are determined not to spread the town boundaries to surrounding forests into developed land. They are also putting up a rent controlled apartment building for temporarily I housed people that make an income far below median area income. There is also a new light rail finishing up next year that goes right to the middle and goes along the entire office space districts.
I'm proud of Washington overall. Growth management law requires that cities accommodate growth. Redmond, Bellevue, Tacoma, Seattle--all are planning for large-scale growth, and this is keeping San Francisco-level problems at bay.
I just moved from San Mateo to the snoqqualmie river valley and I have to say that Redmond is doing so much better than the bay area. It reminds me a *lot* of Redwood City (which should get a lot of credit for densification downtown - but its all been relatively recent- in the last 10 years only) but accomplishing more with the space. Cheers to Redmond.
@@MTBSPD It wasn't affordable housing that they were going to build in Kenmore, but low barrier housing. Low barrier housing means...well, forget about rent, but no matter what addiction, mental illness, or violence problem you have, you get housing. It doesn't take a genius to know why they wouldn't want to live next to that. Plymouth Housing is horrible: they were extremely complicit in killing that pregnant Asian woman a couple years back in beltown. If they are involved, then NIMBY is justified.
May have missed this in the video, but Prop 13 is important context for why all of these are in California. It’s more complicated than this summarization, but basically anyone who has owned a home since the 70s can avoid increased property taxes.
A significant component of Prop 13 that isn't brought up enough is how the limits on property taxes messes with the revenue plans for California cities. Since a town can't make much money from property taxes, Prop 13 incentivizes towns to instead build much more office and commercial space which it is able to tax according to it's real market value. Because of this, there's a ton of space for tech campuses and office buildings throughout the Bay Area but no space to house the people who work there. So not only is housing development artificially depressed are a result of Prop 13 but commercial is overbuilt to make up the lost revenue throwing the entire real estate market in the region completely out of whack.
Most of the NIMBY complaints I hear is about cars. "There will be nowhere to park your car." "There's too much traffic already." I guess that's why there are huge parking lots around the train stations. "Park and Ride" really is no substitute for useful public transit and well-planned density.
Unless you build public transit, there's no way people are going to pay $100 for an Uber or $60 for parking just to have dinner with friends. They will wall off. Maybe that's why people don't go out as much anymore.
Visited Seoul, South Korea recently and was impressed you could take a train to a national park. Feel like California has a lot of potential to do this with their proximity to national parks.
They way I've heard NIMBY used is people who at first appear pro-environmentalism by fighting hard against a chemical plant or toxic waste dump near their homes, but when the builder agrees to move it somewhere else, their opposition ceases and they declare victory. This process, when done over and over, results in the worst environmental offenders, and housing value reducers becoming concentrated in poor and minority neighborhoods. Capitalists will take the path of least resistance and that means they go where the incomes and political clout are lower. NIMBY is bad for what it does not do, rather than for what it does. Of course my perspective is shaped by the fact that I have lived in places where population growth and residential expansion have not been that big, but toxic chemical issues have been.
As a resident of one of those Dallas suburbs with decent density around our DART stations, I appreciate the shoutout! We still have a long way to go, and it’s been a tough fight against the NIMBYs, but from what I’ve seen, Richardson is planning on expanding TOD around all 4 of its DART stations, and Plano has more in store for its new Silver Line stations, too. We’ve lost some fights here and there, but the fight continues!
You should do a video on Japan. The fact that houses there aren't assets, in the same way that they are in America, has meant that density is a given and cheap rents are the norm.
Rent is not cheap, American rent is just absurd. Rent is still increasing in major cities and a large % of one's salary. Places where rent is going down or staying stable is usually from population decline. Land is given inherent value, but buildings on them are not. They are instead treated as depreciating assets because they break down over time and eventually need to be rebuilt to meet updated safety codes. Much of east Asia is similar. Earthquake prone countries tend not to treat houses as permanent appreciating assets, only the land they're built on.
@@4473021 it is probably also easier for native japanese or those who have lived in japan for a long time and become familiar to the language and culture
Japan went through a horrible property speculation bubble to get where they are today. The virtue was also earned through a couple of decades of stagnant economic growth, and a falling population.
Out of 47 prefectures only Aichi, Chiba, Fukuoka, Kanagawa, Okinawa, Saitama, Shiga and Tokyo recieved growth between the 2015 and 2020 census. 11 prefectures recieved higher negative growth than the highest growth (Tokyo) recieved positive growth 0.78% per year.
Here's an idea for those BART and Caltrain stations: Parking garages. Replace every single parking lot with an 8 story parking garage. Think of how many cars we could house
Interesting that Madison is doing great statically because Madison is still 5 years behind in terms of building enough housing, and there are tons of nimby’s rallying against zoning measures to allow more dense housing in single family only areas
Shocker: all of them are in CA. State is NIMBY central, desperately needs some new laws in place to promote affordable housing and restrictions on value increases.
There's a lot of wealthy people here or moving here and they usually get initiated by the locals into "Ma Home Values" club and never learn to really invest. They have the means and time to lobby or donate to lobbyists.
About twenty years ago I was part of a project to write scenarios for our city's future, good and bad. One city we studied was Miami, and I was on a team that went there and heard a wide variety of people talk about planning and development in the area. We had a presentation from the chief planner of the Metrorail heavy rail system who described why it has been a disappointment. Twenty years before our trip they built the first leg of the system, from downtown to Dadeland in the south. That leg was rated number one in ridership potential. Then they were blocked from building the second, third, and fourth legs by neighborhood and city opposition. They eventually built the least desirable leg, out to Hialeah, because it was the only one they could. It was really quite depressing.
I live in a rural retirement area less than 1.5 hours from Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington. The quickly recognizable trait of NIMBY's here is that they moved here flush with cash from a career spent in an urban area, which they are willing to spend on making sure that their new community is nothing like what they escaped when they moved here. They are quick to slam the door behind them when they arrive.
I would say a good 75% or so of environmental laws only protect NIMBY property values. That number is probably much higher for local environmental laws. If you poor or middle class, that fracking well 50ft from your backyard well is going in.
I grew up as a kid in the Silicon Valley in Los Gatos in a tract house that my parents had built new in the mid 1960s for $21,500. While I haven't live for decades now, the neighborhood largely looks the same but the house is now worth $2.5M. Clearly there's a problem.
What's crazy if the price your parent's house that they bought it for in the 1960's kept up with inflation it would have been around 230,077.88 today. Just goes to show housing costs are astronomical since they have outpaced inflation by a huge margin.
@elizabethhenning778 Everybody is the public. What cars are to cyclists in USA, bicycles and the clutter they cause by filling innumerable racks in public space are to pedestrians in the public space. It's mutual competition, space colonization, exclusion, and jealousy dressed up moral high ground and cherry picked reality that's very close to bad religion. Yes I am for bikes in the N.American space. However people should remember the good that comes with the auto, under certain limits, similar to fat tired e bikes.
As an S.F. resident, I’m going to start playing this video from the rooftops of all the mentioned BART stations. Related: SF has approved something like only 15 housing permits for 2024 so far, and only 1 was multi unit (a duplex). So tired of civic leaders in our state pretending there isn’t ample opportunity to at least make a dent in the housing shortage.
There were a couple propositions on the spring ballot about housing that I am hoping help. I am especially curious to see whether the proposition that will exempt taxes on development of commercial space to turn into housing will pay out.
I lived in San Mateo and Redwood City for seven of those years in your survey. It's where I started down this urbanism rabbit hole. They definitely are building housing units, but they're certainly not affordable. It's just more housing. It has many walkable neighborhoods with some missing middle housing. The neighborhoods are actually quite dense; lots aren't big and houses are still close together, though not touching. Many SFH have been modified to have multiple units. It's actually a good example of how suburbs can embrace density. They got rid of the old race track to build... expensive housing. They rebuilt the CalTrain station and put mixed use properties adjacent to it (though they could have done more housing and less office space, but I get it). The problem is... the demand is still sky high. That's not going to change unless you literally start bulldozing million dollar homes for large multi-units and that's probably not off the table. I've seen small/old homes get renovated to have more multi units. But... it's still not enough. There are some obvious opportunities in a few places, but that's really on the margin. They're building. But they can't build fast enough and they definately aren't building SFH. Even those neighborhoods that look like they're SFH - most are duplexes and triplexes.
Even expensive housing helps...it frees up pressure on other units. Do enough of that and the average apartment from 1980 can be pretty affordable. (They're not doing enough of course.)
And they are in the planning stages for redesigning the Hilldale Mall area to include more housing and transport. I grew up in San Mateo and parts of town (Delaware just off 92) I now get lost because of all the mid-rise housing complexes. It's a good thing. I just wonder how long it will take to create more density along El Camino or the like.
@@terriellis3697 They've been debating the housing project on Delaware just off the 92 (the shopping center with the Trader Joes) for over a decade. So who knows how long things will take. I grew up in Detroit and am used to seeing vacant lots and parking lots frequently. San Mateo and RWC are the exact opposite. If I saw any fenced off grass I would wonder when a housing unit would go up there. My only wish/gripe now is there should be an overpass over El Camino between the Hillsdale CalTrain into Hillsdale mall. I used to live in one of the Bay Meadows buildings after they opened up 31st; crossing el camino to get to the mall was the only unpleasant part. It was actually quite nice living around there and not needing a car to do basic things.
I remember an incident in my city where a developer wanted to put in townhouses on an abandoned piece of land in the mid-90's. People complained when they found out the houses were going to be priced at $150,000 "What type of people were going to be living there." Several years before that I purchased my house for $72,500, nice to know my neighbours thought of me as undesirable.
Cool story. That's not the reason people are opposed to more development. There's more noise, more pollution, more congestion, loss of open spaces, more traffic, more crowded. Trying to paint people as Bond villains for having their own opinions says a lot about you.
San Jose native - every homeowner would be proud to on this list. They want to have the high cost home that they can sell and cash out when they retire. But then they don't sell when they retire. Also, yes, I fully expected this to be a list of Bay Area cities.
I am a teenager living in socal, it is so frustrating seeing adults complain about housing being built knowing that I am not even going to be able to live in my childhood city when I get older because of their actions.
Exactly. I’m a young adult from LA, and I’m almost certain that I won’t be able to live in LA once I move out of my parent’s house simply due to it being too expensive and there not being enough housing. I’ll probably be forced to live farther out in the suburbs/exurbs in the IE, the Central Valley, or worse case scenario be pretty much forced out of state. It’s sad, since no one should be forced out of their own hometown/home state. NIMBYs and the California government just make things 10x worse. I’m not interested in moving to another state since California’s my home and what I’m used to, and moving states is just such a big lifestyle change/culture shock. Plus all the anti-Californian sentiment everywhere in the country makes it even more unattractive to leave, since people judge you harshly simply based on where you were born. Hopefully YIMBYism can get some traction and we can start building way more housing, because lord knows California hasn’t taken building housing seriously since the damn 1950s-1960s.
I’m super surprised that San Francisco isn’t on this list. But despite the high rent, it can be actually more affordable than much of the Bay Area especially considering it’s the only city you can survive without a car.
San Francisco scored very high on another of his videos, which looked at your disposable income after allotting for rent and the average number of cars per person in that city * cost of cars.
I have a friend who lived in Sunnyvale. He got a job as a programmer straight out of college and the multi-national tech company he worked for moved him up there, required him to live in the area, set him up with a $3500 rent for a 1bd/1.5 bth apartment and gave him a 4k monthly relocation stipend. Stuff like this really adds up and makes the whole Silicon Valley area ridiculously expensive.
Those without houses, the 18-35 yr old have low turnout rates, and when they do, they seldom leave for state and local government, unless this changes, old NIMBYs will continue to make their lives a living hell.
