To save California, sacrifice single-family zoning
latimes.com
latimes.com
After a divorce and becoming a renter, I have a lot more sympathy for folks subject to the whims of landlords and the rental market. Sure, renting means I have some flexibility and don't have to worry much about maintenance, but there is an emotional and social price you pay for the lack of (sometimes imagined) stability afforded to you by home ownership.
I'm about to plan my CA escape after 27 years in the sun and it is not without regrets. I'll say though that the one thing CA should consider is requiring the supply of housing to match the supply of jobs. I suppose it's fine if, say, Cupertino doesn't want to urbanize, but as long as they allow more commercial space and more jobs, they put pressure on surrounding communities to deal with the negative effects. I can't really care too much anymore though. CA has been good to me for a long time, but she's showing me the door and telling me I'm no longer welcome and it's not something I have the will to fight for.
As a native Californian, I would change that to, "match the supply of water." I'm astounded at all the construction, particularly that being built in the hills overlooking Folsom, and wonder where they're going to get their water.
We need a national water grid ASAP, before climate change threatens the food security of the US.
That would result in the export and subsidizing of the wasteful water management practices of the west. We could then look forward to a few years of record crops, then no crops as all the water runs out across the grid at the same time.
The pragmatic approach would simply be to price water so farmers and consumers are incentivized to use it efficiently.
People growing almonds with flood irrigation (and similar high water needy things) in cali or az
almonds, pistachios, sugar beets.. these (and others) are taking a toll on california's environment to produce some luxury goods for profit - not to provide food for the starving.
And almonds are hardly any more of a luxury food than a 20 minute shower or front lawn. Look at residential water consumption; how much really goes to basic living vs wasted? And how much effort goes into conserving or reusing water efficiently?
The point is to price water any let it flow to the most efficient use as determined by the market. When that happens, you’ll find that suddenly farmers stop flooding fields to grow alfalfa for Australian cattle and pick crops that are economically viable with the water constraints we have. Maybe nuts are too expensive to grow here; we don’t really know.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-07-27/historic...
There. Is. Not. Enough. Water. Anything else you hear is just a lie. I drive by it every day for the past 10 years, it goes up and down a lot but the levels this year are just record breaking, in a bad way.
At zero cost for usage sure. But there is plenty of water if you price it.
http://www.derekchristensen.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/s...
Look at Japan, for example, where houses lose their value after 40 years. I pay cheaper rent in Tokyo than I ever did in even mid-sized American cities.
The housing market boggles my mind how houses don’t appreciate at all there.
http://radicalcartography.net/bayarea.html
https://www.forbes.com/sites/priceonomics/2016/05/11/the-afr...
But they also want a barista to serve them a latte, it doesn't matter if the barista has an hour commute each way and shit benefits.
I'd say eat the rich, but this place hates that meme xD
With seriousness, a slogan that accomplishes nothing takes the teeth out of a protest. Tax the super wealthy at x% ans enforce minimum corporate taxes simply doesnt have a ring to it.
With seriousness.
Literally the words out of the mouth of a close friend of mine who sits on city council for a mid-size CA suburb
To get a National ID system done there should be an earnest effort to ensure that EVERYone gets one free of charge , at the fastest connivence and earnest effort and no future legislation can infringe on its obtainment and replacement. Anything lesser would be I adequate.
I don't know of any SF voters who think "oh yeah, I need to fight this new development so the price of my house continues to rise".
It's more like "I like the way my neighborhood is and don't want it to change".
I suppose that SF residents probably liked what their city was in, say, 1985, and did not want any change. Has SF changed somehow by 2020? Was in to the better?
Legend has it people even have those outside of single family zoned regions in California!
If you currently own a home and a law is passed that allows you to turn your upstairs into an apartment, then your home may now be worth more, and you actually can access the value stored in your home (by renting it out).
Similarly, if any home in your neighborhood can be turned into a fourplex or larger, and there's the demand to do so, then the supply of large single-family homes in your area shrinks. So your house price can increase as it becomes a rarer find.
But since the total supply of units is going up, rent goes down. And since rent goes down, you don't need pay people extra just to accommodate for crazy expensive housing. For the home owner, cost of living goes down, as every store and restaurant they go to gets cheaper.
Plus, it means that they pay less in taxes, or at least get more for the taxes they're already paying. Places like San Francisco are so inefficient with their tax bases because you need to pay every random bureaucrats $100k+ just to keep up with cost of living.
If you stop restricting the size of the pie, it grows and benefits everyone.
It's not a popular opinion here, but quality of life is important for many of us.
A neighborhood that's got a lot of 2/3/4 family homes feels about the same as a SFH neighborhood if those homes have one unit occupied by the owner.
