You can build a skyscraper anywhere in Davis, California
kevin.burke.dev
kevin.burke.dev
But I do have to be realistic, the Nimby feelings in this town are VERY strong. Everybody who buys a house here seems to feel the town should stay exactly the way it was on the day after they arrived, without any recognition of how blinkered that is. The legal fight against something like this would be intense, to say the least. It would require a developer with great lawyers, very deep pockets and the thickest of skins.
I was fortunate to always live in Davis while I went there, but it definitely wasn't inexpensive!
edit: for those curious about Davis, visit the wiki: https://localwiki.org/davis/
While I don't consider myself a NIMBY, because I wouldn't go out of my way to stop a development project, I do appreciate how it has kept Davis a really nice place to live.
I now live in Elk Grove, there are 3 Walmart within 5 minutes of me. Urban sprawl here is ridiculous and can be measured by how many dead skunks, and homeless coyotes you find on the road because farm land and wild spaces are turning into giant air conditioned homes (which I am totally guilty of owning). Folsom, Rancho Cordova, Roseville are the same. If you want to see what happens when Davis grow into a giant city, move to one of these places.
I am not sure what my point is. I guess I am just saying that what Davis is, is not bad, it can be worse.
But for the sake of conversation, if we are going to raze small towns like Davis in the quest of more housing friendly cities, I recommend we model it after Bellevue, WA. They have skyscrapers, and it's beautiful. But then again, that just speaks to the wealth disparity more than anything else... Which is also what keeps Davis so nice.
People really dislike noise. There’s a small airport near me that acts as a regional shipping hub amongst other things and a certain demographic (retirees, not working, own home) is very keen on halting and further business development despite the economic benefits it creates for the city because they don’t like the noise of the airplanes overhead. Personally the occasional airplane is significantly less of a nuisance to me than people revving their loud ass motorcycles at night.
I like living in Seattle with all the aircraft around!
Scientifically that shit is really bad for you, even when you can tune it out. There is a huge correlation with noise (especially during sleep) and cortisol levels among many other things -- it's a massive unmeasured externality (with cars being the primary cause).
Same goes for airports (but even more true of motorcycle dickheads, coal rollers and ricers which are almost always violating vehicle codes but never see enforcement).
That said, NIMBYism isn't the solution. Far better for something along the lines of noise level based zoning, and require whatever project(s) are responsible for noise pollution to pay into a fund that provides building code enforced sound insulation and climate control upgrades as well as compensation for loss of amenity to anyone that gets rezoned (or can prove ambient noise exceeds their zone).
I think the only reason that hospital failed was because they wanted to build multiple stories... People around here have a strong aversion to tall buildings. That was like their biggest complaint. They were worried the hospital would be able to look over their fence and into their pools. Urban sprawl can't happen if we build up. LOL.
Davis has one of the highest bicycle mode shares of any city in the state. It’s an ideal place to add denser housing without the additional traffic or parking lots that blight a lot of bigger (and less dense) cities.
If people afraid of sprawl say no to vertical, then horizontal is going to happen just outside of wherever they care about.
Many people's politics are wildly irrationally disconnected from their sentiments.
I used to live in Davis. If I was King, I'd steamroll everything between A&B and 1st and Russell and replace it with ~30-40 story apartment buildings with multilevel bike parking like in Amsterdam (ex: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/1e/c4/d7/1ec4d7a99c2151699afe...), and rooftop bars and cafes.
The walls would be a mix of vertical gardening (ex: https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/htt...) and photovoltaic windows. The bottom floors would have retail and dedicated community space.
The buildings would further have multi-level skywalks connecting them with small nook like terraces (ex: https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/59f1/27ba/b22e/38e2/a...)
There would intentionally, by design, be zero parking spaces except to accommodate the handicapped.
That's as Davis as you're going to get while actually solving the problem
Alas, all good things must come to an end.
Essentially ban private vehicles on certain blocks except for service transport and smaller golf-cart sized "NEV"s
There's many older European cities with buildings too close to each other for cars where this is done. You'll also find it on islands where the infrastructure to support a car is lacking such as roads with high speed limits and gas stations
The difference here is to claim that's not just a necessity of circumstances but instead, actually a good idea.