A lot of them also don’t understand that the way to bring down prices is with more supply. That means candidates that run on “public housing only” or “rent control” or “block all housing that isn’t X% affordable units” often get a lot of votes from the people who are pissed off about high rents.
The shot at 9:12 of what appear to be solar panels surrounded by vast expanses of parking seems like an almost paradigmatic illustration of greenwashing.
I’m from Fremont, born in Hayward, went to school in San Leandro, and I can definitely confirm that the housing circumstances have barely changed in 30 years. Hayward has probably done the best to increase housing density around the Hayward BART station, but the south Hayward station is about the same as it was when I was a kid in the 90s. The attitude of many homeowners in the area is the root of the problem. Even the modest increases in housing is met with skepticism and hostility. I remember my parents lamenting the construction of new housing as a nuisance, an eyesore, and a traffic hazard. I think their minds are changing now that none of their adult children can afford to live anywhere close to them. I think most people are afraid of change but I hope we all can be brave and create a livable future for ourselves.
Living in a beach community with limited available land, so many rally against building just one or two small, multi-unit, affordable residences. These same people then complain that their kids can't afford houses in the town now due to the increased prices, with one even commenting, "Don't sell your house to a rich person!" Really, how does one even respond to this nonsense.
In Houston we have brothels, random isolated giant skyscrapers, and businesses handling explosive chemicals (that occasionally blow up) plonked down randomly in the middle of urban residential neighborhoods!
There’s a local activist in Seattle who keeps saying Houston is the ideal we should be working towards. She talks a lot about the diversity in n Houston, implying that anyone who disagrees with her is racist. I would love to see a serious discussion of the housing situation and policies in Houston .
@@npgibson69 I actually love Houston. You have to take it on its own terms, though. It is not much to look at. It is easy to dismiss it as an ugly ramshackle monstrosity. The lack of zoning is part of the character of the city. Literally every few years some factory located in the middle of a residential neighborhood blows up. That’s bad, but there are also a LOT of neighborhoods here that are just completely racially scrambled, in a way I have not seen elsewhere in the United States. I am suspicious that the lack of zoning is part of what allows that scrambling to happen. Zoning is often used to keep “the wrong people” out. It is also used to restrict housing. Housing here is cheap. In 2017 hurricane Harvey flooded large areas of the city. There was essentially a near complete breakdown of civil authority across large parts of the city for several days. And what happened? Riots? Looting? No… people in unflooded areas showed up with boats and helped evacuate stranded people. Neighborhoods organized civil militias to guard against outsiders coming in to loot. When police were eventually able to get into the affected areas they just attached themselves to the existing militias to make sure abuses didn’t happen. As the waters receded armies of volunteers showed up to help muck out houses. The volunteers were from unflooded areas but also from areas that were still underwater. And what was really striking was the racial diversity of both the people needing help and the volunteers helping them. Go find some videos and you will see what I mean. For example, “BEME, after the flood”. The marches after George Floyd’s death were peaceful here. No big deal. Houston was the first large city in the US to elect an openly gay mayor. Not that people elected her because she was gay… they elected her because she promised to straighten out the city’s finances. People mostly did not care that she was gay. It’s still Texas. It’s pretty conservative, but not in the “shove religion down your throat” way. It’s more the libertarian “let people get their work done” way, which is out of fashion in both parties now.
That California shows up as the state for ALL of the cities that meet the high NIMBY criteria should make us turn to what state-level policy leads to this NIMBYism. And I think the answer there is obvious: it's prop 13's limits on property tax increases. For homeowners in most of the country, rising home values are countered by equally rising property tax rates. This makes hyper-focus on raising home values less desirable so while NIMBYs exist and do concern themselves with home values, they do not get nearly as much support as they do in California. So as California ran out of land to easily expand outward with it's home construction (which bypasses NIMBY options for control), the state ran out of homes to produce. Thus the cycle of home rises. NIMBYism that runs out of expansive land to build on but also no property tax limits winds up more like the Pacific Northwest. Still full of NIMBYs, still seeing high prices, but with substantially less severity than California's problem. Which should make everyone REALLY nervous that local and some state lawmakers across the US are starting to talk about putting limits on increases to property tax assessments to soften the blow to rising home values. Many of these areas, like in the Sunbelt states like Texas, Florida, and Georgia, may still have land to expand outwards meaning it will take time for this to get California levels of bad, but the more these assessment hikes get limited the greater the NIMBYism we can expect going forward. And I know the complaint is that not limiting assessment hikes will lead to people with low incomes but now in possession of a high value asset to be displaced, but getting displaced with a large pay out is way less bad than people winding up living on the streets because local political incentives have killed housing construction.
Texas and Florida's politicians in particular love to dunk on California's present leadership while studiously repeating California's mistakes from 40-70 years ago that are the real root cause of their present problems.
Prop 13 was a sweetheart deal for California corporations that tagged on a "think of the old people who will get kicked out of their homes!" clause to it and largely pushed THAT part as part of the campaign to get support for it. Let's also not forget the Mello-Roos were invented to get around this cap and screw over new homeowners out of this deal because of the funding shortfall that older generations created.
I think it's interesting looking at the other side in a city like Chicago where high property taxes keeps property values lower on paper. Shows how different policy can have different impacts
@@graytabbycat Chicago is an interesting case because the taxes aren't high enough to depopulate the city but are high enough to suppress valuations. But if you want a REALLY opposite example to prop 13, you should look up how Detroit deliberately raised property taxes targeting it's poorest residents to force people to leave (in order to make it cheaper for "urban renewal" to replace them) and it caused a spiral effect for decades that the city is only just now stabilizing from.
I think the explanation of NIMBY motivation is really incomplete. Removing building restrictions lowers *average* land value, but it doesn't lower it everywhere. I promise, if it was suddenly legal to build tall apartment buildings everywhere in the Bay Area, homeowners in these cities would make fortunes. If it's a $2m plot and all you can build on it is a single family house, a developer would pay far more if they could put a bunch of apartments on it. They're not NIMBYs to keep their property values high, because YIMBY policies would increase their property value even more. It's about nostalgia, racism, classism, parking, traffic, etc. It's the distant commuter towns that would lose property value. Nobody's commuting an hour+ if they can live cheaply closer to the core.
You're overestimating their intelligence with regards to home values rising. Very few would actually know that selling their property to a developer that would pay 3-4x would give them a payday. And it's not just the sale price, plenty of NIMBYs own apartments and they don't want competition, another apartment complex, being built. Never take what NIMBYs say at face value. There is always an ulterior motive and that's money. They will never outright say that anymore (in the past they did, racist HOAs paraded that around when excluding black people).
Yep. Densifying an area actually INCREASES land value. You want your property value to go up? Make it so that your property could potentially house ten times as many people if the right developer can buy and redevelop it. There can be specific circumstances when density lowers a property's value but it is not during a building boom or in places where there's tons of pent up red hot demand.
I love your channel. Keep these posts coming. I thought I'd jump in here with a little perspective on why CA may have a majority of these NIMBY locations, and from the viewpoint of a homeowner. I'm not sure if many of these CA cities mentioned grew in the ways more typical of Eastern or Mid-Western cities. Other than for San Francisco, high urban density does not seem to have been the norm even a 100 years ago. CA was very much a "grow out" type of urban environment. There was plenty of land to do so, so the thought was to keep expanding. While in places like LA, much of that was facilitated by transportation infrastructure, it was the car that really accelerated that grow out ethos. As more and more of CA "urban" areas grew out (I would argue CA may have never really been "urban" in the ways one might think of it from an Eastern urban area point of view), by the time the 60's and 70's came around, this started to bump up against a growing environmental movement which sought to control or stop urban sprawl. These were all "positive" things in my book because preserving the natural resources and beauty of CA is a noble thing. But this came at a cost (literally and figuratively). The environmental regulations with respect to construction and urban growth have often been used offensively by NIMBY protagonists to prevent further urban development in the areas already zoned for housing, in sort of a twisted contradiction to what these regulations really were designed to do. A perfect example is when UC Berkeley wanted to expand enrollment, and planned to build multiunit dorms to accommodate the new students. This was met with intense and extreme opposition by Berkeley residents....ostensibly liberal, pro-environment residents. Their claim was that such increased density in that area would be an environmental disaster. Eventually, I believe the plans were approved after much delay, and then the UC faced massive protests when they planned on removing People's Park to build the dorms. That caused more delays. Tax rules have also played a part in this. When Prop 13 passed, and essentially froze property tax rates for long term owners of property, an inordinate amount of wealth was tied to property. But it was tied in a way that also handcuffed a lot of residents. You could keep your old tax rate, until you bought a new home, and then you would be taxed at the FMV of the property new house when bought. This means a potential huge and immediate increase in your property tax. That could make a move essentially cost-prohibitive. The amount of property turnover decreased, or the incentive to hold on to your property increased. Similar issues are developing in Australia, where perverse tax structures are creating a huge housing problem in that country as well. Finally, with real wage growth stagnating, and most people not able to participate in the equity markets in the same way that high net worth individuals can (i.e., using lots of disposable income), and tax incentives baked in, property appreciation is really the only true asset growth class if you were lucky enough to have owned a house in the past 10-15 years. Again, you wanted to hold on to property instead, decreasing turnover, and increasing property prices in the absence of new growth (which is being hampered, at least in some ways, by the reasons mentioned above). Then comes other structural issues. While you showed a lot of satellite pictures of BART and CalTrain stations built amongst low rise structures and parking spaces, the fact they exist at all has been a major major achievement. As you know, the cost of building rail-based mass transportation systems in urban areas, even if there was no NIMBY, is astronomically high. If you want urban upward construction and high density housing, there is the chicken and the egg. No one can live in these areas without the infrastructure to get these people where they need to go. But you can't build an transportation infrastructure if there is no ridership to be able to support the costs of building one first. So what can you do if you are into urban planning? The parking structures are there because that is the #1 mode of transportation in CA, by far. You need to incentivize people into at least traveling a shorter distance by car, and try to live closer to the rail infrastructure. Then, perhaps, you can encourage enough people and developers to go through the entire regulatory and cost hurdles to build more higher density housing close to these rail centers. You have to start somewhere. You can't just say "POOF" see how badly these areas look and have been designed. There are so many things working against high density urbanization and infrastructure, especially in an area of the country that really never had it, that it's amazing how any effort to increase housing and urbanization even gets done. NIMBY is only part of the problem, or maybe it's just a symptom of all the baggage that has developed over the decades out here in the West.
Madison! As someone who moved here within the last decade, it helps that there are so many young people, both in the university and out of it. Millennials in general seem to be YIMBYs, even if we manage to own our own homes. So many people bike and the bus network is good. There are some nimbys tho. They showed up to a city meeting about expanding the bike network and allowing higher density construction recently. Nowhere is safe
Any place where a disproportionate fraction of "wealth" is in home values, there is going to be a lot of people interested in defending them tooth and nail. Being "liberal" is irrelevant. Also, you might be interested in this trivia, the state with the most people who voted for Trump in 2020? California. There are a lot of republicans in California.
Well that depends on how you use the word "liberal". If you use it accurately instead of broadly anyone left of Regan then it makes perfect sense. Liberals still ultimately uphold capitalism and only have light regulation of the market with minor concessions to the poor with some degree of welfare. Within such a belief system it makes sense to have a vague sympathy for the down trodden but also protect your own wealth with zeal.
@@awedbystander6823Prop 13 was passed by ballot initiative over the opposition of the governor at the time, Jerry Brown. But the point still stands in that it was one of the last great right wing successes in California, which used to be a swing state.
Despite only having traveled to California some twenty times in my life, I was surprised at the number of these cities that I've visited. It shows that you can be a NIMBY in an ritzy upscale neighborhood, a cute, charming area with walkable districts, and in a boring, blah suburb of over overpriced housing.
