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I really don't see how this would solve anything. It'd allow existing areas of SFH to be slowly converted into duplexes. It's not like suburbia is going to line up in droves to have their house converted into a duplex.

This solves basically nothing because if there were pure market forces most of America's cities. would have ceased to be SFH long ago. Slow conversion into duplexes simultaneous pisses off the NIMBYs and doesn't really help add supply in any great deal.

The evening news quote for this would be something like "if it were up to us, we'd build the new high rise today. But the city requires us to build several buildings, have people move in, evict them, then demolish that & start over. Something has to change with this process"

> I really don't see how this would solve anything. It'd allow existing areas of SFH to be slowly converted into duplexes.

Twice as much housing is a lot more housing.

But it isn't. You think all those SFH lots are just going overnight become a duplex? Why would the retired lady who walks her dogs and tends the garden care about building a duplex?

Now when her kids inherit the home & sell it to a developer, sure it'll happen then. But that is a slow, generational process.

Yeah exactly, it's a nice slow process that wouldn't piss people off by having too much rapid change.

I think you need to meet some of the NIMBYs where I live.

I think the point is that it's far too slow to ever make a difference. Is there an existing city which has ever successfully "graduated" through all these levels?

Moving the baseline like this would certainly help. It's also helpful to think about areas that are already a little denser than SFH. Replacing duplexes with small apartment buildings and medium apartment buildings with high-rises would have a much bigger impact and this proposal would make that possible as well.

The part I wonder about are provisions for mixed use. At some point some business should be allowed. I think Japanese zoning has a linear system that covers this: https://www.rahulshankar.com/zoning-in-japan/

Ending single family zoning in Minneapolis resulted in something to the tune of 100 permitted duplex projects.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/what-happened-when-m...

> Minneapolis had 425,336 residents as of mid-2021, the Census Bureau estimates, and 199,143 housing units as of April 2020. By my count the end of single-family zoning has so far allowed for the permitting of at most 97 new units (the above table shows numbers of buildings, not units), some of which haven’t been built yet. If things continue at this pace, ending single-family zoning will have increased the city’s housing supply by just 1% by 2040.

I'm not trying to be sarcastic or snarky here: is this a serious suggestion that one hundred duplexes (net gain of about 100 housing units I would imagine) is a significant change? Or is there a unit error here?

The number (100 units) is very low. 1% of housing stock is still meaningful in the context of places like Boston where we don't build much at all relative to the metro size.

Minneapolis did not change the zoning sufficiently -- the new duplexes and triplexes nearly have to fit into the same footprint as the equivalent single family home. So you can have one big SFH or two half-sized duplexes, etc.

For a single family home, the footprint can't take up more than 50% of the lot. For a duplex, the footprint can't take up more than 60% of the lot. Duplex and triplex projects could be made much more compelling by loosening these restrictions.

https://minneapolis2040.com/media/1816/built-form-districts-...

That's depressing. I can imagine the same thing happening in California because people will think of every other reason they can to stop you.

Problems have solutions, predicaments have outcomes. SF has put themselves into a predicament.

The Strong Towns approach is not really a solution for SF -- it's an approach to prevent the predicament from forming in the first place. Cities that are on the verge of becoming the next SF (Seattle, Portland, Austin) should take heed.

>> It's not like suburbia is going to line up in droves to have their house converted into a duplex.

That's just not true! People would do that in the neighborhood I live in now in Los Angeles if they could because it would allow you to make the same piece of real estate about 1.5x times as valuable.

More interestingly, in Piedmont California where I grew up, there is a lot of controversy about this. That's an area that is very desirable -- great schools, pretty, close to San Francisco -- but also really expensive. Because its been a nice area for a long time many houses are on huge lots or even have servant's houses (!) that can be built up into a pretty nice house. Of course a lot of the neighborhood hates the idea of converting a single family lot into two homes even under these posh circumstances. But the economic incentives are powerful. I see it happening on my parent very fancy street.

PS: One of the things that really bugs me (in my neighborhood and where I grew up) is when home owners argue about preserving the local character. I grew up in city where my mom and grandmother grew up. The house I grew up in was an adjacent piece of land that once had a single house. Now the neighbors would freak out if you took these large plots of land and built two houses on them or god forbid a duplex. But the truth is they haven't lived their that long and if they did they would know that the neighborhood has always been changing. I wish they could make peace with that.

The duplexes near me sell for less than the SFHs one street over. It's a bit of a worst-of-both-worlds, it seems, compared to either owning a 4+ unit building or a standalone house.

One will see if the backyard ADU end up in a similar situation over time or if the larger "main unit" gives them more value. With duplexes where both units are rentals, there's also probably a bit of a "neither of these are receiving significant owner upgrades" factor compared to an owner-occupied home.

