Facing housing crisis, L.A. voters back duplexes in single-family neighborhoods

So perhaps the distinction of democrat is too broad and unhelpful in this situation and it should be broken down into finer demographics. 26% of Americans identify as democrat and there is bound to be a lot of diversity of opinion within such a large body of people.

The causal variable is property ownership vs renting. City council members are older (regardless of party membership) will be property owners, and thus because this issue impacts them personally and very directly, they will always vote to increase their property values (ie less construction / less supply).

Democratic leaders are still usually older, and thus owners - and since this issue impacts them very very personally, they will vote against their constituency.

Duplexes, triplexes and tenements dominate any decent sized city (100K+) in Massachusetts. It’s just what tends to happen when cities were founded 350-400+ years ago.

It's got pros and cons. I think the big issue I observe here is that it doesn't help affordability in any noticeable way. Whenever the single family units are destroyed, they are typically the older / lower end variety first, which had previously been attractive as rentals for lower income people but now they have massive value as teardowns so they can be carved up. Those houses get replaced with high end new construction. So this results in increased real estate value and ultimately a concentration of amenities around these areas that are being "plexed." No affordable housing is built (since this is a southern US city, all low income housing is pushed away from the city core to the exurbs, with long car drive commutes).

Another con is that this town does not have public transportation, and their roads are ill suited for 2-3x the old density. This results in the dreaded "stroads" that have numerous stoplights, carry 5-6 lanes of traffic, and are lined by strip malls as the only connectors.

And finally, when a neighborhood gets "plexed," all the existing foliage is destroyed because it is in the way. So the newly plexed zones are barren with only small shrubs and decorative plants, no trees at all.

I think town home style developments make a lot of sense conceptually. They provide easier access than an apartment building and are much cheaper to build. The density improvements are real, although though not as large as an apartment. I just worry that the way it's being done is rather careless and with little thought for the future, at least in the southern US town I am staying in.

Why the exclusions? Is there a reason to give extra help for the disabled to own homes (and, implicitly, not help disabled renters a similar amount)?

Older retirees could sell off a third of their house's value and cover property taxes for something like 20 years.

Prop 13 can easily be fixed by a) Limiting it to primary homes. b) Removing it from commercial properties. c) Make it means based and if the homeowner can't afford the taxes, tally it up and assess it at death or final sale w/o an equivalent purchase.

You can see how subsidies work due to prop 13 in the map here https://www.taxfairnessproject.org/.

#1 will be challenged in court the highest level. Think "corporations are people".

#2 will pass only if a majority of California residents are renters and decide that they want to band together on this one issue.

#3 could work since it would ensure support from people who are currently renting but want to buy a home soon.

#4 is small compared to how much home prices appreciate. The real problem is supply.

#5 this would open up more space for residential development. If it is zoned mix-use with a mandate for minimum density, then it could definitely add more supply.

Super dense cities are efficient in some ways, but they have tons of other problems and they externalize tons of costs. What we're missing in the U.S. is human-scale density, especially in the form of cohousing arrangements.

Tall high-rises are not actually efficient. You know how much energy it takes to have elevators going up and down 40 floors along with all the other stuff? Land is not the single factor to calculate when we want efficiency.

NYC is one of the few places that can have a lot of super tall buildings really close to each other. That's because the bedrock is so shallow and the ground can take more weight. Los Angeles, by comparison, has a much deeper bedrock, which makes it difficult to build tall buildings very close together.

If you want to get a lot of housing, medium density is the way to go. Medium density is cheaper to build and maintain, can be built in more locations, and is more pleasant to live in.

Notably, those cities have been very expensive for decades because they also slowed their pace of housing construction below demand.

Meanwhile, cities like Houston have kept prices down by granting tons of building permits. For the purposes of pricing (as opposed to urban design), it doesn't matter what form the new units take, as long as they get built.

Cities though have the problem of allowing much more space for jobs than they have for housing. You don’t want high density housing in your city? Fine, cap your employer zoning.

It’s a big country out there and people need to decentralize and stop trying to turn nice places into hong kong density.

Nobody needs to use land “efficiently” by packing more people into it.

Obviously, the discussion above (read: comment thread elsewhere) about "middle density housing" is the same armchair urban planning as your comment, but middle density seems like a much more "moderate" solution by comparison to your proposal.

I lived in a 6 bed unit on the top level of a 3-story duplex that had 4 people living on the ground floor. It was a massive house that allowed for ten non-related people to live together on a street filled with similar houses, lined with massive oak trees and a five minute walk from a lovely pond. Gorgeous neighborhood.

Edit: I’ll add that I never experienced any negative effects in JP that I’d associate with such dense living. Unlike the more rowdy student oriented neighborhoods like Allston that were far more rough and messy.

But what I'm more interested in is this:

> Nearly every single home is multi-family, and the single families that do exist are usually $2 million and up.