I guess housing prices wouldn't rise as quickly, but I doubt that's a big part of the motivation.
It's not cool to be racist, so you have to pretend you're just "hard" on immigration, and that people who aren't racist are soft on it.
It makes it confusing to have a conversation about it, when one side can't admit what they actually want.
Though, since this is not my first rodeo, I'd suggest at least some portion of those claiming to be “xenophilic restrictionists" will reveal that they are xenophobic, and don't care about restricting the "right kind" of immigration.
As I said, it's not cool to be racist, which confuses matters.
I'll give a relatively mundane example in Boston, not even about development. A couple years ago, a taco shop under Emerson College wanted to stay open until 2AM. An organized group of busybodies showed up to the meeting to stop it, claiming it would bother the college students (yes, their claim was that a taco shop open until 2AM would bother college students). The city listened and told the shop it has to close by midnight.[0]
Now, it's pretty obvious to me that the majority of people closest to the taco shop would be fine with it being open. I live a 5-10 minute walk from that location and would love it to be open later as well, but I didn't hear about this meeting until the results were already in. These meetings aren't listed anywhere in bulk online, the people in charge seem to be inclined to listen to whoever wants to stop stuff, and the people who want to stop stuff seem to have organized and made it a full-time hobby to attend these meetings.
So a lot of NIMBY sentiment is simply organization rather than a true majority sentiment.
0. https://www.universalhub.com/2020/city-always-sleeps-think-c...
"That is my spot. In an ever-changing world, it is a single point of consistency. If my life were expressed as a function on a four-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system, that spot at the moment I first sat on it would be zero-zero-zero-zero."
if the function doesn't change, every point should be consistent, right?
1. Just as an aside - 3Blue 1Brown is an amazing resource https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYB8IZa5AuE
He said function "on" the coordinate system. I read it as "function in the coordinate system".
So I'd say Elk Grove's sprawl was driven by NIMBY-style regulation that encouraged low density housing and failed to address the effects of hopscotch development. Within those failures, Elk Grove has a few gimpses of higher density and urban planning, as well as anecdotes about the benefits of mixing different socioeconomic classes.
It's possible to develop in a way that doesn't involve giant strip malls and tons more cars, y'know. Most YIMBY's are urbanists, and would be much more in favor of supporting walking, biking and transit, rather than cars cars cars.
> Jon Snow: What did father use to say? Everything before the word "but" is horse sh|t.
"I would support something like this [...] but fortunately it's only theoretical, because there are enough NIMBYs to make sure it has no chance of actually happening"
But I know the feeling, that was me one year ago: "I would love to get a Covid vaccine right away, but (fortunately) there are people with higher priorities who have to get it (and field test it) first". But I have to mention that I did get vaccinated eventually...
In other words, people support more housing, as long as it doesn't require more housing. You're free to build anywhere, as long as you leave everywhere untouched.
Thankfully, some developers are starting to become more aggressive. At some point you have to decide that appeasement is more trouble than it's worth, and there is untapped potential for developers who will target pro-housing exceptions rather than try to work with the normal planning bureaucracy. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/How-one-S-F-housing-p...
You could build a skyscraper in the middle of my dumb suburban wasteland of the neighborhood I grew up in, but why the hell would I live there when the businesses are all off-the-shelf franchises with giant dusty shitty lots and nobody around to talk to.
Hell, build a skyscraper and surround it by the things I mentioned, that's cool too.
This one rings home because I moved from SF to Davis during the pandemic. I attended UC Davis around 15 years ago and moved back because it’s a great place to race a family.
I would like to see more infill development here. It’s a shame that so many smart and successful people that work here can’t afford to buy homes here.
I’ve toyed around with the idea of building multi-family housing here. Generally, there are easier places to make money in real estate but I would feel pretty good about making something like this happen.
Crazier things have happened, but if there are other HN readers that would like to chat more about this idea I’ll put my email address in my profile if it’s not there already. I’ve become friends with the realtor that helped me buy a house here (Tanner Mohr) - we’ve previously talked about getting a small group of people together for projects like this. So far we looked at one empty lot, but the seller already had plans for something like I had in mind.