You forgot my hometown of Redondo beach / Hermosa Beach Our mayor is a deranged frothing NIMBY who said "there is no housing shortage in our city" He was elected mayor by opposing the teardown of a DERELICT POWER PLANT and building housing on the land instead They use that powerplant to shoot movies sometimes, that's it.
I was just in San Francisco this week and found myself wondering how much the city experiences the consequences of the state’s housing crisis due to the policy decisions of the surrounding municipalities. San Francisco is dense and well built out but this video I think supports my hunch that some of the city’s poor reputation for homelessness rates are due to factors outside its control.
@@Secretlyanothername In 2023, 2,066 newly completed units were added to San Francisco's housing stock. Down from 5,000 per year in 2020 or so. SF has 800k population, Silicone Valley has 8,000,000. Silicone Valley in total seems to be building 5,000/yr, so SF has 10% the population, but 50-90% of the new units built.
@@SecretlyanothernameBecause half the country ships their homeless by bus to California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona. Of course you're going to have a homelessness problem.
I recently started commuting by Bart into San Leandro. It's a nice place where most people could depend on a bike and bart. It would really help lower cost of living. It's a small place and the downtown is nice.
I only got to experience San Leandro for a couple days, but felt similarly. It's not "there" yet, but it's easy to imagine it densified, based on the small set of the Mission Revival-ish apartments along beautiful tree lined narrow-ish streets.
I have lived in San Leandro for several years and haven’t experienced the NIMBYism. I can walk to several trailer parks and a church that’s building some transitional housing. Could it be that we are just landlocked and don’t have enough developer interest to densify yet?
Having experienced California for most of my life, it is infuriating seeing so much land used for so little. And then people try to justify the lack of housing or basically any building taller than 3 floors with "earthquakes", or god-forbid, thinking that you need cars to get around, so you need this many (or more!) parking lots and flat empty area. Then people wonder why summers are getting hotter and why there's a lack of water, hardly a wonder with so much concrete and asphalt poured over everything :/
It's not just that the policy makers are only listening to single family housing owners, it's that policy makers are themselves single family housing owners. Seriously, how many lawmakers are renters?
was really surprised boston and its metro cities/towns like cambridge, brookline, milton, belmont and newton didn’t make any list. massachusetts passed a law where multi family housing has to be rezoned for areas with a train stop and multiple towns went foaming at the mouth to protest it. despite not saying ANY even have to be built. they just have to ZONED for more than single family housing also boston’s sorta biotech bust over the last year with tons if vacant lab space…. rent is still marginally higher than the last year
Some of those towns are bad, but places like Lexington, and basically anywhere outside 128, is far worse (worse than anything in the Bay Area in terms of sprawl)
Growing up in the Bay Area in a very competitive school district, we had state standardized testing each year that didn't really matter for grades or academic progress, high scores really only make your public school look better. When I was in high school, students had caught on and weren't trying on these tests. That lowered the scores for our schools and school district, and some homeowners were pissed that we were supposedly endangering their home values by not putting in full effort on these tests. Just gets more and more absurd in hindsight. The Bay Area dug itself into a deep hole during its explosive growth after WW2, one that even the most YIMBY local governments have a hard time climbing out of. All we can do is keep plugging away at improving things, or get out.
California born and raised. If I didn't have basically all my friends and family here I would leave, and this video affirms that. Hell, I might anyway depending on how things go.
FYI. San Leandro technically has two BART stations. The Bay Fair station even has an approved TOD plan in place to convert the parking lot and adjacent dilapidated mall into mixed use housing/office/retail.
@@mrbloodmuffins You could get a 1,200 sqft place in Rialto, CA for $500k or one in Mesa, AZ for $300k. And the Mesa one probably has a shorter drive to work. You could spend less in Blythe, but there’s no job market there.
Um what? Politics was the second most popular reason for Californians leaving the state, most of the people leaving lived in red areas like central valley
I am completely unsurprised that the entire list is in California, the state's laws give NIMBYs tremendous rights. I'm also not surprised that the entire top 10 is in the bay area or that Sunnyvale (home of Apple) is #1. The bay area tech NIMBYs live in a completely different world than the rest of us. The only reason why BART and CalTrain were even able to be built is they were built before the rich tech NIMBYs were at the level they are now. You could never build BART or the Penninsula Corridor today it would get NIMBYd to death like CAHSR is getting now. As it was the Penninsula Corridor electrification project almost got NIMBYd because one town on the route tried to claim that the catenary wires were an eyesore and they wanted to route run by battery trains. They should be happy that the loud, ancient diesel trains currently running the Penninsula corridor are being replaced by quiet, fast, modern electric trains.
MA housing is absolutely insane. Draw a circle of a 90 minute commute around Boston and double the reasonable asking price of any housing unit inside of that. I long for the days where I spent 1/3 as much to live on the Madison isthmus and be able to bike to work and walk to ice skating and use a timely and reliable bus system. MA is just sad by comparison.
The problem in Southern California at least is infrastructure. Traffic is absolutely dog shit around here and legislators and planners refuse to build a half way decent infrastructure to support anything. It should not take an hour to drive 10 miles.
That's just LA and the Bay Area. Orange County is actually denser than LA County and it's pretty easy to drive 20 miles here. Ironically, Orange County is more conservative than either two.
As a Bay Area local (from a city not on that list, we're on pace to do our share and go from 100K pop to 150K over 10 years), I need to point out the elephant AND the room - the Bay and the Mountains. You're seeing the aftereffects of extreme growth 40 years ago, before we understood growth patterns, hitting the physical limits of the mountains and the Bay. During the early boom (60s-80s), the houses spread in no time to fill all large land parcels. More recent growth has spilled over the mountains to places like Livermore, 40+ miles from the job centers. And there are almost no farms or fields left - the developers of the last generation ran the houses all the way up to the point where the mountains are too steep/unstable to build. There's a lot of infill going on, and more in the pipeline in most of these places (note that Fremont used to be the end of the line until about 5 years ago; South Fremont & beyond are brand new and developments around them are still in the pipe). But the stupid prices hurt most infill applications - it's a HUGE cost to acquire land, and it's really hard to get a high enough return to justify the project for most investors. This is the dilemma of most of the California cities you've selected - with no room, it's harder to grow. And the fact that your index turned up exclusively those cities, including cities like Redwood City that are working hard on infill, should have alerted you to the fact that your index is still severely flawed.
I’m from NorCal and this is pretty obvious if you live around here. Our city had 2 competing initiatives to deal with homelessness. The first provided money for housing and services. The second had a number of penalties designed to make the lives of homelessness people miserable. Guess which one won.
CityNerd mentioned DC in the closing. For YIMBY, I will highlight that the Virginia suburbs of DC have been working hard to overcome NIMBYism. Arlington and Alexandria have essentially eliminated single family zoning. Fairfax county has drastically increased allowable zoning densities adjacent to the new silver line metro stations (6 of which have essentially zero parking) with residential skyscrapers (30+ stories) being built adjacent to the stations. There’s also office to residential building conversions underway. Many of these changes are very recent and take time, but things are moving in the right direction here. So while this video accurately portrayed the horrendous nature of the CA housing market, there are some signs of hope elsewhere.
NIMBYs make my life harder. I’m disabled and sometimes what I need (especially with public transportation) lines up with what they want. While allies are usually good, if one’s concerns allies are NIMBYs, one’s concerns are often time ignored.
Just a few reasons NIMBY is so terrible in the bay area: In the 1970’s there was a plan to PAVE OVER the BAY. No lie. A few local housewives started a movement to stop insane development. Before this the state government was run by land speculators and developers. The movement was successful. Unfortunately it morphed into “any development is bad.” In the 1970’s it finally became illegal to put restrictive covenants in mortgages. Before then your mortgage literally said you cannot sell to African Americans (. Not the term they used obviously) may also prohibit Jews or Latinos. So once the neighborhood was open to everyone the price of homes and “no growth” was used as a stand-in for making sure “those people “ cannot live in the area. Every time a new building is proposed the locals freak out about “ those people “ moving to their fair city. Another tactic is to require all units to have dedicated parking at least one spot per unit. Plus screaming about traffic.
I live in the North Bay. I completely agree with all of the bay cities and just laughed thru a lot of this bc you finally validated what I’ve been feeling for years. This is why I’m going into planning and this field.
I'd love to see a NIMBY analysis focused on transit instead of only housing construction. Could be interesting. In the meantime, bless my native Orange County. You gave us Nixon and tract homes!
MV resident here, I remember that time when there was going to be an apartment built near the city hall, but got shut down by "Stop the Monster", which is an anti-housing organization that shuts down housing projects in Mission Viejo, which is terrible. The main reason they oppose these housing projects is because the Nimby's complained that more housing = "more traffic". Instead MV spent millions on widening I-5.
RE: BART stations, Fremont was long the southern terminus of the system so folks from the eastern part of the South Bay went there to catch trains to Oakland or San Francisco. Warm Springs/South Fremont station used to be surrounded by industry until it became the temporary end of the line (before the expansion to Santa Clara County). So all of the housing around South Fremont (almost exclusively low-rise condos and townhomes) was built in the last 10-15 years. Same goes for the areas near the Great Mall and BART station in Milpitas (ny hometown), and the current southern terminus at Berryessa (East San Jose) - formerly commercial and industrial land converted into condos and townhomes in the last 5-10 years. For better and worse, housing across Silicon Valley is being built this way because there's nowhere else to expand - as heavier industry and old tech companies consolidate or vacate, they're replaced by 5-over-1 style apartment and condo complexes. But virtually none it comes affordably, let alone cheap (which is why I moved out of the area 20+ years ago).
Currently live in Redwood City next to the Caltrain station and although we’re not staying for much longer,still kind feel the need to defend it, as it not nearly as bad as the towns like Palo Alto/Atherton/Mountain View, all towns closer to the university I work at. Redwood City has some of the highest density housing outside of SF/Oakland, and has plans to expand out its offered middle-low housing options dramatically in the upcoming decade, I don’t think the stats you used capture its trajectory well. Yeah there are a ton of nimbys at our city council that I’m kind of fed up with/one of the reasons we’re leaving, but the town is definitely far more progressive in its housing plan than other towns on this list. That being said, a low income housing project that was years in the making was burned down yesterday, which was just kind of salt in the wound as we prepare to leave.
I was surprised to see Redwood City on the NIMBY list. There are lots of apartment buildings and condos that were built over the past ten years in the downtown area close to the Caltrain station.
I want to note that high vacancy rates can merely indicate that those properties are often being owned by institutional investors and are vacant because they’re asking for a huge rent and are content sitting on the asset because it’s driving up prices.
I've ran every street in Sunnyvale as well as several adjacent towns. The 1950s suburban sprawl is like 95% or the town. And based on the people Ive seen and stuff in the front yards, its hardly ever families with kids. Seems to be mostly people in the 50-100 year age range who got their first home before the last decades of housing price increase. I currently rent a townhome which I could never afford because even if I was gifted a 20% down payment, the mortgage would be 3x what I currently pay for rent.
BTW, San Leandro has two Bart stations as well. San Leandeo, and Bay Fair 😊. Warm Springs/South Fremont has TONS of nee housing in the pipeline. Fremont will also be building a 3rd Bart station, Irvington.
Just fwiw, I bought a Nebula lifetime membership to show willing and support all of you, but I mostly watch on YT because it's just a better viewing experience. I have YT premium, though.
Especially for content discovery, it's easier for me to find cool stuff to watch on Nebula by watching RUclips and hearing people discuss their videos on nebula than it is to just use Nebula to find things.
You should look at Japan's zoning laws how they allow developers to build almost anything and can set up shop anywhere. Tokyo has more housing permits issued than the entire state of California. There was never a housing shortage in Tokyo since 1968 when the city planning law was enacted and why the city is affordable compared to many major cities and add in the real estate collapse in the 90s. Housing is a depreciating asset like cars. They have low life span with new building codes written to protect against strong earthquakes. Also look at how apartments are built due to the two stair law.
