The situation has been dire for some time, but all they do are small incremental steps towards building more housing, it's nowhere close to what's necessary. Unfortunately, the NIMBY, anti-housing sentiment is very strong.
Builder’s remedy is already being applied against NIMBY communities like Santa Monica and Redondo beach, no take backs.
It takes time to build the homes and see the impact but it’s hard to say that they’re not moving strongly in the right direction.
Sure they’re doing it 20-30 years later than they should have but they’re certainly not sitting on their hands right now.
Newsome knows he needs to show that he really addressed the massive headline problem that everyone hears about California before he can have a serious crack at the presidency, or else he’s never going to overcome the “California bad because mismanaged by Democrats”
Have you seen the particulars of that law that upzoned the state? It's actually extremely weak:
"* Benefits homeowners NOT institutional investors. Recent amendments require a local agency to impose an owner occupancy requirement as a condition of a homeowner receiving a ministerial lot split. This bill also prohibits the development of small subdivisions and prohibits ministerial lot splits on adjacent parcels by the same individual to prevent investor speculation. In fact, allowing for more neighborhood scale housing in California’s communities actually curbs the market power of institutional investors. SB 9 prevents profiteers from evicting or displacing tenants by excluding properties where a tenant has resided in the past three years."
Translation: will be used only sparingly, because it's illegal to do it with a standard case of a corporation replacing existing housing with more housing. How many owner occupiers are interested in this and can afford this kind of redevelopment?
"Respects local control. Homeowners must comply with local zoning requirements when developing a duplex (height, floor area ratios, lot coverage etc.) as long as they do not physically preclude a lot split or duplex. This bill also allows locals to require a percolation test for any duplex proposed to be on septic tanks."
Translation: still lets local NIMBYs restrict density.
"It takes time to build the homes and see the impact but it’s hard to say that they’re not moving strongly in the right direction."
It's the right direction yes, but as you say, it's the kind of thing that should've been the response to the much weaker housing crisis of 20-30 years ago, not the much more serious one now.
If the state says no that’s not enough units you are just jerking us around, then the municipality is out of compliance and builders are basically autopermitted to build whatever they want (oversimplifying but look at builder’s remedy - it’s already being applied).
One of the important wrinkles is that there’s no take backs, once the city is back in compliance they can’t go back and stop things that were permitted in the meantime. It’s a very serious “fix it on your own terms or we’ll fix it for you and you won’t like it” approach.
Santa Monica is getting like 5000 new housing units all at once, 800 of them affordable housing, in tall apartment buildings because they threw a fit and refused to get in compliance and they found out just how serious the state is.
NIMBYs wail and gnash their teeth but all it does is expose that their “plans” are all a load of BS smoke and mirrors to max out boomer property values. If the plans were good enough, they’d be in compliance with the state and get to keep the “character of their neighborhood” or whatever.
Like, the state already had targets set for cities for a long time, and most cities just kinda ignored them. I know the newer regulations have more teeth, but when you know the other party is hostile to helping people to begin with, it makes more sense to me to explicitly set all the rules up front.
That's not the rule.
The rule is “approve developments such that you meet state housing requirements or lose your ability to deny planning approval to otherwise legally-compliant developments”.
There is no suing involved: the requirements are known up front, and the consequence of not meeting them is automatic.
> Like, the state already had targets set for cities for a long time, and most cities just kinda ignored them.
Yes, that's why they changed the consequences from just “lose access to certain funding, and lose preference points in applications for other funding” to be that plus losing the ability to block housing developments.
And those new teeth have been biting very hard.
I admit I'm still skeptical that the cities won't find a way to tie this shit up in courts, but it's be great to be proven wrong.
Super weird comparatively as a regulatory framework, but uniquely suited to dealing with California-style procedural obstructionism.
If you follow this stuff, these changes are the ones that have finally broken the impasse with these towns - it’s literally already working. The state has come in hard and fast to show it’s for real.
> It it'll inevitably lead to less housing than just outright requiring various upzoning rules
Sure but I’m sure they did their homework and figured out that would be harder to pass in legislature, defend in courts, and defend politically. Giving the towns some chance to increase housing units their way is more politically defensible.
