Rethinking Residential Zoning
livablecity.org
livablecity.org
http://sf-planning.org/sites/default/files/FileCenter/Docume...
The challenge is that construction in general (not to mention the once in a millenium transformation of a former industrial zone to a people friendly multi-story residential zone along with supporting light rail/subway transportation) takes time and the media doesn't have the patience.
There will definitely be a lag time between a project as significant as Salesforce Tower being completed and the supporting residential tower being completed. Residential developers aren't going to start building until there is a sufficient guarantee that the office buildings are going to get completed and corresponding demand will be there. Unfortunately that lag does mean some interim pain with respect to apartment rental rates.
Here's a fun historical time-lapse of Downtown SF. A lot of the office buildings are actually relatively recent (post 90's-20's).
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/BAY-DSJ-Salesforce-Tow...
Mandatory low-density neighborhoods are de facto gated communities. There's no reason for government to enforce such by rule of law. If anything, the government should be encouraging mixed-income communities, not fighting them.
If I were a homeowner in such a zone and I had just bought into a neighborhood that was zoned single family residential or just sunk 250K into a remodel in the same zone, and then all of sudden a bunch of developers not even from the neighborhood try to lobby to change the zoning, I'd feel shortchanged.
If however, I was given fair notice about 8-10 years before the rule/zoning change that the city had such intent, then I would make financial decisions appropriately (i.e. not buy in that neighborhood, wait to build a duplex/triplex instead of an expensive single family that will be sandwiched in between two four story buildings, etc.). It's like when you buy an iPhone and the next day Steve Job announces the new iPhone.
That said, my main point is that the change that can happen in the Dogpatch/Central Waterfront is orders of magnitude greater than up-zoning tweaks to the Victorian neighborhoods of SF with less loss of character.
This just means that the people there who own who are trying to sell then think they get screwed by this announcement, even if it's actually going to change for a decade, especially if people like you won't buy because the change is pending.
Announcing it a full decade out also provides a chance for, potentially, two other municipal administrations to do political machinations that undo the pending change before it takes effect.
If these aren't actually worse situations, an announcement with a decade lead time doesn't necessarily make it better.
>> Agreed. I had not thought of that scenario (which is very likely)! Maybe that's even more reason to focus on the strategy of upzoning under-utilized industrial land to ultra high density residential instead of trying to up zone existing residential neighborhoods.
I don't think the "neighbourhood character" test really holds much muster. Maybe if you bought one of the Painted Ladies, or are on a street that is 90%+ Victorians. Maybe.
I live on 18th and there are few Victorians left. There are a lot of ugly 60's and 70's 2/3/4 story buildings. These could all be upzoned to 6-8 stories without having much of an effect on "neighbourhood character".
My view is you don't buy a time capsule, you're buying a block of land in an evolving city. Things will change, they need to.
Somewhat understandable, but there's a housing crisis. We need more housing, particularly in economically booming areas. For the government, serving people's needs -- and housing and decent jobs are both needs -- has to come before people's wants.
> Victorian neighborhoods of SF with less loss of character.
The current "character" of low-density SFH-only areas is "poors keep out", so I'm less than enthused about keeping it. It's disgusting that government regulation unabashedly supports classist bullshit like that. It's barely better than redlining.
I think one day we'll look back, and be flabbergasted that we tolerated things being this way for so long, the way we segregate people -- and especially children in their schools -- by income.
'With new restaurants or galleries opening seemingly every week, Dogpatch is the city’s fastest-growing neighborhood, with a population set to jump to about 8,000 by 2025 — up from 2,000 in 2015 — as huge developments at Pier 70 and the old Potrero Power Plant join the area’s shiny housing complexes.
In the past three months alone, three developments with a total of 700 housing units have opened in Dogpatch. An additional 1,500 units are set to pop up in the next few years as new buildings rise throughout the flat, sunny, 141-acre rectangle sandwiched between the Central Waterfront and Interstate 280.
Tennessee Street alone, which is home to both the San Francisco chapter of the Hells Angels and City Attorney Dennis Herrera, will see seven new developments totaling 663 units along its 11-block length. Two blocks over, Indiana Street will have 493 new apartments in three developments. And four complexes with 400 units will materialize along Third Street, the main commercial drag, where the T-Third Street Muni cars lurch north toward Mission Bay and south toward the Bayview.'
once in a millenium transformation of a former industrial
zone to a people friendly multi-story residential zone along
with supporting light rail/subway transportation) takes time
This only took about 2-3 years in Los Angeles. Many of the former industrial buildings and districts were rezoned and it has directly helped invigorate many areas of downtown which were formerly sparsely utilized. The Arts district has had several recent projects add what amounts to entirely new neighborhoods with hundreds of units and live/work spaces.