Most people are not going to ride a bicycle to work. Some of us have kids to drop off at school on the way to work. We have to buy enough groceries to feed a family, which don't fit on a bicycle. Let go of your hipster fantasies. We can't all be single people living in a flat, riding a bicycle to the farmer's market and the book store.
Please, oh please, California, don't build more single-family homes and create stable families. Won't someone PLEASE think about Blackrock! REITs need cash flow to be viable investments! How else will we pay out dividends to investors?
Also, infrastructure like water treatment plants are expensive and scale well, so you can spread the cost over more people.
But yes, there are problems that come with density and they have to be thought through.
IOW, there's plenty of slack in existing cities, especially the older coastal cities, which were originally planned and built for far greater density than permitted now, and at a time when per capita usage was far greater. If anything, continuing to incentivize urban sprawl is the surest way to overburden water infrastructure, especially supply.
Most water consumption these days comes from the state's agriculture, which bringing more residents in would not really impact since denser housing would not really go in areas that are rural.
“We’ve reduced water, power, meat, and space consumption by XX%” is not good news. That just means we’re getting poorer. Good news would be “we’ve halved the cost of water, power, meat, and space, so everyone have a good time”.
https://ktla.com/news/california/please-conserve-water-touri...
In the Monterey Peninsula area residential building permits have been restricted for years due to a persistent water shortage. That's been going on since well before the current drought.
The denser the place, the more efficient the infrastructure use. 50 families in a single apartment building use massively fewer pipes & power lines than 50 families in single family homes. But the tax revenue for the city can still be the same. In a denser area, those families are less likely to own or need cars, and if they do, they drive less.
On the other hand, low-density suburban neighborhoods are often so inefficient that the maintenance cost of their infrastructure is more than the tax revenue the residents bring in. (Here's a good overview of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0)
It's more true to say that "we don't have the infrastructure for single family homes" than it is to say that we don't have the infrastructure for apartment buildings.
Do you own a home? Would you willingly let it be replaced alongside surrounding properties with an apartment complex? After all, it's more efficient.
You shouldn't own a washing machine either, that's silly. A laundromat helps reduce the need to own the appliances and create a more social environment.
And we haven't even begun talking about that car you own. Gross. Public transportation is so much more efficient.
Oh you actually wanted to travel somewhere and not have to spend 4 hours of your day to go there, take care of your business, then come home? Weird.
Convince nothing, price them out. The state is not obligated to pay for permanent storage for your private property on public land. If you want a car, you need to pay for its permanent storage.
Also, cars are literally the least space efficient means of transit ever devised. Depending on cars for transit means everyone has to live further apart in order to make roads and parking big enough to accommodate all the cars[0], making commutes worse.
Cars are also time inefficient over longer distances, trains (if we bothered to make them) and airplanes trivially beat cars.
0 - Underground parking solves the storage issue at a ludicrous cost. In many modern buildings the cost of the underground parking structure is often more than the cost of the apartment building above it.
Consider the street closures during the pandemic for outdoors eating. The parking crowd has screeched endlessly about the traffic and parking issues caused by this, but the majority of the populace love these areas now. A bunch of them are actually becoming permanent.
Similarly, the cute, street car suburbs with high walkability and insufficient parking are absurdly expensive everywhere I’ve ever lived. Turns out people like living places that are nice, and that sufficient parking is a relatively minor deciding factor.
Building a new walkable neighborhood is fine. Trying to drastically alter an existing neighborhood is nearly impossible.
Of course, the counter argument is “but Paris has a good metro system”, to which I say maybe we should fix that.
That said, as others have mentioned, urban living arrangements can be more efficient. There is a big question though if that is compatible with the historical CA dream ideal. Sure, that ideal is becoming more and more incompatible with reality, but people want what they want. CA could offer me a free condo in a high-rise urban environment and I'd still leave because that's not something I would ever want to live in.
The only long term solutions are completely infeasible while there are elections in the state. Existing property owners need to pay actual representative property taxes and need to see their homes decrease about 75% in value through a combination of massive building campaign and increase an inventory from the unaffordability of paying real property taxes.
Amazing how many of these articles I'm seeing lately.
Sure, single family zoning contributes to the problem, but Manhattan doesn’t really have single family zoning and is still not affordable. Just getting rid of it, won’t be the end of the world for the neighborhoods, but also won’t really solve problems it’s advertised to solve.
Manhattan isn’t expensive because it’s high density, it’s high density because it’s expensive (desirable). Californian cities could follow suit if allowed to.
What increasing the density does do, is bring forwards when desalination becomes economically worthwhile, solving that better than having only low-density single-family homes.