I think it’s gonna turn out to be a pretty darn good solution, better than waiting longer for a more optimal one.
California needs to dramatically cut back on its land use restrictions and figure out how to streamline everything. Even a typical (nominally uncontroversial) single-family home can take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to entitle before anybody even breaks ground. It's madness.
Unfortunately, it's simply not in the culture of the people of the state to want to pursue cost-efficiency or reductions in bureaucracy.
The rural county I live in has open jobs, but a sizeable chunk of the work force is either seasonal (logging, etc) then coast on unemployment for the off season or don't actually want to work. Those that do, are flaky as all get go. (My partner and I own a small business in the county).
What does this have to do with housing? Covid and growth of a near by metro area (about an hour away) have pushed people to buying up what was previously cheap (yet affordable) housing. Small cabins that would be going for ~75k or a bit more 7 years ago are pushing over $200k now. The local community college as well as natural disasters further puts pressure on the housing situation. How about building more? Well, insuring housing when large fires have come through? Hard to come by. Building costs have also gone through the roof.
Housing is needed in this particular county (and surrounding) but isn't being built.
Where does housing for 3.5 million get built?
One doesn't. One builds 3.5 million homes, mostly apartments.
Unfortunately, the sheer regulatory expense of new housing is such that it's not worth it for anyone to try any project short of big apartment/condo buildings.
With some of the recent changes to building policies I think we're going to find out that NIMBY local policy and regulation aren't the fundamental problem, but we're up against the limits of how capital naturally engages with building projects: chasing demand towards the high end of the market and staying well back from diminishing marginal returns.
https://citiesassociation.org/documents/constraints-survey-d...
Market prices of homes in places like Freemont tend to run from the high 6 figures through the low 7. Knock off $150k and we have maybe a 20% price reduction (probably closer to 15%). Nice to have but hard to figure out how that represents the largest portion of anything.
Land homes sit on costs more than $150k, maybe north of twice as much in Freemont-like areas (unless the lot is weird, inaccessible, or otherwise has issues that make it difficult to build on).
I'm not sure how one is going to get total materials and labor to come in less than $150k for most single family homes in CA. Maybe with small square footage and a good deal of luck with labor and materials? You tell me how to build for less than $120/sqft and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's all ears.
Seems to me to get regulatory expense to be the single largest item for building a home, we'd have ignore land, then play the game of lumping together all such expenses while splitting out building and labor, and even then I'm still not sure how it actually adds up.
The land cost scales down with density. The unit permitting cost is fixed regardless of size.
What infrastructure do you imagine California to be lacking that would be relevant here?
Also, there is the small fact that apartment dwellers use a tiny fraction of the water of people who live in detached houses.
In short, there is plenty of water in various major metropolitan areas.
I find this lack of optimism very dissonant and just divisive.
With the resources of an entire state government, or a lot of private equity, this is very solvable.
Take a place like Sunol, CA or Livermore, CA, either one about an hour east of San Francisco and trivial to connect to public transit.
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.5871047,-121.8716321,3a,75y,...
(California has nowhere to build they say... see above link.)
Build several hundred high-rise apartments with several thousand of residents each. There you go. Housing for a million people in the space of not even a square mile probably. Add in generous amounts of entertainment venues, coffee shops, live music, some parks, and a bunch of office buildings.
Done. Solved. But they don't do it. Why?
This is called the Napkin Fallacy. When you write down some solution to a long standing social problem on a napkin in a coffee shop, and then instead of asking
"What is wrong with my solution, that it hasn't been adopted?"
you ask
"What is wrong with the world, that it hasn't adopted my solution?"
The world needs a lot more people asking the first question rather than the second. Virtually no one should be asking the second question. As the saying goes "For every problem, there is a solution that is clear, simple, and wrong." That's usually the napkin solution. When you stop to really think about what is wrong with the napkin solution, you start down the path of solving real problems. It is highly unlikely that long standing social problems have napkin solutions.