That and it's really hard to buy real estate there as a foreigner. You can't have some Saudi prince obtain a fiefdom and be a landlord then using those same profits to lobby the government.
One thing that struck me is that just going by raw rent and housing prices can potentially bias towards simply expensive places to live. I wonder if we'd get different results if instead of taking dollar amounts for rent and home prices, if we took them as a function of the median income in those cities?
You know what? If you were watching this video on Nebula, where it was available several days early, you wouldn't even be TEMPTED to scroll down to the comments -- because on Nebula, there aren't any! Imagine how much of your life you'll get back when you...just...stop reading comments. Use my link to get 40% off an annual subscription. It's a ridiculous value, and it really does help the channel. go.nebula.tv/citynerd
Bonkers Lifetime deal still available too! go.nebula.tv/lifetime?ref=citynerd
The comments on your channel are generally interesting and worth a read, though! Also, as an environmental scientist, I think of NIMBYism as being about things like wind turbines, landfills etc., not about housing specifically. It's funny to think of people in low-density 'burbs complaining about more housing as housing inevitably is put between them and the perimeter of the urban area. If they went for high-density housing, they might have less area of suburbs to drive though.
I watch on both bro, nebula for the quality. here for you guessed it! comments!
As a wisconsinite idk whats up with madison as i dont live there but like a lot of rustbelt cities punch above their weight in urbanism even if a lot of them have been stagnant or in decline
I also watched it on Nebula, but love to read the comments!
imagine calling your commentators worthless and a waste of time LMFAO
Turns out NIMBY really stands for Not In My BaY area
The consequences of open borders.
@@muhcharonayou must be new here
@@muhcharona No, the consequences of unbelievably stupid zoning policies.
@@muhcharona You mean that California has open borders to the rest of the US?
You guys, always with the loli shit profile pic 😂 @@muhcharona
As an Oakland resident, I'm so happy that you dragged the Bay Area. For all the "progressive" rep the Bay Area has, its housing policy is terribly regressive. It's disgusting.
NIMBYism and left-wing voting seem to be correlated (but so are left-wing voters and cities in general)
Oakland really should have more aggressively pursued attracting development from 2014-2020. Were way behind on municipal taxes because we dragged our feet. Now we’re missing out on new projects with the adverse market conditions.
@@williamdrum9899 left wing people in California want more affordable housing. You underestimate how many wealthy right wing conservatives are in California controlling the housing supply
I grew up in San Leandro, I think we (and Hayward) thought we were above dragging because the Peninsula gets more of the attention.
Glad to see we aren’t.
@@MsKateC2K You'd think that wouldn't be an issue since the Democrats always win in California lately. So if they really wanted to they could fix that
Had to double check the title was "These Are the NIMBY-est Cities In the U.S." and not "These Are the NIMBY-est Cities In California"
There's a difference?
California is the NIMBYest state in the U.S.
For the bally-hooing about California as a liberal/progressive hotspot, but at the end of the day, people here are just as guilty of the selfishness of other, more politically conservative places. Like, the surface level says "Coexist" and then in small print it says "just not around me though"
@@justthecoolestdudeyo9446 liberal/progressivism tends to be extremely selfish. So it shouldn't be surprising a hotspot for that philosophy has a lot of selfishness.
@justthecoolestdudeyo9446 Maybe it's not surprising, considering it's the home of Big Tech and Hollywood. Not surprised these are entitled sorts of people
The Bay Area about to get bodied
Edit: I didn’t expect it to be this ABYSMAL 😭😭😭
Hey there was one city that wasn't in the Bay Area! It was in *checks notes* Southern California
12/10 on that edit
I did.
Wow! I knew things were bad around here in the Bay Area, but this is a shocking perspective.
Bay Area hates outsiders
California should be studied for centuries to come as a case study in wasted potential. Best location with the absolute worst land use
Best weather in the country and rather than having something walkable/bikeable, we turned it into suburban sprawl car sewer.
There are so many people educated by the California public universities that have to leave because of the NIMBY mindset. It is a long term generational loss. The other western states don’t mind gaining that human capital. We need it here in Phoenix.
Argentina beats it out but California comes close
@@WilliamPeregoy because they allowed the population to double. Simple as that.
@@JohnJohnson-rl7fq Nope, its because they let too many in. The number of universities didn't increase either, nor should it.
In the early 2000s a proposal by Peet's Coffee & Tea to construct a small bump-out in front of their store in Berkeley was met with vocal neighborhood opposition. The neighborhood is composed of mostly single-family housing from the 1920s. The bump-out would remove a single parking spot, plant a tree, and allow for four to six small tables and chairs. The entire upper Solano Avenue commercial block had ZERO outdoor seating at the time. Some of the NIMBY comments at the time were amazing.
"IT WILL RUIN THE NEIGHBORHOOD"
"IT'S GOING TO ATTRACT OUTSIDERS AND THEY'll PARK THEIR CARS IN FRONT OF OUR HOUSES"
"WHAT'S THE BENEFIT?"
The plan was ultimately passed and in the years since, the neighborhood hasn't imploded and it's the homeowners themselves that congregate there in the morning for coffee and pastries while watching the world pass them by.
Those that opposed the plan should get a permanent ban from those extra tables.
@@qers only if they nimby a second time
For decades, Berkeley has been nimby-central. But, lately, downtown Berkeley is unrecognizable with the amount of mid and high rise housing being built. My image of the city is changing. Tried to find stats, but read this in an article: “Since the pandemic, Berkeley has added 1,403 housing units, outpacing the rate of housing development between 2010 and 2020 (Berkeleyside).
@@lorenzod9575 I believe that's because there are no "traditional" home owners there in single-family houses. The opposition to proposed high-rise housing at the North Berkeley BART station is very vocal. That's a neighborhood of mostly single-family one-story homes.
All of the supervisors and managers at the Peet's Coffee I worked at in Portland were from LA and the Bay Area, and two of them had worked at the Berkeley Peet's. They couldn't afford to live in Berkeley, Oakland, etc., so moved to Portland :/.
Need a whole YIMBY list to properly cleanse the palate
The people who moved in under YIMBY are now voting NIMBY because their interests have changed.
Austin has to top the list
Yes.
Austin #1
I find it ironic that Texas cities (specially Austin) would top the YIMBY list, whereas 'progressive' California cities are the opposite
The California state government has finally interceded and passed legislation that requires local governments to permit a certain level of development, and those that don't lose the right to restrict development entirely, allowing developers to just build whatever size of project they want.
I used the housing app to look at my cities units permitted per year and you can totally see when that law got passed. The number of units more than doubled.
Wow. Does it state what kind of development? Any bias to mixed use, hopefully?
@@planecrashcorner7283 The details are findable with Google, but the tl;dr is they effectively "banned" R1 zoning in most areas - ie most areas can now build ADUs, duplexes, or small apt buildings. However, cities are finding work-arounds to continue the NIMBYism - like non-market parking minimums that make it impossible to actually build a small apt building without building underground parking (massively expensive).
Good news, maybe one day I’ll be able to afford to move there
@@planecrashcorner7283I think the main requirement is a certain percentage affordable housing.
Speaking of Redwood City, a fire this week destroyed half of an affordable housing complex that was under construction. The project has been under construction for over a year, and is the result of almost a decade of community planning.
Call me a conspiracy theorist..
Jeez, a decade to plan and build before it burned into the ground is genually sad TBH.
A Boeing whistleblower was going to live there…
The same thing happened to another housing development in construction in SF a few months ago. Makes you wonder sometimes…
Maybe don't build your cities out of wood oil and glue. Wahh our shitty cheap buildings keep lighting on fire because we don't want to spend money on actual materials wahhh.
The goddamn zoom out to giant parking lots is heartbreaking
Blame GM and Atlantic Richfield, along with other conspirators. They illegally sabotaged mass transit, from LA to Baltimore from the 1920s through the '40s, and they got away with it. Our non-free enterprise system and our non-democracy did what they do best.
I wish nebula had comments. It's one of the reasons i keep coming back to RUclips. I enjoy the visibility of the community through them
Same here, sometimes I'll watch a video and I'll go down to the comments and there will be counterpoints I hadn't considered with sources cited that I hadn't heard of. It's a worthwhile feature, in my opinion, especially if Nebula is selling itself as a more intellectual youtube
nebula doesn't have comments? thats a surprise
The lack of comments and the player itself (I like the YT controls, speed, skipping, playlists, etc.). I have a Nebula account but forget to go there... RUclips is comfy. I tend to go visit Nebula when someone like Ray mentions it... I go make note of cool shows... then never watch them lol.
I'm flabbergasted that a platform where people have to pay doesn't have comments. Are people really going to burn that much a month to troll paywalled content???
@@linestepprNetflix and other streaming platforms do not have comments either. It’s not meant to be a social media.
THE NIMDEX
How can I invest in a nimdex fund?
@@totaljoeWell however you do it, keep it away from me and my home!
Now we need NIMdex+ (state adjusted where 100 is average) and NIMs above replacement.
Gotta catch 'em all.
I can't stop patting myself on the back for how clever that was
You should check out the Canadian data, where Vacancy rates in some major cities is BELOW 1%. We are suffering from NIMBYism and the housing crisis.
BC just passed a law in the fall that should help undercut NIMBYism. It does away with parking minimums and allows for higher density development near transit hubs.
@@bgabriel28But there's a provincial election coming up and the new BC Conservatives have made mutterings about getting rid of most of the current government's housing policies and changes if elected, because "municipalities know best" or some nonsense along those lines.
@@flargus7919 Yup. The BC Conservative leader doesn't believe there is even a housing crisis (his own words) and plans to get rid of all the NDP's housing policies if elected.
What sucks is the BC Conservatives are gaining momentum off the back of the Federal Conservatives, a completely different party that doesn't share the same values. Here's hoping the NDP somehow pull out a win.
Given that Canadian home loan interest rates reset after 5? years you guys are doomed. No way non-rich people can live when their interest rate doubles or triples.
@@richardarriaga6271 Canada has substantial stress tests in place for mortgages, so even "non-rich" people will survive in the short term. That said, most Canadians don't have much spending money these days as all our income goes towards housing or towards saving a house. While we may avoid a crash in the short term, in the long term our economic outlook is screwed.
Definitely dunking on the Bay Area today. Not undeservedly.
We can collectively call it the NIMBay Area now.
@@mfaizsyahmi bah dum tiss🥁
We deserve it on this topic. I love it here, but my god do we have to do better. When you add hundreds of thousands of jobs and barely any housing to accommodate those people moving here, this is a predictable result.
Young people here are getting sick of this shit.
NGL I kind of want a followup video that explicitly excludes CA, just out of curiosity.
MADISON MENTIONED!!!! I moved there in August last year, and it's the best choice I've ever made. Started living car-free, really putting on that American city-slicker image without the high cost of it. About our housing, we do have a nimby problem here, but the city really is doing everything within its ability here. The only thing holding us back is development companies and NIMBYs, if we had our way our housing would be perfect. Love seeing Madison mentioned in your videos, it's such a great place.
except for the winters.
Thanks for this Ray. The great third rail of American politics is that a 64% majority of American households own property and thus benefit directly from a housing shortage. High rents are a feature for them. A housing crisis inflates the value of their homes and makes them feel wealthier, even if they face the same problem everyone else does when it's time to move. Renters as a class in America need to organize around this bitter reality.
Who TF is Ray?
This is not true at all. In some states the property tax and even insurance has gone up with the value of the home, making it a lot less affordable for home owners and buyers. These people are essentially trapped in their homes because they are unable to sell and downsize with an affordable interest rate. Appreciation cannot be actualized unless the home owner sells.
