The Golden Girls Would Violate Zoning Laws

i cant tell if this is satire or if you actually agree with it

I would even say that the alternatives have the same issue.

Politician C: I will make sure that housing remains affordable.

Politician D: I will make sure that your housing investment does grow.

But C is (loosely) the negation of B and D is (loosely) the negation of A. While there are other choices, the likely ones people vote are are the first group (A, B) verses the second group (C, D), normally with the options appearing in their nicer forms.

In short, affordable housing and having homes be worthwhile investments are at odds with each other in most issues.

The problem is you run out of rings. The three hour commute ring is unsustainable, unlivable and the trend-setters try to move into the center again, city size reaches a maximum and quickly thrown-up roads and bridges start to decay.

But this is the model the US set up and now it has painted itself into a corner in this fashion and many others.

Furthermore, many renters believe that if more housing is built it will only be luxury housing that they couldn't afford anyway. Sure basic economics tells us that increasing supply ought to drive down prices for everyone, but at the individual level it's tough for people to make the connection.

Then the land owners can push through whatever price-exploding rules they want as long as they can maintain that 51% by promising the Judas tenants that their rents will stay the same.

How did you arrive at that conclusion? I'm no expert in that field, but an underwater mortgage really means a decrease in mobility for a mortgage borrower (example: if they want to sell their home and relocate, then their sale proceeds will not cover their full liability). It should have no bearing on the ongoing affordability of that mortgage which is the primary cause of a mortgage borrower losing a home. What am I missing?

The problem with housing is that efficient use of one of the inputs (land) is illegal. Fix this and housing will be available at a variety of price points, just like cars are.

Zoning is not a part of property rights. Zoning was something invented in the early 20th century, because property law wasn't sufficient to enact the kind of racist controls people wanted.

The first problem with this is that most existing zoning rules don't actually meet your premise. They were imposed on whoever owned the property when they were enacted, regardless of their consent.

The second problem is that even for things like HOAs where all the properties were owned by one entity that originally consented to the restrictions, what you then get is essentially a local government-style entity where only land owners get a vote. This is clearly not a particularly egalitarian style of governance.

The most egregious zoning ordinance in Chicago is that in many residential districts an existing structure cannot be subdivided into multiple units, but multiple units can be combined into a larger unit. This is a legal bias in favor of rising prices and falling access.

Many property owners were irate, screaming that people would be demolishing their homes to put up fourplexes in every street, etc.

But the most heinous venom was reserved for the study that showed that with the increase in housing volume and availability that their homes would go from an expected 9% year over year increase to 4.8%, and that somehow infringed on their rights as property owners (I'm still confused as to which clause of the Constitution relates to your rights to have your property value exceed inflation by a certain value). There was no prediction that it'd depress home values - they'd still appreciate. Just not as fast. But you'd think the government was asking them to turn off life support on their children.

If you build a bunch of houses then you have a larger customer base and tax base and have the money to provide more services.

The real issue is that if you get a bunch of new lower income residents who consume more in services than they pay in taxes then it raises costs on the existing residents who have to make up the difference. But if that's the concern then better to use flat-rate service fees so that new lower income residents are at least paying for what they consume than to do something even more regressive with zoning by effectively excluding them from the community entirely.

Yea, out of doing contracting work in 4 states (WA, OR, CO and FL), it's not too difficult (depending on what) to overturn some zoning laws. As long as you are being smart about it. My personal experience, zoning laws are mostly there to make sure idiots are least capable of accomplishing extreme stupidity. If you're careful and smart, you typically hate code enforcement because it's a waste of time for you. But holy shit, are they needed for a lot of contractors.

Fun joke, how do you know if someone has never been on a construction site?

They're a libertarian.

That may be true in some (many?) locales, but it's not for places like California, where the housing shortages are hurting most.

Here, even if you don't need a variance, and your plans are exactly up to code as-is, you should expect to spend 1-2 years fighting NIMBY landowners who don't want anything to change, and use various laws and community comment periods as blunt instruments to delay your building plans to the point that you run out of money while fighting and give up.

I don't think that is true, or at least it doesn't have to be true. First, imagine a world where instead of "you need four parking spots if you want a duplex," the law was more flexible and said something like "the # of cars registered to an address cannot be greater than the # of parking spots at that address." That would solve the problem but also allow the duplex owner to rent to at least some subset of tenants instead of not being able to rent at all. Second, my understanding is older houses are grandfathered in, so if I owned a duplex built 50 years ago that wouldn't pass duplex code today, I would still be able to use it as a duplex without bringing it up to code. That means there are already duplexes with two parking spots that are legal, but I just can't have one if I build it today with more modern, safer building methods. (IANA real estate laywer, but this grandfathering is my understanding of how zoning law works.)

> So a property not designed to hold a large number of people, isn't allowed to hold a large number of people. That seems reasonable. Just from a fire-safety perspective alone it makes a lot of sense to require custom-built commercial facilities after a certain number of kids.

