California higher-density housing bill blocked in first committee hearing
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And even when housing can be built, it is overly expensive due to insanely conservative zoning requirements. A great explanation of just how awful it is in LA is here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_ar...
And SF and the Bay Area have been even worse than LA at building housing.
Crazy conservative (in the sense of "no change allowed") people dominate all the planning meetings, which control what can and can not be built. Meeting code and zoning is not enough, you have to convince the extreme ends of your opponents to get anything built.
I lived in Japan, and I live in New York. Tokyo is mostly low-rise buildings. Outside of a few areas in the center of Tokyo, the city is a sprawling mass of 1-5 story buildings. The vast majority of New York (outside of Manhattan) is the same. Even in Manhattan, most of the residential neighborhoods are under ten stories.
Silicon valley can clearly stand to increase density, but it doesn't help to misrepresent what density looks like.
The general problem with this debate on HN is that everyone gets fixated on a select few areas where 20-something nerdbros want to live and go drinking (e.g. the Mission), and imagines turning it into some vision of Tokyo out of Blade Runner, when the real solution is that we should be building more 3 story condos in Sunnyvale. If you wanted to make the bay area resemble Tokyo as it actually exists, you'd cover every flat part of the bay in 1-5 story buildings, and connect it all by excellent transit. It has little to do with skyscrapers, as such.
And totally agreed on 4/5 stories everywhere; those are what can be built with less expensive wood construction, and what really increase density. High rises and sky scrapers are usually brought up by the NIMBYs as a straw man to argue against.
Everywhere. The comment I originally replied to (upthread) has a delusional vision of New York and Tokyo, and "the problem" is (ostensibly) that the bay doesn't look like that. Any facts that are inconvenient to this narrative will be downvoted into invisibility.
"But this bill was precisely the thing that would have opened up the Avenues in SF without touching the eastern side very much."
While I sympathize with the stated goals, this bill was little more than grandstanding by Weiner. It never had a prayer of becoming law. You probably couldn't pass a rule like this in San Francisco itself, let alone the entire state.
You are not downvoted because you are inconvenient to the narrative, but because you seem to be misunderstanding the discussion.
Similarly, you seem to misunderstand this:
> You probably couldn't pass a rule like this in San Francisco itself, let alone the entire state.
because passing a bill in San Francisco is orders of magnitude more challenging than passing it at the State level. Local decision makers are incredibly vulnerable to small voting blocs, whereas State lawmakers are more free to serve the entire community rather than a few special interests. And that's what happened last year when Jerry Brown pushed hard on more housing and a ton of affordable housing bills were passed. Impossible at the local level, but possible at the state level.
Calling this "grandstanding" is kind of an outrageous interpretation too. It seems to reveal a huge bias. Do you think he didn't want this? Did you think that it wasn't an honest attempt? He sacrificed a ton to rounds of amendments, and it was still a close committee vote.
Entirely depends on the neighborhood. In Palo Alto, yes, they're going to be horrified by 5-story construction. In Oakland, not so much.
The "delusional" part of said comment was the characterization of Tokyo as a place where all of the buildings are tall. In fact, take a train a couple of stops outside the Yamanote line, and you'll likely find yourself standing in the middle of a community of detached, 1-2 story homes that would evoke large parts of the bay area. Tokyo is not especially dense, or tall. Tokyo simply sprawls, and most people on HN have never been outside of Shinjuku enough to know the difference.
Don't believe me? I dropped a pin at random in an area of Tokyo about 10 minutes west of Shinjuku by train: https://goo.gl/maps/6vXn2KqUK4P2
I'm not cherry picking. This is what Tokyo actually looks like, when you get out of the business/tourist districts.
"Do you think he didn't want this? Did you think that it wasn't an honest attempt? He sacrificed a ton to rounds of amendments, and it was still a close committee vote."
Sacrificed? LOL. He threw a half-baked bill over the fence. In exchange, he got his name in the press for months, and convinced a bunch of his (more credulous) voters that he's an effective politician. This was pure political upside for him, and "amendments" don't even factor into it. Read his public comments; he all but admits that the bill never had a chance of passing.
We're slowly losing everyone in Mountain View except dual tech income people who won the stock option lottery, houses are out of reach for most everyone. What does get built via ABAG (Association of Bay Area Governments) mandates is generally rental housing, and rents are astronomical.
This kind of short sightedness is disgusting, and people don't seem to realize that nice, high density areas didn't just spring up in their dense form, they were allowed to evolve over time.