This is not an open class struggle, it’s a problem of status quo bias and economic illiteracy. Renters are just as likely to oppose development than home owners. A third of people polled don’t believe increasing the housing stock with bring down housing prices. People automatically just have a negative view of developers in general. You can look up polls where they ask how open someone is to a new development project and support absolutely plummets if they show the exact same development but include the fact the developer will make a lot of money when completing the project. Most people including renters believe that developers are pillaging a community by tearing something down and putting something new in its place.
@@TurnRiverWhat you’re saying is true but the irrational belief of rising home prices is still a myth that a lot of homeowners believe in. As you said, this actually limits current homeowners and all the equity gained is essentially dead equity. There is not benefit to rising home prices but some still do think it’s good for them.
@@TurnRiver Equity growth feels real to homeowners, no matter the thorny issues they might face in realizing it. But yeah, for a lot of homeowners the plan is to cash out and move out, to someplace cheaper. Witness the exodus of NIMBY-fattened Californians flooding the rest of the West, driving up home prices with their all cash purchases. You don't need to worry as much about interest rates when you are walking away with hundreds of thousands in cash.
The NIMdex.
Amazing. Just amazing. Please publish a paper and make this real academic diction.
Edit: I love all of the irony you create by saying one thing and showing another without insisting on explaining the irony.
The fact that NINE of the TEN cities on this list are in the Bay Area of California, and the other one is another California city... and all twelve other cities meeting the threshold criteria are also Californian... I don't want to hear people complain about California being "too far left" ever again. That is an absolute embarrassment.
Bay Area ironically the bastion of neo-liberalism in the US. As a resident it does indeed make one’s eyes bleed
If you live in California you know people that have in this house we believe sign in front of their 2 million dollar house they bought for 8 goats in 1972. They just don’t get it
This isn't really a left or right issue. Some of the issues are adjacent to left/right because of culture war stuff, but none of the actual values for left vs right has NIMBYism as a focus. Plus, California being the liberal bastion/punching bag of the country is a recent thing relatively, stuff like Prop 13 and redlining that enabled all this decades ago were when we were a much more right-leaning state.
@@ficus3929 I have a family member who owns his house in SF. Today worth close to $2M. Purchased in 1972 for $35K. Pays under $1000 in property taxes annually because of Prop 13.
Texas is solid Red yet extremely YIMBY.
I have lived in the SF Bay Area for almost my entire life, and I knew what this video was going to be like before watching a single second of it 😭
I grew up in Fremont (and still live here), and it's a tragedy how the development panned out around the South Fremont BART and South Fremont overall. It's just massive parking lots with no mixed use.
The YIMBY movement here is growing (I even talked with my City Council member about it), but it's slow and there's so much opposition. When you bought in at $1 million or above and your home is 90% of your net worth, you are naturally going to be the fiercest NIMBY to ever NIMBY to protect your investment. This greed is really really hard to solve for as California gives way too much power to local schmucks who have 0 idea or interest in how to run a healthy society.
I'm a transplant living in Fremont and jfc it is bleak out here. Basically planned on moving far far away as soon as I arrived. Where I live, I'm sure the average house is at least $3mil and the neighborhood opens up to a stroad. I need to drive at least 15min for groceries, public transportation is less than an afterthought, bike lanes are abundant but bizarre. I'm surprised I haven't had an accident with a cyclist yet. You'd think with the huge cost of living and the crazy taxes they collect they'd at least make the place more fun to live in....
I'm also in Fremont. I'm interested in the YIMBY movement you mentioned. Or some sort of Strong Towns discussion or something. If you know anything trying to make progress here, LMK
Houses being sold for any more than about a year's wage in the local area is also the city's fault for not preventing the sale beforehand
I rolled my eyes when they named that area the "Innovation district" and literally named one of the streets "Synergy st." The sea of Parking near BART stations is puzzling as it would be the easiest way for BART to literally build up it's ridership post COVID.
@@noxyburd BART has plans to convert some of its parking lots into housing, but those plans don't extend into Union City or Fremont yet www.bart.gov/about/business/tod
I was a member of the Madison Plan Commission from 2006-2008. The planning staff was great, and led by a man named George Austin, who guided a rezoning of the Isthmus and downtown. The chair was the executive director of the Sierra Club, and she liked densification. All these things helped.
I’m a little surprised Boulder, CO didn’t make the list. The people voted a building permit limit of only 450/yr for a city of 100k years ago. They voted against allowing water and other services above a certain altitude to prevent houses on the hills. And we bought up 100k acres around the city to prevent others from building too close. Average rent for a two bedroom is $2,400/mo. The FHA said 80301 had the largest increase in home value between 1990 and 2017 in the country.
They had to be forced by state law to allow ADUs, allow for more building permits and increase the legal number of renters in a house. Median house price is $1.4 million.
Can't blame the homeowner though, it's a failure of bureaucracy really
I drive from Centennial to Boulder several times a week for classes and have for a couple years now, I graduate soon but I had such a good deal on my place here combined with the issue that my rent would double to triple and sometimes even quadruple depending on where i looked in and around Boulder.
No wonder the place is called "Boulder" -- the people there who vote in favor of said laws are such conservatives that they may as well be considered boulders themselves.
"single family neighborhoods, frozen in amber"
Incredibly damning, and...
[pause to blink]
perfect
Old Lyme, CT, population 7,366, deserves an honorable mention. The train route from NYC to Boston could be 25 minutes quicker but a bunch of super old & wealthy NIMBYs showed up to the town hall and rallied against it. The photo of the meeting is hilarious and also sad. It’s literally a group of almost exclusively 70+ year old people there to stop a railway project that would benefit the entire northeast
I wonder if millennials will turn to the dark side or break the chain of NIMBYism once the Boomers die off.
Im from CT and can confirm there is a massive amount of NIMBYism here. Maybe why homes are appreciating double digits per year still here.
Also partly the reason why everyone in the south is getting priced out by you guessed it, CA and NY area urbanites
You should see the north shore of Long Island in New York. Those old rich NIMBYS constantly block a plan for a bridge or tunnel to CT or anywhere in New England
I’m proud of my town - redmond Washington. It’s a small town outside of seattle but they are taking very seriously the need for more housing over the next 30 years. 5 over 1 apartments are going up all over town, and they are determined not to spread the town boundaries to surrounding forests into developed land. They are also putting up a rent controlled apartment building for temporarily I housed people that make an income far below median area income. There is also a new light rail finishing up next year that goes right to the middle and goes along the entire office space districts.
It was also nice nice to see Redmond immediately step up to save the Plymouth Housing project when the Kenmore NIMBY's killed it. VERY classy!
@@MTBSPD Exactly. I see so many people spreading misinformation about it.
I'm proud of Washington overall. Growth management law requires that cities accommodate growth. Redmond, Bellevue, Tacoma, Seattle--all are planning for large-scale growth, and this is keeping San Francisco-level problems at bay.
I just moved from San Mateo to the snoqqualmie river valley and I have to say that Redmond is doing so much better than the bay area. It reminds me a *lot* of Redwood City (which should get a lot of credit for densification downtown - but its all been relatively recent- in the last 10 years only) but accomplishing more with the space. Cheers to Redmond.
@@MTBSPD It wasn't affordable housing that they were going to build in Kenmore, but low barrier housing. Low barrier housing means...well, forget about rent, but no matter what addiction, mental illness, or violence problem you have, you get housing. It doesn't take a genius to know why they wouldn't want to live next to that. Plymouth Housing is horrible: they were extremely complicit in killing that pregnant Asian woman a couple years back in beltown. If they are involved, then NIMBY is justified.
May have missed this in the video, but Prop 13 is important context for why all of these are in California.
It’s more complicated than this summarization, but basically anyone who has owned a home since the 70s can avoid increased property taxes.
Agree. Prop13 has a huge role in CA and its lack of housing. Prop13 deserves its own video.
A significant component of Prop 13 that isn't brought up enough is how the limits on property taxes messes with the revenue plans for California cities. Since a town can't make much money from property taxes, Prop 13 incentivizes towns to instead build much more office and commercial space which it is able to tax according to it's real market value. Because of this, there's a ton of space for tech campuses and office buildings throughout the Bay Area but no space to house the people who work there. So not only is housing development artificially depressed are a result of Prop 13 but commercial is overbuilt to make up the lost revenue throwing the entire real estate market in the region completely out of whack.
Most of the NIMBY complaints I hear is about cars. "There will be nowhere to park your car." "There's too much traffic already." I guess that's why there are huge parking lots around the train stations. "Park and Ride" really is no substitute for useful public transit and well-planned density.
Unless you build public transit, there's no way people are going to pay $100 for an Uber or $60 for parking just to have dinner with friends. They will wall off. Maybe that's why people don't go out as much anymore.
@@richardarriaga6271 walk. bike
Visited Seoul, South Korea recently and was impressed you could take a train to a national park. Feel like California has a lot of potential to do this with their proximity to national parks.
And Americans will travel to Europe where it is all walkable
They way I've heard NIMBY used is people who at first appear pro-environmentalism by fighting hard against a chemical plant or toxic waste dump near their homes, but when the builder agrees to move it somewhere else, their opposition ceases and they declare victory.
This process, when done over and over, results in the worst environmental offenders, and housing value reducers becoming concentrated in poor and minority neighborhoods. Capitalists will take the path of least resistance and that means they go where the incomes and political clout are lower.
NIMBY is bad for what it does not do, rather than for what it does.
Of course my perspective is shaped by the fact that I have lived in places where population growth and residential expansion have not been that big, but toxic chemical issues have been.
As a resident of one of those Dallas suburbs with decent density around our DART stations, I appreciate the shoutout! We still have a long way to go, and it’s been a tough fight against the NIMBYs, but from what I’ve seen, Richardson is planning on expanding TOD around all 4 of its DART stations, and Plano has more in store for its new Silver Line stations, too. We’ve lost some fights here and there, but the fight continues!
Literally moved to Richardson because of the Dart. We fight on!!
i appreciate this as a bay area native bc i can just send this to my parents to explain why i'll never be able to move out of their house
They say you can never go home again. It is the literal reality for many people that grew up in the Bay Area, but left for more affordable cities.
@@barryrobbins7694 Not to mention the cascading effect of those people increasing the cost of housing in more affordable areas.
You probably should plan moving outside of bay area, or the state altogether.
@@IvanIvanoIvanovich Yes. I knew people that would do 2 hour commutes - each way.
@@saiv46 …or become a neurosurgeon.
You should do a video on Japan. The fact that houses there aren't assets, in the same way that they are in America, has meant that density is a given and cheap rents are the norm.
Rent is not cheap, American rent is just absurd. Rent is still increasing in major cities and a large % of one's salary. Places where rent is going down or staying stable is usually from population decline. Land is given inherent value, but buildings on them are not. They are instead treated as depreciating assets because they break down over time and eventually need to be rebuilt to meet updated safety codes. Much of east Asia is similar. Earthquake prone countries tend not to treat houses as permanent appreciating assets, only the land they're built on.
@@4473021 it is probably also easier for native japanese or those who have lived in japan for a long time and become familiar to the language and culture
Japan went through a horrible property speculation bubble to get where they are today. The virtue was also earned through a couple of decades of stagnant economic growth, and a falling population.
@@seanmcdirmidyes, Japan learned their lesson. But the US clearly has not and will never learn.
Out of 47 prefectures only Aichi, Chiba, Fukuoka, Kanagawa, Okinawa, Saitama, Shiga and Tokyo recieved growth between the 2015 and 2020 census. 11 prefectures recieved higher negative growth than the highest growth (Tokyo) recieved positive growth 0.78% per year.
"Let's change it up dramatically and go to..."
"...the peninsula side of the bay area."
Damn, really got me with that one.
Here's an idea for those BART and Caltrain stations: Parking garages. Replace every single parking lot with an 8 story parking garage.
