Now a court in one of the most-NIMBY counties in California has effectively gutted the law.
Build
Absolutely
Nothing
Anywhere
Near
Anything
The same people, of course, who have a 5-person verizon or tmobile LTE family plan and spend a huge proportion of their waking life glued to their iphone or android phone.
If housing is an investment it means either demand went up (population growth), or supply did not go up (housing wasn't built).
I suspect that if you measure housing price adjusted for inflation per capita, you would get a measure of housing supply.
The fact that house owning individuals financially gain from limiting housing supply is, to me, the defining feature of class warfare, even if people don't think they are participating in it.
I think this is the basis for the statement "housing can either be affordable or an investment, but not both." Housing can either be in adequate supply (affordable) or limited (an investment).
In particular given the amendment to the law in 2017 which added, among other things, these clauses:
> It is the policy of the state that [the HAA] should be interpreted and implemented in a manner to afford the fullest possible weight to the interest of, and the approval and provision of, housing.
and
> despite the fact that, for decades, the Legislature has enacted numerous statutes intended to significantly increase the approval, development, and affordability of housing for all income levels, including this section
Both of these quotations are very clearly statements of "fuck you courts, follow the law", which the court has summarily ignored, stating that even though it is routine for statutes to be interpreted in such a manner that singular nouns include plurals and plural nouns include the singular, that the statement "only residential units" does not include building a residential unit and nothing else.
This is very classic for Californian courts and for Ninth Circuit.
The ability for a city to approve or deny SFHs will have no impact on the housing situation in the state.
Also the intent of the HAA is spelled out in the HAA itself, and it explicitly states that it is for "all economic segments":
The Legislature’s intent in enacting this section in 1982 and in expanding its provisions since then was to significantly increase the approval and construction of new housing for all economic segments of California’s communities by meaningfully and effectively curbing the capability of local governments to deny, reduce the density for, or render infeasible housing development projects and emergency shelters. That intent has not been fulfilled.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
Otherwise you’re arguing that x + 1 == x.
A friend of mine just bought a brand new BMW. He's going to sell his old Nissan. Whomever buys that Nissan will be buying their first car, or selling their old car. The market is interconnected and conditions at one end of it absolutely affect the other end.
Just look at the price of used cars last year when the new car stock was strangled. Imagine if, before that happened, someone was arguing that "making a luxury car doesn't increase the supply of cars"
"Housing Project" is really looking for a larger impact to the market than one home, usually 8+ likely dozens of homes.
A single house is just a house, not a "housing project". Thus, they shouldn't get beneficial tax breaks to build it.
They're called "vacancy chains" in that world, but yes, they're real.
It then goes into the fact that the law in question refers to a "housing development project" in one of 3 ways, 2 of which definitely don't apply, leaving behind the phrase "Residential units only", which they then point "units" is plural, not singular.
So perhaps.. 2 residential units would have been a housing development project.