Sightline Institute

Recommended charity investigating high real estate prices: https://www.sightline.org/ I'm sure I heard about it here, so thanks, hacker news.

That's awesome! And, given current prices, a great opportunity for someone to own a home they otherwise might not have been able to. Here's an article about some of the other things happening: https://www.sightline.org/2023/06/30/parking-mandates-are-vanishing-ac…

Some of it is simply a regional transport issue. The major Russian oil importers appear to be the Pacific Northwest states, by far: https://www.sightline.org/2022/03/04/pacific-northwest-states-paid-700… > "The refineries do not rely on Russian oil equally. Nearly 60 percent of Russian crude imported to Washington went to the Tesoro/Marathon Anacortes refinery, and another 29 percent went to the BP Ferndale refinery. Russian crude made up almost 7 percent of all crude refined at the Tesoro/Marathon Anacortes refinery from 2009 through 2021." Getting oil from Bakken or Pennsylvania would likely be expensive, and also refineries are optimized to process specific grades/types of crude oil. The best solution would be for the US government to prioritize the transition to renewables in Oregon and Washington.

Finding the lever or short-circuit to effect that change is probably the real challenge here. There are countries or cities which _don't_ have a widespread housing crisis. Tokyo and Berlin are frequently touted. There was a recent article series at Sightline which addressed this: https://www.sightline.org/series/winning-abundant-housing/ One of several excellent reading suggestions that turned up in a thread by Shane Phillips: https://nitter.kavin.rocks/ShaneDPhillips/status/1474193088163713031#m

Trains are a great example, since they're motorized mass transport instead of motorized individual transport, and are more efficient and less ecologically destructive per capita at high densities. In cities that aren't built for cars at the expense of human-scale forms of transportation, cycling and walking are often legitimate options as well. (On cycling, read this about Copenhagen's infrastructure: http://www.sightline.org/research/sprawl/res_pubs/Livable_Copenhagen_r… If the standard is endangering thousands and wreaking ecological destruction at a wide scale, the disastrous choice of designing cities to favor the automobile over other forms of transportation is not only a failure, it's a government failure more so than a market failure.

Ok the article was a guest post on the blog by a guy named Aaron Carr which I take is this guy https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaroncarrny/ who seems to be some sort of reasonable expert on homelessness, the article has a lot of sections with stuff like this >Furthermore, if mental health were the main driver of homelessness, places with the most mental illness would have the most homelessness. However, the data shows the exact opposite: followed by a scatterplot graph Rate of Serious Mental Illness Versus PIT Count (per capita) with links to the source of the graph for example this https://www.sightline.org/2022/03/16/homelessness-is-a-housing-problem… So, what is your actual problem with 'this dude'? Or the 'content' that has been 'created'? on edit: I could totally understand (without necessarily agreeing) if your post was "this guy looks like someone trying to increase funding for their organization by cherry-picking stats to support a tenuous case"

The HOA or landlord can modify the terms, but they're disincentivized to do so. The reason that both HOAs and landlords disallow outdoor clothes drying is that it's seen as an eyesore. People associate clotheslines full of clothes with images of testaments in NYC in the 1920s and representing overpopulation and or immigration. Landlords in particular don't want people hanging things from the apartments- even objects like small satellite dishes are often not allowed. What many don't know is that in the US, many of these rules are simply null and void: https://www.sightline.org/2012/02/21/clothesline-bans-void-in-19-state… The challenge is that this requires a great deal of work on the part of the homeowner, and in doing so they would be entering into a conflict with the HOA. They would win in a court, but they would need to put up the money to fight in court. Even if/when they won, the HOA would make life unpleasant for them and likely retaliate in some other way.

