Single Family Zoning is now banned in California | Hacker News Reader

Single Family Zoning is now banned in California

timesheraldonline.com

119 pointsjesussaves99 comments

Just in case people don't understanding zoning laws, this doesn't mean you can't have single family homes. It just allows people to split existing lots (with criteria around 3 years of tenancy and some other caveats) and in general removes places where you can only have single family homes.

As a general question, I think this means that people who currently own single family homes around the Bay Area are going to make out like bandits even more than they already were.

I'm not sure about that last part. In general the people who own single family homes in the Bay Area have had nimby opposition to more dense housing being constructed since more supply lowers prices.

More supply also increases traffic. This isn't just about everyone worrying about their housing prices (there are a lot of NIMBY reasons beyond that).

More housing where the jobs are creates less traffic. Putting your jobs in Berkeley and your housing in Vacaville is what creates more traffic. A Berkeley with 300k people - which is the population that would support the number of jobs already in Berkeley today - would have noticeably less traffic. Same for a San Francisco with two million people etc.

That’s true, but it is difficult to do in the USA since the company town concept/complex fell out of style in this country after WW2. People don’t generally live where they work, especially if they bought 10 years ago and switched jobs twice since then (and that isn’t even counting second body problems). Transit is really needed to fill in the gaps, or perhaps renting should be encouraged so people more easily move when they change jobs (but the second body problem remains).

WFH works also, but then you don’t need to be near where your jobs is.

Tenure of homeownership has more than doubled in the last twenty years, and it is a harmful symptom of the housing crisis, not something to be accommodated. When the housing market was more functional and job mobility in America was more robust, people only owned homes for 4 years at the median. That was the same as the median tenure at jobs. That’s the way it should be.

That isn’t true in other countries, like most of Western Europe. It isn’t how it should be, especially if you have kids (yes, I moved around almost exactly every 4 years as a kid, it sucked). Good transit in urban areas with a lot of jobs is a wonderful combination. Also, husband and wife don’t need to work in the same neighborhood, which is highly unlikely as you go up the skill chain.

Prop 13 is responsible for the extension of tenure, since when you move, your property taxes are reset, and this creates a strong incentive to stay put, across multiple generations as well.

I think many of the reasons are rationalizations or invented primarily in support of protecting net worth, even if they have some truth.

That is disingenuous. A lot of SFH owners like driving cars, dislike transit, and therefore are of the mindset that more housing = more traffic. Density of course needs mass transit if it is going to be feasible (you don't build a 30 story apartment building away from transit and expect that to end well).

Only if you don’t build up walkable areas and public transport. With high density housing many people won’t even own cars as there is not much point.

That’s how it works in the densest cities. The problem occurs if you get density first without that.

It also increases the need for new infrastructure, such as electric wires, sewer/plumbing, trash/sanitation, schools, police, fire stations, etc. You can't just plop Moar Housing down and call it a day. You need to build these things, too.

More office space also contributes to increasing traffic yet curiously there is no widespread, organized NIMBY opposition to offices like there is to housing units.

That only works when they can get together and ban higher density via zoning or whatever other mechanism. If individual homeowners can "defect" without their neighbors blocking the construction, the "union" will quickly fall apart.

It lowers housing prices, not necessarily property prices. If you own a single family home right next to an apartment building, and it's permitted to build an apartment building there, that lot's probably worth a lot more than it would be if you could only build a single family home there.

Imagine a neighborhood with only two single family homes in it; you can only have two families live there, so if more than two families want to live there, they're going to bid up the price. In this case, the cost of the property is the cost of housing in general in that neighborhood, since it's one home per lot.

Now imagine one of those SFHs is replaced by an apartment building with 40 units. Now 41 families can live in that neighborhood, so there's comparatively less competition for housing, which drives down the cost to live there. But the landlord for that apartment building can make a lot more in rent from the units in that building than they could from renting a house to one family, because it's distributed across 40.

If there's enough demand for housing in that area (and in general right now there is in many places due to lack of supply), there are probably lots of people who'd be interested in replacing that second house with another apartment building, and the property values would reflect that. So yeah basically: housing prices go down, property values go up.

