Builder's Remedy goes into effect in many California cities tomorrow

In Houston, we have what is effectively zoning. It's just that we do it at the neighborhood level. You want to go into the museum district or third ward and develop x, or y, or z? No problem. So long as the neighbors agree with you.

Hint: Once they gentrify to the point of being called "The Museum District", they will definitely not be agreeing with you.

I saw someone above throw out a figure of 3 or 4 hundred k as a price point and I had to chuckle. If all you want to do is build a low-rise for workforce housing? Yeah, this neighborhood wouldn't care if you had the money or not. Piss off peasant. The people in the Museum District no longer wish to reside in proximity with your kind. Some neighborhood get togethers you almost get the impression that people would like to put gates to the city at all the 610 exits. Keep the riff raff out. And don't even get me started about what I hear from friends behind the gates down Sunset.

In Houston, the zoning is way worse than in other cities. Because people can literally stop anyone they want. No city council permission necessary.

It's easy to have cheap housing when you ignore common sense and just build wherever. (Also, part of the expense for LA and SF is that we have earthquakes, and our buildings have to be built to withstand earthquakes. For example: a 5.4 earthquake in 2011 caused over $300 million in damage on the East Coast. A series of CA earthquakes stronger than that in 2019, including 6.4 and 7.1 quakes, only caused a few thousand in damage near the epicenter. A 5.1 earthquake earlier this year in SoCal caused so little damage that most people slept through it and only know it happened because the news reported it. Note that each "magnitude" is about 30x difference in strength, so the 6.4 quake was 30x stronger than the 5.4 quake, and the 7.1 quake was nearly 900x stronger.)

Houston has had a stable population (per square mile) over the past decade and has a median income of ~$50,000. Sacramento has had the population per square mile increase by ~15% in the past decade and has a median income of ~$71,000. San Francisco has had the population per square mile increase by ~9% in the past decade and has a median income of ~$126,000.

Houston is a huge urban/semi-urban sprawl, the kind that used to be popular in LA a few decades ago. Dallas is similar, Austin gets that way outside of its downtown, San Antonio does also but at least has a much more interesting urban core. It always seemed you get what you pay for in Houston, there isn’t anything wrong with that, but many people don’t want it.

The outer loop of 99/Grand Parkway nearly encompasses D.C. and Baltimore [2]. Commuting from 99-adjacent (e.g. Sugar Land, Cypress, and the Woodlands) to downtown is common enough. I've seen Katy to Baytown for months while working on (oil & gas) projects. Same goes for Midtown/downtown to Baytown to work in the refineries. Trying to serve an area of that size with any sort of transit is not easy, regardless of density.

As Houston continues to grow, it's going to continually max out arterial road capacity. Even Katy Freeway backs up every day despite being 20+ lanes at its widest [3]. All of those cars have to go somewhere. And you're devoting so much valuable real estate to dozens of lanes for a few hundred thousand commuters. Not even the reverse commute will save you [4].

I have another post that mentions my optimism about Houston suburbs eventually providing more transit and density [5]. It's silly that your choices of hosing are single family or stranded apartment buildings adjacent to the highway [6]. The inability to convert some number of homes into 2 or 3 apartment buildings on the same lot like this [7] seems less disruptive than 5+ unit apartments.

Fundamentally, both are much easier than providing increasingly-distant suburbs with power, water, and highways. Hopefully Houston can start embracing this before prices become as ridiculous as other regions.

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[1] https://tcwp.tamu.edu/wetlands/wetland-loss/ [2] http://mapfrappe.com/?show=64047 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_10_in_Texas#/media/... [4] https://mobility.tamu.edu/mip/corridors-pdfs/houston/HOU-22-... [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33567501 [6] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Brea+Luxury+Apartments/@29... [7] https://www.apartments.com/43-hooper-st-worcester-ma/9rsxk34...

Because they were so close to dense housing, they also had the added benefits of public transit and being walking distance to several grocery stores. Much better than suburbia in my opinion.

Basically how things were built pre-WW2?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0&t=68s

The Oh the Urbanity channel has a video on the (misguided) idea that "urban living" = Manhattan / Hong Kong apartment blocks:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCmz-fgp24E

Examples (Streetview):

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/125+Hampton+Ave,+Toronto,+...

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+O...

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/70+Jackman+Ave+Toronto,+ON

See also:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO6txCZpbsQ&t=9m28s

Fifteen minutes pedalling in one direction is downtown Amsterdam, fifteen minutes in the other is farm land.