Piecing together the story from https://pedestrianobservations.com and other places, I would not imitate Japan in this regard. - Japan's terrain is fairly ideal for rail. Yes, mountains make for more work, put people are also naturally congregated near the coast, in valleys, etc. Additionally, the largest cities with the high population form a linear chain from roughly Nagasaki to Tokyo. That means more network effects per distance of rail (there's no penalty separate than time delay for traveling through other cities first). - Japan has perhaps the best policy around land use in the developed world. See https://www.sightline.org/2021/03/25/yes-other-countries-do-housing-be… for some details. This helps greatly with density and clustering around rail stations. - The privatization was triggered by the fright around Japan's big deficits after the 80s boom, and perhaps still maintained with some fear of that. That doesn't make it a good idea, of course, but I'm willing to call it more "defensive neoliberalism" than "offensive neoliberalism", but maybe that makes it a little less ideological given that Japan was the poster child for all the neoclassical economic doomsday predictions? - https://pedestrianobservations.com in particular says the privatization and and general being spooked about more debt holds back some construction on paper, but since the rail is so well established already and operationally profitable, there is less to screw up. In…

I admit that “supply and demand” is not the cause of the housing crisis. It merely explains the high price of housing (with minor contributions from a bunch of other factors[0][1]). I feel that supply and demand is most useful as an intuitive appeal to balance: There is way more demand than supply,[2] of course we suffer from a shortage. The cause of the crisis is the array of regulations against homebuilding, that caused the shortage. As you say, developers build in times of increasing demand, yet there hasn’t been a real building boom since the early 1990s.[3] In a normal situation, increasing prosperity would bring both jobs and homes to an area. Here, we have the jobs but not the homes.[4] The developers intimately know how price is caused by supply and demand, and do not build unless they are reasonably certain that they can make a profit. They avoid causing gluts. The problem here is that California has some of the most misguided regulations,[5][6] and municipalities some of the worst processes,[7][8] that prevent housing from being affordable to build.[9] Developers can’t be certain to make back their investment when housing is not in crisis, and we need to fix this. Like sea urchins in a kelp desert,[10] mega-developers with large projects are not the core issue. Mega-developers work best when trampling over pristine wilderness. We need to build inside cities.[11] The core issue is that we collectively do not have the imagination to enable thousands of small-time…

Reports: https://buildingdecarb.org/momentum-q2-2026 https://www.sightline.org/apartments-are-the-climate-solution-hiding-i…

Maine uses it! Not on federal level. https://www.sightline.org/2024/09/13/maines-lessons-in-ranked-choice-v…

There's a movement to leave new growth trees in the ground longer for additional carbon capture: https://www.sightline.org/forest-long-rotation-harvests/ I wonder what impact this has on the final product.

Urban housing is still expensive Not compared to most countries: https://www.sightline.org/2021/03/25/yes-other-countries-do-housing-be… https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/opinion/editorials/tokyo-housing.ht…

Have you looked into why housing is cheaper in Japan, its zoning. https://www.sightline.org/2021/03/25/yes-other-countries-do-housing-be… Also checkout Strong Towns blog they go in depth on this. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/category/Zoning

Well, Canadian / Anglosphere governments, anyway. https://www.sightline.org/2021/05/27/yes-other-countries-do-housing-be…

Surely it's more cost-efficient to treat the root cause of homelessness (likely 'high rent prices': See charts in https://www.sightline.org/2022/03/16/homelessness-is-a-housing-problem…

I agree that mental health issues are a serious driver for homelessness. We see that 20-25% of the homeless population has serious mental health issues... not all of them, but much higher than the regular population. However, this doesn't explain why some cities have way more homelessness than others. It's not like there's way more insane people in Portland than other cities. Take a look at the third chart on this page- https://www.sightline.org/2022/03/16/homelessness-is-a-housing-problem…

The data doesn't really back this claim up. There are parts of the country where drug use is very high, and yet they don't have as many homeless people per capita as SF. There is a very clear correlation between homelessness and house prices, and not a clear correlation between drug use and house prices. Additionally, the mere fact of being homeless often results in increases in mental illness symptoms and drug use, so trying to get people to not be drug addicts while not giving them a home means you aren't taking away what is often one of the biggest causes of their drug use. https://www.sightline.org/2022/03/16/homelessness-is-a-housing-problem… https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle-helsinkis…

