97% of California Cities Failed to Meet State Housing Goals
thebaycitybeacon.com
thebaycitybeacon.com
The first major hurdle is obtaining approval from a Design Review Board consisting of 5 elected board members who subjectively determine if the project is "neighborhood compatible". Even while complying with all zoning requirement for setbacks, building height and envelope, lot coverage, environmental impact, etc, and not requesting any variances, most projects stall here, some for years. The board convenes monthly and invites public participation and comments, and if there is opposition either from board members, or neighbors, you're in a very long and arduous process in getting approval. Common complaints are mass and scale, incompatible architecture, view blockage, noise pollution, excessive glazing, color choices, and the list goes on.
When/if you get through design review, you're then off to coastal commission and building and safety for more review and approvals, and eventually building permits if you make it through it all. The entire process will take many years, and potentially 10s or 100s of thousands in expenses before you even break ground. This is for a single residence - I can only imagine the hurdles and expense for a multi-unit project. So I understand and agree with the state attempting to legislate a reduction on the restrictions and roadblocks that local municipalities impose on residential construction.
http://www.carlaef.org/submit/
we'd be happy to look over it and track your city council's actions on this as it moves along.
in particular, it sounds like your project is zoning compliant and follows all the objective standards. at this point there is pretty much no legal reason for the city to hold up your project in design review or even deny it for arbitrary things like "too much glazing" unless they've already sent you a letter explaining--with quantifiable numbers--how much glazing is "too much".
One point of contention has been ADU parking. SB1069 65852.2 states that ADU parking should be waived if the unit resides within 1/2 mile of public transit which our unit will. However, city staff made the decision that because the city's public transit is subject to seasonal schedule and occasional route changes, they will not allow it to be considered for ADU parking waivers. Instead, only the county (OCTA) route will be considered which services PCH only and is well outside of the 1/2 mile range for most of the city. I find this to be a very convenient way to get around this requirement, which effectively eliminates many potential ADUs due to the unfeasibility of onsite parking - e.g.
https://www.lagunabeachindy.com/lawmaker-presses-laguna-move...
Thats an odd determination for staff to make. I've not heard of that trick before but I'll certainly look into it!
If your just making improvements there is a lot more freedom in refurbishing and most code enforcement municipalities just drive by to check on your work. Your most likely not going to run into trouble.
Let me end with, this was done in another state, not by a lawyer, just some random guy on the internet.
Wait – neighbors complain about a (potential) new home because it is designed with too many windows?
Housing cannot simultaneously be affordable and a good investment.
Homeowners on average tend to be more politically engaged, so homeowners dominate state and local politics. As for why every prosperous state doesn't have this problem as badly as California you can add prop 13 which hugely limited property tax increases for existing homeowners. This eliminated one of the major checks on real estate hyperinflation. You can further add the fact that the San Francisco Bay Area (the region with the highest prices by far) is geographically constrained and the fact that earthquake risk imposes additional site preparation and construction costs.
It's really a perfect storm for real estate price insanity, specially in the Bay Area. It's less insane in SoCal but still pretty high, especially when compared to median income in LA County and San Diego. SoCal is less geographically constrained.
Edit: I don’t retract my statement, but at the time of posting this my parent comment only contained the first paragraph. I agree with most points brought up
I also think closet classism/racism plays into it. California has a liberal facade but there's a lot of "we don't want those kinds of people" in our neighborhood sentiment below the surface. Making sure housing is unaffordable for minorities and the poor is a great passive-aggressive way to implement segregation without having to admit it.
In the long-run you want economic development to happen though.
To me it certainly seems worse than other retirement approaches. You are forced into making a single asset a huge percentage of your net worth, which utterly destroys your diversification. Real estate is also notoriously illiquid, so if something forces you out of the area, you could take an enormous loss.
If someone proposed another retirement investment strategy with these characteristics that didn't involve your home, people would say, "I'll pass... that sounds like a really bad deal."
There are also plenty of entrepreneurs and hackers and so on who move up here, so that balances things out to some degree. Still, though, California's NIMBYism has repercussions throughout the entire west coast.
It's almost as though people don't realize that lots of small things (like local zoning for example) add up to all the big differences that made the place so attractive that they moved there.
