Scott Wiener proposes 3 new housing bills for CA | Hacker News Reader

Scott Wiener proposes 3 new housing bills for CA

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16 pointssid-kap11 comments

    SB 827 creates density and height zoning minimums near transit.
  Under SB 827, parcels within a half-mile of high-connectivity transit
  hub — like BART, Muni, Caltrain, and LA Metro stations — will
  be required to have no density maximums (such as single family
  home mandates), no parking minimums, and a minimum height limit
  of between 45 and 85 feet, depending on various factors, such
  as whether the parcel is on a larger corridor and whether it is
  immediately adjacent to the station. A local ordinance can increase
  that height but not go below it. SB 827 allows for many more
  smaller apartment buildings, described as the “missing middle”
  between high-rise steel construction and single family homes.

I think this is overstepping a lot and I hope it fails. Muni is very much within san francisco where there is high density housing, but does this mean all stops? There's a million muni stops and some of them are in areas that don't need such high density. BART can travel very far outside the city to less dense areas. Some caltrain stations are very suburban. This says all parcels within half mile of those station need to be higher density, that is a LOT of homes. You are telling those people who live there that they can never rebuild? If they want to rebuild their house they need to make it into an apartment complex? Is their parcel even big enough for that?

There's hundreds and hundreds of 5,000sqft lots within a half mile of caltrain. Your house burns down in a fire, you cant build it back? A 45 foot house would be at least 3 stories. It's one thing to say we need more dense homes in this area. But if the area was designed and laid our for single family homes with small single family lots, how is putting a 3 story house on those small lots going to help? It's also saying there's no minimum parking requirements. Not that you could really get any underground parking on some of these lots but street parking is going to be trashed as well? It's the suburbs! You do need a car out there! Caltrain/Bart is not the only form of transportation you use!

This seems really shortsighted and ignores the problem that each city and community is a little different. Some cities along the Bart/Caltrain lines could handle this. Others could not. A top down approach saying everything is the same and must follow these rules is not going to work

The idea is not to have a 3 story house, but to have 3 housing units on that 5,000 sq ft lot - which is not even remotely Manhattanization of the neighborhood. However, unless this bill prevents or limits the applicability of minimum size requirements per housing unit, you've got a loophole big enough to drive a very tall single family home through.

I don't really follow how you think this would prevent someone from building back their house if it burned down. As far as I can tell, the idea isn't to force property owners to build taller buildings. It's to not force them to build shorter buildings.

> but does this mean all stops?

SB 827: > parcels within a half-mile of high-connectivity transit hub

[Emphasis added]

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> This says all parcels within half mile of those station need to be higher density

SB 827: > will be required to have no density maximums [...] a minimum height limit of between 45 and 85 feet

[Emphasis added]

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> It's also saying there's no minimum parking requirements [...] street parking is going to be trashed as well?

These are minimums, and cities have often set minimums high to discourage growth. Also,

> parcels within a half-mile of high-connectivity transit hub

That probably doesn't cover suburban stations way out from cities.

> You are telling those people who live there that they can never rebuild? If they want to rebuild their house they need to make it into an apartment complex?

Is it possible you have misparsed "minimum height limit" as a set of minimum requirements on height? I believe it refers to a minimum on height limits, saying that lots cannot be zoned to be one-story-only. Your hypothetical family will be able to rebuild under this.

> This seems really shortsighted and ignores the problem that each city and community is a little different. Some cities along the Bart/Caltrain lines could handle this. Others could not. A top down approach saying everything is the same and must follow these rules is not going to work

You're absolutely right right! This is, in a great many ways, very far from an ideal approach. It refuses to offer the kind of flexibility that individual cities and communities could use to best benefit their residents.

The problem is that these cities and communities have taken that liberty and spent decades abusing it. They have, by and large, used their rights to decide that the appropriate amount of development for them is little to none. This legislation has the feel of a response to those abuses.

What precisely does "X% of people in an metropolitan statistical area cannot afford local rent?" mean?

Aren't all those people paying rent now? If not, in what sense are they "in" an area? If so, in what sense can they not "afford" it?

A large category of people not paying rent is homeowners. Retired homeowners might have small incomes that suggest they can't afford rent, but because they own their home they are fine. Are they part of X%?

What is "local rent"? Perhaps they mean an average of the area. If so, it's not surprising that a good fraction can't afford the average rent, so they live in below-average apartments. Any healthy housing market would have this.

What is "afford"? Is there some percentage of income they're assumed to be able to pay as rent? If some people decide to spend a higher percentage of their income on rent because they care about their neighborhood more than eating out or buying gadgets, do they belong in a statistic that seems designed to show how unaffordable housing is?

I imagine one could write definitions of the above terms to get X anywhere from 0% to 100%.

How does this compare with the dynamic height restrictions advocated by the Strong Towns blog?

For more about the problem: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/10/23/portland-hous...

This is all tinkering around the edges. It may help some, but in general it's still not sufficient to address the problems with housing in this state, and especially in the hardest hit regions (e.g. Bay Area).

I really think that a policy of much denser housing in urban areas must be enacted, including liberal application of eminent domain to reduce the existing stock of low-density homes. Requiring minimum heights within a tiny area around transit hubs helps but just doesn't even come close to addressing the problem.

Applying additional taxes on individual owner dwellings (including single-family homes, condos and townhouses) that aren't primary residences would be a huge step also. It should be very expensive for someone to own these properties and not occupy them.

At the same time, significant tax discounts tied to passing on the savings to renters for multi-family, high-density dwellings ought to be considered.

"transit hubs" may have been the wrong term to use... I think he's proposing these new rules anywhere within 1/4-1/2 mile of any transit stop with 15 min frequency or better. So it's probably a larger area than you think.

1) These proposals are good and certainly better than nothing. They'll probably be impossible to pass because they're so radical. Tinkering around the edges is the best you can hope for. In effective politics your goals need to be modest, realistic and incremental.

2) Taxation, tax breaks and subsidies are seriously the wrong way to go. The problem is too much heavy handed manipulation of the market. There are always unintended consequences. These proposals try to chip away the ability of zoning boards to regulate who can build what where. That's the ultimate solution.

Supply & Demand is the problem, solve it and you have a viable solution.

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