The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability (2002)
nber.org
nber.org
In California, we have a chance to fix things. SB-827 is a new bill that prevents local governments from banning density near public transit. It is the most radical housing bill in decades, because it rebalances zoning control from the local to the state level. It could result in 3 million new units being created in California, a state that builds <100k per year.
https://standupcalifornia.com (this is a website i set up to support this issue, which i see as the most important political issue for myself and my friends, and our ability to stay in our communities)
Still though, it's one issue where we all ought to be able to find some common ground and fix things.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/reforming-land-use-regula...
Which comes back to that:
"Reforming local land use controls is one of those rare areas in which the libertarian and the progressive agree. The current system restricts the freedom of the property owner, and also makes life harder for poorer Americans. The politics of zoning reform may be hard, but our land use regulations are badly in need of rethinking."
Edit:
For many more articles, I have a list here:
... but not necessarily democratic.
I am open minded about the housing policy debate in CA (and in Marin, where I live) but I am dismayed at the rejection of democratic outcomes when those outcomes are found to be inconvenient.
I don't know why people in San Diego or NorCal should have a vote about what happens with respect to zoning in Palo Alto or Mountain View. Why not let people in Butte, Montana put in their vote as well?
> I don't know why people in San Diego or NorCal should have a vote about what happens with respect to zoning in Palo Alto or Mountain View. Why not let people in Butte, Montana put in their vote as well?
I'd be totally okay with nation wide housing policies (and I have lived in one of those cities you mentioned, and I currently live in Silicon Valley so I'd be impacted by this change). I think poor housing policies are big drivers of economic immobility, and people everywhere in the country are affected by it. Someone in Montana may not live in San Francisco, but if they have to turn down a job in SF due to insane rents then they are impacted by SF's housing policies. Consequently, if there was a push to ban nativist policies like rent control, proposition 13, or other barriers in the housing market nation wide I would both think it is fair and I'd support it.
That means I would consistently vote against them in my own community, but I still support the rights of people in other communities to make choices different than my own. If they prefer the outcomes under rent control or Prop-13 type initiatives, who am I to say that they're wrong for their own community? Of course I can have an opinion that they're wrong, but I'd rather not force them to comply with my opinion over their own and their neighbors'.
Side note: the reason I don't live in Silicon Valley right now is that when I went interviewing out there and had job offers from two companies at a healthy increase over my then-salary, neither would allow me to afford to purchase a comparable level of housing and lifestyle to what I have out here. That was in 1998 or 1999.
It's not unlike upper atmosphere pollution, as if every local community were able to have their own policy on it. The cost of pollution is paid for by no one in particular but principally other people far away. Each community's individual impact is tiny and easy to deny, but they all tend to choose the same thing which has a greater collective impact. Aren't their rights to choose more important than any cost to society, without question?
There is an amount of money that an individual can spend to buy a house in Palo Alto. That amount of money might be higher than some people would prefer or elect, or (in many cases) even be able to spend, but there are practical alternatives in any case (to include living in other communities).
In a case where no practical alternatives exist, I agree there's a much greater cause for collective input and decision-making (to include at a global scale in many cases, as these aren't even a state or nation-state level of issue, though it's the states and nation-states that enact policies and laws to implement/enforce collectively-agreed treaties on some of these topics).
Where practical alternatives exist, I find the most local government level to be the most desirable one to make the decisions that disproportionately affect the people who live there over people who don't live there but might like to.
While it's nice to govern as locally as possible as a matter of general principle, when cities are hoarding wealth and opportunity and dumping the downside on the larger community, the larger community is right to reconsider the limits of the authority it delegated. Part of what it means to be in the State of California (or the United States of America) is accepting migration from, and influence by, others in that category.
So, then, is the United States.
Would someone like to bet me that there is nearly 1:1 mapping between (people who think CA should undermine local control over housing) and (people who think CA should exert local control over marijuana policy) ?
