Looking at other countries like Japan with like barely any zoning laws, this looks great, I hope it leads to more mixed cities again and more walkable/liveable areas like before WW2. It is funny that America land of the free had so many restrictions, building up hundreds of zoning laws across the country did a lot of bad and led to a lot of urban sprawl leading to very poor cities and towns that literally cannot pay for themselves. I think we need some zoning laws though, and I'm sure these laws will come back faster then people expect mostly from bad planning or large bribes whichever. But hopefully some good helpful zoning laws will stick.
This has little to do with the existence of zoning laws themselves, but the specific zones that they define. Japan has zones, so does Spain. But there's just nothing anywhere near as Restrictive as most US cities' R1 zone. Many places have R2s and R3s that are still more restrictive than the least dense thing than a Spanish city has.
Remove zones alone, and HOAs will get areas into legally binding covenants that are also just as tough as their current zoning regulation.
To solve the US density issue, localities have to be severely restricted in what they can block, but we also have to look at the bigger picture: What is making people want to restrict their neighborhood to extremely low density suburbs? The answers are very uncomfortable.
Are they? Isn't it possible that people who live in beautiful neighborhoods with mature trees, nice big yards, and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around, want to keep them that way for primarily those reasons?
Of course their desires alone shouldn't be the final word on proposed changes to codes, but implying that all of these homeowners are primarily driven by prejudice is a pretty big leap given the many obvious benefits of the status quo for them.
I imagine you could take almost any demographic and put them in a low density neighborhood with big yards, trees, low traffic, and neighbors that they've known for decades, and they're going to resist change.
> and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around
Actually, suburban streets are significantly more dangerous than urban streets, in terms of number of children killed, as a fraction of both population and miles driven.
> Motor vehicle traffic was the leading mechanism of unintentional injury death among children aged 5–13, with the rural rate (3.1) twice as high as the urban rate (1.5)
> Motor vehicle traffic was the leading mechanism of unintentional injury death among children aged 14–17 in both urban and rural areas; the rate was 2.5 times higher in rural (12.5) than in urban areas
> cul-de-sac communities actually have some of the highest rates of traffic accidents involving young children. In fact, children in suburban communities are five times more likely to be killed in a pedestrian accident than urban children.
But why is that? Maybe because children don’t play on the street at all in the city. So what does the fraction look when we take children playing outside and be healthy instead of just children?
The chance remains the same but for the ones that survive there is a better quality of life.
The disconnect between city folk and rural/suburban folk is wild. We've got comments below saying (paraphrased, my interpretation) "well of course kids play in the streets" followed by "well not literally, I mean on the sidewalks, who on earth would literally play in the street where cars drive".
My neighbors have a basketball hoop facing their street. They consider the street, the street that cars drive on, a basketball court. And the neighborhood I grew up in was dotted with cal-de-sacs. Which, again, are streets that cars drive on, and all of which were baseball diamonds by kids' God-given right.
Half of you know that I literally mean every word of what I said and half of you are equally certain I don't.
Yep we played lots of street hockey with nets in the street. Part of the game was clearing all people/sticks/balls and the two nets in <5 seconds whenever a car showed up.
All drivers in the whole neighborhood understood this as normal.
That said, as kids we’d be equally fine with a dedicated lot specifically to play various types of street ball. As long as it allowed random pickup games, always had a free spot for us, and didn’t require us to pay $100/mo each to some sports league organization.
Abundant free sports facilities for each neighborhood are fine. We don’t need to play in the literal street.
> All drivers in the whole neighborhood understood this as normal.
But the fact remains that kids get hit in suburbs more often. We feel like drivers in suburbia understand this, but the roads are actually designed to encourage speed, and accidents happen.
I did some OpenStreetMap work recently with aerial imagery in the US in such a suburb and was a bit surprised to see that the streets where people lived (not arterial roads through the suburb) were about 10 m wide. I feel the residential streets here with 5.5 m are already a bit too wide, and the main road through the village (with bus traffic and until recently lots of traffic to the motorway) is about 7 m wide.
That people tend to speed when you build a road as if it were a 100 km/h rural road doesn't seem too surprising, sadly. Now, as a parent I still think people are driving too fast, especially around the kindergarten (30 km/h speed limit doesn't automatically make that the desired default speed for that street), but it's probably night and day compared to American suburbs.
Yeah that neighborhood was impossible to speed like today's suburbs. Blocks were 300 ft from intersection to intersection, and no road was longer than 3 blocks. Going to my house from the main road was literally: "First left, then first right, then second left, then first right, then the third house on the left".
On my first trip to the US, early 2000s, my business partner and I were slowly driving around (I think) Palo Alto on a Saturday admiring the houses and he suddenly asked “WHERE ARE ALL THE CHILDREN?”
I couldn’t unsee it. This pristine suburbia, optimized for families, perfect weather, but no kids to be seen. It seemed so weird to us who’d grown up mostly outdoors. In Ireland.
So true. The Bay's suburbs are definitely lacking kids.
Mostly, I think, because those areas are where tech workers live and they tend to skew younger and childless (or few children). So you end up with tech bros crammed into single family homes, with no need for the front/back yard.
Areas around FAANG campuses really just need higher density zoning. It's stupid that the neighborhoods surrounding all Google, Apple, Amazon campuses are single family homes when there is a massive demand for tech workers to be as close to the office as possible.
And let me emphasize that's still suburban, not rural. I live 8 minutes from a good grocery store, 30 minutes from a city of 46,000 people. Small roads aren't paved here (the nearby highway is, and the in-town streets are), and the 20 mph road maintained by nobody else but a couple of residents with tractors is 400 feet from the house.
(And the trade-off for this level of remoteness, for those wondering, is I have about 200 square miles of public lands walkable from the house without crossing a highway. Ever taken a two-hour walk from your house, with your dogs off leash, without seeing another human?)
That's really a question of pick your climate. Colorado's mountains get a lot of snow in the winter, Arizona's deserts never get really cold, Utah gets both snow and hot summers. All of Southwest has quiet spots if you look for them.
I'm an hour south of Colorado's mountain ranges, in a little pocket of microclimate where most storm clouds sweep past you on both sides, where winter still exists but where you don't need to shovel snow, and where summer days stay below 100 F. We looked at houses in 3 states before settling on this.
Look into Arizona, New Mexico, Utah (Moab is an outdoor sports mecca), California (around highway 395, and on the coast outside of big cities, are some pretty areas), Colorado (if you love skiing etc), maybe Texas (e.g. "Hill Country").
And if you want more free space, move to Wyoming or Montana (but good luck with the groceries).
We spent just under 3 years roaming the Western US with a motorhome. I've seen a lot of natural beauty, you just have to leave the cities and it's there. The rest is mostly a matter of what climate, plant life, etc you prefer, and how close do you want to live to a good hospital, groceries, UPS & mail delivery, etc.
Children do play on city streets, however one of the big differences is sight lines. Suburban streets tend to be dangerous due to visibility issues and often lack well connected sidewalks etc.
A core reason for this is developers want to maximize the number of houses they can fit on a given plot of land which will often have odd shapes etc. So kids simply walking to a friends house are often in real danger.
Some anecdata here having moved from a suburb to Boston metro:
I regularly have to slow down for children riding bikes, playing basketball or hockey in the street, etc. to this day when I visit my mom in the suburbs. I have never seen a single child playing in the streets in nearly five years living near Boston.
To be clear, in the city kids don't play literally in the streets. They're on the sidewalks and playgrounds. It's the fact that suburban kids are often in the actual street that is part of the problem, and the fact that the streets are actually roads and designed for cars to go fast on.
I thought about this as I posted my story. There’s a park on the street next to mine. When weather allows, kids play basketball and baseball there and play on the jungle gym. We never had that growing up. For us, there were two or three parks in town, but none were within walking distance of our house, so we didn’t play there. If areas were set aside and accessible for kids to play safely, I’d imagine more would do that.
In my neighborhood of Washington, DC, I do see kids playing in the streets now and then--throwing a football, throwing a baseball, shooting baskets on a hoop at the curb. I also see grumbling about it on the neighborhood listserv. This is a residential neighborhood of free-standing houses, with a few duplexes thrown in.
Where in Boston did you live? That’s definitely the case in the fancy parts of Boston and definitely not the case in the minority ghettoes like roxbury, JP, and dorchester
This kind of data is less than useless without knowing the details of how they measured.
Typically they're just using insurance reported events which has a huge bias against areas where cars are newer on average (rich areas and against states that heavily use road salt) because nobody reports when two 20yo shitboxes trade paint but everybody calls in The System(TM) when two expensive new cars do (and these sorts of small accidents make up the majority of collisions).
Even if we knew it's still skewed heavily against dense metros because it uses miles instead of operating hours.
And this is coming from someone who hates the people of Massachusetts and wants to believe they are rightfully at the top of the list...
I'd argue it's wide suburban streets that encourage high speed driving. The road I live on is not wide enough for two cars to pass each other if there are also cars parked on each side, and driving even 20mph feels way too fast. But when I go visit family members in the suburbs, the streets are wide enough for two lanes of parked cars, plus 3 lanes of driving cars. Driving under 50mph feels like you might as well get out and walk.
This is called "traffic calming", the notion that you have to design the streets so it's impossible for drivers to go at unsafe speeds, rather than making wide straight roads and plonking down a "pls no speederino" sign.
Leave wide straight roads for segregated highways and build streets for people, not just cars.
That sounds like the PR branding for a positive externality of developers making streets narrower because they can and it allows them to maximize the space they get to charge for when they sell.
I live in one such neighborhood, and enough people park on the street that even without two cars needing to pass each other it feels unsafe even at slow speed, because if you're taking a turn you can't see oncoming traffic, and if some kid ran out from behind a car there would be no room to maneuver to avoid them without hitting something else, even at a slow speed.
If it wasn't about money they would just put speed bumps in, like they do in lots of places.
It's not PR branding, cities actually spend time and energy and money actually making streets "worse" for cars. A common technique, for instance, is to alternate the side that cars are parked on. This creates a sinuous road where you're constantly doing little turns, instead of a straight-away.
This isn't just because of the width of the roads, because these didn't exist 30 years ago (in the states at least; they were starting to become common in the UK 30 years ago), but the houses haven't suddenly merged closer together.
I see in another reply you say these underperform. Citation? Fatalities are still lower in cities.
You might slow down but that’s offset by the roads being it’s inherently unsafe. Real world statistics frequently show such designs underperform compared to the expected payoffs and sometimes reduce safety.
Speed bumps make it harder for fire apparatuses to respond to calls. Traffic calming is preferred because the expectation is for opposite ROW traffic to yield to the fire apparatus.
I'm not sure I agree that a high quality of life requires playing in the streets. Perhaps an issue is that many rural areas lack adequate pedestrian pathing and recreational areas? Maybe an even larger issue is that parents generally feel unsafe leaving their kids alone outside.
Urban sprawl by definition takes up a lot of space, meaning that if parks and other shared areas are planned in support of a specific amount of people, many of those people will have to travel farther to reach it than they would were it a more dense neighborhood.
I'm sorry, I don't know what you are responding to with "Probably bikes right?". Cities that are built for living typically include massive investments in pedestrian infrastructure, including bikes, if that is what you are saying. Biking is not feasible in most suburbs because of the distance. Cities that care about reducing traffic, such as Amsterdam, absolutely have more children biking than a suburban area. Unfortunately a lot of cities in the United States were built for cars and not people.
Higher speeds. Suburban streets/roads/stroads optimize for traffic safety, not pedestrian safety.
The wide roads and large front yards promote higher driving speeds. For a long time the thinking was even that front yards can work as a place for cars to stop safely if they fly off the road.
I think it's more likely because there are very few kids playing outside in urban areas. There are kids in the Pearl and the South Waterfront in Portland. It is rare to see them play outside, much more rare to see them playing in the street. On the other hand, kids playing catch or riding their bikes on suburban streets is a daily occurrence in my neighborhood. That's definitely going to drive up interactions with cars, but the motor vehicle rates you cite above are still exceedingly low.
Really? I grew up in the suburbs of chicago and we didn't really play in the streets. We played basketball in one of our parents driveways or at the local park and played football in one of our parents front/back yards or at the local park.
Now I live in Lake View during the summer and I haven't really seen any kids playing in the streets either.
Where are you at in Chicago and what do they play if I may ask?
I'm in Oak Park, just across Austin from Chicago, and kids play in the streets all the time. Basketball and baseball, mostly. The comment upthread suggests kids aren't even riding bikes in the streets. I mean, come on.
Kids play outside on the sidewalk/street in urban Chicago? I've never been to Chicago, but my wife went to school at University of Chicago, and she says she never saw any such thing. The area around the university is pretty rough, but still. And I'm in downtown Portland all the time, and no, there are no kids playing on the sidewalk/street. Not even in the little urban parks, or at least very, very few.
Most of Chicago doesn't look like the loop. It's a big city.
The University of Chicago is in Hyde Park, 10 minutes south of the loop. It's one of the safest neighborhoods in the city. This is what Hyde Park looks like:
Kids play on the sidewalks and in the streets in Chicago all the time. I mean: of course they do? It's a city of 2.7 million people. Did you think all the kids were just kept inside all the time?
That second link is what most of Chicago looks like. See for yourself: this site will generate totally random addresses in Chicago, and you can just copy them to Google Maps to see the street view.
The point, I think, is that the elimination of zoning is meant to upset the R-1 style of development you say is prevalent in Chicago and that I agree is conducive to kids playing outside, on and off the street. Where you have high density mixed-use urban development, outside play of that nature is much, much less common, as evidenced by my examples in Portland.
No, the alternative to R-1 development isn't "high density mixed use", it's 2-, 3-, and 4- flats. Pull up any random address from that site that's in Lakeview --- entirely RT-4 and above --- and you'll see kids playing on the street the same way.
This is the problem with the zoning debate: people exclude the middle, and say that zoning is either good single-family regions where kids can play on the streets, or terrible industrial zones that look like Giede Prime. We don't have to carefully reason through the alternatives --- good, functioning cities are full of them.
Lol. I’ve lived in Hyde Park or Woodlawn (the neighborhoods around UofC) for over 20 years. It’s not rough and kids play in the streets and sidewalks all the time. Soccer, baseball and hockey are very common, along with skateboarding and variations of tag. I’ve recently seen kids playing pickle ball which seems like they should be made fun of for. Basketball is less common than where I grew up in Indiana but that’s because there are a ton of courts in the parks.
Cole said while he doesn't believe he was targeted Tuesday afternoon, he has been shot at in the past, in 2018 and in June of this year as well.
Kilwins, a popular Hyde Park ice cream shop, was damaged in the shooting.
The shop's owner and employees spoke Wednesday about their safety concerns in returning to work, and Cole returned to where he was shot at.
"We need the partner in federal government to step up. Somebody has to have a sense of urgency," he said. "You can't nonprofit your way out of this. We can't program our way out of these shootings," he said.
According to the city's Violence Reduction Dashboard, as of Nov. 8 shootings in the neighborhood have more than tripled compared to 2020, with 16 this year compared to five last year.
The same data shows that for violent crimes of all time, Hyde Park has had 196 so far this year, up from 155 in the same period in 2020.
Kilwins owner Jackie Jackson said the most recent violent crime, along with increasing rent and fewer customers, may force her to close the business she opened nearly 10 years ago.
You're referencing an article about one of the most shocking violent incidents in Hyde Park memory. In 2021, Jahmal Cole was a congressional candidate who was shot at (though not injured) while visiting Hyde Park in a crime they never determined the motif for.
If you go look at the actual Violence Reduction Dashboard referenced in the article you'll see that Hyde Park has less shootings per capita than the loop and the near north side. Its tiered in the safest neighborhoods in Chicago. Its used as an example of what the Dashboard calls "The Safety Gap" to distinguish how much safer some neighborhoods are than others.
Chicago has a violent crime problem, in some neighborhoods its an absolute multiple generation failure and an outrage. But if you aren't comfortable with Hyde Park's crime rate, you aren't comfortable anywhere in Chicago or you have some other bias at play. Thats fine! Feel free to make your own choices about where you go but Hyde Park isn't rough by any American statistical observation.
And it certainly isn't germane to whether kids play outside! You'll find that in the absolute roughest neighborhoods in Chicago as well as the poshest.
kids living in the pearl district or anywhere on the west side south of there, up to and including lake Oswego, are going to be living in million dollar-plus homes and condos, and have parents with plenty of resources to keep them busy in safe environments outsude school.
May also be type of vehicle. Big farm truck in suburbs/rural, can't see anyone under ~3ft well when they're right up on you unless you're really intentionally looking down. Also could be the children are improperly trained. False sense of security, whereas in the city it's basically entrenched in anyone that as soon as you set foot outside that the cars are trying to slaughter everyone so kids & adults alike are always on alert. Whenever I live in the city I basically assume if I'm not in a city park a car is on the prowl to run me over at any minute, which means I'm not really caught unawares.
Yes that was the lesson. Not "if you go outside a driver will slaughter you" which is the lesson in the city, and probably a more accurate one. You still go outside but you know you're in the slaughterhouse. Farm kid by your own admission doesn't realize they're still in the slaughterhouse when off the road.
Sure children can be trained, but children will still go in the road because they are children. Based on current laws, this is acceptable collateral damage so that cars can go fast.
Cities are not just dense downtown cores with arterial streets. Most families living in cities live on side-streets that don't get much through traffic, and children frequently play in them.
> Isn't it possible that people who live in beautiful neighborhoods with mature trees, nice big yards, and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around
The majority of America was not some idyllic "streetcar suburb" even pre WWII. Majority of it was either grid based urban development or rural residential / agriculture in large plots (often 20, 40, 80, 160, 320, 640 acre plots).
As agriculture got more efficient, and raising food for ones self became less common, and as cars became more prevalent these large rural plots often got sold to developers who would be tasked with breaking up the land into parcels and installing new roads and infrastructure.
Even in 1906 in San Francisco, you can see that cars are beginning to overtake the cable car and horse carriage as the central form of transport: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHkc83XA2dY
So it's natural that majority of American land was developed around the automobile.
I grew up in a house built in the 1890s (with residual pipes for gas lighting because electricity hadn't been "invented" yet). It was designed to be with-in walking distance of retail and streetcars/trams/trolleys, because the car had not been invented yet. Grid layout pre-dates the automobile:
Well I've been in many pre 1890s buildings and houses that were never anywhere near a streetcar or even railroad, because they were not located anywhere near a dense urban area. The United States is a vast swath of highly arable land. Far more of it is amenable in terms of climate than Canada. And huge swaths of this country were sparsely inhabitated, broken up into these large rural parcels as I described. People moved to the United States throughout the 1800s specifically to obtain land.
> There's nothing "natural" about car-centric design and giving priority to cars
Look at the video footage of San Fran in 1906 I posted. It is just about as perfect of a model as you could find. It was a premier city at the time. It had cable car infrastructure across the city that survives to this day. However, even in this footage people are foregoing the cable car for the automobile. More people are jetting around in their car, far before any real infrastructure even existed specifically for the car. It was a consumer choice.
People like to think it was some kind of conspiracy that streetcars and railroads fell out of favor for cars.
No, cars replaced horses and horse carriages, which were flexible in path movement, did not depend on central operators, asynchronous in that they could be deployed any time, and also like horses, cars were owned.
Independence, ownership, empowerment, etc. Huge American cultural values in part shaped by the sheer geography of the U.S.
For the United States, based on its geography and culture, absolutely inevitable that independent and self owned forms of transportation would dominate.
Development could have continued to be denser communities around either tram lines, rail stations, or existing towns. LA's 'sprawl' started around the trolley system:
Some of the original bedroom communities were based around rail stations. But those communities still had 'urban-ish' communities that one walked around, and long distance travel was rail, or horse, later car.
And I know well communities not around any dense urban area, as I visited my grandparents' farm in Communist Europe numerous times when I was young: my aunts/uncles had cars back in the Old Country, but my grand parents still used horses for a lot of work and even going into town.
A random farm, in a rural area, in a sprawling country is not the same planned development on a parcel of land, which required government approval and permits. Low-density development, cul-de-sacs, restrictive zoning where residential is not with-in waling distance of commercial/industrial were all policy choices. There was nothing inevitable about it. Certainly in the 1940s and 50s maybe folks didn't know any better, but that's harder to say by the 1970s and 80s.
(Parenthetically, originally people used to live in towns and commute to their farms: living right on the farm was a later development (relatively speaking).)
You can have all this (and more!) in cities as well. Lived in Seattle for a bit and my apartment had several neighborhoods of single-family homes within a couple blocks: each with mature trees, yards, and low traffic streets. Sure, the yard maybe isn't as massive as you can get in a suburb, but there's still plenty of space (and far more public parks).
Because they were so close to dense housing, they also had the added benefits of public transit and being walking distance to several grocery stores. Much better than suburbia in my opinion.
I dont like noise, light pollution, or crowds. I'd like nighttime to be silent and pitch dark, and the daytime to be mostly silent as well.
I go on trips and need to be able to load lots of stuff in and out of "my" or "a" car without living in terror of all of my stuff getting stolen while I'm inside.
Where should I live?
Note: I lived in three different boroughs of NYC for 25 years
That's nice. Many of us don't want that, but have it forced upon us considering something like 90% of all residential zoning in the USA is R1 zoning.
There will be demand for neighborhoods you want and they will exist but it won't necessarily be in the middle of major population centers like it is now.
What? No, doing it by population is a bad approach.
Land is the resource you're dividing up. The question is how much of the divided-up land is allocated to an (allegedly) niche usage.
Doing it by population is like saying "almost no one is a billionaire, almost everyone is basically poor and equally-poor, so there can't possibly be a wealth inequality problem". (I'm not saying there is/isn't a wealth inequality problem, I'm only saying that's a dud argument.)
If we're throwing out anecdata, I've experienced none of that in 22 years of living in the Seattle suburb of Redmond. We've never had a package stolen from our doorstep. No one breaks into our car (and we have multiple vehicles in the driveway). We did have one little shit steal a bunch of mail a few years ago, and locking mailboxes fixed that. There's homeless folks I only know about because I run the local trails, but they are otherwise invisible AFAICT.
And this, despite the Redmond PD apparently going on strike the last few years (when's the last time you saw a RPD car north of 85th St., fellow Redmondites?).
However, if we're addressing the dark and noise part, well, it's a suburb and you don't get dark and quiet here.
I live in a decently "nice" part of Seattle. Constantly concerned stuff will get stolen. Have had car broken in to more than once. "Terror" might be overstating if, but the level of property crime is objectively harming my day-to-day experience.
Yeah, sorry, Im not trying to make a claim as to the cause here, just agreeing that this really does exist and really does make life way shittier in some very major cities.
We're seeing a level of wealth inequality now that rivals the level seen in the Gilded Age. "Petty crime enforcement" won't do anything but place more of your neighbors in harm's way. An oppressively policed neighborhood does not make the neighborhood safer.
The child poverty rate was halved under an emergency declaration in 2020. That policy was allowed to expire in 2022[1] and that, along with unchecked inflation and labor-averse federal monetary policy, is naturally producing misery and desperation.
Having lived, in the past five years, in Seattle, in a Seattle exurb, in a small city well north of Seattle (Bellingham), and now in London, I can say that this is just a problem -- not a Seattle problem, and urban problem, or a US problem. We had people prowling our secure parking garage in my Seattle condo building; my exurb house was in a development where summer days brought the smell of cow manure in through the open windows, but barely a week went by without cars being prowled; Bellingham is a college town and has had property crime issues for decades; and obviously London has loads of thefts and robberies, with a recent trend being masked robbers on motorcycles and scooters snatching phones from people's hands on the streets.
Everybody thinks this is a local problem, but the reality is that, in developed nations, property crime is quite strongly correlated with wealth inequality[1], which has been growing in most of the western world for the past couple of decades.
I don't know. I lived in a wealthy suburb outside San Diego and did not experience this problem (I used to leave my keys in my car with the car unlocked, which was obviously moronic but never caused me any problems), and I lived briefly in SF where it was substantially worse.
I have been robbed at knifepoint, intentionally kicked off my bike by a motorbike, pickpocketed and cash taken from the ATM(with a ruse)... All traumatic events that haunt me to this day.
And yet, I still can say that a city is still one of the safest places to be.
Your experience isn't invalid, it's just how it impacts everyone. The outcome of your and mine experiences are subjective, and people who go through them(you and me both) should stop pretending that our experiences are universal.
>I go on trips and need to be able to load lots of stuff in and out of "my" or "a" car without living in terror of all of my stuff getting stolen while I'm inside.
This is not a problem in cities in Asia. It was not a problem before the '60s. It is still not a problem in the dense downtowns of a few small American cities that have avoided the modern homelessness crisis. It is a specifically recent American major city phenomenon that nobody wants to accept as the norm.
people with homes steal things they see available as well. even people who aren't poor steal things, either just for "fun" or because they are opportunistic and trying to just amass more wealth. laptops, cars etc. are not stolen by homeless people, more like professional thieves. I've seen a lot of things stolen, my own and that of close family members. Crowded places have more theft, facilitated by there just being lots of people around and also that it's the norm for everyone to be completely anonymous of everyone else. Have not been to Asia but you certainly will get your stuff stolen in European cities as well (have had that happen also in Dublin for example, extremely traumatizing).
Words have meaning, and "extremely traumatizing" should be reserved for slightly more damaging things than getting ready to leave the restaurant and realizing your phone is gone. I realize word inflation is a battle that is lost every day, but it's still annoying. See what I did there? I didn't say that word inflation is extremely enraging or plunges me into a mental breakdown. It's just annoying.
how do you know I wasnt robbed at gunpoint? or am phobic of travel and being without a passport etc. had me stranded / without food / etc? make an attempt at seeing other people's existence?
If you just want less human noise, somewhere with a large lot. On my 9 acre lot I can still hear human noise, but usually only big things, which tends to be daytime, and not a lot of it. Oh, and backyard roosters; they're everywhere around here, but only noisy when the sun is up. Vehicle noises carry a long way when people have more horsepower than brains, though; gunshots and fireworks too. Not sure how to avoid those noises. I don't get a lot of artificial light from the neighbors, but there's some; more forest or a larger lot would help.
On the other hand, there's a lot of noise from local wildlife, and wind and rain and hail and other natural phenomenon that creates noise. And sometimes the moon is pretty bright at night. I guess you could live somewhere with caves and avoid some of that, but critters are everywhere.
A small town in Iceland (which is pretty much all of them except Reykjavik) would do the trick.
But then you have a crappy range of very expensive food at the local supermarket, pretty much everything else you have to order in or pick up from Reykjavik (or abroad), if you want to see live music your choice is “Ja Ja Ding Dong” at the (only) pub one night a week or (again) going to Reykjavik. Want to see the latest musical (or a Grand Slam tennis tournament, or a million other events that are on all the time in NYC) live? Hop on an international flight. And everybody in the street will know pretty much everything you do.
But the mountains are stunningly beautiful, the crime rate is almost zero and you can drive your Super Jeep around to your heart’s content.
I get the desire for solitude but it comes with tradeoffs.
If you throw a dart at a US map it will probably land on a place like what you described. It isn't hard to find a house where you literally cannot see your neighbors.
Live in a rural area. Move to Adirondacks, you'll have to drive everywhere - but there's little to no noise and so little light pollution, that you can see the Milky Way.
We moved from Williamsburg to Cornwall(NY). We live in a rural area and there's a tonne of noise(interstate traffic is audible from 5+ miles away) and light pollution(Hudson Valley light pollution is high).
Any smaller city in Europe lol. With a flat facing the inside of house block (not the street). If you want it to be dead silent and truly pitch dark, then northern Europe (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Estonia).
Warm months can get noisy. Especially the god-damned locusts, but there are crickets and all kinds of things at night, even when those are dormant. Coyotes—those even, and perhaps especially, in Winter, but at least they're not so unpleasant to listen to unless your dogs are out or you forgot to put the fowl in for the night. Seemingly-endless Canada geese flocks low overhead, honking from horizon to horizon. God help you if you're near water. Frogs. Ugh. Frogs.
But, not so much neighbors' lawnmowers, or cars. Or car horns. Or people yelling. Or anyone else's music. That is nice. And man are the Winters peaceful.
Dust from gravel roads (you have no idea how much if you've not experienced it—dust every surface at 9am, can write in the new dust on the kitchen table by 4pm, on a bad day when the wind's wrong and it's dry), "snow" from combines and various ag processing plants (pretty sure this stuff's terrible on your lungs, but at least it's not all the time and only in some places). That shit smell for a few days when the next farmer over spreads manure. Your hour-plus drive (each way) every two to four weeks for your "big shopping" (and they say cities have food deserts! LOL—and if you think there aren't rural folks so damn poor they have trouble keeping a car running and need tons of help just to get groceries... well, there are, and lots of them) and needing to have a deep freeze or two and maybe even two refrigerators depending on how big your family is. Having to drive that far, too, if your kid needs clothes or shoes and the limited selection at the tractor & feed won't cut it. Forget walking anywhere that ain't your own land.
Got its own challenges. But, sometimes, it is very, very quiet.
[EDIT] Oh, and gunshots! Pretty often, mostly far off, varies a little depending on what your neighbors are like, but common enough I think it's fair to call that a normal part of the rural soundscape.
Old narrow-street, maybe an alley in the back, grid-layout suburbs with the odd block corner zoned commercial and all-neighborhood-streets routes to all kinds of businesses and parks and libraries and such are a whole different beast from the twisty-road car-dependent mazes of post-70s suburbia. And they're so much damn nicer. Too bad no-one builds them anymore.
We moved from the latter to the former about a year ago, and it's SO MUCH BETTER. The low traffic residential grid roads make great walking and cycling (for quite long distances) and the closer proximity to neighbors seems to result in friendlier people. I'm amazed at what a different feeling it is compared to our old McMansion/Condo stuff where people kept to their boxes and didn't seem to know how to politely interact.
problem isn't zoning but design regulations. A lot of street design is dictated by being able to fire engine equipment in and turned around. Hence no new alleys are being built.
The "residential" road that I live on is (and most in the area are) 45 ft wide, with 2.5' sidewalks. The Hummer H1 is an incredible 7.2 feet wide, meaning you could fit six full-size hummers side-by-side down this road. Add in the mandatory front 30ft setback and you have a sight line that is around 110 feet wide.
People are expected to go up to 30 mph here. They don't.
I think a lot of people just assume that the only kind of suburbia that exists is endless tract housing as far as the eye can see. I'm absolutely positive that does happen, but I've never lived in a suburban neighborhood that fit such a description. We have stores. We have business parks here and there. Heck, we even have public transit.
This is probably why there is such a dichotomy between those who hate suburbia, and those who love it. Different experiences piggybacking on the same terminology.
If you find your way to my other comment ("suburban sprawl") this is largely what it looked like to me when I visited my brother. The developments aren't very large and there is roughly nothing around them.
Contrast to NJ, where the NYC suburbs extend way outside Midtown and the city limits.
As a result, it is very rare to feel like you are in the middle of nowhere.
I don’t think parent was denying that, or at least I don’t get a sense of this dichotomy in the text. As someone that lives on Vashon island (what some consider a suburb of Seattle; but I actually consider rural King County), I got the sense that suburbia here was specifically directed at the endless tract of housing one (so like East Bellevue, Kent, or large parts of Kirkland), but not actual small towns around the main city (like Bothel, Lynnwood, Kirkland proper, or—well—Vashon) or even other dense urban areas like Burien or Redmond.
I mean, you’re basically saying that you can have suburbia in the city?
If lots of people want it, the price will skyrocket, so then somebody will buy some land just outside the city and build suburbia there so more people can afford it.
> Isn't it possible that people who live in beautiful neighborhoods with mature trees, nice big yards, and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around, want to keep them that way for primarily those reasons?
Yes that is absolutely something people want. You can get that in cities if you give up on yard and instead share with parks. That said, some of the reasons people want it are uncomfortable.
Some people don’t like change and moved somewhere based on how it looked in <year>, understandable, but change is a part of life especially as our population grows. Streets that are safe for kids are common in many parts of the world, in many different city structures, not just suburbs. So the “family friendly” myth about suburbs isn’t true.
Regarding uncomfortable truths, if you go and listen to some of the town meetings, you’ll walk away with a couple points, of varying degrees of prejudice.
Some people simply want it to be “exclusionary” to keep prices up, and to keep themselves feeling special. Those people in town meetings may suggest paying for affordable housing in another town to keep theirs as is.
Some people will say they don’t want affordable housing because “we all know that those people bring crime”. This can be a varying degree of prejudice, whether it’s low income people or racial minorities, but invariably someone always says it.
I'm sure at town meetings there are plenty of unsavory things said, and people with prejudices show up in disproportionate numbers. It's just not accurate or OK to imply that all property owners seeking to keep their neighborhoods from rapidly changing to higher densities are doing so out of prejudice. Give people the benefit of believing they are primarily motivated by rational self interest rather than some irrational prejudice.
I totally agree parks are an amazing solution and can create really nice places for kids to play safely. We love our parks. That said, even if the end product is objectively better for the current homeowners due to new amenities, etc. there is still a long period of lots of construction they'll have to endure that might be the only years their kids are at an age where they'd normally be wandering the previously quiet neighborhood. None of this is simple, and it's going to be a trade-off between the valid interests of the existing property owners and the valid interests of the larger metro area population that needs a place to live.
I have nothing against parks. Parks are great. But I'm not sure what problem they supposedly solve.
If I were living in an apartment, then a park would be better than nothing.
But I can't grow a vegetable garden in a park. I can't enjoy the park while I have stuff inside my house that I need to check on in 15 minutes. You can't let a 5 year-old go to the park alone but, if your backyard is relatively secured and you can see them out of your window, then you can let them play in the backyard. I can't let my dog out to run to the park in order to "do its business" etc. I don't have the same level of privacy and solitude at a park as I do in my backyard.
While there are certain things I would prioritize over a backyard (like having a garage to set up a "makers shop" in), there's not much I would trade a backyard for ... least of all a park.
Beyond the "yard solution" I also have a very hard time living in even medium-sized cities, let alone large ones. I don't like noise, traffic (street or pedestrian) or crowds. Public transportation is a nightmare for me and grocery delivery services have actually saved my life so I don't need or want a grocery store within walking distance (I find shopping to be one of the most stressful activities in life). Rural living is for me.
It's funny how common things like vegetable gardens are in Internet rhetoric and how comparatively rare they are in the world I actually walk around in.
This is a thread about development policy. If you actually want to raise a vegetable garden, you're in a small minority. Nobody is forcing you to live anywhere, and there is certainly no need to prevent the growth of cities or preserve low-density neighborhoods in the inner region of a major metropolitan area to ensure there will be space for the small fraction of us who want to grow their own tomatoes. In fact the opposite is true: allowing dense development to take place ensures that there will be more unspoilt land available on the outskirts for those of us with a green thumb.
I don't understand your point. I was replying to people who were talking about how parks solve certain problems for those without yards, and I was wondering what problems they solve. The fact that most people don't grow vegetable gardens is cherry-picking one example I gave of something you can do in a backyard but that you can't do in a park. Why did you zero in on that and go off on a rant about how most people don't grow vegetable gardens and those who do can not live in cities? That has literally nothing to do with my comment.
My point is simple: you are not being forced to live in a city.
>Why did you zero in on that
It helped highlight the irrelevance and myopia of your post.
>That has literally nothing to do with my comment.
Your concluding sentence was "Rural living is for me". Do you see the connection now?
This is a thread about how some people make life more expensive for everyone because the world around them is changing and they want to use the government to stop it. This is a thread about development policy. Development policy does not make your backyard disappear. It is a question about whether you should ban other people from living in ways you don't personally enjoy.