SFH are already 1 million and up in LA, really in SD, LA, SF, Seattle, and Vancouver. It will be interesting to see what happens to SFH values if they become scarcer. It seems like it might have the opposite effect that the NIMBYs generally fear, and make them even _more_ wealthy.

JP isn't quite a suburb but I look to it as a fantastic example of how suburban development could be condensed without losing its character. With proper upzoning, suburbs could have denser cores of multi-family housing without impacting those that want less dense housing outside the core. These towns would be more walkable and prettier places to live.

>It is dense

It's absolutely not dense, probably less dense than newer suburbs with smaller lots.

>walkable, and extremely beautiful.

I'll give you that, it definitely looks beautiful.

Incremental upzoning is what will get us there. So changing single family zoning to duplex zoning like what this does, and current multifamily zoning to much higher density zoning.

Going from single family to high-density apartments zoning overnight will cause a great deal of chaos, both in land valuation and also in political distrust.

California has actually built a huge number of apartment blocks in areas already zoned for that type of housing, and those have been providing most of the new housing supply in the state. Such places have picked up the slack for lower density places where exclusionary zoning has prevented higher density.

But housing has to be built in a wider array of formats because not everyone wants to live in a large apartment block. Today, even in urban California huge areas have single homes on large lots that should have the option of being converted to townhouses or multifamily dwellings. A lot of people (even families) would enjoy and even prefer townhouse style living.

- Home owners delight in 100k of equity per year on what amounts to bungalow property held together by stucco, as they have since the late seventies when neoliberal tax reforms at a republican behest elevated them to an untouchable landed gentry.

- Residents in the state bemoan "Reagans army," the indelible population of more than 70,000 homeless that shuffle through their suburban streets rifling through trash, defecating on sidewalks and stealing from unlocked vehicles.

- politicians promise relief and begin amassing considerable tax funds to house the homeless with various community initiatives resources. politicians secure boisterous agreement that this homeless issue must end in $timeline.

- the landed gentry respond in kind, refusing any and all housing relief or homeless shelter construction in their fiefdom as it may in turn pose a threat to their profiteering. lawsuits are filed and reformists hamstrung in court.

- The city directs their considerable housing funds to cleanup funds, periodically evacuating and sanitizing the overwhelming and seemingly endless number of encampments across freeway overpasses and abandoned investment properties. Homelessness is bad, but another outbreak of cholera or bubonic plague is worse.

- young men and women who cannot find affordable housing in the state simply leave after a decade, taking with them talent experience and acumen honed in the city of angels to cities that can better serve them.

its also worth mentioning that California is very friendly when it comes to investment property. there are hundreds of derelict, abandoned malls, clubs, bars, parking structures, and other edifices of commerce including giant grass and trash lots that just seem to exist. Theyre all owned by property management cabals or millionaires who refuse to do anything with the land because surprise, they dont need to. The landed gentry of homeowners will always go to bat, defending their right to chew up property and deliver nothing in return.

In the end, it boils down to cars, though. Many people see the free parking space in front of their house as an extension of their property, and more people on their street often means they have to compete for it. Make cars optional, and everything else falls into place.

With rose-colored glasses, I can see a path forward; building free-standing parking garages that will eventually be demolished / repurposed when car ownership in a neighborhood goes below a certain level. But that's expensive, clunky, and ugly -- and folks aren't going to want to walk across a wide, busy street just to get to their cars. Probably not politically viable.

Who wants to spend hours every day stuck in traffic and looking for parking and then pay outrageous rents for the privilege?

This isn't undemocratic at all.

I know people hate this generally, but just to make a point: Democracy literally means "rule by the demos". The demos is (definitions from wiktionary because it was the first search result): "ordinary citizens, common people from a district, in a city-state” or "(political science) The common populace of a state or district, the people". So, the citizens or the populace. Meaning the people who live there.

That is to say, the will of "folks that don't live there" has nothing to do with Democracy. The citizens of an area voting for their self interest is completely democratic. It just doesn't end up with the results some people want.

What I've seen in my city (LA adjacent) is the city can find really creative ways of making adding an ADU very expensive. On my block the same contractor built 2 different ~500 sq ft units on two different lots. They both were a garage tear down replaced by a 1 bedroom unit above a garage.

The first unit was done right after the law change allowing ADUs, and cost ~140k. The second, started 18 months later was ~270k and the owner had to pay for things like repaving the ally and upgrading the sewers.

So even the small steps are being impeded.

The debate around legal immigration is very much the same. The people that want to immigrate have no voice.

Several dozen massive apartment complexes have been constructed in L.A. in the past 4 years, and more are being constructed as we speak.

It turns out the problem was never actually zoning; it's simply that it's extremely expensive to build in L.A. when taking into account cost of land (limited supply), cost of materials (excess demand), cost of labor (excess demand), and the extra architectural and structural demands resulting from the dozens of fault lines criss-crossing the L.A. basin.