There seem to be 2 provisions. If one's lot is smaller, one can have a duplex on it. If one's lot is larger, one can split the lot and have a duplex on each sub-lot (i.e. 2 duplexes total).

However, I can't find the guidelines for when one is allowed to split the lot into 2 sub-lots. I'm curious because I have a large-ish empty lot (8,000 sqft in a coastal town) and yes, would make out like a bandit if I'm allowed to split the lot into 2.

Anyone know the guidelines?

---------------

Update: could someone please clarify "criteria around 3 years of tenancy"... does this mean one has to have owned the lot for 3 years minimum?

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

Many, many rules. That ones that stood out to me are:

* Do not demolish more than 25% of existing house's exterior walls.

* Each sub-lot must be at least 2,400 square feet.

* Each sub-lot must be at least 40% of the original lot.

* Each housing unit must be at least 800 square feet.

I didn't read it closely enough to see how you can turn an existing single-family into a duplex.

Thank you.

Doesn’t sound like commercial use is included in this? This is more of a problem than I realised - I live in a fairly old suburb (in Australia) where I can walk to some small shops, cafes and restaurants, as well as having the option of two schools in walking distance if I had kids, and sort of take it for granted, but watching some videos about city planning recently (Not Just Bikes on YouTube is great, along with City Beautiful, Strong Towns etc.), I realise now that it is actually something that makes living here so enjoyable that I hardly even thought about. Then, getting an electric scooter sort of opened up a whole new world of exploring bike paths (I have hardly done any cycling since I was a teenager). Our city seems way better than most of the US and Canada at that, but could be so, so much better.

So this seems like a positive step, but I think in general the goal should be having mixes of single family houses, townhouses/terrace houses, and low rise apartments with small shops, cafes and restaurants, with good walkability and separated cycle paths. As much as I love the flexibility of having a car, looking into this now I do agree that in a lot of places we have actually sacrificed the freedom to not always need to own and use a car to get a lot of places…

Surprised there aren’t more comments here. This is great news for affordable housing right?

There was some discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28559517

SB9 is highly politicized, I'd assume a little much for Sat night for most of us haha :)

I imagine if this wound up higher on the page it would be flagged out

The rush to comment while relevant is getting out of hand frankly. Some things require actual research.

EDIT: However, I have some personal experience in single family zoned housing in the Bay Area, but I would really need to read up on the proposed changes first...

That said, I can say I felt very out of place and wish I had found a better, smaller place to live, for less.

Meanwhile, my first apt in SF was clearly built in a rush, the light switches were leaking, and homeless people would shoot up by the door. All for just over $3k/mo.

No thanks.

I'm just assuming you meant $3k/month

ROFL, yes. Fixed

Affordable housing (or rather the zoning changes needed to realize it) is not always a popular topic on this site.

It’s not surprising when people earning $200k aren’t so enthusiastic when the rest of the population gets the chance to buy a house. Honestly the lack of empathy from people here is a little gross.

Has there ever been an effort of freeing up high density construction that resulted in lower housing prices?

In the places I lived, new construction of big apartment complexes was correlated with prices going up. The new buildings charged more for rent, people paid it, and the surrounding housing followed.

Zoning laws are responsible for higher prices:

https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/rdp/2018/pdf/rdp2018-03....

The mechanism is clear cut. Restrict supply, price goes up. There's quite a bit of empirical support as well.

I don't doubt what you've observed but I think it needs to be addressed rigorously.

All i’ve seen so far is people explaining their preferred reasons for why things happen and their guesses for what new policy will do.

What I haven’t seen is a case study or anecdote of something actually resulting in lower prices. (besides tech busts and covid in SF)

There's lots of evidence and many studies that show that zoning causes high real estate prices. I don't think it's fair to say it's merely a preferred reason. Here's one of many:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3507803

The bar that you're asking for is too high. Relaxing zoning laws in a specific locale shouldn't lead to lower prices necessarily. It should lead to a smaller price increase than what would have otherwise occurred due to supply still being restricted elsewhere and the relative fungibility of low to mid income housing.

But I agree that it would be good to see an event study of a natural experiment in addition to the correlational studies. However given the existing evidence we have, as well as the underlying economic logic, we shouldn't pretend as though there's no basis for bringing up zoning as a major cause of high real estate prices.