>I was wondering what problems they solve. The fact that most people don't grow vegetable gardens is cherry-picking one example I gave of something you can do in a backyard but that you can't do in a park.
Why did you cherry-pick one example the poster gave about what he enjoys about living in a city and go off on a rant about all of the things you can do in a backyard but not in a park?
> My point is simple: you are not being forced to live in a city.
But that has nothing to do with anything. I never once said or even implied that I, or anyone else, was.
> It helped highlight the irrelevance and myopia of your post.
I re-read the thread and come away with a different conclusion. My post was neither myopic or off-topic IMO.
> Your concluding sentence was "Rural living is for me". Do you see the connection now?
You misunderstood my point and concluded that i was implying that everyone is being forced to live in cities. You are being argumentative, I was making conversation.
> Why did you cherry-pick one example the poster gave about what he enjoys about living in a city and go off on a rant about all of the things you can do in a backyard but not in a park?
>I re-read the thread and come away with a different conclusion. My post was neither myopic or off-topic IMO.
The thread is about policy. Every post before yours in the tree you responded to discusses the motivations of people, particularly people in large CA metropolitan areas, for supporting particular policies, or discusses the impacts of the policies themselves. I attempted to respond to your post as though you were trying to say something relevant to policy, and in so doing, tried to explain that your personal preferences are not necessarily a good guide to policy, particularly in the areas in question.
You have pulled the less important sentences out of my posts and chosen to repeatedly attack me personally:
>You are being argumentative
>Re-read the parent, troll.
In fairness, it was not the post you responded to that mentioned parks as an amenity of cities, but the one before that. I regret that my attempt at a humorous illustration seems to have been missed.
It doesn't seem like further exposition on my part is likely to help you see what you missed. Please understand that there are many people like you who interject these sort of unhelpful anti-city anecdotes in discussions about local land use regulations, so I showed a little annoyance.
I agree with all of this, while also noting I have had several friends and colleagues who grow herbs and vegetables in apartments, on balconies, in sun rooms and so on. Anything short of a tree appears completely viable even without an expansive back yard.
In the US it is an arrestable offense for your kids to go play in the park on their own, so I pretty much see it as a waste to fund children's playgrounds. Average parent is worked to death just keeping the household afloat with no time to have to accompany their kid the whole time. Rather have a private one where the police at least need a warrant to enter the secured curtilage.
> In the US it is an arrestable offense for your kids to go play in the park on their own
No, that is definitely just an urban legend. First, the law would depend on the state, and second, most states don’t have restrictions for kids once they are 7-8 years old, which I consider way too young to be by themselves but I wouldn’t get arrested over it.
It does depend on your state, but whenever it happens, it’s a news story simply because it doesn’t happen often. Nuance is important:
> Phillips, Debra Harrell’s attorney, confirmed there is no age at which a child can be left on his or her own specified in South Carolina law. The challenge for the prosecutor will be to prove that this child’s needs and care were not adequately arranged before she was left at the park, he said.
There is no law against it (in South Carolina at least). The law they are using for the charge is reckless endangerment. And usually at the end of it, prosecutors drop all charges due to lack of evidence.
Have you ever been subject of a criminal complaint? Not long ago I was detained on some absurd hearsay. I was cuffed, I was fingerprinted, I was strip searched. Tossed in a cell. Made to perform bodily functions in front of officers. You don't know who is going to take care of your pets, your child(ren). You don't know if you'll be fired from your job. You don't know when you'll be released. In the case of something involving a child, it will be used as prejudicial information in the DCS case and the followup investigation. You quite likely will be put on a civil list of child abusers, which makes it difficult to work with children or adopt.
All these things make public playgrounds just extremely inconvenient. It's such a treacherous hazard I can't in good conscious consider it as anything close to a substitute.
Again that’s not how it works. First, whenever this happens it is broadcast widely in the news. Second, there is some debate, a mention that no state law (and definitely no federal law, as the original comment suggested) actually exists prohibiting kids from being at the playground alone, a vague weak law is used and then the prosecutor goes WTF were the police thinking.
I'm very adaptive and can do both(to a degree), and a lot of people are like you, me and city dwelling socialites(that pay $5000 for a shoebox apartment in the middle of Manhattan).
The issue arises, is when people with your mindset also want to be close to big social life. Then they may, and NIMBYs do, stifle natural city growth. << That is the problem here
I'm 100% sure that there is a way to negotiate better outcomes for everyone.
> It's just not accurate or OK to imply that all property owners seeking to keep their neighborhoods from rapidly changing to higher densities are doing so out of prejudice
Very few people here are implying this. It’s true that some people are doing it out of prejudice, and that some of American culture has been conditioned to like the suburbs, out of historic prejudices.
> there is still a long period of lots of construction they'll have to endure that might be the only years their kids are at an age where they'd normally be wandering the previously quiet neighborhood.
Those people will still have the yards they had yesterday though? They’ll still have everything they had the day before zoning changed. Nothing is lost for homeowners. The whole neighborhood isn’t going to be under scaffolding overnight and quiet neighborhoods are far more dangerous for kids to play outside than a more developed area.
And just as development isn’t instantaneous, neither is childhood growth - the people that move into new houses that are built will likely be pre-child families looking to move somewhere (still quite) quiet to raise a kid.
> trade-off between the valid interests of the existing property owners and the valid interests of the larger metro area population that needs a place to live.
Completely false dichotomy. This isn’t about metro vs suburbs. It’s those homeowners vs all of society, or more precisely current town residents vs future town residents.
The suburbs need more housing, and the cities. All of American society has too few houses for the population, and people have to live somewhere. Some want to live in a big city, but some want to live outside a big city. This population should not be looked at as “city overflow” and more than the current residents should be considered city dwellers. Plenty of people would rather live in a 5% more dense Hillsboro than a 5% more dense San Francisco. And both towns may need to be 5% more dense to support housing needs.
> I'm sure at town meetings there are plenty of unsavory things said, and people with prejudices show up in disproportionate numbers. It's just not accurate or OK to imply that all property owners seeking to keep their neighborhoods from rapidly changing to higher densities are doing so out of prejudice.
Perhaps not, but it's the people who attend town meetings and complain (more often than not for prejudiced reasons, IME) who influence housing policy. City planning leadership reacts to and votes on the opinions of those people primarily, not the people who don't show up.
And additionally, the only people who would show up already live there, when a large part of this issue is about a non-present constituency: those who have either been forced to leave, or those who would like to move there, but cannot afford to currently.
Yes, exactly this. Additionally we have seen how many once beautiful cities and parks have turned into unsafe homeless camps because of government policy. If I buy a house with a nice backyard I can guarantee that it will be nice as long as I maintain it. I cannot guarantee that the local park will not turn into a needle strewn homeless camp sometime in the future when some politician changes something.
And people will be homeless in large numbers until enough housing is built for them, and the government is allowed to spend the $x to house them rather than the $(x * y) required to deal with all the effects them being homeless.
Build subsidized housing for people who need it. Time and time again experience has shown that to be the cheapest solution. But many Americans who never grew past toddlerhood find that unacceptable because it means someone else is getting something they aren't.
Lol. Yeah, and just keep building MORE free housing next year to give away as the Greyhounds keep rolling in. Of course, it's criminal to even suggest building it somewhere less expensive. Only the finest and most convenient locations will do! So, to afford the land and materials, and the armies of social workers, uhh, just raise payroll and property taxes?
My brother bought a house in Fremont next to an apartment building. Had nothing but trouble with the neighbors; loud noise, trash around, tons of traffic in front of his house. He eventually had to move.
Are they? Isn't it possible that people who live in beautiful neighborhoods with mature trees, nice big yards, and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around, want to keep them that way for primarily those reasons?
Cars are currently two tons noise and pollution machine. It's no wonder why people feel unsafe around them.
You could restrict traffic to only bicycles and pedestrians combined with mixed zoning.
> Are they? Isn't it possible that people who live in beautiful neighborhoods with mature trees, nice big yards, and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around, want to keep them that way for primarily those reasons?
I live in a suburban R-1 neighborhood in Oregon and my kids play basketball, ride bikes, and roller skate in the street literally every day with boatloads of other kids. If that's your vision of a nightmare, I fear we're not going to agree on any of this.
I'm seriously shocked by how many people value the idea that kids can play in the street. Why not a park or other recreation area? I get that it isn't entirely common in the United States to build walkable parks but that is a United States problem, not a city problem. Cities built for living should offer much better alternatives to children than playing in the street.
We have a great park just down the street (about a block and a half), but the street is great and it's right outside. Maybe 10 cars per day travel our street. Besides, the street is paved for bikes and rollerskates. The park is, of course, not. Also, it's easier to keep tabs on the kids right out the front door than it is when they're unsupervised down at the park.
But, yes, they also play at the park. They all run all over the damned place -- because it's a safe place and, culturally, the people living in the neighborhood have a high degree of trust and look out for one another. It's very difficult to replicate that in high density urban developments with the attendant problems those areas recruit (e.g., crime, homelessness, etc.).
How do they get there? What might not be obvious is that the parks are often far away, because you can't afford to maintain many parks because the tax base is too small.
I completely agree if we are talking about a typical suburb. A mixed-use area built for living doesn't have that issue. What I find really strange is that some people in these comments seem opposed to mixed-use areas BECAUSE their children will no longer be able to play in the streets. It's like some sort of weird, cyclical way of justifying the lack of proper pedestrian areas.
If the tax base is too small for parks, it's also too small to pay for the street/road infrastructure, and that's being subsidized by people outside of the community. If a community can't afford basic infrastructure (which should include parks), it isn't zoned to be dense enough.
You don't see many kids in San Francisco because homes are tiny, prices are crazy, police don't enforce public order, and the public school system is mess. Opening up zoning restrictions is generally a good thing, but it's not going to make SF an attractive place for middle-class families to raise small children.
What we can't comprehend is forcing everyone in the country to live in the type of town you want. Move to bumfuck if you want a quiet uncrowded town. People near jobs want cheap housing.
> The pro-density crowd cannot comprehend wanting to live in a quiet, safe, uncrowded town.
No, we just can't comprehend why you would expect the big city to be quiet and uncrowded. It's like moving to the tropics, and complaining that it rains too much, and that the skiing sucks.
If you want quiet and uncrowded, there's the 99.9% of the country's land area that isn't taken up by coastal metros in the middle of a crippling housing crisis.
I live in Tokyo, in a central area (nearish to Shibuya). It's dense, but quiet, safe, and surprisingly not that crowded. There's a few children's play areas within a 2 minute walk. There's numerous parks around me, including dog runs.
The anti-density crowd can't imagine allowing well planned towns and cities to exist in the US.
many others have pointed out how tunnel-vision you are being, but just wanted to add:
Low traffic → Less cars driving
How do you get less cars driving? People need realistic options. How do you get those options? Density to support transit and Density to support having businesses close to everyone's homes so they can just walk or bike. Car-dependent suburbia IS the problem, and the more of it you have in the city the bigger the problems of traffic and unaffordability get.
Finally though:
> want to keep them that way
Look, don't get carried away. Unless a very significant block of homeowners in your beautiful leafy neighborhood are itching to sell, you have literally nothing to fear. Maybe when a large mall is demolished a mile away from you, someone will build something other than single-family tract homes. Big whoop.
*Nobody is coming for your suburbs with bulldozers* just because "SFH" might not be enshrined as the only way anything can be developed.
> many others have pointed out how tunnel-vision you are being
I'm not advocating for low density suburbs or for things to remain unchanged.
My point was that the implication that some kind of nefarious prejudice was the main reason for homeowners wanting to keep the status quo, isn't fair or accurate.
This is a very simplistic view. Less people per unit land also means less cars per unit land. Depending on how the roads are designed, you can get a spread out neighborhood with no traffic on your street.
I grew up on a cul-de-sac. There were 8 houses on the street. The only time there was a car on the street is when someone from one of those 8 houses went somewhere. There was zero traffic and the street was safe for kids to play in.
> Less people per unit land also means less cars per unit land.
Only if you arbitrarily cherry-pick the unit of analysis to support your argument.
The only way to actually reduce cars per unit of land across all available land is to increase housing density so that sensible transportation alternatives like bicycle and metro become viable for the lazier marginal population.
> Are they? Isn't it possible that people who live in beautiful neighborhoods with mature trees, nice big yards, and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around, want to keep them that way for primarily those reasons?
You're describing European cities, there. That is literally how I grew up in a big city, and we were lower middle class at best.
Even the prejudice part we don't have to dance around.
I'm from the Netherlands, and for the first 24 years of my life have lived in lower working class neighborhoods, 3 in total. Low income families, people on wellfare, the like. In this case all white, so it's not a racial thing.
All of these 3 neighborhoods were awful. Relatively high crime, vandalism, the public dumping of trash, alcoholism, very loud music blasting, shouting, just general anti-social behavior.
The biggest quality of life improvement in my lifetime is that eventually I was able to afford living in a good neighborhood. Middle class to a bit above it. Families, stable citizens, civil, considerate, sane. The piece of mind this gives is invaluable. This is just one step up the ladder, I'm by no means rich.
It's not elitism. It shouldn't be a high bar to feel comfortable, safe, and not constantly frustrated by obnoxious people, or the spaces ruined. But at the same time we should acknowledge that this "bar" is strongly correlated with class. For obvious reasons, in the lower classes more people have what I'll categorize as "social issues".
And here's the thing. It's a rotten apple dynamic. Perhaps as little as 5-10% of the inhabitants are responsible for all this shit, yet the entire neighborhood becomes unlivable because of it. The real issue here is that these rotten apples are not addressed. Because it's near-impossible to address. The behavior is petty crime at best and often merely obnoxious and anti-social behavior. You can't put people in jail for that and they have to live somewhere. This is already the lowest end, there's nowhere else to go.
So the positive here is that it's not racism (in my example), and not even classism. 90% of people in the lower classes are decent and social people. The real issue is the inability to deal with the 10% that is not. The dysfunctionals and anti-socials wrecking the place.
I'm sure that each has their own story, but I'm not going to suffer my entire life at their whims. I've done plenty of that. You could say that this "prejudice" is very much grounded in reality. Sometimes you need to a reality check.
Nothing about this would let a developer cut down your tree, build on your yard, etc. You just wouldn't be able to stop your neighbor from selling their property to a developer who might cut down trees and build things there. It's not unreasonable for you to have preferences about what your neighbors do with their property, just like it's not unreasonable for you to have preferences about which kinds of restaurants are close to your home. But should you be able to prevent your favorite restaurant from legally closing?
Your neighbor doesn't currently have the right to do anything they want with their property though. They don't absolutely own it and have some kind of sovereign status. They can't turn it into a gas station or auto repair shop. They have the right to exclusive use of the land for the purpose of a single family dwelling built to certain specifications and abiding by various guidelines and regulations.
When each neighbor bought into the neighborhood, they all signed up for this same basic deal. Many of them would likely have chosen to not spend their money on the property had their neighbors not been bound by the same rules.
What is being proposed is a significant change to those rules that every owner at some point agreed to. This absolutely does affect everyone in the neighborhood because an older neighborhood is more than a collection of unrelated properties, it is a collection of actual homes of similar size and character with a particular feel and aesthetic.
A change to the rules may absolutely be necessary for the health of the city / population as a whole. Totally agree with this. Don't pretend though that it's not coming at the cost of infringing on the existing homeowners' reasonable expectations of what they bought into when they purchased their properties. Again, maybe it does need to happen, but homeowners are not unreasonable for wanting to keep their neighborhoods as they've always known and loved them.
> What is being proposed is a significant change to those rules that every owner at some point agreed to.
Sure, because the law is changing, at least ostensibly due to the will of the people. The didn’t initially “agree to the rules,” and the new rules aren’t optional either. I’m obviously not so naive to think that all changes in law reflect the will of the people, but it’s pretty easy to see why this is likely the case, especially in these particular places that have enormous demand for housing and extreme restrictions on new housing developments (I bet that’s not a coincidence!).
> Buying a house and expecting nothing to change in one's neighborhood is completely unreasonable.
From a contractual/legal perspective, sure.
From an emotional perspective though, it's different. Nobody buys a house on a whim, people spend a huge amount of time researching the best spot to buy based on all their preferences. To suddenly change all that is going to be distressing to any person who has ever bought a house.
Without kids in the picture sure, go ahead, make cities look like Coruscant from Star Wars.
The instant you have kids you see how important open spaces safe enough for unstructured minimally supervised play are. Without spaces like this all you have are kids drooling on Roblox and YouTube all day. There’s nothing for kids in an urban core.
Those spaces don’t have to be undeveloped or even outdoor but I have yet to see a city successfully create an environment safe enough that I’d let my small daughters run around.
So while I agree that zoning is dumb and complicated, I also think it’s important to understand where people are coming from.
I grew up in a Soviet planned city, with courtyard focused developments.
Our playgrounds were(they still are) larger and more accessible, than anything my current neighbours kids get on their 2a of land in rural USA.
Even the new developments in Eastern Europe provide a kid friendly courtyard. Shielded from all traffic and observable by literally the whole community.
Suburbia should be reserved for the insane rich people, that hate their neighbors.
Advantages for real-estate developers triumphed over the community-minded across a lot of the USA. I talked to my elderly Uncle, and he said that these zoning and quality of life issues were discussed quite a bit in the 1950s, but the "sprawl" pattern won in most cases. Shopping mall retail is another example of low-quality results in the USA, but with a different menu of inputs.
exactly - the problem is that House-absessed people do not understand how to build and manage apartments. In their imagination its just stacking towers without courtyards on top of each-other.
When they have coirtyards, they looks lile prisons.
Japan is much more child friendly in terms of that. For example, young children are regularly sent to do errands on their own (see the Old Enough tv show for an exaggerated version of that). So people may believe it to be the case, but I'm not convinced our zoning style achieves that goal.
In theory I agree - however there some differences between Japan and the US/CA.
I think the key with Japan is that they have several big HOA style restrictions at the very front of their property - the border. Immigration and existing cultural norms of being super respectful and following conventions in public places make this possible - the HOA style rules are built in at the country level.
There's also a very strict police presence apparently to ensure HOA compliance. [1]
It'd be awesome if there was experimental urban (or suburban) development in the US/CA that existed that was very high density and had very strict HOA rules and enforcement similar to Japan/Singapore.
Your opinion here seems to come from more a lack of experience or imagination, than from reality. Yes, many US "urban cores" are as you describe. But that is not the norm. The US is severely broken when it comes to city planning, and has been since at least the advent of the automobile.
With suburban sprawl, it's likely the only places within walking distance (i.e. "kid-reachable") are other houses, maybe a park. If managed well, a dense(r) city can have a forest or other semi-natural area nearby to everyone.
Freiburg in Germany. The black forest literally starts at the edge of the city. It was a while since I was there, but we definitely walked from the city centre to the forest. Might have been 30 minutes. Would be quick on a bike.
Zaragoza in Spain. Walked from the old city centre to the edge of the city (which was apartment blocks) in a reasonable time. It was mostly agricultural land, but I recall
some forest along the river.
San Sebastián, also in Spain. You can walk into the hills, but we went to the beach.
Parks covered in homeless people is a US problem, in my experience. I've been around most of Europe and haven't seen anything like that. The homeless problem in the US is a policy choice, just like the urban development is. It's easily solvable given political will.
Good for you that you have the money to buy acres of woods (or an exclusive parcel bordering woodland) and a job that can support living in a remote place. For many people that would want that lifestyle it's simply unattainable, and we should give them reasonable alternatives.
I live in Prague, my parents in a nearby town. Walking 10 minutes gets me either to a metro station or an "urban forest"/heavily wooded park called Stromovka. I think it's a very appropriate place for kids to play in nature. My parents have walking/biking access to similar places.
Not every place in Prague is this close to nature, but it's common enough that someone seeking that kind of housing can get it at basically no premium.
> but implying that all of these homeowners are primarily driven by prejudice
This is a good example of why being coy rather than explicit is bad for productive discussion. Bigotry of its various forms is certainly one possible uncomfortable answer to the question. But there are others, like crime, or the effect of local property-value-to-enrollment ratio on school quality, or plenty of other problems that systematically occur in American cities.
NIMBYism is by no means the exclusive domain of homeowners in low-density neighborhoods. Even when it comes from them, they are often concerned with developments that are not actually in their neighborhoods — their trees and yards not being in jeopardy. There's a fundamental distrust of the overall process of development that animates anti-growth sentiments not only in middle-class neighborhoods but also in, for example, the Mission.
I would say that the reasons you stated above are uncomfortable because they are implicitly discriminatory to people outside those areas who want to move in. People who already live there are, in effect, saying "we're full up here, go somewhere else". And these are often the same people with signs in their front yard saying things like "no matter where you are from, we're glad you're our neighbor" in multiple languages, or "climate change is real", or "no human is illegal" which espouse values in direct opposition to that implicitly discriminatory message.
> Are they? Isn't it possible that people who live in beautiful neighborhoods with mature trees, nice big yards, and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around, want to keep them that way for primarily those reasons?
For one if zoning laws change tomorrow no one is going to bulldoze those neighborhoods on Thursday. So everyone already in their "safe" neighborhood will remain "safe". Except in rare circumstances no one is going to build a 10-lane expressway behind that tract of "safe" houses.
Second you've got to be realistic about the socioeconomic factors behind those "safe" suburbs.
The small, often winding suburban streets are largely impenetrable to buses and completely immune to light rail. This means public transit often used by "those people" (for whatever local definition of "those") is inaccessible from inside the "safe" suburban housing tracts. This is exacerbated by many suburbs lacking sidewalks. Inaccessibility of public transit was a design criteria for early suburbs preventing anyone that could afford a house but not a car from moving to them.
> For one if zoning laws change tomorrow no one is going to bulldoze those neighborhoods on Thursday.
I’m so in favor of up zoning, but some parts of California will be quickly thrust into a new reality.
Santa Monica was the first town to
fail the housing element. They previously had 1600 houses built in the last 8 years. Since failing recently, developers have submitted permits for 4000 units. That’s 20x above the yearly average. If I was a “desirable” town, I’d be very nervous to not comply.
If I owned property in one of those towns I’d have been advertising it to developers hard too.
Many of the big trees are on public right of ways. Nothing is happening to them. The center of many city residential blocks are still quiet green oasis. Busy streets will still stay busy, quiet side streets tend to stay that way. Go look at any european city, or any city outside of the US really
> Many of the big trees are on public right of ways. Nothing is happening to them.
*Until the city decides they want to change it
That's why people want to ensrine in law that those trees don't change. They don't trust the city to maintain homeostasis for the duration of their residency.
What happens when people want to build a new apartment building but those trees are too big to safely build next to?
They don't (legally) on city property. That's what we're talking about. If you move into a neighborhood where the city maintains the trees in the common areas (sidewalks, parks, etc.), it's not unreasonable to want to put a barrier between the city deciding, for example, it's too expensive to keep maintaining those trees so they are going to cut them all down.
If I or my neighbor wants to cut down a tree is a completely different conversation.
I appreciate your snark though, even though it's completely irrelevant.
> Remove zones alone, and HOAs will get areas into legally binding covenants that are also just as tough as their current zoning regulation.
This. Houston has little or no zoning and is terribly sprawling and car-centric. Despite the lack of zoning, in most neighborhoods you can't just build whatever you want because of restrictive covenants. Developers build massive car-focused single-family-only developments and load them with covenants that prevent anything else from being built on the property after it is sold.
Houston also had minimum parking requirements. Also, TXDOT literally built highways through the city. It's not JUST zoning, but zoning is a large part of it. Houston does have way lower housing costs than other places though.
HOAs are the most local form of democracy there is. Perhaps just reduce the overwhelming supermajority requirements to dissolve them, perhaps. In many places your only viable option if you don't like your HOA is get elected to the board yourself along with enough like-minded neighbors. You might not be able to dissolve it, but you could seriously neuter the policies if you wanted.
> HOAs are the most local form of democracy there is.
Yes, they're the most local demonstration of the fact that "democracy" is not an acceptable approach to decide what color I can paint my house, or what plants I can plant, or how soon after the 6am garbage pickup my garbage can has to be brought inside.
They're also, often, not even a democracy: they're a loudest-ocracy, because most people have better things to do with their time than dictate what their neighbors can do.
Destroy HOAs with fire.
To be clear, echoing a point from elsewhere in this thread: nobody should have to have an asphalt manufacturing plant next to their home. But that same premise doesn't extend to "nobody should have a house next to them with an Unapproved Paint Color".
Having democratic properties doesn't make a bad thing good.
But like I think states like Michigan should do things like get rid of townships (which end up being a redundant layer under counties given modern infrastructure and administrative capacity).
The dumbest meeting I ever went to was a township zoning discussion where one group disingenuously argued that wind towers were the worst thing that could ever happen, another group argued that they should be able to put a wind tower anywhere they want regardless of any impact on their neighbors, and a guy that liked his own voice talked about how natural gas is a conspiracy, or something like that.
First thing to fix is the broken financial model. Exclusive suburbs pay disproportional less taxes for low density, low efficient, infrastructure. They are being subsidised by high density areas. That's not fair.
We moved from Manhattan an hour north into a rural area. Our town clears our road continuously during winter, while are property taxes are low single thousands. We get three trash pickups per week and other trash removal services included.
Yep, municipalities should require a large deposit up-front to connect new neighborhoods to existing infrastructure, based on the amount of infrastructure (roads, water, sewer) the new neighborhood has.
How does that work? Property tax is by city and suburbs are their own cities. For example, my city has implemented has implemented a Mello-Roos for new developments to fund new schools.
Cherry picking cities can show anything. Let's look at SF compared to suburbs like Palo Alto. Separate cities with their own budgets and SF has one the highest tax revenues per resident in the US but since SF has high density and lacks of car access goes up, costs explode including labor. SF average city employee salary is $180k. SF infrastructure is below palo alto. Palo alto has better streets, better schools, better maintained parks even with standford paying no property taxes.
When I visited Palo Alto I found it a very strange experience, my ‘terrain reading’ skills that would lead me to a convenience store and similar affordances in most developed and developing countries did not work at all.
It seemed to me that you could double the population density of that kind of neighborhood by replacing a single family lot with a 8 story tower every other block and filling in an occasional duplex, triplex or small apartment building. Such a neighborhood would be different but still pretty nice by most people’s standards, you can see neighborhoods like that in L.A. or São Paulo.
To be devil’s advocate though I’d say there are larger scale reasons why people might conclude that ‘California is full’. One is that the population density of California overall is about the same as Germany even though most of California is uninhabitable or massive farm fields. Certain regions of the coast are highly populated by U.S. standards even if they are nothing like Hong Kong or Singapore. The linear pattern of dense development means the radio spectrum is utilized like nowhere else in the US such that there are more OTA TVs channels in LA than some cable plans.
California struggles with water and any population addition would require adding more infrastructure of all kinds. It could be more highways, it could be more public transit but it has to be paid for. And the US is a country that spends 10’s of billions to duplicate a train station in NYC or run rail from Bakersfield to Fresno. A reasonable person could very well try to gum up the gears in that machine no matter how they can.
You might say that more population means more economic activity and more tax base but I am not so sure. A lot of it seems driven by inequity and monopoly power. Google and Facebook could not double their revenue by doubling their hiring in California and it is not so plausible that the next big startup in the U.S. would be able to accomplish what they’ve done. There was a time you could dream of selling a company like WhatsApp to Facebook even if going public was not in the cards but the monopolists would hate to have to spend that much to defend their positions and surely try to shape the environment to prevent that. (Now from Genshin Impact to Tik-Tok innovation in social/entertainment is happening in the PRC because that economy is more open to competition.)
> It seemed to me that you could double the population density of that kind of neighborhood by replacing a single family lot with a 8 story tower every other block and filling in an occasional duplex, triplex or small apartment building.
And you could probably maintain or even increase the amount of ground-level "yard" space per capita even while increasing population density. Of course it would need to be parks that you share.
Dealing with HOAs is actually easier - transfer all infrastructure ownership and maintenance to them... you'll see some big changes real fast.
Like treat HOA as a commercial entity for purposes of trash, water and sewage. (HOAs are, de facto, incorporated organizations). Tax land under the roads as plain land.
As for localities - they should be mandated to reassess property values every X years and distribute infrastructure maintenance costs appropriately. I now live in a rural area, and I underpay taxes for the services I get... while smaller houses in town overpay.
This is the dumbest idea I’ve heard. You’ll end up with people paying $0 for infra for 70 years then suddenly having to buy multimillion dollar projects with no cash reserves. The net result will be widespread chaos and huge social pressure on government to bail out badly managed HOAs.
Not different from the current system, where we elect politicians who promise not to raise taxes, so they defer maintenance on all infrastructure, until in 70 years we have to spend trillions replacing old pipes/bridges/roads that could have been kept up for decades longer with better maintenance.
Except they can't go begging to the feds, because they've also have been voted in under platforms of "minimize tax increases" for 40 years, so they're also indebted.
Chaos for badly managed HOAs, that will have to be dissolved and the property transferred to municipal control... disbanding bad HOAs and leaving properly managed HOAs.
I didn't mention that bad HOAs should definitely have the option to not have to pony up... However, suburban homes have to get their taxes ramped up, because they are unsustainable at current levels.
Streets are dangerous because of cars zipping around. Cars contribute to air pollution quality (until electrified) and noise quality.
So, you ban cars from streets and allow only pedestrians and cyclists. Next, you allow local amenities to pop up so you don't feel the need to get a car out.
The suburban pattern of development as it currently exists isn't the only way to facilitate the quality of life you're looking for.
Nearly all studies regarding suburban vs. urban streets have shown that suburban streets have significantly higher rates of child deaths and injuries than urban streets.
Just absolutely untrue. Cars on my street drive at 20 because of all the speed bumps. Even if a kid got hit it wouldn't be a death sentence. And guess what, they don't, they just move out of the way when a car comes.
Nah some people do. I saw a lady who was letting her infant crawl across an urban road. She gave me the death glare because her child decided to crawl out from underneath a parked vehicle right in front of me and I was only able to avoid it at the last minute because I wasn't expecting crawling babies to pop out from underneath a parked car.
Out of curiosity (I do not know the answer), is there a study on the percentage of time that children spend playing outside in urban vs suburban vs rural areas?
There are constantly kids in my area out and about, playing or on their way to play. I'm not sure what kind of wasteland you thing the suburbs is, but lots of children are within walking distance of each other.
And I grew up in Germany all my life and live in the US now. Maybe "places like suburbs in the US" do exist, though I doubt they are as restricted as the suburbs I'm seeing here, and that you can recognize their nature from a quick Google Maps glance.
But in any case, it does not change the fact that I grew up in a big city, with, as listed above, "cleaner air, safer streets, less traffic, a better place to raise a child and/or dog with backyards and privacy", and that that was common all around me. Children, me included, played on the streets. It's literally called a "Spielstraße", and they are very common. We just walked over to school, too, maybe took the bus for a few stations.
I've been living in the US for close than a decade now, and it's markedly different. I don't blame the US, I just hate zoning with a passion. I so miss living in a nice area in the city and being able to walk over to a small supermarket, a café, a barber, within the same area. Just live my life, without having to hop into my car and make it a journey for every tiny thing. It's so isolating here.
> I've been living in the US for close than a decade now, and it's markedly different.
For what it's worth, the US is huge. I've lived in a number of places around this country, and I can't generalize much of anything between them. This is probably why I love suburbia and you hate it. My neighborhood is awesome and sounds just like you describe your ideal neighborhood to be. It's also suburban by any definition.
Sometimes I wonder if people just assume that all of the US has Midwest-style tract housing that sprawls for miles, or if we're all like California, etc. It's so variable, and the generalizations unhelpful (but hilarious).
Right, so I guess your city does not have the zoning laws that I'm lamenting here? I even specifically wrote "I don't blame the US, I just hate zoning laws with a passion".
Did you read the rest? There are significant differences between the typical downtown area of a US city, and what I was describing. In my experience, downtown is not exactly where children get to play on quiet streets.
But it is true that I don't know every larger city. So if there is a city where the zoning laws I'm lamenting do not apply, great, let's have that in California as well, please.
The answer is very comfortable. Lots of people like a quiet neighborhood and a good amount of space to themselves. It might be a bit selfish, and there are undoubtably some exceptions, but the idea that the suburbs are full of awful people trying to keep out some specific segment is flat wrong. Most people are too concerned with keeping their day to day life together to sit around worrying about/hating on others.
The answer is that people benefit from stability, both financially and socially.
Single and duplex zoning was a great deal for cities and close suburbs because they are operationally efficient - less services are required; fewer parks, fewer schools, fewer calls for fire and police service. It’s a good deal for people because financially it has been historically better to own a building and land vs rent or buy into coops.
For existing, pre-1990 low density urban neighborhoods, retrofitting medium density housing is usually a shitshow. Why?
- The areas of were detached houses that usually have yards, no parks, fire stations, etc.
- Because of healthcare and tax policy, it’s very difficult to run the types of small businesses that are needed to support an urban lifestyle. Boutiques, restaurants/bars and similar
- Because there are no local amenities, people still need cars, and there’s rarely enough parking to meet demand.
- Schools are tied to geography, and changes in school assignments are impactful and traumatic to families.
- Developers usually get tax credits for including street level retail, but have no financial incentive to rent them as tax policy pays them to do nothing.
If you look at functioning urban environments like NYC, you see it all over the place. I grew up in Brooklyn and Queens. As small retail fades away, major big box scaled retail moves in. The neighborhood 20-40k sq ft grocery stores of my childhood (Key Food, Finest, A&P, ShopRite) are being displaced by bodegas at the low end and big developments on the high end - which drive demand for cars and exclude people relying on transit.
You can only fix this stuff with fairly radical change, that will be very painful for lots of stakeholders.
> Because there are no local amenities, people need cars
Seems like the definition of inefficiency
> - Developers usually get tax credits for including street level retail, but have no financial incentive to rent them as tax policy pays them to do nothing
Dumb question, but how do HOAs enforce things? Presumably they have some binding agreement, but I can't imagine why someone would opt into one. 'Why yes, I'd love to pay dues and fines to my noisiest neighbors.'
Had occasion to visit my hometown last year, so I drove around the middle-class neighborhood where I grew up. People have trash, old appliances, rusting inoperable cars parked on the lawn, 4-foot grass and weeds growing. People who spent like a million bucks on a house don't want the neighborhood to be full of blight and trash.
In a typical average HOA neighborhood:
* The HOA pays for landscaping of all the common areas like green belts and parks within the tract. If you don't have an HOA, you either are benefiting from your city choosing to locate and maintain those kinds of amenities right by where you live, or you just don't get any of those.
* Obviously one of the big ones, the other main HOA budget item is pools, clubhouses you can rent cheaply for parties, tennis courts, etc. For rich people they don't care since they have their own pools, but it's a great boon to people not rich enough to have a pool to have easy free access to one that isn't crowded and is close to home.
* They, in theory, fine you for outwardly living like an absolute slob or selfish jerk. NOTE: In practice nobody cares about most of these little rules, like mailbox color or a patio chair left on your lawn, unless you're acting wildly outside the norms. The rules are there to let them enforce them selectively on the person who's making everyone miserable.
* They regulate architecture and paint color. This may be my least favorite because it seems like we shouldn't need this, I have taste and why should I have to submit my stuff for approval to these jerks? But really, this is only there because there would be SOMEBODY who would paint their house an absurd garish color or build a giant ugly addition in their front yard or something that looks wildly out of place.