CA also has a lot of red tape anyone can invoke on any construction project to drown it in bureaucracy for years. The only people willing to fight against the bureaucracy are giant developers who develop large lots into cookie cutter developments. It's a giant mess driven by greed and stupidity.
Why is one group more "horribly selfish" than the other? Especially if you think there's a bubble, you don't want to change the character of the place for a short-term problem.
Why is "build more in one place" a more natural answer than "let tech companies geographically diversify themselves in response to pricing pressure"? Especially given an area that's kind of a natural disaster SPOF.
And since they don't get to control where people move in the United States, they don't actually get to stop change. Change still happens whether they want it or not.
Nobody has the right to stop others from interacting, or renting, or anything like that.
Oh but new people do that all the time.
"Also, they do not get the right to decide other where people live."
Otherwise, everybody gets to choose on their own where they live, and that is a freedom that I am absolutely loathe to restrict.
Why only this? Let's allow people to do everything they want. /s
Why can't some group of people, living in some area, set what are some rules that should be respected by all members?
BTW. We have too many humans on Earth which causes a global warming.
As we don't live in an authoritarian state and we respect individuals' rights, we tend to rely on the market to provide the most fairness. The reason for this is that the market is effectively a democratization of pricing. I don't think it takes a huge degree of empathy to see how some group believe that an individual that believes they should be able to break this democratization of price to force others to enable them to reside wherever they want is what could be called entitled, selfish, and greedy.
I'm not sure how I'm arguing to be able to force others to behave in certain way. I'm against some people being able to punch others; so in that sort of sense, I'm for that sort of controlling others' behavior. But this is no paradox, it's fundamental about what sort of control we're exerting on others.
Is it to increase all our freedom and letting us interact more? Or are we restricting people's behavior to prevent overall freedom?
When a cartel forms, and controls the market, is that regular market behavior? It's certainly to the cartel's benefit, and it's most certainly the natural thing for a cartel to act in its own self interest. But we outlaw that in markets, because they overall greatly restrict markets from operating.
I'm hugely hesitant to view everything from the point of view of markets, but if we were to do that, it's clear that local municipalities are acting as housing cartels on the behalf of a minority of the residents of a community. It's landowners highly constraining the use of land such they benefit and restrict the rest of the market from using land in ways that the cartel disapproves of (for example, multi-unit apartments).
Not "all our" but of certain group.
"your freedom ends where my freedom begins"
What would you say then? When you will have like 10x more problems with overpopulation, crime rising etc.
I disagree with you, but I'm upvoting because (a) you politely expressed a reasonable thought and (b) I can't think of a succinct counter to your argument, and hope by elevating it someone else will. (If not, I have something deeper to think about.)
Basically, we can choose between two sets of problems, the problems of increased density, or the problems of gentrification. Yes, there is some amount of subjectivity here, and I clearly prefer the problems of higher density, but living here, I see a lot of very bad effects of gentrification. Service industry people have massive commutes from far away, yet we're dependent on their services, but we don't want to make housing affordable to make their lives better because we don't want change. We prioritize saving three big trees [1] over development, for example.
What is really disheartening is people saying, as you do, that we should drive tech away in some capacity. I've lived in the rust belt, in areas of low housing cost due to industrial decline, I really would hate to see that here, it's horrible.
[1] https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2017/12/22/downtown-residents-...
And they have ruined what used to be beautiful farm land and orchards to create ugly urban sprawl punctuated by strip malls and plagued by violent crime. There's a very good reason San Jose, not San Francisco, was the site of the first major European settlement on the West Coast. Aside from having fantastic weather year round, San Jose was once beautiful. Few would argue that now.
I know people need jobs and housing but unrestrained urban sprawl is a terrible solution to that problem.
There is no urban sprawl in San Jose, it's all ugly suburbs.
And "urban" is the opposite of "sprawl"; YIMBYs are looking for infill and walkable development, which will eventually end sprawl… maybe.
You might want to check out some Apple Park drone videos - it's gone and time traveled back to 1940, and only cost like ten billion dollars!
tech companies are already building campuses near the new housing
(And if you're rooting for the land between San Carlos St and Santa Clara St. east of the railway to be an employee laden Googleplex, take a good look at 280 during rush hours now even without events at the Arena).
Google is buying those parcels because the city of San Jose is corrupt and selling at a fraction of their value, just like they tried to do when those were earmarked for an A's ballpark. That doesn't mean they will use it for dense office space.
