Great pro-housing messaging from Mayor Daniel Biss’ victory email (housing candidates take note!):
“One issue that was often at the center of that debate was Envision Evanston 2045. To those who are concerned about some of the proposals that have been made, I hear you and feel that it is essential for your voice to be an equal part of this process.
At the same time, the overwhelming election result shows that Evanstonians are ready to do the hard work needed to tackle our challenges. We are eager to find solutions on housing, on affordability, and on downtown revitalization, and as hard as it might be to find common ground on some specifics, the status quo is simply not an acceptable option.”
I think the YIMBY movement's energies are severely misdirected though, all of the attention is on upzoning single-family neighborhoods to allow for multifamily housing. That's both where the greatest opposition is and where there's the least to gain. In every major metro, yes there are lots of single-family neighborhoods, but there are also lots of semi-defunct and/or grossly-underutilized industrial and commercial areas. Imagine constructing housing and parks on the scale of Dumbo in derelict watefront district not only in NYC but across the entire country. Imagine replacing a dying or dead shopping mall with a transit-oriented town center with dense housing and parks such as is being done at Stonestown Mall in San Francisco: https://www.stonestown.com/. Imagine dead strip malls being replaced with high-rise housing towers. Across the country you would have millions of units of new housing and none of it would involve demolishing any single-family homes. None.
The YIMBY movement, having been born in opposition to the NIMBY reality, unfortunately in my opinion way overindexes on the conflict between the two, when millions of new homes could be built in ways that almost entirely sidestop the whole conflict between the two. The solutions to the problem of redeveloping industrial and commercial areas into dense, transit-oriented residential development don't really involve "defeating NIMBYism", it's more about technical problems like cleaning up environmental hazards, upgrading infrastructure, and creating attractive development sites. But solving those problems is a path that can result in housing built at the scale needed to actually impact the problem, as opposed to trying to shoehorn a few six-unit apartments into single-family neighborhoods, with very little market impact.
Great pro-housing messaging from Mayor Daniel Biss’ victory email (housing candidates take note!):
“One issue that was often at the center of that debate was Envision Evanston 2045. To those who are concerned about some of the proposals that have been made, I hear you and feel that it is essential for your voice to be an equal part of this process.
At the same time, the overwhelming election result shows that Evanstonians are ready to do the hard work needed to tackle our challenges. We are eager to find solutions on housing, on affordability, and on downtown revitalization, and as hard as it might be to find common ground on some specifics, the status quo is simply not an acceptable option.”
I think the YIMBY movement's energies are severely misdirected though, all of the attention is on upzoning single-family neighborhoods to allow for multifamily housing. That's both where the greatest opposition is and where there's the least to gain. In every major metro, yes there are lots of single-family neighborhoods, but there are also lots of semi-defunct and/or grossly-underutilized industrial and commercial areas. Imagine constructing housing and parks on the scale of Dumbo in derelict watefront district not only in NYC but across the entire country. Imagine replacing a dying or dead shopping mall with a transit-oriented town center with dense housing and parks such as is being done at Stonestown Mall in San Francisco: https://www.stonestown.com/. Imagine dead strip malls being replaced with high-rise housing towers. Across the country you would have millions of units of new housing and none of it would involve demolishing any single-family homes. None.
The YIMBY movement, having been born in opposition to the NIMBY reality, unfortunately in my opinion way overindexes on the conflict between the two, when millions of new homes could be built in ways that almost entirely sidestop the whole conflict between the two. The solutions to the problem of redeveloping industrial and commercial areas into dense, transit-oriented residential development don't really involve "defeating NIMBYism", it's more about technical problems like cleaning up environmental hazards, upgrading infrastructure, and creating attractive development sites. But solving those problems is a path that can result in housing built at the scale needed to actually impact the problem, as opposed to trying to shoehorn a few six-unit apartments into single-family neighborhoods, with very little market impact.