HOAs vary a lot. My mom is in an HOA because they shovel the snow to her front door in window. Really she lives in a 4 unit apartment where everyone has separate entrances and they are allowed to paint the walls and otherwise change the interior as they want. Which is to say for her needs she has the best of both apartment living and single family house living at the same time. The HOA does all exterior maintenance, and is a good deal.
There are also HOAs that place a lot of weird restrictions on what you can do. It really depends on the HOA, some are good, some are very bad.
That said, for the place where I personally am in life, a HOA is bad and I refuse to live in one.
It’s in the deed so owning the property means you agree to follow the rules of the deed. The HOA can sue you for enforcement.
At a high level, anyone can sue you to enforce a deed term, as long as the organization/person with an interest is around to do it and knows to do it. As an easy example, a long time ago people added racist stuff to deeds, but those family descendants no longer enforce it. HOAs don’t die like people and collect dues so they don’t run out of legal fees.
You can try to get dead HOAs removed from a deed, and you can try to get a living HOA removed from a deed. Obviously one is a lot easier because it doesn’t fight back. You can also get the residents to vote to dissolve an HOA. Some HOAs expire after so long if the residents don’t renew.
TLDR you can’t buy the house without agreeing to the HOA.
Not entirely the same, but here in Canada (still common law), any housing covenants applied to a deed can be struck down if they are illegal. There were a bunch of houses with ancient unenforceable covenants like not selling homes to certain ethnic/religious groups and they were granted the right to no just ignore, but actually remove those causes from the deed. Transitively, I imagine any deeds for HOA rules and regulations that are illegal under the law could also be challenged under similar merits. I've got no examples of this though, so who knows.
I'd be extremely interested in cases of any modern HOA being successfully removed from a deed and thus rendered moot, ideally administratively without a massive legal battle.
If people live in a low density area, we can assume they want to live in a low density area. So it makes perfect sense they would be against making their low density area high density. What is so uncomfortable about that?
To get at what your really implying though, what's wrong with maintaining some degree of cultural homogeneity in a neighborhood? It's a good thing in that it makes for high trust communities.
It's not that mysterious why people want this. For people of means, they want to preserve the quality of life that they see in having mostly single family homes and in the past keep it full of white people with money, hopefully the only whites thing has faded. Of course racism was a core issue in how these exclusions panned out in the US.
If I'm in a city and and I own one of these houses, it's clear economically that wanting to limit building multi-unit housing near me enhances the value growth of my property - because you can't build nearly as many SFH as you can apartments. I'm sure racism and fear of the other is still an issue (I'm from the south, I know it's an issue based on personal experience) but it's far more economic imho today. The end result is the same, people want to hold on to what they see as part of their "intrinsic value" in their neighborhood setup.
> it's clear economically that wanting to limit building multi-unit housing near me enhances the value growth of my property
This argument never made sense for me. Being able to put more units in the same space drastically increases the value of the land. It of course reduces the value of other things like having towering buildings around your 2 story home which blocks your view. In this sense, home owners need to turn to zoning to prevent that despite it being detrimental to their land value.
They have a different argument, namely by making sure houses are less dense, the total number of houses being built in an area is far less than what the land can support, leading to artificial scarcity in the market. The artificially limited supply then leads to high prices.
Restricting supply obviously increases prices. That's economics 101. Their claim is that they are doing it precisely for economic gains. Whereas I'm saying that it is actually not about the economic gains because they are giving up economic value (much higher land value) in order to preserve non-economic things (neighborhood, view, etc.). My point is that an acre of land in the center of Manhattan is worth a lot of money. That value goes drastically down if something prevents you from building above 35 feet.
I think the renters are often acting rationally, given the fact that new construction is so overwhelmingly often directed at their own neighbourhoods where they currently live in affordable apartments. Accordingly no real surprise that someone would act out of self interest to oppose being evicted.
So rarely if ever is new apartment development targeted at a mansion district, and I've never seen an apartment dweller oppose that concept. I don't know why they would and I wouldn't expect them to.
I dunno why this is being downvoted because in my experience this is spot on, and I've heard such things from my neighbours. (maybe people are uncomfortable with the truth spoken so plainly)
Most of all people want exclusivity. Only having a handful of neighbours is something that is hard to buy. It's easier enforced through regulation.
Established neighbourhoods push for regulations to keep people out.
In the past it absolutely was for racist reasons. Today more likely economic ones. Apartments means renters which means less wealthy people. Exclusive detached home areas are pretty much guaranteed to have a high floor of wealth.
> What is making people want to restrict their neighborhood to extremely low density suburbs? The answers are very uncomfortable.
That’s just urbanists smearing people with innuendo about racism to advance unrelated policy goals. It’s actually ironic, because one of the major population trends right now is “black flight” to the suburbs.
People, especially families, like low density suburban zoning because it’s convenient. I live in a pre-zoning code suburb with houses packed tightly together. People are always fighting over parking spots, contractor trucks can block people into their parking spots or block the road, etc. There’s a lot of retired people, and they complain about families with young kids moving in due to the noise. (And these are white and white adjacent kids too.) My parents refused to move into the subdivision, and instead moved nearby to a 1 acre plot surrounded by trees where they didn’t have to interact with their neighbors.
If it was that simple, inner ring suburbs wouldn't all be zoned single-family, and it wouldn't take state-level action to allow multifamily dwellings to be built. Instead, they artificially restrict density, in defiance of market forces.
>What is making people want to restrict their neighborhood to extremely low density suburbs?
Because it's actually what many people want. They want a house in the quiet suburbs that they can sell in 30 years for much more than it's worth. This is obviously all because nearly everyone alive that can vividly remember a time before WW2 are dead. All they know are car-centric architecture. And we all know how much people love change.
As yet anothor note in this thread about Houston (from a long-time Houstonian) and less in direct response to OP -- the lack of zoning bit is actually a bit more complicated than at first glance. While it's true there is no zoning, there are two other forces at work that exacerbate the sprawl issues here:
(1) Minimum parking lot size requirements (as others mentioned). Commercial properties are required to have X amount of parking spaces available.
(2) Political issues and how money gets invested: despite public "protests" (maybe more like "kvetching"), there's continued investment in freeway expansion / car-centric infrastructure due to lobbying/other political efforts instead of public transportation.
Our sprawl is more due to (1) and (2) rather than lack of zoning regulation.
But also to Houston's credit, things are slowly (SLOWLY) getting better.
This one irks me the most. we have 8 parking spots for every car and giant shopping malls are surrounded by parking lots that take up twice their size and are 50% empty for 95% of the time (more if you count night time)
Japan has strong national zoning laws that are very strictly applied. The biggest differences are the zones allow for a looser range of outcomes than the American ones, and the zoning approach is not controlled by local government (which often is NIMBYs)
Tokyo is not a free-for-all. It does zone for different uses by forbidding certain uses above a certain nuisance or hazard level. For instance, in many areas you can’t just plop down a chemical factory. The cool thing about Tokyo zoning though is that anything below a nuisance level is pretty much allowed. Want to build a house next to a dump or above a discotheque? Go for it, no one is going to stop you.
Yes, it makes sense to mix Residential and Commercial in many cases. It rarely makes sense to mix Industrial with either Residential or Commercial. No one wants a smelter next to a house or an office.
This SimCity style thinking about zoning is just too simplistic. Yes, absolutely, nobody wants to live next to a smelter. But not every commercial property is a smelter. People love to live near corner stores, yet that is "commercial."
That's why zoning in the US is classified Residential, Commercial / Light Industrial, and Heavy Industrial, and Residential never abuts Heavy Industrial.
Some people have different preferences when it comes to housing.
My place overlooks a freeway. I really, truly dislike that freeway. But one thing I do like about it is the noise that it makes, even at night. I find it very hard to fall asleep in silence.
Oh and I should mention that most of the units in my building do not face the freeway, and therefore, those who prefer quiet can also get that, even in the same building.
You should really check the air quality you're breathing. I agree about sound, but there's other ways to generate it. Seriously though, check the air quality you breath.
Air quality is absolutely one of the reasons that I hate that highway. It sucks.
I'm of the persuasion that highways should never go through cities. I'd never argue living by a highway is good. It's just that one isolated aspect of it that others may find bad, I find good, due to preference.
Looking forward, if we really do turn automotive transportation green, some of the negative effects like air quality will improve dramatically. Though I suppose the accompanying reduction in noise will be a detriment for your particular sleeping needs.
I read an article a year or two ago (maybe posted here?) about Japan's zoning laws and they just make sense.
- Rather than dozens of categories, there are just 4 or 5 in increasing amounts of annoyance (e.g residence -> retail/office -> manufacturing) and areas approved for one level can always be used by lower levels.
- The laws are uniform nationally.
- Zoning decisions get made at higher levels (prefecture or national?) so they can consider what the whole region needs, and get less NIMBYism / maximize-my-near-term-property-value-ism.
I don't recall whether they even have the distinct single-family versus multi-family dwelling categorization that seems to cause so much of the housing supply shortage in the U.S.
I'm not an expert, but I lean towards relaxing zoning laws but not getting rid of them completely. Look to Houston to see what happens when there are no zoning laws at all.
Would just like to correct a common misconception:
Houston technically has no zoning laws, but it has a combination of other laws that end up behaving similarly to exactly how zoning laws work. Giving you a link to City Beautiful which works as a great primer.
He's referring to the hundreds of houses that were knowingly built in a floodplain, because Houston does not have the kind of zoning that would have prevented that. Those houses are at high risk of flooding any time there is a storm, and many of them did flood during last year's storms.
It's easy to have cheap housing when you ignore common sense and just build wherever. (Also, part of the expense for LA and SF is that we have earthquakes, and our buildings have to be built to withstand earthquakes. For example: a 5.4 earthquake in 2011 caused over $300 million in damage on the East Coast. A series of CA earthquakes stronger than that in 2019, including 6.4 and 7.1 quakes, only caused a few thousand in damage near the epicenter. A 5.1 earthquake earlier this year in SoCal caused so little damage that most people slept through it and only know it happened because the news reported it. Note that each "magnitude" is about 30x difference in strength, so the 6.4 quake was 30x stronger than the 5.4 quake, and the 7.1 quake was nearly 900x stronger.)
I'm not sure what codes are in Texas, but I can tell you in MN the housing codes are designed nationally to cover CA earthquakes and Florida Hurricanes even though both are not factors. Of course those codes also cover insulation which the other two states don't really need as much of..
Housing codes are adopted at the municipal or state level. There is no mandatory "national" building code in the U.S., though there is a "model" building code at the national level upon which the state and local building codes are based. (https://localhousingsolutions.org/housing-policy-library/hou...)
You can't compare prices across geographic areas like that. For instance, property taxes are way higher in Houston. Assuming everything else was equal, the price of real estate in Houston would be less simply because it has higher carrying costs. That's just one of many possible differences unrelated to zoning.
There are no income taxes in Houston though, so while the property tax load is higher, the tax part of cost of living is not very different. (depending on what state you compare to)
With a moderate density like 40du/acre, that amounts to about $130,000 in land cost per unit, which is not so bad!
even at our grossly inflated land costs, simply allowing density throughout the Bay Area would enable much more housing affordability, allow more transit, and reduce our emissions and enhance our social contact. But a side benefit of broad legalization of density would be that those land costs would drop dramatically too, as there would be a much greater supply.
- Is it a desirable location, and the zoning laws cause the prices to skyrocket because not all the people that want to live there can
- Is it desirable because the zoning laws make sure it's a certain type of environment, and the desirability is what causes the price to increase
- Is it a combination of the two.
I think any reasonable person would say it's a combination of the two. And removing the zoning laws would both make it less desirable _and_ lower the price of housing. It would not leave it just as desirable, but with more people living there.
No doubt the $5.2MM anticipated the zoning changes. No one would be stupid enough to sell property based on the law today if you knew it was going to change tomorrow.
I mean, houses abutting landfills are even cheaper, but no one would consider "put landfills everywhere" a good strategy.
Houston has had a stable population (per square mile) over the past decade and has a median income of ~$50,000.
Sacramento has had the population per square mile increase by ~15% in the past decade and has a median income of ~$71,000.
San Francisco has had the population per square mile increase by ~9% in the past decade and has a median income of ~$126,000.
California has a population density of 249.1 people per sq mile compared to 103.2 people per sq mile in Texas. Seems an obviously more important factor here.
Both states have a lot of rural areas that should not be counted when considering density. CSA and MSA for a city are the easiest to look up that can be compared. Even then though things are misleading. (the MSA for my city is mostly large farms so overall our density is very low, but if you only take the parts that look like a city is much higher)
In Houston, we have what is effectively zoning. It's just that we do it at the neighborhood level. You want to go into the museum district or third ward and develop x, or y, or z? No problem. So long as the neighbors agree with you.
Hint: Once they gentrify to the point of being called "The Museum District", they will definitely not be agreeing with you.
I saw someone above throw out a figure of 3 or 4 hundred k as a price point and I had to chuckle. If all you want to do is build a low-rise for workforce housing? Yeah, this neighborhood wouldn't care if you had the money or not. Piss off peasant. The people in the Museum District no longer wish to reside in proximity with your kind. Some neighborhood get togethers you almost get the impression that people would like to put gates to the city at all the 610 exits. Keep the riff raff out. And don't even get me started about what I hear from friends behind the gates down Sunset.
In Houston, the zoning is way worse than in other cities. Because people can literally stop anyone they want. No city council permission necessary.
What I've noticed too - when I've visited a couple of times - in addition once you move out of the city center, in the suburbs surrounding Houston, residential developments with strict HOAs are pretty much the de facto standard for residential developments.
Houston has lots of zoning laws in the way of parking minimums. These parking spot requirements apply to new buildings and make it very difficult to build dense housing. It’s a big reason why Houston has so much sprawl.
You’re going to need to do more than just toss off a scaremongering phrase like “look to Houston” with no elaboration, particularly when the replies are already explaining that its approach to zoning has been rewarded with much more tractable prices. What, specifically, is wrong with Houston, and is it worse than the affordability disaster that is most of California?
Technically not most of California, since population is focused into a few urban areas and otherwise you have vast amounts of nothing if you actually see the state.
Houston is a huge urban/semi-urban sprawl, the kind that used to be popular in LA a few decades ago. Dallas is similar, Austin gets that way outside of its downtown, San Antonio does also but at least has a much more interesting urban core. It always seemed you get what you pay for in Houston, there isn’t anything wrong with that, but many people don’t want it.
What's wrong with Houston? You have pretty much whatever you want there. You can go get a single family house, live in a gated community, rent a shack on the bayou, go be a hipster in montrose, live in a high-rise downtown... Pretty good as far as I'm concerned.
Tokyo has lax zoning, but it looks the way it does only because people who live there want it to look that way.
Houston, which also has loose zoning, looks totally different because most Texans want to live in suburbs and drive cars.
In other words, zoning laws are generally an expression of what the majority of people already wanted.
I can tell you for sure that in most parts of California (and most of the rest of the USA) the majority of people want to live in a detached single-family home that they own, and prefer driving cars to public transit.
People who prefer a denser arrangement are an especially vocal minority on the internet, but if you put it to a vote, you'd end up with pretty much what we have today -- the fact that people wanted them is why they got built in the first place!
Texans don't want to live in suburbs in drive cars, they have no choice because it's illegal to build dense housing via deed covenants and city ordinances that work in place of zoning. The most expensive and desirable housing (not counting the hyper-wealthy enclaves) in Houston is also the most walkable and dense.
Another data point on lax zoning laws is Houston, which is awful and completely unwalkable. It’s not cool when someone builds a concrete plant next to your house either.
One thing that's interesting about Japanese zoning is that I wouldn't describe it as "no zoning," (for that matter I wouldn't in Houston either because that's more rhetorical than reality but anyway).
They key is that they don't do Euclidian, or exclusive zoning. You can build housing in almost every single one of their (iirc) fifteen different zoning designations.
So to US norms, this feels like "no zoning," but it's still restrictive in many ways. Just not in a way that says "only housing here" or "no housing here." (again on that last one, in the vast majority of cases, but not strictly speaking all.)
Whats wrong with having rural areas close to the city proper? In Berlin (one of Europe’s largest cities) you don’t need to go more the 10 km from Neukölln (one of it’s densest neighborhoods) before you hit the country side. In Seattle the Snoqualmie River and the Duvall valley is a beautiful countryside only 20 miles from the city center. Why would you want to sacrifice that for a sub-optimal housing sprawl with horrible carbon footprint?
For people that like the quiet living they can live in a nearby town (Duvall has around 10,000 people living in the town), the density of the town means you’ll probably be close to a grocery store and other amenities, and probably even a bus line or a commuter train to the nearby city if you need to commute to work. Meanwhile the countryside is open for everyone (including city dwellers) to enjoy.
It feels like sacrificing this for boring monotonous suburban sprawl (as is tradition in California) benefits nobody while ruining a good thing many have.
I think that many US people have too optimistic idea about zoning laws in other countries. In many countries there are floor area ratio requirements in zoning plans and if you have ratio limit 0.2 on <1000 m^2 land lots, you cannot really build anything much different than single family housing.
It's disingenuous/dishonest to paint it like that. Japan for example has extremely strict controls on on-street parking: if you want to buy a car you need to prove you own the parking space to put it. Try to make that fly in the US.
I dunno, I feel like things like heavy manufacturing, smokestack etc. Should have their zoning controlled, everything else.. go nuts. I just don't want to breathe emissions.
This is a great article about great news (except for the first sentence calling it "A little known law" -- it's been quite contentious).
Palo Alto has fought these rules and I'm glad they will be enforced. When I first moved to Palo Alto in the early 80s it had a very progressive climate: a couple of SRO buildings, lower average income than some of the neighboring towns, a lot of social support programs, and decidedly un-fancy retail. But the flood of gold-seeking people who showed up for the dotcom boom allowed the real estate interests to seize control of the city council and in general made the town much snootier. The SRO hotels turned into boutique hotels and a lot of long term residents were ejected. Well those assholes are reaping what they have sown, thank goodness. Perhaps we'll recover some of the chill experimental vibe thanks to an influx of new people.
I hadn't realised the housing shortage issue stretched back decades. It sets an interesting context for Prop 13 (basing the tax base on the purchase price, not generally on assessed value) since the zoning rules were so exclusionary. Basically, shows that the State's tax difficulties are themselves the consequence of exclusion.
I wonder how this will work outside the dense areas. For example, Calaveras county has a shrinking population, but the main sources of jobs and taxes is construction. With no constraints on construction will there be a small boom in new development, tearing down virgin forest in order to make empty developments?
SROs went out of style throughout the USA because they provided poor returns for the property used and were a huge hassle for whoever was running them, not to mention being magnates for crime. It’s sad, since an SRO is better than a tent. The socialization of lower tier housing (via HUD) also played a role as SROs didn’t really fit what was expected once the government got involved.
China has a lot of options for cheap housing, none at all legal, but rule of law isn’t really a thing there so just keep things quiet. In Beijing, you can rent a windowless sub-basement room for a few hundred kuai a month, mold is an issue, but it’s better than other options. Waitresses also often crash on the floors of the restaurants they are working in, so the windows are all blinded over in cardboard after closing time. This is all working poor, it is really hard to be a vagabond in China because the social safety net just isn’t there for it (and you can’t just crash under an overpass because the police are already in to that).
> With no constraints on construction will there be a small boom in new development, tearing down virgin forest in order to make empty developments?
Probably? I live in Michigan, which (with the exception of two spots) has no meaningful limits on construction. Even the cities that technically have-and-enforce zoning, waive all the rules constantly anytime a developer asks.
And yes -- it means developers can build almost anything they want, almost anywhere they want. (Truly anything, I live next to a 15-story concrete castle apartment building that a developer built on what was once a trailer park).
Unfortunately, it does not mean you get lower cost of housing (prices here are still astronomical, and while they look cheaper in comparison to California, is only because of the severely reduced income locals make -- prices are still at record-all-time highs)
But it does mean, developers routinely cut down entire forests or farmland for new suburbs anytime they'd like. If you want a house made of sticks and cardboard, we have loads and loads of them for 'just' $450k. Years worth of 'inventory' here.
> Unfortunately, it does not mean you get lower cost of housing (prices here are still astronomical, and while they look cheaper in comparison to California, is only because of the severely reduced income locals make -- prices are still at record-all-time highs)
Are you taking into account the inflation we've experienced? If the mental anchor against which you compare this "all time high" is 2015, for example, then we've seen over 20% inflation. Over 33% inflation since 2008.
My very first thought there was 'here's an example of what could have been ambitious, interesting architecture, except all the public space is devoted to cars instead of people'.
> Unfortunately, it does not mean you get lower cost of housing
You don't believe in supply and demand? I'm not saying you have cheap housing. I'm saying you would have more expensive housing if there were fewer of them, the same way GPUs are more valuable when there are fewer of them.
Induced demand is a thing, as (and much more common) are demand curves that are flat enough that shifting the supply curve to the right by some large fraction of the current market clearing quantity has no discernable effect on the market clearing price.
Real life supply and demand involves more than the simplest Econ 101 illustrative examples of the general direction of the ideal relation.
What you're not factoring in is the cost of labor and materials. They are both already quite expensive and when you have a building boom the costs of both will skyrocket. What will happen is you'll end up with cheaply constructed housing made from the worst materials. And that's the good outcome.
The bad outcome is the rich who are looking for alternate investments will buy up all the labor and materials and build construction for themselves and will build rentals. That's the bad outcome.
The awful outcome, and likely outcome is that the labor and materials will be bought by newly formed real estate companies that will build rental property that is ugly and expensive - because they control the market more and more as they merge into 2 super landlord companys.
The cost of the house itself is nothing compared to the cost of the land. Houses don't appreciate in value because of the houses (which deteriorate over time) - they appreciate because of the scarcity of land.
Sure, but houses don't depreciate as quickly as you might think. There's a few reasons for this:
- Constructing a new building isn't as cheap as when the existing structure was built. For instance, my home cost about $15,000 to build 100 years ago. Today the structure itself is worth more than that. Inflation matters here.
- People maintain and improve their homes. New kitchens, roofs, flooring, furnaces, siding, etc. In essence you are rebuilding a home 1 piece at a time from the day it is made. If you don't then the house gets to a point it can't be lived in.
People who haven't looked at new build prices for 10 years are shocked at what it costs today.
Nothing you're saying is wrong, but it doesn't change the fact that the land is an order of magnitude more valuable than the building (I'm speaking broadly and for residential real estate).
We still have more lumber than land. In a very hand-wavy way we have more labor than land. The limiting factor is always what drives the price.
This is not accurate outside of a handful of broken housing markets. In Philadelphia[1] land is often 1/5 of the total value. There are definitely some parcels that are undeveloped[2] or underdeveloped[3], but most properties are more balanced.
[1] I chose Philly because of a good clickable property tax browser https://property.phila.gov/?p=881576550, and because it keeps separate land vs. improvement assessments.
Single-unit buildings close to downtown can have higher land costs. But single-unit buildings in single-unit neighborhoods are, again, around 1/5 land cost.
These are definitely better examples than you previously used. That said, I think the tax assessments don't accurately state the value of the land vs the building. I don't think OnlineGladiator is correct about the universality of >10x land:building, but I don't think you're right about ~0.2x in these neighborhoods either. I do think OG is correct about housing as an appreciating asset being primarily about the land value.
1) The nominal land cost has huge jumps up and down. From 2016->2017, all of these properties had their land value lowered 60-70%: $150k->$44k; $166k->$59k; $75k->$32k; $279k->$96k. I find it hard to believe that property prices swung that much, especially since the total appraised value remained constant.
2) The price of the land depends on the zoning of the land. A lot which can't be subdivided further or which can't have multi-unit housing will be constrained by what a single family is willing to pay for the lot. If you compare the last property ($140k land assessment / 19k ft2) to a smaller lot nearby [0] ($50k land / 2.4k ft2), you can see a huge difference in the land price per ft2: $6.7/ft2 vs $20.4/ft2. This price difference reflects legal constraints on what can be done with the lot. If the larger lot could be subdivided, it should be closer in price per ft2 to the smaller lot and would be worth ~$390k. If the total assessed value remained constant, that would be 1.25:1 for land:building.
3) Furthermore, the price of the building itself depends on the scarcity of housing. With plentiful land to build new housing, old housing loses value quicker. An old house in a constricted market has more value because it's existing housing on a scarce plot of land. Even though the value is assigned to the building, that building is more valuable because of the plot of land it's associated with.
I used to believe this and then I got into the area. It depends on the area of course but it turns out that the cost of the house is quite significant. House construction costs are $200-500 per square foot, putting even a medium-sized house at around a quarter of a million dollars. When you look at the costs of empty plots of land versus similar plots of land with houses on them, you'll see that the housed plots of land cost the same as the empty plots plus the construction costs of a similar-sized house. In the areas where I looked, the costs of the house dominated, such that the land value is about 20% of the total value of the plot. Even the variance that occurs at that level can be further explained by the value of potential future plots of land on the space -- a plot of land that has one house but could hold a second (for whatever reason) is more valuable than an otherwise-identical plot that can only support one house.
There's a certain cost to build a house. It's not like the houses themselves are more in CA (well, maybe a little), it's the land. For example, my house is appraised around $300k but the land is appraised at $1.2 million.
My 4 bedroom house in Oakland had a replacement cost/value of about $400k. That seemed high but not unreasonable. Then the Santa Rosa fire burned down 1000 homes and insurers realized that construction costs in California are insane (especially when you are trying to build a thousand in a year). Replacement cost jumped to $750k in one year. The land used to be worth quite a good fraction of the property, and then it wasn't.
My home’s replacement cost is way higher than what the insurer appraised it as, but asking for a higher appraisal counts as warning bells in their eyes (are they planning on burning down their home?).
That may be what your used house is worth in an appraisal but if you wanted to build it new, it would cost significantly more I imagine. It depends a lot on finishes and framing complexity of course (number of windows, roof, etc).
A lot of people I know in Colorado found this out when their homes burned down. They had the structure insured for like $500,000 and found out that rebuilding their home that was built 20 years ago would cost around $1,000,000.
A friend recently had a multi story addition put on his house, and of course additions always cost more because there's some amount of demolition and working on an existing site, so the new footings have to be underpinned, etc. It's also a large kitchen and the existing kitchen space had to be demo'd and rebuilt into a new, basic room. The upstairs connected to a hallways but there was some work. Anyways, the cost, all in was over $500k. Even if he didn't use Marvin windows, Wold appliances, nice cabinetry, etc it would have been like $400k. And yes you can go lower. But don't be fooled. A lot of the cheaper construction you see is not only made with awful materials and lazy/inexperienced tradesmen, but is also track housing or similar no modifications allowed type things.
I'm in Austin. I believe there to be inconsistency in zoning here because I'm on the top floor of a 10+ floor residential building looking down on a neighborhood park, single family homes, a motel, and smaller apartment buildings.
The building occurring downtown is insane. I haven't seen anything like it since the booms in Shanghai and Dubai.
> (prices here are still astronomical, and while they look cheaper in comparison to California, is only because of the severely reduced income locals make -- prices are still at record-all-time highs)
>Basically, shows that the State's tax difficulties are themselves the consequence of exclusion.
I'm not sure what you mean by tax difficulties, if you mean the state has trouble raising revenue, that's certainly not the case. CA is running a large budget surplus right now. If they only relied on property tax it could be an issue, but they also have an income tax, so the revenue outlook in CA is pretty good right now.
Fari enough: let me clarify. Because California gets so little tax from property, it must get more from income taxes. That has a couple of negative consequences.
The nice thing about property taxes is that housing prices change slowly, even in boom/bust cycles -- essentially they are coupled to a dashpot. While income, especially in California with a progressive system coupled with most of the high earners paying cap gains, leading to large swings (further influenced by the Fed).
Also property taxes are the main source of municipal and school funding; with property taxes artificially pulled low, the state needs to step in instead. In addition, the structure of Prop 13 discourages people from moving which reduces the availability of housing stock.
Prop 13 wouldn't be so bad if it excluded commercial buildings (including rental properties) and didn't have the huge inheritance loophole. But neither of those is likely to change.
The reason I mentioned the coupling between prop 13 and exclusion: Californians voided all restrictive covenants in the 60s, which lead to more selective zoning restrictions; Prop 13 came from conservative southern californians and (due to the stickiness mentioned above, including a retroactive valuation reduction and the inheritance loophole) locked a lot of "those" buyers out of the existing neghborhoods.
Funny enough, Texas is basically the opposite: there's no income tax, and so it has to get taxes from property. That also has a couple of negative consequences:
There's a "homesteading exemption" for taxes on a primary residence. This means your property taxes can't shoot up massively if your property suddenly gets more expensive.
This pushes even more of the property tax burden onto investment properties, which sounds good to some in theory, but one affect it has is that rental properties are investment properties. So rents go up a lot. This means renters end up paying a lot of property taxes, which is, uh... a surprising outcome.
The Lebowski loophole is partially closed on large enough values. But I doubt it prevents corporations/trusts from being a simple workaround. Then they added new loopholes to make it so old people can move and keep their low property taxes.
Prop 13 is IMO the biggest problem that California faces, because it’s the most intractable to solve (it would be political suicide to try to roll it back now that so many people are paying way lower taxes than they would without it) but is also a major contributor to a lot of other problems in the housing market. I can think of ways to roll it back slowly, but let’s be real, people will freak out if they think they’ll have to start paying 5x what they currently pay in property taxes, even if it’s after they die or in 20 years from now.
As a proportion of net state product it’s property taxes are low. Compared to most other states, California provides a lot of services and looks after a lot of land (has a lot of thinly-settled land — people there need services too). It’s a major net contributor to the federal budget.
It should have a better mix of tax sources.
Remember the size of the state’s economy and population would make it one of the large EU countries.
Your point about moving is really important: there are a ton of boomers sitting in houses which are much larger than they need without children living at home but in many cases they're doing exactly what the system incentivizes. Accessory dwelling units (ADUs) can help somewhat if they have enough space and want to get in the landlord business (or have family who need it) but really we need to make it easy for people to downsize without financial precarity.
On one hand I’m sympathetic to the individualist argument that it’s unfair for these people to have to vacate their 30+ year residences just because a bunch of people moved to their area.
On the other, I agree that it’s ridiculous someone can be paying 10-20% what their neighbor pays in property taxes, and that this causes an inefficient allocation of resources.
If we ever want to solve this we IMO need some kind of gradual phase out. We can immediately/over a 5-20 year interval move the taxes to what they should be on commercial and non-primary residences. But for actual primary homes probably the only way we can do it is if we let the property taxes be deferred until the current homeowner dies. No matter how much pain the policy causes we must under no circumstances cause a single grandma to lose her home.
A lot of this also comes back to the “just build more housing” point: an 80 year old probably doesn't want to have to be responsible for a house, but if the choice is considerably more expensive or moving away from everyone & everything they've known for 40+ years they'll do it. If there were reasonably-sized options nearby, they'd probably have a different answer.
Where I live now has a couple of nice options for aging in place – dedicated 55+ apartment building, with government support for low-income; and a co-op where the units are smaller but they have more shared space. A lot of older neighbors have spoken glowingly the latter because it's all ages and it since they see their neighbors more they don't feel lonely the way someone in a detached suburban home might. I wish we'd build a lot more stuff like that where someone has an option which doesn't break the bank and avoids those other downsides.
Great point. Prop 13 creates a lot of illiquidity/friction that probably keeps people in places they wouldn’t stay in otherwise. Not just old folks. It’s probably just as much of a problem for people who inherit property or get a job an hour away.
Prop 19 passed in 2020 IIUC partially solves the problem you mention because people 55+ can maintain lower tax rates after moving, but of course it is just a bandaid. Definitely the better solution would be for the real estate market to not be so expensive that people can’t afford to move/live in the general type of housing they want though.
> It’s probably just as much of a problem for people who inherit property or get a job an hour away.
My knowledge is stale - I moved away from California a decade ago - but I think you’re right about downsizing at least to the extent that they can actually find a cheaper place.
I think now seniors can keep their Prop 13 tax exemption if they move anywhere in the state. However, that is a law that only passed a few years ago. Before then, I believe you were restricted to moving only within the same county.
The income+sales taxes are so high in CA partially because prop 13 reduces the amount of funding able to be gathered from property taxes. The reliance on income taxes, as the other reply mentions, means that CA gets streaks of extra tax from capital gains sometimes (leading to occasional budget surpluses).
IMO Prop 13 is at the root of a lot of dysfunction in CA, but personally I hate it because these extra income+sales taxes put a lot of tax burden on new residents and young professionals.
PA has random pockets of new development, like on Alma St & Page Mill across from where AOL was.
Mountain View has much more around the San Antonio Shopping Center where it's starting to look like SF.
I'm wondering if there will be random developments that will sink property values because big city blight comes with : homeless camping, property crime, and so forth.
Palo Alto is unique in California in that it is/was legal to dwell in a vehicle because it wasn't criminalized since the law had to be rolled back due to a Ninth Circuit ruling about another law in LA.
> It sets an interesting context for Prop 13 (basing the tax base on the purchase price, not generally on assessed value)
Prop 13 uses assessed value, but only allows unlimited assessment increases at sales, some other non-exempt transfers, and a few other qualifying events, otherwise, the year-over-year increase in tax basis value is limited to 2% or the rate of inflation, whichever is lower.
But, also missed in most discussions of Prop 13, is that it capped property tax rates at 1%, which (even before considering the value missed by the assessment cap) is not only way below the common rates prior to Prop 13, its way below the national average effective property tax rate.
Prop 13 isn't a result of exclusive zoning, it is—like exclusive zoning—a measure that protects status quo elites at the expense of everyone else.
> For example, Calaveras county has a shrinking population, but the main sources of jobs and taxes is construction. With no constraints on construction will there be a small boom in new development, tearing down virgin forest in order to make empty developments?
Neither Calaveras County nor any city therein has a noncompliant housing element, so “no constraints” due to builder's remedy is not an issue. OTOH, other places in the state getting more housing is more likely to accelerate Calaveras County population loss.
>With no constraints on construction will there be a small boom in new development, tearing down virgin forest in order to make empty developments?
Prior to these changes, so much new housing was forced into the urban-wildland interface that entire neighborhoods regularly burned in our seasonal wildfires. The hope is these rule changes will force cities that use land inefficiently to densify rather than encourage more sprawl.
Maybe "little know outside of California" is more accurate. I certainly haven't heard anything about this, and it seems like the article is aiming for the broader audience
It won't make economic sense to try a builder's remedy project in lower land value jurisdictions, especially when you consider the legal headache. This is why we saw so many in Santa Monica and few in, say, the Inland Empire.
The article doesn’t mention it, but it’s my understanding that this auto-approval only happens within a certain distance of public transit as well. I know that’s been a part of prior laws by Wiener, but I could totes be wrong that it’s a part of this one as well.
The developers still have to abide by construction laws - safety, and I think environmental impact. All that’s released (AFAIK?) is the zoning-based “no” from cities (and when within a certain distance from public transit hubs, maybe).
I think you are referring to AB 2097, which allows more housing near transit hubs. It was passed in the latest legislative session, but is distinct from the Builder's Remedy and has height restrictions unlike the topic of this article. The same author wrote about it here:
My guess is that a lot will in the short term, which will result in streamlining changes to CEQA rules specifically applying to them. It probably won't be a straight exemption like SB288 and SB922 provided for certain projects.
And if the pressure for a statewide emergenct declaration on the housing crisis bears out, well, a lot could happen without legislative change.
If I were to stop 100 people on the street and ask them if they'd heard of hedgehogs, the positive answer percentage would be depressingly low, I feel...