Cars are currently two tons noise and pollution machine. It's no wonder why people feel unsafe around them.

You could restrict traffic to only bicycles and pedestrians combined with mixed zoning.

Also, lawn mowers....They're extremely loud.

It’s all about kids.

Without kids in the picture sure, go ahead, make cities look like Coruscant from Star Wars.

The instant you have kids you see how important open spaces safe enough for unstructured minimally supervised play are. Without spaces like this all you have are kids drooling on Roblox and YouTube all day. There’s nothing for kids in an urban core.

Those spaces don’t have to be undeveloped or even outdoor but I have yet to see a city successfully create an environment safe enough that I’d let my small daughters run around.

So while I agree that zoning is dumb and complicated, I also think it’s important to understand where people are coming from.

Actually, suburban streets are significantly more dangerous than urban streets, in terms of number of children killed, as a fraction of both population and miles driven.

> Motor vehicle traffic was the leading mechanism of unintentional injury death among children aged 5–13, with the rural rate (3.1) twice as high as the urban rate (1.5)

> Motor vehicle traffic was the leading mechanism of unintentional injury death among children aged 14–17 in both urban and rural areas; the rate was 2.5 times higher in rural (12.5) than in urban areas

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db421.htm

> cul-de-sac communities actually have some of the highest rates of traffic accidents involving young children. In fact, children in suburban communities are five times more likely to be killed in a pedestrian accident than urban children.

https://www.lewisandtompkins.com/motor-vehicle-and-public-tr...

> City streets safer than suburban roads, study finds

https://whyy.org/articles/study-city-driving-often-safer-tha...

> Cul-de-Sacs Are Killing Us: Public Safety Lessons From Suburbia

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2011/06/07/cul-de-sacs-are-killi...

For one if zoning laws change tomorrow no one is going to bulldoze those neighborhoods on Thursday. So everyone already in their "safe" neighborhood will remain "safe". Except in rare circumstances no one is going to build a 10-lane expressway behind that tract of "safe" houses.

Second you've got to be realistic about the socioeconomic factors behind those "safe" suburbs.

The small, often winding suburban streets are largely impenetrable to buses and completely immune to light rail. This means public transit often used by "those people" (for whatever local definition of "those") is inaccessible from inside the "safe" suburban housing tracts. This is exacerbated by many suburbs lacking sidewalks. Inaccessibility of public transit was a design criteria for early suburbs preventing anyone that could afford a house but not a car from moving to them.

You mean like all the medium-density neighborhoods of San Francisco? American R-1 suburbs are a nightmare for kids, and that's why you never see any kids outside there, tell me how this: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Menlo+Park,+CA/@37.4562493...

, in one of America's most expensive suburbs, is any sort of safe for kids.

Yes that is absolutely something people want. You can get that in cities if you give up on yard and instead share with parks. That said, some of the reasons people want it are uncomfortable.

Some people don’t like change and moved somewhere based on how it looked in <year>, understandable, but change is a part of life especially as our population grows. Streets that are safe for kids are common in many parts of the world, in many different city structures, not just suburbs. So the “family friendly” myth about suburbs isn’t true.

Regarding uncomfortable truths, if you go and listen to some of the town meetings, you’ll walk away with a couple points, of varying degrees of prejudice.

Some people simply want it to be “exclusionary” to keep prices up, and to keep themselves feeling special. Those people in town meetings may suggest paying for affordable housing in another town to keep theirs as is.

Some people will say they don’t want affordable housing because “we all know that those people bring crime”. This can be a varying degree of prejudice, whether it’s low income people or racial minorities, but invariably someone always says it.

In the end it should be their right... but... what happens now, is that they underpay for the infrastructure and services they get.

Low traffic → Less cars driving

How do you get less cars driving? People need realistic options. How do you get those options? Density to support transit and Density to support having businesses close to everyone's homes so they can just walk or bike. Car-dependent suburbia IS the problem, and the more of it you have in the city the bigger the problems of traffic and unaffordability get.

Finally though:

> want to keep them that way

Look, don't get carried away. Unless a very significant block of homeowners in your beautiful leafy neighborhood are itching to sell, you have literally nothing to fear. Maybe when a large mall is demolished a mile away from you, someone will build something other than single-family tract homes. Big whoop.

*Nobody is coming for your suburbs with bulldozers* just because "SFH" might not be enshrined as the only way anything can be developed.

You're describing European cities, there. That is literally how I grew up in a big city, and we were lower middle class at best.