Specifically with regards to a bunch of retirees moving in, I'd take that over young couples any day of the week. People raising family will have much more impact than people who just want to enjoy retirement.
Yes, lots of people plan to sell and move to a less expensive locale in retirement. Often, people who came to expensive places for good jobs but not because they had any particular desire to live in that place plan to return to where they came from in retirement. I've known lots of people from the Midwest working in CA where this is their plan.
Let's say you buy a house at price 100, and the market doubles bringing the price up to 200. If you then sell and move into a house that was 120 and is now 240, then you've got to find 40 extra for the upgrade instead of the 20 extra you would have paid absent the price change.
That might hurt in the short-term, but in absolute terms your asset is worth a lot more, so you're winning. And depending on how much of your mortgage is paid off, you could be ahead in the short-term too; if you have paid down 25, when you sell you get 50 back to put into your new mortgage, and that more than covers the increase in cost of the upgrade (you got 25 profit from the market movement, and had to pay 20 extra for your upgrade, so you're up 5).
Not to mention that if you don't decide to move house, the nest egg that you're leaving to your kids (or sitting on until you downsize later in life) just doubled in value.
As you can probably see it would be easy to construct a set of parameters where the short-term price change hurts you (e.g. you're moving before paying down much of your principal), but property owners tend to be optimizing for the long-term gains.
Not always. Being able to flip a single family to a developer who is going to build multifamily is often the best return on your investment. The more confidence the developer has that their proposed building will be approved, the higher the price you can get for your lot.
You profit from this, but at the expense of your neighbors. Imagine the opposite scenario where all over your neighbors do this, but you're the single hold out. Would your home be worth more, less, or the same with twice (or more) the number of people living on the block? Obviously, we don't really know, but the holdout is likely fearful that their property value would go down dramatically.
You can see why people who have $1,000,000 mortgages don't want to see the value of their house fall to reasonable levels, because they'd be the ones taking the six-figure bath.
As a single family house its value would be less. But since all your neighbours already flipped their home for a developer building multifamily buildings, you surely can do the same, and as land to build an apartment building, your property probably is more valuable than it ever could have been as a single family home.
Not if you own the underlying land, or at least a portion thereof, and willing to build higher and denser and rent it out. For example, if I own a 1 story house, NIMBYism prevents me from building another story and renting it out as a separate unit for extra income. NIMBYism raises the value of my current property but lowers its potential value.
In short, it's a lot easier to not do something than to do it and in an environment of diverse, competing interest, the easiest route is the likely winner.
The people of LA, SF and surrounding cities have done a very thorough job of consolidating power and marginalizing everyone else.
The source of your problems is in the mirror.
"Doublethink is the act of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, often in distinct social contexts.."
I believe this site is also full of that all the time. From metered usage of all resources but internet, doctors vs bankers pay and so on.
edit: To those downvoting me, can you please explain why? Was something that I said inaccurate?
The problem we’re trying to solve here is that people are artificially denied access to the (jobs, infrastructure, culture) benefits of concentrated capital.
If you think we shouldn’t have cities, that’s one thing. If you think they should be reserved exclusively for the people who already live in them, that’s quite another, and you’re simply creating a new form of structural inequality based on birthplace (even within the US).
> The housing crisis is caused by economic inequality concentrating capital to a handful of cities
This is a pretty bizarre claim, since by definition a city's housing crisis is a local affair, so what does it have to do with capital being concentrated in a 'handful' of cities? But assuming your claim is that wealth in a city ---> housing shortage, then you need to explain how you make that connection.
> Housing costs rise because that's where the money/power/jobs are
What does this mean? If you mean that you need money to build housing, then shouldn't capital concentration to a city mean more housing? If you mean that wealthy or powerful people benefit from less housing, show your work. If you're trying to demonstrate the above connection between wealth and housing shortage, there are a plethora of cities with high wealth and no housing shortages (Singapore, Chicago, Budapest, Seoul...)
Also, aren't housing costs driven by the same forces that drive the cost of anything else? Namely, supply and demand?
> Instead of slapping a bandaid on it by increasing housing
If the definition of the housing crisis is 'not enough housing for the people who need homes' then why would "increasing housing" - the literal solution to the crisis - be considered slapping on a bandaid?
