There is an easy solution: move most land-use regulation to the state level, not the local level. CA's legislature is making some noises in that direction. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-01-06/sb-50-ch...
However, the idea is that as more people join the YIMBY cause, they will elect enough YIMBY representatives that the state will be able to pass solid state level laws about zoning and development that preempt local NIMBY groups.
Your analysis is exactly right, and taking local control away from state and county governments is a partial solution. There should also be financial implications to local governments if they take too long to turn around permit applications. (1.5x actual damages incurred after a cutoff date, paid directly to the home owner, no lawyer required, seems reasonable to me).
In particular, some local planning offices are notoriously obstructionist. In the best case (no zoning exceptions, no objections from neighbors, sympathetic bureaucrats in the office itself), they still needlessly delay the project, and compliance with questionable local regulations with bloat the budget. A San Jose builders association estimates that 25% of the cost of new construction goes to this — I don’t think that includes finance costs due to delay, and it still seems low. Individual homeowners probably pay more as a percentage than well-connected development firms. Alternatively, maybe SJ is more developer-friendly than most places around here.
Over the decades, NIMBYs have passed a set of onerous laws, and created numerous new county offices to enforce them. Of course, the offices are woefully understaffed. There can be a dozen, and they are all backlogged. To resubmit, you have to wait for the slowest office to respond, and with 12 offices, you’ll definitely be resubmitting.
There has been some action at the state level for ADUs (nanny units). Basically, local governments had to remove a bunch of restrictions that were designed to make ADU development impossible, and impose an SLA (of many months, which is lightning fast by CA standards) on permit application processing. If the governments didn’t comply, the law temporarily voided the entirety of their local zoning laws.
Sadly, it only applied to ADU’s, which are limited to being the second house on a lot, with a max square footage of 1200 sq ft.
That’s intentionally too small for families with kids, especially in areas with weird lot shape constraints. I guess this protects affluent schools from poor kids.
Also, they can’t be sold separately from the main house, only rented. Presumably this is to prevent lower class people from owning houses. (If this seems implausible to you, search for “palo alto redlining“ to get an idea of the historical behavior of the city governments around here.)
On the bright side for owners of ADUs, the state-wide rent control laws that were recently passed don’t apply to them (though the anti-eviction clauses might) so home owners can use them to extract extra money from students (and therefore UC), as rent control restricts construction of higher density housing.
We need to elect and re-elect more pro-housing candidates, e.g., Scott Wiener from San Francisco, Shelly Masur from Redwood City, Dave Cortese from San Jose, Nancy Skinner from Berkeley, Marisol Rubio from San Ramon, Maria Cadenas from Santa Cruz.
> That’s intentionally too small for families with kids, especially in areas with weird lot shape constraints.
No, that's just what an ADU is. It stands for accessory dwelling unit, not additional dwelling unit. If you want to argue that people should be able to build additional full-size dwelling units on their property, that's fine, and I might even agree with you. But then we're no longer talking about ADUs, and we have to address a whole different set of practical problems. ADU's have an important role, which would not necessarily be served by unrestricted infill.
> I guess this protects affluent schools from poor kids.
Really? You guess? You can't imagine any other reasons folks might be reluctant to allow unrestricted construction of multiple new residences on existing lots?
> Also, they can’t be sold separately from the main house, only rented. Presumably this is to prevent lower class people from owning houses.
No, it's because selling an ADU separately from the primary dwelling makes no fucking sense whatsoever. An ADU doesn't have it's own separate water, sewer, or electrical service. It shares the lot with the primary dwelling, and you can't subdivide without figuring out right-of-ways, for which there is often not enough room.
> On the bright side for owners of ADUs, the state-wide rent control laws that were recently passed don’t apply to them (though the anti-eviction clauses might) so home owners can use them to extract extra money from students (and therefore UC), as rent control restricts construction of higher density housing.
Great, another variation on the old theme of the landed class extracting money from the working class. Fine, NIMBY homeowners are evil. I agree enthusiastically, without irony. But renting an ADU is much like renting out a room in your house. Imposing restrictions on how much money someone can make from renting a portion of their own residence, or worse yet, preventing a homeowner from evicting tenants from the homeowner's own residence, sure sounds like a recipe for not having any rented ADUs in a city, and accordingly for doing jack shit to improve the housing situation.
Sure, usually they bitch and moan that someone else will take their taxpayer-funded free storage for private property (so long as it has an engine) on a public street.
Of course, this is not a popular view so I remain an eccentric cycling weirdo, except that I got tired of dealing with drivers trying to kill me while cycling in the city, so now I live in the country, and drive everywhere.
I was taking a more conservative stance than that: Why not allow one ADU, and put a limit on the sum of the square footage on the property? Currently zoned for 8000 sq ft + 1200 sq ft ADU? Build two 4600 sq ft McMansions, for all I care.
Going to unlimited infill dwellings regardless of zoning and local infrastructure is pretty radical, and I’m actually not for that.
We’re actually opting for a below-average size house with giant yard for our kids too. :-)