Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
sfchronicle.com
sfchronicle.com
Proposals like these, while admirable, usually miss the mark and have little to no impact on housing availability because they fail to accept that housing development isn't just about zoning.
Impact fees, planning regs (traffic, parking, etc), planning delays, NIMBY fights, labor costs...these are all inputs into the question of whether a multifamily development makes economic sense for a developer.
There is a formula under which you can build market-rate and/or affordable housing (sometimes the same) and when that formula checks out, you see lots of development.
All of that has to work out to a cost per door and that cost has to be recouped in rents that pay for opex and debt. The fourplex in the article would cost $562,500/door. A very basic calc of the necessary rents would be $4,950.
California, particularly San Francisco, has pressures at every step of that formula. So if the Bay Area wants more housing, it has to be willing to look at the problem holistically.
- What role do planning review delays play in increasing the costs and perceived risk of acquiring a parcel and going through the process?
- What % of potential building sites are classified as historical properties?
- What are the parking, traffic impact and roadway requirements that multifamily traffic counts will have to mitigate/build for?
- What power do unions have to dictate building programs?
- Who can object to proposals?
Most of that area is not classified as historical, and a lot of it is filled with relatively cheaply constructed and not particularly beautiful buildings (property values have increased a lot in the past few decades). The residential streets in most of that area are way wider than currently necessary and there is a lot of free or cheap street parking everywhere, but some arterial roads are a bottleneck during commute hours and public transit is inadequate. The zoning is basically “sleepy low-density beach town” rather than “cosmopolitan city”.
Changing the zoning of most of those areas to the purple (NCT) or medium orange (RM, RC, RTO) types is not the only change needed, and it won’t make a difference overnight, but it would eventually allow something like doubling the population of the city without requiring anything taller or larger than 4–10-unit low-rise buildings. It would probably also force the city to make a bunch of public transit upgrades, as the whole western half of the city is currently pretty isolated from the more connected eastern half.
Rezoning is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
The idea housing is so expensive is just ridiculous. There should theoretically be no arbitrage between renting and owning. The market is so distorted though that the idea is a joke.
If there is something that free markets would do a very good job at solving it is this problem. If we don't believe in that at least we are really in trouble.
The really sad thing is this is just crushing poor people with rents. No one would be helped more by free markets in real estate than poor people.
The bigger the change in a single effort, the faster it often dies. This one is already fairly large and what happens to rent will be important in the short term but also the long term where you could build enough to keep things stable or growing slower.
Sean Kieghran, president of San Francisco's Residential Builders Association, said he supports getting rid of single-family only zoning but doesn't think it will result in many new units. Kieghran said that building fourplexes requires either two staircases or a staircase and an elevator, which takes up too much of the site.
And, unless the city streamlined the process of building a fourplex on a single-family lot, builders would run into too many bureaucratic obstacles, Kieghran said. "With how long it takes to get through planning and fire and DPW and all the other red tape it's not likely we are going to see anybody building fourplexes anytime soon," he said.
...
One of the few architects to design fourplexes on single-family sized lots in the last few decades is Daniel Solomon, who has worked on three such projects...
"These are nifty little projects, but they won't make a big dent in the housing need," Solomon said. "That zoning is a tool to create housing production is a widely held and completely fallacious idea. Just because something is permitted doesn't mean it happens. It's very hard to find a vacant lot or tear down at a price that would work."
He said the fourplexes he designed and built were profitable, but barely. And they took as much time to design and execute as the 100-unit complexes his firm, Mithun, is known for.
"You would need to find a developer willing to take a risk on a minuscule profit and an architect who enjoys brain damage," he said. "They are complicated little projects. It's the absolute opposite of economy of scale."
It has added barely any new supply at all.
I think it didn't go far enough. Rezone for 4-10 story apartment buildings, and now you're getting somewhere.
This single family home thing just doesn't work in cities with as much demand as San Francisco and Vancouver.
If you want to tackle the problem from the supply side, you need to be more aggressive about it. You need for the potential profit to be great enough to justify buying multiple adjacent homes, tearing them down, and combining the lots.
Even then, it might not be enough to solve the problem, but it's a start.
I'm also of course seeing nimbys against tower development at commercial and broadway, which would have the biggest short term impact imo. They want to protect their scarcity.
Ugh. We have to put a stop to that if we don't want to end up like San Francisco. The Tokyo model is the one to emulate.
I'm not one for completely favouring towers, but in this particular neighborhood, there's basically no new buyable housing stock. If people want to live here, they're either renting or buying one of the endlessly appreciating massive houses. That need to rent and the scarcity drives up the big house value further, and the only people who can get ahead are the ones who cam buy something for 1.7m.
If they're rental units, that's also ok, more supply brings down rents and lower rent causes more landlords to sell. Extra supply does add downward pressure on prices one way or another.
I don't see where the "value destroyer" is.
You buy condos, you own them, and you can get a mortgage on them. I think you don't know what a condo is.
People say that on here all the time, but I have never seen that happen. Do you have an example where increased housing supply lowered prices aside from a natural or market disaster? Maybe, Detroit where people simply abandoned their homes with no intent to sell.
> While the cost of housing is climbing in many global cities, the average middle-class family in Tokyo can still afford to buy a new, single-family detached home for $300,000. That’s right. The typical Tokyo starter home is a brand new three-bedroom.
Their national zoning rules allow supply to meet demand without city-level meddling. Houses there sell for roughly the cost of construction.
The reason housing is so nuts in SF is because the city added half as many new houses as required to meet demand over the last say 30 years. [2]
[1] https://archive.curbed.com/2017/2/3/14496248/tokyo-real-esta...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_housing_shortage
This is not quite the same thing as an immediate increase in supply, but instead a large drop in demand. The net result is the exact same thing: a large increase in the vacancy rate, which resulted in a rapid and dramatic decrease in median rents.
Is there some effect in real life that prevents it from working the way the theory predicts?
I don't think so. I would put the burden of proof on you, if you want to go against a solid theory. It seems self evident that more housing supply means houses stay on the market longer (there is lots of evidence for that) and that means sellers have more incentives to lower the price to get a quicker sale (lots of evidence for that too.) Look for historical real estate inventory reports that include prices and you should see the effect when time on market increases.
