And there it is.

I build apartments too bro.

Usually mid rise though.

America Needs to End Its Love Affair With Single-Family Homes.

America Needs to End Its Love Affair With red meat.

America Needs to End Its Love Affair With independence.

America Needs to End Its Love Affair With privacy.

America Needs to End Its Love Affair With driving.

America Needs to End Its Love Affair With meat.

America Needs to End Its Love Affair With electricity.

America Needs to End Its Love Affair With food.

Arbeit macht frei

Site coverage on that lot isn't all that high, it's maybe 50%.

Is your concern here actually about stormwater?

@VictorGonzales ... are we neighbors? You're pretty much describing my neighborhood to a T.
My home is about 1,050 sq ft. 150 of that is an addition.

Even my small house shows in Zillow as estimated around $340,000

Chinese Tesla workers may be sleeping at the factory.    All you need is a pod.

No.
America needs to squat in ALL of the wallstreet and foreign investor owned homes.

Housing costs have been inflated intentionally with purpose.

It is not market driven when the market is controlled by the manipulators.

Make it the law that only owner occupiers can own , possess, control, purchase a home and you will see an immediate and drastic market crash correction.

But the laws, regs, bureaucracies have been made to manipulate for other interests.

You will own nothing and be cattle

Going to turn all the renters out on the street?

So, like a barracks? Nah, man. That’s the mouse utopia experiment.

I'll take that with a bit of dirt before I'd live in a apartment or shared wall situation.

Before they demolished the old houses, there were probably half to two thirds as many houses on that block, and they were smaller.  It used to be the sort of neighborhood where kids had plenty of room to play in their yard.

My concern is that the city administration has done the opposite of what they said (after the May 2010 flood) they were going to do, used the flooding issue to justify new fees on property owners, imposed things like requiring a homeowner to pay for a new concrete sidewalk from property edge to property edge if they needed a permit for an addition to their house, added paved bike lanes (often including a 3 foot safety zone between lanes of traffic and the bike lane) to busy streets where bikes are rarely (if ever) seen, then (a couple years ago) increased property taxes to help pay for the additional infrastructure and deals they were making for the developers.

The past statements about focusing on NOT allowing runaway development, with the focus on keeping enough green space to control the runoff, is an easy contradiction to point out between what they have said they would do, and what they did.

The 2010 flood was due to around 13 inches of rain over a two day period.  There was much talk about how it was an "unprecedented" flood and we would likely never see another one that bad.  A city water treatment plant was flooded, and they had to put in a temporary above-ground line connecting to a utility co-op, to meet the city's water needs until the treatment plant could be repaired.  The local Red Cross suddenly realized that having all of their emergency supplies on one side of the river, could be a problem if flooding closed the bridges (and some bridges in the area were closed).  I live downriver from the city, in the same area I have spent the majority of my life.  I had to keep in mind that most of the people going on about it being such an "unprecedented" flood, were either too young to remember the floods of the 1970s, or didn't move here until sometime after that, or I would have ended up calling them senile idiots that couldn't remember a damn thing from more than a few years in the past.  While the 1970s floods didn't get the river up as high as the 2010 flood, the 1970s floods weren't that much lower, and the area could much more easily absorb the rainfall, back then (nowhere near as much area paved over).

In the 1990s, my uncle tried talking to his new neighbor while they were in the early stages of building their house.  He told them that they were building on land that tended to flood in the spring.  They looked at him like he was some crazy old fool and told him there was no indication the land had ever flooded.  He tried telling them we had been in a drought for the last decade, but they wouldn't listen.  The first time (well before the 2010 flood) they had to spend the night in their attic, praying that the water wouldn't come any higher in their house, they packed up what little they could salvage the next day, left, and never came back.

After the 2010 flood, my sister was at a medical appointment and one of the medical staff started talking about how part of their subdivision had flooded.  My sister asked where they lived, then told them she was familiar with that area (maybe five miles from my house, as the crow flies) and that it used to have floods every spring - there were even houses on the other side of the river from that subdivision, that the owners had jacked the houses up, built block basements under them, then hauled in dirt to fill in around the houses and bury the new basements, after getting tired of being flooded.  The woman said that was the first time she had ever heard that there was a previously known chance of her subdivision flooding.

