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Originally Posted by The Dirt
"Fuck NIMBYs. They just want to dip Denver in amber and make it a rich person's playground. I don't like the attitude of I've got mine, fuck everyone else." - bunt, circa 2010
"Now that I've got my exclusive zip code, central Denver historic home, fuck everyone else." - bunt, circa 2021
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My views haven't changed. When you guys stopped believing in middle ground, compromise, policy over ideology, and turned every issue, even unrelated ones, into a goddamn race war, that is what has changed. I still want to build big, build fast, and build tall. I don't think you need to declare war on white privilege to do it. Those are separate issues. Just because somebody wrote a book once on the history of redlining doesn't mean everything is about that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by The Dirt
The problem is, small incremental change won't make a shit stain of a change. Piece meal redeveloping parking lots and rezonings aren't going to make a dent for affordability. their privilege is being eroded away isn't a good argument.
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Agree to disagree on this one. 9th and Colorado ended up with 1,100 units. If that had been 3,100 units it would be a better project,
and you could have preserved 2,000 Congress Park bungalows. And the practicalities of real estate development are such that you could upzone all of Congress Park and not see 2,000 new units for decades. But you would probably see 200. And piss off a whole lot of people in the process. Who then, guess what, fight you the next time you want to rezone for 3,000 instead of 1,000.
If you guys actually focused on the substance of the issues, you would see that you are focused on the wrong things if you want to effect change. But you either lack the subject matter expertise, or you prefer the ideological "pure" battles; I am not sure which it is. But that is what I see as having changed.
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Originally Posted by Agent Orange
I agree with many of your critiques, especially the quixotic, polarizing anti-racist wing of the YIMBY cohort. But really what are the "bigger opportunities" passing us by compared to broad reforms like zoning liberalization and ending parking minimums? You think YIMBYites should spend all their energy on upzoning one or two high profile lots at a time? From a Strong Townsian standpoint, I think the mass upzoning approach (eg Sacramento) will bear much more fruit in the long term and will benefit local homeowners/small developers rather than a Toronto landscape of SFH neighborhoods punctured by occasional towers on old church grounds.
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I actually disagree that the mass upzoning produces better results, or more housing over the long term, because it can't deliver at scale. The notion that we are going to organically redevelop our neighborhoods with gentle density one lot at a time over the years is a little bit naïve and out of touch with how the vast majority of development, even infill development, occurs today. Just look at how damned expensive it is to build a single ADU...
(Strong Towns is equally ideological, and not actually smart on development, though I like a lot of what they do and advocate for in theory. And as for parking minimums, they are rarely relevant here on projects of any significance - parking is being provided for other reasons, not because it is mandated. On the other hand, if we are talking about parking minimum preventing small scale neighborhood infill... that's theoretically a problem, yes, but rarely the real issue; small scale development is just really tough to make pencil and there's not a lot we can do to change those underlying economics in a way that is going to amount to much more than a trickle.)
In the meantime, the high-profile fights - a parking lot here, a parking lot there - actually set the tone and the precedent for how zoning fights take place in our City. How CPD approaches them, how Council approaches them, how RNOs approach them, and most importantly, how developers approach them. I have no way to quantify this, but I assure you the legacy of that god forsaken No High Rises in West Highlands fight, in terms of political shifts, and most damagingly, risks never taken by subsequent developers to avoid long and bloody fights, has cost us more density and more housing units in this City than we would build in a decade following Minneapolis-style reform. Every project that shaves one floor here, or accepts an necessary setback there, results in dozens of units lost. You'd have to wipe out a lot of white bread single family housing stock to replace what is surrendered to neighborhoods and Council every day on projects, relative to what developers would build absent those pressures (often, even within the current zoning!). And those precedent setting fights that developers lose on are the "bigger opportunities" I am talking about.
It's not like YIMBYs have somehow managed to escape the "developer shill" criticism by wrapping themselves in a cloak of racial equity. Nobody is fooled by that. It just seems disingenuous.