I am seeing you completely ignore the real world for your own preferred reason why things happen and your guess for what new policy will do.

I am seriously disappointed that you wrote such an awful comment.

Yes, seattle over the last 5 years, as well as down town Houston Texas have both seen construction booms and price declines or slower than average price increases.

> seattle over the last 5 years, as well as down town Houston Texas have both seen construction booms and price declines or slower than average price increases.

Not sure about Houston, but our price increases here in Seattle have been anything but "slower than average." But that isn't to say that the price increases wouldn't have been worse if they didn't build housing like crazy here.

You have the causality wrong.

- Builders build because if high demand.

- Landlords raise rent because of high demand.

- High demand is based on the localities productivity. Places that are in high demand have lots of jobs that pay high wages.

The only way to relieve the pressure is to build faster than existing demand or to lower the productivity of the region.

Yes that’s the econ 101 explanation but what seems to have actually happened is the existing demand wasn’t driving up prices in a neighborhood of old brownstones and some rental houses until after new large apartment complexes went up and the new places charged considerably higher rent than the existing supply. This is something I heard first hand more than once from small landlords saying they were increasing prices because the large buildings nearby were also expensive.

I.e. it wasn’t demand but normalizing higher prices that people willing to pay high prices.

What I am asking for is actual demonstrated evidence of changing policies leading to changing housing supply leading to lower prices.

It depends how deep in the weeds we want to get. I remember when first moving to Oregon, a news station played an interview with a contractor building apartments in Portland. The TLDR of that interview was, we could build affordable housing. However, if the investors in the complex spend a few extra hundred bucks on materials (think granite counter tops), they can append 'luxury' to the word 'apartment' and easily ask a couple hundred more a month. Resulting in a better investment.

New construction is more expensive because it's new. It won't be new forever.

This confuses correlation and causation. Increased demand causes new units with a price premium to be built and causes older units to rise in price. You see them concurrently because of the lease cycle, and sometimes secondarily because of weird municipal rent laws.

When you have a conversation with a landlord about why they raised rent, it’s not confusing corrolation for causation.

Just because they use new construction as a price signal doesn’t mean the underlying causality changes. Small landlords don’t necessarily read market reports or The RealDeal.

Have you ever thought about where the cheap old buildings come from? People built them. New buildings get to charge a premium, old buildings don't.

It's really telling when people look at the first 1-5 years of a building and ignore that this building will stand several decades there and with each decade that building becomes more affordable.

Seriously, how difficult is this to understand? High prices -> people build more -> more old stock -> more affordable housing.

Seems great! https://cayimby.org/california-yimby-celebrates-signing-of-h...

I have to wonder if some of the more affluent neighborhoods/cities won't just find a way to stop this in their area. Does anyone have a sense of how effective this law will really be, particularly in cities with NIMBY attitudes?

I don't really see it affecting say Atherton or Los Altos Hills much - the people who live there are rich enough that splitting a lot and putting up duplexes isn't going to make a measurable economic difference to them, at least not one worth giving up their prime estate. The hillside communities (mid-peninsula, Oakland/Berkeley hills, Saratoga/Portola/Woodside) likely also won't see much adoption, just because the geology & topography doesn't really support the types of construction & road access to build multi-family housing.

I could see it making a huge difference in "affluent suburbia" - places like Sunnyvale, Cupertino, San Jose, the SFH parts of Mountain View and San Francisco, etc. The lots there are generally wide enough to support a lot split, and you have a lot of homeowners that just spent $3M because you need to in order to own property, carrying a massive mortgage. The lot split would immediately let them pay back a good chunk of that principal, and a duplex would give you rental income to cover most of the payment. A lot of homeowners would go from being financially stretched on 2 FAANG incomes to being comfortably able to live on one salary, while still maintaining ownership of a duplex.

Many of these neighborhoods are precisely the ones that need it most - they're close to jobs, they're flat, they could support a lot more population, and they already have significant pro-housing contingents. Traffic on 85 is going to suck even more than it already does, though.