Unfortunately due to prop 13, there's still a vast amount of empty lots and unused buildings just wasting space without adding any value to the city or residents. Given the rezoning, it seems to have finally inspired use of some of these buildings but many empty units will still exist until there's incentive to not just horde without use.
Talk is cheap, but voters consistently prefer increasing property values.
You don't need to care about privacy, just claim to; you don't need to care about poor people when you can claim it's the right wing (who don't exist in SF)'s fault; you can claim to care about diversity and continue to hire only white men from Stanford etc.
Weird world.
I think it is selfish - especially to our children and grandchildren that will never be able to live in SF and/or the bay area, but CA (or more accurately the bay area) asked for this and it will be hard to turn back :( Judging by reports such as this ( http://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/265?platform=hoo... ) it will just mean the middle class will be gone soon and this will be the land of the rich only...
This is not wholly unique to the bay - almost every city does this. They champion rising home prices as great and then complain when they are too high b/c they didn't build to keep up with demand. Oh and also blame the techies b/c that is the cool thing to do.
"Maybe if we just create/change a few more rules everything will be better" type mentality probably won't fix things. I see there are ideas to relax rules, which is good, but ultimately that might actually remove the 'money' aspect of the situation.
My mentality is that if the costs are too high then don't pay them (hint: move away).
The fact is, the SF Bay area is a housing shitshow, mostly because of a boom economy, which will end. Nobody was talking about this crisis in 2002 when the economy hit the skids, and all of the wacky California policy issues with property taxes and development challenges were all there.
I don't live in California. I live in an urban environment in a neighborhood a mixed 1-4 family freestanding units. A major component of my property's valuation is that neighborhood cohesion. When you hear people characterizing turning potting sheds into shitty rental units as some sort of victory for social justice, you're hearing a movement that is poised to be upsurped by well capitalized real estate developers.
I grew up in Queens, NYC, which has pretty loose zoning controls. My neighborhood, which in the 80s was a mix a 1-2 family detached and attached homes, changed dramatically, starting with the 80s real estate boom and continuing in waves in the 90s boom and the 2000's boom. The end result is a mix of cut-up single family homes and a bunch of teardown situations where nasty condo units eliminated open space, made parking a nightmare and killed the community. The only happy stakeholders are the real estate people who walked away with millions and left a mess for the residents and the city to deal with.
Your framing of the residents of high-density housing as not "stakeholders" or "the community" is a common NIMBY talking point, but the condo/apartment dwellers whose humanity you choose to deny are not less deserving of space than you. If the "well-capitalized developers" want to help people like me (who were born too late to own city land) fight for the right to occupy space, I'll take it.
I live 4,000 miles away. My humanity doesn’t require that I have an apartment on 5th Avenue. Instead, I own a home where high quality housing runs around $100/ft.
Fundamentally, the reason you don’t live in Cleveland or Buffalo is that aerospace and other industries left and moved to California 80 years ago, largely because it was cheap to buy an Orange grove. Capital and the investment culture of tech is why SFO is the way it is. Until that changes and Google Omaha starts impacting demand, you are stuck.
Markets are about control. Not fairness, not what is right. If you don’t control the votes, and don’t control the land, you don’t have a stake.
If you prevent wealthy people from buying new homes, they'll just buy old ones instead. This isn't a theoretical concern. In fact, it's precisely what has been happening throughout the SF Bay Area.
What do you mean by your first statement? There are many types of market economies; this one seems to be state-driven (into the ground).
The idea that we just have to wait for the "boom economy" to end for the housing prices to fall to reasonable levels is not backed up by any evidence. Even the dotcom collapse of the oughts and the Great Recession didn't have enough of an effect on Bay Area housing prices [1] to make them affordable. Furthermore, there's plenty of evidence that this isn't a bubble—the demand is driven by well-established tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple that aren't going anywhere.
> The end result is a mix of cut-up single family homes and a bunch of teardown situations where nasty condo units eliminated open space, made parking a nightmare and killed the community.
Speak for yourself. I happen to like those "nasty condo units". In fact, I just bought one in San Francisco (in a building that replaced a disused industrial warehouse) after nearly a decade of saving—which was necessary largely because of NIMBYs driving down supply. I consider myself very fortunate to be able to do that, and I fully intend to buck the trend of homeowner-driven NIMBYism and encourage more development in the area so that others in my generation, as well as future generations, can afford to live here.
[1]: https://www.paragon-re.com/trend/annual-trends-overview-san-...
By the by, it's also a grave injustice that I'm not driving a lambo; someone needs to sort that snafu out, because it's not my fault.