> but implying that all of these homeowners are primarily driven by prejudice

This is a good example of why being coy rather than explicit is bad for productive discussion. Bigotry of its various forms is certainly one possible uncomfortable answer to the question. But there are others, like crime, or the effect of local property-value-to-enrollment ratio on school quality, or plenty of other problems that systematically occur in American cities.

NIMBYism is by no means the exclusive domain of homeowners in low-density neighborhoods. Even when it comes from them, they are often concerned with developments that are not actually in their neighborhoods — their trees and yards not being in jeopardy. There's a fundamental distrust of the overall process of development that animates anti-growth sentiments not only in middle-class neighborhoods but also in, for example, the Mission.

Suburban streets are extremely dangerous to kids (in fact being hit by a driver is the leading cause of death to kids under 14).

You know what is safe? Walkable cities, pedestrianised streets, speed bumps wherever cars do drive inside the city, etc.

I'm from the Netherlands, and for the first 24 years of my life have lived in lower working class neighborhoods, 3 in total. Low income families, people on wellfare, the like. In this case all white, so it's not a racial thing.

All of these 3 neighborhoods were awful. Relatively high crime, vandalism, the public dumping of trash, alcoholism, very loud music blasting, shouting, just general anti-social behavior.

The biggest quality of life improvement in my lifetime is that eventually I was able to afford living in a good neighborhood. Middle class to a bit above it. Families, stable citizens, civil, considerate, sane. The piece of mind this gives is invaluable. This is just one step up the ladder, I'm by no means rich.

It's not elitism. It shouldn't be a high bar to feel comfortable, safe, and not constantly frustrated by obnoxious people, or the spaces ruined. But at the same time we should acknowledge that this "bar" is strongly correlated with class. For obvious reasons, in the lower classes more people have what I'll categorize as "social issues".

And here's the thing. It's a rotten apple dynamic. Perhaps as little as 5-10% of the inhabitants are responsible for all this shit, yet the entire neighborhood becomes unlivable because of it. The real issue here is that these rotten apples are not addressed. Because it's near-impossible to address. The behavior is petty crime at best and often merely obnoxious and anti-social behavior. You can't put people in jail for that and they have to live somewhere. This is already the lowest end, there's nowhere else to go.

So the positive here is that it's not racism (in my example), and not even classism. 90% of people in the lower classes are decent and social people. The real issue is the inability to deal with the 10% that is not. The dysfunctionals and anti-socials wrecking the place.

I'm sure that each has their own story, but I'm not going to suffer my entire life at their whims. I've done plenty of that. You could say that this "prejudice" is very much grounded in reality. Sometimes you need to a reality check.

This argument never made sense for me. Being able to put more units in the same space drastically increases the value of the land. It of course reduces the value of other things like having towering buildings around your 2 story home which blocks your view. In this sense, home owners need to turn to zoning to prevent that despite it being detrimental to their land value.

Most of all people want exclusivity. Only having a handful of neighbours is something that is hard to buy. It's easier enforced through regulation.

Established neighbourhoods push for regulations to keep people out.

In the past it absolutely was for racist reasons. Today more likely economic ones. Apartments means renters which means less wealthy people. Exclusive detached home areas are pretty much guaranteed to have a high floor of wealth.

We moved from Manhattan an hour north into a rural area. Our town clears our road continuously during winter, while are property taxes are low single thousands. We get three trash pickups per week and other trash removal services included.

We woefully underpay for those services.

So, you ban cars from streets and allow only pedestrians and cyclists. Next, you allow local amenities to pop up so you don't feel the need to get a car out.

The suburban pattern of development as it currently exists isn't the only way to facilitate the quality of life you're looking for.

So, like in European cities.

You cannot buy without being a part of the HOA.

At a high level, anyone can sue you to enforce a deed term, as long as the organization/person with an interest is around to do it and knows to do it. As an easy example, a long time ago people added racist stuff to deeds, but those family descendants no longer enforce it. HOAs don’t die like people and collect dues so they don’t run out of legal fees.

You can try to get dead HOAs removed from a deed, and you can try to get a living HOA removed from a deed. Obviously one is a lot easier because it doesn’t fight back. You can also get the residents to vote to dissolve an HOA. Some HOAs expire after so long if the residents don’t renew.

TLDR you can’t buy the house without agreeing to the HOA.

There are also HOAs that place a lot of weird restrictions on what you can do. It really depends on the HOA, some are good, some are very bad.

