Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Oh, this is relevant to DC.

It applies to any place where land is restricted, yet people really want to live. DC, Seattle, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, LA – every big, productive, talent-magnet city in the US.

In all of those cities, housing prices are going way way up. That's a supply of land and demand for housing issue.
And Berlin and Holland have faced that, and they're findiing new solutions.

Paris is late to the game. Housing prices there are CRAZY. So Paris has been trying to adopt the ideas above. DC and American cities are way late.

If you re-read carefully, DC already has all of this stuff.

- Public housing
- Multi-generational housing
- Group houses

Check, check and check. It just indicates to me that you haven’t been here very long and should get to know the place before trying to change policies.

(I can do snark too I see you don't know much about housing, and you also didn't read the article.

In many European cities there are downtown 5 bedroom apartments for families with kids. How many of them are there in the DMV? Miniscule numbers.
Public workforce housing in DC: nearly none. In European cities teachers can afford to live in most of the city. Not here. DC's telling teachers to go live in PG County.
Group houses for non-college kids: nearly none.

Look, good-faith people can critique any one of the above ideas. Many are a bit outside our experience. But some of them are good. And we should talk about them.

But it's just absolute denial to say "DC already has this." It's like saying the sky is black or my uncle is my grandma. Just massively incorrect.

First of all, you are telling on yourself. If you actually knew a Black person or any immigrant family you would intrinsically know about multi-generational housing. Clearly you don’t know people of other races or actually know them very well. So that should first disqualify you from discussing housing policy.

Second, Group House living in DC has been a major trend, fact of life and a huge part of the culture of the city going back to the 80s. For a long time, Mt. Pleasant was the epicenter of group house living in DC. I’m sorry that you don’t know this. People still live in Group Houses.
https://www.washingtonian.com/2020/03/27/whats-it-like-to-live-in-a-dc-group-house-during-covid-19/

Lastly, public housing in DC is run by DCHA. There is a waiting list. Unfortunately a lot of it is not well maintained.

Everything that article recommends is already being done. If you really want to make an impact on housing in DC, the last undeveloped tract of land is RFK. I highly recommend getting involved in planning discussion for the future of that site. Currently the majority of the land out of the flood plain is being planned for commercial and then some mixed use development. Go demand that this metro accessible property becomes 100% housing and mixed income housing. There could be tens of thousands of housing units there, which would make a real impact. All this other stuff would not because, again, DC is already doing it.

DP. I don't have time to dissect your rebuttal to the PP line by line, as nearly all of it is wrong or specious (they never said DC doesn't have multi-generational housing, for instance), but I have to call out the bolded. That's just flat-out wrong. Upzoning and increasing density throughout DC would have a much bigger impact on housing than developing RFK alone.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Oh, this is relevant to DC.

It applies to any place where land is restricted, yet people really want to live. DC, Seattle, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, LA – every big, productive, talent-magnet city in the US.

In all of those cities, housing prices are going way way up. That's a supply of land and demand for housing issue.
And Berlin and Holland have faced that, and they're findiing new solutions.

Paris is late to the game. Housing prices there are CRAZY. So Paris has been trying to adopt the ideas above. DC and American cities are way late.

If you re-read carefully, DC already has all of this stuff.

- Public housing
- Multi-generational housing
- Group houses

Check, check and check. It just indicates to me that you haven’t been here very long and should get to know the place before trying to change policies.

(I can do snark too I see you don't know much about housing, and you also didn't read the article.

In many European cities there are downtown 5 bedroom apartments for families with kids. How many of them are there in the DMV? Miniscule numbers.
Public workforce housing in DC: nearly none. In European cities teachers can afford to live in most of the city. Not here. DC's telling teachers to go live in PG County.
Group houses for non-college kids: nearly none.

Look, good-faith people can critique any one of the above ideas. Many are a bit outside our experience. But some of them are good. And we should talk about them.

But it's just absolute denial to say "DC already has this." It's like saying the sky is black or my uncle is my grandma. Just massively incorrect.

First of all, you are telling on yourself. If you actually knew a Black person or any immigrant family you would intrinsically know about multi-generational housing. Clearly you don’t know people of other races or actually know them very well. So that should first disqualify you from discussing housing policy.

Second, Group House living in DC has been a major trend, fact of life and a huge part of the culture of the city going back to the 80s. For a long time, Mt. Pleasant was the epicenter of group house living in DC. I’m sorry that you don’t know this. People still live in Group Houses.
https://www.washingtonian.com/2020/03/27/whats-it-like-to-live-in-a-dc-group-house-during-covid-19/

Lastly, public housing in DC is run by DCHA. There is a waiting list. Unfortunately a lot of it is not well maintained.

Everything that article recommends is already being done. If you really want to make an impact on housing in DC, the last undeveloped tract of land is RFK. I highly recommend getting involved in planning discussion for the future of that site. Currently the majority of the land out of the flood plain is being planned for commercial and then some mixed use development. Go demand that this metro accessible property becomes 100% housing and mixed income housing. There could be tens of thousands of housing units there, which would make a real impact. All this other stuff would not because, again, DC is already doing it.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Oh, this is relevant to DC.

It applies to any place where land is restricted, yet people really want to live. DC, Seattle, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, LA – every big, productive, talent-magnet city in the US.

In all of those cities, housing prices are going way way up. That's a supply of land and demand for housing issue.
And Berlin and Holland have faced that, and they're findiing new solutions.

Paris is late to the game. Housing prices there are CRAZY. So Paris has been trying to adopt the ideas above. DC and American cities are way late.