As a slightly toxic corollary to the Napkin Fallacy is the Virtue Fallacy, which tries to answer the second question with
"It is because the world is run by bad people"
This is bad not only because it is an easy way to avoid the difficult work of understanding why the napkin solution doesn't work, but also because it caricatures one's opponents, and it is close to self-deification. While the saying "Let God be true, but every man a liar" is sound, the saying "Let me be true but every man a liar" is unsound. There is generally nothing about any of us that makes us better than others. Do not assume the world is run by people worse than you.
There are many vacant houses in the U.S., and many cheap houses -- pretending this is about shortage of physical housing is just foolish.
This is about shortage of desirable housing, and instead of stopping to ask what are the mechanisms that cause desirable housing (for you) to be so expensive, you just assume the problem is like a shortage of lumber or "space" or something equally irrelevant. If you build lots of affordable housing in Livermore, what would happen is that Livermore would stop being desirable for you, and you would end up wanting to live in some satellite area that was created outside of Livermore in which the exclusivity was maintained. Then good jobs would move there, because over the long term, the jobs follow the skilled workers and not the other way around. Then your utopian project in Livermore would find itself turned into a low income area where there is a shortage of good jobs, and most of the good jobs are elsewhere, in more exclusive areas, that are within commuting distance of the Lab. Then the Lab would find itself having trouble hiring enough people, and it would open satellite offices elsewhere. Then you would complain about a shortage of housing there, and want to rinse and repeat, not understanding why your intervention failed to solve the problem.
A good example is San Francisco. Most tech jobs were in Santa Clara county, not San Francisco. But a lot of tech workers enjoyed living in SF and did a long commute. Then tech companies realized they could hire more easily if they opened offices in San Francisco. Then companies began to be founded there, etc. All of a sudden, lots of tech jobs in SF. The jobs follow the skilled workers, and skilled workers have a lot of options in terms of picking where they want to live. They vote with their feet, and the jobs follow. How did the jobs end up in Santa Clara? Or Belmont. Through a similar process. Jobs chase high skilled people.
So you have to come to grips with why people that have a lot of choices choose to live in expensive, more exclusive areas. Why does the average high income person really not want to live in a neighborhood with a lot of poor people? Or, for that matter, even average income person? Why this hatred towards average people (something that can easily be found even on this site)? Why are they willing to commute elsewhere, and even take a pay cut, to be in a more exclusive area that is surrounded by other high income people? (And so signals to employers to open an office nearby). This is a social issue, not about lack of nails or space or a shortage of lumber.
I do have some arguments in favor of your position, but they’re mostly specific to the US: 1. Many people’s primary retirement plan and emergency fund is often their house, so property values are exceptionally important to them. 2. School funding per student goes down if less wealthy parents move to the district. 3. Violence in poor neighbourhoods can get really bad. None of this is God-given, though, which is why nimbyism isn’t quite as bad in many other countries. And while important, these factors don’t seem to be dominant.
The fact is, there just aren't that many cities that fit this bill, and those that do experience rapidly rising real estate prices. As with many issues, race is a taboo factor operating behind the scenes in determining which neighborhoods are targets of gentrification and which are not. When you create a lot of low income housing, people viewed as more undesirable move in and the high income earners go elsewhere. Then you rinse and repeat. But of course the problem is not that there's a shortage of housing or even a shortage of affordable housing. Median value of owner occupied units is $245K, which is 3.5x the median household income[1]. That's perfectly affordable. But the median home value in a major urban city with less than a 10% African American population is a different story. So there's a shortage of housing in our diverse society that has the "right" kind of demographics. As we become more diverse, the number of locations that are predominantly white or asian will get more and more scarce -- and more and more expensive.
You see a similar situation in Sweden, which accepted a large number of migrants and put them on the outskirts of major cities, and of course the house prices of units in the urban cores that were free of migrants skyrocketed. People are paying to not live in areas with large migrant populations. So all of a sudden housing is becoming 'unaffordable' in Sweden. But the unspoken part is that housing with few migrants is become unaffordable, not all housing. Again, this is a social problem, it's not a problem of a shortage of lumber or space.
