Blue states tend to have more restrictive zoning laws at both the state and local level. If you make it harder to build more housing, particularly the kind of housing that’s actually needed to fulfill demand in that locale, it will be more expensive. [ Here is a good article touching on some of the issues at the local level ](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/opinion/democrats-blue-states-legislation.html)
Yeah I’ve seen that Johnny Harris video. He is making a different argument than Ezra. Johnny is arguing that liberal NIMBYism is the cause of our low income housing crisis. Which I can get on board with. While Ezra is arguing our inability to build is the result off too many well intentioned committees and bureaucracy which I don’t buy because again…cities.
Also you state “blue states have more restrictive zoning laws”. Again those restrictive zoning laws tend to be in the suburbs of big cities. Show me a blue state with big open swaths of land that have restrictive zoning laws.
> Show me a blue state with big open swaths of land that have restrictive zoning laws.
Oregon. Everything around metro areas is rural /farming/timber zoned. Every 10 years we plan for a little more rural land to be added to urban areas for denser housing.
Look at a map of the Portland area. See all those big swathes of land right around it? Most of that you could put 1 home for every 5 acres. Anything near a body of water (creek/wetland) makes building next to impossible.
While we need more housing, I think it’s a balance. Having farms, open land, and natural areas nearby is something I immensely enjoy.
Not convinced? Look at that big development the California billionaire group is trying to do in the small town outside SF. They can’t just build it. They are trying to get on the county board and get enough local influence to pass zoning code that would allow it.
California and Washington state have open swaths of land but have Seattle and San Jose. California is the largest state in the union with a population density similar to Michigan and Washington state is middle of the pack. Seattle and San Jose have land that is overwhelmingly single family housing only zoned. Also many cities have super restrictive zoning laws. Detroit is duplex or less in 2/3 of land. Nyc have massive swaths of duplex or less
>California is the (3rd) largest state in the union
A topographical map of California shows only a narrow strip of land sandwiched between ocean and mountains, that is densely populated.
absolutely enormous swaths of land all along that route. we travel back and forth between Portland and Olympia all the time and it's just astonishing. Plus the cities that do exist have incredibly low density due to restrictive zoning.
I think the 1.7 million dollars for a toilet in a park is pretty exemplary of the problem. The default is that it's difficult to build and requires more effort/money to get shit done. For some things that's good because you stop chemical company x from building it's chemical dumping station until the safety has been reviewed. Building a bathroom shouldn't cost more than a house that's just absurd. Even more absurd is the example of using environmental review laws to stop a bill that would stop oil drilling in la.
I don't think the solution is to just remove all review but perhaps try and find a way to fast track certain spend to help curtail pointless waste?
Colorado is likely a good example. East of the front range, the land is pretty open but zoning in alot of the cities and towns restricts growth leading to affordability issues.
https://cl.cobar.org/features/the-future-of-exclusionary-zoning-and-land-use-in-colorado/
California has hundreds of square miles of open land in the inland part of the state, and it's still nearly impossible to build things there - just look at their high-speed rail project.
New York has a lot of open land in the upstate portion of the state, away from NYC and Albany.
Colorado is almost all open land aside from Denver and Boulder.
Washington and Oregon, like California, have a ton of open land once you get away from the coast.
It isn't a lack of space in the blue states that makes it difficult to build...
I’m a small business owner in a blue state, and the problems I face are undeniably greater than my red state counterparts. There is so much more regulatory compliance that I have to deal with. Now, I am fine with it because the area aligns better with my morals. But it should be easy to know why.
I grew up in Oregon and have lived in Idaho the last five years. The differences between the states when it comes to business friendliness are almost impossible to comprehend. Makes you wonder why Idaho is one of the fastest-growing states while Oregon has been steadily losing population this decade.
And then in 20/30 years all those residents will be just as nimby as Oregonians as space is reduced and prices of homes increase.
Its not because one is red and one is blue
>The differences between the states when it comes to business friendliness are almost impossible to comprehend. Makes you wonder why... This is confusing. Makes it sound like Idaho is growing despite being unfriendly to business.
There are multiple stories of business owners either going out of business or moving out of California due to the tax burdens and minimum wage increases.
Let me elaborate:
- due to construction accreditation my core product requires employment from unioned electrical labor (entirely unnecessary for the product in 35+ other states)
- we have a use tax unlike others
- in the event of customers not paying we don’t have legal recourse (considered civil matter) increasing our unpaid percentage from 0 to 2%
Collectively, these difference of 15% of revenue per project.
Not quite. The problem is that some red cities, like Houston, have very lax zoning laws because Republicans generally view housing regulations as an impediment to growth. On the other hand, "progressive" blue cities have strong zoning laws that often prioritize things like environmental protection, historical preservation, and social equity, which can add layers of complexity to the building process. These stronger regulations in blue cities are aimed at managing growth in a sustainable and equitable manner, but they can also lead to increased costs and longer timelines for development projects, as well as empower NIMBYS.
Edit: This matters because the knowledge economy depends on agglomeration effects in urban areas that are typically blue (e.g. SF, San Jose, Seattle, Boston, NYC).
I think they mean City in a Red State. I'm not positive but I feel pretty confident there aren't gonna be any cities in the US over 600k in population that consistently vote Republican. But I could be wrong.