This is a topic of actual research, and metro area rental vacancy rates (i.e. how affordable/abundant housing is) are the main determiners of whether someone at risk actually becomes homeless. > The fundamental conclusion is that the consequences of individual vulnerabilities are far more severe in locations with less accommodating housing markets. [0] [0] https://www.sightline.org/2022/03/16/homelessness-is-a-housing-problem… As an easy counterexample, San Francisco had a rising population experiencing homelessness years before marijuana legalization in January 2018 [1]. [1] https://sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-population

Zoning laws seem like the easiest single lever here. Government can change one thing and get out of the way (yes I'm naive here..) The cities of the world that don't feel like they're enveloped in a housing crisis have opposite zoning restrictions to those that do - namely they restrict single-family homes and high rises, and permit that middle-sized building and also for existing single family homes to be converted into multiplexes. https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-way-to-aff…

I was in SF yesterday for the first time in about eight years. I can't say I witnessed crimes, but I will say that the homelessness problem is much, much worse than I remember. It's hard to see any of these problems changing without it becoming cheaper to live in the city, and without more housing, I don't know how that's a possibility. I see a lot of people talking about how people are homeless because of addiction or mental health problems, and there are certainly people who are homeless because of those reasons. That being said, homelessness seems to track much more closely with housing availability than social policies[0]. SF is such a beautiful city — it's sad to see all this abject poverty throughout it. 0: https://www.sightline.org/2022/03/16/homelessness-is-a-housing-problem…

Multiple examples provided in this article: https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-way-to-aff…

The number of people who want to move in to live and work in the Bay Area so vastly exceeds the supply of new housing that it is like a Sotheby’s auction where only the richest can win. This is reinforced by the fact that it takes so long to get permission to build anything that you can only make money by developing super luxury property. In a well-functioning city you can make money building anything from mid-market up. Affordable housing is the stuff that was mid market 10-20 years ago, or luxury 20-40 years ago. If you want to see this in the real world, just look at the market for cars. More here: https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-way-to-aff…

It appears they did, from https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/19/what-really-happened-with-instant… "In a single high-turnout election in November, voters could rank any candidates they wanted, regardless of party."

> Methane is a more than viable alternative Is it? https://www.sightline.org/2019/02/12/methane-climate-change-co2-on-ste… https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191216140715.htm https://www.livescience.com/52715-natural-gas-not-as-clean-as-people-t… We're already coming to the conclusion that electric cars aren't that clean so when I hear about carbon neutral supersonic planes I kind of feel like I'm in a bad dream.

In Seattle building "apodments" has been an uphill battle against the city: https://www.sightline.org/2016/09/06/how-seattle-killed-micro-housing/

> That may be the case in Germany. In the US, the exact opposite is nearly universally true. Any data on that? At least the first Google results I find indicate a very similar correlation. If I believe this https://www.sightline.org/2012/03/08/how-income-and-neighborhoods-affe… then definitely there's a connection between "richer" and "more driving", though there's a bit of plateauing (i.e. the rich don't drive more than the middle income), but the poor definitely drive fewer.

That's only if you do it wrong. If you offer offsets in return for inclusionary zoning, it can work quite well. If you offer no offsets whatsoever like San Francisco, though, then the cost is borne by the community, not the developers: https://www.sightline.org/2016/11/29/inclusionary-zoning-the-most-prom…

The Christmas Tree Carbon Question is more complicated than you might think. https://www.sightline.org/2015/12/21/your-christmas-trees-carbon-footp… The tl;dr is that usually cut trees are better in terms of carbon footprint, but not always.

If you're afraid (or overjoyed) that this might change the city overnight, you might want to read this story about an area of Portland that repealed its apartment ban 39 years ago. Even without exclusionary zoning, neighborhoods change very slowly. https://www.sightline.org/2019/06/21/this-is-what-a-street-looks-like-…