Try this series on the economics of rural development. https://actionlab.strongtowns.org/hc/en-us/articles/44022590...
Alameda, Ca - I was talking to the planning department about this problem as I was interested in creating a Tiny Home Community - and had one of the Pre-Eminent Tiny Home Companies on board: Wind River Tiny Homes to assist in planning, speaking to the city council etc...
The city council shut it down and refused to re-zone the lots. They stated that one was not allowed to put multiple tiny homes on a single lot - as the zoning required one entrance per dwelling only on the lot, which meant one pluming infrastructure, one sewer and one power...
So I asked if I could build shared utilities underground for multiple units on a lot - and they said no, because they defined single dwelling as only having one primary entrance (front door)
And they were dead set against changing any zoning laws.
Further, when asked about municipal broadband, they said "no we sold that whole contract to comcast, and we wont be looking at that again"
(That is an actual quote)
Maybe the solution is not to build more residential to keep growing, but instead to limit implantation of new jobs/companies to limit the growth to a sustainable decent value? The result would be to limit real estate price, but without making the Bay Area a hellscape of concrete towers.
I understand it is controversial, but do we really want to transform the Bay Area (which still has some really fine natural beauty and neighborhoods) into the hellscape that are some Chinese (or European) concrete tower based suburbs? Do we still want to keep centralizing more?
Sadly free market + democracy means either the homeowners side are in charge and keep the status quo so their property prices go up. Or the renters side might one day win, and start sacrificing this nice place to make concrete prisons for everyone. The current system ensures that the optimal thing to do will never happen.
But of course this « different system » is science fiction at this point, especially in the US.
IMHO, the Bay Area is its own kind of dystopia, with low-density 'burbia spreading like a mat over the (previously beautiful, I presume) landscape. Even things like central Santa Clara are quite low density, with wide (very wide!) streets, low houses (typically 1-2 stories) set back far from the streets with ginormous parking lots.
But e.g. having taken Caltrain from Palo Alto to SF a few times, there is plenty of room for much higher density around several of the stations without losing much of value, and in doing so you'd take a lot of pressure off both the nearby city centres and the less developed land.
I live in London and wish for the same here - instead of increasing density in areas that are already high density, pull development out of the centres, surround well connected stations, and use that to justify more services on more suburban stretches of existing rail etc.
My favourite example is that highrises going up surrounding my local train station will house as many people on ca. 2,000m^2 of land as my road of 660 houses has space for on ca. 40,000m^2 of land. And the environmental effects of less travel etc. as more of those people can rely on public transit will be enormous. Increasing density around the stations like that will reduce the need for smaller density increases across the board, or eating into greenfield sites.
It may well be it needs upgrades to be able to handle more, but even just having the land is a major part of the cost. It's certainly better than depending on trying to dump higher density housing in the middle of neighbourhoods where transport upgrades will require starting from scratch.
And if remote working continues, that'd allow far more housing near transport hubs. People will still travel on occasion, for all kinds of reasons.
And the second advantage of construction near transport hubs is that it usually means fewer neighbours likely to object. E.g. last time I was at Palo Alto at least, there was no low density housing immediately surrounding the station, and even where there is, there's typically little enough to make buying up the required properties to resolve the issues a lot easier.
Consider that the number of trains per hour for Caltrain today is a joke, and the length of the trains likewise. From a few quick searches it seems much of that is due to lack of electrification, which is apparently in progress. Complete that and you get 30%+ capacity increase without increasing train lengths, and Caltrain trains are about half the length of e.g. London commuter trains. I suspect you'd need signalling upgrades to increase the frequency much, but you probably could more than quadruple Caltrain capacity from current levels with relatively low impact works to the actual lines (finish electrification; extend platforms to handle at least 12 cars; signalling upgrades to handle a few more trains per hour) - most of the cost would be additional trains.
That gives a lot of room for additional density along the existing line before you need to justify expensive expansions.
But getting support for expansions would probably also be easier if people come to see it as a way of keeping development pressure away from their neighbourhoods and focused on the transit hubs.
The solution to a lot of the "housing problems" around the country isn't further concentration but decentralization.
I think the problem is that outside the government spending like that, private industry has a hard time getting sufficient funding to create a meaningful new center of innovation.
I'd argue that it's good for California to have all those people. It's pretty hard to argue that it isn't, based on the cultural, economic, and agricultural output of the state. Now whether or not it's good for the people in California is another matter altogether. And I say that as someone who recently left CA for another state.
Today its somehow an unreachable goal that people cant obtain. Why? I dont want to live in a pod or communal flat with 20 people. How are people not revolting over the direction western economies are taking?