If you re-read carefully, DC already has all of this stuff.

- Public housing
- Multi-generational housing
- Group houses

Check, check and check. It just indicates to me that you haven’t been here very long and should get to know the place before trying to change policies.

(I can do snark too I see you don't know much about housing, and you also didn't read the article.

In many European cities there are downtown 5 bedroom apartments for families with kids. How many of them are there in the DMV? Miniscule numbers.
Public workforce housing in DC: nearly none. In European cities teachers can afford to live in most of the city. Not here. DC's telling teachers to go live in PG County.
Group houses for non-college kids: nearly none.

Look, good-faith people can critique any one of the above ideas. Many are a bit outside our experience. But some of them are good. And we should talk about them.

But it's just absolute denial to say "DC already has this." It's like saying the sky is black or my uncle is my grandma. Just massively incorrect.

Anonymous wrote:The problem with having no density, like Atlanta, Miami, LA, is TRAFFIC DISASTER.

That's why DC's traffic is terrible - we've expanded OUT of DC. We just can't move out past Loudon and keep building more sprawl housing. Unless you want everyone who's not rich or old to have hateful, numbing commutes.

And the DC is filled with smart talented people, which makes other smart talented people want to move here. So the answer can't be "no more people in DC". Let's do what the Europeans do, adopting their best ideas. Before they beat us as America's economy sinks into the mud because we've destroyed our world-leading talent economy. (That's already happening in Silicon Valley and Seattle – because we have crappy land use policies, jobs are moving to Vancouver and other parts of Canada.)

Anonymous wrote:The problem with having no density, like Atlanta, Miami, LA, is TRAFFIC DISASTER.

That's why DC's traffic is terrible - we've expanded OUT of DC. We just can't move out past Loudon and keep building more sprawl housing. Unless you want everyone who's not rich or old to have hateful, numbing commutes.

And the DC is filled with smart talented people, which makes other smart talented people want to move here. So the answer can't be "no more people in DC". Let's do what the Europeans do, adopting their best ideas. Before they beat us as America's economy sinks into the mud because we've destroyed our world-leading talent economy. (That's already happening in Silicon Valley and Seattle – because we have crappy land use policies, jobs are moving to Vancouver and other parts of Canada.)

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Oh, this is relevant to DC.

It applies to any place where land is restricted, yet people really want to live. DC, Seattle, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, LA – every big, productive, talent-magnet city in the US.

In all of those cities, housing prices are going way way up. That's a supply of land and demand for housing issue.
And Berlin and Holland have faced that, and they're findiing new solutions.

Paris is late to the game. Housing prices there are CRAZY. So Paris has been trying to adopt the ideas above. DC and American cities are way late.

If you re-read carefully, DC already has all of this stuff.

- Public housing
- Multi-generational housing
- Group houses

Check, check and check. It just indicates to me that you haven’t been here very long and should get to know the place before trying to change policies.

Anonymous wrote:Oh, this is relevant to DC.

It applies to any place where land is restricted, yet people really want to live. DC, Seattle, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, LA – every big, productive, talent-magnet city in the US.

In all of those cities, housing prices are going way way up. That's a supply of land and demand for housing issue.
And Berlin and Holland have faced that, and they're findiing new solutions.

Paris is late to the game. Housing prices there are CRAZY. So Paris has been trying to adopt the ideas above. DC and American cities are way late.

[In] most of the US, we have banal and expensive housing forms — sprawling detached houses, townhomes, and a smattering of condos or apartments — but we don’t really have housing options. There isn’t the variety in forms and cost one might find in a typical German city. Our urban land-use policies are weak to nonexistent; there are virtually no formats or vehicles for non-market housing.

Meanwhile, cities like Berlin, Vienna, and Freiburg have proactive land policies for non-market housing like social housing, cooperatives, and baugruppen. They award sites to projects incorporating sustainability, affordability, or other innovations.

A quarter of housing in the Netherlands is social housing. Two-thirds of Vienna residents live in social housing. Zürich, Switzerland, is aiming for a quarter of all households to live in cooperatives. By 2030, 30 percent of all Parisian homes will be social housing.

Household formation today is diverse and varied, and we should have housing options that match that diversity. More specifically, we should have affordable housing that matches these shifting demographics, encourages community, and enhances solidarity.

Many of the EU re-compaction and brownfield developments I am praising are going all-in on diverse housing types: social housing, multigenerational housing (for young and old, single and families), clusterwohnungen (“cluster apartments” with large communal units for six to 15 people), baugruppen (urban cohousing), elderly housing, housing for single parents, housing for couples, cooperatives, and rental syndicates (a la Mietshäuser Syndikat, a networked syndicate of affordable rental cooperatives), temporary worker housing, maisonettes (two-story apartments), and more.

There is no housing in the US like the stunning Wohnprojekt Wien baugruppe in Vienna or the R-50 baugruppe in Berlin. The Swiss city of Zug is getting an enormous mass timber skyscraper that will incorporate many of these housing types, with abundant amenity space: galleries, music rooms, a library, ateliers, workshops, and sport studios.

Housing diversity is built around the idea of choosing one’s community, choosing how to live. Almost always, sustainability, walkability, and low-carbon living are paramount. There are multiple venues and forums for discussing these issues, including symposia, building exhibitions, and competitions. Many cities encourage diverse housing forms through direct subsidy or progressive land policies (using public land for non-market housing).

US demographics have shifted in the last half-century, to say the least, but there is virtually no discussion here of true housing diversity.