There're more options than rust belt or NYC. I've spent my life in places that are thriving but also more sprawling. I suspect the future looks more like Atlanta or Dallas or Houston, especially with autonomous and electric vehicles on the horizon. They have a huge advantage in that world, in having far more land to easily expand into. I'm sympathetic to those who like their current areas, as well as to those in economically depressed areas - some increased diversification would help both of those groups! And I'm skeptical of densification as an answer to all cost woes, since Manhattan is dense and still stupendously expensive. Similarly, LA is much denser than Dallas, and still much more expensive. Maybe we'd be better off if some of that wealth got spread around, instead of continuing to accommodate even more concentration in a few centers.
I have a goal of owning a single-family detached home, and here's the thing I see missing in these arguments: it's not because of property values. It's because it's a fundamentally different experience that is how I would prefer to live, and so I see why people would fight to preserve the ability to have that, instead of just bowing to the god of economic efficiency.
In many places you can satisfy both, but the geographic constraints of the Bay Area make that harder. So someone has to lose, but I don't see either side worse than the other.
But the state of the world today in Silicon Valley is that there's not enough housing. Another possible reaction is to hire more telecommuters and expand offices outside of Silicon Valley. Why do you believe the local communities must change rather than the business practices? Are business needs inherently more important?
We really shouldn't try to all live in the same city.
Does everyone deserve to live in a place like SF or mid-town Manhattan for cheap, by forcing infinite housing supply?
Or is it ok to price people out of areas, creating different classes of people & forcing certain classes of people to migrate to places like Ohio (or Mexico)?
Unfortunately, the people that are going to be ruined are the poor that currently live in the expensive places.
This does not reflect anybody's position on the pro-housing side.
Extreme exaggerations like "infinite" or "everyone deserving to live" do not facilitate conversations.
Saying that more housing should be built is not saying infinite. The idea that all workers in an economy should be able to afford their housing is not saying everybody should get to live in the most expensive place.
It may not be intentional but it seems like these statements were meant to take discussion off the rails.
But this is exactly what's happening. Look at the discussion here, and you'll see people pushing for high-rises.
Should high-rises be placed wherever there's demand? Or is it OK to say no and limit people?
I do know that the current limit is not working. We should change it somehow. Any move towards more housing will at least help.
But this feels like a very false argument, like those who argue against a carbon tax or other Pigovian taxes that correct negative externalities. Sure, we may not know a priori what the best possible setting of the parameter is, but there's a huge range better settings out there, and it would be really hard to get it wrong if we take a single step in one direction.
I don't see anybody arguing for high rises. I see some people mentioning Tokyo, but that's not all high rises.
This bill was about low rises.
And even building some high rises somewhere is not a terrible thing. Just because somebody mentions the possibility do we need to circle the wagons and stop all multi-unit buildings from going up?
Because USian land use laws / zoning laws (that enshrine single-family houses while prohibiting/obstructing the construction of most everything else) aren't good at all, and there's no good reason to preserve them as they are, nor any reason to think that they're optimal for anything; except for increasing the value of single-family homes by rigorously prohibiting the construction of alternatives.
Even "tradition" doesn't apply here, since the changes that prohibit high-rise/high-density/SROish housing are quite recent compared to the history of US cities.
It's really not about "tech companies", it's more about the fact that US jurisdictions have systematically eliminated and prohibited entire categories of housing.
> you don't want to change the character of the place for a short-term problem
I do want to change the character of the place, and I think that objections (aesthetic or otherwise) to any kind of new structurally-sound housing are bunk and should not be entertained or given any sort of authority.
Once you have people literally living and shitting in the street, I sorta feel that these NIMBYs should altogether lose the authority to obstruct/delay the construction of new housing.
how horribly selfish existing home owners are
So if the vast majority are actually on the YIMBY side, then recalcitrant officeholders will be gone shortly... right?
So that leaves a small number of highly motivated people to choose these commissions. And because it takes very few votes to change the commissions one way or the other every decision can now be swayed by whatever small number of people show up at random times during the day.
Small numbers of highly motivated people control these commissions. They rally a large enough number of people at the right time, and they organize, and they do have complete control of these decisions.
Meanwhile, those who are young and have to work, or those who have to work many jobs and have children to take care of, can't spend the hours per week it takes to give input.
This form of direct democracy ends up enfranchising those with the most time and power to follow minutia that's unrelated to their day-to-day lives. And it attracts the sort of people that like to stick their noses into all sorts of other people's business.
so many offices on huge ballots
Those elections are generally low turnout as well, so the YIMBY types should find it easy to have an impact if the broad electorate is on their side.
For a (slightly) longer exposition I found chapters 6 and 7 of "The Captured Economy" by Lindsey and Teles quite informative.