> which would just lead to further capital concentration and political polarization
Again, this makes no sense. If more houses means more wealth concentration, then shouldn't the wealthy want to build more houses? But in your previous comment, you made it sound like the wealthy don't want to build more houses.
> we need to address capital concentration
This is a altogether different point that you are welcome to argue on your own time but it really has nothing to do with housing shortages unless you want to expound upon the above a little more clearly.
What this means is that a family making $100k/yr can spend dramatically more than one making $50k/yr, and making $200k can spend more on housing their the other two families make in a year.
In most cities, this plays out by having islands of expensive neighborhoods in desirable areas. And housing decreases proportional to desirability as you get out. The problem in some cities in California is that there are so many extremely wealthy families, that the island of desirability has become so large that there are no affordable housing anywhere close to where the good jobs are, so lower income people are forced to commute for longer and longer.
Most other cities do not have the same numbers of extremely wealthy people. But in every city where a large number of disproportionately wealthy people move in, a housing crisis seems to follow.
It used to be, living closer to the city meant a compromise in some other area. Maybe you lived in an apartment and took the bus everywhere because you couldn't afford to have a house and a car in the neighborhood you want to be in. But now, people can afford to have a single family home with a garage in areas that really should be limited to large apartments.
Econ 101 tells us the way to meet that demand without increasing prices is to increase supply. That part hasn’t been done. No amount of “housing denial” and rent control will change it.
Even without lots of rich people/capital concentration, you would still have the same problem (housing prices wouldn't be as high), but the percentage of people able to afford a house would remain the same.
Supply/Demand is the problem -> Supply is not allowed to increase to meet demand and at the same time we're encouraging all kinds of demand by increasing the number of companies and jobs in CA. It's like playing musical chairs with 1000 people and only 5 chairs. No matter how you split up those chairs, there's gonna be a lot of unhappy people.
That's why you build more houses. The more you build, the less contention for housing at whatever quality level.
Of course this is correct. However, it is also correct that many, many of these are badly mischaracterized as "crises".
It is not a crisis that you cannot afford to live in Aspen.
It is not a crisis that you cannot afford an apartment in the very specific neighborhood in the very specific borough of New York City that you prefer.
It is not a crisis that you cannot afford to buy a house, with a yard, in Marin County.
It is a crisis that the bay area has created office space for 8 new jobs for every 1 new unit of housing built.
It is a crisis if you work in Aspen and can not afford to live in Aspen.
> It is not a crisis that you cannot afford an apartment in the very specific neighborhood in the very specific borough of New York City that you prefer.
It is a crisis to work in NYC and are not be able to afford to live in NYC, which is real situation that actually exists for many people today.
I understand there are a tiny few percent of people who's issues are 'badly mischaracterized as crises'. But the vast majority of the crisis is correctly characterized. We have a major urban housing problem. We should not dismiss it with a "let them eat cake" attitude.
No, it's not. It's very inconvenient, certainly. Further, it is completely incompatible with many very fashionable life scripts.
However it is trivially solved in any number of different ways (relocation, downsizing, commuting, etc.) and is therefore not a crisis.
A starter home in a downscale neighborhood and a second job were, at one time, life scripts that were enthusiastically embraced as the necessary rungs on the ladder into the middle class. It is hard to believe that a generation later these actions are "unthinkable" and evidence of a "crisis".
Nobody owes you living in Aspen.
Your ignorance within the space shows with some of your suggested 'solutions.' You do realize some people are too poor to move, right? You do realize some cities were designed around cars and lack decent public transit, right? And downsizing? The people who are affected by housing crises spend their months in shelters and being evicted from apartments.
Your lack of care for fellow members of your community aside, you could at least recommend equally outlandish solutions that align more with your view of the people affected like, 'just give the serfs a shack and stop the whining.'
When I was growing up in a poor, semi-rural community in Colorado, my father drove a four hour round-trip every day to his job in Denver. I know of other people in my peer generation (late generation x) whose parents made similar decisions and sacrifices (second jobs, starter homes, relocation) that are now considered unthinkable and evidence of a crisis.
I reject that line of thought.