It's important to note that prices would only fall if the change in supply overwhelmed the change in demand. In cities like Vancouver the demand is increasing at such a rate that increased supply only means prices don't rise as much as they would have otherwise. Time on market is always short. There was a brief dip in prices early in the pandemic and then things compensated back in the other direction.
https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...
Isn’t that exactly the point? These are the people that can’t afford to live in the city now.
First you make things legal then you streamline them.
> You would need to find a developer willing to take a risk on a minuscule profit and an architect who enjoys brain damage," he said. "They are complicated little projects. It's the absolute opposite of economy of scale."
Once you’ve gotten the streamlining part right, new actors can come in to make this cheaper. Those developers just want to keep the code complex so that only 100 unit projects are viable so that huge firms are the only ones who can execute projects.
Strong disagreement.
The best thing for developers would be minimal zoning, Houston style.
As the Bay Area built to expand from 7M people to, say, 20M in a decade, enormous fortunes and livelihoods would be made from all that construction work.
It's like in many industries; the interests of the group as a whole push towards deregulation, while the interests of the biggest, politically well-connected firms is to increase regulation that will be harder for competitors to deal with and will allow them to get or maintain a stranglehold over the market.
A big lie spread under capitalism is that the wealthy and powerful actually like growth.
The rich and powerful "don't like" growth? Well, they've been failing spectacularly for quite some time: maybe they aren't so powerful? It makes no sense.
Prime example is oil wealth. With their massive coffers, fossil fuel companies could be leading the transition to renewable energy, massive increasing human wealth as they drive the cost of energy down and drive their former competitors out of business by acquiring all the new renewables startups that will become the large companies of the future.
Tech, and the HN crowd in general, pursues a strategy of generally increasing the pie size, of disrupting themselves before somebody else disrupts them. But that is not the case for the majority of the economy in developed countries. And in undeveloped countries it's painfully easy to see so many wealthy people maximizing their own position in society over maximally growing their wealth.
Why are they NIMBYs when they could make much more money redeveloping their best-positioned neighborhoods as massive apartments they rent out?
Why did they not let wages grow, when the resulting increase in consumption will make them more profit?
If rich people as a class really were interested in max growth, they would have stayed Fordist-Keynesianist, but that did not happen. And indeed growth, while still present, hasn't been what it was in the past.
Developers who are entrenched enjoy the fact it is hard to get a permit. Then, the specialty becomes navigating the system (which the surviving developers are de facto good at). It is hard for the best developers from other cities, who may be amazing at cheap/efficient/quality construction to challenge the incumbents in SF.
It is like saying that government contractors who build websites want the bid system to be simpler. In some ways they do, since on paper they would save a lot of money if they could get rid of their dozen employees who specialize in navigating it. At the same time, most government website contractors probably are not the best web developers - jsut the best at navigating the system.
The post you reply too says "we need minimal zoning". You say "its hard to work because of too many restrictions".
Am I reading it wrong, but you disagree but seem to agree on the main points: Government needs to get out of the way to allow progress.
Imagine how much a developer with Coastal Commission expertise could charge. That's probably a specialty in itself.
The handful of developers who are working in the current environment? No.
You see this with every regulated industry. The people who pissed away a ton of time and money to get into the club don't want the club to fall apart.
Even if it did, remote-work-driven sprawl would be terrible for humanity. We should still congregate for environmental reasons, whether that means 5 story walkable towns, or 20 story city. No where does SFH fit in the picture. Li-on will not save us.
They're political similar, economically as similar as you'll get (silicon forest in Hillsboro and Seattle's whole tech scene rivals SF), and geographically similar in terms of climate to parts of the bay area.
If we blow it in the US there are plenty of people ready to work for TikTok or whatever other overseas company takes over.
Though I am surprised NYC doesn't have more tech jobs
If someone said you could live in one of the most desirable places in the entire world on an 'ordinary' job but you had to share a room (which TBH could just be your significant other anyway) that would seem like a great deal right?
When many categories of essential workers start to be priced out of living locally and need to commute long distances from undesirable far-flung suburbs, it is (a) a grossly inefficient use of resources, and (b) makes the city much less pleasant and effective. A city where all of the residents are wealthy professionals with other workers as second-class commuters is not a very nice place to live, more like a theme park or resort hotel than a real city.
We do need to get rid of stupid zoning, but also cannot rely on a housing market to do the right thing. We need to force a shift to anti-car rather than pro-car development (and it really is a dichotomy, with the midpoint being a highly unstable equilibrium).
The fact that they are talking about 4-plexes shows they really don't get the scale of density that is needed. Everything should be 5 stories minimum. Maybe some shorter Victorians can be grandfathered in, but the Sunset and western half more broadly needs to be almost entirely redeveloped.
The headlines will read "Poor Betty was forced from her home by the evil mayor and money grubbing developer".
They set the table when they built it, and to undo all of that is going to be crazy expensive and difficult.
Some people dream of a car free utopia. Some people like their SFR. Those things may not be compatible.
Things like the Miami tower collapse will make things worse. A lot of people don't want their life dictated by their neighbors. HOAs are well known to be horrendous. And the Miami disaster just goes to show that not only can your HOA affect your sanity, but also your life safety.
The government shouldn't be telling people what they can or can't build (beyond safety)
SF and adjacent cities need to both reduce the approval process and encourage higher density.
1. https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/as-if-you-needed...
I’m not alone in this - several cities have already banned AirBNB.
In the case of San Francisco, they also need a centralized, online planning/permits database. They are still doing things on paper, and they've got a backlog of thousands of permits. It can take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars simply to navigate the permitting process.
Wow. That means they can get away with one staircase in San Fran. Wouldn't fly where I'm from.
His material point is correct though. Real estate development is about money. Where I live, you can generally only make money on fourplexes where land prices are low enough. I don't know much about San Fran real estate, but from what I've heard, land is not very cheap.
I would think in San Fran larger apartment complexes would be more profitable. Of course then there are all kinds of other headaches, like getting all the lots you need in the exact same contiguous area. Which also doesn't sound cheap in San Fran. So maybe what I meant is luxury condos instead of apartments? Point is that however it happens the money math has to work.
