California's Housing Laws Should Be Under State Control | Hacker News Reader

California's Housing Laws Should Be Under State Control

citylab.com

10 pointsjseliger16 comments

I think this article is spot on. I was struck when this Geneva city planner acknowledged that they have to fight the nimby movement to keep their city's infrastructure balanced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUfwIPzh_MM (from an urban infrastructure planning course on Coursera). We need someone this objective managing our housing infrastructure at least across the whole bay area.

If you listen to the Cupertino mayor, everything is fine as it is. According to a recent Better Cupertion Q&A with the mayor and with city councilman, Apple isn't really adding any new employees with their new headquarters. The cities are the ones who keep adding office space and turning away housing! Their denial is so upsetting, especially when you inevitably find that the people in charge are homeowners.

We need to stop letting the foxes run the hen house!

edit: typo - new/now

Australian chiming in: I've always found it absurd how much power local governments have in the US, the idea of paying different amounts of tax in different cities of the same state is alien to me. It explains so much about the inequality too, poor schools in poor neighborhoods isn't really a thing here, at least not to the same extent.

Actual title: "California's Housing Prices Need to Come Down"

Even more damning from the sub: "Shifting control of housing decisions from local to state oversight _could be a way_ to slow the rise of California’s house prices".

Lot's of happy hoping for something.

Since they like to just take random stabs to hope to come up with a kind of variable idea, here are mine:

-Repeal prop 13.

-Enact regional governmental authorities [ala PANYNJ[1]] to govern (coordinate) growth efforts.

-Break the state into at least two distinct new states (it's too big an unwieldy to server everyone well)

[1]I know the PAofNYNJ don't have a good track record, but it's better than the record the 9 bay area counties have in coordinating growth.

I'm excited that you're thinking about solutions to the housing crisis :). Unfortunately, prop 13 is basically untouchable - though it is a root cause of misaligned incentives for homeowners. Walk down my street in Sunnyvale, and 4/5 people are elderly and can't really afford their home without prop 13.

Regional government is just what sb 828, which adds teeth to the state housing planning (and sort of sb 827, which sets zoning state wide), will do!

I don't think breaking up CA would solve our jurisdictional issues (E.G. Sunnyvale can't get BART if Palo Alto won't accept it, or Cupertino can't get VTA investment if San Jose controls it) or change the local home owner politics in the Bay Area.

I think it's pretty likely that we'll see 827 and 828 whittled down to nothing in the senate, but it doesn't mean we should give up. The tide is turning. Whether that happens fast enough to keep our cities viable depends on our participation.

  change the local home owner politics

Local home owners don't control local politics; the party apparatchiks do.

VTA wouldn't be so wasteful and screwed up if those "4/5 elderly" had any say in it the past 40 years.

I would be against zoning state-wide. I can go with regional, but not state-wide. That's overreach and unnecessary in most of the surface area of the state.

They won't come down as long as municipalities are allowed to dictate their own housing policies.

One thing that I've, so far, never seen raised in discussions of housing in CA is how we will make equivalent investment in infrastructure. In this case I don't just mean roads/bridges/parks. This also includes emergency services, schools, and even things as basic as the number of available grocery stores.

All around I see new apartments being built and I guess that's great, but I haven't seen anywhere near as many infrastructure projects in the same time.

Oh come now, the "free market" fairy will solve everything! No need for any centralized city or regional planning - that'd smack of socialism and 5 year plans.

Dunno about the rest of California but Bay Area regional planning, which in theory does take place already, leaves a lot to be desired. San Francisco is simple, it is one consolidated city and county, there is no distinction between the city and county government to be made, and it happens to be one of the largest cities around.*

In regional planning however which tends to lump in every county and every city (as legally defined by California law) in those counties, San Francisco has essentially zero political power. It has one vote on matters, and the interests of the many cities and counties around don't always squarely align with what SF wants to do. To put it bluntly, even if San Francisco were the epitome of high governance and quality infrastructure planning, even if San Francisco had stack of workable solutions printed out on a perfect stack of paper with absolutely stunning typography and presented and overwhelmingly supported by quality leadership with a fully funded budget and electoral mandate, there would be nothing SF could do to solve any of what ails the region as a whole without the cooperation of the other cities and counties.

Homelessness in San Francisco and the larger cities? That's their problem. Lack of housing? That's their problem. Not enough regional public transit? Not a problem here! Everyone has a car!

So yeah, the free market fairy won't solve anything, but neither will regional planning boards. At least the State can put pressure on local governments and they can either react sensibly, or keep trying to push every problem back into the urban core and just bottle it up there. When the pressure builds up, maybe we can get the free market fairy and the socialist fairy to meetup at a bar and hash something out. Would be nice anyway but I wouldn't hold my breath.

* I'm being incredibly generous by allowing San Jose to call itself a city, but San Francisco is essentially the biggest fish in the region.

What part of rigorous zoning laws and artificially constrained housing supplies by city councils sounds like the free market to you?

It's important to distinguish primary infrastructure from the secondary infrastructure that is built on top of it. Housing, transit, energy, water & waste water, and communications are the primary infrastructures (made of networks like roads and pipes, and the services on top of the networks, like buses and water) on top of which we provide secondary services, like healthcare and schools.

In the bay area, we have good city planning for our primary infrastructure besides transit and housing. For instance, Sunnyvale owns its wastewater treatment plant and is prudently investing in it. Housing has no real planning, except for city councils (who benefit from a housing shortage) approving projects. Transit is a derived need that stems from our housing inbalance among other things.

If transit isn't working, ambulances can't get around and children can't get to school. If water isn't working, we can't operate hospitals. This is why we distinguish primary and secondary infrastructure as layers of abstraction.

Not to say that secondary infrastructure isn't important, but it doesn't have as much public sunk cost investment in things like the digging the networks of tunnels and such, so secondary infrastructure is easier to fix in a shorter time span.

  city councils (who benefit from a housing shortage)

How do city councils benefit?

They are all home owners.

Councilmembers may be. It's not required. But how would city government as an entity benefit?

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