I understand the need for some requirements, like fire safety. That's very important and there are separate rules for that. But California requires something like 35 indoor sq feet per child in a home day care facility. That means you can have 14 kids in a 1,000 square foot home, but can't have 15 kids in a 3,000 square foot home. These laws are very blunt instruments.

In the case of the parking, how is someone else harmed as long as they are aware of the parking before any purchasing/leasing decisions are made? Signing up for any paid service fiscally hurts someone, but the vast majority of people have no problem as long as there is full agreement on the extent of that harm before signup. Only when the harm is hidden in fine print or not disclosed at all is it an issue.

I guess to say it another way: you should be able to do whatever you want to your property if it doesn't really hurt anyone without their consent. As for what constitutes consent, that is an entire planet of canned worms waiting to be opened.

Enacting this vision will take years of diligent hard work, but that's what I'm signing up for.

Don't buy a house off the end of a runway unless you want to listen to my 230HP of bug smashing power...

I understand if it was a pig slaughterhouse or night club or something like that. But even the early 1900s had office buildings, law offices, various small shops, and other quiet firms.

Seems like a heavy-handed approach in retrospect. If anything the laws should be related to the type of business or externalities (noise, smell, etc) it produces rather than on strict residential/work/industrial lines.

My secret is very small cities. They generally have suburban density, but aren't technically suburban because there isn't a rush-hour commute to a larger city. These places are also affordable. For example, median houses (typically about 1500 square feet on 0.25 acre) go for about $150,000 in Melbourne, FL.

That 40 mile commute is definitely a choice.

There are various reasons: rent control would be lost, property tax control would be lost, kids would need to attend different schools, spouse would need a job in the same location, real estate agents eat 6% of home value, etc.

So it works for a person's first job, assuming a 1-income household. After a few years, there is a job change, and then never again is work close to home.

If you want to tackle commute distances you need to deal with all the reasons people refuse to move. You can't count on people staying with the same employer forever.

E.g.:

In Seattle when they upzone a small area it immediately goes up in value because a builder can put say four houses now and sell more units. There is nowhere else that can be done so that land has a premium on it due to the restrictive zoning in the rest of the city.

Now if the whole city was up zoned at the same time then the zoning would not affect the value of the land, only its amenity and location factors as per usual. In fact in this case land values would likely drop overall because now more units can be built everywhere allowing more people to live in the city in a variety of housing types, we reduced the supply demand gap and that affects the value of land overall.

Money is not the only value land has.

I'm sure some voters are concerned with the things you mentioned.

I'm also sure other voters are concerned with lowering the price of rent. This can be done by increasing supply of housing, which can be done by increasing both the number of people who can live in one lot, as well as increasing the number of lots.

Local governments can be petty, but that is the human condition. Congress has been known to be petty and corrupt, and so have federal agencies.

I think SF still thinks of itself as a small, scenic city of 850000, a strange hybrid of cosmopolitan and provincial traits. It fits neatly into a small box. For this version of SF, a small, pleasant place with a stable population, a budget over 11 billion (last year's number) is huge. It's enough that SF gov't can burn hundreds of millions on programs that don't solve problems and still stay solvent.

I think the problem is that the 11+ billion dollar budget actually reflects a much bigger and more dynamic city that is outgrowing that small box, and you can see the strain. This San Francisco needs a vastly improved public transportation system. San Francisco's city streets are overwhelmed, and the NIMBYs near my neighborhood aren't wrong when they say traffic from higher density will grind to a halt with the higher density apartments the YIMBYs are asking for. We can't do this with our existing infrastructure, we can't do this if everyone's going to get to work in their own SUV with their own parking space, and I personally believe we're already seeing this paralysis even with our restrictive building codes (largely because in the absence of proper housing, 8 adults will cram into a single family house, and they'll all want to park somewhere). Public transportation needs to be safe and efficient, it needs to have a vastly greater coverage reach, much of it should ideally be underground in SF proper, and it needs to link suburban and exurban areas to allow people to reach job centers. I'm a parent, and SF park and rec summer camps filled up so fast that people are waiting by the computer, watching the international clock, and are content if they can fill up a third of their schedule (it's a real crapshoot). San Francisco needs vastly expanded services. We'll need a much better storm draining and sewage system, maybe with pumps in some areas, we need better drainage "sinks" and areas with more soil filter, probably expanded sewage treatment centers, we need to relieve bottlenecks. It goes on and on.

When you think about what SF needs to get done, 11 billion doesn't seem like so much. Unfortunately, as it stands, I think SF views it as a windfall that can buttress ineffective government and wasteful programs.

From what you've read, you can probably tell I'm not an anti-government type, though I am wary of excessive government programs, since I do think they have a tendency to be wasteful. SF needs good government and proper infrastructure badly, and it's going to cost $$.

To be clear, I'm not making a Republican versus Democrat argument here. The problem is the lack of a viable alternative rather than the particular party in power.

I've bought two houses in my life. Both had obviously unpermitted work; I had no issue in either case as it was generally acceptable quality of work. If a shopper for my house has a problem with unpermitted work when I go to sell, they're free to move along and find a house without any.