So building more low income housing doesn't have the effects you believe, in terms of increasing the amount of housing in highly desirable areas. It will have the opposite effect, by removing one area that has the desired demographics, it makes the remaining islands even more desirable and thus even more expensive. At least this is my reading of history. It was very clear, after the race riots of 2020, how home prices in predominantly white/asian enclaves began to rapidly increase, at which point those who wanted to live in these enclaves began complaining about a "housing crisis" because they could not bring themselves to complain about a racial crisis.
But hey, I could be wrong -- housing in St. Louis or Detroit is still affordable. I'll wait to see tech workers scramble to move there, rather than, say Salt Lake City.
[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/VET605221
I don't know what all is happening in Sweden, but what happened in Chicago wasn't an organic process; it was deliberately engineered.
Fun Fact: The Obama Administration was instrumental in tearing down a number of low income housing projects in Chicago and exporting them to nearby cities in Illinois, in an attempt to "unlock value" in downtown Chicago housing by removing poor black families. This has had limited success, although South Chicago is still overall a no go zone for gentrification. This explains the slight gentrification you are referring to. There were multiple lawsuits over this, as the nearby suburbs did not want to receive these housing projects, and were basically forced into it by the Obama administration. This was portrayed not as an effort to enrich administration-connected housing developers in downtown Chicago, but rather as an effort "integrate wealthy suburbs" so that they do "their fair share".
Bottom line, you have to be aware of race and what is really going on when you complain about "lack of affordable housing". There is, of course, plenty of affordable housing. But not where you want to live.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/chicago...
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/race-real-estate-oak...
Public housing projects as implemented by cities like Chicago were a failed experiment. The people that used to live in those places get Section 8 vouchers now, and live in houses on blocks like mine. They're better off, and the city is better off.
California is not great. It hasnt been great for a long time. It's hostile to anyone who is not the elite while also mascarading as a progressive paradise. The problem with people leaving is they export the same politics that got California to it's position as a working class hostile state. In the most common states, Oregon, Nevada, and Texas Californians are looked at with great disdain. It tells you something, at least, when even a left-leaning state like Oregon doesn't want you.
I live where I live and travel to California so often I more or less live there for several days a week. The only thing great about California is the weather.
It's simple, assimilate or stay over there. You left California for a reason - why bring the garbage to every other state? Your voting is the reason California is a dumpster fire in almost every major metro. Walking down Santa Monica, or almost anywhere in San Francisco smells like human waste. You cannot tell me California is "nice". At least the Californians coming here aren't exporting the smell.
Living in California is expensive, in more ways than just housing. Not everyone can afford it. Just like not everyone can afford a new BMW. In my corner of the state, people who increasingly cannot afford to live here are noisy. I mostly don't engage because I'm aware that I will simply receive vitriol and anger for sharing my views. But quietly, I'm ok with it. They can move if they want to. I love it here and having fewer people on the fringes of society as neighbors isn't really the worst outcome to me.
Edit: and this why I don't engage. I'm out. Merry Christmas everyone.
[0] I say "naive accounting," because it's not so great if you ever need to buy a new lawnmower, sofa, or iPhone or if you hope your kids will someday be able to. And it's not so great for your city in the long run if making ordinary products illegal results in drastically lower levels of productivity, etc, etc.
One person's quality of life is not affected in any way by another person having a sofa.
More housing and population density does lead to increased crowding, which some people consider a decrease in quality of life.
We can argue which QOL argument outweighs the other, but it's plain wrong to say that increasing housing has no impact on existing residents.
You live in a society. Of course the things other people do impact you. That's a low bar, easily met, and not interesting enough to justify a ban on new housing. The impacts have to be overwhelmingly harmful to justify prohibition. Apartment buildings clearly do not meet that standard. You might not like apartments, but I love them, and banal preferences shouldn't drive policy in a free society.
In the United States we have a Constitution that enumerates a set of Rights about which nobody gets to vote. It doesn't matter if you (or even 99% of all people) think it should be illegal for me to express this opinion, for example; you don't get to vote on that.
