Single unit is the most expensive and least efficient zoning rule. Getting rid of it would bring housing costs down.
Ever visit a beautiful city like Paris, Copenhagen, Milan and wonder why we don't have that? It would be illegal to make the buildings they have under our zoning code and parking mandates!
You answered your own question. Housing costs coming down is a good thing for people who need housing, but it's not really a good thing for people who own valuable homes, and people who own valuable homes tend to have much more political power.
Someone else stated it simply as "undesirables", which I think is the quick summation of your statement and other similar reasoning. It all comes down to "I get that people need a place to live, but they can find that somewhere else" or "we've got a good thing going here (for me, the politician)".
/s lest someone Poe's Law on this.
People like to live in single family homes and live next to single family homes.
> Ever visit a beautiful city like Paris, Copenhagen, Milan and wonder why we don't have that? It would be illegal to make the buildings they have under our zoning code and parking mandates!
You won't get a beautiful city like those with any kind of [realistic American] zoning. It's too expensive. You'd get flimsy modern cookie-cutter buildings and maybe some brutalist concrete hulks.
Are you claiming those cities don't have zoning?
I'm claiming modern construction isn't very beautiful. If you drop single family zoning for something denser, you're not going to get something like those beautiful cities that were cited above. It's false advertising to suggest that denser zoning would give us another Paris (at least not the parts people are referring to when they bring it up). You'd get McMansion Hell, 4-Plex Edition or The Concrete Hulks of Shanghai (e.g. https://aurelien-marechal.com/block#1).
I suppose you could have a zoning code that mandated "building them like they used to," but that would be too expensive.
I think in the US there are some comparable developments, where they also try building walkable neighborhoods with high density, having shops and restaurants mixed in. But that is still very rare in the US.
You don't get beautiful walkable cities if you let people just do whatever they want wherever they want. If you do that you get Houston Texas.
Then those people should buy a single family home and the single family homes around them and keep them that way.
>You won't get a beautiful city like those with any kind of zoning. It's too expensive. You'd get flimsy modern cookie-cutter buildings and maybe some brutalist concrete hulks.
The current restrictions that have created suburbia are already yield expensive, cookie cutter and flimsy housing, so even if your arguments were taken at face value (Which I disagree with), nothing changes for the worse.
I'm not disputing that. What I am disputing is denser housing would get us "a beautiful city like Paris, Copenhagen, Milan..." It's false advertising.
The only thing you'll get with density is density.
That's what we did. Now people like you are saying me and my neighbors are NIBMYs and want us to change.
You bought a single family home and all surrounding single family homes around it? If that's the case, no one is asking you to change anything. They're literally your backyards and you can choose to not build any further. If your neighbors don't want to build more units, they should be free not to as well.
What needs to change is neighbors restricting housing units on property they do not own. No one is advocating for completely abolishing all zoning, but the current approach isn't working as housing prices skyrocket everywhere that housing production can't keep up — often because of zoning restrictions.
And when they do (as an upstream commenter has done), they're attacked by the good people who blame single-family houses for what's wrong with California.
This thread is an example.
People like living in walkable neighborhoods with public transportation more, as proven by housing prices, but those are mostly illegal to build.
Also I think that society is now much more complex than the single family American dream of the past. And the US should wake up to the reality that in their society the poor are subsidizing the rich in almost everything, especially in housing.
Hint: wealth gap is your answer.
I own a single family home in the Palo Alto. If I wanted to living in a city like Paris, I would. I like it here.
I don't care about the price of my house, since I do not plan to sell it this decade. I care a TON about my neighborhood. I love that my neighborhood is quiet, not crowded, and has easy parking. I will vote against any proposals or elected officials who represent me that would make that worse.
I get I represent NIMBY-ism, but these tradeoffs are real. I often see people strawman them like there are easy/obvious solutions to shared problems. There aren't.
I make well into 6 figures a year and I can't buy a shack in Fremont because of people like you.
Density isn't the issue demand is. You want to live in a place everyone else does.
At 1.3 million on average you could buy 100a property on prime farmland or you could buy an apartment in New York or a house in Freemont. Wanting Freemont to be zoned like New York property would probably make it more popular with new hot properities and it will price you out further. The truth is there are a lot of people making more money who want housing in Freemont.
> make it more popular with new hot properities and it will price you out further
It's a common NIMBY misconception that adding more supply increases prices. Basic economics says this is obviously wrong.
> The truth is there are a lot of people making more money who want housing in Freemont
I'm pretty sure my income puts me in the top 10% of income in the Bay and definitely top 1% nationally. You're saying that less than 10% of the population should be able to purchase a starter home (what I mean by a shack). Do you not listen to what you're saying?