Changing the zoning is a good first step, but not the only (or even the most significant) obstacle.
Between California and Bay Area regulations it is very challenging to turn a profit on demolitions except at the highest echelons of the housing market.
We need Land Value Taxes.
Dodd Frank made speculative financing so difficult, that the industry either scaled up, as was mentioned in the article, to make it worth the trouble of pacifying HUD, or scaled down and run a business that essentially relies on clients to finance the projects. Most builders (and others in the industry) were forced to scale down.
These were the builders that might have considered 4-plex or other small multifamily projects, but they've essentially been barred from the market.
They should have pulled their heads out of their butts and respected people's property rights 20, 30yr ago when the problems were becoming obvious. But they didn't so they're gonna have to pay up.
Repealing some zoning is a small step in the right direction but they're gonna continue hemorrhaging money until they start tackling the other ideologically driven inefficiency (of which the person you are replying to has named a few types) before they really start seeing improvement.
An opposite example might be, in the East Bay hills, on a steep area of dense old vegetation, a developer wants to bulldoze the entire thing, add heavy landscaping and drainage, and built four dozen "premium" homes. If the city council member is looking at the hundreds of millions of dollars that will change hands, over an are that is literally no dollars now, then the plan gets approved. You might guess, this is a true example and a developer from Hong Kong put their name on the project and it was built.
The case of a beach is also not-obvious, as it is world-scale irreplaceable.
I'm not sure if you are referring to the big tacky mansions on Highland Terrace in Fremont, but if you are those are now the most heavily-assessed properties in Alameda County.
Also, small elevators are definitely something that could benefit from an economy of scale, and anyway make a big difference in accessibility for any building above one story. Likewise, the possible designs of multi-unit homes on small lots could become more standardized. And the regulations could improve, and the regulatory institutions could gain more experience handling these kinds of projects.
All of that starts with the zoning.
They built a duplex by me and the combined units went for less than what a SFH would have gone for. Plus I imagine it was more expensive to build.
I think it only makes sense where the lot is big enough to fit 2 essentially full SFHs as a duplex.
It wasn't until the late 60's / early 70's that explicit racial discrimination was finally outlawed, and it's not a coincidence that exclusionary zoning took off immediately thereafter as a prima facie race-neutral way to achieve the same outcome.
...
But the largest legislative achievement of this emerging anti-growth coalition would be the Residential Rezoning of 1978, a project to implement stricter controls across all of San Francisco’s neighborhoods. In addition to creating 40-foot building-height limits for most residential areas, the legislation included new setback rules (regulating how far a building could be from the public right-of-way), low-density requirements (limiting the number of housing units in a given building), and overall design guidelines aimed at preserving entire neighborhoods in amber.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90242388/the-bad-design-that-cre...
Our city council only recently changed zoning to allow an increase from only 2!!! non-related adults living in the same place to 5. It's crazy to me that was ever a limit in the first place.
No 3 bed apartments for non-blood relatives?!
The old zoning that was fixed also made it harder and limited certain types of group homes, rehabs etc too, especially the number of and locations.
One of the filers of this repeal said the following in a press article - clear intent imho.
“This affects their very wealth. Their very wealth,” said George E. Mayl, one of the five voters who officially filed to create a referendum committee. “And not only that, their children’s, their heirs’ wealth. Someone’s home is their single largest investment of their life.”
also the way they use 'neighborhood' to me is not so veiled language in the context of race and class - just like the many policies and laws in the past. It's used as a rhetorical excuse just like 'protecting the kids' is often used.
Similarly like Trump & Reps in 2020 made 'protect the suburbs from' or 'border invasion' a key message.
There are another 2 housing measures on the ballot that are competing.
A big developer spent like $20 million or something to buy rights for a golf course in the city that they want to develop.
They bought it with a green space park easement... But to be profitable they have to repeal the easement so they can built over the park. They gambled on their power to change the law.
So they filed a measure to allow them to build more (to be fair they still plan on having a park, but less green space than currently protected in an easement).
So now there is a competing measure in response to protect the park.
I'm for it we don't have a ton of open green space in Denver and we can't build more. Let's change laws and remove red tape to build UP.
What happens if they both pass? who in the world will be able to decipher the two when voting?
And what does it say that corporations & white homeowners consistently and so plainly manipulate the law directly for their bottom line (oil and gas is a big one here)?
Another one on the ballot around homelessness. HUGE problem, we have tents in residential neighborhoods and lots of theft.
But it's pretending to address the problem while really making more laws and regulations to criminalize homelessness and disallow solutions.
They're so brave to invest in allowing homeless to sleep in parking lots lol...
While simultaneously making it harder to create group living and the rehab that a ton of homeless individuals would greatly benefit from.
Thankfully we do have some push by Rep. DeGette and a few others to buy old motels. That's a good investment and would actually help.
Folks might not be able to choose where they live, but at least they will get cheap housing? Is that a fair trade?
But don't lose hope for direct democracy yet! A few years later Prop 13, which is arguably worse on minorities https://harvardcrcl.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/..., passed by a wide margin and continues to see strong support from voting demographics today.
By definition not racist.
It's why educated Blacks in the US are moving back to red Southern states more so than they're moving to blue Northeast and Western ones. It's much cheaper and easier to build new housing in suburban Dallas or Atlanta versus San Francisco, New York, or LA.
To me I view racism as a larger umbrella. Includes bias, both on the surface but also more broadly what has been cultivated as a society. Context is very important in my definition viewpoint. centuries of historic oppression, which led to unequal wealth, opportunity, and more. ongoing bias which discriminates in hiring and opportunity and more.
I view this context as a kind of 'prior' (to use a ML term I don't fully understand lol) when assessing whether or not something is 'racist.'
While on the other hand it seems like some view racism as solely a person knowingly and vocally treating one ethnicity differently and discriminating openly.
To me I agree with parent and I hold the larger viewpoint.
Because of centuries of oppression BIPOC have less money, less opportunity, own less housing, communities are segregated don't have nearly as much ownership in the 'single family neighborhoods' & that community which drives the policy we are talking about.
I don't think one can ignore that context, and its implicit bias, when looking at why these laws, regulations, zoning were (and are) being passed.