Is it injustice that a new CS grad who got a job at Facebook can't afford a place in San Francisco? Not really, plenty of other places to work.
Do I follow you correctly? I have to assume not, because such a notion is an affront to equity, fairness, and progressive principles. I would very much like to know where I erred in following your logic.
I dont care about SF, the best would be for tech to move away from there. It just dont fit in, spacewise. Companies should more to place where they fit.
But I find it funny that the same forum that yap and cry about lack of community or loneliness in every single loosely related topic (and especially when it is possible to blame women not being at home anymore), puts exactly zero value on it when it comes to people who were born in San Francisco and are not one of us.
The parent you complain about here is literally about social ties and community. Newcomers don't have it and young tech people don't really value it, so maybe it would make sense for us to move away. Unless we make it about entering contracts and all that, in which case people who been there first has the same right to make rules they do like.
I value community that is willing to include me. I do not value community that rejects me, especially after I make sincere efforts. Someone else's insular community is irrelevant to my decision-making processes. Generally, I'm content to live and let live, as much as it irks to be excluded because I lack some shibboleth. I know they're not going to start caring about me because I stand with them in solidarity, so I spare myself the effort.
This changes when insular communities seek to leverage their position against my interests and those of my community.
I understand where you're coming from. You see a comment about social ties, community, and cohesion and someone else accusing them of trying to create an aristocracy. It looks spurious, like this joker refuses to care, think, or understand why someone might care about such things.
I see someone looking to legitimize a system of exclusion of my community on supposedly progressive grounds. With the idea being that they can protect their privilege - without ever using the p-word - by encouraging exclusion. I find it hypocritical and distasteful.
I understand why they want to do it. I do. I understand their pain, their sense of loss, their fears for the future. I simply do not agree with what they would do about these.
Sure they do. There is tons of space on the vertical axis that we're choosing not to use.
It doesn't fit in spacewise if everyone needs a detached house and a car.
Where does it follow from those principles that it is in any way fair, equitable, or progressive that people born into a community, with friends, family, and community there, should have to move out because they can't find a good job or afford housing in that community?
Similarly, how does it follow that some other young person should have to completely uproot themselves and move to a strange city just to get a decent-paying job?
"Labor mobility" is for the convenience of capitalists, not workers.
You're absolutely right. That isn't fair or equitable in any way, shape, form, or manner. Forcing people to move isn't fair or equitable.
> Similarly, how does it follow that some other young person should have to completely uproot themselves and move to a strange city just to get a decent-paying job?
You're absolutely right. That isn't fair or equitable in any way, shape, form, or manner. Forcing people to move isn't fair or equitable.
With all that said, don't you think people should have the right to live where they choose? I do. I think it's a basic human right for people to have the ability to emigrate where and when they choose. I think it's unfair and inequitable to stand in the way of this.
Though I understand where some people might otherwise. After all, new people are scary! They might have more/less money, more/less melanin, speak different languages, pray differently, and so on. The urge to exclude The Other is basic, deep-seated, and very human one. I understand that some people have no wish to over come it. They'd rather raise walls than open their arms.
But I'm hoping that the best among us can. Maybe I hope too much.
Restrictive zoning and planning are a price-fixing cartel perpetrated by homeowners. The fact that they do it through the ceremony of local government may change the legal status, but not the ethical status.
* Do you want good teachers for your kids?
* Ever need a nurse at the hospital or at the doctor's office?
* How about police?
* And firefighters?
How are you going to have people like that if you have to earn 300,000 to even afford a home?
I am Norwegian myself but when I lived in the US I was always puzzled by the extremely segmented feel of cities. Everything in one area was the same, and when you meet people you get the feeling that most people only know people from their own economic class.
As a country that prides itself on diversity, there doesn’t seem to be much diversity where people live.
I think cities with less rules which are able to grow more organically will tend to develop better.
Or I guess it depends on the type of planning. Where I live in Oslo a lot of thought went into making it possible for kids to walk to school, playgrounds etc without crossing car roads or walking next to car roads.
http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html
It's from a while back... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540845
In American cities, I can always tell whether a neighborhood is rich or poor or middle-class. I notice even without thinking about it, it's blatantly obvious by the homes and the cars and the environment.
In Munich, even when I'm trying to figure out how rich an area is, I usually can't tell. In terms of income distribution at least, most parts of the city -- and its suburbs -- feel roughly similar, in that they have a mix of people. This undoubtedly has to do with the fact that even "low density" parts of Munich still have duplexes, triplexes, and small apartment complexes (but more tastefully designed than ones in the states, I admit).
America must adopt the "build whatever you want on your own land" regime that progressive nations have.