I agree two software engineers in the bay area who want to raise their child in a single family home in the peninsula, but can't shell out the millions necessary to do so don't quite fit the bill for those affected by a housing crises. In fact, that scenario allows for all of the solutions suggested above (relocate, commute, etc).
The crises is that in a large number of American cities poor and minority populations were left in the urban core while wealthier families moved out into the suburbs. Several generations later, wealthy families now want to flight back to the urban cores, while plenty still occupy the suburbs. This leaves almost no area for the poor people to go. That sounds like a crises to me - and I am thankful I never have to be personally afflicted by it, but I do no good whatsoever making absolutist claims about how poor people just need to work harder. You are being ignorant of the single mother of two raising her children, the father isn't paying child support, and 80% of her ~$700 income (all welfare) goes to rent - and pretending these highly complex, largely ignored cases are not massively present in those afflicted by poverty, that is wrong. The above scenario is not an exception, but largely par-the-course.
What solutions do you have for her?
https://www.aspentimes.com/news/aspen-school-district-eyes-m...
- Brisbane still does not want to build any housing at the Baylands, just south of SF. Developer wants to build 4400 new housing units.
- The Central SOMA Plan (in SF) as written would add 50,000 new jobs and only 7500 new housing units.
- San Mateo blocked new housing just last week: https://www.smdailyjournal.com/news/local/council-denies-con...
- Local governments in Marin County and Beverly Hills are lobbying against SB 827, which would upzone large swaths of land near public transit.
As other people have pointed out, if California wants to lead then the state should be something to admire. And being 42nd out of 50 on K-12 education and highest poverty rate, aren't good things to lead with. Lots of opportunities to improve.
1. What do you consider modest prices?
2. What exactly do you do to check out the local real estate scene?
Because I recently left California to get off the street after moving around California a bit in search of affordable living and doing like 3 years of research, and my point of view and yours are so not on the same page, they aren't even in the same book.
Anything under 300K? How about 200K? A fraction of the Bay area doesn't necessarily mean affordable.
Anecdotally, a of my friend moved from the Bay Area to Fresno and explicitly claims it's in the middle of nowhere.
Music events at Woodward Park often attracted women in shorts or skirts and cowboy boots. Culturally, the city reads sort of like half a million farmers and ranchers decided to move to the suburbs.
It is a fairly unique city, with an international airport and multiple national forests nearby. But "check out the natural beauty of our great outdoors!" is typically a small town or rural marketing pitch, not the pitch of a major city.
Last I checked, it was the 5th largest city in California and I think the 34th largest in the US. So I think there are 20 US states that don't have a city of that size. The entire state of Wyoming, our least populous state, has about the same number of people as the city of Fresno, in the neighborhood of about a half million apiece.
Fresno is a very unusual city and I think most people can't really relate to it. I spent considerable time baffled by its terrible reputation and simultaneously trying to wrap my mind around the place. It isn't like most big cities.
It has a terrible reputation for air quality. I found that weird when I lived there because I could see the stars at night better than anyplace else I had lived. On the other hand, moving elsewhere has dramatically improved my health. So, in retrospect, I think there are serious environmental issues there, though I am not entirely sure what they are because I remain baffled by the idea that air quality there is extremely bad when the stars are so much more visible than I am used to.
This is part of why I want details. I need a house under $100k. After looking at what that kind of money buys in Cali -- anywhere in Cali -- and looking at what it buys outside of Cali, I eventually concluded it made more sense to go elsewhere. If you can't afford at least $200k in Cali, you can expect it to be a shithole. It would undermine my fragile health and also need ten's of thousands of dollars worth of work. I am happy to buy a fixer, but not one that will ruin my health and my finances.
I don't even need employment prospects. I have alimony and I make my money online. So that wasn't even a factor, and, no, it didn't fly in Cali.
It really is the middle of nowhere, despite being the fifth most populous city in the state.
But, you say, how can that be: the bigger cities are all embedded in even bigger urban clusters [0]. Fresno is, well, in the middle of nowhere.
[0] And even the smaller central cities; Sacramento, is a little smaller than Fresno if you look at the city itself, but the metro area is a time and a half the Fresno metro area.
https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Bakersfield-CA/3506_ri...
You're telling OP to live in hell and it still costs more than they can afford.
