To tackle highest housing costs, hawaii's gov declares YIMBY martial law

https://reason.com/2023/08/23/to-tackle-highest-housing-costs-in-the-country-hawaiis-governor-declares-yimby-martial-law/

by resalisbury • 3 years ago

35 50 3 years ago

reason.com

brutusborn• 3 years ago

Is it just me or is it crazy that it takes a massive disaster for something like this to happen?

Maybe the disaster makes it politically acceptable now.

FreshStart• 3 years ago

Shock therapy capitalism was always acceptable for non empire people.

candiodari• 3 years ago

It's because in a 10 years someone is going to notice that "somehow" the current governor of Hawaii became a billionaire, along with 10 project developers. Probably this will happen when one of the buildings collapses taking 100 children directly to ~2 meters below the surface ...

umeshunni• 3 years ago

Is this similar to the 'Builders Remedy' law in CA cities?

In California, if a city does not plan for the number of homes required by the state, the city has to approve any housing project as long as at least 20% of the homes are low-income or 100% of them are moderate-income.

sidewndr46• 3 years ago

This gets repeated all the time, but from what I can tell is just a power fantasy.

There are no California cities actually rubber stamping all housing, despite numerous cities being very far from compliance.

PopAlongKid• 3 years ago

The builder's remedy circumvents the need for a city to approve or "rubber stamp" anything.

It does seem just at the cusp of finally being a meaningful provision, see this recent legal development involving the first court ruling on the law after an out of compliance city nevertheless denied a developer.

California Court Issues First Decision Addressing Builder’s Remedy; Decision on Related Lawsuit Pending

https://www.fbm.com/publications/california-court-issues-fir...

getwiththeprog• 3 years ago

I don't think this would work in Melbourne, where I'm from. The land is so high priced, and developers can build anyway.

We need caps on normal family houses, single and double living apartments and more land released with the services such as public transport to back it up.

lostlogin• 3 years ago

Same with Auckland, but we need higher intensity, not more land. Public transport that’s useful seems very unlikely here.

We tried looser regulations and got a massive fiasco of leaky buildings due to poor design, poor material choice, poor workmanship, poor auditing and inappropriate sign off.

It’ll be interesting to see how all goes for Hawaii.

techdragon2• 3 years ago

The effectiveness of public transport is significantly affected by the population density.

Without sufficient people per unit area, you won’t have enough passengers to make the public transport work, depending on all the obvious factors like cost/quality of the public transport, proximity to housing without parking, the existence of housing without parking, etc.

I would view the existence of housing that doesn’t come with parking to be a forcing function, it on average only gets built where public transportation is viable, and once built it ensures ongoing continued demand for that transportation which keeps public transport more viable around that location.

Not a lot of housing development (even removing suburban homes where driving is basically a necessity) in Australia or New Zealand gets built without at least one parking space per dwelling be it a town house an unit or even a studio apartment… it does happen but it’s kind of rare. In large part due to the conflict between inner city real estate where public transport density is high enough to make car free living practical for normal people, is sufficiently expensive that the market selects for people who are rich and thus you’ll see apartments built where the entire first few floors are a multi story carpark squashed in under the actual living space because no one that can afford the apartments would even consider not having room to park their luxury car.

It’s sort of a vicious cycle, the cost also helps drive realestate speculation and the ongoing rise in prices and the continued cyclical rise in real estate prices year on year.

brettermeier• 3 years ago

Yeah, as they say in the text:

> "At the end of the [proclamation], if there's anything close to the 50,000 new units on the market the governor predicted and the sky's not black with pollution, the waters look like they do today, that's going to provide some empirical proof that it was these [regulations] getting in the way."

I'm also curious to see what the environment will look like after most of the regulations are eliminated.

xg15• 3 years ago

Judging from the articles that get posted on here, in the US you only seem to have a choice between completely bonkers regulations that only serve entrenched interests or no regulation at all.

How about regulation that is actually sensible?

nottorp4• 3 years ago

That's what I was thinking of. If you turn off all regulation you'll end with 20 story apartment buildings with zero parking space, zero greenery and accessible only by a tiny narrow road that's always clogged.

rhaway84773• 3 years ago

Why do you think people will build houses with no street space? Anyways it’s not like street space will suddenly be turned over from the govt to private builders, but even if it was private land why wouldn’t they build land with enough space in it?