Private property rights in my view quite clearly fall under this rubric and it's only because of a few laughably bad SCOTUS decisions that this is even a live debate at all. For most of our history this was well understood.
If given the chance, most people will vote to ban new construction in their neighborhoods. I presume that if given the chance significant percentages of the population would also vote to ban certain kinds of speech. In neither case do I believe those positions are made legitimate by virtue of having majority support.
No, it doesn't, since people actually do campaign on changing the Constitution. I mean, unless you specifically and exclusively mean “the right to equal representation of your State in the Senate”, and even that is debatable, since you could vote for someone who proposes removing that limitation on amendments from the Constitution.
If wouldn't be capitalism if we demanded you let us build on your land, but it's certainly not capitalism when you won't let us build on our land.
1. to the extent that land can be owned under a given mode of production.
It's in important distinction because even post-capitalist dialectics need an answer for the need of housing.
Why introduce "hate other people" into the discussion? Would you maybe allow that what some people actually "hate," are jammed highways and thoroughfares, not enough parking, and everything crowded? To the extent that people have a say (a vote) in zoning regulations, people are entitled to voice their opinion about the population density of the area where they live.
We get it, you don't care about anyone else, only yourself. This was already clear from your previous comments.
On a side note, how can you be mad at people who have a home, are raising their kids and don't want an apartment building smacked down next to them and their kid's schools flooded with hundreds of extra students?
I believe you.
People who feel threatened move to the right.
This Volts episode about the psychology of "system justification" covers one facet of that phenomenon.
"Why social change is so excruciatingly difficult" [2022-10-24]
https://www.volts.wtf/p/why-social-change-is-so-excruciating...
Progressives ignore the psychology of action and reaction to their own peril.
I'm working on an entire comedy set about how many of my peers care more about dissecting the wording of shit rather than actually furthering a cause. Those idiots aren't going to affect my ideology, though I am sometimes cancelled for the hilarious reasons (i.e. mentioning Joe Rogan).
Lastly, I got ran out of a bar for saying I think people deserve health care. Labeled a communist with no job and that I'm not welcome there. Lol!
Your logic isn’t unsound, but it will increasingly come across as unreasonable because not everyone in the workforce has the option of finding employment and accommodation elsewhere.
But it’s not _illogical_ for someone who has everything they want to oppose things they don’t need.
NIMBY-is like another application of the “possession is 9/10ths of the law” argument. It has legs, but it doesn’t always win out.
Imagine property values start plunging, people can't leave, they just start abandoning houses, soon you get vast swathes of abandoned houses which lead to increased crime and urban decay.
Decades from now people will shake their heads and talk about the golden days of California and the problems with the silicon belt.
As a San Francisco area homeowner and a BMW owner, I believe every human deserves a roof over their head.
Edit: Please don't discuss the things I've said. My BMW is the victim! Merry Christmas.
"Increasing price of cars during pandemic not an issue for people who already have cars."
Yes, people are upset that the government pushes policies that hurt people, and that make no sense generationally (intentionally targeting rising property values is just a generational ponzi scheme).
If your stance is apathy or even pleasure upon seeing the suffering caused by bad policy, it's no wonder you're being downvoted.
There was absolutely nothing in the comment to imply he derived "pleasure from seeing suffering." You are making that leap in bad faith.
I think the build-or-not argument might be more productive if the "YIMBY" side would acknowledge that a massive increases in housing density (and therefore population density) does have an effect on existing residents.
Maybe pleasure was the wrong word, but they certainly seem to enjoy the terrible situation. It's not very far off, and saying that you're okay with and even love the current setup that helps you at the expense of others isn't a great look.
> would acknowledge that a massive increases in housing density (and therefore population density) does have an effect on existing residents.
Obviously it does, just like increasing the supply of anything has an impact relative to the option of constrained supply.
Realistically, the real solution is radical upzoning at the state or even federal level. Upzoning individual neighborhoods and cities exacerbates the negative side effects of upzoning by concentrating them in small areas. If the population increase is broadly spread out, it'll be much less of an issue.