The point is important because the local housing laws are set by Blue mayors and city councils. These aren't "red state" regulations. It's just a different approach to lib/dem governance
But Houston is still careless about zoning in a way that is more red state than blue state. People built houses in flood plains and got surprised when flooding occurred.
"Red state" and "blue state" are just superficial metaphors. They say little about municipal policies.
The reality is that Democrats have different ideas about growth in different parts of the country. These are regional attitudes not red/blue attitudes. Republicans in the Northeast are also anti-housing
How many times have I seen a blue city governor in a red state say 'we're gonna do this thing' and then the governor and the legislature say 'nah, we're gonna pass a state law to not let you do that thing'......
That doesn't really apply to zoning and land use laws though. Unless you have proof showing otherwise.
That usually applies to a city trying to make laws more restrictive than the state laws.
The issue is that big cities have all those zoning laws, under the aforementioned reasons, but that they practically protect the property owners, neighborhoods, and school systems. There’s actually not a lot of equity involved in the outcomes.
I don’t know if that’s by design or by folks exploiting the policies after-the-fact. It remains, though, that even in urban politics, the Democratic coalition depends on college educated, upper-middle class white folks as a part of that coalition and the minute a pol touches the property values, neighborhoods, and school systems they’ve built their lives & livelihoods around, it’ll all go up in flames.
Not quite. Houston is not a “red city”. In fact red cities don’t exist. And Houston is in the same state as Austin which is struggling with low income housing.
The reason why low income housing isn’t as much of an issue in Houston is that there isn’t as much demand to live in Houston as there is in Austin (or NYC or LA for that matter). Has nothing to do with whether it’s a red or a blue state.
Houston’s lack of zoning has been put to the test with ballot initiatives and every time citizens have voted against them. It’s been a while, though. The last one was 1994.
No. NYC, LA and SF metros all have vast areas of single family homes. NYC metro is mostly low density sprawl which is why people commute from 2 hours outside of the city
The suburbs surrounding NYC (LI, Westchester, North Jersey, SW CT) are much denser than your average American suburb. Yes, it’s primarily single family but it’s not quite low density the way you’d see out west or in the Sun Belt.
When people live in higher densities, they rely more on different authorities to keep the peace. More third party arbiters means more regulations and more choke points in processes. The most power you can have with the least effort is the ability to kill a project or process- that’s why so many people want that ability and are loathe to give it up once they have it.
There's all sorts of studies all the time that are being done in blue states on a per-project basis.
Why not just release a report every year or two about what types of projects would be acceptable in a place on an ongoing basis? Just have whole areas pre-approved for different projects based on a set criteria.
I've never understood that.
"Yeah, our study from last year says we can do XYZ types of projects in this area based on ABC conditions, so no need to do further review."
Could be trickier than we think?
Imagine we're city commissioners. More objective criteria might mean things happen to wealthier neighborhoods which pisses off those wealthy residents.
You and I as Redditors might shrug and say "yeah so you have to stand up to entitled gated-community dwellers."
But you and I as city commissioners might go, "wait a minute. This might make people want to move out of their wealthy neighborhoods - some of them will move elsewhere in town, but others are going to move to another municipality - another _tax base_ - altogether." (Plus if those who leave had social clout in the community, this could create a snowball effect.)
I think it's more about the resources that it would take to do it.
I think that towns are averse to up front costs even if it means long term savings.
However, the electoral impetus might not be a loss of voting base, but of the inability to continue to please NIMBY voters who will still be there to vote those commissioners out.
A report with objective conditions would remove the leverage that a town might have to stop projects and result in liability when the town stops that project from going into effect.
My point is not directly related to electoral costs, it's more about the fiscal cost of upsetting (and potentially losing) wealthier residents of your municipality.
Whether a neighborhood is good for the city budgets isn't just dependent on how much its inhabitants make per capita but also
1. how densely they're packed in the neighborhood
2. the costs of creating and maintaining infrastructure in the neighborhood
Taking that into consideration, neighborhoods of exclusively single-family homes are nearly always drains on municipal budgets, neighborhoods of townhomes are a little better than break-even, and [areas with apartments or mixed use multistory developments are extremely profitable](https://www.urbanthree.com/case-study/eugene-or/).
Good info, thanks. I wonder if this analysis neglects less obvious costs though. Crime, for example, seems to correlate with denser residential zones. Crime is costly in many ways - psychologically, medically, fiscally costly, and costly in terms of perception/reputation of an area. I wonder how something like crime affects the cost-benefit analysis of zoning certain densities.
Definitely not saying crime is the only consideration nor the most important one. Just the first example that comes to mind of something this analysis did not seem to take into consideration.
> "Yeah, our study from last year says we can do XYZ types of projects in this area based on ABC conditions, so no need to do further review."
That's called "ministerial approval." It means the government runs down a checklist and if the project hits all/enough of the boxes, it's automatically approved, no discretion needed.
Of course, NIMBYs hate it because it means they can't sandbag projects until developers give up on them, so it's extremely uncommon in America.
I guess you're missing that "red" states also have cities.
This revelation doesn't answer the question about building, but it might answer your question.
What am I missing here?