> Between 1970 and 2010, Bakersfield grew 400% (from 70,000 to 347,483),[33] making it one of the fastest growing cities in California.[17]
It can't be too much hell if so many people want to live there that the population quadrupled in 40 years.
Here, I found another example: > Between 1968 and 1975 the Dubai's population grew by over 300%
Maybe OP could find a sweet oil job there!
I don't know if you realize it, but oil is, in fact, a big part of the economy in Bakersfield. And air quality is terrible because of it.
https://www.bing.com/search?q=bakersfield+economy+oil&FORM=E...
I would still be interested in the OPs answer. I wasn't just living on the coast or researching coastal communities before finally looking elsewhere and ultimately leaving.
I (coming from Europe) travelled on the East and West coast and both times was astounded by how much US living relies on having a car. I'm myself pretty anti-car-ownership by now, but I think this is much easier to do in European cities.
One of the reasons I ended up here: I had no problem arranging to get here affordably and efficiently via train and intercity bus. Many of the small towns I researched in the western half of the US were a case of "Good luck trying to get there!" and/or would have cost a great deal more just to get there, on the order of two to three times what it cost me for train and bus tickets to get here just for tickets. And the reality is that if you travel for a couple of days or so, you want the sleeper car if possible or to stay at a hotel at some point, etc. Thus,the places that are that hard to get to wind up having additional expenses involved in just getting there.
An additional benefit of that is that I don't feel trapped here. If I want to go somewhere for any reason, whether for travel or to move again, getting out of here without a car is not some intimidating obstacle. I can readily get on an intercity bus and go to a variety of places in this region. I haven't looked into it, but I imagine it would not be too hard to get to the Seattle Tacoma International Airport and, from there, out into the world.
I was a military wife for a lot of years. I like living within a couple of hours of a major city and a major airport. I have not flown in years, but I have friends and family all over the planet and I always keep it in mind that I might need access to the ability to seriously travel.
Many years ago, I previously lived in Richland, WA and its downtown center was fairly pedestrian friendly as well. I don't know how easily you could get there without a car. It did not make my radar for where to go to get off the street.
Very affordable by coastal standards, but with very low incomes by coastal standards, too. Which somewhat offsets the affordability, unless you are talking about, e.g., long-distance commuters working in the Bay Area.
Nevertheless, yes, the interior is better at meeting the targets for Low and Very Low income affordable housing as specified in the report finding the 97.6% miss rate; lots of the interior jurisdictions are only missing on the Above Modest income targets. (Though there are exceptions, e.g., Fresno County also misses on the lower income targets.)
Modest is $150K to $200K for a home. I get there this way; At a salary of $48,000 / year (take home $38,753) and allocating a bit less than a third of the take home to paying the mortgage that is about $1K/month or, at current interest rates a $150K - $200K house. $48K/year is about 60% of the median salary in California.
As far as checking out the scene I look at things like how many days on the market for properties that are for sale, infrastructure (markets, transportation, nominal weather, services, crime statistics, Etc) all the kinds of things that I normally would check if I were moving there.
My experience has been that people who are more comfortably well off than I am are not really looking very closely at the details of homes when they survey the lower end homes. I have had conversations with people who claim there is tons of affordable housing and they pull up some low priced listing in Detroit, a city in such a state of crisis that a woman created a non profit to pay water bills there. I have looked at listings in Detroit. The dirt cheap listings I looked at while homeless were mostly a case of "Oh, god, no! I would rather keep sleeping in a tent!" I am talking about burned out husks or houses that had been flooded and now had horrifying mold problems.
Things I was looking for in a house as someone in genuine need of affordable housing:
In walking distance of basics like a grocery store or, at minimum, able to get to such cheaply and efficiently via public transit.
I want something at $100k or less that can qualify for financing. When you look at a lot of super cheap housing, it is cash only and has defects that disqualify it from any kind of bank financing. I have seen houses listed that explicitly said "No foundation. Will not qualify for financing."
A single family detached house that is not a trailer where the price includes both house and land. When buying a trailer you are frequently buying only the trailer, not the land it sits on, and it is located in a trailer court where you have additional rental fees for being on that land on top of the purchase price of the trailer.