Personally I don’t think I could stomach the risk of trying to build something huge here. That sort of speaks to the point Kevin is making about nimbyism. I certainly wouldn’t want my money tied up in a legal fight. But I could imagine more 4-5 story condos close to campus and downtown doing well here.
I found several students passed out in my yard or on my stool steps. Each one was given a medical exam (my partner was a nurse) and a burrito, and a ride home.
I didn't mind the constant parties so much except when i had a kid-- her first year was very tough sleeping and on numerous occasions outrageously loud parties kept her up all night. 2-month-olds don't care if its Halloween or not.
One kid vaguely threatened me saying he had a "party right of way" to do whatever he wanted. I informed him I was a gun owner.
One time a woman directly out my front door was screaming "RAPE! RAPE!" and I felt obligated to interdict.
The ex-wife and I would stay up on nights there was likely to be trouble, having gotten the rhythm of the place after a decade.
That being said, if you kept your wits about yourself it was a really fun place to live, any problems the kids caused were way overshadowed by the vibrancy of the neighborhood.
All that you mentioned looks like features to me, not bugs.
isn't that why you would move? Can't expect the world to change to suit i reckon.
Smells like cows, tiny town, Sac is boring, San Francisco is too far.
But when I ride my bike to the campus farm to buy meat, depending on the weather and perhaps other conditions it might smell like cow shit! It doesn’t happen often though.
That doesn’t really bother me. However, one year when I was in college something happened to the tomato harvest that caused lots of huge flies all over the city. I generally like the weather here and all the other sort of agricultural elements, but that was the one gross think I can think of.
My quality of life at college improved a lot when I switched from having a roommate to getting a single room.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/02/business/munger-residences-mi...
This is not likely to happen though.
compare this to a city like Boston where these caps are negotiated and set on a per development basis. As a result, while each new residential building may have proportionally less low-income units, boston as a whole has more affordable units available for rent since more housing was built in the first place due to the flexibility of these caps.
I was born and raised in CA, but for the progressive a state we claim to be, some of these policies are down right counterproductive (despite having great intentions) and should be revisited.
* my source here is I used to rent an apartment from the head of affordable housing commission in boston. If there is published materials that contradict this please correct me!
Cynical take: that's the reason the cap exists
Localities are incentivized by Prop 13 and many other things to not approve housing. This is good for localities' budgets because people demand more services than office space, but is bad for California if every locality does it because then where will new residents live?
So the state, which is keen to have more residents, requires each locality to "do its part" and accommodate some number of housing. Davis currently doesn't meet these targets, and so state law now overrides local zoning laws to allow any amount of density to be built so that Davis can catch up.
In our federal US system, states are sovereign, so the feds can't just lord it over states, but cities have no such predefined relationship to their state. In fact, all cities only get the powers that states choose to delegate them, which is why state preemption (e.g. "every county must do X" or "no county can do Y" is a thing.)
It was however shelved recently.
They're all gonna need the same amount of parking, parks, shops, employment, education, entertainment, etc. They'll also pay the same taxes to fund all that stuff.
The construction effort or materials of a skyscraper probably isn't much different to 10 streets of 50 houses either.
It does. Because a Skyscraper needs infrastructure which flat houses do not (Special water pumps, specially trained firefighters, support for rapid evacuation). Having a lot of people in one tall building creates challenges that a small town is not ready for.
Of course, any new construction won't be priced toward that crowd. But yes the demand could feasibly exist.
Taller buildings cost somewhat more per square foot. You need a stronger foundation and building materials, past a certain height you need pumps for water and things like that.
That's worth the cost where land is expensive and you're building a 30 story building next to a bunch of 15 story buildings you'd otherwise have to knock down. When you're building next to cows, you just build five story buildings or two story buildings and build more of them, because the land isn't that expensive.
This is presumably why it's easier to pass there. Not going to be a lot of takers on the skyscrapers.
Though it could still be useful if you get some five story buildings where there might have only been single family homes.
Also the same rules currently apply in Redondo Beach which is a little bit more expensive.