It might be a popular action for people to take just before they move out. Instead of selling one house for $3M, build the duplices, sell them for a combined $5-6M, and leave instead of living with the consequences.

That might happen in the really rich neighborhoods too.

I half-joked on Reddit that folks in Atherton or Palo Alto might do it just to troll their neighbors. Not every rich person likes every other rich person; if you've had a rocky relationship, what better way to get even than to make your uptight neighbors live next to a bunch of ordinary people?

You'd have way better liquidity too. It's hard to sell a $15M estate. It's significantly easier to sell a pair of nice duplexes, each on 1/2-acre lots with double ADUs on each. You could probably get more than $15M in total for them too, since 8 units with an Atherton zip would rent for a pretty penny.

> Traffic on 85 is going to suck even more than it already does, though.

Sounds like a good reason to WFH.

Pretty much any suburban development of single family homes will include a restrictive coveant on each property that it may only be used for a single family dwelling.

Lots of older neighborhoods in cities, however, don't have any such covenants.

Can’t see how this is a good thing - property prices will rise since there is no cap on income generation

If my neighbor sells his house to a developer building condos, then my property appreciates

First house to convert to condos just makes everyone else’s experience that much worse: traffic congestion, parking, schools

It's a good thing because while land prices rise with density, rent prices will decrease as housing stock increases. If your neighbor sells his house and it gets replaced with condos, then more people will be able to live there.

Maybe it's counterintuitive to you, but dense housing is actually better for traffic congestion as people are better able to live near the places they need to go, instead of having vast swaths of suburbs a la Los Angeles.

Suburban living causes traffic congestion and parking problems.

Only ~700k of the 7M homes are open to lot splitting.

This policy will raise prices faster by squeezing SFH supply and likely only a <30% of the 700k homes will want to have their property tax rates re-assessed.

There are 5M USD homes in California that pay 10k/yr in property taxes.

Nobody wants to abandon their property tax legacy.

Recent and related:

Newsom signs legislation to boost California’s housing supply - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28559517 - Sept 2021 (134 comments)

https://archive.is/ueggZ

> A study by UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation found that the new law likely would add, at most, fewer than 700,000 housing units across California.

A good, a pointless divisive bill that does nothing to fundamentally address the issues.

It’s almost as if California politicians have discovered it’s better to have a bill that makes a lot of noise to make it seem like work is being done while simultaneously not doing anything meaningful that would truly disturb anyone.

This is another version of banning restaurants from automatically giving water while the majority of the water goes to farms that hardly pay anything for it.

700,000 is not a tiny amount.

It’s tiny when it’s the max end of the estimation in a state of 40 million people.

It’s probably enough to house almost 10% of those people at 3 persons per unit, which is not insubstantial.

6% increase in housing units isn't nothing [1]. That said, I think you're right that more aggressive measures would need to be taken to resolve the shortage. Is there a link to recommendations that would have larger impact? I know CEQA's brought up a lot, but is there some paper that's been written around proposals and estimated housing units?

[1] https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/california/housing-stat...

That’s effectively nothing when everything is so constrained already.

A 3bd/2ba house in Sunnyvale runs for a couple of million dollars. Do you think 6% is going to bring it down to 300-500k like other suburbs in the country (e.g. around Indianapolis, Atlanta, Dallas)?

I don't think anyone believes this bill will single-handedly solve the housing crisis or intended it to do so. The hope is that it will be a good incremental step, and encourage other reforms to promote more housing as people discover that multifamily units aren't a big deal.

It's not going to bring home prices down - it actually reduces the number of SFHs on the market, and the new units created are duplexes where they'll be a landlord (probably an occupant) and a tenant.

It's likely going to bring rents down, or at least keep them from climbing much higher. But that's already a huge win. A 2BR duplex in Sunnyvale rents for about $3500/month, which is pretty insane. Bring that down to $2K/month and you might have families living in their own unit again (instead of 3 families sharing a 3BR, each getting one room), or young people that can afford to found startups.

700,000 new housing units sounds pretty good for such a modest change? It does seem like more action will be needed in the future - perhaps once people see that CA isn't transformed into MegaCity One by this change, they'll be further open to options like the previous SB 50 bill?