Zero parking space would be a good thing because it would indicate public transport is good enough that people don’t need their own private cars for most trips. But in practice if that’s not the case a builder is gonna be unable to sell an apartment without parking space, so they aren’t gonna build apartments like those.

And what’s wrong with 20 storey apartment buildings? And why does that preclude greenery?

pjc502• 3 years ago

TBH, a few of those with transit would be completely fine for housing affordability if centrally located.

panick21_3• 3 years ago

Zero parking is good. A tiny narrow road is good. And greenery while nice isn't important.

strikelaserclaw• 3 years ago

at least people would get to live close to where they need to and not commute for hours a day and they might actually be able to afford to live in places. Fundamentally this always seemed like a problem where some people pretty much park their head in the sand and go "well i don't care about others, as long as my space is protected".

vidarh2• 3 years ago

If everyone lived in 20 story apartment buildings there's be massive amounts of space no longer used for low density housing that could be freed up for parks etc.

My road alone takes up around 40,000m^2 to house and transport about the same as housed in 2,2000m^2 near the local train station.

namaria• 3 years ago

That's São Paulo for you (Brazil biggest city). An ocean of concrete towers, and severe endemic violence, flooding and congestion.

reducesuffering3• 3 years ago

Every NIMBY thinks they have just the right amount of "sensible" regulation.

"But what about schools?" Enrollment is declining precipitously.

"But what about traffic?" Okay, we're improving bike lanes, and putting accessible retail on the ground floor of housing for walkability. "No, not like that."

On and on.

rcme2• 3 years ago

My experience is different. Local people care about things like schools and traffic in a way that those outside the immediate area don’t. A local example: the state of NJ built a small bridge over a creek a few year back that now allows drivers going through the Holland Tunnel into NYC to use Jersey City as a shortcut when traffic on the highway is bad. Now you basically can’t go outside during rush hour. It’s terrible. Does anyone from the state care? No. Why would they?

A representative democracy is a foundation of our society. That means you get a say in decisions that affect you. If you take hyper-local decisions and remove all local agency, then that is effectively removing representation.

refurb• 3 years ago

Isn’t Europe notorious for it’s regulatory bureaucracy?

pjc502• 3 years ago

There's a lot more of it, and it's a big burden on small businesses, but it lacks the flamboyant craziness of the worst excesses of US regulation.

Also the EU does not regulate urban planning at all, that's all local.

Simulacra2• 3 years ago

The problem with regulation is the process as it is extremely drawn out, and creates dozens of opportunities for anyone, even someone with zero standing, to sue and stop it.

One of the most interesting things to happen to regulation is when the former administration required the removal of two regulations for every one that the government wished to enact. It was near paralysis.

more_corn• 3 years ago

One thing they can do to make it easier is publish approved adu plans.

bahro• 3 years ago

environmental groups have already denounced the proclamation's potential to allow for high-rises in residential neighborhoods

That's not an "environmental group." They may call themselves that, but there's no need for journalists to credulously repeat it. There is no "environmental" argument for preventing new residential buildings, even tall ones, from being built in existing urban residential neighborhoods. To protect the environment this is even necessary. I hope there are some real environmental orgs in Hawaii fighting back against greenfield development by supporting urban infill.

Simulacra2• 3 years ago

Environmental Impact Studies have been used to halt a wide number of projects that could be hugely beneficial to society, from green energy and nuclear, to multi-unit dwellings and mass transit. There is an entire industry of attorneys who specializes in suing to stop projects like this, and in some cases, if they win they an get their fees paid for by the state under "environmental justice" laws.

In short, using environmental protection to halt projects is mostly a NIMBY farce.

rayiner• 3 years ago

Environmentalism is a big coalition, not just one focused on climate change. There’s a lot of people who oppose “the concrete jungle.” Most existing environmental laws, dating to the 1970s, are geared to them, not the more recent (or recently understood) problem of climate change.

dixie_land• 3 years ago

I wonder if this will backfire and make it a land grab for developers to build new luxury vacation homes/resorts for the express purpose of Airbnb them out

say_it_as_it_is• 3 years ago

To tackle highest housing costs, developers are going to build luxury high rise units afforded by banks lending at the highest rates in 50 years. A sliver of affordable units will be extended to politically aligned friends and family, and of course the 50% of the workforce employed by the government.

There should be legislation associated with this decree that pins market prices where they ought to be in order to address affordability concerns. This would keep everyone accountable.

To tackle highest housing costs, hawaii's gov declares YIMBY martial law

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