I want a modest home in decent shape. I don't mind a fixer, but a lot of cheap housing in the US has major defects that will cost serious money to remedy. It is a sucker's deal. You should not buy a house like that because budget matters. You buy a house like that because it has amazing views or historic significance or something and you have deep pockets. Poor people buying that kind of house are getting stiffed.
I basically want the kind of house I grew up in, something that affords one a lower middle class life with security and financial stability and a future. And it is extremely challenging to find that anywhere in the US. I concluded it does not exist in California. A lot of lower end housing is trailers and condos and stuff being sold as a tear down because it survived a fire.
So the next time you survey local real estate, maybe consider looking a little more closely at the details. Because your opinion that this is not really a problem in California flies in the face of countless articles about the affordable housing crisis in the state that routinely make the front page of HN. There is lots of homelessness there and people getting roommates to be able to afford a place at all. And I have difficulty fathoming how you can so cavalierly ignore the overwhelming evidence and pronounce this not really a problem.
I wanted to be an urban planner before life got in the way. I have formal education and have done a lot of reading related to this. It is not an uninformed opinion.
So, how does driving through the interior with apparently zero knowledge of what the relevant goals are do anything to inform you of whether cities are meeting them.
> When I stop for lunch or a break I like to check out the local real estate scene and its often the case in these cities that there are many houses and other living accommodations available at modest prices.
Modest for you, perhaps. Modest for the incomes in the area? Probsbly less so. In any case, does this tell you anything about whether they are meeting the needs assessments that look at availability in multiple levels? Probably not.
> Hard to imagine a city like Mojave not meeting it "goal".
Mojave is a “census-designated place” in unincorporated Kern County; it not a city or other jurisdiction of its own subject to the targets; Kern County is (the headline about cities is wrong, jurisdictions subject to the targets include both cities and counties, the latter for their unincorporated areas.)
Kern County is among those not meeting targets, though only in the Above Moderate income Regional Housing Needs Assessment, not the Low or Very Low income assessments.
This is worth considering.
I find it despicable that otherwise liberal, progressive people are willing to immediately discard democratic results simply because they dislike them.
There is nothing unconstitutional (CA) or unlawful about "NIMBY policies". However you may feel about them, they are valid, lawful policy goals in a democracy.
If you don't like them, you should organize to defeat them democratically.
I spend my free time doing some advocacy in this space. Heres a few things you might not know.
1) Nimby's dont derive power from the ballot box, they derive power from distinctly undemocratic processes like courts and arbitrary middle of the day planning meetings. The biggest NIMBY tool is CEQA, the "california environmental quality act" which allows anyone to sue a project for "environmental" reasons. The reasons are spurious at best (project would increase traffic at an intersection). Nearly all CEQA law suits are filed by neighbors who want to kill the project, or by unions on projects that aren't using union labor. The law suits are rarely won by the plaintiff, but they are nearly always successful because they delay projects long enough to get them canceled. The second tool is the design review meeting, which often occurs around 2pm on some random mid week day, when most people are at work and unable to leave their job. A single project may go through 5 design review meetings where retired nimbys with nothing better to do with their time berate new developments for arbitrary reasons (make it smaller, its out of character etc). In this system, its not "one person one vote" but rather "your power in this process is proportional to how much time you can spend at city hall during normal working hours on a recurring basis and grind it out over months and months of meetings"
2) Nimby policies are being defeated democratically. Our elected officials are realizing the harm that these policies are causing and seeing that an anti-nimby constituency is forming. SB 827 is a democratic solution to this problem.
3) Hyperlocal control (aka, cities deciding their own land use policies) is undemocratic, and essentially feudal. It limits the voices heard in democracy to the people who are able to afford living in the city in question, but excludes the voices of those who stakeholders in the city in some other way, say by working in the city, or commuting through the city. Local control allows cities to capture outsized benefits of development while forcing other cities to absorb the negative externalities. For instance, cupertino built the new apple campus for 12k workers, but didn't build any new housing for them. Now the rest of the bay area needs to deal with the reality of these 12k new highly paid residents looking for housing. Another example is Atherton suing to block caltrain electrifiction within its city limits. A single city is blocking an expansion of public transit that serves 60k riders per day. Why is this city allowed to delay the project and create a negative impact on all of these commuters? Why are they not beholden to a larger set of stakeholders than just the people that live within their boarders?