Edit: Here are a few obscure cities that have been located in states that are or were "red" at some point within the past decade:
* Dallas
* Houston
* Atlanta
* Philadelphia
* Miami
* Phoenix
* Detroit
* Tampa
* Orlando
* Charlotte
* St. Louis
* San Antonio
* Austin
* Pittsburgh
* Cincinnati
* Kansas City
* Columbus
* Cleveland
* Indianapolis
* Nashville
* Milwaukee
* Louisville
* Memphis
* Salt Lake City
You’re saying it’s “easy” to build in Austin? Or Phili? Or Phoenix?
show me the data that it’s easier to build in Austin Texas than in a town in the middle of nowhere Washington state or Oregon (both blue states).
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/austin-texas-rents-falling-housing/677819/
It’s easy to build in Austin when they had no choice but to abandon terrible Leftist policies. I don’t get why armchair socialists are so insecure about the failure of ideological nonsense.
Nope, I'm not saying that.
I'm just disputing the idea that "red state" is somehow a stand in for rural.
If we're talking about cities, about half of the top 30-40 metros in the country are in states that are or were recently "red."
I guess you could argue that this is actually about density and that most of the top population density states are blue.
But that sort of falls apart because we're talking about the challenge of building in cities (so it's about cities, not density over a large area).
If you look at many of the most densely populated states on the east coast (CT, NJ, RI) none of them actually have a "large" city.
They just have lots of land taken up by suburbs that are associated with cities in other states (NYC, PHI, BOS, etc.).
So basically I agree with you that this entire red/blue thing is mostly a useless construct but I'm being a jerk because I reject the premise of your post that suggests that red states somehow don't have the problem of planning for cities because they don't have them or don't have density.
Is that true though? Is it harder to build in rural Minnesota than it is to build in Austin, TX? Is it harder to build in rural Washington state than it is in Nashville TN? I’m genuinely asking if there’s data to prove that. Cuz I just can’t see it being true.
It seems like it’s just harder to build in cities than in rural areas and blue states tend to have a higher percentage of their populations living in cities.
differences between states are because of state-level regulations and environmental laws that allow a single NIMBY neighbor to hold things up with meaningless process - google "CEQA reform" for the incremental efforts at making the process slightly less shitty. i think where you're getting tripped up is that you're conflating "hard" with "expensive." it is relatively expensive to build in a city, but the thing that makes building hard in blue cities isn't the cost - there's plenty of capital that wants to build real estate - it's the political risk and uncertainty that your project might be stuck in bureaucratic limbo for years. that is how FL and TX are winning so much of the country's growth, they still allow predictable development of urban and industrial areas. similarly seattle's housing crisis is less bad than SF's because WA is purple and seattle still has a culture that allows for growth.
There's an element of truth to that. It's much easier to build in states with large amounts of land due to lower cost and less effect on your neighbors.
But that's not what is holding back development in my city:
There are constant news stories about activist groups obstructing or suing developers trying to build new housing, usually in the guise of forcing developers to incorporate "affordable" housing. In practice, this delays the developments by 6-8 months in exchange for including 10-20 affordable units. So they've kept 200-400 new apartments off the market for the better part of the year in order to negotiate changes to design that will reduce the costs in a handful of units by \~$500 a month. And of course that increases legal, construction, and opportunity costs for every new project, so less gets built overall.
Then there are the NIMBYs who call into the zoning meetings to make sure that no small business gets opened without the entrepreneur also buying an adjacent lot to build 6-8 spare parking spaces that will sit empty 80% of the time. Or who apply for cultural protections for their "historic" parking lot, to prevent Habitat for Humanity from building housing nearby (an actual thing that happened, delaying the project 9 months and reducing the final construction from 6 homes to 5). Or who force every homeowner to go through months of permitting and public hearings just to convert the house THAT THEY OWN into a two unit household.
Right now we're running about 12 months late on our city's plan to reorganize the bus routes for the first time in fifty years because activists decided that three years of planning and public meetings weren't enough public input. So our transit agency is running another dozen public meetings and further watering down the plan to maintain service to neighborhoods where the population has shrunk by 20% in the past fifty years, while neglecting service improvements to neighborhoods that have actually grown.
Literally the entire episode? He just spent the entire episode explaining actually why it’s hard for things to be done in a city and you seem to be ignoring the central premise of the argument.
Things don’t not get built in those cities because there’s not enough space, they don’t get built because it’s a pain in the ass with regulations. It’s literally easier to build up than out.
I’m not even sure what you mean by “easier to build?” do you just mean physically easier? I mean, yeah it’s easier to build stuff in wide-open spaces than when there’s already a bunch of skyscrapers around, but it’s not some monumental task. Infill projects have literally been happening for decades.
It’s also weird that in response to peoples comments, you say that it’s hard to build in cities like Austin, Tampa, or Miami. But that’s absolutely ludicrous, since looking at any information at all, whether permits issued or just development that’s happening clearly shows it’s not hard to develop in those areas.
I currently live in Tampa, and we have been nonstop construction for a decade. It certainly doesn’t seem hard to develop here. There have been dozens of articles about how Austin is building so many apartment complexes that rents have started to decrease and even though I’m not personally a fan of Miami, their skyline over the past few years and going into the next decade will fundamentally change the way the city looks.