In the US, we're not going to view as "progressive" anything that lets my next-door-neighbor decide to build an oil refinery in my subdivision. That will take significant value from my house and land, with no recourse available to me. That's... not going to fly here.
What we need is something between what we have now (too rigid) and "build whatever you want on your own land".
Want to build one? Also buy the land to have a minimum distance in between it and the nearest residential.
In contrast to that, a system fully reliant on "expert" opinion to do zoning, can allow for that if that expert thinks that this is a smart thing to do so.
US zoning rules are terrible IMHO with the possible exception of being nice for cars.
I was able to live in the most expensive area of all of Oslo while being just regular middle class. That is because there was some mix of housing not just huge villas. It meant I get to know people far outside my social class and they got to know more refular people. I think that keeps people grounded.
Outside the US what I really like is being able to walk to a local store, gym or whatever. In the Netherlands you’d find cozy cafe’s on the corner you could walk to. So many residential areas in the US are like a dessert. Nothing is going on there.
Having a bit more mix of housing, a couple of convenient local stores etc isn’t exactly like building a refinery or high rise in bel air
Half of Europe, and as the comment below says, also Japan.
Which half? Can you name some of these countries that allow you to "build whatever you want on your own land"? Every country I've lived in has plenty of rules about what you are and aren't allowed to build on your own land.
Correction: i checked it, Japan does use explicit zoning, just nowhere as zealous as in US.
Cars aren't going away. At /best/ we'll get self driving cars, but we aren't there yet, and even when we get there it'll probably be a bit before they fully kill the dedicated car.
It is reasonable to assume 1 car for EVERY ADULT that MIGHT live someplace, and to then add an additional 0.2 cars for any adult that might thus visit someplace.
THAT is how much parking should be accommodated, not on the street or in front, but probably in a shared community parking garage (with some slots assigned by unit, and others for guests).
The community garage should also have a loading dock and staging area for deliveries and movers; with egress paths that make sense given use for both that and light/mid level construction activities.
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In a separate point, the building codes should be such that when I shut my windows and doors, I don't hear or smell anyone near by me in any way. Even if they're doing something noisy but normal. (Watching a film, the laundry, a shower, etc.) They should also require /specific/ areas for smoking, and anyone smoking outside of those areas (particularly in rented units) should see //HEAVY// fines. I am so sick of opening a window or door and being unable to breath.
My wife and I live in San Francisco, don't have a car, don't have a garage. Are you saying I should be forced to pay for not just one, but actually two spots?
Square footage in San Francisco is extremely precious. If people aren't willing to pay for parking I don't see why it should exist, or why people without cars should be forced to pay for it.
To be clear, I'm against parking maximums as well. If people are willing to pay for a spot, let them do so!
The loading dock is a very useful part of the concept, as is the necessity of a /community/ garage encouraging all moving vehicles to operate on a distinct layer from pedestrian areas.
It would not be uncommon to have lawns, pathways, even a park or garden above such a garage.
In a denser area the streets could actually be moved entirely underground, aside from some access roads that /normally/ wouldn't be used as such. (Special permits to bring in LARGE cranes/etc.)
Also, it would be required of the area /building/; if you don't need that particular piece of property then I can easily imagine it being leased to nearby businesses as part of their parking allocation.
A requirement is a very expensive way of foisting a certain lifestyle on everyone, regardless of whether they want it or not. You can't just say "oh it would be nice," you have to actually justify why it's okay to force people to do things this way, and making housing much more expensive.
America has a brazenly stupid and counterproductive car culture. Cars are fine and good in moderation, but the way we promote them to the exclusion of all else is ridiculous. For a country that supposedly cares about freedom and choice, it's a bit odd that our transportation system forces everyone into one mode.
Actually solving the issue of making it human scale to walk around from place to place. Of having a shops and //far range transit links// within that walkable distance that actually allows someone to make a journey to a relative's house or another town/city.
Particularly on the west coast of the US, we are nowhere NEAR being able to remove a car from someone's life and expect them to maintain interactions with those not fortunate enough to be able to live within the overpriced city cores.
MAYBE in heavy urban areas like the east coast metro sprawl, which are old enough to have inherited a rail transit interlink system that isn't completely broken and which have grand-fathered-in layouts and zoning that are more human scale. Maybe there such an elimination of parking could work.
Okay, but mandating tons of parking everywhere makes every other mode worse. It's not "should we make driving better or worse" in a vacuum, it's "how much resources do we allocate to each mode". Right now the usual answer to that is "put nearly everything into cars", and most Americans think that's the natural state of things, as if the universe has decreed that other forms of transport are unworthy.