After a while, you get tired of trying to tell the idiots what actually happens when we get a 'wet spring', and just stand back to see how painful their lesson eventually ends up being for them.  With the runaway development we have seen over the last decade, the next lesson will likely be very painful.

That's really modest for Steamboat. The price is crazy, but that how things are up there.

Ski resort economy eventually ruins everything. That's why I bought land in the banana belt.

Fortunately for you my man computer games are not yet on the chopping block.

One of the problems is that the FEMA maps don't get updated often enough. The other is that flood insurance makes high risk development possible.

When I lived in Los Angeles County they passed a 2.5 cent per square foot tax on impermeable surfaces that will fund $300M a year in stormwater improvements. That sounds great, but ultimately they would have gotten a lot more mileage out of reducing parking requirements... this is the same city where I had to build covered parking and a driveway that was, no shit, 1,000 square feet of concrete and shingles. Parking for a single car. The curb cut, incidentally, removed parking for a single car, so it would have been the same if I had simply removed off street parking entirely and freed up another spot on the street, except the site would have had 1/3 less coverage than before, and the curb would have detained more water.

Cities should be removing housing from flood prone areas, stacking it deep on dry land, and building appropriate controls to keep dry land dry. Instead they are trying to force developers to manage stormwater for them, and it isn't going to work as well as they want it too. And I'm a huge fan of LID and all the light imprint stuff... but it isn't a 100% solution. You still need large projects and land set aside to flood.


ETA: I will revisit this in the morning and see if I can make more sense, this is rambling.

Maybe I'm in Chandler. Mine is at like 440 on Zillow. Fucking insane lol.  My next door neighbor who only has 2 bedrooms went for 390 last year.  I only paid 95k for this house in 2009.

mericans already are cattle.

Well I guess business owners need to pony up and quit looking to government for tax breaks and grants to build shit housing projects in nice neighborhoods.  

They’ve been putting them up left and right around here.

Alternate thread title: "i cant get what i want so im going to take it from someone else."

We had an impervious surface stormwater fee where I used to live.  I always thought it was kinda fucked up how they calculated it.  It was strictly the sq footage of impervious surface, without any consideration of total lot size.  So someone with 3000 sq ft of impervious surface on a 5000 sq ft lot paid the same as someone with 3000 sq ft of impervious surface in middle of five acres.  I always thought it should be percentage of impervious surface.

For the poors who eagerly and willingly left cheap areas of the country in order to live and work in expensive ones.

Government does not exist in a vacuum especially at the local level.  Residents of the area have said they don't want dense development and /or bought their homes with the understanding dense development would not happen.  If you're going to change the rules pay up.  If you don't like it build elsewhere jts not hard.  


Markets have rules and the local residents have set the rules.   Developers need to stop trying to change the rules for places they don't live so they can make a buck.  If developers want dense development next to sfh developers can build it next to their homes first.    

I'd rather die than pay rent, or share a wall with someone outside of my family again.

America needs to trust Big Brother, if Big Brother does not deem it necessary why worry your little head about it. You'll be better off without it.

There's no need for that, if you simply made more development possible within the building and zoning codes it would happen without any subsidy.

Congratulations, you live in one of the rare places where a house like that is legal.

You think you own your property? The King let’s you think that but he will take it away in a heartbeat if he needs to and there is nothing you can do about it.

Did they mention an exemption for democrats?

An end to privacy? That’s not going to do well.

ETA: How the hell am I supposed to LARP? I guess I could still do it but I’ll never be able to LARP hard.

Bldg and zoning codes are a reflection of what that community wants and how they want to live.   Its the developers and business owners that are trying to tell others how they should live.    

a direct answer to your question is no they won't, any dense developments that are built are far from affordable with out subsidies.  Again I've sat on that committee developers were raking in cash and tax credits to guarantee affordable units in the development while charging top of the market rates for the rest.

No, it's not. The people that show up to those meetings don't look anything like the community. As someone that has successfully lobbied a city for changes to zoning, I can assure you that no one involved looked anything like the people that lived there... the people that show up to those meetings are 30 years older and about 3x the median income of the communities that they "represent." That goes for the city councils as well.

But again, your argument that single family zoning reflects democratic control of the means of production isn't exactly a free market one.  



Are you now arguing regulatory capture? Because one sentence ago you were saying that communities were in control.