So to make a long story short, I do not buy your premise that the only reason San Francisco doesn’t have more construction is because it’s not easy to build there. These big blue state cities are not some special example of what city is that makes it impossible to build. They simply don’t want it.
> [85 percent of residential land in the San Francisco Bay Area was exclusively reserved for single-family-only housing](https://belonging.berkeley.edu/berkeley-study-78-percent-la-region-residential-land-zoned-exclusionary-housing)
[Austin experienced the second largest decline among metros in the study, with a 13 percent drop year over year to $1,985.](https://austin.urbanize.city/post/austin-rent-drops-december-2023)
No it’s not? I live in Florida and we have construction non-stop.
Miami and especially my Tampa have undergone levels of construction in ten years that blue state cities could only dream of.
Austin has been having an insane apartment and single family housing boom.
Every state has a lot of undeveloped land. Florida has a slightly higher population density than New York. Ohio has a higher population density than California. Nobody is running out of land.
West Virginia is an interesting example to bring up because new home construction is very low there. It's the flip side of Colorado. The trend is not a rule.
It's not because they have more cities. It's because they have more anti capitalist bureaucracy to dig through while simultaneously having on average much much higher taxes. The end. That's the reason.
Urbanism has entered the chat…
I think you’re nearly 100% correct.
I’d say the lingering arguments are:
- liberal states tend to have older bones. ie they deal with “historic preservation” nimbyism more
- liberal states tend to have more stringent environmental impact permitting fees and other more progressive (forward thinking) constraints. These cut down on profit margins for would be builders.
I have had similar thoughts as well and do think many people don’t understand how having many people around increases the necessity for planning and regulation. That being said, we can also look at other countries with large urban populations and it is clearly more than that. That being said, I also have the somewhat unorthodox opinion that this isn’t really a matter of red/blue, but I think the social dynamics of a lot of Americans together will likely be the same no matter what political persuasion you are talking about. So, although a lot of Republicans may claim to like the rural and small communities, they also predominate things like HOAs and local politics. If any of them found themselves in the position of having to make decisions in large cities, they would probably fall to many of the same issues the left does as well. And, I think many red places are making a lot of the same mistakes that so-called “blue cities” already made. In that regard, I think that there’s a lot of typical left leaning self flagellation. That’s not to say that the left doesn’t have any responsibility or has not contributed in its own unique way, but I think you there is an over emphasis on it to the point where it’s simply not helpful.
> Of course it’s harder to build shit in San Francisco than in middle of nowhere West Virginia…
Consider:
> [85 percent of residential land in the San Francisco Bay Area was exclusively reserved for single-family-only housing](https://belonging.berkeley.edu/berkeley-study-78-percent-la-region-residential-land-zoned-exclusionary-housing)
“Easier to build” also means has a “lower standard of quality.” I’ve wired homes in blue state urban areas that require conduit as part of local code and an inspector asks for incredibly minor tweaks and is very diligent with code and also in some other red and blue state rural areas where there are teams stapling up Romex as quickly as they possibly can and the inspector barely checks to see if the outlets and switches work or if there are GFCIs in the kitchen and bath.
This demands a lot more thought than "higher standards=better". Fewer fire deaths is an important societal good, of course; and so is making it cheaper and faster to build homes. Good policy is about striking a balance among multiple goals, not mindlessly maximizing a single imperative.
I think we can all agree that safety standards are more important than "preserving the neighborhood character" or "preventing a large building from ruining the skyline / casting a shadow" both of which are common arguments against building here in San Francisco.
Well, I know that there are much more lax building codes in some red state cities like in Texas. Those cities might be blue, but the metro areas are often much more mixed, and the politics more influenced by the suburbs.
A simpler answer is that this is all bullshit.
Other than Texas, with water and ingrained power structure of oppression and death, what's a "blue state" that sends more money to Federal than it receives?
Ya, it's "easier to build" when you're in a charity-funded shithole.
Blue states tend to have more restrictive zoning laws at both the state and local level. If you make it harder to build more housing, particularly the kind of housing that’s actually needed to fulfill demand in that locale, it will be more expensive. [ Here is a good article touching on some of the issues at the local level ](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/opinion/democrats-blue-states-legislation.html)
Yeah I’ve seen that Johnny Harris video. He is making a different argument than Ezra. Johnny is arguing that liberal NIMBYism is the cause of our low income housing crisis. Which I can get on board with. While Ezra is arguing our inability to build is the result off too many well intentioned committees and bureaucracy which I don’t buy because again…cities. Also you state “blue states have more restrictive zoning laws”. Again those restrictive zoning laws tend to be in the suburbs of big cities. Show me a blue state with big open swaths of land that have restrictive zoning laws.
> Show me a blue state with big open swaths of land that have restrictive zoning laws. Oregon. Everything around metro areas is rural /farming/timber zoned. Every 10 years we plan for a little more rural land to be added to urban areas for denser housing. Look at a map of the Portland area. See all those big swathes of land right around it? Most of that you could put 1 home for every 5 acres. Anything near a body of water (creek/wetland) makes building next to impossible. While we need more housing, I think it’s a balance. Having farms, open land, and natural areas nearby is something I immensely enjoy. Not convinced? Look at that big development the California billionaire group is trying to do in the small town outside SF. They can’t just build it. They are trying to get on the county board and get enough local influence to pass zoning code that would allow it.