And plus many times it's also explicitly racist like the latter viewpoint; like the language Trump & Republicans use about 'invading' the suburbs.
Suburbs are de facto and de jure not racist. No one is stopping any race of people from moving to the suburbs, no law is stopping any members of any race from moving to the suburbs, etc.
You can definitely make the claim that suburbs are classist, but racist? No.
No, our nation's history guarantees that economic segregation is racial segregation. These laws were literally designed to create racial segregation.
Saying, "we only like the economic segregation part now" doesn't change the outcome.
>Saying, "we only like the economic segregation part now" doesn't change the outcome.
Correlation does not imply causation. It's no secret that Asians (a historically disadvantaged POC) flock to the suburbs. They are de facto not barred from suburbs, meaning suburbs are de facto not racist.
You're pretending that explicit racism is the only form of racism. Modern zoning was invented precisely because the Supreme Court outlawed explicit racial zoning. It was designed to racially segregate and continues to do so.
Example: "More than 80% of America’s large metropolitan areas were more racially segregated in 2019 than they were in 1990" https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/28/us-racial-se...
"Correlation does not imply causation."
The history is well documented. Read Color of Law or for a shorter form: https://grist.org/cities/zoned-out-one-womans-half-century-f...
When the origin and outcome are both racist then policy itself is clearly racist.
I'm not pretending, racism is racism, you don't get to redefine what words mean in order to fit your narrative. Suburbs are de facto and de jure not racist.
>Modern zoning was invented precisely because the Supreme Court outlawed explicit racial zoning.
This is not entirely true. Zoning laws in LA and NYC predate explicit racial zoning, and survived past the 1917 Supreme Court ruling.
>It was designed to racially segregate and continues to do so.
Again, not entirely true, and definitely no longer true. Asians, Jews, Indians, Africans, etc. are all more likely to reside in suburban areas now, so they by definition do not "racially segregate and continues to do so".
>"More than 80% of America’s large metropolitan areas were more racially segregated in 2019 than they were in 1990" https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/28/us-racial-se...
Your link literally agrees with me: "Many of these policies were not designed to oppress."
>The history is well documented. Read Color of Law or for a shorter form: https://grist.org/cities/zoned-out-one-womans-half-century-f...
Poor opinion piece that conflates zoning and segregation laws, which is what many people have been doing because it's politically expedient.
>When the origin
Maybe, but not entirely.
>and outcome
Provably not so. Asians/Indians (a historically disadvantaged POC), Africans, etc. are all flooding to suburbs, which means they are de facto no longer racist, and do not have a racist outcome. QED.
It's also worth noting that the same laws were applied to Asians - exclusionary zoning and housing policies led to the consolidation of populations within certain neighborhoods, like San Francisco's Chinatown: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/how-1800s-racism-...
It wasn't always the case that most Asians could (whether financially or politically) move to the suburbs.
Correlation does not imply causation.
>But if you want to exclude certain people from your neighborhood, and those people happen to often be from a certain culture/socioeconomic class…
No doubt, no one wants to live around low class riff raff. That's not race specific, and so, is by definition not racist.
>It's also worth noting that the same laws were applied to Asians - exclusionary zoning and housing policies led to the consolidation of populations within certain neighborhoods, like San Francisco's Chinatown
Now you're straw manning hard. No one is making the claim that laws of the past weren't racist. Now, they're not, and so Asians, Indians, Africans (as in recent African immigrants) all flood to the suburbs because suburbs are decidedly not racist, and are free of the riff raff.
>It wasn't always the case that most Asians could (whether financially or politically) move to the suburbs.
Same for whites. Many/most were locked away in perpetual poverty in rural areas.
We really need to densify a lot, and do so quickly, and I am skeptical the market will get us the quick enough.
Zoning is bad, but don't forget all our good unplanned construction was also pre-auto. Looking at e.g. parts of Texas, I worry that the self-perpetuation dynamics of cars --- which are very strong --- will make a market-based transition away from low density too quite tenuous.
I have 0 problem saying in Core areas single family family homes have no place, and we should ban them outright. SFH zoning is bad because it causes land too be wasted, such that future generations have to pay the costs of redevelopment rather than building right on "unimproved" land. Conversely, "too much density", if there even is such a thing, would waste very little land, meaning that a mandated switch back to SFH suburbia would be cheap, just as it was 50+ years ago.
It's not hubris, it's learning from our mistakes.
SFH IS the best options, nobody WANTS to live in an apartment if given the choice.
There's so many positives to living in an apartment that are pretty much direct effects of the denser housing.
Of course there goes your rents and home prices, but now if you actually lived in the surrounding area you'd be able to easier walk to shops and with rents being less that'd wind up eventually as lower prices and lower cost of living.
Its not surprising that the half-measures they're taking almost seems designed to not have a lot of actual uptake.
Like you mention importance of stores.
I would maybe subsidize grocers & shops with tax breaks for a few years to get the walkability cycle going. The cart before horse problem, build it and they will come theory.
And have it all near enough school and offices that a <10 minute bus ride can get you to those campuses.
And you can still have islands of SFH/Townhouses that are within ~4 blocks of high density (I'd probably prefer that since I'm quite introverted most of the time).
"The small apartment buildings that triggered this revolt are called are called 'dingbats'. They're those boxy buildings you see all over the place with pompous names like 'La Traviata' or 'Chateau Antoinette'. These kinds of housing weren't pretty, but they were no-frills apartments you could afford if you were an actor, or a grocery clerk, or a secretary. This scared the hell out of homeowners in rich neighborhoods, because apartments were for poor people and minorities. So, we voted for politicians who reduced the zoning of LA bit by bit, effectively freezing the status quo in place. And after 1970, rich communities just stopped building new housing, period. You can see the results from the population table below."
> But while the movement to allow multifamily buildings in zones previously limited to single-family homes
How is this even a thing? Couldn't two families just define themselves as a big extended family? They could for example just have two people marry for a day, move into the upstairs and downstairs respectively, and then get divorced the next day to hack the system.
They shouldn't have to. That's a ton of work.
At one point in time black people could vote if they 'hacked the system' by paying or passing a test.