I would wager money that members of the general public are at least five times as likely to have heard of the Java programming language as the Housing Accountability Act.
Bob was the owner of the "Is this a historic laundromat?" property. He knew that his project was fully compliant with state laws that would force San Francisco to approve his permit for eight stories of mixed-use housing, and indeed, after much bluster, they eventually were. The building was demolished last year and construction is in progress.
I mean, maybe it's a high rise. When the builder's remedy went into effect for Santa Monica, developers proposed 15- and 11-story apartment buildings [0].
There is a massive amount of demand for housing in California that is being choked by restrictive, ruinous zoning. Meeting that demand is going to take some big buildings.
The original plan from the developer included multiple 8 story towers. But the property is right off of a major freeway and just a few minutes from 20+ story towers in San Jose, so I see no reason to hold back.
Interesting - I could see California cities attempting to force fairly tall towers (taller than 5-over-1s) into small areas in an attempt to prevent upzoning the rest of the SFH areas in their cities. Hopefully this will work better than the last time this strategy was attempted (housing projects in mid-20th-century USA).
I had to laugh at the Santa Monica list in the article where someone, immediately after the Builder's Remedy came into effect, submitted a 2000 unit development. I wonder how long they'd been sitting on that one.
Interest rates are super high right now, so you might get some reprieve in the short term. They'll probably slow play Vallco until rates come down, doing just enough to keep their zoning exemption?
The reprieve in the short term would be lots of new housing built as quickly as possible, to help alleviate massively rising rents. High interest rates preventing construction of new, desperately needed housing is exactly the opposite of what we need.
Interest rates are not super high. They seem that way if you only look at the past few year, but they are close to normal if you look on a larger time scale.
It's not me you have to convince buddy, its the Sand Hill Property team and their econometrist, who are probably expecting an interest rate cut cycle this year.
Good. Fuck your neighbors. The region is long overdue for more housing to fix the ridiculous situation that has formed down there. Hopefully the region will become more affordable as new housing floods the area and brings down prices and makes things generally more affordable.
> Fuck your neighbors. The region is long overdue for more housing to fix the ridiculous situation that has formed down there.
I wonder what the repercussions of this type of uncontrolled building will be.
An overreaction to a frustrating situation usually doesn't end well.
There are good reasons to have construction permits, so growth can be planned. There's also endless ways cities abuse the permit process. But the good reasons still exist.
If developers are allowed to build without any limit, who is going to be planning for all the requirements external to the new building? Water supply capacity, sewer capacity, traffic flow into and out of it, new schools required, etc?
Developers are happy to build a building, sell all the units and leave town with the profits. But additional units do generate additional support needs from the city infrastructure, is anyone considering these needs if a developer is allowed to build anything they like no matter how big?
I understand the point of these laws to be that cities were given the opportunity to have "increased density without high rise developments," the cities failed to use those opportunities, and so now that control is being taken away and the cities are being forced to accept whatever is sent their way.
Any bets on whether eliminating zoning has any effect on the number of "people living in fucking tents?" In my experience, the people in tents aren't waiting with a down payment that's a few tens of thousands short of market. I think you're right that the solution here is being driven by homelessness. I also think it's more progressive wishful thinking.
That depends on how long this goes on. It takes months to build a new unit, so it will make no difference in 3 months. In many areas there is a lot of pent up demand from people with more means who are living elsewhere, and they are now living in houses in areas far enough away that those living in tents won't find moving there useful.
In short it will take a decade or two of building to make a difference to those living in tents.
Also living in tents often implies other issues. More housing will not solve anything if your real issue is serious mental illness. There will also be a few people living in tents/on the street because their reason for living in tents is not related to the cost of housing. Building more housing will make a difference to those who's problem is housing is too expensive, but it can't help those who's problems are not high cost of housing.
This is all about making housing affordable. Ignore the 20% affordable housing figurine in the article; that's just a bandaid measure that doesn't address the root issue, which is that housing is too expensive. Increasing the supply of housing will decrease the cost of housing, for everyone. So yes, it will have an effect, but since there is such a high demand for housing and since it takes a long time to build it, it will be a while before that effect is felt. And if the growth in housing isn't sustained, then this will just be a blip.
Okay fantastic. California and the USA has extremely huge amounts of 'rural area with access to nature'. Enough for everyone with those desires to set up shop. I really don't think anyone would complain at all as many people are already camped on city sidewalks and we tolerate it, so hey, it's a somewhat improvement.
For everyone else, we are in desperate demand of 'inner city high rise'
All tent cities in California cities should be relocated to state parks and open space land in unoccupied areas of the state, with homeless services exclusively provided there. They can be housed there while we build housing for the homeless in the more urban areas.
I suppose maybe some people in California want their budget to balance in the upcoming decades, and have finally realized that restricting housing until the point that you start losing representatives in Congress is a long-term losing strategy.
I live in a high rise and it's quite nice compared to a lot of the available alternatives at the same price. And the one I live in was built 7 decades ago, so imagine how nice a new one would be!
Ah dystopian high rises, I never thought about it that way. Maybe you’re right. At least the dystopian homeless encampments we currently have are always out of your line of sight.
High rises are one of the most efficient ways to house people at scale. There's a reason the majority of the human population lived in cities, historically.
It's also more efficient greenhouse-gas wise, as suburban sprawl means more driving to transport goods.
Actually it is mid rises that are most efficient. High rises are very expensive to build. The cheapest construction is good to use for up to about 5 floors (check with a structural engineer for details). As such building 5 floors everywhere should be the goal: it is the cheapest mix of low costs and high density. There is no real advantage to making your city any denser than this.
Five floors may be the best for the parts of a city where the land is relatively cheap, but I doubt it's the most cost-efficient for, say, Manhattan, or the city centre of Hong Kong. At a certain point, the construction costs are dwarfed by the cost of land, and constructing a slightly larger building becomes a rounding error, unless somehow the marginal cost of the sixth floor increases astronomically.
It would be more cost effective for people around Manhattan to build up to 5 floors, and then extend the subway out to them. (assuming reasonable costs - NYC subways cost 7-10 times what they should to build). This would extend the built up area of NYC by quite a lot.
Now that Hong Kong is reunified with the mainline (since 1997 IIRC) they have been building out to the mainland. Of course when your city is land constrained there is no choice but to build up.
Well, I'd like to see the methodology for how five floors was determined to be the absolute lowest possible costs.
That's not really the end of the story though, anyway. As long as the price per square foot is still higher, it could make sense to keep building up. At a price of, say, $2k per square foot in Manhattan, if your costs are $500 per square foot for five storeys, vs. $1k for ten, the former earns you $(2000-500)*5 = $7500, while the latter earns $10k per square foot of land, so obviously it's better to build the latter.
Souls? you mean other people? Or, f- them in favor of the existing residents...
And 'affordable dystopian' housing? Only 20% of the units are required to be affordable. Who knows what private developers will come up with to maximize their profits. So, dystopian? Probably. Affordable? Just a little.
Affordable is about supply and demand. Build enough and all houses are affordable. Don't build enough and people will find ways to cheat to get what you make as 'affordable' so they get in.
Of course there will always be people taking advantage of every system. I think it's more problematic when the people setting up a system is also participating in it. See: US Congress making rules for itself, including stock trading (small potatoes) and corporations investing in politicians for massive returns (very large potatoes)
Not-so-poor people playing a game well that results in massive benefits? A mere distraction.
>Build enough and all houses are affordable.
There are more vacant units in the US than homeless people. There is some nuance in how the market functions - it happens to be profitable for large private landlords to set prices higher. The market does not exist to optimize the number of people who have housing, it exists to optimize the amount of money that landlords can make.
High rises are for people who aren't light sleepers, don't mind hearing music and noise in adjacent walls or above or below, are tolerant of parties and generally sociable.
Guess who fits that demographic? Young single people and young couples who go out. The average middle age crank needs a house without shared walls and space.
There are individual preferences at play here. No one chooses a high rise, it's just more affordable. The exception is amenities, doormen, other services.
There are plenty of high-density buildings that don't require 'light sleepers'. I live in one right now. The only sound I hear from other units is if we both have windows open; otherwise it's dead quiet to the point that I had to put in some rugs to muffle echoes from walking around on the tiled floors.
I live in the most modern and luxurious of modern luxury buildings and while most people don't complain about noise, I'm jolted awake by door slamming in the hallway, I can hear parties two floors up and music (bass specifically) travels effortlessly through all the modern concrete floor and non-concrete walls all the same. It depends more on the neighbors than the construction. Nothing will stop a modern subwoofer.
The uncertainty around neighbors and the obligation to be tolerant is why single family houses are preferable to some people. Barking dogs when owners are away are another joy of apartment living.
It sounds like where you live isn't actually a luxury building... it's just an expensive but cheaply built building that was labeled 'luxury' to try and justify the price tag.
The solution here isn't to pretend that high-density buildings aren't needed, because they absolutely are; rather, it's to apply and enforce reasonable standards around noise insulation in shared-wall units, and to reduce the time and expense of the permitting and planning process in general so that there isn't as much motivation to cut corners to save money on the back end.
There is an epidemic of "luxury" units that are really just poorly constructed buildings with a fancy stove and granite countertop. Modern buildings will have noise leakage via doors and windows for obvious reasons, but should not be transmitting anything but extreme noise through floors and walls. If you can really hear noises two floors away, I'm guessing your building wasn't built with noise in mind OR the party goers have blasted their eardrums too many times. Regardless, I'm surprised the landlords haven't handled this already if they are charging luxury prices.
Nobody forces a builder to put in sound deadening, and they won't experience the suffering of hearing their neighbors, and they won't lose profit because pretty much by definition they are only building in places with excess demand so they can still charge pretty pennies for junk.
So of course it's one of the first things to go. Everyone always chooses to pinch pennies instead of do the right thing.
I've lived in many homes and a couple high-rises. The noise isolation in the high-rises was miles ahead of that in the homes. I'm guessing the concrete construction is a pretty big factor in this.
Yes, people here celebrating this don't understand at all that all this does is give developers more power over communities they have no interest in but money. And of course, the politicians that they will fund/bribe to make this happen.
We just went from democracy to oligarchy in this case.
Where does this narrative about evil greedy developers come from?
If the new housing represents a net increase in people, then the developers are filling unmet demand. It’s not that different from restricting the supply of milk and getting angry that milk producers will make more money when those restrictions are lifted. Yeah, they will, but only because there is more demand for their product than they were previously legally allowed to satisfy.
Developer margins should actually decrease when zoning is more permissive anyway. Right now in SF there is a whole cottage industry of “facilitators” and direct graft/corruption making it hard to build housing unless you know how to work the system.
While it’s absolutely true that developers can cut corners, I personally don’t see them as any more evil than any other business.
People are looking for any scapegoat for the problems in their community so they don't have to look in the mirror.
This is the same reason why there's a persistent myth that homeless are bused in from other states or whatever (when in reality, 70-90% of them were in homes in San Francisco before going on the street). It absolves people of blame
That seems to show 65% of the homeless population of LA County were living there before they became homeless - others travelled within state or from another state to be there.
That wasn't quite what I expected to see based on the stats cited above, but it's useful info. Thank you.
The fact that housing prices are high isn't a sign of greed: it's a sign of a constrained supply. Developers build housing, the price is set by what people are willing to pay.
The price is also set by developers. There's no reason for rent to increase 30-50% in a single year other than literal greed. Will people pay it? Yes, because they have no choice in the matter, they need a place to live. But it's still greed raising the price.
To be pedantic, the price is set by the leasing office, which may or may not be run by the developer. People do have a choice in the matter: they choose to live elsewhere. If an apartment raised rents 30-50% for no reason, that's what everyone would do and they would get no tenants.
Except, they're not raising rent for no reason. They're raising rent because housing is becoming a scare commodity, and there's way more people looking for housing than there are housing units available. If they look elsewhere the prices would also be high.
The "greedy" developers are the ones that are capable of bringing us out of this situation by profiting off this shortage by building more housing. Hostility to developers is a big reason why San Francisco and similar ares have such high housing costs.
The people actually building the buildings (developers) are, generally, different than the people renting out buildings (landlords). Developers profit when more units are built, landlords are hurt with increased competition.
Also, recent California law was changed so that the maximum allowable annual rent increase is ~10% (still rough if you are hit with that, but better than 30%).
Truth is people want to live in a community of the character they choose when they moved into that community. The high density housing community seems to think everyone just needs an efficiency unit in a Soviet style housing block and anyone else is an entitled NIMBY. What the person said was developers don’t care about the community they’re building into. Loosening of community rules means they can move in start building the anti-NIMBY idealized massive communal living arcology in the on the east and west of your 100 year old Victorian neighborhood blocking the sun for 70% of the day, razing historic buildings and creating a construction zone for the next five years. Then once they’ve made everyone miserable for forever they pocket the profit and use it to buy a nice Victorian in a community with community zoning laws.
> Truth is people want to live in a community of the character they choose when they moved into that community.
They are not _entitled_ to forever freeze a city just because they live there. I bet they would not like their town if it still looked the same as it was in 1890.
They aren’t, but they’re entitled to advocate for it without derision. My point is the NIMBY crowd have their point, and it’s unreasonable and unfair to assume they’re entitled asshats that hate poor people. Solutions where they exist will lie in the middle, otherwise in a democracy we have ways of resolving these things.
However it really should be a city level decision - the whole point of having lots of cities is they can vary in their character and quality. Moving these decisions to a state level doesn’t allow for the advocacy of a neighborhood to matter as much. That’s not good.
The world shouldn’t revolve around some NIMBY, but a community of NIMBYs should be respected for their desires as the community. Ceding community control to the government and developers isn’t the right way to go.
> They aren’t, but they’re entitled to advocate for it without derision.
I mean, no they aren't? These people are directly screwing over people like me. I'm gonna disagree with them loudly and publicly until the problem is solved.
If you are being harmed, of course you have a right to speak up against the ones committing said harm!
Explain how this is a direct screwing over please. It seems fairly indirect. Did they enter into a contract with you for an affordable home and then broke it? Did they jack up your rent and evict you? Or did they lobby their government for a policy you don’t like and could, along with other factors, cause your rent to go up? If it’s the latter, that’s pretty indirect.
I don’t think I did. There are many factors other than NIMBYs that lead to the perceived harm. It’s also unclear what the harm is - that you can’t afford something in a market economy? That you have to move? When they raze all the single family homes and replace them with Soviet style block houses and everyone can afford it, the NIMBYs will move too. Did they face harm?
I think he is angry at the wrong thing. Maybe being angry that the cities are necessary to live in to get ahead? Maybe he should be hopeful that telecommuting will relieve housing pressures over time? Maybe there’s a saddle point that can be reached by not assuming the other side is malicious towards you personally?
No one has complained about the prices being too high in a market economy. In fact, NIMBYs are distorting the market with inefficient regulation. The harm, of course, is that this regulation unfairly favors current home owners.
The state of California has said enough is enough and has rendered the local regulation null and void.
And no one has said anything about soviet style apartment buildings. That is very unlikely.
The policy they've chosen to advocate directly harms me. Not in a, "oh, no, there's now a construction project nearby" sort of way. In a, "I literally cannot afford to live in this city anymore, so I have to leave" sort of way. I will deride the hell out of the extremely privileged status quo interests who put their precious aesthetic opinions above the basic needs of their children and grandchildren. If you loudly advocate your selfish and in doing so you hurt the hell out of large groups of people, they will dislike you for it.
I see, the harm done is if the city won’t change to accommodate you you might have to move to another city. The harm done to the other side is they can’t stand to live in the city that changed to accommodate you so you didn’t have to leave, and they have to leave. Their advocacy for the city accommodating them is selfish, but your advocacy for the city accommodating you is egalitarian?
I see a lot of people say this is direct harm. I don’t think people understand what that term means. “I’m upset by the outcome of your advocacy” doesn’t mean direct harm. Advocacy isn’t directed towards you, no one has come to you and harmed you. Direct harm would be them coming and removing you from your home and keeping you under housed directly. Their advocacy indirectly leads to higher housing prices, and even then there’s a lot of other confounding factors. “I’m really upset with the situation and those guys are advocating for a partial factor that gives rise” is about as indirect as you get.
Harm is done to the person owning the single family home absolutely but I would argue that is the lesser of two evils. The best way would be to give them some element of compensation, but still, if one wants a nice, lower density area they should move away from the rapidly growing city. You can't just expect to maintain that forever.
The same could be said of the person who wants a larger apartment than they could afford given the market for housing - move further away from the city.
Neither extreme makes sense, we should probably recognize both camps have valid points and a middle path is likely the right one, and no one will be fully satisfied.
From a utilitarian perspective though it's a greater harm to all the people that would live in the high-rise that now have to live miles from the city versus the handful of single family home owners.
That is true. Hence my comments above about the extreme is razing all the SFH and replacing them with society style apartment blocks to ensure everyone has the minimum required to house the maximum number of people at the lowest cost possible. The other side is they’re incumbent, have established a life, and their entire community wants the life they have lived. Respecting that is important too, otherwise you get what you see in China with the razing of old cities replaced with efficiency unit high rises and forced relocation. There’s something to be said for respecting the lives built of a community vs destroying the community built for utilitarian gain.
> I see, the harm done is if the city won’t change to accommodate you you might have to move to another city. The harm done to the other side is they can’t stand to live in the city that changed to accommodate you so you didn’t have to leave, and they have to leave. Their advocacy for the city accommodating them is selfish, but your advocacy for the city accommodating you is egalitarian?
This is very well expressed, thanks.
Fundamentally you have people who live somewhere and like it how it is, and all the people who don't live there and want to radically change it to be something else. Clearly these desires are in conflict. Each side has the right to speak up for what they'd like to see, sure.
But where does it come the idea that the people who don't live there should have a greater say in how the place develops than those who actually make their life there?
I can only live in one place, all other towns of the world are places I don't live in. By that logic, I should be able to influence all the N-1 places on earth I don't live it, but have no say in how development occurs in the 1 place I do live in. Does that make sense?
I don't live in Boston. Should I have greater vote on how Boston needs to change than people who actually live there? (To pick a random city I don't live in.)
But isn't your position premised on an entitlement to live in a particular place? I don't recall ever creating or affirming that entitlement. And it doesn't exactly strike me as reasonable. There are expensive neighborhoods that I cannot afford to live in. I don't see anything wrong with that.
Depends on the level of information available to voters. At the local level, decisions are usually terrible, as getting info about local elections is usually contained within patronage networks.
At the state level, elections are much better, and state level elections are usually far more informed. There have been moments of pure greed by the electorate, like with Prop 13, that have severely harmed the state, but that's a common trap with all electorates.
Overall I think California voters are newer on par with places like Minnesota thag have generally very good governance.
> There have been moments of pure greed by the electorate, like with Prop 13
That is a very uncharitable description. Prop13 was driven by people sick of getting thrown out of their long-time homes by huge tax increases. There is no "greed" in the desire to keep living in the home you bought.
You know what’s really a problem? How dystopian America is.
The opportunity and jobs are in big cities. But housing makes it impossible for many people to even live near the city. People want to solve this problem, but are blocked because people like that their neighborhood has street parking.
It’s killing America and it’s really killing our ability to become a modern, progressive society.
I think the real problem is the density of opportunity and jobs in cities. I’m hopeful that remote work will break that tyranny to some extent. In five years when the emotions have cooled about return to office and the director of finance provides an analysis to the CFO about how much they could save and increase EPS while improving productivity using 2020/21 data and the CFO takes it to the board, that will be the end of the opportunity density in the cities.
It’s a fundamental problem caused by the necessity to collocate to collaborate, which is largely not true any more. Jobs will diffuse away from cities as the people who live in the city out of obligation and have no desire leave. Some stay because they like it. Regardless the density will reduce. That’s a good thing. The hollowing out of the country into the coastal cities is a flaw not a feature.
Have you been to an urban downtown during lockdown where only jobs requiring in person attendance were encouraged to work in the office? They were literally empty. Now with hybrid they’re mostly empty. There wouldn’t be articles we are responding to if this were not true.
The majority of jobs in an urban core is not heavy industry or medical or teaching. Those are on the outside of the urban core, especially heavy industry is usually not in an urban environment at all in modern times.
In the city of Boston, fully half the jobs are in healthcare and education. Many urban jobs can certainly go remote but I don’t think it’s more than half.
Yes, but on the flip side thousands of people will no longer be paying $3k/mo in rent for a shitty apartment, and homelessness will drop dramatically.
The anti-NIMBY movement didn't come about because people want to override existing communities. It came about because people need a place to live, and NIMBYs were actively campaigning against it for decades with no consideration for the needs of others.
Now, I think it's reached the stage where at least among young people making their lives miserable is honestly seen as a positive.
If you expect to have retail stores, teachers, and tradespeople nearby, then you need to build housing they can afford. If everyone has a one-hour commute to get to their job at 7-11 you're going to see even more inflation.
Would love to have a law that the minimum wage for people whose services you use, whether that person lives close or far, must be enough to pay for the mortgage at, say, 40th percentile of a studio in the area. Want that receptionist at the doctor to make an appointment for you? Want somebody to restock the shelves at the grocery store? Better pay up... Want to go to a doctor's office that has a janitorial service? Better expect those janitors to get paid.
We have an entire generation of extremely over privileged, overly entitled, and narcissistic people setting housing policy that seemingly have no idea about all the labor that makes all their lives possible. We are reaching "let them eat cake" levels of self-deception from homeowners.
People want to live where the jobs are. It doesn’t make sense for California to brag about being the world’s fifth largest economy but to also plan on housing 0 new people a year.
No one is taking single family homes from people in Santa Monica. They are just saying anyone who wants to sell they can now turn that into apartments. If you frame it the way I'm describing it really it's the NIMBY people who "need" santa monica to be a certain way
And that’s happening, but still your plumber has to come from somewhere. As the need to commute drops the population density that can be accommodated will rise just because there won’t be huge flows of commuter traffic.
My quick kaging tells me a plumber in Santa Monica makes on average $80k, and the average software dev makes $90. I think you underestimate how much skilled trades actually make. The parallel thread regarding unskilled labor (janitors) is more to the point. Even then, somehow, the building are clean even in places considerably more expensive than Santa Monica. I don’t think the homeless camps are filled with janitors, but I very well could be wrong. I know a lot of recent homeless are people simply priced out of being homed. A solution in my mind lies somewhere between razing every single family home and erecting massive Soviet style block housing across the skyline and disallowing any change to any structure.
The people who do it today, but with the people who don’t have to live there for work gone, their housing will be more affordable. Unless you’re saying there’s no janitors in Santa Monica?
This is not at all true, if you wanted character to your community then the community should have approved a building plan that kept the character and allowed for more housing. As it stands these communities have said no to everything and now housing is being foisted upon them, and I say good. Too many people and families have been displaced by the absolutely absurd housing situation in California, and the failure of the people of California to address the cost of housing in their communities shows their abject dismissal of the overwhelming humanitarian toll they have inflicted on their neighbors and the environment.
Well, you know, it sure would be nice if people could build more of those tightly-clustered Victorians in, say, San Francisco, to continue the classic character of the city and replace ugly box houses... but zoning laws mean they can't.
I'm truly sorry if this comes off as a personal attack because I'm trying really hard for it not to be but my frustration bubbles over.
> demolishing beautiful, sustainably-built housing with shoddy, ugly, mass-produced 5-over-1s
YES. BECAUSE THAT'S ALL MODERN ZONING PERMITS. WHICH IS PRECISELY THE [bad word] PROBLEM.
In our haste, particularly on the West Coast, to ensure that we build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody, we've made zoning codes that produce THIS OUTCOME.
There's a reply upthread that says that density advocates want to cram everyone into Soviet-style "dystopian" high rises and, to be honest, your reply here sounds a lot like that.
A WORLD of difference exists between "detached dwelling on a 7,500 square foot lot" and "clone stamp 5-over-1 with empty retail on the bottom." BUT ZONING DOESN'T PERMIT IT. We absolutely should be building rowhouses and stacked flats and plaza housing and all of the other beautiful, people-scale-yet-still-dense, workable housing types that have been tried all over the planet yet America thinks we're too god damn special to have because "American Dream".
If you have rules that say you can only build 5-over-1s, it should come as no shock at all when those are the only things being built, especially in the very tiny slice of areas where it's permitted to build anything dense at all.
If the truth is that zoning is the only obstacle holding us back from idyllic, beautiful mixed-density cities, then I'm showing my ignorance, but I'm not convinced that it is. From what I've seen, developers love building places like Mission Bay in SF and Seaport in Boston, made of cheap and ugly ticky-tacky that caters to insular WFH yuppies. If that's the vision of our utopian future, count me out.
> If the truth is that zoning is the only obstacle holding us back from idyllic, beautiful mixed-density cities, then I'm showing my ignorance, but I'm not convinced that it is.
It definitely is. I work in IT but one of my kids is in land use planning and they have regaled me with many stories of how builders come to the city (not in California) with plans. All of them involve a zoning variance and, more often than not, a trip through what is called Design Review. If the zoning change doesn't kill it--usually because they want a departure from what is called "floor area ratio" rules or from the "wedding cake" style zoning that is supposed to keep zones of detached housing "safe" from "impacts"--then design review absolutely does. Which dovetails into...
> made of cheap and ugly ticky-tacky that caters to insular WFH yuppies
...your other point. It's fine to not like the design of a particular building, but to enforce design aesthetic onto someone else is also a failing of zoning. Design review is often used as a cudgel to "catch" what zoning doesn't (so the rules say this kind of building is allowed but neighbors don't want it) and then administrivia it into, if not oblivion, then a very expensive project through things like "more building modulation" and "tamp down building massing" and "mitigate shadow impacts".
In your world, everyone counts except the people who actually live in the community today and will be affected by changes. You're shocked that outsiders come into a town with plans to build things that require special consideration and the people of the town demand it be put through a rigorous process?
I get it, there are real issues. But minimizing real concerns of people that are the stakeholders isn't fair. Construction means years of noise and dust, and traffic issues in many cases and people don't want that. People are wary of the character of their town being ruined - what makes the town a great place to be. I agree that there's usualy a middle ground that could be found. But importantly, to your last point...
> It's fine to not like the design of a particular building, but to enforce design aesthetic onto someone else is also a failing of zoning.
I disagree. Go to somewhere like the UK and you'll see in many places they not only restrict what you can do to existing structures, but they dictate which materials can be used to build new developments. They do this because it allows the area to develop while also hopefully maintaining the character of the place. The thing that makes the place nice today. If someone wanted to put up a house covered in vinyl siding, they wouldn't be allowed to.
I fully support enforcing new developments having to use certain materials and be restricted to certain sizes, styles, and layouts.
> In your world, everyone counts except the people who actually live in the community today and will be affected by changes.
In my world, everyone counts including the people who actually live in the community today and will be affected by changes...alongside the people who do not yet live there and thus have no voice.
I am vehemently opposed to ladder-pulling in all its forms.
> But minimizing real concerns of people that are the stakeholders isn't fair.
I do not believe I am minimizing their real concerns, I believe I am putting them on the same footing as other real concerns, concerns which people who want to act insular have no motivation to consider. Concerns like the state bill in question here attempts to balance.
Cities change or they die. The world is full of inconveniences and problems related to change but it is not fair to use the regulatory power of the state to insist that a hamlet remain as-is in perpetuity. There are strategies to mitigate those inconveniences instead of "nope, not here."
> I fully support enforcing new developments having to use certain materials and be restricted to certain sizes, styles, and layouts.
In a perfect world, I would be fine with this, but we do not live in a perfect world and these restrictions are more often used as a fig leaf to keep people out than they are to maintain a character. Hell, the phrase "neighborhood character" is very often used as a code phrase for keeping out "those people", whomever is the villain of the day (often renters or people who want to buy but who can't or don't want to buy a massive structure).
These sorts of rules can be useful--look at Leavenworth in Washington State, for example--but, in a lot of places in the United States and especially on the West Coast, they are impossible-to-meet predicates for exclusion.
> In my world, everyone counts including the people who actually live in the community today and will be affected by changes...alongside the people who do not yet live there and thus have no voice.
It's difficult to understand how this makes sense. There are ~900K people who live in San Francisco. There are (roughly) 333 million people in the US who don't live in San Francisco. So you're saying those 333 million people should all have equal voice in deciding what happens in SF? Why?
Because his son is a developer who wants to disrupt existing communities without the community having a say in it. He disguises it in a mask of egalitarianism. But his argument is the same as a pro-lifer who claims they’re the voice of the unheard baby to be aborted without considering the existing person who’s voice we can actually verify.
You can’t possibly know what future people in the community may want and can only justify your own opinions about what ought to be by projecting them on these hypothetical people. If anything the evidence says differently as the people living in a community today were the hypothetical people in previous years.
Developers "love" building that stuff because... it's what zoning allows them to build.
You would need to actually look at a place with better zoning to see a functional example, like suburban metropolitan Japan or France or Spain, where neighborhoods are often made of tightly-clustered detached homes (e.g. the old-fashioned Victorian row home equivalent) mixed with corner store retail.
As an aside... I find it fun that people in the US use the term 'Victorian' to describe an era. I like the idea of naming an era in a Republic after a foreign monarch.
Incidentally, if it were 100 years old it would be Georgian. Vitoria died in 1901
No, the term describes an architectural style that was popular ~100 years ago. I might be off by some number of years. It is related to the era, but it is independent of it.
Ok, I consider 100 years ago from the top of my head pretty reasonable, especially as someone who couldn’t care less about a foreign monarch or precision in dating architectural styles. But, regardless, it’s not referring to an era but to an architectural style. While it was most popular 120 years ago, there have been Victorians built since then. I know not every Victorian in SF is 120+ years old because the city was burned to the ground in 1906.
In the USA, many “revival” style homes were built in the 19th and early 20th century. It wouldn’t be uncommon to find a Victorian next to a Georgian next to a Tutor. But they are just styles.
So much of the problems with housing in the state stem from the fact that lots of community members are valuing their investment in their own house over everything else. Housing can either be affordable or it can be a good investment, it really can't be both.
At this point the market has been so perverted by entrenched interests blocking new development that I would be okay with a dictatorship of developers for a solid decade. It might be enough to dig us out of the hole we're in.
This is a point I don't often see discussed. I have friends and family in CA whose primary asset is their home, with little to nothing invested elsewhere (perhaps because of the high cost of living)...resulting in a mortgage they have no intention of ever paying off, little retirement savings, and fingers crossed for a cash-out down the line.
That's not all of it, either. Older buyers have gotten the lionshare of their wealth from housing appreciation by preventing new housing and pay a lower tax burden than new buyers due to Prop 13. There's a reason that when it made it to the supreme court Justice Stevens called it medeival and referred to entrenched owners as Squires.
"During the two past decades, California property owners have enjoyed extraordinary prosperity. As the State's population has mushroomed, so has the value of its real estate. Between 1976 and 1986 alone, the total assessed value of California property subject to property taxation increased tenfold. Simply put, those who invested in California real estate in the 1970s are among the most fortunate capitalists in the world.Proposition 13 has provided these successful investors with a tremendous windfall and, in doing so, has created severe inequities in California's property tax scheme. These property owners (hereinafter "the Squires) are
guaranteed that, so long as they retain their property and do not improve it, their taxes will not increase more than 2% in any given year. As a direct result of this windfall for the Squires, later purchasers must pay far more than their fair share of property taxes." https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/90-1912.ZD.html
This might be one of the craziest parts of it, and it makes me understand how a lot of neighborhoods in California just look sort of...dumpy. The system actively discourages you from improving a property!
My dream is to see the state property tax code flipped to land value tax. No penalties for improving the property, just purely tax the value of the land and penalize people who park their vacant lots for year after year.
No, what this does is give developers the power to bring affordable housing to california. Them making money is just the incentive to do it. Silicon valley was already an oligarchy since housing affordability ensures only the wealthy can afford to vote in local elections.
It's interesting to hear people describe government-organized supply restriction cartels as some sort of utopia, whereas, in their world, eliminating the cartel is in fact creating an "oligarchy."
Who cares if the developers get rich? Do you(and the rest of society) get what you want?
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages”
― Adam Smith
> Do you(and the rest of society) get what you want?
That is an interesting question. In many cases people here are advocating that the locals don't get what they want, so that "the rest of society" does.
The NIMBY locals always think they represent the community when poll after poll shows that they do not.
The process has been setup to allow a few squeaky wheels to have veto power over change. It's just pure narcissism of the NIMBY that all the other community members have the same belief as them.
Collectively, perhaps, but the developer who built my house has by far the biggest house in the area, on the nicest property, with the nicest cars, and Facebook albums filled to the brim with pictures of him meeting famous people I'll not ever get to schmooze with.
This is actually the compromise position - California proposed SB 50, which would have unilaterally set density standards near transit and permitted fourplexes in single family zones. Cities fiercely opposed this.
So instead we have this dumb system where every city gets a target number from the state and can choose where the housing goes, as long as they can show they meet the target. "Local control!"
Most of them are choosing really dumb spots - Orinda is trying to put 200 low income homes on a freeway shoulder near the Caldecott Tunnel, Palo Alto has two Caltrain stations but is trying to put all the new apartments near the 101 freeway.
It's not dumb, it's cynical. Pushing less well off people into the most polluted areas rather than sharing space is a pattern that keeps reappearing in US society.
Housing right next to highways is pretty bad. There's a huge amount of pollution, both particulate and noise, and depending on the layout, also light. Constant exposure to all of those will quickly lead to a variety of chronic conditions and generally make one miserable.
That's what HCD is trying to enforce -- that cities aren't just putting all the low-income housing in undesirable areas but are instead spreading it throughout.
You can read our letter about the Caldecott site - it's in a fire zone, there are no amenities, utilities would likely need to be pulled across the freeway and active BART line.
It isn't horrible but I don't think you can argue that it'd be better to put the high-rises near the Caltrain stations. If you don't then you are just requiring people to have cars which also makes it harder to afford the housing.
Yeah, it's a hamfisted solution, but only because it has to be.
And as the state government has said -- cities can still plan their own growth! They just have to plan some growth rather than none, which, obviously, is the sticking point.
Exactly right. The cities had a long time to implement less clumsy plans but kept caving to local political groups funded by wealthy people. I'm not against those people having their opinions be part of a solution, but up until now it's been almost entirely driven by that group, and they were unwilling to give up enough to find workable middle ground. It was always token concessions. Maybe this will be a wake-up call.
They are able to plan their own growth, but they aren't able to refuse to grow. Or at least, not through zoning; being located where potable water or sewer/septic are at capacity is probably still valid to restrict new building.
If I understand correctly, the Monterey Peninsula Water Management District is subject to an order from the (California) State Water Resources Control Board which prevents it from allowing new water meters[1]. New house construction in most communities with municipal water service will not be issued final approval without being connected to the water service; so this effectively prevents new construction. I strongly suspect (but have no evidence) that an onsite private well would be prohibited as well.
The City of Monterey has a page[2] describing this as well as a published wait list [3], with the first project having submitted in 2003.
I don't know if they deny construction permits, but you'd have to be pretty foolish to actually construct residences that can't be legally occupied because they lack potable water.
I don't think you should be blindly downvoted for this -- I think it is a totally valid question, and one that the YIMBY movement needs to find a way to answer consistently.
Personally, I would say that lots of low-density communities do remain low-density. And generally, that's because people don't want to move to them.
But if you're a small town in Northern California, one of the most desirable places in the world, saying "we want to remain low density" is basically saying "we got here first, so it's ours -- nobody else gets to have this!"
And I think that's a fundamentally wrong way for us to organize our places. Desirable communities shouldn't be able to keep out people who want to come in, just because they want to stay exclusive.