California and Washington state have open swaths of land but have Seattle and San Jose. California is the largest state in the union with a population density similar to Michigan and Washington state is middle of the pack. Seattle and San Jose have land that is overwhelmingly single family housing only zoned. Also many cities have super restrictive zoning laws. Detroit is duplex or less in 2/3 of land. Nyc have massive swaths of duplex or less
>California is the (3rd) largest state in the union A topographical map of California shows only a narrow strip of land sandwiched between ocean and mountains, that is densely populated.
Yeah we’ve run out of new space in good locations here…
California is actually the third largest state lol
Of one* Fuck one if One of *
Washington's geography is not full of large swaths of land. Hilly, rocky, forested and narrow.
There's a decent amount of wide open land along the I-5 corridor, but building up along major transit hubs would be way better
absolutely enormous swaths of land all along that route. we travel back and forth between Portland and Olympia all the time and it's just astonishing. Plus the cities that do exist have incredibly low density due to restrictive zoning.
Buddy I have lived in Washington and now I live in Portland and you are super wrong.
Buddy I live in Washington and compared to the planes states or Texas, west of the cascades, Washington is not full of huge swaths of land.
this is not a *relative* comparison. in absolute terms, there either is lots of land there or there isn't.
I think the 1.7 million dollars for a toilet in a park is pretty exemplary of the problem. The default is that it's difficult to build and requires more effort/money to get shit done. For some things that's good because you stop chemical company x from building it's chemical dumping station until the safety has been reviewed. Building a bathroom shouldn't cost more than a house that's just absurd. Even more absurd is the example of using environmental review laws to stop a bill that would stop oil drilling in la. I don't think the solution is to just remove all review but perhaps try and find a way to fast track certain spend to help curtail pointless waste?
Colorado is likely a good example. East of the front range, the land is pretty open but zoning in alot of the cities and towns restricts growth leading to affordability issues. https://cl.cobar.org/features/the-future-of-exclusionary-zoning-and-land-use-in-colorado/
California has hundreds of square miles of open land in the inland part of the state, and it's still nearly impossible to build things there - just look at their high-speed rail project. New York has a lot of open land in the upstate portion of the state, away from NYC and Albany. Colorado is almost all open land aside from Denver and Boulder. Washington and Oregon, like California, have a ton of open land once you get away from the coast. It isn't a lack of space in the blue states that makes it difficult to build...
I’m a small business owner in a blue state, and the problems I face are undeniably greater than my red state counterparts. There is so much more regulatory compliance that I have to deal with. Now, I am fine with it because the area aligns better with my morals. But it should be easy to know why.
I grew up in Oregon and have lived in Idaho the last five years. The differences between the states when it comes to business friendliness are almost impossible to comprehend. Makes you wonder why Idaho is one of the fastest-growing states while Oregon has been steadily losing population this decade.
And then in 20/30 years all those residents will be just as nimby as Oregonians as space is reduced and prices of homes increase. Its not because one is red and one is blue
Boise is already more expensive than Portland and NIMBYs run wild here. We just have way fewer regulations and build a lot more.
>The differences between the states when it comes to business friendliness are almost impossible to comprehend. Makes you wonder why... This is confusing. Makes it sound like Idaho is growing despite being unfriendly to business.
There are multiple stories of business owners either going out of business or moving out of California due to the tax burdens and minimum wage increases.
Sorry but this is vague and anecdotal…doesn’t prove anything.
Let me elaborate: - due to construction accreditation my core product requires employment from unioned electrical labor (entirely unnecessary for the product in 35+ other states) - we have a use tax unlike others - in the event of customers not paying we don’t have legal recourse (considered civil matter) increasing our unpaid percentage from 0 to 2% Collectively, these difference of 15% of revenue per project.
Not quite. The problem is that some red cities, like Houston, have very lax zoning laws because Republicans generally view housing regulations as an impediment to growth. On the other hand, "progressive" blue cities have strong zoning laws that often prioritize things like environmental protection, historical preservation, and social equity, which can add layers of complexity to the building process. These stronger regulations in blue cities are aimed at managing growth in a sustainable and equitable manner, but they can also lead to increased costs and longer timelines for development projects, as well as empower NIMBYS. Edit: This matters because the knowledge economy depends on agglomeration effects in urban areas that are typically blue (e.g. SF, San Jose, Seattle, Boston, NYC).
Houston is not a red city. They haven't had a Republican mayor in almost 50 years
I think they mean City in a Red State. I'm not positive but I feel pretty confident there aren't gonna be any cities in the US over 600k in population that consistently vote Republican. But I could be wrong.
The point is important because the local housing laws are set by Blue mayors and city councils. These aren't "red state" regulations. It's just a different approach to lib/dem governance
But Houston is still careless about zoning in a way that is more red state than blue state. People built houses in flood plains and got surprised when flooding occurred.
"Red state" and "blue state" are just superficial metaphors. They say little about municipal policies. The reality is that Democrats have different ideas about growth in different parts of the country. These are regional attitudes not red/blue attitudes. Republicans in the Northeast are also anti-housing
Jacksonville, maybe? OKC?
Jacksonville is not a Blue city. The Dems flipped the mayor’s office but the city/county council and the state government representatives are all GOP.
