California Bill Would Allow Unrestricted Housing by Transit | Hacker News Reader

California Bill Would Allow Unrestricted Housing by Transit

slate.com

52 pointsxtacy21 comments

Previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16073219

I wonder if this could backfire by having neighborhoods in urban areas being opposed to transit improvements to avoid being labeled a 'transit rich' area.

SF does not have nearly the subway line coverage it needs to adequately serve the city (e.g. takes 40 minutes to take the bus to downtown from the marina).

If inhabitants of non-transit areas refuse transit improvements (and transit money), then the transit improvements and associated state money will go to the already labeled transit areas. Everybody's happy.

Why try to convince people to take money if they don't want it?

Edit: People usually ask for everything: landlords of non-transit areas may ask for transit improvements, as well as to keep zoning regulations, as well as to keep their property price at current levels. Hopefully they won't get all three!

Marin residents voted against BART a long time ago as it would have attracted crime.

Not a new topic, wouldn't change much.

The same reasoning has prevented light rail from expanding further in the St. Louis metro, too. Unfortunately, the extension to one of the area's largest malls did by all accounts attract at least some new crime:

https://www.riverfronttimes.com/stlouis/out-of-control-shopl...

I haven't followed the stats since then (and there could be other explanations for the reports in that article), but the perception in the region that transit brings crime is very strong.

Same reasoning in Minneapolis.

"I want to thank you for ruining our city," said Donna Azarian, an Eden Prairie resident, during the city's public hearing. She said that the city doesn't have the density to support light rail and that it will "bring crime to our city." Her comments were met with audience applause..."

"as it would have attracted crime."

Source?

San Mateo county voted out of BART for what are probably similar reasons (i.e., belief that transit = poor people and poor people = crime, therefore transit = crime).

Which does a bad job of estimating the kind of people who use mass transit even in the Bay. Caltrain (which has also been targeted by wealthier communities in an attempt to stop it from improving), for example, is packed with young professionals and with middle-class (by peninsula standards) teenagers who use it to commute to school. BART and the ferries and other transit systems are used heavily by tech people and other professionals, because trying to get places by driving is a massive headache. But among a certain class of people the whole transit network is perceived as being for the exclusive use of homeless people and criminals.

My first thought exactly. Particularly with any area that's largely single-family dwellings, this would completely galvanize opposition to transit, as the locals would quite correctly apprehend that it's the fast track to having the neighborhood change, and explicitly so.

It's also essentially a way of telling everyone "want a life where rail travel is your primary commute? hope you also don't want a single-family home."

Now, maybe that's an acceptable loss, given that single-family neighborhoods are already not exactly friendly to rail lines coming in, and they are by nature exactly in heavy supply near rail.

Or maybe the unintended consequence is going to be to halt the expansion of rail.

I can't speak for SF, but in my area, I believe that availability of transit raises property values. So being opposed to transit improvements in your neighborhood means being opposed to increasing the value of your property. That's not a position likely to attract a majority of property owners.

A lot of property owners never want to leave. Ever. They want this to be their home (or 2nd home) forever, and want it to never change from what they remember it being for the past 20 years.

They have no interest in "property value". Especially if they already have too much money.

NIMBYism is less "I don't want my property value affected" and more "I don't want anything affected"

> A lot of property owners never want to leave. Ever. They want this to be their home (or 2nd home) forever, and want it to never change from what they remember it being for the past 20 years.

That's really not generally true. Talk about "property values" generally does actually pertain to financial outcomes related to their property.

And they have valid reasons to: if you're paying a mortgage, you're in trouble if the value of your property drops. Even if you've paid off your mortgage already, you still don't want it to drop, because it reduces your wealth on paper (reducing your financial flexibility), and it also reduces the size of the estate you can bequeath to your children. But more immediately than that: just because the value of your property has dropped, that doesn't mean the taxes you pay on it automatically drop too. (See: Detroit, where people had to sell their homes to force a revaluation, because the annual taxes were more than the value of their homes after the market crashed, and the city refused to reassess the homes, because it was broke).

The problem is that "property values" is also used as a dog-whistle for racism and redlining - or, in other words, making neighborhoods less accessible to (or attractive to) people who aren't white. This is especially true in California and the Pacific Northwest, which has an incredibly long history of passing exclusionary laws regarding housing and property ownership.

Availability is generally viewed as a plus.

Proximity (especially being close to tracks but far from stations) is viewed as a minus.

> I wonder if this could backfire

In regards to politics, the answer to this question is, without a doubt, regardless of the content, always "Yes it will."

I think the State is more concerned about rental prices than transportation at the moment.

A sunrise provision, where new transit doesn’t cause a community to be deemed “transit rich” for N years would be smart, however. We don’t want to grind transit construction to a halt statewide in order to solve our housing problem.

I'm pretty sure they'd just eminent domain it at that point, and then the whole plan backfires.

As the article says, the bill, as is, is too radical to pass. But I'd wager that's intentional. Knowing that negotiation will have to happen in order to get the bill passed, he proposed something extreme, so it would still be close to what he actually wanted when all was said and done.

Or maybe I'm reading into it too much.

I live in LA and we desperately need more dense housing and better mass transit. You can't have one without the other, so it makes sense to build new dense housing near transit. But the article links to a counterpoint [1] making the very valid point that this bill would allow a lot of predatory development in working-class neighborhoods of LA. I am conflicted. Hopefully there is some middle ground. The population of LA is too big to live in single-family homes, it is impossible to make it work.

Great idea. Therefore, it'll never happen. Too many entrenched interests will be hurt by solving the problem, I fear.

So, it sounds like their would be no visual or noise restrictions or barriers? Haven't studies shown those are real problems (or at least, we need X hours of sleep)

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