But I don't think that's a settled point, and there is a lot of nuance to basically every adjective I just used.
At a certain point, it starts to be like "two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner" when you get some of these communities that don't want anyone else there. And that's fundamentally unfair.
I like the Strong Towns notion of "no massive changes anywhere, but lots of smaller changes everywhere", although in practice it's not always quite so smooth.
It seems pretty clear cut given the focus on property rights in the States that whoever got there first does get to call the shots. There are maybe some overrides like eminent domain but it seems the only non-coercive way to change this is to get your own land and make your own rules (e.g. HOAs, incorporate towns with better rules, etc).
Besides, who's to say that these desirable places are not desirable because they are low-density? It's a chicken and egg problem.
Property rights absolutism would mean landowners can build what they want. Zoning has already moved the question of allowed building types into the realm of public policy; now we’re talking about what the policy should be.
> It seems pretty clear cut given the focus on property rights in the States that whoever got there first does get to call the shots.
If we're concerned about property rights, why can't the property owners build at a higher density? Or sell to a developer that will build at a higher density? The fact is the zoning at play _restricts_ property rights it doesn't protect them.
Anyway zoning was never static (it wasn't ordained by God after all), so changing it isn't really a big deal. People are angry and surprised of course, but the writing has been on the wall for a long time.
My answer comes from more of a Libertarian perspective it is quite simple. The community does not own the privately held land. If every landowner in the community opposed development, zoning would be unnecessary. If some individuals want to sell to Developers, zoning is just oppression of the minority by Democratic means.
Being part of a democracy does not mean you get to control every single action that could impact you.
The majority can also buy out someone who wants to sell to a developer. I know a neighborhood where everyone pitched in to buy land that would have been developed and ruined their view, depreciating property prices. But they put their money where their mouths were by buying the land themselves.
That's another reason that people are frustrated with Central planning. Your community might have a very strong opinion, but they're not willing to pay for it. This means that they will settle for making it illegal.
I see a lot of validity in this line of thought and agree with it in principle, but in practice it has led to a lot of problems in California.
For one, California is split up into many smaller towns/cities in large metro areas, so each having their own policies leads to locally-optimal but regionally-suboptimal policies of trying to get as much commercial development as possible with as little residential development as possible. This is a direct contributor to gentrification (if you are “lucky” and able to soak up the commercial demand without increasing residential supply, you’ve created a mismatch between jobs and people in your area), ghettoisation (the people priced out of where they were before have to go somewhere), traffic (people have to commute into their jobs), and affordability (even the bad communities can’t increase housing much because they have the weakest tax base, plus all the restricted supply where jobs and taxes actually are).
The right solution to this problem is to recognize the whole local-optimization problem and make it so every municipality has to solve the problem at once, to prevent the adverse selection of solving the problem in only one municipality. Which is what the state of CA is doing.
This could also be addressed from the other side, which is a complete political non-starter, of trying to limit job growth. Obviously nobody wants to do that. But the problem by and large is not just that CA has a lot of low density communities that want to remain that way, but also that those low density communities are creating more jobs than they can house.
I agree with your premise. I just disagree that the use of authority is the solution here. I don't see any reason why the state needs to intervene. Just let the locally-optimal solutions (peacefully) compete and sort themselves out. Let there be winners and losers, and don't get in the way. Using authority to force cooperation is tyranny. We're not all on the same team. We're self-interested, in-group focused, animals and there's nothing wrong with that.
The locally-optimal solution is always to try to get as much commercial tax base as possible (since it increases the tax base without much increase in spending) and as little resident tax base as possible (since it increases spending). So I don’t really see how it will sort itself out.
When you are a bunch of small, close by municipalities all operating in essentially the same economic context (job market, etc.) the regional issues always become someone else’s problem.
From what perspective is that optimal at all? Certainly humans care about more in life than the tax revenue of their municipal government. I can't speak for you but that's not my goal in life
People generally don’t try to block offices or retail the way they try to block housing. Many of the NIMBY concerns like having to build more schools don’t apply.
> Using authority to force cooperation is tyranny.
Wow, this is an odd definition of tyranny. The elected representatives of the people of our state wrote these laws. I personally think it's fair for us to make laws that apply across our state rather than having full autonomy at the city level.
If you want low density, you're going to pay for it by not being in the center of a major hub of civilization.
Places like Gilroy and Morgan Hill will probably be mostly left alone in this, and this will probably apply downward pressure on their housing prices, making it more affordable for people to live in low density neighborhoods, while not having a 3 hour commute from the central valley.
Obviously developers could target those cities, but they would probably start with more desirable ones first.
In California, all city authority is granted to the cities by the state. The state sees overall growth and wants to provide for it. It's reasonably fair to allocate for growth in residential units in a region among all the communities in the region. The status quo of most communities in areas where people want to live refusing residential growth is clearly not working for the state, and they've been gradually increasing the pressure on local government to resolve the issue, so this is just the next step in escalation.
I personally love low density living, and I live on a 9 acre lot as a result. But, I can't keep my neighbors from subdividing their lots. Locally, my city (in WA) has places that would be better suited to higher density living and places that are not so well suited; but city council drags their feet on all new construction, so we're not meeting state growth targets here, and I suspect we'll eventually end up with something like described in this article. That would be unfortunate, IMHO, because increasing density in a desirable place to live is inevitable and I think it's better to have (expanding) pockets of high density rather than greatly mixed densities. It's easier to add 30 residences where there's municipal water and sewer than to extend municipal water and sewer 2 miles to a new project site where neighbors are on private wells and septic, which doesn't tend to work well for a 4 story condo building.
What is the legal standing of a "community" in American or state law?
Looking at this abstractly, buying a plot of land grants you ownership over that plot, nothing more. So on what basis should an owner of one plot be able to dictate what others can do with their own plot?
Scaling up to a community, what % of plot owners need to share an opinion for that opinion to outweigh the property rights of disagreeing plot owners?
To my knowledge, the relevant collective management levels recognized under law are municipal, state, and federal.
Where does "community" mean anything beyond being a manufactured scope of convenience for NIMBYs? They can't get the entire city to agree with them, so they draw an artificial boundary where the majority agree with them and call it a neighbourhood.
Housing is most people's largest purchase in life. Zoning is put in place to make sure that that purchase is suitable for the purpose intended so people feel comfortable making that large investment. They tried to get a variance to my local zoning to put in an asphalt plant, that would spew crap into the air my kids breath. That makes my house unsuitable to the use I purchased it for, and that the county promised it would be for via zoning, as my entire purpose was to raise kids in a healthy environment.
"Don't build an asphalt plant near residential zones" is an extremely reasonable zoning restriction. That's what zoning should be doing.
"Don't build any apartments anywhere in this city" isn't.
There should be a range of options available for people, ranging from a house with a yard and no shared walls with anyone, to mid-rise apartment buildings, and many things in between.
I think it's entirely possible for a rule that seems plausible and fair to create bad outcomes, making it a bad rule. Saying that the people of a community may vote to decide to to allow anyone else in seems fair... until too many communities do it, leading to people not having anywhere affordable to live that is reasonably close to employment opportunities.
And it's a sort of collective coordination problem, too. People can move from city to city, and if a city decides to allow lots of new housing, they'll get lots of new people, which not only increases density, but also lowers rents in other cities by a little bit, while not lowering the rents/property prices in their own city by as much as they would if inter-city migration weren't a thing.
So when a city allows more housing, it benefits other cities. It's best if every city does this -- but because the incentives are a bit messed up, most cities in California have decided to "defect" and block construction. (There are other reasons -- people with the most free time to attend city council meetings and run for positions in local government are much more likely to be landowners or landlords, so they are over-represented, while renters are under-represented).
If every city and town builds a some more housing, you can get a much more drastic increase in affordability than if only some are shouldering all the burden, without massive changes to any one place. Which is why I think it makes sense to handle this at the state level.
Because it's regulatory capture. We hate it when big corporations do it, small towns shouldn't be able to either. If they were to fairly pay for it, maybe we could talk, but when things like Prop 13 exist, it's clear they are not paying for it.
Housing near job centers is a scarce resource, we shouldn't put up with people hoarding housings anymore they we would put up with someone hoarding water during a drought.
Because the community's governance is granted to it by the state. Nowhere in the constitution are the rights of city councils enumerated, and states are sovereign entities.
As such, any power your local community has to govern itself is just largess from its state. When it stops governing in a way that the state approves of, there is nothing preventing the state from stepping in.
American citizens with the freedom of movement? If you want to remain low-density go settle where California City is, I guarantee you will stay small. Santa Monica, however, is going to have to build housing.
freedom of movement != freedom over the personal property of others, or freedom from binding agreements. You can walk the streets of any neighbourhood you please. Using state authority to overrule local decisions about local matters is what I'm objecting to here.
No one is taking their personal property? The state is removing the restriction around what a developer can build on their own property.
Further, the state is doing their job. If the town next to mine enacts restrictive housing measures, then my town is likely to become more burdened by the issue. If we then enact restrictive housing, the next town over now has to deal with the effects of 2 freeriders. Why should the rest of California allow Beverly Hills and Santa Monica to saddle us with the burden of housing everyone? So the wealthy can have their enclaves?
My house is worthless to me if they put a batch asphalt plant next door, as my whole purpose for my house was to raise my children in. They tried to get a variance. Luckily I come from California, so I am not adverse to raising friction and gathering a coalition and was able to get enough people to the planning meeting to keep zoning rules enforced and not allow that exception.
What is the point of your anecdote, no one is suggesting that we remove industrial zoning? This law removes specific residential housing restrictions which require single-family in areas that have enough demand that developers will build multi-tenant buildings. You can still raise your children fine in a slightly more dense neighborhood, everything will adapt.
Because I don't see "California" as one entity like a sports team. I see it as various groups each competing with each other, like an ecosystem. Beverly Hills and Santa Monica just happen to be "winning" (rather arbitrarily). Using authority to punish them for (peacefully) winning is tyranny. Just let them win.
> The state is removing the restriction
That was enforced by a local democracy, for what is fundamentally local concern. The state should not be able to supersede local authority for local concerns, it's authoritarian.
This is a tragedy of the commons type thing. If every local democracy votes in favor of local concerns (no new housing), then the problem doesn't solve itself; California has a bunch of angry residents that can't find anywhere to live. Whatever you think is right or wrong, there is still an elected government at the state level, and it's not only homeowners that vote in those elections. So their hand is forced to do something given the gridlock at the local level. (If it was only Santa Monica that refused to build new housing, then this wouldn't have become a state-level issue. But every locale is making the exact same decision, because it's in their current residents' best interests. The state has to take into account the views of everyone.)
It's really convenient for you to not see California as one entity. Unfortunately for you, that's not reality and we are, in fact, part of a single entity.
> Beverly Hills and Santa Monica just happen to be "winning" (rather arbitrarily). Using authority to punish them for (peacefully) winning is tyranny. Just let them win.
The residents of those areas have been using authority to make their "wins" a fait accompli for nearly 100 years, but yeah, it's tyranny if we remove their priviliges.
> The state should not be able to supersede local authority for local concerns, it's authoritarian.
California voters elected the legislature and executive who signed off on it. If Santa Monica restricts housing, it affects neighboring cities. Please explain how it is authoritarian for the state to balance these concerns?
All politics is local. Every citizen of a city is also a citizen of the state. "Local" is a demarcation drawn where ever it's convenient for the speaker. A smaller group should not be able to supersede the superior authority at the larger polity's expense.
In this case, the locally-optimal choices cities are making is having deleterious effects on the quality of life of the citizens of the state as a whole. It is perfectly reasonable for the state to therefore act.
And why should an individual not be able to build whatever they want (including apartments) on land they own? Why should local decisions override individual freedom?
Well they don't have any rights over property they don't own. Why should a narrow majority or as is often the case a small but highly motivated minority have a veto over any conceivable use of your property just because it happens to be near them.
I'm not proposing allowing a chicken processing plant in a residential area, but it's no one else's business if you want to build a duplex on a lot you own.
I think this is only applicable if said community is isolated enough. But most communities in the Bay Area (for example) are not isolated. People live in one city, work in another, on the weekends they drive out to some other cities for R&R.
then they should enforce 1 child per family while they're at it. their kids have to live somewhere right? I live in a rural city in Utah that doesn't like building new homes yet it's a Mormon town where families are about 5 kids on average. if you want grandkids nearby then more homes need built. period.
Or people whom the community has no room for can leave. I think this comes from an axiomatic disagreement about what being born/alive entitles a person to. My view is that we are all born owning nothing, and that everything we acquire we must acquire via consensual exchange.
According to that line of thinking, older generations should also stop receiving support from welfare and social security. Let them sell their houses and leave their communities if they can't afford to acquire the goods and services they need through consensual exchange.
And yet very few will accept elderly starving in the streets en masse because their pensions were gutted or went bankrupt. And so some measure of intergenerational agreement is necessary, where each generation provides for the next.
Given that people are paying into Social Security their entire life, I imagine they'd take some offense if you took it away and said it was because the young'uns were tired of paying for them. They might be of the opinion that they did in fact fund the investment for their retirement.
This comes about from job openings in places that don't have housing, so, basically a disagreement about where people should work and live, acted out on the housing and job markets.
If you're going down the slippery slope of libertarianism (on a strange collective/communist level), then who are the rest of us to stop an individual property owner from selling his lot to someone that wants to build 5+1 multiunit housing?
So either you go right wing and you have no right to restrict developers on land they legitimately procure
Or you go left wing and you have no right to impose (?accidentally...ish?) racist, classist, and generationalist zoning results on people.
Or you go centrist and point out that population growth, livability, and cost for practically everyone is raging out of control because of zoning laws.
Now, that's all policy reasoning on idealistic grounds, which of course matters not at all! The real political calculus is rich (landed) vs the young / middle class / poor (priced out).
Of course it's all a scale and there are infinite points along that scale. Wanting democracy at the lowest possible level doesn't preclude wanting to avoid going all the way to the "every man for himself" option. I guarantee some folks want it to be dictated at the federal level, even.
The other lesson might be that 'city' is too broad a term. Some cities are standalone, some are just arbitrary boundaries within a metropolis. Maybe the latter should be eliminated and replaced with a metropolis-wide city.
Agreed, there should be a strict framework within such planning happens, to avoid the housing crisis that CA cities have created for those that don't own land. Japan is a great inspiration for planning like this. US planning, the entire field, is absolutely abhorrent, and should really be scrapped and rebuilt from scratch.
This isn't some unknown town that put in a lot of planning, money, and effort to create demand. The only thing of "value" that happened was that a state full of good weather and jobs was monopolized early with low density housing. I don't know of any small towns that don't want more growth. Asking for more planning is only used in areas of rampant speculation.
Also the whole idea behind the suburban experiment was the idea that it was a finished state. That there was absolutely no need to densify or plan for growth, because more suburban land could just be annexed.
In theory cities planning their own growth sounds good. In practice it fails miserably.
I think it should really be decided at the metro area level. Since job markets exist at that level, having housing decisions there avoids the problem where a city benefits from a booming economy but refuses to provide housing to anyone participating in that economy, shoving that responsibility onto the other nearby cities.
Maybe if they actually planned growth. In practice they just prevent growth. I'd rather err on the side of property rights--if you buy some land you can build stuff on it (within reason).
This is GREAT news. American zoning laws, that have led to vast swaths of single-family-home-only zones, are an absolute disaster. There are plenty of car-dependent SFH-only suburban neighborhoods in existence where fans of SFHs will always be able to find them, and they're not going anywhere. I live in a SFH myself. But in congested cities, *no more of that crap needs to be built!* It's as inappropriate of a land use in a place like SF or Oakland as a 20-acre cornfield.
A real city is better when you can walk to things near where you live, like offices, doctors, restaurants, etc. You get that so easily with housing on top, businesses below. And businesses interspersed with the housing. It just works.
I grew up in Santa Monica and live here now. Except for getting around the height restriction, this really is good news. Here's one big reason why.
Maybe half the houses and apartments in the city were built to last 30 years. They are literal tear-downs and should be replaced. It's that simple. There are lots of valid points to debate here but crap houses made of rotting sticks just need to go.
School districts/boundaries being so unequal is at least partially the result of zoning policy that makes it harder for people of less financial means to move into affluent areas.
I saw a counterexample living in Munich, just in the sense that the differences between neighborhoods in apparent wealth were much less stark than in the US. Almost everywhere looked vaguely middling, very few places looked obviously rich or poor. And so it's no surprise that the differences between public schools was lesser too.
I'm talking about the area boundaries that determine where people go to school. Many terrible school districts or schools in the US actually have plenty of money (the DC school district is a famous example).
Yep. Eventually the rich die and their kids have zero interest in living in the town and sell the property on an open market and huzzah now there is the potential start to open up the opportunities for more people to live in the gated community.
I think that's fine. I dont think the point of this is to confiscate land that people own and build condos on it. But realistically real estate ownership is pretty disperse, even in small town called Atherton there are going to be thousands of individuals that own 1 acre plots and maybe a hundred that own larger plots. It just takes a couple people to choose to sell their land or to die.
And the average home in America is owned for what, like 5-7 years? If someone is moving out of the community, are they really going to ignore a windfall payment from a developer?
And how about estate sales? Are the out-of-state heirs going to care to who their parent's property is sold? Or are they just going to go for the top dollar?
Put me on team top dollar. Hell, I'd even consider accepting a lower offer from a developer if I knew they were gonna build more properties in it (though of course this is extremely unlikely to happen as the developer planning on building more units stands to make more profit and the land is thus worth more to them).
Putting on the red team NIMBY hat, could they try and use private deed restrictions (https://www.carealtytraining.com/blogs/deed-restrictions-wha...) ? E.g. reuse the same mechanism that the city plans to use: "proposed building are deed-restricted to low income residents who make at or less than 80% the area median income."
Virtually every affluent residential neighborhood in Houston has strict private deed restrictions — and, remarkably many of those deed restrictions can be enforced by the city. That’s why River Oaks, Houston’s wealthiest neighborhood, doesn’t have apartment buildings or office buildings in the middle of the neighborhood.
That would only work if the state allowed those deed restrictions to stand, which it likely wouldn't. Just because Houston allows such a clause doesn't mean California would.
Those deed covenants go back to the KKK and whites-only policies imposed by the builder during lot subdivision. The game-theory doesn't work for retroactively imposing them on your neighbours. Why would someone selling promise to give up upside when they are moving away anyway? Like, are Anderson and Curry gonna show up on your lawn at midnight in hoods?
Especially when they fight with each other, as neighbors do. The wealthy aren't always a monolithic block of undifferentiated piles of money so, not that I know what the future holds, but imagine you've been squabbling with your neighbor for decades; you've always wanted to move back east. What better giant finger to that neighbor than selling your multi-acre estate to be replaced by a 30 or 100-unit apartment complex?
But on the other hand, the coalition of rich neighbors could organize a counter-offer to buy out neighbors who want to leave. A bit like lands are bought up by conservation groups to prevent development. Put a price on how much you want to preserve your neighborhood.
They could even buy out the developer who purchased a spite sale, unless there are deed restrictions in that sale. Most developers are also doing it as a business, not for idealism, so it there ought to be a price point where they see it is more lucrative to fold than to go forward with the building project.
I'm not sure I understand the economic effect of something like this. At first blush it almost seems like the same feedback loop as land value taxes. But, it also creates a game-theoretic scenario where the coalition is pumping up the price of their own neighborhood and increasing the potential gains for the next defector, at which point the values could rapidly unwind if the coalition loses its way.
Seems like there would be massive, easy arbitrage in buying the home and saying you are moving in then changing your mind and building multi-family, then taking the buyout from the coalition of rich neighbors.
Free money for defection and could easily exhaust the resources of this coalition.
> What better giant finger to that neighbor than selling your multi-acre estate to be replaced by a 30 or 100-unit apartment complex?
You really do not realize how big (or small, rather) apartment complexes are. 100-unit building is the size of 6-7 single family homes (or maybe 3 McMansions), and maybe twice as high. It would barely be noticeable in such neighborhood.
It's not really the size of the building, it's the size of the parking lot and the resulting traffic. That's what *everyone* hates.
With parking minimums of 2 spots per unit, your standard 800 sq ft apartment requires another 600 sq ft of parking. And units can be stacked relatively cheaply, parking can't.
In my country parking spaces for residential buildings are all underground, outside parking is considered subpar, thanks to the climate. I've seen residential buildings with 3 underground levels, to accommodate all the parking requirements. But in case of 100-unit thing that should not be necessary, one level is enough.
"
There’s a lot of questions still unanswered, though. This will all be legally challenged since we’re in new territory with the HAA. Many developers still can’t believe it and aren’t sure to propose nor have readied capital to propose projects. Other builders since the Santa Monica news appear quite excited to build apartments in exclusive, expensive enclaves they’ve always wanted to. There’s a political question too about whether HCD will let substandard housing elements through just to not anger cities and incite backlash.
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Very likely the 'political question' will not be limited to 'whether HCD will let substandard housing elements through'.
Eventually, people die, and sometimes the children were not part of the monopoly...
I do wonder if anti-trust could be applied against such a "don't sell" pact, especially if it was successful enough to capture an entire town. Probably not, but that sort of anti-competitive behavior should most definitely be illegal, with stiff penalties for those who participate.
We aren't going to force anyone to sell their property. But realistically, Atherton has many property owners (including many that are far less rich than the ones you mentioned). The chance that none of them ever agree to sell is zero.
I'd imagine Atherton would remain more or less the same with the exception of some homes being converted to duplexes and triplexes. At least in Minneapolis with the 2040 plan, more affluent neighborhoods tend to stay that way.
How would a coalition work here? They have no power to stop anyone from defecting. Unless Marc and Steph offer to buy any property in Atherton at absurd values they're powerless to stop a developer from buying someones house.
The logical move would seem to be to submit lots of proposals for super tall massive ugly developments on Wednesday. No need to actually have the cash arranged to build them. Propose 100 floor tiny apartments everywhere.
Then, they get approved.
Then the city gets it's zoning laws in place and regrets the approval of your massive ugly development.
But then you go to the city with an offer... Send in a new, more reasonable plan. If they approve the new plan, great. If they don't, you're gonna build what they originally approved, and they hate.
It's unlikely to change development significantly.
California NIMBYs still have enormous autonomy through CEQA. It enables any individual to contest developments for years, obligating developers enormous sums of money and time to study "environmental impacts".
Last winter, the law was expanded through a ruling in Berkeley. If a development adds a sizable number of people, it can be seen as an environmental impact and denied.
Development will remain costly, time consuming, and ultimately as unpredictable as the law allows. Wealthy and well connected developers might get by, but it won't be a Japan-like situation. For those wishing reform on an "environmental law" it will be a lot more politically costly. We'll likely get another Houston situation where "no zoning" doesn't imply what it should imply.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Berkeley's housing element was just rejected today (the deadline by which they needed it certified in order to avoid the Builder's Remedy). The provisions in this piece will kick in there tomorrow.
As for CEQA, here's what a local law firm has to say: "In particular, the intersection between Builder's Remedy and California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) remains untested. Jurisdictions may try to use CEQA to regain discretionary authority over Builder's Remedy projects. Whether that tactic will prove effective remains to be seen, given that CEQA may not be used to do that which other statutes prohibit. Pub. Res. Code, § 21004; CEQA Guidelines § 15040(e)."
For all of California's huge dysfunctions (which are frequently the side-effects of its huge successes), this is a good example of what the state gets right.
To people who are freaked out that this is going to turn into the opening scenes from Pixar's "Up", more often than not, in suburban areas, this will just result in a few dwellings per lot, imagine 2-3 town homes on what is now a .25 acre single family lot.
The 20% affordable component of Builder's Remedy means you need to propose at least 5 homes so one of them can be affordable.
That said, a "missing middle" program is a really helpful thing to help cities get their Housing Element into compliance so if you think there is a place where this density would be helpful, send a comment to your city council and cc HousingElements@hcd.ca.gov.
Perhaps it's less lucrative, but it would still allow for increasing the housing stock without putting a 50 unit building in the midst of an existing SFH neighborhood. Developers will also need to weigh the desirability of what they build into the equation. There's quite possibly a sweet spot of desirability and affordability at 3 dwellings per lot.
As an example, I live on a multi-dwelling lot (effectively town-homes without shared walls) in a predominately SFH neighborhood. It's very high density by California standards, but it's quite desirable and not apartment-block style living.
Unfortunately, many California cities are so incredibly far behind what's actually needed for equitable housing costs that the only practical way for them to catch up is a lot of 50-unit buildings built yesterday.
The "local control" freaks have misapprehended the entire situation. The state of California is not analogous to the federal system of the United States. Cities have no powers other than those granted by the state, no natural right to exist, and continue to exist only at the sufferance of the state legislature. The legislature can disincorporate any city with a simple majority. Cities like Santa Monica should be relieved if land use planning is the only power they lose. The state would be well within its rights and powers to conclude that the existence of Santa Monica is not in the public interest and to assign their lands to Los Angeles.
One of the few things Twitter does well is turn city council meetings into a digestible summary, and it is absolutely hilarious to see all the upset, privileged citizens thinking that if they just fight back hard enough, the law will not apply to them. And it's sad to see the loca politicians that pander to this obviously incorrect belief, as several politicians that did try to follow state law were ejected by their constituents.
And to some degree, the citizens have been right, when fighting individual projects. Delay a project long enough, and the financial incentive to build can be eliminated, so the developer moves on. Frivolous, baseless lawsuits are a great way to do that. But when it comes to fighting the State, there is no financial incentive to disappear and make the State stop fighting. There is only the law.
We're hosting a Zoning Holiday party tomorrow in SF at SPUR center to celebrate!
25+ architects for all kinds of firms submitted 5-unit designs to us, and we'll showcase them at the event!
It'll be a fun opportunity to meet likeminded property owners, architects, YIMBY advocates and developers. The event is open to all, just buy a $10 ticket. There will even be kebabs. Check out https://zoningholiday.com
The level of bureaucratic creep that has been imposed on property owners is actually unbelievable to me. I obviously understand some regulations (you can't built a chemical processing plant in a residential neighborhood, obviously), but cities have creeped themselves into all-powerful overseers.
Most cities now have the power to tell you what kind of house you can build, how you can paint it, how you can landscape it, what kinds of cars you can keep in your own driveway, what you can do in your leisure time on the property etc.
It is insane.
I honestly hope there is a property-rights case that abolishes all of this. If I own the property, then it's mine. If I want to collect old VW busses and park them in the front yard, I don't care what effect this has on my neighbors property value. This is my home. If you don't want to deal with living near other people, move to the country.
> If you don't want to deal with living near other people, move to the country.
The reverse could also be said - if you don't want to deal with people deciding together that they want their community to have certain guidelines, move to the country. You can do pretty much whatever you want in rural areas without significantly impacting your neighbors.
People living together in a small area do get to decide together what they want that area to be like within reason. Creating some guidelines to create a desirable, pleasant and safe environment for them and their families is totally reasonable and has been the historical norm for most of the history of civilization.
Of course things can get out of hand and over-reaching. If the people decide together to change it though, they can. I don't think the solution is just nuking all zoning regulations from orbit.
> I don't think the solution is just nuking all zoning regulations from orbit.
It has to be, because the in-group, i.e. the people already living there don't accrue the cost as that falls on the out-group, the people who need to live there (job etc) but cannot. Its the essence of a "f** you i got mine attitude"
Same thing with building codes. Make them more onerous to increase construction costs. Then lol all the way to the bank when you grandfather your own house in, increasing your own property value as it is now impossible to build a house as economically as your own. Sprinkle in some "think of the safety of the children" for good measure, no matter the fact your own house is justified as safe enough to stand.
San Francisco is 2/3rds renters, all of whom can vote. You shouldn't pretend that they have no say in how their city is run.
If they want more rentals and more density, they have the power to vote for people who can make it happen. Instead they vote for people who talk a lot about preserving the character of San Francisco.
Everyone can vote? American Samoans, green card holders, various non-citizen immigrants? I thought SF was unusually immigrant rich.
There are a ton of people in SF who are paying sizeable taxes and rents with no vote in these matters. It's quite likely they are disproportionately renters.
To be clear, my comment was more a reaction to what I perceived as the idea that any zoning of residential areas by the community that lives there is unacceptable and that you should be able to do literally anything that's not actively endangering your neighbors. That would result in most neighborhoods being much less pleasant due to a few owners deciding to do things against the interests of the many.
I think the "community" can also extend to something as large as California. If California as a community decides it's in the best interest of that community to loosen some zoning restrictions in particularly high demand areas, fine. Do it with thoughtfulness and as much respect for existing owners' interests as possible while still accomplishing the desired objective. That's similar to a smaller community deciding to change the rules to account for some new undesirable behavior of certain community members.
This is America, land of the free, home of the property rights. It's a weird imposition to say that I can't build exactly what I want on my property (assuming it's safe). It's a totally fair thing to say that if you want full control over what can be built adjacent to your house buy a ranch in Montana.
Don't want a skyscraper in downtown SF? Buy the plot. Can't afford it? Sorry, you're getting neighbors. You shouldn't try and bog them down with a nightmare bureaucratic process of shade measurement and bird counting.
> What’s wrong with the alternative of sane zoning instead of “just buy the plot”?
Honestly, this is sane zoning. The Japanese model is very effective. They saw roughly 0% growth in housing prices from 1990 to present. Housing in downtown Tokyo is affordable. You'll be hard pressed to find someone who thinks Tokyo is an abomination, it's a top-10 world city is basically every ranking.
> All people want is to live in a quiet and a nice place after all.
Some of them! Not all of them. Some of them want a place to live within an hour of work, and for them that's more important.
For those that want that they can (a) buy the land around them necessary to make that happen (b) lobby the city around them to buy the land necessary to make that happen (a 'park') or (c) move somewhere like-minded people live.
> Why someone who doesn’t even live there but has a bigger buck should decide?
Why should the person who got there first decide what other people get to do? That's not even democracy, that's just gerontocracy.
Obviously not the 14M people who live in Tokyo. Those buildings aren't empty! Population of Santa Monica is 91,000, which is what the population of Tokyo would be if nobody wanted to live there :)
If the density becomes problematic, buy the land, or mosey on.
This to me is the least compelling counter-argument. "Nobody wants to live in a big dense city" is like saying "nobody drives in New York, there's too much traffic!" You personally don't, but obviously, we can tell by inspection that's simply not a true statement in general.
Which brings us back to "but I got here first!" which is to me, the second-least compelling argument.
>All people want is to live in a quiet and a nice place after all.
People want all sorts of things. Walkability, transit, cafes, restaurants, recreation, jobs. Some do prefer the particular brand of quiet offered by the suburban form, but because it's the only thing you're allowed to build, lots of us who do not want it are forced into it.
> don't want to deal with people deciding together that they want their community to have certain guidelines, move to the country
Shouldn’t this be the message to a suburban homeowner clinging to the past? Move to the country. Buy land around you. Don’t tell others what they can and cannot do on property you don’t own.
Devil’s advocate: they did. 50+ years ago they moved to a sleepy suburban town that through no fault of their own became a center of a worldwide tech revolution. Things change, sometimes dramatically. A place in the country you move to today can also transform 50 years in the future if you’re unlucky.
There's no right to be free from change. You may need to keep moving around if you're after a specific ethos or aesthetic on the land you don't own. Your early arrival shouldn't have permanent supremacy over your neighbors plot of land. Don't want a building there? Buy the land. Can't afford it? Prepare some welcome gifts for your new neighbors.
They didn’t. If they bought the block, or easements on it, they would have. But they bought a plot. Others bought adjacent plots. Now they’re arguing they get to tell the adjacent plots what they can and cannot do.
That may have been the purchaser's expectation, but their deal was with the seller (and bank), not the community in general. In none of the legal papers I signed when purchasing my home was any arrangement with the city constraining future construction nearby. That's done with my vote (so without much effect) and any political action I can spur.
Devil's devil's advocate: The world is not static. No one can reasonably expect nothing to change over the course of half a century. The only constant is change itself, and you have to deal with changing situations. Maybe it made sense as farmland 50 years ago, but if it makes sense as apartment blocks now, by God put apartment blocks on it then. The collective value to all those new tenants massively outweighs the downside to the single existing landowner (who stands to make a huge payday anyway!).
And at the cost of the character of their neighborhood changing, their property valuation rose to the point that they can now live almost wherever they would like to. Countless people have to see their neighborhood change without the financial windfall they got.
I mean… there's a balance, right? People should be able to mostly do what they want with their own property. At the same time, they should be able to come together to make collective decisions about their towns/cities/neighborhoods. Each of those has a bad outcome if taken to the extreme.
> At the same time, they should be able to come together to make collective decisions about their towns/cities/neighborhoods.
That's exactly what's happening here. Californians have collectively decided that zoning laws need to change. If the current actions by the state are somehow unreasonable, how could the original zoning provisions ever have been considered reasonable in the first place?
Sure, but we should apply 'strict scrutiny' to that. Strict scrutiny is a legal term meaning in general that isn't a right the community should have, but we will make exceptions for really bad things only. (you have free speech, but you can't just yell fire in a crowded area. There are things you cannot do on your land, but they should be very limited.
Again this is where we are getting into what it means to own something. Do I own the property or not? If my neighbors want to get together and buy my house from me because they want to do something with it, then they are by all means allowed to do so.
Nobody in the US, and indeed most of the world, "owns" their property. Try not paying your property taxes, and see where that gets you. You lease the right to usus, mostly fructus, and to some extent abusus from the state.
Maybe in theory, but functionally it is the same. You don't pay your property taxes, you get a lien, and can eventually, in extreme circumstances, be foreclosed on.
I do not understand your point, really. Obviously, from a legal standpoint, ownership exists. But you say, no, no, no, that's not _reaaaal_ ownership, since I have to pay property taxes.
When most people talk about ownership, when the law talks about ownership, it exists, and I think that is enough for it to exist.
That's okay, it requires some knowledge of rather niche economic philosophies. I'd suggest reading into some philosophy of property, labor, and ownership. Specifically in the right-libertarian and left-anarchist traditions. Start with John Locke and Adam Smith, then move into thinkers such as Marx, Proudhon, George (Henry, of Georgism fame), Nozick, Rothbard, and writers on similar topics.
This is a great example of how framing makes a big difference.
If I used the same framing, I would say LVT are an incentive to tear down the land (introduce toxic waste, endangered species that can't legally be disturbed, etc).
Or I could say Property taxes are a disincentive to hoarding buildings.
No, you don't own the property. Under what coherent system of thought could you possibly own something that was there before humans existed and will be there after humans are gone, and which you did nothing to create or maintain? Property ownership is a societal construct that we agree to use to improve our lives together. If it's not serving our needs we can change it.
That is no different from ownership of anything else, including one’s own body. The government has an interest in property and may tax it, but how is that different from auto registration, income tax, or any other tax liability? Someone can be imprisoned for daily to pay income tax, but the government doesn’t own their job or work.
You maintain the property to make it suitable for your needs. But if you didn't "maintain" it, nothing would actually happen to it. It would still be completely usable in 1 million years.
An important caveat here is that these small groups are only "nuked from orbit" for the time period that they're out of compliance with a law that has existed for 50 years.
I totally agree that "people living together in a small area" can pretty much do what they want. The only issue is when that starts to screw over other folks, and when all the other small areas get together to do the same.