Yeah I'd be curious to know more about how they envision that slow conversion playing out. I don't love all the 30 or 40-story condo buildings that have been built a few blocks away from me in Williamsburg over the past 10-15 years, but people do need places to live in NYC. To really get the density bump in their conversion formula we'd have to demolish avenues of buildings. It's unlikely we can just convert large swaths of three story townhouses to, say, six story buildings like you see in Paris. So we end up with new 40-story buildings in places that were formally zoned for industrial.

I mean, I'm all for trying it, but we probably should have done it 30 years ago since the rent is too damn high now.

NIMBY absolutists exist, and in fact are pretty common. There really are people who will oppose any new construction at all, even at the cost of destroying the livability of their city.

But do what you describe as “YIMBY absolutists” actually exist? Maybe they do, but from my perspective I don’t really see anyone arguing that everything should be buildable everywhere.

There's also BANANA (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody) which is perhaps a bit more tongue in cheek. It also sounds like the "YIMBY absolutists" mentioned in the GP.

"arguably a 30 story condo tower is better than a housing crisis"

This. It means, if you don't want your precious quality of life messed up, be nicer to all those other people you normally think you don't have to give a shit about.

If there wasn't a mass of people with no good jobs or housing, then there wouldn't be an ugly tower being built in your back yard. If your neighbor had his own food, he wouldn't need to steal yours, and you wouldn't have to live within your own private prison.

> The problem with YIMBY absolutists is also obvious -- it's probably not ideal to build a 30 story condo tower in the middle of a neighborhood of single family homes.

Very few people suggest this seriously, and in any case allowing for this in the market, it's unlikely any developer would do that. Skyscrapers make sense when the land there is particularly in demand, above and beyond what you're likely to find in a SFH neighborhood (unless it's some grandfathered-in area of Manhattan).

> it's probably not ideal to build a 30 story condo tower in the middle of a neighborhood of single family homes

You mean because then it would be in their back yard? Or why?

Because the surrounding infrastructure wasn't made for that density, and it takes way longer to retrofit than it does to throw up density, lowering the quality of life for the existing residents.

Isn't that a chicken and egg problem ?

Perhaps you'd authorize that kind of development under condition of adding sime more infra to support the additional residents, but in itself getting a tower of residents doesn't look like an issue.

You’d have to expand power grid, more water, city employees, build a new school, parking, roads, shopping for the influx of new residents, more police, more fire dept hires.

Further, no one bought and built a 7 bedroom and 9 bath room home on an acre lot to live next to a few hundred people. It’s utterly irrational and illogical.

It completely denies the role of status seeking behaviour in our societies which is a human universal. We need wealthy people enjoying all the trappings of wealth and feel special about their status because it is them who are subsidizing the vast majority of the rest of the population. If you don’t reward the golden goose, no free golden egg. Fight the right battle.

Not sure what you're referring to, but having a 7+ bedroom that sits on multiple lots in a SFH neighborhood is a single of wealth where I'm at. The fact that it sits in a dense community near a city is a bonus.

I've seen some really beautiful homes out in the country as well, but they aren't that practical unless you are retired.

If it is economical to build a 30 story condo then you can be assured the area is either a very dense city or an extremely rich suburb. I don't think either areas deserves special protection.

I suppose I would take the above proposal over the status quo if it truly eliminated local control - but otherwise seems like a very long time for a neighborhood to upzone. Its almost never going to be economical to tear down a SFH and build a triplex unless the SFH is in disrepair - which may be after 50 years from initial construction in most cases.

> The idea is that it allows neighborhoods to "thicken up" over a few decades.

Which doesn't seem a bad idea.. but where does the level of employment and services factor into this? If an area expands economically, you're going to need to expand housing options, regardless of what was traditionally there.. if the area does not produce a lot of economic activity, then allowing more low density housing is ostensibly not a problem.

If property owners have the option to convert single family homes into duplexes, they can do that. Then if there's not enough demand for their units, they lower the rent until they fill the units. If demand is really high, then more property owners will start converting. If demand remains high, eventually those duplexes will be cleared out for some modest apartment complexes.

For areas that don't have a lot of economic activity, I think very few homeowners will go through the expense of converting their properties because they won't be able to make the money back on rent. In those areas it would be more efficient to build new SFHs on vacant lots.

Either way, with byzantine zoning rules out of the picture, the pricing and incentives to build, sell, or rent will match the local area much better.

This is a perfectly fine idea if you currently have an okay housing market.

But a lot of cities are so far behind that they need a lot more very quickly. You need more radical rezoning to actually help people soon for that.

Of course, the most likely outcome is politicians hemming and hawing some more, putting forth grossly inadequate solutions, and passing the buck to the next generation, as is tradition.

> single family -> duplex/triplex

Duplex gives almost no advantage in housing density, but adds more complications due to shared parts of constructions.