Think of how many cars we could house
NIMBYs only want low density parking
Pretty much what Dubiln is doing. Just opened a second multi-story parking garage at the Dublin-Pleasanton station (on the Dublin side).
Prop 13 cooked here
Interesting that Madison is doing great statically because Madison is still 5 years behind in terms of building enough housing, and there are tons of nimby’s rallying against zoning measures to allow more dense housing in single family only areas
Honestly can't name one city that doesn't have some sort of nimby group to stop new denser zoning policies
It probably helps that Wisconsin is still quite affordable and the commutable regions are low traffic (relatively) and not hard to get to.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed is king.
Houses, yes. Apartments, absolutely false.
Shocker: all of them are in CA. State is NIMBY central, desperately needs some new laws in place to promote affordable housing and restrictions on value increases.
No surprise here
There's a lot of wealthy people here or moving here and they usually get initiated by the locals into "Ma Home Values" club and never learn to really invest. They have the means and time to lobby or donate to lobbyists.
it's mostly left wing Democrats who have made these cities what they are
About twenty years ago I was part of a project to write scenarios for our city's future, good and bad. One city we studied was Miami, and I was on a team that went there and heard a wide variety of people talk about planning and development in the area. We had a presentation from the chief planner of the Metrorail heavy rail system who described why it has been a disappointment. Twenty years before our trip they built the first leg of the system, from downtown to Dadeland in the south. That leg was rated number one in ridership potential. Then they were blocked from building the second, third, and fourth legs by neighborhood and city opposition. They eventually built the least desirable leg, out to Hialeah, because it was the only one they could. It was really quite depressing.
I live in a rural retirement area less than 1.5 hours from Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington. The quickly recognizable trait of NIMBY's here is that they moved here flush with cash from a career spent in an urban area, which they are willing to spend on making sure that their new community is nothing like what they escaped when they moved here. They are quick to slam the door behind them when they arrive.
I would say a good 75% or so of environmental laws only protect NIMBY property values. That number is probably much higher for local environmental laws. If you poor or middle class, that fracking well 50ft from your backyard well is going in.
I grew up as a kid in the Silicon Valley in Los Gatos in a tract house that my parents had built new in the mid 1960s for $21,500. While I haven't live for decades now, the neighborhood largely looks the same but the house is now worth $2.5M. Clearly there's a problem.
What's crazy if the price your parent's house that they bought it for in the 1960's kept up with inflation it would have been around 230,077.88 today. Just goes to show housing costs are astronomical since they have outpaced inflation by a huge margin.
NIMBY: The feelings of the few outweigh the needs of the many.
When you're sitting on a 2 million dollar asset you bought for 100k in 1980, yeah you tend to be fiercely protective of that value.
@@mikeydude750Housing should never be an asset. You live there, but it's not a dragon hoard.
Cyclists fighting for a lane to the exclusion of parking for cars, defo the few outweighing the many. Human life is messy for sure.
@@delftfietser Uh, no. Using public right of way for convenient personal vehicle storage is the few giving everyone else the finger.
@elizabethhenning778 Everybody is the public. What cars are to cyclists in USA, bicycles and the clutter they cause by filling innumerable racks in public space are to pedestrians in the public space. It's mutual competition, space colonization, exclusion, and jealousy dressed up moral high ground and cherry picked reality that's very close to bad religion. Yes I am for bikes in the N.American space. However people should remember the good that comes with the auto, under certain limits, similar to fat tired e bikes.
Proposition 13 and its consequences has been a disaster for California
As an S.F. resident, I’m going to start playing this video from the rooftops of all the mentioned BART stations.
Related: SF has approved something like only 15 housing permits for 2024 so far, and only 1 was multi unit (a duplex). So tired of civic leaders in our state pretending there isn’t ample opportunity to at least make a dent in the housing shortage.
There were a couple propositions on the spring ballot about housing that I am hoping help. I am especially curious to see whether the proposition that will exempt taxes on development of commercial space to turn into housing will pay out.
@@CafeLu yes and combined with states initiatives to spur development there is hope. Long ways to go though
I lived in San Mateo and Redwood City for seven of those years in your survey. It's where I started down this urbanism rabbit hole. They definitely are building housing units, but they're certainly not affordable. It's just more housing. It has many walkable neighborhoods with some missing middle housing. The neighborhoods are actually quite dense; lots aren't big and houses are still close together, though not touching. Many SFH have been modified to have multiple units. It's actually a good example of how suburbs can embrace density. They got rid of the old race track to build... expensive housing. They rebuilt the CalTrain station and put mixed use properties adjacent to it (though they could have done more housing and less office space, but I get it). The problem is... the demand is still sky high. That's not going to change unless you literally start bulldozing million dollar homes for large multi-units and that's probably not off the table. I've seen small/old homes get renovated to have more multi units. But... it's still not enough. There are some obvious opportunities in a few places, but that's really on the margin. They're building. But they can't build fast enough and they definately aren't building SFH. Even those neighborhoods that look like they're SFH - most are duplexes and triplexes.
Even expensive housing helps...it frees up pressure on other units. Do enough of that and the average apartment from 1980 can be pretty affordable. (They're not doing enough of course.)
@@matthays9497 Except when it doesn't. Because all it does is displace people from cheaper apartments that are upgraded to the more expensive ones.
And they are in the planning stages for redesigning the Hilldale Mall area to include more housing and transport. I grew up in San Mateo and parts of town (Delaware just off 92) I now get lost because of all the mid-rise housing complexes. It's a good thing. I just wonder how long it will take to create more density along El Camino or the like.
@@terriellis3697 They've been debating the housing project on Delaware just off the 92 (the shopping center with the Trader Joes) for over a decade. So who knows how long things will take. I grew up in Detroit and am used to seeing vacant lots and parking lots frequently. San Mateo and RWC are the exact opposite. If I saw any fenced off grass I would wonder when a housing unit would go up there. My only wish/gripe now is there should be an overpass over El Camino between the Hillsdale CalTrain into Hillsdale mall. I used to live in one of the Bay Meadows buildings after they opened up 31st; crossing el camino to get to the mall was the only unpleasant part. It was actually quite nice living around there and not needing a car to do basic things.
I remember an incident in my city where a developer wanted to put in townhouses on an abandoned piece of land in the mid-90's. People complained when they found out the houses were going to be priced at $150,000 "What type of people were going to be living there." Several years before that I purchased my house for $72,500, nice to know my neighbours thought of me as undesirable.
Money doesn't buy class, but they believe it does: for people who clearly have none they will need that belief.
Cool story. That's not the reason people are opposed to more development. There's more noise, more pollution, more congestion, loss of open spaces, more traffic, more crowded. Trying to paint people as Bond villains for having their own opinions says a lot about you.
@@diegoflores9237 But that was the reason they gave for opposing the development, none of ones you mentioned
San Jose native - every homeowner would be proud to on this list. They want to have the high cost home that they can sell and cash out when they retire. But then they don't sell when they retire.
Also, yes, I fully expected this to be a list of Bay Area cities.
I am a teenager living in socal, it is so frustrating seeing adults complain about housing being built knowing that I am not even going to be able to live in my childhood city when I get older because of their actions.
Exactly. I’m a young adult from LA, and I’m almost certain that I won’t be able to live in LA once I move out of my parent’s house simply due to it being too expensive and there not being enough housing. I’ll probably be forced to live farther out in the suburbs/exurbs in the IE, the Central Valley, or worse case scenario be pretty much forced out of state. It’s sad, since no one should be forced out of their own hometown/home state.
NIMBYs and the California government just make things 10x worse. I’m not interested in moving to another state since California’s my home and what I’m used to, and moving states is just such a big lifestyle change/culture shock. Plus all the anti-Californian sentiment everywhere in the country makes it even more unattractive to leave, since people judge you harshly simply based on where you were born. Hopefully YIMBYism can get some traction and we can start building way more housing, because lord knows California hasn’t taken building housing seriously since the damn 1950s-1960s.
I’m super surprised that San Francisco isn’t on this list. But despite the high rent, it can be actually more affordable than much of the Bay Area especially considering it’s the only city you can survive without a car.
In CA
Can confirm
San Francisco scored very high on another of his videos, which looked at your disposable income after allotting for rent and the average number of cars per person in that city * cost of cars.
Yeah I guess if you don't ever want to leave SF and go somewhere there isn't a human poop map...
@@mikeydude750 you can tell someone has never been to SF when they imagine the fox news memes are accurate
I have a friend who lived in Sunnyvale. He got a job as a programmer straight out of college and the multi-national tech company he worked for moved him up there, required him to live in the area, set him up with a $3500 rent for a 1bd/1.5 bth apartment and gave him a 4k monthly relocation stipend. Stuff like this really adds up and makes the whole Silicon Valley area ridiculously expensive.
Those without houses, the 18-35 yr old have low turnout rates, and when they do, they seldom leave for state and local government, unless this changes, old NIMBYs will continue to make their lives a living hell.
A lot of them also don’t understand that the way to bring down prices is with more supply. That means candidates that run on “public housing only” or “rent control” or “block all housing that isn’t X% affordable units” often get a lot of votes from the people who are pissed off about high rents.
You have an interesting vocal tone and drop off. It gives the feeling of one person starting the sentence and a second person finishing it.
The shot at 9:12 of what appear to be solar panels surrounded by vast expanses of parking seems like an almost paradigmatic illustration of greenwashing.
they almost get it
I’m from Fremont, born in Hayward, went to school in San Leandro, and I can definitely confirm that the housing circumstances have barely changed in 30 years. Hayward has probably done the best to increase housing density around the Hayward BART station, but the south Hayward station is about the same as it was when I was a kid in the 90s. The attitude of many homeowners in the area is the root of the problem. Even the modest increases in housing is met with skepticism and hostility. I remember my parents lamenting the construction of new housing as a nuisance, an eyesore, and a traffic hazard. I think their minds are changing now that none of their adult children can afford to live anywhere close to them. I think most people are afraid of change but I hope we all can be brave and create a livable future for ourselves.
Living in a beach community with limited available land, so many rally against building just one or two small, multi-unit, affordable residences. These same people then complain that their kids can't afford houses in the town now due to the increased prices, with one even commenting, "Don't sell your house to a rich person!" Really, how does one even respond to this nonsense.
In Houston we have brothels, random isolated giant skyscrapers, and businesses handling explosive chemicals (that occasionally blow up) plonked down randomly in the middle of urban residential neighborhoods!
There’s a local activist in Seattle who keeps saying Houston is the ideal we should be working towards. She talks a lot about the diversity in n Houston, implying that anyone who disagrees with her is racist. I would love to see a serious discussion of the housing situation and policies in Houston
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@@npgibson69 I actually love Houston. You have to take it on its own terms, though. It is not much to look at. It is easy to dismiss it as an ugly ramshackle monstrosity. The lack of zoning is part of the character of the city. Literally every few years some factory located in the middle of a residential neighborhood blows up. That’s bad, but there are also a LOT of neighborhoods here that are just completely racially scrambled, in a way I have not seen elsewhere in the United States. I am suspicious that the lack of zoning is part of what allows that scrambling to happen. Zoning is often used to keep “the wrong people” out. It is also used to restrict housing. Housing here is cheap.
In 2017 hurricane Harvey flooded large areas of the city. There was essentially a near complete breakdown of civil authority across large parts of the city for several days. And what happened? Riots? Looting? No… people in unflooded areas showed up with boats and helped evacuate stranded people. Neighborhoods organized civil militias to guard against outsiders coming in to loot. When police were eventually able to get into the affected areas they just attached themselves to the existing militias to make sure abuses didn’t happen. As the waters receded armies of volunteers showed up to help muck out houses. The volunteers were from unflooded areas but also from areas that were still underwater. And what was really striking was the racial diversity of both the people needing help and the volunteers helping them. Go find some videos and you will see what I mean. For example, “BEME, after the flood”.
