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Comment by karma_vaccum123 | Hacker News Reader

Governor Brown is trying to move legislation that would allow developments that meet a minimum below-market allocation to bypass local approval completely.

If this becomes law, NIMBYs will become extinct quickly as developers will just bite the bullet and include a lower-cost component to get fast-track approval to build directly from the State. And they'll get it.

Personally I feel that we are really getting close to killing the golden goose. At some point, companies will leave or grow large satellite offices elsewhere if housing becomes unattainable even to well-paid employees. We need to inform change, not fight it.

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I support this change, but it applies to the zoning that exists. If it passes, NIMBY efforts will shift to down zoning. Down zoning has already happened in many cities (including San Francisco), but it could be taken further.

Generally speaking, the downzoning already happened decades ago.

In CA, various state laws require that cities zone some parcels for new housing. Often, that housing never happens because cities can disapprove even zoning-compliant projects on those parcels. The by-right law is intended to fix that problem.

Unfortunately, the by-right law does not seem likely to pass the legislature. If you support it, you should call and email your state reps.

> If it passes, NIMBY efforts will shift to down zoning.

For once, CEQA would actually protect the environment: Nowadays, downzoning requires an impact study. There's no way any credible study could conclude that promoting sprawl is good for the planet.

Unfortunately, environmental review is often a vehicle for ensuring that people get as many chances to complain and obstruct as possible, even if the environmental impacts are minimal. An example of absurd objections in this vein can be found in the Virginia Avenue Tunnel replacement project, where residents objected because:

a) It would lower their home values (note that the railroad tunnel predates the houses by a few decades, and the railroad has talked about doing this project for 2 decades)

b) Extra train traffic means more pollution. Seems reasonable, until you realize that the tunnel is almost literally in the shadow (it's on the south side, not north, so not quite literally) of an interstate. Guess who's responsible for most of the air pollution.

c) The project calls for railroad to temporarily run in a exposed trench while building the tunnel. Residents are worried about what would happen if an oil tanker car caught fire. Unfortunately, a glance at the map indicates that this is not on the routes between oil supply centers and oil demand centers, and, as Baltimore found out (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Street_Tunnel_fire ), fires in tunnels are much worse than fires in the open air.

> Unfortunately, environmental review is often a vehicle for ensuring that people get as many chances to complain and obstruct as possible, even if the environmental impacts are minimal

Yes, but this time instead of an individual development being up for CEQA obstruction (which favors NIMBYs), proposed rezoning would be subject to environmental review. This means pro-growth people could use the NIMBYs' own favorite tool against them, preventing down zoning. Poetic justice.

If as-of-right passes, and NIMBYs shift to downzoning, we can pass another law to deal with that. After all, if as-of-right passes, the legislators who voted for it would probably also be willing to vote for restrictions on downzoning -- especially when downzoning is done in direct opposition to the intent of the as-of-right law they just passed.

There already is a law[1] that prevents downzoning: the Housing Element law. Every 7 years, local governments are required to create a document (the Housing Element) that demonstrates that they have zoned enough housing for their share of the estimated regional population growth (Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA)). But almost every locality (especially San Francisco) routinely falls short of the allocated housing production[2]. The housing by-right bill is the Governor’s attempt to fix the perceived flaw with the Housing Element law that localities promise that they will allow a certain number of housing units but break their word by rejecting the actual projects during discretionary review.

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x....

[2] http://www.abag.ca.gov/planning/housing/datasets.html#report...

"Personally I feel that we are really getting close to killing the golden goose. At some point, companies will leave or grow large satellite offices elsewhere if housing becomes unattainable even to well-paid employees."

Good! Fantastic! Brilliant! Because that's the start to an actual, sustainable solution for this problem. I have no problem with construction, but diversification of the tech industry is far more important.

It is absolutely insane to believe that you can continue to cram the global tech industry into the popular third of the SF peninsula (i.e. the ~20 square miles east of Divisadero and north of Cesar Chavez), and maintain affordable housing. No matter how much you build, it's going to be ridiculously expensive, because developers do not build into falling markets. Manhattan and London and Tokyo are not cheap places to live, despite decades of construction. Moreover, even in "high-rise" cities like Tokyo, most of the residential construction is under 5 stories. Those cities sprawl to accommodate their population. SF doesn't have that option.

At this point, the only rational solution is for the tech industry to diversify geographically. It's better for SF, it's better for the companies, and it's way, way better for the employees.

We need both. Prices are rising in desirable places all over the west coast because of the same NIMBY attitudes.

Prices will rise anywhere demand is concentrated. There is simply not enough land in most of the Bay Area for reasonable rents, as additional supply will be quickly soaked up (just as building additional road capacity is futile, and is quickly swamped with more traffic).

You can use either the carrot or the stick to promote tech companies to either deploy satellite offices across the country or enable remote work, but this is not a planning problem, its a tech sector externality.

With apologies to Sam Kinison, "Move where the land is cheap."

I have no problem with construction, but you're equivocating.

The SF housing crunch is an acute, hyper-local problem, obviously caused by a tech bubble. Rents were declining in SF as recently as 2009. Rents decline rapidly as you get further from the city.

The long-term price trends of homes in (say) San Luis Obispo, while interesting, is of little relevance to the discussion. The markets are so different that you can't draw any conclusions (except, perhaps, that Prop 13 is a horrible law, and that mortgage interest deduction is a disastrous public policy choice).

It's not just a local problem though: there is a steady flow of people moving to, say, Portland because they have no hope of owning a house in the Bay Area in a place close to their jobs. As a consequence, prices in Portland are growing rapidly. Same thing here in Bend.

There is also a nationwide increase in housing prices going on: the Case-Shiller housing price index is back where it was in 2008, before the crash. But San Francisco's problems go above and beyond this macroeconomic trend.

San Fran is particularly bad, but it's a problem anywhere that is now 'desirable':

http://www.oregonlive.com/front-porch/index.ssf/2016/05/port...

Rents were declining in 2009? On the back of the biggest recession in 80 yrs and a collapse of the housing market?

You shock me.

You're easily "shocked", I suppose. I'm not making a moral judgment, I'm pointing out that SF has gone from declining rents to a "crisis" market within a few years' time. The rent crisis is acute, and it's quite obviously due to a bubble on the demand side.

I could have just as easily used 2012 as the year, because rents were more-or-less flat in SF from 2010-2012, after some declines in 2009. Rent lunacy began concurrently with startup valuation lunacy.

You're wrong about Tokyo, where housing prices have remained pretty flat for the last 20 years: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/08/lai...

Yeah, well...certainly another feasible option for affordable housing is a huge economic crash followed by two decades of negative growth and/or deflation.

That said, I fail to see how this makes me "wrong"...I said that most residential construction in Tokyo is under five stories, and that the city sprawls. Both are true statements. Tokyo has enormous, far-flung suburbs of low-rise buildings, and most of the population lives there.

It's better than SF, in that you do see taller (i.e. 5-10 story) buildings along major roads, and the buildings have a smaller footprint, but these things are details. Tokyo is a gigantic, sprawling city. It's something like 20 times the size of SF.

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