Homeowners benefit from the ability to obstruct/delay/deny others from building more housing, because it makes them a frighteningly huge amount of money by making their property worth more.
Morally yes, these people ought to be told to go pound sand; the very fact that there's legal authority to prevent dense/tall housing from being built is abhorrent, but it's the function of those boards (and everything else is secondary) -- to "increase property value" by artificially restricting what other people can do with their own property.
If yes, is it also abhorrent when a group of workers at a company band together to influence the working conditions they all work under?
When segregated neighborhoods collectively influenced which races could buy houses, was that abhorrent? I think we would all agree. When neighborhoods for neighborhoods watch groups, or clean up a playground, or build community by throwing block parties, they are doing great, not abhorrent things.
Conspiring to keep others out is usually abhorrent though.
Workers want good working conditions, home owners good living conditions.
Nothing wrong with it! If some people in a neighbourhood want to buy up a parcel of land to prevent housing from being built there, there's nothing wrong with that. The issue sorta crops up when you start dictating what (structurally-sound) buildings others get to build on their own land.
If you want to reject private property altogether and go to some centrally-planned economic system then you've got a lot of work to do because even the fucking USSR was better at building housing than US cities are today.
I would gladly pay for an extra spot, and I'm sure developers would build more monthly garages a la NYC.
It's super hard to convince all those single family home owners at meeting that I actually like density, and choose to live in the densest part of my city because I like it. I'm not alone, there are a lot of us! But others prevent us from living in our preferred way for no good reason.
Not building parking spaces in LA would be denying the realities of living there.
Refusing to allow people to go carless has a predictable result, that is self enforcing. I would say that "denying reality" is when people refuse to allow others to be different from them.
And it's not just LA, it's the entire state.
Instead we seem to be building large condo/apartments with shops at the ground floor and parking underground. We'll see how they turn out, I suppose.
large condo/apartments with shops at the ground floor
Prop 13 needs to be extended to all persons perpetually under a certain income or over a certain age for their primary residence.
The other issue is new housing construction supply, which while providing new living spaces, reduces demand also impacts open space.
Maybe folks don’t remember the valley when there were fewer buildings. Heck, I remember a corn and pumpkin field across from the middle school I went to in south San Jose that’s now yet another soul-less strip-mall.
The Valley needs to balance concerns of open space/urban sprawl, building height/ ascetics, traffic/transport, property values, non-tech workers unable to save for retirement and homelessness.
Result: expensive housing and bad traffic. Prop 13 is a classic case of "road to hell paved with good intentions".
Land value tax means a tax on the market value of the land, but not on the value of the buildings, only the land is taxed. So imagine two neighboring plots of land in an expensive urban area. The plots are identical except that one has a single family home with a lovely vegetable garden, and the next plot has a ten-story apartment building. Both plots would be taxed the same amount, because the tax is not on the buildings, it is only on the land. With a tax like this, the owners of the single family home would have an increased incentive to develop their land, or sell it and move to an area more suited to single family homes. Another apartment building could then go up, helping to alleviate the housing shortage.
What's more, replacing the income tax would incentivize the creation of more jobs.
If you were to be heard uttering such policy ideas on NextDoor, you'd probably be added to a list so that they can do background on you to dig up at future meetings, or attempt to discredit you. In any case you'll probably be called a shill for greedy developers. Happened to me!
California local tax policy is extremely regressive. High sales tax as a replacement for extremely low property taxes adds greatly to wealth inequality.
Whether those municipalities raise money via sales tax (hugely regressive) or property tax (less regressive), that structural problem will remain for schools.
Meanwhile, sales taxes could be replaced or lightened by a tax on carbon.
LVT isn't politically viable, particularly in contexts (such as the U.S.) where property taxes are principally used by state and especially local government for revenue.
Note that Prop 13 largely passed because 1) people were concerned about seniors being forced out of their homes and 2) the informal practice of property assessors undervaluing the homes of seniors resulted in a perception of unfair and capricious assessments. LVT is a radical move in the completely opposite direction.
The Obamacare debate has shown how irrationally attached people are to specific doctors, and how reactionary they get when you expose them to market forces in an attempt to improve overall welfare. But that's nothing compared to the reaction that happens when tax policy systematically and (more importantly) visibly forces people to move out of their homes. Even if LVT was in practice Pareto Optimal--all people forced to move were objectively better off (e.g. significantly richer)--people would never perceive it that way.
If something isn't politically viable, theoretical arguments are pointless. That we've discounted, forgotten, and even rejected that basic truism of governance--politics is the art of the possible, the attainable--explains much about today's divisive and ineffective politics.