Regardless of whether or not it "solves" the housing crisis, it's still the right thing to do. If you own a large-enough plot of land, why should you be barred from building an in-law unit, or adding a second floor that functions as a separate housing unit?

This just gives people some of their property rights back.

700k isn't nothing, either. I agree that it's not a ton, and it isn't going to solve the housing crisis, but it's a step in the right direction, and is a bonus for doing the right thing with regard to making zoning less restrictive.

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28559517

I don't know whether this is a good or bad thing.

Might look up a YouTube video to explain without politicization.

California is a big state. Surely this only bans single family zoning in egregious areas like San Francisco and not other parts of California that don't have a housing crisis?

The whole state has a housing crises. Even the little towns in the sierras or way up north.

That isn't a uniform "housing crises" throughout the state. Susanville and Eureka are really different from San Francisco or South Lake Tahoe.

The bill also doesn't eliminate single family zoning everywhere, things like no sewers (so have to use septic) still apply to necessarily reduced density.

Eureka is burdened by high housing prices relative to the local economy, same as San Francisco. Yes houses cost less, but prevailing wages are also less. Eureka has basically no economy to speak of and the houses there still cost $400k.

The text of the bill: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

By definition, the places where land is abundant do not face market pressure to build dense

The onus should be these "other places" to justify their egregious violation of property rights. The default should be people can build what they want as long as conforms to the building code.

Le Corbusier had the solutions long ago.

If I wanted to move to California and live in a single family home (my wife is from there), won’t this legislation just make those dwellings even more expensive now? Because California government says no more future supply.

I get the urgency on addressing the housing situation in California, but this feels to me like “we must do something, and this is something, so we will do it”.

I think you're confusing "Banning single family homes" and "Banning single family zoning". Nothing about this law prevents you buying land and building a SFH on it, so your characterization as "no more future supply" is inaccurate.

It simply gives you the right to, in certain circumstances, build an additional home on your property.

Wouldn't it also allow developers to build apartments in places that previously they couldn't have because the ritzy neighborhood down the street can't bear the site of 'em?

There are still lot-size restrictions as to how many units you can build.

But if a lot is large enough, and the owner of a SFH wants to sell to a developer that wants to build a 4- or 8- or whatever-is-allowed-unit building, IMO they should be allowed to do so.

And maybe that will reduce property values in some places like that ritzy neighborhood down the street. It may also increase property values in others. That's just life. Buying property shouldn't give you an immutable ticket to guaranteed value improvement. If you're lucky, it might, but as a property owner in CA myself, I would certainly give up value appreciation if it meant homes became affordable again. I get that some people wouldn't make that choice, but... tough luck; that's life. Your "right" to make money off of your primary residence shouldn't trump someone else's right to have a stable place to live.

I agree with you a lot here. Not in California, so have not looked at the bill so was curious as to if this applied to developers or just homeowners with large lots? Housing has a lot of regulatory capture that benefits already existing property holders unproportionally. I see it here in Central Oregon. Especially as home ownership is the primary way in which families build wealth or reserve wealth.

It can also be a very costly venture to re-zone properties. Even though in a lot of cases, the barrier to re-zone does not make much sense. SFH and MFH, it is not like these are based on some premise of the land has to be a certain quality. The same applies to business zoning. Why does it even make sense to say, you can build a restaurant here, but not a house?

Thanks kinda the point. System is rigged in favor of the land owners, at the expense of renters and future owners. Perfect example of legislating supply constraints is Prop 13, which fixes the tax basis to the purchase price making people stay in their homes to avoid a huge increase in property taxes were they to move. This drives up asset values and land owners love it! Boomers retirement is based on this! And it’s even better for commercial property owners who can charge 2021 sky high rents while paying taxes as if it were still 1978.

You're part of the problem.

They're not banning single family homes. Just zoning for them. THere's a housing shortage, especially in urban areas right around what little public transit there is. Insisting that only a few people live on lots in this area is insane.

Respectfully, I think you are.

I asked a question about the potential impact of this change on prices, and speculated about what might happen if single family homes become a rare (or rarer) commodity. I’m sorry that places like SF are managed so terribly, but it might have something to do with how hostile people there get when this issue comes up.