Maybe it is part of the problem. Smaller house obviously is cheaper to build and maintain.
edit: basic thing I was thinking about was giving people incentives for YIMBY pushes in areas.. yea prop13 complicates it, but just wondering if there is any incentive for the folks that live in someplace already or the base assumption is that a very large percentage will vote against it?
Why do we have to bribe people to rescind rights that they never had in the first place?
Luckily, none of that will ever happen. You'll get apartments, not warehouses.
So I guess the answer to your question is "because those people bought their deeds under when a certain set of rules were in place, and they are in a position to exert pressure to keep those rules in place". Why would you expect them to act against (what they perceive as) their own self interest?
The answer of "because it helps society as a whole" is a powerful one, but not one that holds enough weight for a lot of people to give up a significant portion of their net wealth / retirement / satisfaction.
Pretty sure Bakersfield will do just fine with single-family zoning.
In other words we already learned that lesson and people generally do not like unappealing entities being right next door. It allows the public an extra check on something not appropriate.
Why does California not have a wider range of political ideas to solve their problems?
It appears Cali is chasing its tail by their brand and experiment in democracy when they try to "solve" their glaring issues.
Credit where due -- many times other states have benefited from California being so big and mandated certain safety laws. But like the famous saying many citizens of the Golden State will soon be able to answer the question for Newsom (uberkind-liberal-idiot-when-it-suits): What have you done for me lately?
OK then I am sure you would be ok with zoning being changed to allow for a nuclear power plant in your neighborhood whenever someone(s) with big piles of cash comes through. Yeah, no thanks mate.
Where I live the last heads of our county council, where openly corrupt with sweetheart deals handed out to local construction and developer companies. The one before last ended up in jail thanks to the feds investigating these type crimes. This is in the US no less. No way buddy. The public has a right to decide who can built what where and for what purpose.
Yes there should be defining discrimination which rightly limits a free for all when it comes to zoning.
How naïve are you?
<insert low effort quip about consumers being cheapskates and not knowing what's good for them here>
The reason I say that is because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand NYC built all the housing they possibly can, and yet I personally still could never afford to own property there. Same with LA.
I'm also opposed to the building of more roads. Not because (as you might claim) I own existing roads and have a vested interest, but because I know that more roads simply means more traffic. The places that have the most roads also have the worst traffic.
I wish it were different.
Nevertheless, I completely hope that I'm totally wrong on everything I said. It would mean that I might finally be able to afford to buy a house in those places.
Stop growing water intensive crops and you do even better
https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/#:~....
There's even lawyers who specialize in the stuff, telling people to setup businesses and have the house owned by the business to reduce their tax rate.
https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/a-kleptocra...
https://calmatters.org/housing/2018/03/data-dig-are-foreign-...
https://www.avvo.com/legal-guides/ugc/a-guide-for-foreign-in...
It's easy to see how it doesn't add up. Why would some wealthy foreign investor want to buy a house and then lose a bunch of money by not renting it out?
I mean, there are multiple multi-billion dollar companies who haven't let go of their office spaces when there's no hope that people were going to return to work anytime soon. One of the many simple reasons, they can afford to burn the cash and it's a drop in the bucket. I don't think you are grasping what kind of wealth buys up houses.
> It's easy to see how it doesn't add up.
> Why would some wealthy foreign investor want to buy a house and then lose a bunch of money by not renting it out?
In the late 2010s, the primary reason was as a protective measure/taxation avoidance. In China, the wealthy are always at a danger of being on the wrong side of the government and having your wealth confiscated. In Bellevue (the wealthy eastside of the Seattle area) had a burgeoning industry of exotic car dealerships, luxury jewelry and housing prices soaring as Chinese money loaded up on housing. When Xi (and the PRC at large) decided to crack down https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2020/02/chinas-new-fore..., by 2019 most of the luxury businesses evaporated and houses were being liquidated (most still made money because of decent US housing inflation) because of the taxation of foreign assets and the penalties for not disclosing them. So that's done.
There's always oil money from the middle east which has ended up in California. My family sold off 2 properties to families from Quatar and Iran, who casually paid for east house up front. These were their "California" homes.
Banks have been buying up houses for awhile now. Yes, it pains me to bring up FOX News. https://foxbaltimore.com/news/nation-world/major-wall-street... - they are likely to rent out the homes. American banks who are looking to maximize value for something they don't intend to even live in (or run to), don't mind renting. This is a maximized investment that makes sense to you. Those do happen.
My wife and I just bought a house next door to one of the MANY display houses of Todd Griffin (Windows Plus). The yard is a wreck but the interior furnishings (kitchen, windows, shelving, etc) are very nice, barring the bare slab concrete floor. Nobody has ever lived there.