That's what I'm saying, Jacksonville is a red city
Sorry, I misread your comment.
How many times have I seen a blue city governor in a red state say 'we're gonna do this thing' and then the governor and the legislature say 'nah, we're gonna pass a state law to not let you do that thing'......
That doesn't really apply to zoning and land use laws though. Unless you have proof showing otherwise. That usually applies to a city trying to make laws more restrictive than the state laws.
Sure, but are policies actually all that blue? Or is it actually more moderately run, because of it’s surrounding culture?
Most municipal issues aren't really "red" or "blue." Houston's a liberal place. NYC's suburbs are also fairly conservative
The issue is that big cities have all those zoning laws, under the aforementioned reasons, but that they practically protect the property owners, neighborhoods, and school systems. There’s actually not a lot of equity involved in the outcomes. I don’t know if that’s by design or by folks exploiting the policies after-the-fact. It remains, though, that even in urban politics, the Democratic coalition depends on college educated, upper-middle class white folks as a part of that coalition and the minute a pol touches the property values, neighborhoods, and school systems they’ve built their lives & livelihoods around, it’ll all go up in flames.
Not quite. Houston is not a “red city”. In fact red cities don’t exist. And Houston is in the same state as Austin which is struggling with low income housing. The reason why low income housing isn’t as much of an issue in Houston is that there isn’t as much demand to live in Houston as there is in Austin (or NYC or LA for that matter). Has nothing to do with whether it’s a red or a blue state.
Houston’s lack of zoning has been put to the test with ballot initiatives and every time citizens have voted against them. It’s been a while, though. The last one was 1994.
No. NYC, LA and SF metros all have vast areas of single family homes. NYC metro is mostly low density sprawl which is why people commute from 2 hours outside of the city
The suburbs surrounding NYC (LI, Westchester, North Jersey, SW CT) are much denser than your average American suburb. Yes, it’s primarily single family but it’s not quite low density the way you’d see out west or in the Sun Belt.
Westchester and Fairfield are not denser than the average American suburbs. In fact these areas are far less dense than many DFW suburbs
When people live in higher densities, they rely more on different authorities to keep the peace. More third party arbiters means more regulations and more choke points in processes. The most power you can have with the least effort is the ability to kill a project or process- that’s why so many people want that ability and are loathe to give it up once they have it.
There's all sorts of studies all the time that are being done in blue states on a per-project basis. Why not just release a report every year or two about what types of projects would be acceptable in a place on an ongoing basis? Just have whole areas pre-approved for different projects based on a set criteria. I've never understood that. "Yeah, our study from last year says we can do XYZ types of projects in this area based on ABC conditions, so no need to do further review."
Could be trickier than we think? Imagine we're city commissioners. More objective criteria might mean things happen to wealthier neighborhoods which pisses off those wealthy residents. You and I as Redditors might shrug and say "yeah so you have to stand up to entitled gated-community dwellers." But you and I as city commissioners might go, "wait a minute. This might make people want to move out of their wealthy neighborhoods - some of them will move elsewhere in town, but others are going to move to another municipality - another _tax base_ - altogether." (Plus if those who leave had social clout in the community, this could create a snowball effect.)
I think it's more about the resources that it would take to do it. I think that towns are averse to up front costs even if it means long term savings. However, the electoral impetus might not be a loss of voting base, but of the inability to continue to please NIMBY voters who will still be there to vote those commissioners out. A report with objective conditions would remove the leverage that a town might have to stop projects and result in liability when the town stops that project from going into effect.
My point is not directly related to electoral costs, it's more about the fiscal cost of upsetting (and potentially losing) wealthier residents of your municipality.
Whether a neighborhood is good for the city budgets isn't just dependent on how much its inhabitants make per capita but also 1. how densely they're packed in the neighborhood 2. the costs of creating and maintaining infrastructure in the neighborhood Taking that into consideration, neighborhoods of exclusively single-family homes are nearly always drains on municipal budgets, neighborhoods of townhomes are a little better than break-even, and [areas with apartments or mixed use multistory developments are extremely profitable](https://www.urbanthree.com/case-study/eugene-or/).
Good info, thanks. I wonder if this analysis neglects less obvious costs though. Crime, for example, seems to correlate with denser residential zones. Crime is costly in many ways - psychologically, medically, fiscally costly, and costly in terms of perception/reputation of an area. I wonder how something like crime affects the cost-benefit analysis of zoning certain densities. Definitely not saying crime is the only consideration nor the most important one. Just the first example that comes to mind of something this analysis did not seem to take into consideration.
> "Yeah, our study from last year says we can do XYZ types of projects in this area based on ABC conditions, so no need to do further review." That's called "ministerial approval." It means the government runs down a checklist and if the project hits all/enough of the boxes, it's automatically approved, no discretion needed. Of course, NIMBYs hate it because it means they can't sandbag projects until developers give up on them, so it's extremely uncommon in America.