I agree that these things are annoying and selfish (and possibly mean-spirited) but they are not undemocratic. They adhere to the laws and regulations of our state. They are the (unfortunate) results of a democratic process.
I reiterate my objection to non-democratic solutions to these problems.
Further, as someone who lives in a design-reviewed community in a NIMBY county (Marin), my firsthand experience has shown me that these roadblocks and inefficiencies are applied equally to everyone ... it's not like there is some class of people who get streamlined approvals and fast-tracked homebuilding. Everyone has to deal with the same bullshit, as far as I can tell ...
In Berkeley there is a subway station surrounded by a five-acre parking lot. The owner of the parking list wishes to build there, but the city refuses to rezone the land, which is presently “U - Unclassified”. This law would remove Berkeley’s authority in the matter.
In San Francisco 71% of the land is zoned for detached single family homes, despite virtually all of that city being within half a mile of a rail or light rail station. This bill would raise all of those limits.
Basically, the city outlaws any building taller than 40' above grade at its highest point. Between that, and minimum setbacks from the frontage line and other property lines, 90% of the work to prevent densification is already done. Once a building plan has grown to completely fill its legal envelope, there's nowhere else to go but down, and that becomes prohibitively expensive fast.
The remaining 10% can be handled by mandating a minimum square footage per residential unit that is slightly more than half the theoretical maximum from a building at maximum height and minimum height on the mean lot size for that zone. Then no amount of building up or out can allow you to squeeze another unit onto your property. You have to resort to tricks like lowering ceiling heights.
If you enact a law at the state level that triggers automatic lessening of restrictions on building heights or setbacks every time a municipality fails to grow enough housing, zoning boards will be a lot more tractable when a developer wants to build.
It's the same mentality that uses the "within X' of a school" that elides over the fact that a sufficiently large X will cover everything in the jurisdiction. The PLSS grid system put a school at every other corner, so there was a school every 2 miles, and no child would have to walk more than 1.414 miles to reach one. So if you had defined a zone "within 7500' of a school" that would have been a synonym for "everywhere" that bakes in "think of the children" to your legislation.
"Within X' of a public transit station" instead bakes in "think of the hordes of poor people".
A loud minority of people already fight transit and successfully prevent it or water it down. The type of people who fight transit also fight housing. There isn’t really much headway for their coalitions to grow because they’re selfish old boomers who want to pull up the ladder, it’s not an message that inspires solidarity.
65917.7.b.4.A and B both impose minimums on the maximum height limit that can be imposed. They do not impose a minimum on the height itself. This bill allows for building higher, it does not force it.
When I read the article I got the impression it was a mandate to increase the number of homes. They talk about targets and rolling over targets into the next 8 years. That seems different than just saying to change zoning and approve more projects that are already desired.
Redevelopment is a thing that happens, and removing barriers to redevelopment for densification will encourage such development compared to the status quo ante.
There is no need for a mandate. Just allow people to build more on their land if they want, and most of them will surely want because people like money. No need to force anyone to do anything. All that is needed is to remove artificial regulations and let the market run its course.
>SB 827, Wiener’s bill to mandate increased density near public transit, was recently the subject of a spat on Twitter between the Senator and former Beverly Hills mayor John Mirisch. Mirisch began his tirade by calling the bill “a bizarre combination of Soviet-style master planning with raging crony capitalism…the urban planning lovechild of Vladimir Putin and the Koch Bros.”
>“Not quite sure how he got to this conclusion but definitely scores high in the melodramatic response competition,” Wiener responded. “Interesting to say that my authoring a bill to allow more housing near transit makes me Putin, since I sort of got the idea from a guy named [President Barack] Obama,” he remarked wryly.
The name dropping and mudslinging here is pretty laughable. The reason reason for conflict seems to me to be misaligned incentives though. The idea that a place like Beverly Hills is going to have to throw up a bunch of new housing to please CA congress is ridiculous, since essentially the city now has to find a way to destroy existing housing or places of business in order to throw up new, cheaper housing, assuming the bill passes.
I've noticed a common talking point among anti-development types is to assert that changing zoning to allow denser housing translates to mandating denser housing, which is obviously ridiculous.
They don't have to do anything except allow private landowners to build higher if they wish.