That said, for the place where I personally am in life, a HOA is bad and I refuse to live in one.

In a typical average HOA neighborhood:

* The HOA pays for landscaping of all the common areas like green belts and parks within the tract. If you don't have an HOA, you either are benefiting from your city choosing to locate and maintain those kinds of amenities right by where you live, or you just don't get any of those.

* Obviously one of the big ones, the other main HOA budget item is pools, clubhouses you can rent cheaply for parties, tennis courts, etc. For rich people they don't care since they have their own pools, but it's a great boon to people not rich enough to have a pool to have easy free access to one that isn't crowded and is close to home.

* They, in theory, fine you for outwardly living like an absolute slob or selfish jerk. NOTE: In practice nobody cares about most of these little rules, like mailbox color or a patio chair left on your lawn, unless you're acting wildly outside the norms. The rules are there to let them enforce them selectively on the person who's making everyone miserable.

* They regulate architecture and paint color. This may be my least favorite because it seems like we shouldn't need this, I have taste and why should I have to submit my stuff for approval to these jerks? But really, this is only there because there would be SOMEBODY who would paint their house an absurd garish color or build a giant ugly addition in their front yard or something that looks wildly out of place.

And you could probably maintain or even increase the amount of ground-level "yard" space per capita even while increasing population density. Of course it would need to be parks that you share.

Sooner or later this will collapse disasterously

> Because there are no local amenities, people need cars

Seems like the definition of inefficiency

> - Developers usually get tax credits for including street level retail, but have no financial incentive to rent them as tax policy pays them to do nothing

Damn

My place overlooks a freeway. I really, truly dislike that freeway. But one thing I do like about it is the noise that it makes, even at night. I find it very hard to fall asleep in silence.

Oh and I should mention that most of the units in my building do not face the freeway, and therefore, those who prefer quiet can also get that, even in the same building.

Certain types of housing are illegal because people don’t like them, and voted to ban them! Zoning laws don’t just magically appear out of nowhere.

The bad outcome is the rich who are looking for alternate investments will buy up all the labor and materials and build construction for themselves and will build rentals. That's the bad outcome.

The awful outcome, and likely outcome is that the labor and materials will be bought by newly formed real estate companies that will build rental property that is ugly and expensive - because they control the market more and more as they merge into 2 super landlord companys.

Induced demand is a thing, as (and much more common) are demand curves that are flat enough that shifting the supply curve to the right by some large fraction of the current market clearing quantity has no discernable effect on the market clearing price.

Real life supply and demand involves more than the simplest Econ 101 illustrative examples of the general direction of the ideal relation.

A lot of people I know in Colorado found this out when their homes burned down. They had the structure insured for like $500,000 and found out that rebuilding their home that was built 20 years ago would cost around $1,000,000.

A friend recently had a multi story addition put on his house, and of course additions always cost more because there's some amount of demolition and working on an existing site, so the new footings have to be underpinned, etc. It's also a large kitchen and the existing kitchen space had to be demo'd and rebuilt into a new, basic room. The upstairs connected to a hallways but there was some work. Anyways, the cost, all in was over $500k. Even if he didn't use Marvin windows, Wold appliances, nice cabinetry, etc it would have been like $400k. And yes you can go lower. But don't be fooled. A lot of the cheaper construction you see is not only made with awful materials and lazy/inexperienced tradesmen, but is also track housing or similar no modifications allowed type things.

By these numbers, up about 78% since 2008 and 2015, which almost matched.

Up 50% since the previous peak in 2005, so yeah all-time high.

There's a "homesteading exemption" for taxes on a primary residence. This means your property taxes can't shoot up massively if your property suddenly gets more expensive.

This pushes even more of the property tax burden onto investment properties, which sounds good to some in theory, but one affect it has is that rental properties are investment properties. So rents go up a lot. This means renters end up paying a lot of property taxes, which is, uh... a surprising outcome.

Prop 13 is IMO the biggest problem that California faces, because it’s the most intractable to solve (it would be political suicide to try to roll it back now that so many people are paying way lower taxes than they would without it) but is also a major contributor to a lot of other problems in the housing market. I can think of ways to roll it back slowly, but let’s be real, people will freak out if they think they’ll have to start paying 5x what they currently pay in property taxes, even if it’s after they die or in 20 years from now.

https://taxfoundation.org/state-property-taxes-per-capita-20...

California property taxes for $1620 per capita, which is average. How does this translate to “so little tax from property”?

I think his profit margin must be okay.

