you cut and pasted this from MS Word aparently, there were a bunch of tags listed as "class=MSonormal" that were screwing up the formatting and made it not display correctly. If you want to cut and paste from MS applications, you'll have to disable rich-text and manually remove the "MSonormal" tags if you want the diary to display correctly.

....the dead hand of the past, here.  Neighborhoods, town, even cities die or morph such that they're unrecognizable to their previous inhabitants.  This makes them no different from any other human construct, apart from the Pyramids.

whatever the market can't (or really, doesn't want to) price into costs. And since it's easier for developers to lobby for changes to zoning laws, things get bad before the average citizen starts fighting back.

The bigger problem I have with Yglesias is that he really doesn't take reality into account. Here in the PNW, Seattle and Bellevue have done exactly what he recommended, we've had a 20 year building boom of high density housing. And the result ... is that it's still expensive to live in downtown Seattle or Bellevue. So I don't think the housing market works the way he thinks it does.

[quote]I

 Pre-emptive review., March 7, 2012

I'm going to say up front that I did not read the book, nor will I. Upon learning of Andrew Breitbart's death, the author declared: "Conventions around dead people are ridiculous. The world outlook is slightly improved with @AndrewBrietbart dead." Matt Yglesias openly celebrated the death of a political enemy. Now he wants me to buy his book? No deal, Sparky. No deal.[/quote] And, about the larger point, he needs to visit Shanghai, or Bombay, and compare to, say, Singapore. 

I wonder how you feel about roads, which certainly shape the character of our neighbourhoods, arguably even more so than the heighth of our habitations. Some want only to get from A to B as quickly as possible, with ample parking to boot, others want bicycle lanes, and still others want nothing more than a pleasant place to walk their dogs. The peanut butter market forces don't seem to be at play here.

I'm now listening to the audiobook of musician David Byrne's The Bicycle Diaries. He has been cycling since the 80s, mostly in New York where he lives, but also in cities around the world thanks to his fold-up bike. He says that New York over the years has gradually improved for cycling. Though I've heard many stories of intense animosity between cyclists and drivers as cycling becomes more popular. (incident in Toronto couple years ago when a driver killed an assertive cyclist)

Perhaps facilities for cyclists are improving in the States. I can report this is not the case in China, which at one time was as close a place to heaven on earth as any for cyclists. I remember personally witnessing the transformation of Renmin Xi Lu in Kunming, a major shopping thoroughfare and start of the famous Burma Road. Apart from the sidewalks, it had two narrow strips of land home to tall leafy platanus trees in the road leaving two lanes bicycle lanes on either side and one automobile lane for each direction running down the middle. I watched the trees being cut down, the verges removed and the beginning of the end of the bike lanes. Quite a depressing development, I thought.

I'm glad to finally see a defence of NIMBYism here at The Forvm. If you won't take a stand to defend your back yard, I can't see you taking a stand to defend anything.

Loosening the legally permissible only works when it's physically possible and economically viable. In NYC, where rents are $1,700/month on the upper west side for a studio, permitting higher densities makes sense. In my neck of the woods, higher densities are being permitted in certain locales but the trade-offs for developers are aesthetic concessions such as building modulation, public space and certain desired architectural features.

There are many reasons he's wrong. But an easy one to understand is that buildings are paid for not only by people who intend to live in them for a long time, and care about the neighborhood, but also by landlords interested in rental properties.

Renters just need a place to live for a while. They have no investment in the neighborhood, or the city for that matter. Landlords only need to cater to their limited needs, so they can build ugly and too dense with no correction from the market. So, a city can greatly deteriorate as a place worth living in, and yet all the while market forces are operating perfectly.

The problem is that there is a mistmatch between the 50 year impact a building will minimally have, and the one or two year rental contracts that can drive its construction. A second problem is that all buildings create externalities, such as shadows, traffic, blocked views, and so on, that damage the value of other properties.

Without zoning, you end up like this.