You do sometimes here about communities trying to enforce prohibitions on unrelated people living together in single family homes, but where the zoning itself is almost universal in America, such enforcement is very rare.
I don’t know if there’s a solution. Cities may just go through decade long cycles of stagnation and revitalization as NIMBY generations die off, there’s less “romance” around the current character/ the place falls into disrepair, the city wants to attract new folks, and newer generations have strong demand for different modes of living.
Meanwhile, all of the brownfield sites that are appearing are being turned into student accomodation en masse; even with planning restrictions. I can only Imagine the state of the city if we just blindly allowed building.
I am sure scale of planning matters too, and that there was at least a little bit of planning, but perhaps smaller in scale.
The more evident factor in “beautiful” cities is probably that they came about before the advent of personal automobiles. They are much more pleasant to be in outside of a vehicle, and hence more “beautiful” simply because there were no vehicles at the time, and so whatever developed, planned or unplanned, had parameters that only considered people not in big boxes moving at high speeds.
Also, we now have the automobile to content with. The car is a like a gene drive, a self-perpetuating technology like we had never seen before, radically upending status-quo-ante system dynamics. (The reasons being a) Cars push everyone else off the streets, b) car-driven development spreads everything way to far apart for anything else to be practical.)
The market alone can't defeat cars any more than evolution can defeat gene drives. Only social failure / extension (and heaven forbid horizontal gene transfer!) can rain them in "endogenously".
Why is the government involved in whether I can run a business from my home? Why is the government responsible for controlling where businesses might be located instead of the free market controlling that aspect more dynamically?
The de facto justification is indirect negative externalities exist like traffic congestion. Also known as F U I got mine.
Plopping down a subdivisions in a sleepy county can quickly overwhelm local school systems, sewage treatment, etc. Even just 7% annual growth doubles the local population every decade which requires incredible and increasing investments in infrastructure. Slowing that down slightly is hardly unreasonable and it can help avoid expensive and damaging boom / bust cycles.
I would still be skeptical of this since I've learned the racial views of many famous environmental figures (like John Miur) and the various organizations brought up in their wake. Obviously correlation != causation but check out the trajectories and intersection between the usage of "segregationist" and "environmentalist" in American English publications. They cross over right around the time of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (1973):
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gentrification...
(Sorry for gross huge URL. You might have to focus the input box and hit Enter to see the results. Here's a screenshot otherwise: https://i.imgur.com/kP8ugvH.png )
The only way they get there is when housing is built up around them.
If you're too lazy to fire up Google maps before you buy well then that's on you.
Though you can move just outside town if you want chickens I guess.
I found many pieces of it - some of which were directly related to lack of zoning - to be aesthetic disasters.
There seems to be a conception that support of zoning, and things like it, need be grounded in some scientific public-good maximalism that probably doesn't exist.
I don't feel bound by that at all.
The reason I am against ad-hoc liquor stores being run from a walled in front porch of a single-family home converted (badly) to a duplex[1] is because I dislike them aesthetically.
[1] Houston, circa 1999.
The general idea is that city planners prioritize aesthetics over their residents being able to afford housing.
I keep wondering: How soon until someone proposes that building codes drive up housing prices and that code enforcement unfairly impacts PoC ?
It seems outlandish but ... part of me thinks it's just a matter of time.
But fourplexes? Not a chance.
This reasoning is exactly why I stopped being a libertarian, the free market has no recourse mechanisms for actors making peoples lives worse.
Nuisance law is a recourse mechanism in the case you point out, and is included in any reasonable notion of "free market". (In the more radical notions of libertarianism, you and the other guy would simply submit the dispute to a mutually-trusted outside arbitrator, with a voluntary agreement to abide by the arbitrator's ruling.)
Government policy and the marketplace aren't the exclusive ways of managing relationships between people.
Annnnd from the perspective of the person you’re complaining about this is an incentive for libertarianism, you are making their life worse by enacting arbitrary rules that make you happy and enforcing those rules with violence.
And it could be that some other inane government rule made it so that they had to park trucks where they did in the first place.
No one ain’t building a four plex on that, unless a) the height restriction is also raised b) one parking space per unit no longer required and c) some fancy footwork somehow incentivizing adjoining plots to combine.
If you had two plots and lifted the restrictions, then I could see making 4 units comfortably out of that. But seeing how unlikely it is two neighbors sell at the same time, seems unlikely
I think this would be more meaningful in other cities, where there are a lot of ranch style homes / bigger plots
When SF made that change, you had people saying the same thing “this won’t change anything because you can’t build the housing that’s needed”.
No one is saying that this, by itself, with zero other changes, will resolve the issue. I prefer to applaud individual incremental improvements than belabor the fact that this one change is not enough.
[0] https://www.livablecity.org/time-san-francisco-say-goodbye-m...
I'm concerned the transformation of single family homes to apartments would just present another opportunity wealth and property to move from private owners to conglomerated investment or the rich. Personally, my best experiences have always been renting with private owners, so if people have to rent in the future, hopefully they aren't stuck doing so from a comparatively small number of management companies that control the market.
I'd love to change it, with greater zoning diversity and particularly that which allows higher density, but there valid objections to doing it all at once. Roads would need to be upgraded and then maintained, at direct town expense, plus dealing with increased traffic. Ditto for water and sewer lines, minus the traffic issue. Electrical, gas, and communications are better in that they're not at town expense but worse in that more parties have to be involved (and they tend to cheap out even more than the town does). And then there's schools - the town's crown jewels and the main reason anyone lives here. They're excellent but already overcrowded. Work is under way to fix that, but we really can't afford to add even more stress to that system.
These are very real issues that I'm sensitive to, even though I also think there are other issues - especially racial and income diversity - that we must address in the longer term. These same issues recur many other places, I'm sure including the Bay Area. It has to be not only allowable but profitable for developers to do the actual building, or else they won't, and then the town needs property-tax revenue from each tranche before they begin the next. It's a very tricky dance, and I do not at all envy the people on zoning/planning boards trying to reconcile all these conflicting needs.
The simplest way to change your own situation is to move. Different towns, cities, rural areas, etc. with different land uses exist so that people with different preferences can all find some place that reasonably matches their preferences. Making them all the same just so they match your personal preferences makes the situation worse, not better.
