https://www.universalhub.com/2016/lagrange-street-residents-...
>The Zoning Board of Appeals this week rejected a proposed condo building on the site of a former asthma-inhaler factory in West Roxbury, citing neighborhood concerns about density, parking and the developer's proposal to assemble prefab modular units on the site, rather than hiring local workers for more traditional construction.
>...
>But board member Mark Erlich, who is also executive secretary and treasurer of the New England Regional Council of Carpenters, used the proposed modular construction to open an attack on the project. City officials have frequently expressed skepticism of such prefab units being bolted together, he said. But he added:
>It also removes a lot of [work] hours that could be done by people who live and work in the city vs. people in Maine, who wear sneakers.
It seems so orthogonal that I think it must be some kind of local joke?
I wanted to buy a $60,000 foreclosure in my town-- they told me I'm not allowed to even step foot on the property until I install a septic system.
They literally don't let you buy or move onto specific properties without submitting plans from "an approved septic installation company."
You can imagine who is on the approval board, and which companies are "approved providers."
But their policies don't reflect this noble goal.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2015/apr/30/china-bu...
If all the localities in a region, or even most of them, act this way, the end result is a housing shortage even when the economy is barely chugging along.
It's more complicated than just sharing.
It's not about whether you have to let people come and live on your own property. It's about whether your neighbour may subdivide her own property for a profit. Collectively, owners have an incentive to stop her; but individual incentives are mixed.
We can see how the politics of that tension is working out right now. But how can anyone tell how it will play out in the future?
CA where raising local taxes is fiendishly difficult
The localities have a point. Why should existing residents pay for new infrastructure, to accommodate housing for 10,000 new residents (All because large tech firms keep building offices in the valley?)
In a proper world, either the tech giant, or those new employees should pay for those infrastructure improvements.
Traditionally, this has been done through high re-zoning and subdivision fees.
If you and your 4 roommates rent a 5-bedroom house... And then a sixth person moves in, and demands that everyone spends $20,000 each, to construct a sixth bedroom... The old residents are getting a pretty bad deal. The new resident paid $20,000 to get a room... But the rest of the house paid $100,000, for no benefit to themselves.
Cities have zoning/subdivision fees to deal with this exact problem. If you're adding X new units to the city, you have to pay for the infrastructure to support these X units.
property tax is lower for older residents
My sorries to people insulted by this statement.
And housing costs are high because of asinine zoning laws, as OP mentioned.
So if a building used to cost 400k, broken into 200k land cost and 200k building cost, it will still cost 400k, 300k land cost and 100k building cost.
That's how prices are set. It's not "how much this costs to build plus a fair profit".
San Francisco in particular makes it extremely easy for neighborhood residents to impede projects that would be automatically approved in any other city [1, 2]. This is why nothing gets built here, it has nothing to do with the cost of land.
No developer can afford to put up with a five-year battle with neighbors who complain about the shadow that the new building will cast onto their back yard, or to pay for fifteen $X0,000 bullshit environmental studies that the city will make the developer conduct as a "compromise." And remember, these are for designs that are completely up to code and that are zoned legally.
[1]: https://sf.curbed.com/2013/4/17/10252934/what-the-heck-is-di...
[2]: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/nevius/article/Discretionary-...
Can you expand on this? What's the monopoly of?
Rezoning isn't going to fix this IMHO. It might help, but you will reach a limit and then have the same root cause to deal with: rentiers.
No, I imagine these would mostly be used to construct "condo-cities": exurbs/farmland "reformatted" all at once into new urban branch-nodes by plopping five hundred mixed-use condo buildings onto it, and then connecting it to the nearest urban center using high-speed rail or other public transit.
Live in a few of them and you'll see that the level of build quality can be wildly divorced from appearance and sales messaging. :)