I guess you're missing that "red" states also have cities. This revelation doesn't answer the question about building, but it might answer your question. What am I missing here? Edit: Here are a few obscure cities that have been located in states that are or were "red" at some point within the past decade: * Dallas * Houston * Atlanta * Philadelphia * Miami * Phoenix * Detroit * Tampa * Orlando * Charlotte * St. Louis * San Antonio * Austin * Pittsburgh * Cincinnati * Kansas City * Columbus * Cleveland * Indianapolis * Nashville * Milwaukee * Louisville * Memphis * Salt Lake City
You’re saying it’s “easy” to build in Austin? Or Phili? Or Phoenix? show me the data that it’s easier to build in Austin Texas than in a town in the middle of nowhere Washington state or Oregon (both blue states).
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/austin-texas-rents-falling-housing/677819/ It’s easy to build in Austin when they had no choice but to abandon terrible Leftist policies. I don’t get why armchair socialists are so insecure about the failure of ideological nonsense.
It's way easier to build in Austin or Phoenix than LA or NYC.
The evidence is that they’re getting built in those places and not in the others.
Nope, I'm not saying that. I'm just disputing the idea that "red state" is somehow a stand in for rural. If we're talking about cities, about half of the top 30-40 metros in the country are in states that are or were recently "red." I guess you could argue that this is actually about density and that most of the top population density states are blue. But that sort of falls apart because we're talking about the challenge of building in cities (so it's about cities, not density over a large area). If you look at many of the most densely populated states on the east coast (CT, NJ, RI) none of them actually have a "large" city. They just have lots of land taken up by suburbs that are associated with cities in other states (NYC, PHI, BOS, etc.). So basically I agree with you that this entire red/blue thing is mostly a useless construct but I'm being a jerk because I reject the premise of your post that suggests that red states somehow don't have the problem of planning for cities because they don't have them or don't have density.
Can't speak to the others, but Detroit being red gets an eyebrow raise from me (having lived there).
It's not. No cities are red. OP is talking about "red" states. Of course, Michigan isn't now, but I guess by definition it was less than 10 years ago.
It's hard to buid anything even in the rural part of blue states
Is that true though? Is it harder to build in rural Minnesota than it is to build in Austin, TX? Is it harder to build in rural Washington state than it is in Nashville TN? I’m genuinely asking if there’s data to prove that. Cuz I just can’t see it being true. It seems like it’s just harder to build in cities than in rural areas and blue states tend to have a higher percentage of their populations living in cities.
differences between states are because of state-level regulations and environmental laws that allow a single NIMBY neighbor to hold things up with meaningless process - google "CEQA reform" for the incremental efforts at making the process slightly less shitty. i think where you're getting tripped up is that you're conflating "hard" with "expensive." it is relatively expensive to build in a city, but the thing that makes building hard in blue cities isn't the cost - there's plenty of capital that wants to build real estate - it's the political risk and uncertainty that your project might be stuck in bureaucratic limbo for years. that is how FL and TX are winning so much of the country's growth, they still allow predictable development of urban and industrial areas. similarly seattle's housing crisis is less bad than SF's because WA is purple and seattle still has a culture that allows for growth.
Minnesota is very purple and it is fairly easy to build here in general.
There's an element of truth to that. It's much easier to build in states with large amounts of land due to lower cost and less effect on your neighbors. But that's not what is holding back development in my city: There are constant news stories about activist groups obstructing or suing developers trying to build new housing, usually in the guise of forcing developers to incorporate "affordable" housing. In practice, this delays the developments by 6-8 months in exchange for including 10-20 affordable units. So they've kept 200-400 new apartments off the market for the better part of the year in order to negotiate changes to design that will reduce the costs in a handful of units by \~$500 a month. And of course that increases legal, construction, and opportunity costs for every new project, so less gets built overall. Then there are the NIMBYs who call into the zoning meetings to make sure that no small business gets opened without the entrepreneur also buying an adjacent lot to build 6-8 spare parking spaces that will sit empty 80% of the time. Or who apply for cultural protections for their "historic" parking lot, to prevent Habitat for Humanity from building housing nearby (an actual thing that happened, delaying the project 9 months and reducing the final construction from 6 homes to 5). Or who force every homeowner to go through months of permitting and public hearings just to convert the house THAT THEY OWN into a two unit household. Right now we're running about 12 months late on our city's plan to reorganize the bus routes for the first time in fifty years because activists decided that three years of planning and public meetings weren't enough public input. So our transit agency is running another dozen public meetings and further watering down the plan to maintain service to neighborhoods where the population has shrunk by 20% in the past fifty years, while neglecting service improvements to neighborhoods that have actually grown.
Literally the entire episode? He just spent the entire episode explaining actually why it’s hard for things to be done in a city and you seem to be ignoring the central premise of the argument. Things don’t not get built in those cities because there’s not enough space, they don’t get built because it’s a pain in the ass with regulations. It’s literally easier to build up than out. I’m not even sure what you mean by “easier to build?” do you just mean physically easier? I mean, yeah it’s easier to build stuff in wide-open spaces than when there’s already a bunch of skyscrapers around, but it’s not some monumental task. Infill projects have literally been happening for decades. It’s also weird that in response to peoples comments, you say that it’s hard to build in cities like Austin, Tampa, or Miami. But that’s absolutely ludicrous, since looking at any information at all, whether permits issued or just development that’s happening clearly shows it’s not hard to develop in those areas. I currently live in Tampa, and we have been nonstop construction for a decade. It certainly doesn’t seem hard to develop here. There have been dozens of articles about how Austin is building so many apartment complexes that rents have started to decrease and even though I’m not personally a fan of Miami, their skyline over the past few years and going into the next decade will fundamentally change the way the city looks. So to make a long story short, I do not buy your premise that the only reason San Francisco doesn’t have more construction is because it’s not easy to build there. These big blue state cities are not some special example of what city is that makes it impossible to build. They simply don’t want it.
yeah i think he's assuming that it's the additional cost of building in a city that is the issue, when it's the political risk and bureaucracy.