Then it's pretty reasonable for the state to go "you can't just never build houses. That's a decision that screws the rest of the state" and enforce that decision
> Then it's pretty reasonable for the state to go "you can't just never build houses. That's a decision that screws the rest of the state" and enforce that decision
Totally agree. The state or larger city, etc. is also a community that should be able to make rules that promote the welfare of the great majority over the objections of a small minority, as long as they take care to not harm the small minority unnecessarily. I just think the solution is thoughtful modification of existing codes, possibly forced by larger jurisdictions, and not just a free for all where almost anything goes as was proposed by the parent commenter.
>People living together in a small area do get to decide together what they want that area to be like within reason.
This argument ignores 100 years of research in game theory and development economics. No community is an island, okay except Alameda, but even they are a component of a wider metropolis. The way you set zoning laws and transportation infrastructure influences who comes into and passes through your community — no municipality in the core of a metropolitan area can ever truly behave like a single community organizing its residents' lifestyles.
So you see, for example, an attempt to increase the total property value per resident because it leads to a better school district. You see attempts to block new developments and transit stops because relative popularity may transiently increase the local cost of living, even if it benefits the affordability of the metro as a whole. You see militarized police departments who realize they can't outrun crime but they can certainly outrun Emeryville.
None of these are the products of a community of people democratically deciding what kind of lifestyle fits their particular interests. They are the choices of a faction jockeying for status in the desperate power struggle that characterizes the great modern balkanized American Combined Statistical Area.
Is this a question of jurisdiction? I mean the people living together in a slightly larger area get to decide together what they want the collective area to be like as well right? Surely local politics can be overruled when the policies start having a material effect on individuals outside of the local jurisdiction.
So you can live in the actual countryside, or the population center curated to be like countryside. So many choices!
What about those of us who actually want to live in cities? The only way cities come to be is incrementally; if an already-settled place cannot intensify then cities cannot exist.
Where this breaks down is cities that do not even have space for their own offspring. Again sticking with my own city of Berkeley, demographic processes, birth rate combined with increasing longevity, means that Berkeley has been exporting young people for 50 years, causing housing crises in those places, too. In what way is that equitable to either the offspring in question or the people who already lived in the other places?
All developed countries have negative demographic growth, if people want to get into very few places this does not make it right. At the opposite end you find the example of hundreds of villages in Italy that are deserted (and many more in less famous countries), do you say they are also exporting population?
As a property owner, I've always found this to be remarkably short sighted.
If the city booms, land value goes up. E.g. Manhattan. Trying to keep your small suburb a small suburb isn't maximizing investor value.
edit: to responders, yes I'm aware houses have other value. My comment is in response the parent comment that specifically addresses investment value protection aspect.
A little game theory may come to play though. If the whole city booms and just my neighborhood stays single-family large lot, my price/sqft may increase drastically, and I may get better return on any improvements I do to my property based on my investment profile.
If instead my neighborhood is converted to apartments or high-density condos, I might not have the capital to take advantage of those opportunities but my single family house becomes undesirable in that zone. I am forced to sell to a developer in order to maximize return. I probably still make money, but it might be less then I could have made in the other scenario, and I am unable to use the house for my own residence up until the time I need to liquidate.
No, it's almost entirely short-sighted, at least in terms of economics.
First, I've never heard of anyone being forced to sell, unless there's some truly huge and necessary infrastructure development. You are generally offered some money by a developer and you personally decide whether or not to take it. Sometimes people can be stubborn and there are plenty of examples of large high-rises built around tiny structures that wouldn't sell.
Also, your price per square foot goes up fastest directly adjacent to the largest developments. If your neighborhood can economically support larger buildings, that directly increases the amount of money developers will pay for your land. The less development you allow your neighborhood to have, the less your neighborhood will be able to support large developments. You want your neighborhood to support large developments.
You may want to hold on to YOUR house as an investment, and to keep from a property tax re-assessment, but it makes no economic sense to prevent your neighbors from building higher if they want to.
Maybe not in the USA but certain countries have a special emergency nationalisation procedure that has payment first, skips the consent and leaves the challenge to after-the-fact.
I never meant that anyone was forced to sell, legally. Only that the economics forced them to sell at a different schedule or terms than they would have preferred.
I get some people want to live in a small suburb. Small suburbs are often quiet and peaceful. But small suburbs are also inefficient, environmentally unfriendly, and expensive to support so much road/electricity/water/etc infrastructure for so few people. Especially if the voting base of the suburb is effectively strangling their children by ensuring their kids will never be able to themselves afford a life there. It makes sense to me that the broader voting base is seeing they no longer benefit from a minority of suburban voters with a hold on city-level politics, and thereby vote in state-level politicians to force the issue.
edited to add: I'm sympathetic to the suburban homeowners near/in cities who are under pressure for their lifestyle and environment to end up rapidly changing within their generation due to economic local growth. I just don't think it's reasonable that that sympathy should extend to supporting their wants over the clear consequences of refusing to capitulate to the majority's needs for more housing.
As a suburban homeowner/parent, house prices have little bearing for me. I hope to live in my house for decades, so the sell price in the distant future doesn’t matter. It’s the “quiet and peaceful” part that I care about. West coast cities have repeatedly demonstrated that they are unwilling or unable to prevent crime and keep things clean, so I will continue fighting to my last breath to prevent my suburb from becoming like that.
> unwilling or unable to prevent crime and keep things clean
These things are typically solvable at a policy level but the policies are often fought against by the same people asking for the city to solve crime.
You cant just out-violence poverty. If someone has nothing to lose, you can't convince them to not risk it all.
How do you solve "people are too poor to survive to the homeowner's standards" without quoting mien kampf or socializing things and spending money on social projects? It typically feels like suburban communities lean towards the former. Very little empathy for people as long as they don't need to see them anymore.
I'm hoping this zoning change would work for the better. I know "missing middle" is a bit of a meme at this point but a few house sized quadplexes on a block would scale and provide a lot more housing. Its typically the "property value" crowd that fights against them, but sometimes its simply a racist generalization of "the poors" that would live in a multifamily home.
Small suburbs can work fine around small cities. Hypothetically, a ring starting 5 miles from the city center extending out another 10 miles = Pi * (15^2 - 5^2) = 628 square miles. At even 1k people per square mile you’re up to 600,000 people reasonably close to the urban core. People can easily commute into the core because the distance and traffic levels are reasonable.
The problem is as cities grow a smaller percentage of the overall population can live in a small suburb. Build up that first ring, and the next 10 mile ring is Pi * (25^5 -15^2) = less than double the area at 1,256 square miles and now needs a longer commute through the inner ring. Meanwhile that inner ring 15 mile radius can have easily ten or more times the population.
PS: Geography adds it’s own constraints. If the cities core in next to the ocean then much of the hypothetical low density ring is under water.
I agree with you. Also to me it's the larger cities that are environmentally unfriendly and hostile places like the parent described, not these smaller cities with suburbs. Just look at the 405 on a weekday. I live in a city of about 300k and it is perfect. Under 15 minutes anywhere in the city and I work from home so personally I don't even commute.
It definitely feels that way, unfortunately high rises are extremely energy, materials, and space efficient. Public transportation similarly reduces the needs for roads and fossil fuels.
NYC inner core may be toxic, but the average New Yorker’s environmental impact is well below the national average.
High rises are, but not very many people desire to live in a high rise. Hence the inefficiency. I mean if everyone lived in a 5x5 box it would be super efficient. But yeah, I think people would rather die first.
I'm also curious if you could actually back up that New York statement with some unbiased research.
“New York residents were using an average of 572 kWh a month in 2017.” NYC is so efficient that: “New York ranks 50th out of the 51 states and the District of Columbia. The only state with a lower per capita consumption is Rohde Island at 176 million Btu (MMBtu) or 51.6 MWh. The total 2016 U.S. consumption per capita was 301 million Btu (88.2 MWh).”
First you said environmental impact, not electricity usage which is very different.
Second that article makes it really unclear what is being included in "energy expenditures". In the earlier paragraphs it talks about electricity which makes sense given a.) it's extremely expensive in NY and b.) I'd imagine more heating comes from natural gas as opposed to AC in southern climates which comes from electricity.
It lacks a lot of critical information to measure environmental impact vs. other cities.
Lastly who is being included? Inner city residents only? Or metro area?
Edit: Feel free to do whatever research or literature review you want I don’t feel like trying to convince you.
Using electricity has an environmental impact. As does burning fossil fuels for heat etc, which is where the BTU numbers show up.
The biggest benefit is land use it’s self has an environmental impact. The ability to leave land for nature requires people not to be living on it. We don’t want wolves and buffalo walking through suburbs. Rabbits etc can’t graze on a paved roads, and drained swamps stop being swamps.
The thing that you and many prior comments mention is proximity, city size, density, and living in a specific place.
The problem isn't about land - there's plenty of that elsewhere. The problem is people all wanting to live in the same area and having high standards. You have a visous cycle where the denser places have the most jobs or the highest paying jobs, while the cost of living goes way up and the standard of living goes down.
It would be nice to have smaller cities. The real problem is how to convince businesses to reinvigorate the dying cities, or for people to change their preferences (either for locality or property type/size). These are being largely ignored in these conversations.
Even a look at current population densities destroys this argument as cities like San Francisco need far more density from this sort of inner ring. Keep in mind the actual core in this model is only 25 square miles so even if the core of San Francisco has 20 times the density of the suburbs it fits only 500,000 people. Your 5-15 mile ring fits only 600,000 people so you’ve gone 15 miles out from the centre of San Francisco and you’ve only fit 1,100,000 or so people of the 1.8 million that live in SF proper to say nothing of any of the people living in nearby cities or suburbs you’ve also hit.
San Francisco is extremely space constrained due to the Ocean, Bay, and Parks.
If you look at the actual population vs land available it needs a far higher density than I am talking about. 1k people per square mile is really low density. That’s single family homes with 1/2 acre back yard territory.
Funny, I live in a small suburbia style town in the mountains, our infrastructure prices are much cheaper than California's, we have no big city we parasite off of, and everything here is much cheaper/affordable including housing, with a much smaller property tax base. We had Gb fiber while the big city had horrible DSL (if you were close enough to the DSLAM or whatever it was). We now have multiple Gb fiber options in our neighborhoods. Housing prices are affordable.
Could you speak more about why your suburbia-style town in the mountains maintains its infrastructure prices? How is food, medicine, or construction goods delivered to you, and how do you pay for that transportation? I'm not asking out of skepticism: my understanding is that more remote locations are expensive partially because of logistical deliveries and maintenance costs, and I'd love to know how this is managed in well-maintained suburbia-style towns!
It would make sense if this town was in the proximity of major trucking/rail lines. Many towns in the foothills of the Sierras can be considered such. But then of course to pretend that the town is somehow "isolated" yet successful is certainly not accurate.
> We had Gb fiber while the big city had horrible DSL
So do you or do you not have a big city nearby?
> our infrastructure prices are much cheaper than California's
As always, the big question - how old is that infrastructure, and when was it last renewed? What is the budget/reserves/debt like of the town? Because if infrastructure doesn't cost a lot to build, it doesn't mean it's sustainable to maintain/renew in the medium/long term.
If we taxed suburbs by how much they actually drain city budgets, no one would want to live in suburbs. It is by now a well-studied fact that suburbs are effectively subsidized by metropolitan cores. Makers and takers, indeed...
The folks at Strong Towns also talk a lot about productive land use measured as property tax income per square foot. They say it is the gold standard way to make sure your budget remains solvent and you can provide the services people need to make your city thrive. Obviously this means building up.
I hear that a lot from the StrongTowns-types, but I also observe many of the (financially independent) cities and towns that surround Boston are all financially doing extremely well, in contrast to the prediction that their lower density, less intensely urban development patterns would fall apart once the town/small city is fully built out and goes into maintenance mode.
Strong Towns are picking the outliers that are not doing well and trying to extrapolate to all suburbs. I quit reading them a few years ago when I realized the place they using as an example was a rural town an hour drive from anyplace that could be considered a city - yet somehow this was supposed to show why suburbs were insolvent.
Suburbs have existed for more than 100 years, start with thee streetcar suburbs (which often feature lots larger than what the new suburbs around me are building). They have already added sewer, water, telephone, eclectic, cable TV, internet, and some of those have been replaced as well. They have already replaced their roads many times over the years.
Sure there are some suburbs that have been badly managed and so haven't kept up. However that is a reflection on the short sighted voters, and not suburbs.
Your response makes me think you are not as familiar with Strong Towns' advocacy as you may wish to indicate. Their focus is not on density vs sprawl, and they are very careful to qualify that dichotomy against other dichotomies along which one may proceed with analysis. Their focus is rather on walkability and the accessibility of all kinds of services -- open public spaces a la parks, grocery and shopping stores, healthcare, schools, cultural offerings and nightlife, etc. To pretend that anything to which is attached the label "suburb", unqualified, is the target of their ire, is lazy.
I quit reading several years ago. Thier focus on walkabilty is good, but they also talk about how suburbs are not sustainable (or did then, and others seem to imply still do), and that position does not add up.
Same. I binge watched and binge read piles of related content on the topic several years ago and the overall message resonated quite a bit (in the “hell yeah, why don’t we do that?!” way).
Then I took that overall very positive lens and started to apply it to what I saw and the financial arguments didn’t hold up to what I could plainly see in the low-density, car-dominated towns and suburbs around me.
Rich suburbs do fine. Many suburbs of Boston have high income earners and high property values resulting in sane levels of property tax that actually fund those regions adequately. Most of the suburbs Strong Towns criticizes have $250k homes with household incomes between 40-50k and it’s impossible to tax those residents enough to pay for their infrastructure.
Were they bulldozed and rebuilt into car-centric development?
From my understanding Strong Towns think "lower density, less intensely urban development" towns are fine. E.g. at 0:57 of the video, it's anything but intensely urban development.
"In this example, a 100-year-old commercial block, built in the traditional style of development, drastically outperformed a shiny new development, created in the modern car-centric style."
I would describe Arlington (1635), Belmont (1849), Waltham (1884), Watertown (1630), Lincoln (1754), Wellesley (1881), Newton (1688 town, 1874 city) as being substantially car-centric with respect to the majority of 21-65 year old residents of those towns/cities owning a car and using a car or car service more than 250 days out of the year. Arlington would be feasible to get by without a car in many of its areas. Others would be much more difficult in the majority of the land.
Speaking as an Arlington resident, I would not describe it as "car centric", although cars are accommodated far more than I would like. It's still a classical streetcar suburb. The majority of Arlington's housing stock is from multifamily buildings within a couple of minutes walk to high frequency bus service (~5 minute wait).
Arlington and Watertown are higher density than Lowellor Quincy. Newton and Waltham are not far behind. You're relying on intuition rather than data and it's showing.
I would really only categorize Lincoln and Wellesley "low density suburb". The rest certainly have car centric qualities but they're too built up to be called the exception to the rule.
Would the suburbs be forced to pay city rates for their roads/water/etc departments? Plenty of low-middle income low density small towns with suburbia densities survive just fine, have great services, AND are affordable all on their own. My town had Gb fiber before the big cities rolled theirs out in scale, and we now have the choice of more than 2 providers. My water rates are cheap even though our waste water is held to much higher standards than big cities (last I knew coastal cities still got to pump a ton of sewage out to sea). My roads are plowed day of while the nearest big cities can take a week to get theirs under control. All with a much smaller tax base (but a much more accountable local government). The California everyone wants to go to survived this way with positive local budgets, and enough money that all of the roads were landscaped, back before hyper growth. I remember when highway 1 through Santa Cruz didn't look dystopian but was full of colorful flowers even into the 80s. And it was actually affordable to live there then too.
Because suburbs, despite lower taxes - often generate more tax income. Where I live the city itself has a large part of the downtown owned by the county, state and federal government (it is the state capital, plus various federal offices that all cities have). Half of the valuable downtown pays zero tax to the city, yet the city is still maintaining infrastructure for those lots. That is in addition to a few churches that pay no tax in the US, and a bunch of parks. Thus the city has the high value core which isn't paying for itself, and then the lower value ring around the core that has lower property values to generate tax income from. If they can annex a suburb just outside that with higher values the city gets more money (with their higher taxes), and probably can reduce the tax rates for everyone (still a tax increase for the annexed suburb!)
The evidence strong towns presents is not convincing. They take rural towns far from cities and claim that towns issues represent suburbs. They cherry pick suburbs that have issues and claim it represents all. Nowhere do they apply statistical or scientific rigor.
Suburbs have existed for more than 100 years. They have rebuilt their roads many times. They have installed modern things like telephone, running water and so on over the years.
Strong Towns is talking about tax income vs tax expenditure efficiency (dollars received vs benefits realized). It is easily possible that receiving more money does not necessarily correspond to improved quality of life, if those funds are spent on projects that don't enable local prosperity.
At least from what I've personally seen, suburbs are not a drain. Do they cost more per person - yes. However, you have to look at the income side as well.
The people making money tend to leave cities because they want different property, fewer people, better services, less crime, etc. The people who can afford to do this are relatively well off. This ends up creating an area with fewer poor people and a higher tax income even if tax rates are lower. Cities have higher tax rates to have even similar (if that) per capita revenue because they have more poor people who cannot pay and must tax the ones who can at a higher rate. This is nothing against poorer people, just a reality of it works. You have a market force basically segregating people by income.
A local example for me is how Philadelphia County is extremely poor - the poorest in the state and has one of the highest rates of extreme poverty for any big city in the US. Some of the richest counties in the state are the ones immediately surrounding it, like Bucks, Chester, and Delaware. Even within these counties you have poor cities/towns and rich townships. The main difference isn't the tax rate, it's that the concentration of wealthy people.
I'm not going to argue if this is generally true or not, but in my N=1, I don't see how this applies at all to something like sunnyvale or santa clara (where I live).
Which 'metropolitan core' are we leeching from? It's not San Jose - it famously has a higher nighttime population implying people leave to work (and it's obvs to locals based on traffic patterns). It's probably not San Francisco, we're 1 hour away.
The metro area in the Bay Area is a bit of an outlier as regards things like commute-sheds, etc. The problem with bandying about a one-size-fits-all label like "suburb" should be obvious.
If you need an explicit answer, generally speaking, SF is "the metro core" for the bay. Travel distances matter little compared to macro-economic "correlation" distances when considering metro areas.
Everybody (for certain values of "everybody", I guess I should specify because this is HN) wants 0.5-5 acres on the edge of a nice, compact city. A little land, no close neighbors, but still very close to everything and the city itself is nice & pleasant to visit.
But if too many people get it, you don't have a compact city anymore, you have a sprawl hellscape that's neither country nor city, but a habitat for cars.
Having to hop in a car to do either human things or nature things makes it the worst of both worlds. Not enough land to do anything with, view is just a bunch of cookie-cutter houses with boring landscaping, lawn-mower noises all weekend long. Anything worth doing starts with a 15 minute drive, minimum, each way, and the view out the window the whole way is mostly parking lots and roads. And fast food signs.
But I don't have enough money for private school for all the kids, and all the top 50% of school districts for like a 200 mile radius are in the burbs. So. I "love" them.
This is an incredibly misleading statistic. When you describe "a town of less than 50,000 people," what comes to mind most easily is some sort of rural town. But at your link, I recognize several of the places on that "fastest-growing" list. Leander is a suburb of Austin, Little Elm and Forney are both suburbs of Dallas, as are (scrolling down) Frisco and Farmers Branch, while Boerne is a suburb of San Antonio, and Georgetown is a suburb of Austin again.
Most of these, you wouldn't know you were in a separate city if you didn't pay close attention to roadside signs, and I suspect the same is true of a large percentage of that 61% figure.
That says something, since those people didn't choose to live closer to the central of the metro area, but it doesn't say as much as you're implying it does, because they're all examples of places for which, if someone outside of Texas asks where they live, they're going to say "Austin" or "Dallas" or "San Antonio," and only if asked where in Dallas will they respond Little Elm, just as they might otherwise respond Lakewood or Hamilton Park, which are neighborhoods but not separate cities.
How's that deal with attached suburb-cities and town-in-city-enclaves? Are parts of major metro areas excluded? I bet 300-400 thousand of the people in my metro area live in such sub-50k "towns" but actually they live in the city—go a few blocks over and it looks exactly the same, but now you're "in the city" instead of "in a town". Perhaps that many again live in places far-flung enough that you could maybe count them as independent towns, but aside from local fast food workers they all commute to the city for work.
A sibling comment of yours mentions Leander; there's only one train in Austin, and it goes from downtown to Leander. So you could even get there without a car. Good luck once you get there, though.
If you include the burbs as part of the definition of city then what are we even talking about? If they're completely detached then they're not suburbs.
That's the point, I think. Most metro areas are made up of a collection of many incorporated areas which collectively make up what people think of as the city. Some of those incorporated areas are large, some are small, and you might not realize you're driving from one to another since nothing changes except which legal entity collects the property taxes.
Yeah, my city totally surrounds several sub-50k "towns", plus has several others glommed on to the side of it that you'd be forgiven for not realizing are separate from the city, and it's not even an extreme case (see St. Louis for that)
If you're already 5x leveraged into a single asset in a single location whose value is wholly outside of your control you don't need the extra risk of redevelopment
It can be when you can artificially induce a housing shortage.
E.g. I have a friend whose area has become extremely popular for city people and prices have gone up a ton over the past couple years.
Their father owns a bunch of property in the area and sits on a bunch of local board, and specifically lobbies to block housing development to protect their "future" that's locked up in these properties. (Mostly SFH in suburbs.) It's an explicit goal for some people.
As long as demand is high, b/c of mostly immutable factors, schools/weather/job opportunities etc and people have the money to spend then prices will go up if you keep housing supply low.
This is a great example of a financial misunderstanding. Land use restrictions reduce land value. Seriously, compare property prices per unit lot area in fancy, restricted communities (e.g. Atherton) to neighboring lots in less restricted, less fancy areas (e.g. Menlo Park or Fair Oaks, hah). Land in Atherton is worth less. Which makes sense — you can’t do as much with it.
At best, single family zoning preserves the value of a (depreciating!) house to a limited extent.
Um, sure. If you take away the property-owner lobby, the vast majority of truly bad zoning wouldn't exist. I'm comfortable ascribing causality directly to the force which, if removed, would eliminate the effect.
Zoning is also used to preserve the character of a neighborhood. Unfortunately, that typically includes racial character. The US has a long history of zoning as a proxy for redlining and racism [0].
Character is the worst part of any area. They are preserving old buildings that cannot be made energy efficient without a large investment, while making that investment illegal as well. All in name of preserving a building just because it is 'old'.
Sure there are a few buildings that are historic and should be preserved, but the vast majority are only old, and have no other historic value.
This position would be a lot more popular if 99% of new development wasn't hideous beyond words and an affront to human dignity.
People want to preserve old stuff because (and only when) it's beautiful, but there's no reason we couldn't and shouldn't be building beautiful stuff today!
> If I want to collect old VW busses and park them in the front yard, I don't care what effect this has on my neighbors property value. This is my home. If you don't want to deal with living near other people, move to the country.
I don't like that we have to have laws like this in society anymore than you do. But you're kind of ignoring Chesterton's fence here.
I've lived next to places like you're describing, and I don't mean trash heaps like you see in rural parts of America, though I've lived next to them, too. I mean collectors who simply fall behind on preventative maintenance for mundane reasons. So I don't care until I'm forced to... Which is typically when the rats show up.
This argument is a strawman though. Reasonable restrictions are fine, but in practice you get neighbors arguing about what kind of tile you’re allowed to put on your porch roof. If you ever listen in on local city planning/design meetings it’s pretty illuminating.
We have some refineries right up against homes in Wilmington and the bad parts of Long Beach.
In either case, the fact that zoning laws aren't stopping this but are taken as seriously as laws of physics when it comes to apartments shows that they're mostly a scam
I'm assuming you are U.S. citizen and not super familiar with the common law; apologies up front if that isn't the case.
Property law principles in the common law are vastly more complicated than this. There are all sorts of ways that your right to use real estate as you wish can be affected by past practices, hazy conventions, etc. Check out "easements", "mineral rights", "air rights", "adverse possession", and the sometimes elaborate processes of establishing title and specific property interests in particular jurisdictions.
And many of those limitations are logically prior to U.S. specific legislation around zoning, restrictive covenants, etc.
Most cities now have the power to tell you what kind of house you can build, how you can paint it, how you can landscape it, what kinds of cars you can keep in your own driveway, what you can do in your leisure time on the property etc.
In my experience, the city regulations around what you’ve listed are always sensible. It’s the HOA regulations that tend to be kooky and capricious.
Pretty much any city that was rich in at any point in the latter half of the 20th century has a ton of regulations that boil down to "if you couldn't get away with it in a gated community you can't get away with it here." No one regulation is onerous on its face but the sum total of them are damn near impossible to comply with unless being a high class homeowner is your hobby so this just results in discretionary enforcement which is complaint driven. And of course because the .gov doesn't want their snitches getting stitches they won't tell you who complained so you can't even go attempt to work things out with your neighbors. Karen complains about your shed and you're getting fined $50/day until you tear the thing down not knowing that she'd have been fine if you just painted it.
Your experience sounds outdated. It was like that 10 years ago, even 5 years ago in many cities, but in the last few years so many cities have gotten into HOA territory. Even small cities in places you wouldn't expect.
That kind of timeline is extreme and definitely doesn't pass the smell test. Sounds like a whitewashed variation of "big gubmint takin over as nanny state" reactionary predilections.
Goodbye "high-rises can't be built in SF because they cast an unsightly shadow". But also hope it doesn't mean California gets to regulate San Jose's "green belt".
isn't building high-rises in SF precarious because the ground is soft, with inadequate bedrock? are there also concerns about aesthetics, if i understand?
From what I understand it's about the same as building in Tokyo. With modern technology and proper materials you can build a safe building. But the residential tower currently sinking into the ground indicates that either that isn't actually true or the rules aren't being enforced.
I think it's more likely that corners were cut with the Millennium Tower, or the engineers made an error of some kind.
None of the other big buildings in SF are connected to the bedrock. None of the towers in LA have supports connected to the bedrock. Heck, the Burj Khalifa isn't connected to bedrock. They all use friction piles, and these can work fine if they're done properly.
I stand corrected! I got my information from a soil scientist who was explaining that the bedrock wasn't anywhere close to the surface in SF and LA and misunderstood that to mean that none of the towers went all the way down. I stand by my claim that the Burj Khalifa isn't on bedrock, however.
Yeah, that one was a case of taking shortcuts. The bedrock was 200"[1] down but the studies they used said that wasn't necessary. So NOW they are taking steps to introduce new pilons that go all the way down to bedrock and will be braced to the current, faultily installed ones.
[1] Not sure the exact depth, but whatever, they went like half way down to save on money.
If that were true, there wouldn't be any building in the New Orleans area more than a couple stories high. Everything south of the lake is built on an alluvial delta.
In one notable case, it was decided to not bore all the way down to bedrock, resulting is a sinking building and many lawsuits. More commonly, someone complains that a planned building will cast a shadow, and after spending millions the builders are not allowed to proceed.
> you can't built a chemical processing plant in a residential neighborhood, obviously
Lots of people disagree with this! There are tons of chemical processing facilities that pop up near my neighborhood, particularly rail car cleaning.
Can smell a different chemical every day depending on what they’re spraying out of the rail cars.
La Porte, TX
Pasadena, TX
Lake Jackson, TX
There are both new subdivisions and new processing facilities going up all the time. ProPublica ran some big articles on it, absolutely skyrocketing cancer rates around here.
Yeah, no kidding, no residential zoning at all? Hard to believe it's CA, but good for them! This will vastly improve the housing situation, if CA has sense enough to keep it this way.
Yeah man I was shocked here in Texas on how much crap I had to go through with the city to build a small workshop in my backyard. It was absolutely ridiculous since it was a permanent structure (stone and wood with concrete foundation). Good for California and I hope other states follow suit. Austin has two failed attempts to set up rezoning in the past 15 years or so, millions of dollars spent on the plans that ultimately failed.
The idea that property rights are totally inviolable doesn't really hold water when you think about it a little more. Stuff like electricity, running water, trash and recycling, roads, parks, schools, public safety, the technology behind your fridge/oven/heating/AC etc. only exist because of decades or even hundreds of years of robust public investment. Without any of that, you wouldn't even have a house!
The relationship is that private property only exists because of a system that enforces it and provides many of the services that lend it value. Whatever you think of this system, the two are deeply intertwined.
And, crucially, the relevant services all have easements that supercede your desires to do whatever you want on your property. You don't have the right to NOT have a powerline going down the street on your property, or a city sewer line, or a sidewalk, etc.
So the next logical step would be that property tax to be extended over all your property, not just real estate. We already pay property tax on cars in Europe, but not yet on bank accounts, clothes on our back, collection of family photos, etc. Probably with you guys, it's already on the way.
I agree that the distinction between property and other forms of wealth doesn't make a lot of sense from the perspective of taxation and mostly exists for historical reasons. Especially because the wealthier the individual, the smaller the percentage of their wealth that is derived from property. Small amounts of wealth like clothes and family photos probably shouldn't be taxable in the same way that small amounts of income aren't.
>(you can't built a chemical processing plant in a residential neighborhood, obviously)
You can get darn close in some places. I mean, in Texas, residential damage and evacuations from chemical plant explosions are practically routine. I live in a neighborhood surrounded by biotech labs, which tend not to blow up, though we do joke a bit about being zombie-apocalypse-ground-zero (also, every available developable lot gets sucked up by a new lab project). And of course, in some rural areas, the proximity of farms waste lagoons and low-income neighborhoods is a serious issue.
> how you can landscape it, what kinds of cars you can keep in your own driveway
These two at least make some sense. The former, landscaping restrictions, can be used to prevent people from creating groundwater issues or flood risks, and the latter... no one wants a neighbor in a residential zone keeping broken-down trash cars out in the open.
Some things have to be regulated even in a relatively free society because otherwise the potential is too high for greedy or stupid people to ruin everyone else's life.
It makes perfect sense to me to regulate things that could potentially have an adverse effect on others that they can't easily opt out of. Loud noise in the middle of the night? Sure. Anything that creates pollution? Sure. Unleashed pit bulls that devour the neighborhood children? Depends on which children, but otherwise banning this makes sense.
But rules based on "it doesn't look nice"? That seems both subjective and ridiculous. If someone has garbage on their property and it's blowing into yours, that gives you a right to complain. But if you just think their property is ugly for whatever reason, well, maybe don't look at it? What made people think they should have any say over the visual appearance of what someone else owns?
so let me ask from a point of trying to see it the other way, why do you want broken-down trash cars out in the open of your house? if you're just playing devil's advocate, then whatever, but if you truly want trash cars, I truly want to hear why
but see, you're not being fair to the question. i'm not asking for justification. i'm asking why you want trash cars. it's no different than asking why your favorite food is what it might ever be. there's no judgement in my asking. i'm just trying to understand, you know, to get to know you. maybe you'll have a strong reason for it that convinces me to want trash cars in my yard too. but you'll never know because you take this immediate position of justification and non-answers
Not OP, but given enough time/money/land I'd probably have a dozen or so old trash cars on my property. It's fun to fix things, including buying a couple wrecked donor cars in order to (attempt to) build up one working one. It's one of my hobbies, although I don't have the time/money or room to go all out.
there's a difference between a parts car and a trash car. parts car implies what you are saying that there's a project car somewhere. trash car implies something else entirely.
Today's broken down car sitting in my driveway is my son's future "hey dad what's that if I get it running can me and my buddies drive it around?" and 8 years later it's a mechanical engineering degree.
They can potentially become a blight. I'm not talking about a single classic car you're restoring, I'm talking about 3+ vehicles, some parked on driveway, others on the grass. They're homes for vermin and other animals, they're a disaster aesthetically and probably dangerous to kids in the neighborhood (sometimes they're on jack stands). They're often accompanied by stacks of tires and other debris.
I've lived off-grid in the desert, and I've seen certain people become 'garbage collectors' - a few cars turns into 20+, with all the associated junk. In the desert, nobody really cares - but you'd be crazy to move in next to one of those junk yards.
It's not going to ruin anyone's life, but it's definitely not nice. It depends on the community and circumstances I suppose.
There are some properties in a neighboring county where a guy has been running junk yards in residential neighborhoods. 50+ rusted junkers stacked in a suburban yard, against local law. When the law finally is about to seize the land, he's moved it all to other residential properties in the area. Lawsuits have been going on since the 90s. I believe he's lost at least one house and possibly spent some time in jail, but it keeps going.
If that trash car is in the garage to be worked on, noone is going to care. If it is a trash car in the laneway that is being worked on and being kept in reasonable cosmetic condition, some are going to oppose it and some are going to accept it. Once you start collecting auto carcasses, leaving your property in disarray, and not doing much about it ... well, don't be surprised if people start viewing your property as an undesirable dump in the middle of a residential community.
People have limits. While some people push those limits too far (in either direction), there are times when those limits are realistic.
No, they don't. These exact sorts of "well nobody likes" arguments are why the bureaucracy has the reach it does and CA has the problems it does.
Yes, society probably won't crumble if we cave to your whining and regulate your pet issue of the minute but regulating in this manner is like littering in the park, if everyone does it the park is ruined.
If people are poisoning the groundwater or creating other "off their property" problems then fine them accordingly. If they aren't then screw off. None of this "the thing you want to isn't already on the approved list so you have to go through an onerous and expensive process of proving it won't hurt anything" garbage.
>Yes, society probably won't crumble if we cave to your whining and regulate your pet issue of the minute
I disagree, and I think this sort of nonsense is a cornerstone of why society is crumbling. People don't look at their homes as homes they look at them as temporary investments that they hope to sell to somebody else for more money in the future. People don't end up investing (in the societal, emotional sense) into their communities and their homes because they recognize that they don't really own them.
Give the rights back to the people to own their homes and they start to care again. Tell property investors that I'm sorry, but actually you might have to deal with a guy who doesn't give a shit about weeds and likes to work on his car in the driveway next to your investment and maybe houses stop being such a safe speculative vehicle.
If housing ceases to be a relatively safe investment vehicle, what will become it?
I dislike the idea of home-as-investment as much as the next guy, but I'd like to think about some consequences of houses stopping to be an investment, Japan-style.
If houses were no longer an investment but rather just poaces to live, the result might be that more and better housing would be constantly being built. This is one of the points of this article that was posted here the other day: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/actually-japan-has-changed...
I said elsewhere so sorry for repeating, but: you should find your city's code and read it. Almost all cities at this point have adopted things that used to be exclusive to HOAs.
San Francisco is a good case study in what happens when you don't build enough housing - people who were previously able to afford cheap apartments now can't and do all of their business out in the street.
Other cities and states have worse problems with drug use but don't have problems with homelessness because housing is more affordable there.
I'd like people with substance problems to get help for their problems, and I'd like for everyone in the richest country in the world to be able to sleep with a roof over their head, instead of in the cold and rain.
I can absolutely agree with you on both of those things. Until everyone in North America has adequate food, shelter, and medical care, we need to insist that our children and country-people come first.
> If I want to collect old VW busses and park them in the front yard, I don't care what effect this has on my neighbors property value. This is my home. If you don't want to deal with living near other people, move to the country.
Many (most?) of these types of rules are imposed by HOAs made up of property owners, not the city.
I think most larger cities have rules against parking vehicles in a yard visible to the street. In the driveway is usually ok. And converting more of your yard into driveway is usually restricted by zoning as well.
Actually it strips power away from the people making us less democratic. What will happen is developers with political connection/money to get their people elected, will have fewer barriers to their profits now.
This is a transfer of power from the people, that is democracy, to the oligarchy.
> I don't care what effect this has on my neighbors property value.
That is such an awful attitude and a big problem of what is wrong in the country today. We live in communities and communities agree to certain values. It's about well more than just you and what you want to do.