My school has a third the enrollment of davis and has two 12 story residential towers plus a smaller one (or something, they've been doing a lot of construction), so assuming everything is like for like (which is a terible assumption), you could have similar housing for Davis with a 72 story tower. That's definitely a skyscraper, although not in competition for any height prizes.
Usually something that big will be in a dense urban core though. My impression is that Davis doesn't have the density where it makes economic sense to build that high. Probably would be easier and cheaper to do something around 10 stories, maybe with a large footprint.
Done.
There are no loopholes for you because you are not a friend. The system intentionally is all based on human to human trust because that allows complete discretion, and therefore abuse. You can't rules lawyer it. They will simply wait you out because they pick the wait period and they're paid to wait and you pay to wait.
Like Los Altos Hills could mandate that new apartments be covered in real gold, but they don’t do that.
I've been struggling for two years just to fix a leaky roof. When my town fails to get an approved Housing Element, I'll probably build condos out of spite. And move to a red state so I have some property rights and better ROI on taxes.
In that case they would just have to ban buildings over three stories, no strange egress requirements needed.
That would in turn get tested against state laws.
No doubt there are plenty of anti-density regulations on the books, like cities with minimum lot sizes in the SF Peninsula, but it would be challenging to pass those regulations now in California.
Davis has a somewhat famous precedent for that too: https://localwiki.org/davis/Toad_Tunnel
Wildlife?? Oh sure, "environmental impact" can be about wildlife and the environment, but it could also be as minimal as traffic patterns and aesthetics. That's why just about anyone can get in on the California environmental review process and go through several rounds of delays in hopes of extorting something from you, and a key reason California has trouble building anything.
On the other hand, "omg! birds running into the windows!" is as good a start as any.
It's not much, requiring cities to have their housing rules written down ahead of time. But it is enough the organizations like CaRLA are having some success suing cities for capriciously denying housing.
https://carlaef.org/category/legal-action/housing-accountabi...
Taxing the nearly 2/3 of taxpayers without a degree to fund the housing of university students doesn't seem egalitarian.
It was really quite upsetting to think that despite not even having a job, he effectively "made" more money than I did.
Then I thoguht it through a little more, and realised that was as good as his life would ever get unless he did something to change it.
TL;DR: I don't begrudge people who are able to subsist and are happy at that level. Even if it means they get what can appear to be nicer accommodation than what I'm paying for at that time. I'm not wired that way. I want more.
The idea is that this is not fair - it’s not so much about subsidies for individual people but the fact that if you’re born in 2000 vs. 1980 you’re much more likely to live in a polluted area because the population is bigger now and that’s where we’ve been adding the housing.
Fair housing laws are about adding more housing in the areas of your town that have historically been unwelcoming to minorities and have less pollution and better schools.
Also it’s bad for public health to have many more people living in polluted areas, bad for social mobility to increase the student count at the worst schools instead of the best schools, etc.
Curious to know which ones.
(The submissions are staggered across the state; the Bay Area’s deadline is later than Yolo County’s.)
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/How-one-S-F-housing-p...
However, if San Francisco does not submit a valid Housing Element by the end of the year, then unlimited density could potentially be available on any lot in the city.
lol citation please!
Per California HCD, Davis issued permits for about 1350 homes between 2013 and 2020, or roughly, Davis grew by about 4.5% in that time frame.
California grew its population by about 6% between 2010 and 2020 and the total housing stock by about 5.2% which puts Davis at just about average in terms of construction, far from "tons." https://www.census.gov/library/stories/state-by-state/califo...
"Oh, the data says I'm wrong? Well, check your data again I guess.
What, provide my own data? As if!"
Tokyo is even bigger than New York, and you can rent a one bedroom in the heart of downtown for $1,000 a month, because they actually build a lot of new housing there.
"New York City issued fewer housing unit permits on a per capita basis than nearly every other large city, including not only fast-growing Seattle and Austin, but also cities that face similar constraints to development. New York issued permits for 40 percent fewer units per capita than San Francisco, half as many as Boston, and nearly two-thirds less than Washington, D.C. New York also lags on other metrics like the net change in the number of housing units."
https://cbcny.org/research/strategies-boost-housing-producti...
