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.
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.