I'm always of the mind that it's harder for developers to have connections at a state level compared to a local level. It's more believable that a local developer has connections to city council in a single city and the amount of palms to grease is much less. Moving up to state level (especially in CA) the amount of money / influence would greatly increase to be able to influence the new zoning regulators. Not saying it can't happen, but it would be more of an undertaking (imo).
It's easy to despondent at the political norms and the status quo in the United States at present but honestly what you're seeing with what CA is doing here gives me hopes that good things can still happen.
For a bit of background, a big problem with housing in the US is that people became property owners and the whole system became financialized so the voters became incentivized to oppose housing to increase the value of their own homes. They also voted themselves massive generational tax breaks (eg Prop 13).
The net effect is that almost all the polices you see around this are demand side, making it easier to buy a home. Why? Because this increases values. It's ineffective and everyone knows it. They just don't care.
But what CA is doing here is one of the first large scale supply side policies with actual teeth and it's great to see. These cities have really fucked around and are now finding out. You see the same tactics too. Complaints about "maintaining character" and focusing new housing on poorer areas, which are both exclusionary and discriminatory policies.
Well-intentioned laws in CA have been effectively weaponized to fight more and new housing (eg CEQA). Approvals processes can take years and really add to the cost. Even things like parking minimums are intentionally used to kill higher density housing (eg in LA).
The builder's remedy mentioned here bypasses all local zoning and allows a court to approve plans. When Santa Monica fell out of compliance it saw approvals for thousands of new units. I really hope this happens in much of the Bay Area.
What I find particularly disheartening is many self-identified "progressives" are the biggest NIMBYs. Denying people affordable housing is state violence.
The headline makes it sound broader than it is. Rather than "CA Cities", it's actually "will eliminate the zoning ordinances of the vast majority of cities throughout the Bay Area". Still pretty broad, of course.
Yes, a common misconception. The RHNA process is conducted on a rolling calendar. SANDAG had to close their housing elements in April 2021. SCAG cities had a deadline in October 2021. ABAG cities are due today. AMBAG is not due until December 2023.
Edit:
RHNA: regional housing needs allocation
SANDAG: San Diego Association of Governments
SCAG: Southern California Association of Governments
ABAG: Association of Bay Area Governments
AMBAG: Association of Monterey Bay Area Governments
Can anyone suggest an accurate, neutral title, preferably using representative language from the article, which fits within HN's 80 char limit? If so, I'll be happy to change it above.
(We usually do this ourselves, but I find the details here a bit disorienting and don't have time to concentrate on it)
I think just changing "California" to "Bay Area" would be reasonable for now. If the article is correct, zoning is being completely eradicated, but I'm not sure why the poster decided to say it was for all of California.
You could go with something that's more technically correct, if not immediately more clear. This would at least give people the opportunity to google the terms and learn about them themselves.
"Builder's Remedy goes into effect in many California cities tomorrow"
I strongly recommend Darrell Owens' substack (and Twitter). He's a young guy who got involved in housing politics in Berkeley back in high school and is studying data analytics. The blog has real data analysis of housing issues, not just polemics or the latest gossip (though there is a bit of that).
IMHO the insistence on below-market-rate quotas is counterproductive in terms of the actual housing market (though it's probably necessary in terms of political feasibility). The BMR housing is _already built_: there is plenty of old, un-renovated housing in cities like San Francisco that ought to rent for far less than it does, were it not for the fact that quality housing is in such short supply that high-level demand spills over.
Concrete example: does your SF apartment have poor insulation? Single-pane windows? Creaking floors which are not level? In continental Europe, _that_ would be your low/medium income housing. Instead it's full of tech people because they have nowhere else to go.
And ridiculously bad sound isolation. So many neighbor problems go away if you can't hear your neighbor coughing in their bedroom from your bedroom in the dead of night.
And no in-unit washer dryer.
And no dish washing machine.
And no living room because it's been converted into a bedroom to be able to make rent.
And slow Internet that's from a provider with notoriously bad customer service.
As someone who spent 5 years attempting to get through zoning including a purely subjective “design review committee” in one of these affluent cities, I applaud this. While I agree with the desire to preserve the character and uniqueness one’s town, that pendulum has swung so far over driven by older, established nimbies who got theirs decades ago, or their offspring who inherited both homes and excessively low prop 13 tax rates locked in decades ago. The wealth disparity this whole system has created is staggering.
In my local community (rural area) the county changed zoning laws on people's residential properties. It's a damned nightmare. You can't rebuild a home or get approval for anything. According to the wording of the law, the county can sell the trees on your property (and you have to allow any heavy equipment on premise to allow this to happen) and they can supercede any water rights you have (water is not scarce here like in the SW). To be clear those last two points haven't been used...yet.
The funny thing is that this happened along class lines in a 'progressive' county. Richer people have MUCH more forgiving zoning and many live right down the street from poor people who essentially don't own the land they live on anymore. The equity they used to have was wiped out almost entirely because nobody wants to buy their property due to zoning (!). Think they can get a loan now? What do you think happened to property values for the rich people?
I'm honestly surprised somebody at the end of their rope hasn't gotten violent about this, it's outrageous.
It's in Oregon, I'd rather not say where exactly because I live in a very, very small community and I'm not sure if it's a widespread problem in the county or a localized issue in my neck of the woods.
A lot of this goes back to the 70's IIRC where Gov. Tom McCall passed a law to limit land use, which was great. Nobody wanted the sprawl you see on the East Coast or in parts of California, it's why Oregon still has a lot of nice areas with small farms and communities instead of shopping centers. Also of concern was, say, timber companies doing a harvest and then selling the land for a housing development or something -- this would also be terrible. Unfortunately, some more activist counties used this to deprive people of property rights which they bought into, I know there was a huge legal dispute over an issue along these lines just outside Portland in the 90's. We also had a ballot measure that was on tge books for about a year or two which would compensate land owners for lost value due to zoning changes, but that was thrown out pretty quickly.
I'm not exactly sure how we got such clear class divides in zoning and if it was intentional or not, but the effect is black and white.
Also of interest is how different counties handled permitting post-wildfires in 2020. There are many wildfire victims from my area who have been unable to rebuild because of permitting issues and what appears to be intentional obstruction by the county.
A side note, I don't know any displaced wildfire victims that received the hundreds of millions in federal aid sent our way. FEMA didn't approve any loans even though hundreds of structures were lost in a poor rural area -- but they were happy to provide water and WiFi, which is...something.
I hadn't heard of anything directly along those lines, which is why I asked for location. Figured if it was close enough to me, I might be able to learn more; I'm always interested in other viewpoints as well as gov't policies that I may be unaware of, but still subject to. I live in Oregon, so I'll have to do some more digging. Based on the wildfire comment, I could make some educated guesses. Certainly every time I drive down 22 from Salem over to Bend I'm struck by how many houses are still not being rebuilt. There are some, but there are vastly more RVs siting on big empty lots with remnants of what was once built there.
Sure but in doing so you've stiffed the people least able to fight it. They don't treat businesses or the middle and upper classes like this because they'd fuck the county 23 different ways in court.
Essentially it's a slow-acting imminent domain without compensation.
Such an arrangement is not unlawful though. In fact, it can even be in two (or three even! ) different private entities: one for the land, one for the building, one for the unit ownership and and then the final tenant of the unit.
The part that I'm sure many here are skimming for:
> HCD reviewed SF’s housing element and said it “largely compiled” with the state’s rules, even though it was heavy on promises. As such, SF will not be subjected to the builder remedy on Wednesday.
(But it's an interesting piece in general and you should read the whole thing for important context!)
The whole "heavy on promises" thing makes me nervous. But the HCD has been super intensely focused on San Francisco in particular -- the article mentions the special investigation they opened into the city's Board of Supervisors -- and so I'm hoping that if they think it's good, then it's actually good.
Apparently there's nothing _preventing_ mixed-use buildings. But are there incentives?
Having residential buildings on top of commercial ones is the secret for walkability in many European cities. Grocery shops and other small businesses are usually very close to where you live.
I think (without evidence) that most developers of mid-size apartment/condo buildings would inherently gravitate towards ground-floor retail when it's not banned by zoning (as it often is), because the comparative rarity of that kind of thing in the US would make it perceived as 'fancier' and thereby more valuable.
> The “builder’s remedy” is a very old law from the 1990s
I know the old jokes of 'in the UK 100 miles is a long way, in the states 100 years is a long time' et al.... but this is stretching even that understanding of 'very old'. It goes on to mention laws of the 1970's, I guess that is time immemorial. 'Before the war' said a commentator, what is that, Classical Civilisation?
> I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you… multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus.
Sadly this won't apply to San Francisco, which has made a very unlikely-sounding pinkie promise to allow 8,200 new housing units a year starting right now.
The SF plan does make some sense though. For example most of Lombard street through the Marina got upzoned. So all those old motor hotels can probably be converted into multistory housing.
That is a fucking incredible law. They allow zero houses to be built for decades and then some meme law activates and suddenly 5000 houses are being built next week.
Will this allow people to turn their homes into a business. I can see this radically transforming communities and making cities more lively and walkable.
We've had these laws in NJ (USA) for many years now. The results are mixed. What basically happened is that if a several acre lot became available in a suburban town, the builder would petition to change the single familty home zoing to allow them to build a 100 unit condo buliding. My relatively small town had a population of about 7k people for many years, but then quickly shot up to 10k in just a few years due to many 100 unit buildings being built.
NJ is unusual in that we have many small towns. The large builders learned how to take advantage of these laws and built legal teams that can easily defeat the lawyers representing the small towns. And the small towns don't want to risk millions of taxpayer dollars on a litigation with a small chance of winning.
And the town always loses in the court of public opinion. The towns try to argue against forced over development, but the large builders change the narative to the town being racist/classist/greedy, etc. If you go to the K Hovnanian site and look at the map of their developments, NJ is full of red dots.
I agree it's great to build housing. But picture this scenario. You buy a 3 bedroom house on a quiet cul de sac with five other similar houses next to it. At the end of the cul de sac next to your house is a few acres of woods. A builder then builds a 100 town house 5-story building right behind your house. An entrance to the building is put in right next to your house and you now have 200 cars from the 100 units entering and exiting right past your house. The new residents can stare down from the fifth floor of their units into your once private back yard. And of the 100 units, only 10 or 15 are designated low-income.
"San Francisco’s Sunset District will be upzoned for new, high density housing to help add 80,000 new homes via the housing element approved by SF city gov’t and the state."
I don't understand that statement along with the photo. That is a high density neighborhood. The houses are very close to each other, many are double story, and I don't see many green areas in between.
Fair enough. But honestly I wouldn't be happy if my area (which has big properties, lots of space between each house) was de-zoned into an anarchy where developers could build 10 story "luxury housing", increasing traffic and noise. I guess the intention is good, but it won't work everywhere.
The new zoning would allow buildings up to 85 feet, or ~10 stories.
> Areas within a short walk of a rapid bus or light rail line — including stretches of Ocean Avenue, Geary Boulevard and Taraval, Judah and Lombard streets — could see developments 55 to 85 feet high. In other areas close to major bus lines, developers would be allowed to build unlimited density within existing height limits. Virtually everywhere else on the west side, up to four units would be allowed on every lot.
The article doesn't specify that it will open to commercial zoning. Just that there is no limit to residential. So if someone has the capital there is no height limit to build in a residential area... I don't see much changing here. Most people won't add on a second, third, or fourth floor.
New builds however...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For these cities that lose their local authorities, does that include building code requirements for things like parking minimums and mixed commercial/residential buildings?
My understanding is that California is short around a million housing units. Truly a staggering number that will take very long to catch up on. Not sure how many units are being allowed by builder's remedy but it surely isn't the full million.
Somehow we have grown a whole generation of people that thinks they are entitled to live wherever they want, when that has never been the case in world’s history.
I too want a penthouse in Manhattan, who do I need to mail to demand I am given a penthouse in Manhattan?
California clearly doesn’t have the capacity to serve the current population, let alone an increased population. All services are 3rd world quality, besides a few rich enclaves.
Somehow we have grown a whole generation of people that thinks they are entitled to tell their neighbors what they are allowed to build. I too want everyone around me to have a one story house so I can look over them from my balcony, but guess what, that would impede on their property rights. California absolutely has the capacity to serve the current population, they just need to fix the shit show that is their housing policy.
Stats like these are only true because the general public and policymakers/NGOs mean completely different populations of people when discussing "the homeless."
Private market housing in SF will not get most of the very visible & mentally ill off of the streets, this likely requires services and some level of compulsion.
If you redefine "homelessness" to only include those with addiction or mental illness problems, then you might have a point. But that's not a terrible useful definition, and many of those addiction and mental illness problems stem from not having housing and the extreme difficulty of that situation.
Other areas with higher rates of addiction, but cheaper housing, have lower rates of homelessness. Cheaper housing really does allow people to get off the streets.
Expensive housing is also correlated with better provisioning of services which draws people here.
I am not redefining anything, I am describing to you what people are colloquially talking about and why these conversations oftentimes are just people talking past each other because they have different issues in mind. When people in SF say "homelessness is out of control", they are typically talking about the population I am mentioning - one that is unlikely to be helped by changes to housing costs at the margin.
Note that homelessness is a constant flow of people. The services and compulsion removing people from the streets is currently happening. The problem is that the housing market is dumping more new homeless onto the street than our current system can handle. Turning off the faucet, so to speak, will make dealing with the existing homeless population a much simpler and more humane activity.
> Over the course of the book, the researchers illustrate how absolute rent levels and rental vacancy rates are associated with regional rates of homelessness. Many other common explanations—drug use, mental illness, poverty, or local political context—fail to account for regional variation.
It's not really going to help the people that most imagine when they think of their personal experience of homelessness. i.e. people sleeping in the streets or on the subway, or the "crazy people" you cross the street to avoid.
For example, in NYC, more than 95% of the homeless are actually sheltered (whether in the city shelter system, or in other temporary situations like doubling up with friends or relatives), and more than 80% of homelessness is situational rather chronic. 30% of homeless families have at least one employed adult. 60% of all shelter residents are families.
Most spending on combating homelessness is invisible to us; and most improvements in affordable housing are going to have little impact on the (predominantly) male, drug-using and/or mentally-ill street sleepers.
People enter homelessness and drug use from both directions. Many homeless are not addicts and more affordable housing will help get those off the street and keep more people at the margin in more stable housing situations. This will in turn help make services more available for the drug using homeless.
NYC, HI, CA >40 per 100k homeless in 2020 (higher now)
States with lots of poverty but also extremely cheap housing at the bottom with a 5x lower rate of homelessness: LA, AL, MS
Similarly, WV very low on the list despite being high on all of the other supposedly causal factors such as mental health and drug problems
Poor people with mental health and addiction problems can still live with a roof over their head as long as they're not competing with tech salaries to buy any kind of shelter.
> You would then expect the percent of homeless per state to be roughly similar
No, I would expect the opposite. All the would be homeless in unappealing states leave and go to california or NYC because if they're not paying for housing they figure might as well go to the nicest area.
That's a very different model than 'prefer to live in the same places everyone else' -- you're saying that wherever housed people want to live, the homeless want to live there even more.
There are confounding factors at work here - for example, since 1979, people in NY have a legal right-to-shelter founded on the state constitution which does tend to generate a more encompassing homelessness policy than in, say, PA.
> Something tells me everyone who's homeless isn't a fentanyl addict. Especially given housing costs
SF/LA has numerous programs that will give you housing if you're homeless. The issue is that many of the homeless refuse to take up these programs and insist on staying in their tents.... because they're mentally ill.... because of drugs.
You should look at the often onerous restrictions that come with those programs, often including:
* No Pets
* No Visitors
* Curfew Time
* Limits on the number of people per unit (meaning, families and couples cannot always be accommodated together)
- and a host of others. Also in some places there is a requirement that you have a social worker, and/or receiving mental healthcare treatment - except there are long waiting periods.
For most long term homeless people telling them "you have to give up your dog" will keep them on the streets - its not "housing, no questions asked" its "housing with rules".
Building more housing will reduce the existing homeless population - because a significant portion of existing homeless are working poor, but more importantly, it will stall the creation of new homeless, the longer you're homeless the more likely you are to acquire an addiction, or other mental health issue.
I'm sure it can't be this simple, but I would love to hear what the problems are with building large apartment complexes on cheap land in the outskirts of cities, staffing them with security, social workers, medical workers, etc. and then letting people live there no questions asked.
You would of course still need some rules in these places and there would certainly be various issues and difficulties, but it seems a whole lot better than what we have happening now in city centers?
I want to predicate this with a statement, I believe there is no such thing as 'unworthy poor' all poverty is worth solving, because the broader societal costs in not solving poverty is corrosive on wider society. Poverty is at the roots of some of the causes of homelessness, but not all of them.
So, a generation ago, we warehoused people who had an inability to thrive in society in mental hospitals, now we do it with jails, or just leave them on the streets. I think it's a thought that upsets people (and runs into ideological issues across the spectrum), but essentially, there is some percentage of the population, that no matter the supports they are given, will fail to thrive. If we try to jail them all, or just ignore the problems, it creates a great number of externalities which effect all of us in a myriad of ways.
To further drill down, it's a spectrum of behaviors, some folks have enough problems that cash benefits and subsidized housing are not enough to allow them to follow the rules in general society.
In any case, to circle back around, it essentially creates an second class citizen and nuisances around these places, thats a solvable problem though, but rather authoritarian in how you'd have to solve it.
I've had extensive conversations for this with friends, and we've come to the conclusion (reluctantly) that the only complete fix for homelessness would be something the equivalent of civil commitment to a 'guided living' community, you'd have a large community on the edge of town, it'd have a mix of halfway houses, group living and individual apartments and has centers for mental health, social work, as well as sources of employment, shops and communal spaces.
The idea is, if simple housing supports wont get you out of homelessness, you could be sent there - there would be a way to graduate out of the program, but for some they would go and might never be able to leave.
Thanks for the very thoughtful comment. The solution you describe strikes me as so common sensical that I feel I must be missing something or else it would have already been implemented, considering how universally everyone seems to agree that the status quo is urgently unacceptable.
It's clear, as you say, that we need something that is not prison or a psych ward, but also not the streets of a city center.
It definitely seems that we're letting perfect be the enemy of good on this. It's like there's a burning building and everyone's standing around arguing about what the pH level of the water from the hoses should be rather than putting the damn thing out.
And while I agree with the concern about creating second class citizens, I'd say these people are in a worse situation than that currently, and they are bringing entire neighborhoods full of innocent people down with them.
There are a couple of factors I think in the way of adopting the solution I've outlined -
* It's incredibly authoritarian, ripe for abuse (as the commitment to mental hospitals was), and requires an evolution in legal thinking about what civil commitment can be used for.
* It offends a wide swath of people in an ideological way. No one really want to believe that some people cannot help themselves improve enough to exist in wider society (liberals assume everyone unless profoundly disabled can if given proper support, conservatives just assume people need to tug harder on those bootstraps). Similarly everyone on some level I've talked to about it is offended by the authoritarian nature of - it bothers people of all stripes once they think about it a little (including myself as a liberal with a general libertarian lean). Conservatives also object to spending money on such a venture (why should those people who contribute nothing to society eat better than I do?) for pretty obvious and consistent reasons.
* No one knows how to fund it, you need to either create new sources of revenue or deallocate money from someplace else, now, yes perhaps you could reduce funding allocated to policing - but there are existing stakeholders who will fight ardently to prevent it.
* Finally, there are existing stakeholders (the homeless industrial complex, as I glibly descried them) who want the status quo to persist for various reasons (for many organizations it is raison d'être - either for religious reasons, or more basal ones - money, they have workforces who are paid, and are a consumer of taxpayer grants).
I agree broadly with you, that the current illness is worse than the cure, but the cure isn't without its own side effects.
For what it's worth the example that I use of some people not being able to improve themselves is the Vanderbilt family, One of Cornelius Vanderbilt's great grandchildren was born into poverty. No matter what advantages afforded, some people will fail to thrive. (See https://www.amazon.com/Fortunes-Children-Fall-House-Vanderbi... for more information)
I agree with you, everyone is very busy arguing about either the PH of the water, the color of the water spout or if you should spray the base of the fire, or the top of the fire, and the fire rages further consuming people in its path and we never quite get around to putting the fire out.
There are a whole host of issues in society that are like this - where the optimal solution will never get significant political support behind it without the problem being perceived by voters as much worse than it is perceived now.
Some of these are:
* End of Life Care (from old age, chronic illness, etc)
* Cigarette Regulations (There are a ton of stakeholders who want to preserve the status quo of regressive taxes with general availability, when lower taxes with a gradually increasing age of purchase would be better for society)
* Overemphasis on safety in automobiles and other things (I did a cost benefit analysis on backup cameras, and it came out to something like 15,000 dollar per life saved, and most of these added burdens end up on the poor)
Perhaps a less authoritarian option than civil commitment could be to create this type of housing then incentivize it in various ways.
The biggest one is: if you’re going to have zones where hard drugs are de facto legalized, it should be in one of these places that are out of the way and designed to handle the externalities as well as possible rather than in the middle of cities.
It would also give police a place to take people who are creating quality of life issues for residents (tents, screaming, littering, using streets as toilets, etc.). Instead of the “bus out of town” or simply moving people around in the city, they could keep bringing people back to these facilities. Perhaps not all would stay, but I imagine many would.
Maybe the way to think about it is almost like a business serving customers. If homeless people don’t want to stay in this housing voluntarily, how can it be improved to change that? They have reasons for choosing the places that they do now, so if those factors can be replicated and improved upon, force might not generally be necessary.
I dont know that you can get people to stay without more.. coercion, particularly those who are homeless by choice. In some ways, they're the most libertarian of the libertarians, they dont like being told to what to do, they often (but not always) have various addictions - and move around. They're also the homeless who are least likely to cause trouble, leave a mess, they vary from addicts who are on the streets to 'urban campers'.
I think at least trying it would be better than what we're doing now, and I think we're on the same page about that.
You win victories against great social ills by convincing one person at a time that we need to try something different. I believe firmly that most of the ills our society has are caused by poverty, if we can solve 3/4 of poverty, we will end up with a richer, safer and happier world.
That's pretty much right on the nose when it comes to 'Housing First' approaches to the homeless. Most localities refuse to do that for political reasons more than practical ones: too many people take to crab-bucket complaining as soon as you just give homeless people homes.
There is opposition to it across the ideological spectrum, the right doesnt like it, because they feel people should do for themselves, parts of the left doesnt because of one of two reasons A) it doesnt provide an acceptable enough standard of living for those pushed into it B) it doesnt provide the 'comprehensive care' required to really help people (as seen from folks inside the homelessness industrial complex, which is to say, anyone with a vested interest in continuing the status quo).
In reality housing first solves a great many problems, and creates some others - but its better than anything else we're currently doing.
The provision of housing to the homeless can be refused for a lot of reasons. One being that the housing might be in a place where the person has no access or restricted access to other social programs such as food or jobs programs. The housing might make them feel unsafe, such as being crammed into a shelter. The housing might be overly restrictive, such as refusing to allow them to bring their pet which may be the only thing keeping them going emotionally. They may feel they don't have adequate support to transition to housing, if the housing demands they get off an addictive substance first (chicken and egg problem, because its much harder to get off an addiction if one is currently in crisis like being homeless).
so i am dealing with this issue with a good friend of mine right now, who is homeless in the city of san francisco. No, this isnt true , theres a very very long waitlist for assistance. His credit is shot and he cannot find a new rental. so, hes been living in a hotel. Hes paying the daily, so he has money.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting a drug problem is a character defect nor am I implying that these people don't deserve a huge amount of empathy.
I'm just unsure if the root cause is the price of housing (despite there meaning numerous problems to house & relocate them) or if it's due to the drug addiction.
Anyway, obviously I'm for more housing to reduce the price of rent.
There's a youtube channel called Invisible People that interviews homeless people on the streets and the story is very frequently
had job -> got on highly addictive drugs -> everything is about getting another hit -> tried rehab multiple times and want to go to rehab again
And yeah I mean, heroine/meth/whatever is obviously super dangerous & addictive so you can't really blame them.
Why not both? And if the law fixes the prior, it will reduce overall homelessness. I'll take the progress and we can deal with the fentanyl issue in parallel for its own reasons.
Other people have linked good articles, but a good way to think about it is in Japan and West Virginia they have almost no homelessness and in both those places its very easy to rent a studio for under 300$ a month. Even for someone addicted to drugs you can see how its possible to manage 300$ a month (or for say a charity or city organization to come up with the money) without solving the underlying issues.
SF/LA has numerous programs that will give you housing if you're homeless. The issue is that many of the homeless refuse to take up these programs and insist on staying in their tents.... so... no?
I'm from Vancouver so I'm pretty familiar with this issue. They give you housing but don't allow drugs. Being able to own your own place where you can do drugs helps.
These people are addicts and homeless. We can cure homelessness with more homes, but we also need to help them get rid of addiction.
Depends on what you mean by homeless. Regular people mean people living on the street. Policy types mean them but also people living in overcrowded conditions.
I mean, it stands to reason that there also need to be homes for those people to live in. Unless you're planning on executing or imprisoning them instead.
> That all changed with laws mainly passed by state senators Nancy Skinner (D - Berkeley) and Scott Wiener (D - San Francisco) in the 2010s to update the RHNA requirements. Cities now had to zone for a variety of equitable impacts, most importantly putting housing in affluent neighborhoods, away from toxic industry and in ways that were feasible for development. So for example, SoCal cities loved to zone for apartments on top of active, popular shopping centers that would never be torn down. This was no longer permitted.
> And Wiener’s law SB 828 reformed RHNA so that the numbers had to more accurately gauge for population demand, lack of vacant housing and household formation which increased housing requirements tremendously. Places like Beverly Hills went from being required to build 3 homes over 8 years in the previous RHNA cycle to 3,000 homes now post-SB 828.
As someone who is generally anti-woke, stuff like this is sobering. Laws drafted by woke politicians aimed at achieving woke buzzwords ("equitable impacts") led to something really excellent.
> The city councils and zoning boards had zero authority to deny the projects. Zero.
How did this authority come to be in the first place? How did cities magically get this authority to dictate how people should build. I imagine such laws didn’t always exist, how far back does this stuff go? Likewise how did states get authority over the cities on local matters that have to be obeyed?
It goes back to the late 1800's and Early 1900's and like many legal overreaches in the US, zoning laws were primarily spawned from a desire to discriminate on the basis of race or class.
I generally avoid citing Wikipedia directly but in this case I feel it gives a pretty digestible overview while being fairly well sourced throughout. Even if it's not perfectly Fair & Balanced^tm I don't think people in the early 1900s using the law to suppress minorities/the poor is a such contested viewpoint that we need to hunt for the perfectly centrist perspective to get a rough idea.
In the US states are the ultimate unit of law (at least pre civil war). States can supersede the authority of their cities and counties with near impunity since there is no Bill of Rights between each state and its constituent parts.
That’s interesting that we have county and city governing bodies at all. It’s natural things like those bodies would unfold but to go this long with the state staying out of these affairs and stepping in when needed is pretty fascinating to see in real time like this.
In NJ, an interesting point is that the owner can only get back roughly the original price of the house when they sell. So it's sort of a double-edged sword as sure, they get to buy and live in a home, but they can't reap the benefits of increased real estate values, which would otherwise be a great benefit for a low income family.
I don't live in the area but I like the idea that the codes are updated to match the population. I hope there are some provisions for "access to sunlight" as the buildings grow -- something like Japan's Nisshoken policies... or I'd like to hear how that isn't a good idea for city planning.
If this is allowed to pan out, it's the best thing to happen to California in decades.
But I'll only believe it when I see it.
I assume it's stopped in some way before any substantial amount of housing is built. I hope I'm wrong, but I just can't believe California will allow it.
If they could gather enough capital to buy enough land and build enough in a neighborhood to allow this, they get part way there. Commercial buildings, such as small corner stores, daycare, etc. would still be banned in purely residential neighborhoods.
US planning is really abysmal and detrimental to quality of life, and it's nearly impossible to get people to even realize it because of car brain.
I'm hopeful that we can adopt eco-districts in some area and start to turn this around, but it will be a 50-100 year project to correct US planning.
> HCD reviewed SF’s housing element and said it “largely compiled” with the state’s rules, even though it was heavy on promises. As such, SF will not be subjected to the builder remedy on Wednesday. Shockingly, only a few other Bay Area jurisdictions can claim to keep their zoning as of writing this: Emeryville, Redwood City, and Alameda city.
SF zoned a bunch of the Richmond and Sunset (which aren't really "IMBY") for high density, sounds like. So no, this isn't going to radically change anything for SF.
This isn't removing zoning. It is changing zoning to someone else's view. There are still low income requirements for building. The state still has zoning powers.
Sounds too good to be true. I’m skeptical that cities won’t just add more rules and reviews that end up extending the process 2x or more (plus more review fees!)
It takes about a year to get permits in most cities in the best of cases, and we're in uncharted waters here, legally, so I would not expect anything to break ground for years.
I'd still prefer to tackle the motivations for NIMBYism (namely: by using land value taxation to discourage or outright eliminate the treatment of land as a speculative asset) rather than the symptoms, but tackling the symptoms is infinitely better than doing nothing at all.
It's really hard (maybe impossible) to completely stop speculation on land while at the same time being sure you can estimate your living expenses very long term when you buy a house (or rent, if there's rent control). If you think housing is a human right then you have to lock down taxes, otherwise it's like yeah it's a human right until it becomes "too expensive for you" and the government kicks you out of your house because you can't pay taxes. The human right is to establish a home, not to have to be a nomad constantly moving around to the places where you can pay taxes/rent.
The problem is the current zoning laws are too individualistic. If let's say 20% of a block is ok to sell and allow high rises, if the building fits and meets neighborhood regulations they should be allowed to build it. In cities where you can do that, that usually convinces 60% more of the block into selling and moving out, since higher density housing zoning raises land prices. If you don't want to because you are in your last years, yeah that sucks. But you know what also sucks? Having to rent from slumlords or have 15 roommates in your prime while trying to contribute to society as a professional because your city decided to be a retirement community funded by commercial lease taxes from greedy tech companies.
Possibly the opposite. If you own a home on a lot that previously you could only build one or two units on, but now you can build N+ units, that lot is worth a lot more.
The math of this: a lot with 1 unit, worth $1m today, becomes a lot worth $3m and 10 units on it. So the cost per unit is $300k; unit price goes down, but value for the original land owner goes up.
yea but once anything starts getting actually built prices have to fall, that's sort of the point, and it's not like demand is so high that every house in the Bay Area would need to be replaced by an apartment building.
If you ever go to a local planning meeting, when the topic of building new houses comes up, the reaction of those living near is always blatant and horrific. Lots of talk about "low-quality" tenants "ruining the character". It doesn't take a genius to know what these people mean.
San Francisco's housing element is a sham, but their NIMBY-pandering supervisors have successfully kicked the can down 4 years. By then, the city will have gone sufficiently down Detroit's path of urban decay that there won't be any developers left willing to build there.
That's a poorly-written sentence. The law requires a certain percentage of units to be set aside for households making below 120% of the AMI, with rents restricted to be affordable to such families.
Got it - so it's sort of the same thing as the prior sentence. I'm semi familiar with the setup having lived in Mission Bay for a few years. Thanks for clarifying!
> Old law proposes to turn the Bay Area's zoning system into something like Japan's in just two days.
Would be exciting to see this flip switched because it would help resolve some debates at the very least.
Clearly the housing market in Japan is dramatically different than that of North America and it would be very interesting to see if it is indeed the zoning that is the dominant reason for this difference.
Many have pointed to the zoning as being the core thing that induces more affordable housing in Japan, and hand in hand with that is the notion that if we adopted a more Japanese style zoning that we'd see some of our housing problems solved, but there are many other differences between the housing economy of Japan and NA than just zoning.
If we more closely mirror Japanese style zoning and we don't see the same results, it means there's more to it than just the zoning.
How about some zoning laws to build adequate soundproofing?
With efficiency being in homes being stacked, more stress and disruption and crime come from low quality and control in walls/floors especially in regard to soundproofing.
It's worth noting the overlap of the people mocking San Francisco for having a homelessness crisis and those decrying upzoning for density and providing affordable housing.
Tbf, why are yimbys celebrating all over twitter? You do NOT want your enemies to know that they are about to fall, they might just fight back. At least wait until after Feb 1?
FWIW this has been a pretty epic journey and is a great way to illustrate how government can work, even when people with money are united against it doing so.
Still, the accusation that California should "do what they purport to believe in" still has quite the bite. As the 5th largest economy in the world it should be possible for California to demonstrate a reformed health care policy that is more in line with other developed countries but has not been able to. Just my $0.02.
I think this line from the article serves as a good summary:
> We’ve never seen anything like this in California housing history where a residential building of any height, with any amount of parking, can be placed in the wealthiest communities in the world provided its just 20% affordable and is safe.
That slogan has been poisoned in the public consciousness, but the idea of it isn't a bad one. You do get problems like this in government occasionally where it's not exactly corruption, but things have degraded so much it looks corruption-esque.
It's suspicious that I can't find any news articles talking about this. Seems like a super interesting, controversial, and timely topic to cover. Makes me wonder if this blog is misleading or inflating the facts.
The coastal zone is also subject to Coastal Commission oversight, which I believe could override the Builder's Remedy, though the legal specifics would probably have to be settled in court, IIRC. Chris Elmendorf has written on this, if you want details.
But the prospect of a long lawsuit or a long decision will be enough to kill nearly all Builders Remedy projects in the coastal zone, as it would jack up the risk of success far too high to pay for the profits, most likely.
ahh makes sense. not sure how far in the coastal commission would have control, but even a 10 story building far enough in would drastically change the landscape of say the sunset district in San Francisco
"
And in the Bay Area, our time is almost up. HCD has made clear than any housing element that doesn’t zone feasibly for new housing especially in affluent areas will have their housing elements rejected. If they’re still in a rejected state by the deadline, their zoning disappears. If a city creates a good housing element and HCD approves, the builder’s remedy turns off and their local zoning is restored — but the projects approved under builder’s remedy will remain.
San Francisco frantically sought to avoid this, especially since HCD drew extra fire on the city and announced a special investigation into the slow housing approval process of San Francisco’s political system. The first ever housing investigation of its kind. Supervisors in the city cried they were being targeted and bullied by the state — but it worked. Fearing total loss of the highly sacred power to approve housing in San Francisco, the Board of Supervisors, the Planning Department & Commission, and the political activists of the city assembled quite a radical (but potentially lemon) housing element. One that proposes to upzone corridors in SF’s wealthier and lower density westside, something that was long believed to be politically impossible a year or two ago.
HCD reviewed SF’s housing element and said it “largely compiled” with the state’s rules, even though it was heavy on promises. As such, SF will not be subjected to the builder remedy on Wednesday. Shockingly, only a few other Bay Area jurisdictions can claim to keep their zoning as of writing this: Emeryville, Redwood City, and Alameda city.
"
If you want to end homelessness in California build affordable housing everywhere and hire the homeless to be go-fors on construction projects.
There is absolutely no reason that there should be sub five story buildings in downtown San Francisco when there are people living on the street.
Imagine if people could start building these cool buildings from AI: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-01-31/architect... but for large scale residential housing. You could have a whole new generation of architectural firms building the future of urban living.
Who covers the new costs for high-rise firetrucks, crews, and training?
What about high-pressure water supply for upper floors and high-capacity sewage management for the suddenly increased, ahem... effluence of these new living spaces?