Of course that's true. Now defend the principle, and benefits, of local control in some spheres where it's convenient but not in other spheres where it is not.
It doesn't matter whether the decision is coming from a democratic government above or a democratic government below; what matters is doing the right thing.
I'm willing to sacrifice liberal processes to get liberal outcomes. To somewhat invert the meaning of an aphorism, the means do not justify the ends.
* to be clear, we're talking about small-l liberal here, not "liberal" as in "left of center" as it is frequently (mis)used.
As someone who has spent close to the last decade trying to figure out where to put down "roots" it's utter insanity to me. It's clear as day that one of the most evil parts of American society is tying what is typically far and away your largest "investment" to housing. It creates insanely perverse incentives.
It seems to me that most folks have lost their collective minds and forgot the reason we needed housing in the first place.
What is NIMBYism? NIMBYism is opposition to necessary structures (that we all want) being built in specific places (e.g. near me). NIMBYism is saying that, while you understand that we need a water treatment plant -- you agree that we should build one -- you want to locate it on the other side of town (i.e. not in my backyard).
That's not what this is.
This is the desire to limit building entirely. It's the desire to prevent certain areas from growing, getting bigger. It's an opposition to density. It's a reactionary, conservative, nostalgic preference for the past. It's the belief that San Francisco should look like it did on the day you bought your house for the rest of all time. And it's an attempt to lock in enormous housing gains.
These are not the same thing. One is not "taking the other too far." It's a totally different thing.
I'm afraid it may be one of those 'short term gain, long term consequence' type bills that CA has a history of cough prop 13. However, at least it's looking in the right direction, since the housing situation couldn't be much worse
But Senator's Wiener's FAQ answers the question you ask: https://extranewsfeed.com/my-transit-density-bill-sb-827-ans...
he says "First, most cities and towns don’t operate their own transit systems, given that transit agencies are typically separate from cities or regional in nature. Thus, very few cities even have the power to reduce transit service, even if they wanted to do so in order to avoid SB 827.
Second, while communities could organize to fight new transit stations or to reduce bus service, let’s also be real: people already fight transit expansions in their neighborhoods."
How does building high density housing near public transportation incentivize people to not use that public transportation?
Say, you own a piece of land with a house near public transit. Since the local township can no longer forbid building an apartment building on your land, you can probably sell your land to a developer for $$$$, so you make much more money than selling just a single house.
And because you didn't want to live near public transit, with the $$$$ you can spend $$$ to buy a house that is sufficiently far away from public transit and still make a good profit in the trade.
So if you like money more than your current house, why would you oppose?
More density does not mean more crime or more "deplorables" unless you actively enable people get into that position. It does not tarnish the environment worse than endless seas of sprawl housing and resultant insane amounts spent on transit. Literally the only reason to not enable growth is to profit from its absence.
For example, the entire point of doing this is to get housing costs down, and people hear that and think it will cause their property values to go down.
But those are actually two different things.
Housing costs are per square foot. They go down when there is a bunch of new housing because of supply and demand.
Property values include the value of the land. If you zone for high density, it causes the land to be worth significantly more because people will pay you a million dollars for it so they can bulldoze your house and build a tower there.
It beehives them
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/9/revisiting-what...
Of course, in the United States people are more comfortable with their own cars, and less reliant on public transport. So the effect remains to be seen.
It's seems absurd in this day and age that we're still concentrating business to such an extent in places like the NY Metro Area and the Bay Area. IBM in the olden times leveraged locating facilities in nowheresville as a competitive advantage. I'm surprised it isn't catching on now that engineers are being so highly compensated.
*Network effects are unfortunately only understood as a handwavey buzzphrase in tech, but they have been researched and defined in extreme detail by economists. Think non-ergodic math.
perhaps for a reason, civilization has something to do with cities
Think about how startups work today. Rather than leasing a commercial office at half the price, they pay exorbitant premiums for WeWork. Nobody does proper capacity planning on AWS (let alone physical infrastructure), everyone only hires the most senior people, everyone pays exorbitant premiums to recruiters rather than building inbound candidate flow.