As the world (not US) urbanizes and population growth slows, we could perhaps reach a dense urban equilibrium, but until then cities must continue to grow, even if they are already dense.
It's a metro of 40 million that's nationally important on a level unseen in the US -- it's like you took NYC and SF and LA and combined them all into one megacity. And yet rent prices there are...well, they're still somewhat expensive, but less so than you'd expect, definitely.
NYC is more than 2x as expensive as Tokyo for rent: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
This is particularly true if you look at the case of a 1 bedroom commuter (not in city center) apartment: $2200 in NYC, $700 in Tokyo. Almost like letting people building housing supply to meet demand actually works.
Tokyo "feels" knit closer together mostly because they don't suck at public transport.
What's your point?
And then if you look at the Bay Area having a low overall population density but it's still really expensive, it's pretty obvious what needs to happen.
I love the brash interesting solution the author has brought up! It's how we move into the future, trying new things. Is it the right thing for Davis? Probably not, but it sure would be interesting.
I struggle between novelty, interesting, and sustainable. :)
It's just that you probably want the biggest building possible so the potential profit is worth the years of delay while inevitable legal challenges and possibly an EIR work their way through the courts and planning process.
...to maximize the loss when the lack of local infrastructure to support people using a building of that size makes it impossible to sell or lease space in it.
There's still giant holes in the ground from abandoned skyscrapers the Sacramento market wouldn't support a decade ago, and that was a place not obviously insane for them.
I'll also note that the alternative to infill housing is single family home suburban sprawl, which is a lot more taxing infrastructure wise - apartment dwellers use less water, less electricity, and are less likely to own a car than suburban single family homeowners. Further the consequence of less homebuilding in California is more homebuilding in places like Texas, which are a lot less friendly for the environment.
If that is true, then it would seem like one plus five, one plus four, 5 over 1, and 4 over 1 buildings would refer to how many wood floors the building has above the first floor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1
I do not know how good the source is for Wikipedia, but I have only ever seen 5 and 6 story buildings, and never 7 or more stories with the first floor having masonry/steel and then wood for the rest.
The only reason Target had to be that far out is no place in the city center area had space for the literal sea of parking Target wanted. It's had major chains much closer to downtown for a long time (Borders and then Whole Foods right in downtown, Gottschalks at UMall until the chain went bankrupt in 2009, etc.)
It's all about social class. There's no website dedicated to calling people who shop at Target landwhales.
It's the cachet of having the French store[0] in the area, over one that's from flyover-country. ;)
But theres also no law stating this would be profitable, even as a oneoff
Does Davis have anything worth seeing? The Central Valley is all flat farmland with the dry side of some mountains in the distance.
Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Pasadena, Palo Alto, Cupertino, and (my favorite) Atherton, will also soon see their housing limits invalidated as noncompliant, based on their current (bad-faith) plans they're trying to squeak by, and in _those_ markets, I guarantee you someone _will_ try to take advantage of it. Maybe not as skyscrapers, but as fourplexes, 10-plexes, and missing middle housing this state so desperately needs in affluent areas. As an example: Beverly Hills is now required to zone 3096 net-new housing units that are likely to be re-developed in the next 10 years. Last year they zoned... 4. Good luck fudging that!)
This is a return to market-based development, too, and not some government intervention: real estate developers still aren't going to build where it doesn't make sense to, but now they'll have some of the red tape artificially holding development back removed in places where it does make sense.
There's no requirement that the developer is a public agency and only 20% of the apartments must be made available to families making $74,000 or less.
This is far into the salary scale for Davis School District educators, for example. https://resources.finalsite.net/images/v1593632639/davisk12u...
Time to start working through some pro-formas, this might have a lot of potential.
Prop 13 typically makes it really really hard for new landlords to compete, since long-time landlords pay nearly zero in taxes, but this might actually pencil.
Plus modern design philosophy solves many of the issues by making the common/public areas more visible rather than less. Also cameras/CCTV are so cheap now there's little chance of serious violent crime occurring.
Instead of declaring our surrender, why don't we learn from the places that got it right?