The vast majority of development isn't subsidized, it's a profit center for local government. The trick to making cheap market rate apartments is to make the units small. When you look at historic apartment buildings that make up much of the housing stock it was common to see one bedroom apartments as small as 380 SF, but generally under 500 SF. Now, cities are likely to require a balcony, open space, 1.5-2 parking stalls, etc, so you can't make a unit that small that pays for itself. I know where I could build and rent a small apartment like that profitably for $1,500 a month. After the city gets its wishlist, plus fees, new roads, etc the unit has to be around 750 SF to get the $2,300 rents required to pay for that project.

giving up single family homes..

are they talking about ramping up Multi-Generational family homes or having to entertain and live with a family from Honduras that the Feds will be requiring us to house for a certain amount of time? or are they just going to build apartments and condo's?

just trying to figure this out. I've only got 3 bedrooms.

Multigenerational housing is already on the production homebuilders radar, they've been building dual masters and casitas for years.

Multigenerational housing is going to be an important part of surviving an economic and security crisis that I believe is coming. Grandma and grandpa can put their social security in the pot, watch kids and take day shift monitoring the doors and street. They wake up to piss a lot so can do a perimeter check. Don’t knock it. The ancients knew to keep their parents with them for security—trusting the police to keep the goblins from whacking grandma and grandpa in their rambler two states away from the kids is a historical aberration.

Did you mean aren’t? And the cities interests carry FAR more weight than developers interests. Being a developer is a crap job.



Dense developments, absent government interference, are typically both more profitable for the developer and more affordable for the customer. That’s true until the buildings get large enough for construction costs to hit the next plateau.

Apartments and condos.

Multigenerational homes are easy to do in cities like Chicago where there is a stock of older 2-3 flat buildings. Older folks can live on lower floors (due to stairs) and the younger families can live on the 2nd/3rd floor.

I've only seen vague explanations of the formula they use here, but it supposedly does take the percentage of each type of surface into account.

The only things I know about it for certain, are

- A building under 1500 sq ft on five acres resulted in a $3 per month fee, when the system was created a decade or so ago.  It has since been changed to $6 per month.

- Properties that do not have an outside water source (no connection to the city water dept and do not get water from a utility co-op) are exempt from the fee (they seem to act like they don't know that property even exists).

- Fees are collected by the city water dept, and an attempt was made to get utility co-ops to cooperate and bill their customers for the monthly fee.  The co-ops initially cooperated by providing contact information on their customers, but essentially told the city water dept to go fuck themselves, after they were informed that the city water dept expected them to collect fees and hand them over.  There seems to be no attempt by the city water dept to update information on the properties that are serviced by the utility co-ops, either by getting info from the co-ops (which may still be defaulting to 'fuck you, do it yourself'), or checking for changes in ownership on recorded deeds.

- Trying the experiment of "what are you gonna do if I don't pay, since you can't turn off a water meter owned by the co-op?", results in a letter, around six months after the last payment was received, that can be summed up as 'we will fucking destroy your credit rating, if you do not immediately pay every cent that we say you owe.'  The experiment of "what are you gonna do if I don't pay, since you can't turn off a water meter owned by the co-op, and you are trying to collect from a dead person?" is still waiting for the previous owner of my property to die.  My closest neighbor may have already tried this experiment, as I mentioned the fee to him when he bought my father's place, but also pointed out they don't update their bill to show a change in ownership, so they would be billing my dead father if he didn't go out of his way to tell them to put his name on their bill, but he hasn't mentioned anything to me about it, since then.

- In the decade or so since the fee was created, I have seen one water dept pickup, with a single confused looking employee in it.  I was walking the dog, and asked if I could help him when he stopped.  He explained that after the big 2010 flood, they had paid a contractor to do a survey to identify drainage problems, and he showed me a picture (that he said had been taken by the contractor, a year or two earlier) of a tree down across the creek.  He asked if I could tell where that tree was from the picture, and I replied that from that picture, I could pick out a few points along the road that it definitely wasn't, but otherwise it could be anywhere, then added that if the tree had caused a problem (blocking the creek), one of us would have already grabbed a chainsaw and dealt with it.  He went off in search of his tree, and I continued walking the dog.  Later, he was coming back out (dead end road), and I was still walking the dog, so I waved and asked if he had found the tree.  He replied that he found the tree, but couldn't understand why the contractor had reported it, since it was clearly on private property.  That statement left me still wondering why he was there at all, since the road we were on is private, with the creek running roughly along the road from its source (only property on the road that even adjoins the creek and has any public road frontage, is a corner lot where the private road turns off of the public road), crossing under the public road once, then back out onto private property, before dumping into the main river in the area, well downriver from the city that is extorting fees for 'managing' storm water runoff in the area.  He went on to the next problem that he was supposed to check the condition of, and I went back to walking the dog (which also seemed to raise an eye at this odd, never before seen, pickup being in the area).