P.S. Almost forgot to point out the "making them all the same" strawman. Never suggested that, champ.
I'm assuming no such thing. I'm only assuming that there are places that would match your preferences better than where you currently live (or, if you want to be really precise, enough better to justify the costs of moving). Since people move all the time, for precisely that reason (I've done it myself, several times), that does not seem to me like a very extravagant assumption.
It is true that no place will be perfect: no place will satisfy literally all of someone's preferences. (There may be rare people that can find such a place, but they are going to be rare enough that we can ignore them for this discussion.) But I did not claim that you could find a place that would be perfect for you. I only claimed that you could find a place that would be better than where you currently are.
> Every town that already exists has been shaped by the conscious choices of people who live there and vote there and serve in offices there.
That's true. And if you think enough other people in your town would support your desired changes, you can of course get them to help you enact them, and then you won't have to move. But that is likely to take a lot more time and effort than moving to a place that already matches your preferences better than where you are now. I didn't say moving was the only solution to your problem. I only said it was the simplest one.
Still assuming there is such a a place. Why would you assume (again) that I didn't already research and consider alternatives before plonking down a third of my net worth on a house? I live where I do because it was the best match for what I'm looking for, but the fact that it's the best available doesn't mean I can't wish it to be better for myself and others.
Also, even if there were such a better place already, moving itself isn't a no-op. Moving even between ideal locations can be considered worse than staying even in one non-ideal location. Pulling kids out of a school system and away from all of their friends is particularly disruptive. "Love it or leave it" only works for one constituency - those who are fine with the status quo, who don't have or seek any connection to their communities, and don't see a need for there to be more of anything else. It doesn't even engage with people whose circumstances or beliefs are different; it just ignores their existence. I don't think that's constructive. Why are you so dead set against people solving problems instead of running away from them?
Have you tried to find out?
> "Just move" only works for one constituency - those who don't have or want any connection to whatever community they live in
Not at all. People can change communities. The fact that a person chooses to move does not mean that had no connection to the place they are leaving, or that they won't form any connections to the place they move to. Maybe you can't imagine ever being connected to any other place than the one you live in right now, but not everyone is like you.
> Pulling kids out of a school system and away from all of their friends is particularly disruptive.
It could be. Or it could be an opportunity to broaden their horizons and give them a chance to make new friends, and to cease having to deal with the kids at their school that they can't stand.
> I live where I do because it's the best match for what I'm looking for
Your original post in this subthread didn't make it sound that way. But if that is in fact the case for you, that's fine. It might not be the case for many other people.
If you succeeded in making your desired changes in your town, what would happen to the people that didn't want them--that like things the way they are now?
I live that way and rather enjoy it. If that sounds so terrible to you, I suppose you should move elsewhere instead of turning the neighborhood I live in into the one you'd like to.
There's plenty of room for everyone.
This is just suburban America in general.
90%(?) of America lives in Single Family homes. We've agreed that this is the best. Dont change it.
The progressive city I used to live in (section 8 housing, homeless housing, source of random bands like Grateful Dead, Joan baez, grace slick) was taken over by the greed lobby when the dot com boom hit and has become an “I got mine, jack” colony.
Dot com has nothing to do with it
Even in the 90s Palo Alto had SRO housing for the homeless, required section 8 housing in new developments, and a lower median income than neighboring Menlo Park or Los Altos (and I read actually MV too, though I find that hard to believe). There was more tolerance for goofball behavior, though perhaps less than the 70s or 80s.
But 21st century Palo Alto is a different beast, and much more boring. People moved here to gain wealth (rather than nerd out) and once they had it, flaunt it. It's a real shame; there are plenty of other places to do that.
The SF supervisor Mandelman who was mentioned in the article has been against all of Weiner's housing bills, so he has zero credibility in my book.
The lot sizes are not a physical problem. They may be a political problem (ie. the issue is people don’t want new tall buildings built).
Regulations for both are substantially higher than those imposed on the conventional choice, making them more expensive in through self-fulfilling prophecies.
Additionally, having stopped working on them for 40 years means that the US is completely clueless about building them in an effective manner. Thus, the populace and even planners feel like the only choice is 50 year old infrastructure solutions. This also means that secondary ecosystems have developed with assumptions of the conventional choice, rendering the alternatives unable to take advantage of these secondary ecosystems.
Lastly, somehow arguments around both end up appearing far more ideological than scientific. Now, I am squarely on the nuclear/multi-family side of things, but it is particularly difficult to find consensus within the community on it.
As a software architect, it feels as if the common recipe for solving a scalability problem is decentralization for which you need an awesome messaging system. I do not get why we keep centralizing ourselves around the Bay Area. I am not an expert in the field so perhaps I am coming from a point of ignorance here, but I am genuinely curious as to why.
The USA built the most new cities and roads during the time it prospered, and it seems that we stopped doing that. Not long ago, Elon Musk was highlighting how fast China continues building infrastructures to satisfy the demands of their growing population, and I had noticed that too thanks to friends who have tons of awesome things to say about their visits. Why we don’t go that route? It seems like China is kicking our ass there.
It's not possible. It's a geometry problem. Cars take up too much space.
And if you increase the size of the roads well, you simply induce demand, adding more space inefficient cars to clog up the road. This is why places like LA and Houston have never solved their traffic problems.
There's only really one way to move people faster, and that's to focus on moving the person with more space efficient forms of transportation (ie. trains).
If you put a population cap on LA or wherever, you could solve traffic with construction. Instead, the goal is to increase road capacity inline with the increased trip demand that's largely driven by population growth.
Sure, there are some trips that are taken when there's sufficient capacity, and not when there's not, and you can call discovery of those trips induced demand. But most of the demand increase is from population increase. LA is actually putting in a lot of mass transit, and it gets a surprisingly high (to me anyway) ridership, but it's pretty hard to provide a comprehensive solution to the commute needs of the area when there's no real centralization of workplaces or housing or even retail or amusement. All of those things are more or less distributed throughout the greater LA area, and people live in multi-income households, so relocating to be transit accessible for all earners is difficult. It's really hard to beat point to point time of a flexible, if congested, car vs inflexible transit lines if you have to make more than one transfer.