SF isn't the only city in california.

A bigger city supports a bigger suburban ring around it since you don't have to live so close to the city center anymore to get high paying jobs.

If there are 10 people and 5 of them want to live in a single family home and 5 of them want to live in a multi family home then forcing all 10 people to live in a single family home will mean that single family housing is more expensive than it needs to be since people who don't want it are forced to live in it.

I remember reading article about San Francisco being the "mercenary city": Young professionals come here, live in tiny apartments, get big tech wages for a couple of years, then move somewhere more affordable.

With the remote situation, people are getting out of SF faster than ever.

Won't this bill drive up the price of a single family home while driving down the price of multifamily homes? But the dream for most American families is to settle down in a single family home. And so even if this bill lowers rent, won't it actually push more senior tech workers to look elsewhere for their eventual long term home, making the region more "mercenary" than ever?

I wonder how many people will go from "I can afford a single family house in SF" to "I cannot afford a single family house in SF" as a result of this bill.

I think you have it backwards. More housing reduces housing pressure and prices.

Aren’t many of the single family houses currently occupied by people flatsharing, which would be better served by other types of housing?

Who cares? If you are dead-set on a single family house, you probably shouldn't move to a dense, urban area. SFHs are incredibly inefficient uses of land, and that only makes sense where land is more plentiful and in lower demand.

SFHs in Manhattan easily go for over $2k per square foot, or even a lot more (just found one listed on Zillow for $5k/sqft). No one seriously complains about that, because "wasting" space in an urban area should cost you.

Sure, most of Manhattan is a lot more dense than most of SF, but given demand here, expecting affordable SFHs is unrealistic already.

Allowing multifamily homes to be built means people that want multifamily homes can have them. The other 98% of the land won't face the same pressure and it can bring down prices for everyone.

Exactly. If people actually want single family homes that's what they will pay money for. If they want multifamily homes then let them have them.

America is supposed to be this mecca of the mythical "free market" but as soon as it's about land suddenly those rules don't matter at all. Supply and demand don't matter. The freedom of choosing what you want doesn't matter. Instead, the local residents abuse the government to force their way of life onto other people who disagree with it.

Your comment makes no sense. Building more housing means that housing costs will go down, making it way more likely that you WILL "be able to afford a single family home -- the American dream when you settle down..."

The bill will likely make single family residences more expensive. Since single family residences will now compete for multifamily, and multifamily uses land so much more efficiently, multifamily development will be able to outbid single family construction.

Not that this is a problem. The goal of housing policy is to house people, not give a certain fraction of the population exactly what they want and telling everyone else ‘sucks to be you, I got mine’

Ah yes, the free market of home owners forcing their wishes upon everyone else.

Housing demand and supply isn't something to be decided by individuals, instead by a special group of interests that must tell you what you want and what should be available.

How can you not see the cognitive dissonance in your own comment?

The reason why everyone lives in tiny apartments and then moves to a cheaper area is SF is largely covered by single family homes, and building anything else is subject to so much process it drives costs up to the moon!

I think the "mercenary" bit is (aside from being exaggerated) not really the point. My view on this is that if you want to live in a dense, urban area, you should have to pay a premium to live in a single family home, because SFHs are incredibly inefficient uses of land in that kind of environment. Suburbs, sure, SFHs all over, and that's expected. But not in a city.

The goal of less restrictive zoning like this is that we see more in-law units and 2-, 3-, and 4-plexes cropping up all over (some/many of these replacing existing single family homes). While that may increase the cost of SFHs, the average cost of homes in general will go down, because you'll have greater supply to meet demand. And they don't have to be "tiny apartments", either.

I do think this is a bit overblown; it's not like I see SF's Outer Sunset converting any significant amount of housing stock to duplexes and 4-plexes any time soon (or ever), and I expect residents will (unfortunately) still have other non-zoning-related tools at their disposal to fight development plans they don't like.

A UC Berkeley study (referenced and quoted elsewhere on this post) expects this measure to only increase the statewide housing stock by around 700k units. That's not nothing, but if they expected a significant number of SFHs to get torn down and replaced by multi-unit buildings, that number would be a good order of magnitude higher.

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