Typical developer double speak.   Read what I said in my area developers get tax credits to build MF and must promise a certain % of those untis will be affordable. Obviously there is a mix of units but the affordable mix must match the mix in the complex.  End of story.  


The people that show up to the meetings represent the community that is a median household income of roughly 100k. So no they're not lower income.  The ones that want to change the community are the developers 99% of the time outsiders.  It is a free market with rules established when the community was 1st built if you would like to change that buy us out.   What you want is to buy property under one set if rules then change the rules to enrich yourself.  

Free markets have rules without that you have anarchy, see Houston where you can drop a bar in a residential neighborhood.  Feel free to build your denser developments there

America needs to remove all Democrats/Liberals/Progressives/RINOs/Socialists/Marxists/Communists/Humanists/etc.

Somalia isn't even half full.  Haiti is too close.  Tajikistan is better still.

It's gonna be a bloodbath (possibly not in a figurative sense) when we finally get robots that can handle the basic clean & serve roles in a human-centered environment (read: can replace the Maid, the Lawn Dude, and the Waiter).


Lots of folks are going to be without means of support when those jobs start going away....and the Haves aren't going to want them hanging out in Ski Country and the Hamptons.  When you aren't The Help any longer, they don't need you hanging around, lowering the tone.


I bet we'll end up with Soviet/Russian-style "closed towns", where you don't get in (read: the cops don't let you pass the VCP) without being a homeowner, business owner, or having either a work permit or a certified invitation.

A good portion of the housing shortage in my area is caused by the municipality and county not issuing permits or allowing land use changes.

The limited permit issuance has been going on for decades.   It has reached critical mass with the pandemic causing a large scale migration.

The largest city near me has a no sprawl policy.   But they also limit all new construction to be under 5 stories.

The vast majority of apartments are not subsidized in any way. It's like 75% market to 25% LIHTC. I'm actually surprised that it is that high.

 

I've had the opposite experience, the city removed a significant amount of our development rights and we were able to preserve some but not all of them, which is considered a success.

If you are concerned about people enriching themselves then look at existing land owners that want to increase their property values.



Houston is more bar friendly than apartment friendly.

Most people on this site would consider your town to be a success story, and if you have a problem with that they will call you a loser for not being wealthy enough to not give a shit.

Not sure what the bitching is about. Why would increasing supply be a bad thing? Most ski towns are already condos, townhomes, duplexes, and still sky high in living cost.

This is spot on. Only to add NONE of these people represent the local population.  Sure they all CLAIM that, but they don't..... and it's almost always all the same people showing up. And there is NOTHING that they like or approve of. Add to it, the people in the gov as "planers" and that work in those departments. Are 95% of them are social radicals out for change. From schools that are a hot bed for environmental terrorism. Environmental and social justice dives there plans and motivations more than anything.  But wait it gets even better. There is a global world influence.  I was at some hearings for a local county that was redoing there zoning. They brought in a guy that came hear from Germany to help them re do things. At the hearing this guy came right out and said.

"You have let to many people build on to much of this land, we have to set any larger tracks or water front land that are left aside for the future generations to be able to build on them." He was pushing NO building on any waterfront lots, or larger (10ac) tracks. Results of that asshole. Was waterfront setbacks went from 100' to 200'. I ask you, how many waterfront lots are less than 10 ac and have a building envelope more than 200' from the water. Can I go to Germany and tell them what they can do with there land???

That’s a bingo

There are only 2 classes in a mountain town. The super rich, and the worker peons to support the rich.
There is no middle class.
Increasing the supply of homes is okay, but is the creation of affordable gov't housing okay?