The efficiency of roads is limited by the fact that the vehicles occupying them are large, individually piloted, and have slow reaction times.
Throughout is limited because, as cars go faster, they need to be spaced out more.
We have known this for seventy years. Automobile highways simply cannot work for ultra high throughput corridors.
I don’t want to go into conspiracy theory territory, but it does seem as if there are powerful entities that are invested in maintaining the status quo or perhaps it’s just incompetence.
Where’s the lobby against the automobile industry and all the deaths that cars cause? Aren’t car wrecks the #1 cause of death of teenagers? “But utility of cars!!” Well that utility only exists because we’ve decided to create it, not that it’s actually necessary.
If in reading this comment you find yourself disagreeing, think about the alleyways and layout of Lago d’Orta for example. Oh but how do they live without 2 cars per household!?
The background: other cities exist and have existed. Companies can locate anywhere.
Centralization exists in many industries. It's not a phenomenon unique to tech, the Bay Area, or the United States.
Desirable cities also exist in China. The government is constantly dreaming up ways to get people to stop moving to Beijing and Shanghai.
This situation cannot be merely wished away. The tendency for an industry to concentrate in a particular city is historically broad and durable.
We have never seen these population levels in the USA, and a country with a bigger population seems to be tackling the problem with a level of success by building more cities.
Also, perhaps those other cities need to offer incentives for the companies to move. I just don’t think we are tackling the problem the proper way.
There needs to be a serious re-think on public transportation.
> We call them “Missing” because they have typically been illegal to build since the mid-1940s
but I could not easily find and further explanation about why this is, etc
If we presume everyone drives, then all the de-zoning and other measures will never succeed, and e.g. SF is already at max density. If we believe we can make car usage go down, our current streets will be good enough for 10x growth.
I went to the peninsula looking at houses and the new trend is to add ADUs as part of the house or in the back.
You know why?
To help the owners pay off their $3M houses they used to be $1M 8 years ago. This then figures into the calculus of how much you can afford to buy a house for. What is an unaffordable $8000/month mortgage now becomes $6000/month. So people keep bidding higher and higher.
People in the Bay Area don’t realize that every little thing that keeps costs low gets funneled back into house prices. Interest on mortgage is tax deductible? Oh that means I can afford more house. The public schools are good? That saves me $3000/month so I can funnel that into the mortgage. Commute is shorter by 20 mins? That means $200/month extra I can spend on the house.
There is no answer except for rich employers like Google and Facebook to spread out their headquarters across the world. Too many rich engineers with their stock going up 10-20x is what is fueling the housing crunch. Or create entire new cities along 280 where there is plenty of space. Invest in new cities, not try to cram more people in the same small area.
Because the root cause is the demand for housing in Bay Area is far outstripping supply. You must tweak either or both of those to move the price. Addressing supply certainly does, but it might not be sufficient supply to overcome the demand. But it does help the situation.
[0]: https://www.planetizen.com/news/2019/06/104783-doubt-cast-in...
[1]: https://cityobservatory.org/another-housing-myth-debunked-ne...
2) The problem we’re trying to solve here is that the people who would fill those new units to capacity are instead locked (or pushed) out. Of course if that problem is solved they will instead be here. That’s the whole point of making anything cheaper or more abundant. So that more people can enjoy it.
The difference is VOLUME
House prices or commute times may only fall by the slimmest of margins but the number of people who have access to whatever the resource is at the same price point will be increased.
Density and more building will increase land values, yes. We shouldn't strive for land values going down.
But build enough, and floor value go down. This is the efficiency of land use increasing ahead of of demand, decreasing prices.
Public housing is needed because it is quite the private sector cannot be relied upon building enough to decrease precises. Even without all he zoning bullshit, housing is still quite an inelastic marke.
> Too many rich engineers with their stock going up 10-20x is what is fueling the housing crunch.
But you’ve missed the mark here. We haven’t seen rich engineers push up the price of Teslas or iPhones or Xfinity because these things are all in plentiful supply. If there were only 1000 iPhones in the world, they would cost a fortune and all be owned by rich people or speculators. And that’s the situation with housing, not just in the Bay Area but across much of America and Western Europe. The majority of the housing stock is owned by the baby boomers who neglected the need to build new housing for their children. And where does all this tech wealth end up? In that generation’s bank accounts when they sell or rent.
The people with means are not the problem. The people ripping them off are. They might even be your own parents.
Jobs aren't a problem. Bay Area housing has been a mess since we'll before the internet and other parts of California, where jobs are nowhere near as good, have the same problem.
>The percentage of California single-family homes bought in all-cash transactions has climbed in the past decade from 10 to 25 percent—and many of those are investors from Asia.
https://calmatters.org/housing/2018/03/data-dig-are-foreign-...
Most of them then go and get a mortgage.
The calmaters article has zero data about "investors from Asia". It's an assumption.
Anyway the buses only explain partially how Googlers and other tech employees can survive the housing crisis, not what caused it. The cause is extremely simple. Births - Deaths = Growth. Don't overthink it.
Maybe the market just sucks at housing in general. Keep fighting about it instead of admitting the situation is hopeless, I guess, and those of us who know better will snap up the $160k four bedroom mansions until you figure it out.
They're considered a symbol of the class divide. Not a cause, but just a visible display of the income inequality present in the city. Poor people don't get a "workaround" for the the Bay Area's awful/nonexistent transportation system, they have to either rely on private cars or take public transit anyways.
disclaimer: the windows were shot out when I was riding the Google bus a couple years back
The article provides no reference to this claim of racism. I personally find it more likely that these zoning laws are simply to control density.
Where I live (in the US) increasing housing availability drives up housing prices proportionally. The way that works is that demand is fairly constant due to people moving in driving up the population (about 22.4% decade over decade) but there aren’t geographic limitations on construction. Real estate is a fixed resource though and you can only build so many houses before filling an area and pushing out the commute. In the spaces left over, after large scale housing developments, come the numerous large apartment complexes. The increased number of multi family dwellings drives up the price of single family houses. I have seen this pattern repeated various times in both median and extremely wealthy areas. Consequently, avoiding new construction either results in depreciation or merely delays the same pattern even by up 15 years.