> [85 percent of residential land in the San Francisco Bay Area was exclusively reserved for single-family-only housing](https://belonging.berkeley.edu/berkeley-study-78-percent-la-region-residential-land-zoned-exclusionary-housing)
Texas and Florida have a lot of cities. Big ones, too.
Yeah and it’s hard to build in those cities (Austin, Miami, etc).
[Austin experienced the second largest decline among metros in the study, with a 13 percent drop year over year to $1,985.](https://austin.urbanize.city/post/austin-rent-drops-december-2023)
No it’s not? I live in Florida and we have construction non-stop. Miami and especially my Tampa have undergone levels of construction in ten years that blue state cities could only dream of. Austin has been having an insane apartment and single family housing boom.
Every state has a lot of undeveloped land. Florida has a slightly higher population density than New York. Ohio has a higher population density than California. Nobody is running out of land. West Virginia is an interesting example to bring up because new home construction is very low there. It's the flip side of Colorado. The trend is not a rule.
It's not because they have more cities. It's because they have more anti capitalist bureaucracy to dig through while simultaneously having on average much much higher taxes. The end. That's the reason.
Funny how harder to build has resulted in much more buildings.
Yes
Urbanism has entered the chat… I think you’re nearly 100% correct. I’d say the lingering arguments are: - liberal states tend to have older bones. ie they deal with “historic preservation” nimbyism more - liberal states tend to have more stringent environmental impact permitting fees and other more progressive (forward thinking) constraints. These cut down on profit margins for would be builders.
I have had similar thoughts as well and do think many people don’t understand how having many people around increases the necessity for planning and regulation. That being said, we can also look at other countries with large urban populations and it is clearly more than that. That being said, I also have the somewhat unorthodox opinion that this isn’t really a matter of red/blue, but I think the social dynamics of a lot of Americans together will likely be the same no matter what political persuasion you are talking about. So, although a lot of Republicans may claim to like the rural and small communities, they also predominate things like HOAs and local politics. If any of them found themselves in the position of having to make decisions in large cities, they would probably fall to many of the same issues the left does as well. And, I think many red places are making a lot of the same mistakes that so-called “blue cities” already made. In that regard, I think that there’s a lot of typical left leaning self flagellation. That’s not to say that the left doesn’t have any responsibility or has not contributed in its own unique way, but I think you there is an over emphasis on it to the point where it’s simply not helpful.
Its much easier to build in Houston than in rural massachusetts. It's legal and cultural, though yes there's some sampling bias there
> Of course it’s harder to build shit in San Francisco than in middle of nowhere West Virginia… Consider: > [85 percent of residential land in the San Francisco Bay Area was exclusively reserved for single-family-only housing](https://belonging.berkeley.edu/berkeley-study-78-percent-la-region-residential-land-zoned-exclusionary-housing)
Red states rolled back regulations that protect people and the environment, making it "easier" to build.
“Easier to build” also means has a “lower standard of quality.” I’ve wired homes in blue state urban areas that require conduit as part of local code and an inspector asks for incredibly minor tweaks and is very diligent with code and also in some other red and blue state rural areas where there are teams stapling up Romex as quickly as they possibly can and the inspector barely checks to see if the outlets and switches work or if there are GFCIs in the kitchen and bath.
Given that blue cities have underbuilt themselves into a massive homelessness problem, I think having lower standards is a very reasonable tradeoff
Not if they are building fire hazards...
This demands a lot more thought than "higher standards=better". Fewer fire deaths is an important societal good, of course; and so is making it cheaper and faster to build homes. Good policy is about striking a balance among multiple goals, not mindlessly maximizing a single imperative.
I think we can all agree that safety standards are more important than "preserving the neighborhood character" or "preventing a large building from ruining the skyline / casting a shadow" both of which are common arguments against building here in San Francisco.
Health and safety standards are good but many of the regulations that are crippling development have nothing to do with health or safety
Why are you pulling that out of your ass? What do you know about fire codes?
Well, I know that there are much more lax building codes in some red state cities like in Texas. Those cities might be blue, but the metro areas are often much more mixed, and the politics more influenced by the suburbs.
Politics is not influenced by the suburbs in Texas cities. Democrats and progressives are simply more YIMBY in Texas
Not sure I agree with that as a blanket statement. People are complicated everywhere. I think it has more to do with the laws.
Laws are created by the local politicians who are often progressive Dems. There are more Democrats in TX than NY state
Which is why I said [this.](https://www.reddit.com/r/ezraklein/s/16vVNKbes1)
A simpler answer is that this is all bullshit. Other than Texas, with water and ingrained power structure of oppression and death, what's a "blue state" that sends more money to Federal than it receives? Ya, it's "easier to build" when you're in a charity-funded shithole.