The marches after George Floyd’s death were peaceful here. No big deal. Houston was the first large city in the US to elect an openly gay mayor. Not that people elected her because she was gay… they elected her because she promised to straighten out the city’s finances. People mostly did not care that she was gay. It’s still Texas. It’s pretty conservative, but not in the “shove religion down your throat” way. It’s more the libertarian “let people get their work done” way, which is out of fashion in both parties now.
That California shows up as the state for ALL of the cities that meet the high NIMBY criteria should make us turn to what state-level policy leads to this NIMBYism. And I think the answer there is obvious: it's prop 13's limits on property tax increases. For homeowners in most of the country, rising home values are countered by equally rising property tax rates. This makes hyper-focus on raising home values less desirable so while NIMBYs exist and do concern themselves with home values, they do not get nearly as much support as they do in California. So as California ran out of land to easily expand outward with it's home construction (which bypasses NIMBY options for control), the state ran out of homes to produce. Thus the cycle of home rises. NIMBYism that runs out of expansive land to build on but also no property tax limits winds up more like the Pacific Northwest. Still full of NIMBYs, still seeing high prices, but with substantially less severity than California's problem.
Which should make everyone REALLY nervous that local and some state lawmakers across the US are starting to talk about putting limits on increases to property tax assessments to soften the blow to rising home values. Many of these areas, like in the Sunbelt states like Texas, Florida, and Georgia, may still have land to expand outwards meaning it will take time for this to get California levels of bad, but the more these assessment hikes get limited the greater the NIMBYism we can expect going forward. And I know the complaint is that not limiting assessment hikes will lead to people with low incomes but now in possession of a high value asset to be displaced, but getting displaced with a large pay out is way less bad than people winding up living on the streets because local political incentives have killed housing construction.
Texas and Florida's politicians in particular love to dunk on California's present leadership while studiously repeating California's mistakes from 40-70 years ago that are the real root cause of their present problems.
Prop 13 was a sweetheart deal for California corporations that tagged on a "think of the old people who will get kicked out of their homes!" clause to it and largely pushed THAT part as part of the campaign to get support for it. Let's also not forget the Mello-Roos were invented to get around this cap and screw over new homeowners out of this deal because of the funding shortfall that older generations created.
I think it's interesting looking at the other side in a city like Chicago where high property taxes keeps property values lower on paper. Shows how different policy can have different impacts
@@graytabbycat Chicago is an interesting case because the taxes aren't high enough to depopulate the city but are high enough to suppress valuations. But if you want a REALLY opposite example to prop 13, you should look up how Detroit deliberately raised property taxes targeting it's poorest residents to force people to leave (in order to make it cheaper for "urban renewal" to replace them) and it caused a spiral effect for decades that the city is only just now stabilizing from.
I think the explanation of NIMBY motivation is really incomplete. Removing building restrictions lowers *average* land value, but it doesn't lower it everywhere.
I promise, if it was suddenly legal to build tall apartment buildings everywhere in the Bay Area, homeowners in these cities would make fortunes. If it's a $2m plot and all you can build on it is a single family house, a developer would pay far more if they could put a bunch of apartments on it.
They're not NIMBYs to keep their property values high, because YIMBY policies would increase their property value even more. It's about nostalgia, racism, classism, parking, traffic, etc.
It's the distant commuter towns that would lose property value. Nobody's commuting an hour+ if they can live cheaply closer to the core.
Good point
You're overestimating their intelligence with regards to home values rising. Very few would actually know that selling their property to a developer that would pay 3-4x would give them a payday. And it's not just the sale price, plenty of NIMBYs own apartments and they don't want competition, another apartment complex, being built. Never take what NIMBYs say at face value. There is always an ulterior motive and that's money. They will never outright say that anymore (in the past they did, racist HOAs paraded that around when excluding black people).
And intense dislike of both outsiders and rich people, on the left
Yep. Densifying an area actually INCREASES land value.
You want your property value to go up? Make it so that your property could potentially house ten times as many people if the right developer can buy and redevelop it.
There can be specific circumstances when density lowers a property's value but it is not during a building boom or in places where there's tons of pent up red hot demand.
I love your channel. Keep these posts coming. I thought I'd jump in here with a little perspective on why CA may have a majority of these NIMBY locations, and from the viewpoint of a homeowner. I'm not sure if many of these CA cities mentioned grew in the ways more typical of Eastern or Mid-Western cities. Other than for San Francisco, high urban density does not seem to have been the norm even a 100 years ago. CA was very much a "grow out" type of urban environment. There was plenty of land to do so, so the thought was to keep expanding. While in places like LA, much of that was facilitated by transportation infrastructure, it was the car that really accelerated that grow out ethos.
As more and more of CA "urban" areas grew out (I would argue CA may have never really been "urban" in the ways one might think of it from an Eastern urban area point of view), by the time the 60's and 70's came around, this started to bump up against a growing environmental movement which sought to control or stop urban sprawl. These were all "positive" things in my book because preserving the natural resources and beauty of CA is a noble thing. But this came at a cost (literally and figuratively).
The environmental regulations with respect to construction and urban growth have often been used offensively by NIMBY protagonists to prevent further urban development in the areas already zoned for housing, in sort of a twisted contradiction to what these regulations really were designed to do. A perfect example is when UC Berkeley wanted to expand enrollment, and planned to build multiunit dorms to accommodate the new students. This was met with intense and extreme opposition by Berkeley residents....ostensibly liberal, pro-environment residents. Their claim was that such increased density in that area would be an environmental disaster. Eventually, I believe the plans were approved after much delay, and then the UC faced massive protests when they planned on removing People's Park to build the dorms. That caused more delays.
Tax rules have also played a part in this. When Prop 13 passed, and essentially froze property tax rates for long term owners of property, an inordinate amount of wealth was tied to property. But it was tied in a way that also handcuffed a lot of residents. You could keep your old tax rate, until you bought a new home, and then you would be taxed at the FMV of the property new house when bought. This means a potential huge and immediate increase in your property tax. That could make a move essentially cost-prohibitive. The amount of property turnover decreased, or the incentive to hold on to your property increased.
Similar issues are developing in Australia, where perverse tax structures are creating a huge housing problem in that country as well.
Finally, with real wage growth stagnating, and most people not able to participate in the equity markets in the same way that high net worth individuals can (i.e., using lots of disposable income), and tax incentives baked in, property appreciation is really the only true asset growth class if you were lucky enough to have owned a house in the past 10-15 years. Again, you wanted to hold on to property instead, decreasing turnover, and increasing property prices in the absence of new growth (which is being hampered, at least in some ways, by the reasons mentioned above).
Then comes other structural issues.
While you showed a lot of satellite pictures of BART and CalTrain stations built amongst low rise structures and parking spaces, the fact they exist at all has been a major major achievement. As you know, the cost of building rail-based mass transportation systems in urban areas, even if there was no NIMBY, is astronomically high. If you want urban upward construction and high density housing, there is the chicken and the egg. No one can live in these areas without the infrastructure to get these people where they need to go. But you can't build an transportation infrastructure if there is no ridership to be able to support the costs of building one first. So what can you do if you are into urban planning? The parking structures are there because that is the #1 mode of transportation in CA, by far. You need to incentivize people into at least traveling a shorter distance by car, and try to live closer to the rail infrastructure. Then, perhaps, you can encourage enough people and developers to go through the entire regulatory and cost hurdles to build more higher density housing close to these rail centers.
You have to start somewhere. You can't just say "POOF" see how badly these areas look and have been designed. There are so many things working against high density urbanization and infrastructure, especially in an area of the country that really never had it, that it's amazing how any effort to increase housing and urbanization even gets done.
NIMBY is only part of the problem, or maybe it's just a symptom of all the baggage that has developed over the decades out here in the West.
Madison! As someone who moved here within the last decade, it helps that there are so many young people, both in the university and out of it. Millennials in general seem to be YIMBYs, even if we manage to own our own homes. So many people bike and the bus network is good.
There are some nimbys tho. They showed up to a city meeting about expanding the bike network and allowing higher density construction recently. Nowhere is safe
Why build new and diverse housing, when you can blame homeless people. Let’s blame utterly powerless people
For such a Liberal state, California sure does have a lot of NIMBYs 😅
Any place where a disproportionate fraction of "wealth" is in home values, there is going to be a lot of people interested in defending them tooth and nail. Being "liberal" is irrelevant. Also, you might be interested in this trivia, the state with the most people who voted for Trump in 2020? California. There are a lot of republicans in California.
@@knutthompson7879 capitalism and Zionism is Uniparty in this country.
Well that depends on how you use the word "liberal". If you use it accurately instead of broadly anyone left of Regan then it makes perfect sense. Liberals still ultimately uphold capitalism and only have light regulation of the market with minor concessions to the poor with some degree of welfare. Within such a belief system it makes sense to have a vague sympathy for the down trodden but also protect your own wealth with zeal.
Hah. It doesn't help they passed a law capping property taxes under a conservative governor.
@@awedbystander6823Prop 13 was passed by ballot initiative over the opposition of the governor at the time, Jerry Brown. But the point still stands in that it was one of the last great right wing successes in California, which used to be a swing state.
Despite only having traveled to California some twenty times in my life, I was surprised at the number of these cities that I've visited. It shows that you can be a NIMBY in an ritzy upscale neighborhood, a cute, charming area with walkable districts, and in a boring, blah suburb of over overpriced housing.
You forgot my hometown of Redondo beach / Hermosa Beach
Our mayor is a deranged frothing NIMBY who said "there is no housing shortage in our city"
He was elected mayor by opposing the teardown of a DERELICT POWER PLANT and building housing on the land instead
They use that powerplant to shoot movies sometimes, that's it.
Sunnyvale, CA, definitely deserves the title. The residents STORMED the planning commission meeting when they suggested ONE new apartment complex.
Their whole attitude is to never give an inch. So if the tides turn take the whole mile. Don't appease.
I was just in San Francisco this week and found myself wondering how much the city experiences the consequences of the state’s housing crisis due to the policy decisions of the surrounding municipalities. San Francisco is dense and well built out but this video I think supports my hunch that some of the city’s poor reputation for homelessness rates are due to factors outside its control.
How is housing outside of its control? SF permitted just four houses in April!
@@Secretlyanothername In 2023, 2,066 newly completed units were added to San Francisco's housing stock. Down from 5,000 per year in 2020 or so. SF has 800k population, Silicone Valley has 8,000,000. Silicone Valley in total seems to be building 5,000/yr, so SF has 10% the population, but 50-90% of the new units built.
@@SecretlyanothernameBecause half the country ships their homeless by bus to California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona. Of course you're going to have a homelessness problem.
I recently started commuting by Bart into San Leandro.
It's a nice place where most people could depend on a bike and bart. It would really help lower cost of living.
It's a small place and the downtown is nice.
I only got to experience San Leandro for a couple days, but felt similarly. It's not "there" yet, but it's easy to imagine it densified, based on the small set of the Mission Revival-ish apartments along beautiful tree lined narrow-ish streets.
I have lived in San Leandro for several years and haven’t experienced the NIMBYism. I can walk to several trailer parks and a church that’s building some transitional housing. Could it be that we are just landlocked and don’t have enough developer interest to densify yet?
Having experienced California for most of my life, it is infuriating seeing so much land used for so little. And then people try to justify the lack of housing or basically any building taller than 3 floors with "earthquakes", or god-forbid, thinking that you need cars to get around, so you need this many (or more!) parking lots and flat empty area. Then people wonder why summers are getting hotter and why there's a lack of water, hardly a wonder with so much concrete and asphalt poured over everything :/
Re: 'earthquakes', have them talk to the Japanese.
It's not just that the policy makers are only listening to single family housing owners, it's that policy makers are themselves single family housing owners. Seriously, how many lawmakers are renters?