Top 1% nationwide is: 538,926 Top 10% in bay area: 534,600
If you make only 100k with no savings or partner you might be priced out of that 6000ft average home. Most people will buy as a couple, have a down payment and get help from parents which puts you at a disadvantage but it is still possible.
No idea if a 5 bedroom NJ home is equal to a 3 bedroom 6000 ft home in Freemont. Not sure one location has more value. I would choose Freemont over NJ.
> If you make only 100k with no savings or partner you might be priced out of that 6000ft average home. Most people will buy as a couple, have a down payment and get help from parents which puts you at a disadvantage but it is still possible
Do you listen to what you're saying? A top 10% earner in the region needs to buy as a couple and get help from parents to afford a _starter home_? So everyone else that's under the 90th percentile is just screwed?
> Top 1% nationwide is: 538,926 Top 10% in bay area: 534,600
90th percentile income in 2018 in the Bay was $384k [1]. Someone in the top 10% of incomes should not be struggling to afford a basic home with 3 bedrooms in a mediocre area.
[1]: https://www.thecalifornian.com/story/news/2020/01/31/bay-are...
The Bay area numbers I gave are from 2021 source included.
Here are some current prices: https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Fremont_CA
The 1450+ feet one for 1.2 seems nice. The 760 one seems within reach.
The prices are similiar around the world. 1.5-1.8 is the average house price in Toronto. If New York/NJ is under valued and you can get a similiar home for less I would probably make the move.
That's household income. But sure, put me in the top 20% instead of the top 10%. Still incredibly ridiculous that an 80th percentile earner cannot afford a basic home.
> Here are some current prices
What you linked are apartments/townhomes. These have much higher HOA fees and are priced accordingly. The sticker price seems lower but the monthly payments end up the same as more expensive SFHs. To boot, most of them are really small - everything over 1500 sqft is over 1.3M which is ridiculous. So no, that's not really more affordable. Density doesn't mean everyone lives in a shoebox, it means building taller so the same land can fit 5x more people.
> The 760 one seems within reach
Again, if a 800sqft apartment that looks like it was built 70 years ago is all that's within reach of an 80th percentile household then you need to re-evaluate housing policy.
> The prices are similiar around the world. 1.5-1.8 is the average house price in Toronto
No, it's only similar in places with similarly dysfunctional real estate markets and NIMBYism as CA. Toronto and Vancouver famously have terrible SFH zoning policies. When you look at places like Atlanta, Miami, Austin, Chicago, etc. they are nowhere near the levels seen in CA.
> If New York/NJ is under valued and you can get a similiar home for less I would probably make the move
Or I can keep voting against NIMBYs and vote for densifying the Bay.
Austin and Atlanta have smaller population densities compared to SF. SF is double Austin.
An 800sqft apartment is larger than any apartment I've rented. New condos can have 500sqft and still go for 800k in dense cities.
> Density means accepting smaller
Strongly disagree. You can still have 1200+sqft apartments. Most of the 2 and 3bd luxury apartments near me are around 1000-1100 sqft.
> An 800sqft apartment is larger than any apartment I've rented.
Not sure what kind of apartment you're renting... (or maybe you're out of touch with the market?) 500sqft is a studio and you're not fitting much more than a bed and desk in there. You have to remember that square footage includes things like bathroom, closet, washer/dryer if they're in unit, etc. And that realtors exaggerate so in practice an apartment advertised as 500 sqft is more like 350.
Please just take a look at Zillow/Redfin for one moment and tell me where you see 500sqft condos that look like actual condos rather than studios.
I have lived in areas with only single family dwellings(Tempe AZ, density 5,203 people per square mile.) and in areas with high rises(Hoboken NJ, density 41,038 people per square mile) and I can attest that most noise is from the cars on the main roads of the city, which largely depends on urban design, e.g. Hoboken has only 2 main arterial roads(Washington Street and Observer Highway) which excludes most of the noise from the interiors.
> not crowded
By what metric? I can walk my dog outside easily, travel easily in the train to manhattan, and get reservations to any restaurant on the day in Hoboken. I don't think most places are as crazy crowded as Manhattan (Brooklyn, Queen and Bronx are much lower density) where the dynamics are different because work and tourism.
Are most single family zoned places in California work building heavy areas and touristy destinations?
> easy parking.
I can find parking for ~200$ per month here. So it is kind of expensive, i'll give you that.
When I down my street, I'll see at most 1-2 people out and about. To me, that's a more relaxing environment than even the best urban environments where I'll see dozens of people.