A corollary is that you can't separate politics from economics. Political power is a form of currency--votes in a democracy being the most obvious medium--used for exchange just like money. It's just that what people are exchanging (favors, policies, dreams) is much less concrete than physical goods or interpersonal services.
More than most economic policies LVT utterly fails to account for this aspect of market behavior. LVT only efficiently internalizes costs and benefits if we ignore politics. But it should be obvious that the character of taxation and process of assessment would result in people very quickly diluting LVT. Taxation and property assessment are entirely government functions, LVT invites voters to effectively rent seek en masse, LVT provides no market mechanism whatsoever to compensate, so an LVT regime is unsustainable where you have a free political market.
Indeed, it's in such an opposite direction that I think LVT is illegal under Prop 13. You're welcome to try repealing that one…
I vote against them all on principle, even though for many of them it's very very very hard for me to convince myself of that princple while in the voting box. When you see something that in one or two sentences seems to support your positions, it's really hard to vote against.
However, when I have in theory supported propositions when they pass, I have always regretted the outcomes several years later.
Propositions are almost universally poorly written laws. And worse than that, they are even harder to change. At least poorly laws passed by the legislature can be somewhat easily changed by the legislature whenever the legislature is meeting. Propositions have to go through the voters again, and go through the same distortions of public propaganda all over again.
Crazy conservative
And there's nothing stopping people from having very conservative views about local matters but progressive views for others on the larger stage. That is quite frequent in California: progressive views are held until it affects personal advancement. And the same is quite true for conservatives in other parts of the country, values are held until they get in the way of personal advancement. (E.g. abortion bans are just for other people, but I'm a good person and in a hard situation so it's ok if I get one, but I'll be out protesting next week.)
1) http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-jackson-californi...
Donate/volunteer: https://cayimby.org
(I am not affiliated with California YIMBY.)
- https://dominiccummings.com/2017/01/09/on-the-referendum-21-...
- "Win Bigly" by Scott Adams
It may help to provide a tiny teaser about why it's interesting and relevant if you'd like more people to read it, as the current introduction doesn't do it many favors.
The goal is simple. To live closer to the areas you depend on and not have to lose everything doing so. A disappointment that it was not fully understood. So many hours commuting and pollution moving from A to B when we can use transit and live near it effectively if we can simply build.
For one, bus stops are generally already near existing development, so unless property values plummet, that land won’t be turned into condos.
The second problem is that bus stops can move. Yes - one of he big advantages of busses over rail is that the location of the stops is infinitely flexible. Forward thinking cities build bus pull-outs on major streets in new neighborhoods all the time, so they can be used in the future. Requiring a specific type of zoning at all of hear bus stops will effectively freeze this type of flexibility.
OTOH, building a new train station? Yeah - put up some condos!
I think it is difficult to get a bus line moved in California though, because of CEQA - didn't it take a decade to start a new one in SF just recently? This is why everyone does UberPool.
There needs to be a way to build transit-friendly neighborhoods without turning people against transit.
Like what? Given the dire housing situation in California, making perfect the enemy of good will end up badly in the long run.
my first thought is that instead of tying the upzoning to transit lines or transit stations, it should be tied to transportation corridors. if a route carries a certain amount of people, whether by car or bus or train or jetpack, nearby buildings should be ineligible for certain height restrictions and parking minimums.
SV is too economically important to the national and world economies to allow hysterical, superstitious, and irrational local interests to overheat its housing market.
One method might be to require a tax increase in every neighborhood that is nullified if that neighborhood does certain things (like allowing dense condos). The important thing would be to make it absolutely clear that a whole city/region is in the same boat, that certain actions will be taken on all areas and no one will be allowed to squirm out of them.
My best insight on what is driving the opposition is contained in a book by Zillow researchers called “Zillow Talk”. Basically, housing shortages drive up home values.
The other side of the coin is that "fixing" people's desires on where they want to live sounds pretty creepy.
Housing appreciation is particularly appalling. Rarely is it due to any particular improvements an owner makes, rather its due to city or local changes which reward homeowners for no action of their own. Your schools received higher test scores, collect 35k, and pass Go. A factory ignored EPA regulations, lose 15k. There is no sense or reward for good decisions - just the whims of fate. In fast growing cities like SF, it's worse, home value grows off speculative home value, which grows off even more speculative home values. The monopoly self-reinforces.
There is no reason for such an artificial monopoly to exist. The native Americans got this right. Communists got this right. The Chinese 90-year lease model looks much better.