Increased demand for single family homes drives up price of single family homes.
People moving in drives up price of land and dwelling units, obviously because people need a place to live.
The only thing that can move price down is demand decreasing (which will not happen if people are migrating in) or supply increasing sufficiently to accommodate demand.
You obviously live in one of the most in demand places in the US right now, and so almost no amount of supply will keep up with demand to cause prices to stop going up. But at the end of the day, price is always a function of supply and demand.
> Consequently, avoiding new construction either results in depreciation or merely delays the same pattern even by up 15 years.
Places that are not desirable to live in simply do not have construction. Why would people want to invest in areas that they predict will depreciate or stagnate? There is no construction in Cairo, IL, but they are not avoiding construction to prevent prices from increasing.
> Increased demand drives up construction rates before it drives up prices.
The rate of construction will go up if prices are going up, or the entities doing the construction believe prices will go up (and there is capacity to increase rate of construction, of course). These are all very fluid measures, but all are a function of supply and demand.
There is no situation where increase in supply of a good alone by itself causes the price of the good to increase.
But that is irrelevant to the fact that more supply of a good relative to demand will not cause prices to rise. This might not be easily evident over 1 year, but on a longer timescale, if supply and demand is not behaving as expected, then there will be arbitrage that someone will likely take advantage of.
It is possible that the high price of land in a highly desirable area is something there is a lot of demand for itself. The only way to bring prices of individual dwelling units down in this case is to build more dense housing, and that involves a lot of politics.
SF is more walkable than most USA cities. Tokyo is more walkable than SF.
On the other hand my sense, based on anecdata, is that a large proportion of the condos constructed in the past 15-ish years in eastern SF (Embarcadero, Rincon, etc.) and SOMA/Dogpatch are owned by absentee landlords as investment property. Since these folk are mostly rich SV types (or wealthy overseas investors), they can afford the eye-watering prices. Their renters are also well-paid techies, so they can pay the hyper-inflated rents.
So I believe the housing crisis is instead a result of society deciding that no one actually has a right to a home of their own. Instead, it is in fact a good thing to engage in literally rent-seeking behavior[0] and we should all be in a race to accumulate the most wealth we can to pass down to our offspring, so that they can continue this cycle.
If my analysis is correct, then more construction will just result in more of the same. Rich people buying 2 and 3rd homes that they rent out to people who are here for the short term and can afford inflated rents.
It seems to me a good first step would instead be to slap a Vancouver-style 15% property tax on any home that is not occupied by the owner (not just foreigners). Of course, there is no way in hell Californians will actually do something that requires actual self-sacrifice, so that's never going to happen.
( I have more anecdata about SV residents buying 2 or 3 houses in the Austin area in order to capitalize on the real estate boom caused by other SV ex-residents moving there, further driving up costs in the area. But let's restrict the discussion to SF Bay Area for now).
This theory is obviously based on feels rather than data, since I don't know of any way to actually get ownership/residence data broken down this way. That would probably violate all kinds of privacy laws.
I would love to be disabused of my notions with data. Not motivated-reasoning "studies" by think-tanks who have vested interests, but actual data.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking (the rent seekers in this case being all the homeowners who resist any property tax reform which would affect their bottom line)
In a well-functioning city you can make money building anything from mid-market up. Affordable housing is the stuff that was mid market 10-20 years ago, or luxury 20-40 years ago.
If you want to see this in the real world, just look at the market for cars.
More here: https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...
* These taxes added 8000+ 'empty' homes to the rental pool overnight.
* Many "luxury" condos in development changed into purpose built rental for locals.
* The vacancy rate barely budged and remained stubbornly low.
So while it was definitely worth while to bring in these taxes in order to instantly create more housing, and change the nature of what sort of housing was being created, effectively nothing has really changed in the grand scheme of things. Vancouver still has a housing scarcity problem, and near zero vacancy, and still needs to build much more housing.
I encourage SF to do the same sort of things that Vancouver has done, but they will also need to increase apartment development massively.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr...
I feel this argument is a nice way to phrase that neighborhoods should never change. There is a limited amount of land. For everyone to have long term housing we need to build. We need to build until there are more units than what rich people can afford to monopolize. Rent control, historical preservation, they're just ways to restrict growth and I hate it. I am not sure people should have a right to a home if that prevents growth. It just creates a new set of haves.
If you want to put a stop to the kind of development that is actually causing SV types to materialize, that would be offices. Offices are are generally popular and unobjectionable.
The thing is, if we can build giant ant mounds in just a few places it'll save the central coast and California north of the Golden Gate from destruction.
Step two would be to connect the giant metro areas to the rest of the state via a dirt road.
I realize the privacy conversation here usually revolves around ad tech, but for me at least, it's more general than that. And I find that the denser the population, no matter how optimal it is, creates more constraints for me as a human being.
There's a sweet spot in the human equation for me, when I am the most liberty to enjoy self determination and free well, but also rub shoulders socially with enough of the rest of mankind that I enjoy the magnification that happens when we work together.
So I applaud efforts to get people in equitable homes--I have a married daughter who takes care of my wonderful wonderful 20mo grand twins, and I fear and angst for their future housing prospects in this country--but if they're just cages for rent in the end, did we really get the real prize?
Of course when all we want is the mere existence of humans then there can be as many additional humans as rats on the planet and they'll get to live the same quality of life.
Car Suburbia is damaging and wasteful no matter the population size.
Could everyone in the world own property without pushing the environment to the brink? Probably not.
Even at small scale, a venue might hold 500 people, but it's probably a nicer experience if there are far less than that many there.
A (cold) rational perspective sees that many (if not most) challenges facing society share a root cause of there being simply too many people.
A single apartment building uses far fewer resources per person than the equivalent number of people would if they all had 10 acre lots in the countryside. The habitat destruction alone would be an ecological disaster.
Beg to differ. Exhibit A: climate change. Your solution would not ameliorate climate change. In fact it would likely exacerbate it. We need as much of the land as possible to be rewilded(left alone to maximize CO2 absorption and heal the planet). And stop having babies. Do you really want to bring a child into the nightmare we are barreling towards?