Unless I live next to a major road/highway, the occasional car noise is less bothersome to me personally than noise from people. To me car noise feels like white background noise, but voices trigger some active part of my brain.
I'm not arguing that's a completely rational way to feel / belief, but it totally how I feel.
Given the choice, many will vote to restrict what other people around them can do with their property to benefit their own interests - financial, quality of life, etc. While externalizing the costs (higher housing costs, pollution, etc) across a large number of people who aren't allowed a vote. Hoping people will do otherwise isn't going to get results.
But given that the zoning impacts have just as big an impact on the low-paid worker who has to commute hours to the local hospital to work, it is entirely reasonable to allow those impacted parties a vote by moving zoning away from total local control up to a larger level. Recent legislative steps in CA are a move in the right direction, but need to go much farther to create more meaningful changes.
Basically, if you want a quiet neighborhood with large plots of land, you should be required to bear the full cost of that, rather than voting to externalize the majority of those costs across the larger population.
Personally, I think we need both. Let the urban areas increasingly densify and let the people who want larger single family homes move into those types of developments that are farther out of the city centers.
Some people just don't want to live in apartment buildings, and as someone with a young child, I much prefer having my own home with a yard and parking space and garage for projects than living in an apartment building and parking on the street or in a garage. But when I was younger I wanted to be closer to restaurants and the like.
CA should invest heavily in opening up more land for housing developments and equipping them with schools and shopping close by, with transit for commuters, while prioritizing density projects in the urban centers.
Replace some of that water intensive agriculture with small towns for people to live in.
Some people really want to live in lower-density suburban environments, though. I can't say I blame them, because the absolutely overwhelming majority of apartments/condos are strictly inferior in a number of ways. Sound transparency through walls / floors alone is a significant issue. Smells and ventilation too. And it's nice to have outside space you have access to / control over. Sure, units could be built to standards that mitigate those problems... but that costs money.
> It would be illegal to make the buildings they have under our zoning code and parking mandates!
More "costly" than illegal, if the LA neighborhoods I'm familiar with are any indication -- there's plenty of 3 story urban buildings with parking underneath (including one I recently moved out of), but of course that's a whole "floor" that could have been housing units, and the owner wants to recoup that with higher rents. $4250/mo for 2 bd last I checked.
Give it time. The state government is hobbled and regional fiefdoms have far too much sway. That's slowly changing.
The state is in the middle of planning the long-term Regional Housing Needs Assessment. Regions across the state are responsible for coughing up realistic plans to meet the growth targets. If they don't come up with realistic plans to meet those targets, not only can they lose their precious single family home zoning, they can lose their zoning privileges entirely. There are even plans in the works for local governments to have state oversight officials appointed for them to completely take over their housing policy. Get your popcorn.
Obviously housing cost is the tips of iceberg, and the result of state policy, resemblance to the development path often seen in middle and south America.
It has. California has passed SB9. It allows up to four units to be built on a current single unit lot.
They need to bite the bullet … train … or some other effectively fast transport.
California has such a huge housing deficit at this point that people really have no option except to move out. The point where they are losing the population equivalent of 3 mid size cities every year while still maintaining a housing crisis.
And, that housing deficit probably won't be filled with anything affordable. Starting 2023, title 24 requires solar panels that cover the full annual energy usage of the home, along with battery storage. But, guess that's a drop in the bucket for CA housing prices.
There is a high amount of population that lives in agricultural areas like the Central Valley where the cost of living is drastically lower than the very population dense cities.
If you compare the people there to the relatively smaller number of high income earners who live in the excessively high cost cities of Los Angelos, San Francisco, etc. then on a graph its going to look unfair.
Even though the house in the Central Valley might actually be much bigger and nicer if you are ok living in the suburbs/ex-urbs.
The causes of homelessness is well understood now. The problem comes from ideology, not only is the fix ideologically opposed, the cause is ideologically imposed.
Homelessness after many years or no growth or even the situation getting better started rising in 2014. LA county homelessness was roughly 40,000 in 2011, dropping in 2012, rising slightly for 13, 14. Overall pretty flat for several years straight. Then suddenly a huge increase in 2014. Basically rising every year since. https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-ln-homeless-p...
So we know it's a policy that changed in 2014 and has been making the situation worse every year. A policy which hadn't been changing prior to 2014 but also a policy that is getting worse every year.
https://foreignusa.com/california-state-minimum-wage/
Greece fell into this trap as well. You think you are doing a good thing with the best of intentions. Instead of helping people earn more, you are in fact creating homelessness.