What about suddenly dumping another 2,000 cars into a neighborhood without parking and traffic management for everyone leaving and returning at the same time? (magical thinking about mass transit?)
Surface and sub-surface infrastructure costs remain the hidden barrier to expansion and they can't be wished away. Real zoning is about managing capital investments and leveraging infrastructure for dual use where possible. Yes, it can be used for evil, but at the root, zoning is actually about central social management of scarce infrastructure resources.
So, I guess, hooray? You've unleashed a bunch of capitalist land barons who can now ignore local citizen oversight of their countryside and capital infrastructure spending?
You may not be happy with today, but the impact of this change is not well considered and I suspect the 7-year wailing will come from every optimistic constituent whose childlike expectations were obviously never possible through simple inspection of the proposal
All of the issues you just mentioned are much more expensive on a per capita basis to deal with in spread-out car-centric suburbs than in dense cities. Indeed if these are the issues that you actually care about them you should be championing as many people living in dense cities in possible. Such people use much less water, can much more efficiently be served by emergency services, generate way less car traffic, etc., etc. This law being enforced is a win-win as far as you're concerned.
The home of ironies like "Let's build affordable housing" and simultaneously "not in my back yard". You can replace "affordable housing" with other things, like improved electrical grid power lines, or water storage reservoirs, and so on... and so forth...
>Developers will be allowed to propose housing at any height and any density anywhere in a city, so long as at least 20% of the homes in the proposed building are deed-restricted to low income residents who make at or less than 80% the area median income.
With neither of these percentages being 50, it sounds to me like this policy ensures gentrification.
California is still in the middle of a drought, and politicians want to railroad the production of additional housing supply for more people when the state can barely afford to provide for the water needs of the population it has?
This has nothing to do with creating housing for the homeless. Homeless shelters already exist. This is about creating affordable housing for people moving into an area that can't support the population it already has. Until all the appropriations that were made for creating additional reservoirs start actually seeing results there shouldn't be ANY new construction.
I get not wanting to suddenly put an extra five hundred families onto a road that was only designed for a hundred single-family dwellings. What I don't get is being so nimby that you'd rather have your streets utterly full of homeless people and human waste.
I don't think that it's a preference either/or for nimby people. It's important to steelman arguments to better understand the incentives of people. My understanding is that there is a personal desire not to have one's personal life rapidly disrupted by increased demand of communal resources such as road space. There's a desire to consistently put off this rapid change. The second-order effects like an increased presence of homelessness doesn't intuitively have to do with not building an apartment: you can reason to yourself as a homeowner that these are people not even from your suburb community, but strangers invading it and ruining it, adding to the notion that more people decreases your quality of life personally.
Imagine if there was a law that only permitted the construction of cars that cost over $100,000 per year, and then think about the effects of that on used car prices
This is not my understanding. 70% of the homeless in SF had an apartment before they became homeless. They had income, but weren't able to continue to afford the apartment. There's certainly a portion of people who have no desire to be productive, but it's far from all of the homeless or even a majority.
Alternatives/"solutions" aren't always better than that which they seek to replace or fix and may very well be noticeably worse.
Homeless people are an annoyance but so is extremely dense housing to the point that local resources and infrastructure are overloaded. In addition, I'm skeptical that the new housing developments will even resolve the homeless problem, as its not really targeting the root cause of the issue. Most of the homeless aren't keen on helping themselves, either. You'd have more luck shipping them off to coal mines to work than this, I reckon.
I don't really see what's wrong with the residents of a town saying "town's full, go away." The properties in CA are expensive because it's a highly desirable place to live. There are other states with open arms welcoming new growth. I don't have a problem with either.
This attitude has led to pretty much everyone I grew up with not being able to afford to live anywhere near where they grew up (or their parents), as well as rising homelessness, declining school population, and an inability to hire teachers, bus drivers or city staff. Also a strong case it is choking innovation in one of the most creative areas in human history.
If you don't build then as people get richer they buy second homes, put homes on Zillow, merge lots into one and your population gradually thins out.
'Here’s a brief rundown of cities’ housing element status by yimby activists who have been pressuring suburbs and cities throughout the Bay Area to abide by fair housing and re-zone their wealthy enclaves.'
Should really be 'Yes In Your Back Yard' activists, not 'yes in my back yard'. Few of these 'activists' want to be sardined in with new, noisy neighbors in reality.
How are the utilities infrastructures going to cope with all these extra water and effluent issues? California is pretty old and rickety underground, especially the SF sunset district. You can probably add smelly to noisy in these 15 minute car less city areas.
From my observation, these new housing developments are built without adequate parking and without improvements to the streets, leading to congested messes and worsening already bad traffic. How people can see this as a positive is unknown to me.
Building neighborhoods with parking can lead to worse traffic, the further out you build things, the more likely people need to drive. Roads cannot become infinitely wide, so if there's a shopping center in the middle of a city, but houses spread out for tens of miles, all those people in the radius will drive, causing more traffic. If everyone is in a denser location where more trips don't need to be done with driving, people will opt out of a car, or use a car way less, thus less congestion.
San Jose is mostly zoned single family homes with lots of parking, yet there's plenty of traffic. Maybe it's the ample space devoted to parking and driving that's the real problem, as it forces you to drive.
I think the next step is providing more services closer to people in these upzoned areas, as well as good transit to commercial centers so they can opt out of driving entirely.
On my street, a parcel with one home was just rezoned for 24 homes - with zero on site parking. 24 homes without parking will add ~ 50 cars to on street parking. There is room for maybe 30 cars on the local streets without having to cross a 6 lane highway. Interesting to see how this will play out.
You weren’t worried about traffic when people built who knows how many thousands of single family homes many miles from anything people might actually want to go to, making traffic in many US cities a complete disaster. And now that people are considering a mode of development that’s just slightly more sane - a little less car centric and a little more dense… suddenly this is what’s going to somehow push the traffic over the edge. It’s so precisely backwards it’s honestly funny.
One of the problems with new construction in some places (eg LA county) is that new construction has a requirement of too many parking spaces, not too few.
This is an important element - if developers don't have to take into account the infrastructure needs of their buildings, then won't it just lead to the tragedy of the commons?
Because California with its infinite water supply can definitely support an infinite increase in population, right?
Higher density areas don't solve a single problem. They make areas less desirable. They displace wildlife (less green areas, because WE NEED MORE HOUSING). Pandemics love density.
Higher density means more people, more local spending power, more local businesses, more demand for workers that translates into more demand for people and thus again yet again and so on and so forth. There's no end to this cycle.
So when and if this takes effect, what do self proclaimed YIMBYs think is going to happen to everything in these cities that aren’t housing? Schools, roads, grocery stores, public transit, parks, etc. Is the thinking that they’re just going to magically be expanded to meet the massively higher density than these areas were ever planned to built for?
> So when and if this takes effect, what do self proclaimed YIMBYs think is going to happen to everything in these cities that aren’t housing?
They think that, as Santa Monica did, cities will quickly file compliant housing plans and get their zoning power back, with very few (compared to need or current size, not past pace of new development) builders remedy units, and after this initial round, cities won't play chicken with the law anymore.
No magic, just incentives driving city planning priorities.
I mean, I don't think the YIMBY movement always speaks with a single voice, but I do think there's an understanding that infrastructure will have to keep up.
The thing is that in order to expand infrastructure, you need
- public pressure and demonstrated need for that expansion
- tax dollars to fund the expansion
and the quickest way to get both of those is... to build more homes and put people in them. I don't think there's any magic involved, just time and necessity.
Prop 13, the favourite legislation of NIMBYs, is the main reason why the infrastructure in California is lagging. Presumably more construction = more apartments = more tax = more infrastructure
The cities will have increased property taxes (at full rate, not 1978 rates) which they can use to expand services. It'll take a few years of pain, but that's the price cities like Santa Monica get to pay for trying to avoid doing their fair share.
> The cities will have increased property taxes (at full rate, not 1978 rates) which they can use to expand services.
No, the maximum property tax rate is much less than the 1978 rates under Prop 13 rate caps, which is the reason Prop 13 led to local government being dependent on state funding transfers.
You mean taxed based in full value for the first year, then decaying (as a share of full value) thereafter, because of the Prop 13 assessment increase limit to the lower of 2% or the rate of inflation. But maintenance cost increases over time aren't capped the way prooertt taxes are, even if property taxes were adequate to initially maintain infrastructure.
I live in Berkeley. Berkeley was originally zoned, when zoning was invented, for about a quarter million people. Berkeley has the water and sewer supply for this population. Berkeley has three subway stations that were planned to serve this population. But, in a reactionary spasm by White people suddenly faced with a rapidly growing Black population between 1950 and 1970, the city down-zoned itself in 1975, cutting the ultimate resident population capacity in half. We have an abundance of infrastructure and not enough people to exploit it or, crucially, to fund its maintenance.
The new larger tax base can have their taxes spent on schools, roads, and public transit. Also public transit benefits a lot from density so it should get more efficient per taxpayer, not less.
If a city still refuses to comply, they will just be shooting themselves in the foot.
I loathe the suburbs and car-only infrastructure. It's backwards, bone-headed, and downright treacherously stupid. In addition to zoning reform we should nationally remove mandatory parking minimums. Hell, if anything we should de-zone strip malls and any new development that practically requires a car to get to (implementation details fuzzy).
But I do have sympathy for people who move to a location or community for the aspects of that location or community and want to preserve that. It's immature to not consider that. We're also essentially just setting goal posts for what development is ok or not ok and I do think this will give further rise to private developments and incorporations that can't legally be challenged here - i.e. more gated communities.
There is real harm done, and it is anti-democratic in some ways to take state or national laws and have those supercede (micromanage in this case) local building rules or regulations. For example, where I live you have to go through local neighborhood zoning review to do things like change your door or even tear down or modify your home. We live in a historic neighborhood. Previously the government in the 60s or so wanted to tear it down and build a highway through it. In this case, the local community stopped the government from imposing a monumentally stupid new construction which would have "increased GDP" and whatever other simplistic bullshit economic metrics people use.
Certainly with that being said this doesn't also blanket excuse local entities from being "anti-development", but we probably shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. If a community neighborhood is walkable and charming with cute little shops and maybe mountains nearby or a university, guess what? It's just expensive. Develop somewhere else. Otherwise when a big corporation or the governments wants to come through and "increase land value" you will just have to do what they say with no recourse.
> There is real harm done, and it is anti-democratic in some ways to take state or national laws and have those supercede (micromanage in this case) local building rules or regulations.
You could just as easily argue it's pro-democratic because it lets the State break the power of the local, petty gentry to keep people from moving in.
I'm not concerned about "petty gentry" or whatever silly class warfare terms people use. It's not only boring but harms progress by pitting people against each other.
You can of course argue that things are or are not democratic. That's part of my point. Overriding local, more direct democracy (in theory) could be anti-democratic in my view. But doing something like having highly restrictive zoning laws such that you keep certain people out seems probably anti-democratic at best and prejudice almost certainly.
But you can make cases for both. For every "We don't like the zoning because it keeps the place expensive" there's "we don't care what the residents want this toxic waste dump has to go somewhere.
> Overriding local, more direct democracy (in theory) could be anti-democratic in my view.
Your theory is bunk, that's my point. What pits people against each other are exclusionary housing laws that the wealthy use to keep poor people separate from them, not the words we use to describe that choice.
> But you can make cases for both. For every "We don't like the zoning because it keeps the place expensive" there's "we don't care what the residents want this toxic waste dump has to go somewhere.
No you can't, because the people who promote exclusionary housing laws always want to solve the issue by putting the toxic waste dump where the poor live. Never mind that the wealth in their community is directly correlated to generating the toxic waste in the first place. When a wealthy elite foist all of their externalities on the masses, that's oligarchy baby.
It's fine to hold that as your ideal, I'm not a purist, but don't claim that's democracy by any modern definition.
What part of the theory is "bunk"? Are you suggesting that the less local a government is the more democratic it is? Please also note that I said could because I'm not making a strong claim for this to always be true.
> What pits people against each other are exclusionary housing laws that the wealthy use to keep poor people separate from them, not the words we use to describe that choice.
Generic suburbs (with their exclusionary housing laws) would have to be included in this statement for it to be true. "The wealthy" whoever that convenient scapegoat is are not the only ones who do this.
I’m explicitly stating that the fact its more local doesn’t make it more democratic per se. A small group of people who can effectively vote down the majority are not being democratic.
> The state should not be able to supersede local authority for local concerns, it's authoritarian.
Absolutely I include the suburbs I grew up in. The rich keep the middle out, and the middle keep the poor out. Not that hard to fathom.
> I’m explicitly stating that the fact its more local doesn’t make it more democratic per se.
Ok why are you explicitly stating that? Was what I wrote unclear?
> A small group of people who can effectively vote down the majority are not being democratic.
This occurs at "higher" levels of government as well.
> Absolutely I include the suburbs I grew up in. The rich keep the middle out, and the middle keep the poor out. Not that hard to fathom.
I just wanted to make it was very explicit that we're talking about the "rich" and middle class and that together they are oppressing the poor because you only mentioned "the wealthy".
What you wrote was wrong, so I refuted it. It's not anti-democratic or wrong for a state or national government to supersede laws and authority that are being used undemocratically.
> This occurs at "higher" levels of government as well.
Duh, that's why we try to achieve balances of power. The state overriding exclusionary housing laws during a housing crisis a good example of this being used correctly.
> I just wanted to make it was very explicit that we're talking about the "rich" and middle class and that together they are oppressing the poor because you only mentioned "the wealthy".
I didn't say they were working together, I said everyone is punching down.
What specifically did I write that was wrong? Because I did not claim that in all cases a state or national government subsperceding local authority is always un-democratic. I explained that it could be un-democratic. The key word is could hear.
> What pits people against each other are exclusionary housing laws that the wealthy use to keep poor people separate from them, not the words we use to describe that choice.
Just to be clear, when you wrote this instead of "the wealthy use to keep poor people separate from them" what you meant was "what each progressively wealthier group uses to keep the poorer groups separate from them" then?
> Duh, that's why we try to achieve balances of power. The state overriding exclusionary housing laws during a housing crisis a good example of this being used correctly.
"When state power is being used in the way I agree with to supersede other democratically elected governments it's good".
The State used that same justification to wield this same power to override the wishes of the historically black communities of my home town and forced them out for highway construction.
I didn't claim that it's always good or always bad or always democratic or always un-democratic for the state to override the wishes of a group of citizens and their democratically elected government. I claimed that sometimes it could be. History also shows, and I've given a very good and clear example, that this power tends to be abused. Usually by corporate interests in cahoots with the biggest government entity they can get to wield power.
My elaboration on the wealthy was sufficient. "Rich keep out the middle, middle keep out the poor".
> The State used that same justification to wield this same power to override the wishes of the historically black communities of my home town and forced them out for highway construction.
The historically black communities of your home town were almost certainly a minority within their state (or city if you grew up in LA or NYC). That is an example of democracy resulting in a morally bad result, but a democratic one nonetheless.
> There is real harm done, and it is anti-democratic in some ways to take state or national laws and have those supercede (micromanage in this case) local building rules or regulations.
No, it's really not.
There's nothing fundamentally anti-democratic about higher government overriding lower government. Often, deciding rules at a lower level doesn't work well, and this is a good example of that.
Deciding housing density at the neighborhood or city level has been an abject failure, because every city is incentivized to benefit from the metro area booming job market while not shouldering responsibility for housing all the new people coming in. Pushing that burden onto the other cities is irresponsible, but that's what they all try to do, with the result being that hardly any cities build sufficient housing.
It'd probably be better to decide this with a metro-level authority rather than the state, but the state is still better than the city.
> There's nothing fundamentally anti-democratic about higher government overriding lower government.
> It'd probably be better to decide this with a metro-level authority rather than the state, but the state is still better than the city.
What about if the state of Ohio overrides Columbus' gun restrictions? (ex)
What if the state of Nevada mandates cities provide 2 parking spaces per dwelling?
You're just picking and choosing when the "higher" government overrides the "local" government. When you agree with it, it's good. When you disagree it's presumably still good right?
> Deciding housing density at the neighborhood or city level has been an abject failure
It's been a failure for one simple reason, which is what we build car-only infrastructure. You can't build density and car-only infrastructure. It won't work.
> What about if the state of Ohio overrides Columbus' gun restrictions? (ex)
> What if the state of Nevada mandates cities provide 2 parking spaces per dwelling?
Those are bad because the ideas are bad, not because they're "anti-democratic".
> You're just picking and choosing when the "higher" government overrides the "local" government. When you agree with it, it's good. When you disagree it's presumably still good right?
You're shifting the argument. I was talking about anti-democratic or not, not good or bad. Just because a law was passed democratically doesn't mean it's a good idea. Please try to stay on your own topic.
> It'd probably be better to decide this with a metro-level authority rather than the state, but the state is still better than the city.
It seems to me you do imply that a state level authority or higher is inherently better. But anyway, why not just clarify your position? It's not a big deal.
> Those are bad because the ideas are bad, not because they're "anti-democratic".
Ok let's start simple, what level of authority should decide those things [1]? State? City? Muni? Federal?
> Please try to stay on your own topic.
If I changed topics that's fine we can talk about the new topic or not. I don't even know what the exact topic was. Do you recall?
[1] A state declares that all dwellings should have a minimum of two parking spaces, and the state law overrides the city's gun laws.
> Ok let's start simple, what level of authority should decide those things [1]? State? City? Muni? Federal?
Straight up just admitting you didn't actually read what I wrote before responding, because I already specified. C'mon man.
"It'd probably be better to decide this with a metro-level authority rather than the state, but the state is still better than the city."
> Do you recall?
Yes, and I made it extremely clear that I was objecting to calling this "anti-democratic". You then switched arguments for some reason, while acting like it was the same topic.
> Yes, and I made it extremely clear that I was objecting to calling this "anti-democratic". You then switched arguments for some reason, while acting like it was the same topic.
Ok so it's democratic for the state of Ohio to override the city of Columbus gun laws?
It's not anti-democratic for a higher level government to override a lower level government, no. That doesn't make it necessarily a good idea. Some issues make more sense to manage at a higher or lower level, and beyond that of course I have opinions on specific laws being good or bad.
What level of government you decide certain policies at is orthogonal to how democratic a thing is*.
As a relevant example of higher level authority on zoning, IIRC Japan just has twelve levels of zoning for the whole country; cities can choose which one to use for different areas, but they can't make up a new level. Whereas in the US, every city seems to have a dozen or more variants they made up themselves. Neither of these is fundamentally more democratic than the other.
* assuming we're talking about democracies at each level, of course.
I'm trying to avoid getting into a discussion about exact definitions of democracy, but what I see here is that you're arguing that the bigger a government is the more democratic it is and thus it is justified in imposing its will on other democratically elected governments by virtue of its size and I don't think that those things follow one another.
If you want to say that of course a higher (which is typically defined by size, but I guess also potentially authority or ability to enforce rules or some other concern) level government overriding a lower level government could be anti-democratic then we're just arbitrarily picking and choosing what we believe is democratic or anti-democratic which ties back to effectively expressing moral statements of good and bad.
Leaving aside natural rights, and the complexities of state sovereignty in the United States specifically.
I don't see how a small minority of wealthy people voting to keep everyone else out of their community by making it prohibitively expensive is democratic.
You’re looking at the specific case and not the general case, like in the 1950s when black communities in cities like Columbus were bulldozed for highways and had no recourse. Same line of argument.
Cities can in fact maintain zoning powers if they can prove that their zoning regulations are equitable. Protection of a historic neighborhood could theoretically be allowed, but must be balanced with other interests.
Yea but that's just "who knows" which is no more right or wrong than local residents deciding that something should or should not be.
Easy example: we are going to put a highway through this historically black neighborhood because the interests of the residents must be balanced with the economic interests of the state and the jobs created by new highway construction.
And now we have lost those neighborhoods and we're dependent on cars.
I am not an expert in California but I don't love this concept in general. Here in New York, the Governor is attempting to drive higher housing density in certain places regardless of what the local people think and want.
I think this is a sort of obvious effort at a form of gerrymandering - if the assumption is that the residents of higher-density dwellings are more likely to vote Democrat on average vs the current home owners, spreading high density housing around districts (vs concentrating them in the already-super Blue cities) locks democratic control over those districts with more probability/certainty.
There are obvious concerns being raised about - traffic, ability of utilities to handle the extra density, school capacity, not to mention wishes of those (like me) who explicitly chose a suburban lifestyle for our family - when viewed through the cynical electoral lens these concerns aren't relevant to the decision which optimizes for power concentration at the expense of everything else.
The local people in every place want to live in rural towns 5 minutes from the big city. It’s built into the human psyche. The problem is it’s geometrically impossible. So it comes down to how important you think “finders keepers” is - do the people who got there first have the right to lock everyone else out forever? However justified they may be in wanting this, it’s hard to deny that the costs imposed on everyone else from being locked out of (or trying to squeeze into) the inadequate housing supplies in high-opportunity regions are massive.
// So it comes down to how important you think “finders keepers” is - do the people who got there first have the right to lock everyone else out forever?
I get the point you're making and it's not illogical, it's just what do you prioritize? In many situations honoring the existing relationships and the wishes of people in it is the more humane choice.
When your dad married your mom, he locked everyone out from marrying her. We honor the exclusivity of their relationship even if there are like 5 single guys in town. We don't force your parents to let 5 additional men into the relationship because it's not fair that they are locked out.
Why should your dad have some special status with your mom - why "finders keepers?" But in reality, we honor that because we understand that forcing equity here would be horrific.
Obviously I am making assumptions about your fam and that's just an example, and obviously your marriage is an even more intimate topic than the nature of your town, but you can see the continuum I think. If I upended my life to live in a certain type of town, it's very turbulent to have that town completely change by government decree.
Also - there's no finders keepers here. Like 20% of my town is families that moves from the city during covid. There's constant turnover as older folks move out and younger families move in. What stays constant is the nature of town - those who want that nature move here, those who don't, stay in NYC.
Men and women are naturally born in equal proportion, and government policies that have created big structural imbalances are generally considered awful mistakes.
Around California cities which is where this discussion is relevant, everyone already votes Democrat. The thing is which Democrat.
So, it's a little bit of this, a little bit of that regarding gerrymandering. For example the article talks about Atherton getting high-rises. Those apartments would probably be occupied by transplants from another city like San Francisco, and those voters would be more familiar with the "left" Democrats and maybe turn Atherton less conservative (which is honestly not that hard, it's a city that's literally against public transport). The units those people vacate on San Francisco would get squeezed in by lower income voters upgrading their living conditions which is something very functional to the current SF government. That's just a theory of course.
In my opinion most of this more aggressive stance at fixing the California housing emergency is motivated either by true commitment and vocation, which is not hard to find regarding housing since the situation is really bad. In the case of Wiener he's been doing this for a while and sounds like a true believer. Of course some legislators supporting this may just be thinking about using it as a platform to run for executive or federal positions, but honestly looking at the track record of most people pushing this you can see they legitimately have been tackling hard problems in all of their political careers.
> regardless of what the local people think and want.
NIMBY has caused so many issues that I'm not sure the people who already live in a place should have this much power. They bought the land their property sits on and nothing else.
> if the assumption is that the residents of higher-density dwellings are more likely to vote Democrat on average vs the current home owners
Citation needed.
> There are obvious concerns being raised about - traffic
You know the great thing about higher density areas? You can have effective public transportation. Low density zoning connected by highways is the main driving force for traffic.
> ability of utilities to handle the extra density
It's much cheaper to do that versus low density.
> school capacity
Might require more schools. Or larger schools since one can serve more people. Certainly easier to do than having many schools spread across a large area.
> not to mention wishes of those (like me) who explicitly chose a suburban lifestyle for our family
You should book a trip with your family and visit an european country, with their walkable cities. And then come back and let us know if a suburb – which you can only reach via car and people are mostly inside their houses because there's nothing to do outside – is really preferable to a city where you can actually walk around (and, for kids, actually socialize)
// You should book a trip with your family and visit an european country, with their walkable cities. And then come back and let us know if a suburb – which you can only reach via car and people are mostly inside their houses because there's nothing to do outside – is really preferable to a city where you can actually walk around (and, for kids, actually socialize)
(I am the person you're responding to.) I grew up in Europe and then lived in NYC. So I am extremely familiar with this model. I am also someone who chose to live in the burbs once we had kids.
In Manhattan, my neighbors had ~0 kids on average. In my current town, my neighbors are by and large former NYC residents who have ~3-4 kids on average. Very clearly people with kids are choosing the burbs, despite plenty of experience with the other model, and I expect that most of my neighbors have been to Europe plenty. We know the options.
Also, have you ever been to Europe outside the big cities? You need a car.
And also also, do you have kids? I was much more enthused about city life before I had a family, now I get it.
Honestly that’s some pretty complex calculus. I think it has more to do with the fact there are Hoovervilles all over the west coast due to the extreme cost of housing. Being in NY I get it, you don’t really see them there. But but you should come visit the best coast and check it out - the homelessness problem is like a Great Depression scene. Literally every public open space in seattle is encamped, every road is lined with broken down RVs that folks are living in, etc. It’s gotten worse over the last 5 years to the point there’s something obviously wrong. While the insane and drug dependent are the most visible my understanding is this new wave of homeless are simply priced out of housing.
The only solution is to build more homes. It doesn’t get more complicated.
Note, these homeless already live here and are entitled to vote. Putting them in a home won’t change the demographics.
That said, I’m generally not in favor of radical housing and zoning reform. I think there are middle path solutions. But it’s not a gerrymandering induced issue, it’s an extreme homelessness induced issue.
If the Governor is wildly successful your town's housing supply will grow by about 2% per year. That is not enough to do a gerrymander and it's not going to change your "suburban lifestyle."
It will let more people afford to live close to one of the world's great cities though, instead of moving to a lower opportunity area like Jacksonville.
// our town's housing supply will grow by about 2% per year. That is not enough to do a gerrymander and it's not going to change your "suburban lifestyle."
I don't get your math. If the town is very closely split as many of NY suburbs are, they may go 49/51 red or blue depending on the year.
2% a year is 8% growth (ignoring compounding..) between two presidential elections. That's enough to lock in the outcome if you can predict that incoming residents are bluer or redder (in this case, bluer) than the existing given how close it is.
The deadlock in the bay area is much worse than than NYC, not sure about new york state. E.g. NYC has a maximum amount of time you're allowed to argue about some new development, the bay area doesn't.
Generally speaking in the Northeast there's way more inbuilt density so this is less of an issue imo.
Things are so spread out over here that trains literally don't exist.
As someone who grew up in California and is now in NY, I don't think that hypothesis is correct at all. And even if it was, isn't it actually less gerrymandering? Uniformly spreading the different populations is much fairer than artificially restricting them to an "already-super Blue city".
// artificially restricting them to an "already-super Blue city".
I think the idea is that people are choosing how to live. When I was younger, I chose to live in Manhattan because that made sense for work and dating. If Manhattan was rezoned to single-family homes, I'd be pissed.
Now I chose to live in an a medium density area (.15 acre lots, way less dense than the city, much more dense than the 2 acre lots in other towns) because of the lifestyle it affords. We know all our neighbors, the streets are quiet, etc. Everyone who lives here owns here. Everyone in this town chose this town for these attributes.
To stick in a high-rise here despite the desires of every resident would be the "artificial" thing. In the city, you can always build higher and nobody can really object to the extra density because that was always part of the equation.
I don't think Democrats are worried about losing control of California any time soon, it's basically a one party rule situation. The political divide is primarily rural parts of the state vs everyone else. The entire Bay Area, including the suburban parts, consistently votes Democrat about 2:1.
I generally agree with what you’re saying, but things have swung so hard in California that’s it’s impossible to build here. It’s only natural when everything boils over and it swings hard in the other direction. Eventually there will be equilibrium.
The entire SF Bay Area votes strongly Democratic already; the most Republican county in the Bay Area is Solano County, where Trump got 34% of the vote in 2020.
Weiner is DSA so this isn't too surprising given the long winding march they've been taking (and succeeding) to destroy everything here. Most likely the net effect will be more people leaving behind California as it plunges into the abyss. The comments here embracing what is actually a play for anarchy when it comes to building is a good sign of what's to come for the state as a whole. I don't think there's really any path to correcting it at this point, since it's basically just smarter to leave.
edit: I'll happily take any downvoters on a 10 year long bet that California will continue to see a net outflow of the wealthy and continual growth in crime absent a flip back, however temporarily, to Republican rule at the state level. Easy bet.
When I visited, I found Seoul to be an amazing city. While there was higher density there, I would not describe it as 'congested' because they had planning for how to manage (mostly) foot traffic.
I would be very happy if Sunnyvale/Santa Clara started to look a bit more like seoul.
I mean, California already has both a massive homelessness problem and a major housing shortage. The prices from the latter have driven a ton of migration out of the state. Is your solution to just do nothing?
It's sad that people assume density must mean mega cities instead of gentle density like Paris suburbs. You could double the Bay Area's density by approving duplexes, fourplexes, and sixplexes + a few more more apartment buildings.
All of these can look like they fit in the neighborhood too quite easily.
Have you ever been to Mumbai? Have you been inside their newer luxury buildings?
It has many issues, but the modern tall buildings in Mumbai are amazing and are the solution to many of their issues.
If the US would start to build new buildings like Mumbai or Singapore more Americans would realize just what luxury and space a condo could have!
Mumbai needs more walkability (through super blocks and such), better trash etiquette (more trash cans - especially for the middle classes new fascination with dogs), and it needs 1000x more livable square feet.
I would probably create a bridge or something over the slums. Cheap enough toll to not be much for the people living in the condos, but expensive enough those living in squalor below find it unaffordable. Then you could pretty much live your life going from middle class+ establishment to the next without having to think about the slums below. The bridge would also double as a shelter over any leaking tarp roofs below.
The “toll” to be on the bridge is the cost of ownership of motorized transport. Wealth segregation by neighborhood is also a thing. This segregation is executed similarly to how it is in North America or Europe.
FWIW, in Mumbai they differentiate a bridge to be road over water and a flyover to be road over other road or residence.
If you want your own undisturbed 10,000 sqft domain, like a British lord of old, you can move to Idaho. Or pay a huge premium to compete for a limited pool of available low density land.
This has the real possibility to destroy wealth and land value. I understand the desire for more housing, but you absolutely need people in the community to be making these decisions. State-level officials don't have the ability to make informed decisions on important local issues like this.
Unfortunately, I have first-hand experience with this. The state decided to build a (very) small bridge over a creek in my neighborhood. The purpose of the bridge was to make it easier to get to the highway. None of the residents wanted this bridge, but it was built any way. After the bridge was built, Google Maps started routing people off the highway during rush hour, creating gridlock and heavy traffic. As a result, you can't leave your house between 7-10 and 4-6. Walking on the streets is dangerous as drivers stuck in gridlock become increasingly aggressive towards pedestrians. And don't even think about trying to drive somewhere. It takes 30-45 minutes just to drive a few blocks.
The irony is that this "shortcut" doesn't save any time. Google Maps routes people from the highway into town up until traffic is so bad in town that it... takes just as much time as the highway. So the beauty of this small town was destroyed for literally no reason. Property values have begun to decline as it is no longer a desirable place to live.
Of course, prior to building the bridge, the state ran "traffic studies" that indicated there would be no impact to traffic in town. They had no incentive to really study the problem, however, as there are no consequences for them if they do a bad job.
Another way to say "this will destroy land value" is "this will lower housing prices". That's the point.
But reality is more nuanced than that; the cost/value of apartments will go down, but the cost/value of single-family houses will go up, as there will be interest in buying the latter and turning it into the former. Land values will go up; rent and condo prices will go down.
No, that's not what I'm saying at all. "Destroy land value" doesn't mean lower housing prices, or at least lower in a productive way. Imagine you have some land and then the city builds a dump next to the land. That destroys the value of the land because no one wants to live there anymore. Housing prices are a second-order effect based off of the land value and the availability of housing units. The new policy in California's purpose is to increase housing units, but has the potential to destroy the value of the land.
Again, I'm not saying that multi-family housing is akin to a garbage dump. I fully support more housing. But, the state officials making these decisions have no incentive to ensure that they're preserving the land's value. Any system that doesn't provide incentives for the decision makers to make good decisions ends terribly.
> This has the real possibility to destroy wealth and land value.
Good.
Treating increasing unaffordability as a good thing is an insane part of American culture. We didn't celebrate car prices going through the roof during the pandemic, and neither does it make sense to celebrate skyrocketing housing prices.
The ideal price of housing would be zero, same as other products.
No, not good. It doesn't make sense to destroy wealth. If you want to transfer wealth from one party (land owners) to another (renters) that's fine. The land itself has intrinsic value. It's fine to transfer that value from one party to another. But it's absolutely not fine to destroy it. Everyone is worse off.
Your argument is basically that we should start salting farm land to decrease its value.
Destroying wealth because you've lowered the price of goods and make them more accessible, is not the same thing as destroying wealth by actually destroying the utility of something.
If I made a super food replicator that halved the price of food permanently, that would destroy much wealth in the agricultural sector, and it would still be a good thing for humanity as a whole.
Truth be told, the value of the land itself in these cities, I don't think will change very much. The value of the property on top of that land though, that'll probably change, as the total housing supply increases.
> If I made a super food replicator that halved the price of food permanently, that would destroy much wealth in the agricultural sector, and it would still be a good thing for humanity as a whole.
No, no wealth would be destroyed. Some of the old agricultural sector's wealth would be transferred to you. The rest would stay with the purchasers of food. Again, no wealth is destroyed when you make something more productive. In fact, your food replicator creates wealth because people get the same amount of food and have more money.
Again, I think you're getting confused by the concepts of destroying wealth and transferring wealth. In your scenario, you're transferring and creating wealth through innovation. In my anecdote, wealth was destroyed. It didn't go anywhere. It just ceased to exist.
This was exactly the attitude causing the problem in the first place.
The long term solution of housing being cheap is obviously superior to the long term solution of housing prices doubling every generation until nobody but the very wealthy can afford to buy a home.
My parents own a home in the bay area, so it does actually indirectly affect me. But so did leaving the bay area because it was insanely expensive (and similarly, almost everyone from my graduating class left too).
> This has the real possibility to destroy wealth and land value
Good. Housing is way too expensive, and people who have the luxury of owning housing, especially in California, could stand to lose some small percentage of their wealth if it means we can better provide a necessary part of life to someone less wealthy.
Bummer, but people aren't cars and builder's remedy shouldn't apply to bridges on public roads? You just named a good reason to ban cars nearby though.
The point is that the state made a decision for the state’s benefit without considering the impact on the town itself. And this is natural: those in the state government have little incentive to care about the impact on the town.
Also, ironically, the town has excellent train and bus coverage. Most don’t own cars. And if they do, they use them seldomly. We all moved here because we don’t like cars and wanted a place with good mass transit. Now all those benefits are gone.
When people want housing change, I think they really want to transfer some of the wealth from landowners to other people. But in my case, no wealth was transferred. It was literally destroyed. Everyone is worse off.
I think we agree, actually. In your case the state is imposing a negative externality (more cars). I am investigating moving to bloommerwede.nl/ and I will be FURIOUS if the Dutch government forces them to start letting cars through.
Just out of curiosity, may I ask roughly where you are?
I hope we can agree that the common enemy here is cars. The cities have spent most of a century fighting homes for, among other reasons, the belief that more homes means more cars (which isn't true if your city isn't horrible, but almost all American cities are car-choked hellscapes).
So far as I'm aware Builder's Remedy should not mean more roads being built. Hopefully, it eventually leads to car infrastructure like parking garages being removed in favour of housing.