Edit: I don't care what kind of housing it is, but it needs to be for sale as opposed to for rent.

I have an expression for this. "Solving the problem is only half the problem." Everyone knows how to fix the housing problem (build some f'ing houses). But solving that problem is only half the problem.

This is generally referred to as NIMBYism. And yeah, it’s a problem, but particularly in California where property values have skyrocketed to the point homeowners can’t afford to give up their nest egg because then they’d have nowhere to live.

It does concern me however what it took to make people give up their advantages, the grossly more obvious inequities in that case (and solution), and how long it took.

And the voices of those who own land?

It's called a cartel to artificially inflate housing for the benefit of existing owners.

So what if you want to have a family and need to move to a bigger place ? Is it not a problem then ?

California’s housing crisis has given me a clear perspective on the debate between centralized and distributed powers, a topic I have long struggled to resolve. It harkens back to debates as old as federalism vs anti-federalism. States rights versus federal rights. Similarly, in this case, it’s about county rights versus the state’s right. Debates on this topic usually resolves around one or the other, leading to rather binary positions. But really, the discussion should be about the appropriate balance between the two. I find we are well informed about the tyranny of centralized power by the state. As a specific example, there is a narrative that the Robert Moses era of the mid-20th century lead to massive civil projects, such as freeways, that put the interests of the state ahead of individual neighborhoods, leading to destroyed and fractured communities. It appears there has been a political whiplash against this era which has lead us to the predicament we find ourselves with today, which is that powers are now heavily distributed. What can and cannot be built is now dictated by the counties and the neighborhoods within it. This is wonderful in the sense that you, as an individual property owner, have much greater control on what goes on in your community. But this also has a systemic effect of acting as a problem that the federalists originally warned about in their own debates, which is the tyranny of the majority. Because powers are so heavily distributed, it has lead to an artificially constructed zero-sum game, as you point out in your post, where everyone who owns a home is content and will do whatever they can to limit supply as doing so feeds their natural own self-interests. In this regard, I think it is clear that we have an improper balance between distributed and centralized power. I believe it weighs too heavily on the distributed side. This results in the trampling of interests of both developers, who wish to produce supply, and individuals themselves who wish to participate in the society, but cannot due to unaffordability. This is a shift in position that I would say is rather unique for me. I tend to advocate for the inverse, a reduction in centralized power. But in this particular case, I think centralization is an appropriate step.

I also want to make one additional disclaimer. By centralization of power, I don’t mean the state should be involved in housing construction itself. This is a position often proposed by progressive advocates. Instead what I mean is that the state should have the power to override local interests so that the market can do its job, which is its interest to increase supply. In other words, the state should do what it can to remove the local bureaucracy that stifles development.

For example, the law could say "Property taxes on all properties built before 2021 will be reduced to zero, while all properties built after 2021 will have to pay property tax at 5% of the property value for 30 years, before dropping for to 0%".

If they upzone my single family home lot I will make out like a bandit. Developers will be all over this neighborhood, building townhouses galore. The last townhouse to sell in my neighborhood went for 2.1MM+.

Upzoning does not magically make housing affordable. Housing pricing is more complicated than a simple supply and demand curve, although that tells a story at the macro level. And truly affordable housing can only be created by mandating that units sell below market value. This shotgun approach to upzoning will alleviate issues in some neighborhoods—in others it will make developers and homeowners a lot of money.

These oversimplified narratives on HN are so tiring. Local conditions are much more complex and multifaceted than these "upzone everything" posts would have you believe.

If anything, this law will make the problem worse. LA is already packed with people and it takes 30 minutes to drive 3 miles on the city streets. If implemented, this will bring yet more people to the neighborhoods, increase density and make the situation far worse.

But, like you said, the crux of the problem is the price and not anything else.

I'm sure they would if they could, but with all the greyhound buses full of people going to LA from places like Texan prisons, how do you prevent them from coming back? Also, I don't think $5k provides as much influence these days as you think it does, even to someone who is homeless.

> LA and much of California is past saving, get out while you still can.

Yes, LA has too many people with more coming, housing prices are too high, and again growing. Chicago is losing people, so it is much easier to live there.

If you keep those suburbs as single family housing, their value goes up tremendously at the cost of everyone else. It is not beneficial for the community at large to have these single residences in areas that could provide jobs, services, organizations, to many more people. Having more people also increases the tax base for a city compared to a single family.

it absolutely is just political theater, at least for duplexes and accessory dwelling units (adu), two laws recently passed here in CA. it’s a show of ‘doing something’ while not changing the landscape at all. less than 1% of LA will upgrade to duplexes from single-family homes because of the underwhelming economics. what we need is a minimum of 4+1 (quadplex plus adu) by right on an R1-zoned property, and scaling up from there.

This is not going to double the density of neighborhoods, but it opens options for residents and makes it much easier to add units. Sometimes that won't be worth it economically - even if you want to - but the numbers will work out in many cases.