It's incredible how far we've pushed the time premium for money. I'm honestly not sure whether it's rational or not. But I think there are two good lessons from this.
#1: Patience is a massive advantage if you can pull it off. You can get out of the environment that's pushing senior level dev salaries to 200k or higher, pay less for everything, etc.
#2: There is good money in selling time to financed startups. If you can do anything that would conceivably let young, cash-rich startups trade time for money, that's a business.
Does any piece of this legislation deal with the inherent problem of rapid-transit noise + dense housing?
Noise sucks, but for some people it's the right tradeoff. We should allow people to choose that if they want.
What inherent problem? Rapid transit is certainly quieter than vehicle traffic. Noise pollution comes from sirens and heavy trucking, not public transportation.
I say this as someone that lived near an airport, even guests did not notice unless the windows where open.
1. Not my video, but my neighborhood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_M8PCO3BvE
Buses regularly have speakers announcing the stop (85th and X) that can be heard at quite a distance.
I guess people think this is a joke or nimbyism, but it is a legit concern. We all know by know how important sleep is to health. well, that rapid transit noise (even bus) is a factor. Trucks and cars, late at night, have a flow. Buses stop, the speaker garbles all too loudly, air brakes hiss, and the slow elephantine weight of the vehicle is dragged into motion by a guttural engine rumble.
Reno, Nevada hasn't had a rail system since 1927, and there is exactly one "rapid" bus line (out of 30 routes total) Are you really arguing that significant numbers of downtown residents were so outraged by inescapable bus noise that they migrated to...whatever constitutes a "suburb" of Reno, or are you suggesting that Reno is the suburb people were fleeing to, and if so, from where? Or is there some other Reno we're talking about here?
Quick question: why does "Tell me how they vote" require my email address? Couldn't that information just appear when the area is clicked on, or am I misinterpreting that feature?
Sure I can name a bunch of reasons why little housing is built in California, we can start with the Libertarian wet dream that is Prop 13. Prop 13 does two things, removes any incentive for muni's to approve new housing. And starves the government of funding to pay for public goods like schools and mass transit. The zoning restrictions Libertarians bitch about are partly the direct result of that.
Okay fine. But then still the question is, even if we admit California has issues, why is it that corporations which are totally free to locate elsewhere aren't doing so? You would think with a large cost differential corporations would move. Why not?
Because neoliberal conservative dominated governments in the rest of the US means that VC's, engineers, and mangers don't want to live in those places at all. So they and their companies are paying a large premium not to.
No workers don't want to work in 'right to work state' They don't want to send their kids to schools that teach creationism and abstinence only sex education. They don't want to live in communities with bad family planning.
This isn't the case. Silicon Valley, Seattle, etc. are just on the leading edge of a larger tend towards greater urbanization. It's a pattern that's also happening in Austin, Portland, and more cities just to less extreme degrees. The simple fact is that in a developed country dense population centers are more efficient - both economically and environmentally.
To a large degree we're still living in the shadow of the industrial revolution, when workers flocked to cities for work. As a telecommuter, my quality of life is a thousand fold higher than my co-workers in the D.C. or Dallas metro areas where it seems many people find themselves alone in a sea of humans and chronically maligning poorly planned mass transit.
Sources for greater economic growth in urban areas:
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/emp...
Countries by CO2 emissions per-capita: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
Countries by urbanization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country
And that's not even getting into things like the amount of land that gets developed for low density homes and services, roads, water reservoirs, electric lines, etc.