The policy makers aren't that poor. They likely own several apartment complexes or CRT too. Their personal home value is peanuts.
was really surprised boston and its metro cities/towns like cambridge, brookline, milton, belmont and newton didn’t make any list.
massachusetts passed a law where multi family housing has to be rezoned for areas with a train stop and multiple towns went foaming at the mouth to protest it.
despite not saying ANY even have to be built. they just have to ZONED for more than single family housing
also boston’s sorta biotech bust over the last year with tons if vacant lab space…. rent is still marginally higher than the last year
Some of those towns are bad, but places like Lexington, and basically anywhere outside 128, is far worse (worse than anything in the Bay Area in terms of sprawl)
Woo I win! Sunnyvale resident here and yep it’s like that. New housing is being built but none of it is cheap.
Who needs a home when you have golf
Many years ago, George Carlin said golf courses were the best places to build low-cost housing. Truer today than it was when he first spoke it.
Golf is actually quite nice when you need to fly in VC partners and international partners. Gets funding done
Growing up in the Bay Area in a very competitive school district, we had state standardized testing each year that didn't really matter for grades or academic progress, high scores really only make your public school look better. When I was in high school, students had caught on and weren't trying on these tests. That lowered the scores for our schools and school district, and some homeowners were pissed that we were supposedly endangering their home values by not putting in full effort on these tests. Just gets more and more absurd in hindsight.
The Bay Area dug itself into a deep hole during its explosive growth after WW2, one that even the most YIMBY local governments have a hard time climbing out of. All we can do is keep plugging away at improving things, or get out.
California born and raised. If I didn't have basically all my friends and family here I would leave, and this video affirms that. Hell, I might anyway depending on how things go.
FYI. San Leandro technically has two BART stations. The Bay Fair station even has an approved TOD plan in place to convert the parking lot and adjacent dilapidated mall into mixed use housing/office/retail.
Many politicians blame taxes and liberalism as the reasons that people have been leaving California. City Nerd has shown the real reason.
There is plenty of California that isn't NIMBY SF or LA. You don't have to go all the way to an Arizona suburb for that.
@@mrbloodmuffins You could get a 1,200 sqft place in Rialto, CA for $500k or one in Mesa, AZ for $300k. And the Mesa one probably has a shorter drive to work. You could spend less in Blythe, but there’s no job market there.
This right here! I left because I'll never be able to save money in my hometown!
Um what? Politics was the second most popular reason for Californians leaving the state, most of the people leaving lived in red areas like central valley
I am completely unsurprised that the entire list is in California, the state's laws give NIMBYs tremendous rights. I'm also not surprised that the entire top 10 is in the bay area or that Sunnyvale (home of Apple) is #1. The bay area tech NIMBYs live in a completely different world than the rest of us. The only reason why BART and CalTrain were even able to be built is they were built before the rich tech NIMBYs were at the level they are now. You could never build BART or the Penninsula Corridor today it would get NIMBYd to death like CAHSR is getting now. As it was the Penninsula Corridor electrification project almost got NIMBYd because one town on the route tried to claim that the catenary wires were an eyesore and they wanted to route run by battery trains. They should be happy that the loud, ancient diesel trains currently running the Penninsula corridor are being replaced by quiet, fast, modern electric trains.
As a priced out bay area kid I greatly appreciate the dunking on the land use outside BART stations.
Pre watch:
Lemme guess: SF bay area and 90% of all white flight destination cities 🤔
I love the slow flyovers of golf courses and parking lots. Man these are some silly cities
Massachusetts (AKA California East) won't be too far behind the way things are going.
MA housing is absolutely insane. Draw a circle of a 90 minute commute around Boston and double the reasonable asking price of any housing unit inside of that.
I long for the days where I spent 1/3 as much to live on the Madison isthmus and be able to bike to work and walk to ice skating and use a timely and reliable bus system. MA is just sad by comparison.
The problem in Southern California at least is infrastructure. Traffic is absolutely dog shit around here and legislators and planners refuse to build a half way decent infrastructure to support anything.
It should not take an hour to drive 10 miles.
Sounds like alot of the distance between where you came from and where you are go is taken up by single family housing instead of destinations.
That's just LA and the Bay Area. Orange County is actually denser than LA County and it's pretty easy to drive 20 miles here. Ironically, Orange County is more conservative than either two.
As a Bay Area local (from a city not on that list, we're on pace to do our share and go from 100K pop to 150K over 10 years), I need to point out the elephant AND the room - the Bay and the Mountains. You're seeing the aftereffects of extreme growth 40 years ago, before we understood growth patterns, hitting the physical limits of the mountains and the Bay. During the early boom (60s-80s), the houses spread in no time to fill all large land parcels. More recent growth has spilled over the mountains to places like Livermore, 40+ miles from the job centers. And there are almost no farms or fields left - the developers of the last generation ran the houses all the way up to the point where the mountains are too steep/unstable to build.
There's a lot of infill going on, and more in the pipeline in most of these places (note that Fremont used to be the end of the line until about 5 years ago; South Fremont & beyond are brand new and developments around them are still in the pipe). But the stupid prices hurt most infill applications - it's a HUGE cost to acquire land, and it's really hard to get a high enough return to justify the project for most investors.
This is the dilemma of most of the California cities you've selected - with no room, it's harder to grow. And the fact that your index turned up exclusively those cities, including cities like Redwood City that are working hard on infill, should have alerted you to the fact that your index is still severely flawed.
This is literally the root cause of basically all of California’s problems.
I’m from NorCal and this is pretty obvious if you live around here. Our city had 2 competing initiatives to deal with homelessness. The first provided money for housing and services. The second had a number of penalties designed to make the lives of homelessness people miserable. Guess which one won.
CityNerd mentioned DC in the closing. For YIMBY, I will highlight that the Virginia suburbs of DC have been working hard to overcome NIMBYism. Arlington and Alexandria have essentially eliminated single family zoning. Fairfax county has drastically increased allowable zoning densities adjacent to the new silver line metro stations (6 of which have essentially zero parking) with residential skyscrapers (30+ stories) being built adjacent to the stations. There’s also office to residential building conversions underway. Many of these changes are very recent and take time, but things are moving in the right direction here.
So while this video accurately portrayed the horrendous nature of the CA housing market, there are some signs of hope elsewhere.
NIMBYs make my life harder. I’m disabled and sometimes what I need (especially with public transportation) lines up with what they want. While allies are usually good, if one’s concerns allies are NIMBYs, one’s concerns are often time ignored.
Just a few reasons NIMBY is so terrible in the bay area:
In the 1970’s there was a plan to PAVE OVER the BAY. No lie. A few local housewives started a movement to stop insane development. Before this the state government was run by land speculators and developers. The movement was successful. Unfortunately it morphed into “any development is bad.”
In the 1970’s it finally became illegal to put restrictive covenants in mortgages. Before then your mortgage literally said you cannot sell to African Americans (. Not the term they used obviously) may also prohibit Jews or Latinos. So once the neighborhood was open to everyone the price of homes and “no growth” was used as a stand-in for making sure “those people “ cannot live in the area. Every time a new building is proposed the locals freak out about “ those people “ moving to their fair city.
Another tactic is to require all units to have dedicated parking at least one spot per unit. Plus screaming about traffic.
Thank you for providing important context. The anti-development left is a huge part of the problem
I live in the North Bay. I completely agree with all of the bay cities and just laughed thru a lot of this bc you finally validated what I’ve been feeling for years. This is why I’m going into planning and this field.
I'd love to see a NIMBY analysis focused on transit instead of only housing construction. Could be interesting.
In the meantime, bless my native Orange County. You gave us Nixon and tract homes!
MV resident here, I remember that time when there was going to be an apartment built near the city hall, but got shut down by "Stop the Monster", which is an anti-housing organization that shuts down housing projects in Mission Viejo, which is terrible.
The main reason they oppose these housing projects is because the Nimby's complained that more housing = "more traffic".
Instead MV spent millions on widening I-5.
RE: BART stations, Fremont was long the southern terminus of the system so folks from the eastern part of the South Bay went there to catch trains to Oakland or San Francisco. Warm Springs/South Fremont station used to be surrounded by industry until it became the temporary end of the line (before the expansion to Santa Clara County). So all of the housing around South Fremont (almost exclusively low-rise condos and townhomes) was built in the last 10-15 years. Same goes for the areas near the Great Mall and BART station in Milpitas (ny hometown), and the current southern terminus at Berryessa (East San Jose) - formerly commercial and industrial land converted into condos and townhomes in the last 5-10 years.
For better and worse, housing across Silicon Valley is being built this way because there's nowhere else to expand - as heavier industry and old tech companies consolidate or vacate, they're replaced by 5-over-1 style apartment and condo complexes. But virtually none it comes affordably, let alone cheap (which is why I moved out of the area 20+ years ago).
Currently live in Redwood City next to the Caltrain station and although we’re not staying for much longer,still kind feel the need to defend it, as it not nearly as bad as the towns like Palo Alto/Atherton/Mountain View, all towns closer to the university I work at. Redwood City has some of the highest density housing outside of SF/Oakland, and has plans to expand out its offered middle-low housing options dramatically in the upcoming decade, I don’t think the stats you used capture its trajectory well. Yeah there are a ton of nimbys at our city council that I’m kind of fed up with/one of the reasons we’re leaving, but the town is definitely far more progressive in its housing plan than other towns on this list. That being said, a low income housing project that was years in the making was burned down yesterday, which was just kind of salt in the wound as we prepare to leave.
I was surprised to see Redwood City on the NIMBY list. There are lots of apartment buildings and condos that were built over the past ten years in the downtown area close to the Caltrain station.
I want to note that high vacancy rates can merely indicate that those properties are often being owned by institutional investors and are vacant because they’re asking for a huge rent and are content sitting on the asset because it’s driving up prices.
I've ran every street in Sunnyvale as well as several adjacent towns. The 1950s suburban sprawl is like 95% or the town. And based on the people Ive seen and stuff in the front yards, its hardly ever families with kids. Seems to be mostly people in the 50-100 year age range who got their first home before the last decades of housing price increase.
I currently rent a townhome which I could never afford because even if I was gifted a 20% down payment, the mortgage would be 3x what I currently pay for rent.
BTW, San Leandro has two Bart stations as well. San Leandeo, and Bay Fair 😊. Warm Springs/South Fremont has TONS of nee housing in the pipeline. Fremont will also be building a 3rd Bart station, Irvington.
Just fwiw, I bought a Nebula lifetime membership to show willing and support all of you, but I mostly watch on YT because it's just a better viewing experience. I have YT premium, though.
Especially for content discovery, it's easier for me to find cool stuff to watch on Nebula by watching RUclips and hearing people discuss their videos on nebula than it is to just use Nebula to find things.
Overheard in Vermont: “We’re BANANAs: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.”
👍
Wow
I was expecting Cambridge to make the list.
You should look at Japan's zoning laws how they allow developers to build almost anything and can set up shop anywhere. Tokyo has more housing permits issued than the entire state of California. There was never a housing shortage in Tokyo since 1968 when the city planning law was enacted and why the city is affordable compared to many major cities and add in the real estate collapse in the 90s. Housing is a depreciating asset like cars. They have low life span with new building codes written to protect against strong earthquakes.
Also look at how apartments are built due to the two stair law.
That and it's really hard to buy real estate there as a foreigner. You can't have some Saudi prince obtain a fiefdom and be a landlord then using those same profits to lobby the government.
As a YIMBY resident of San Jose, I am not surprised at this list unfortunately.
One thing that struck me is that just going by raw rent and housing prices can potentially bias towards simply expensive places to live. I wonder if we'd get different results if instead of taking dollar amounts for rent and home prices, if we took them as a function of the median income in those cities?
Harry Potter and The Chamber of NIMBY Horrors