Wealthy rural countries (USA, Australia, Russia), produce more carbon than dense wealthy countries. Granted, I wouldn't be surprised if carbon emissions and environmental impact of the average city resident was higher than the average rural resident - but that's largely a result of the fact that rural residents are generally less wealthy. This is definitely true on a global scale (the countries with the lowest carbon footprints are poor, rural ones), and I wouldn't be surprised if it were true on a nation wide scale. I didn't explicitly state it in in the first post, but I did clarify in the second that this was for the same standard of living.
On a side note, an interesting thing to look into is how Singapore manages to provide so much services with such a small budget - 14.2% of GDP per capita as opposed to 26% in the US. A huge part of this is because it's so much more efficient to provide services when you're dealing with population concentrated in such a small area. Imagine how much more money (and energy) it takes to deliver electricity, running water, sewage, emergency services, education, etc. to households in Oregon where 4 million people are distributed across 98,466 square miles as opposed to concentrating them all in 278 square miles. Even if things like land and labor cost more, so much overhead and operational costs are saved by not having to service such a massive area.
I realize that's more of a value judgement and not objective. But there are definitely costs associated with living in dense urban places. Regardless of efficiencies we are definitely still living in a post-industrial-revolution world, and people did not voluntarily cram themselves into giant cities then, so some sort of reversion when it's possible makes sense. Vast populations of urban people in China would rather not have to move into the city.
The states you speak of are the ones most friendly to home schooling. You can teach evolution and anti-abstinence all you want. FYI though, there are creationist engineers. I've met many.
I'm not sure what you mean by "bad" family planning. I don't see why you should care what other people do. Maybe I am "bad" for having 11 kids, but I won't force you to have that many.
Right across the hall from me is an engineer who left SF. He uses his AR-15 at home in his yard. (might go over badly in SF, you think?) He keeps goats and lots of chickens. Clearly, he does in fact "want to live in those places" instead of in SF where he grew up.
http://www.businessinsider.com/state-domestic-migration-map-...
OTOH they are also moving out of Wyoming and Kansas and into Colorado and Oregon.
What to make of this?
Maybe... people mostly go where jobs and cost of living and social connections line up, politics either direction just isn't a great predictor?
To be fair, not everyone wants Manhattan so density, and even change, can be terrifying. But, to be fair, there were special and specific circumstances that created Manhattan that just don’t exist in SV or Oakland. So, that fear may not be justified. Still, is a step in the right direction...
Developers aren't helping the matter. Multifamily buildings in America are too often cheap and hastily-built crap polluting the suburban landscape, or gleaming ultra-luxury alien invaders menacing vulnerable urban neighborhoods. It might help with sentiment if we had more multifamily buildings that were pleasant to live in and that middle-class voters could actually identify with.
I'm as YIMBY as anyone, but the actual recent condo buildings I can point to are making it hard to challenge the preference for single-family homes. Anything that looks as good costs twice as much, or more with HOA fees.
Nobody's being forced into my neighborhood. The working class homeowners have been pushed out of the houses by yuppies like me long ago. Now they're being pushed out of that one rental building, which has been remodeled, and where they've stopped taking Section 8. And they're pushed out by people who for whatever reason are quite happily packing themselves into these buildings.
For example where I live so malls get built by the same developer. Even if someone wanted I'm sure it would be nigh impossible to get permits etc. to build a competing mall next door and try to drive them out of business like in a real market. I'd love to see real, break neck, free market competition for all projects and no schmoozing with the major.
Multifamily buildings in America are too often cheap and hastily-built crap
Seeing an NBER paper on Hacker News of all places makes me want to cry tears of joy.
That zoning and insane levels of regulation are absolutely the causes of the housing crises in the US is the mainstream consensus among economists.
For those unfamiliar, Glaeser is widely considered the foremost urban economist, so I'm shocked to see his famous paper linked on here. He's absolutely brilliant.
https://deleonrealty.com/2016/facebooks-effect-appreciation-...
The solution is to share the benefits of new development with the existing residents so they gain from development. Get this right and communities will be fighting each other to have developers come in and build new houses.