This is the same reason why there's a persistent myth that homeless are bused in from other states or whatever (when in reality, 70-90% of them were in homes in San Francisco before going on the street). It absolves people of blame

That is an interesting question. In many cases people here are advocating that the locals don't get what they want, so that "the rest of society" does.

And 'affordable dystopian' housing? Only 20% of the units are required to be affordable. Who knows what private developers will come up with to maximize their profits. So, dystopian? Probably. Affordable? Just a little.

* Clearcut wilderness to build more suburban homes

* Don't build more homes, just stuff more people into existing homes

* Let the excess population live in cars or on the sidewalk

* Cull the excess population

It's also more efficient greenhouse-gas wise, as suburban sprawl means more driving to transport goods.

For one, California is split up into many smaller towns/cities in large metro areas, so each having their own policies leads to locally-optimal but regionally-suboptimal policies of trying to get as much commercial development as possible with as little residential development as possible. This is a direct contributor to gentrification (if you are “lucky” and able to soak up the commercial demand without increasing residential supply, you’ve created a mismatch between jobs and people in your area), ghettoisation (the people priced out of where they were before have to go somewhere), traffic (people have to commute into their jobs), and affordability (even the bad communities can’t increase housing much because they have the weakest tax base, plus all the restricted supply where jobs and taxes actually are).

The right solution to this problem is to recognize the whole local-optimization problem and make it so every municipality has to solve the problem at once, to prevent the adverse selection of solving the problem in only one municipality. Which is what the state of CA is doing.

This could also be addressed from the other side, which is a complete political non-starter, of trying to limit job growth. Obviously nobody wants to do that. But the problem by and large is not just that CA has a lot of low density communities that want to remain that way, but also that those low density communities are creating more jobs than they can house.

Personally, I would say that lots of low-density communities do remain low-density. And generally, that's because people don't want to move to them.

But if you're a small town in Northern California, one of the most desirable places in the world, saying "we want to remain low density" is basically saying "we got here first, so it's ours -- nobody else gets to have this!"

And I think that's a fundamentally wrong way for us to organize our places. Desirable communities shouldn't be able to keep out people who want to come in, just because they want to stay exclusive.

But I don't think that's a settled point, and there is a lot of nuance to basically every adjective I just used.

Places like Gilroy and Morgan Hill will probably be mostly left alone in this, and this will probably apply downward pressure on their housing prices, making it more affordable for people to live in low density neighborhoods, while not having a 3 hour commute from the central valley.

Obviously developers could target those cities, but they would probably start with more desirable ones first.

I personally love low density living, and I live on a 9 acre lot as a result. But, I can't keep my neighbors from subdividing their lots. Locally, my city (in WA) has places that would be better suited to higher density living and places that are not so well suited; but city council drags their feet on all new construction, so we're not meeting state growth targets here, and I suspect we'll eventually end up with something like described in this article. That would be unfortunate, IMHO, because increasing density in a desirable place to live is inevitable and I think it's better to have (expanding) pockets of high density rather than greatly mixed densities. It's easier to add 30 residences where there's municipal water and sewer than to extend municipal water and sewer 2 miles to a new project site where neighbors are on private wells and septic, which doesn't tend to work well for a 4 story condo building.

As such, any power your local community has to govern itself is just largess from its state. When it stops governing in a way that the state approves of, there is nothing preventing the state from stepping in.

Housing near job centers is a scarce resource, we shouldn't put up with people hoarding housings anymore they we would put up with someone hoarding water during a drought.

Looking at this abstractly, buying a plot of land grants you ownership over that plot, nothing more. So on what basis should an owner of one plot be able to dictate what others can do with their own plot?

Scaling up to a community, what % of plot owners need to share an opinion for that opinion to outweigh the property rights of disagreeing plot owners?

To my knowledge, the relevant collective management levels recognized under law are municipal, state, and federal.

Where does "community" mean anything beyond being a manufactured scope of convenience for NIMBYs? They can't get the entire city to agree with them, so they draw an artificial boundary where the majority agree with them and call it a neighbourhood.

And it's a sort of collective coordination problem, too. People can move from city to city, and if a city decides to allow lots of new housing, they'll get lots of new people, which not only increases density, but also lowers rents in other cities by a little bit, while not lowering the rents/property prices in their own city by as much as they would if inter-city migration weren't a thing.

So when a city allows more housing, it benefits other cities. It's best if every city does this -- but because the incentives are a bit messed up, most cities in California have decided to "defect" and block construction. (There are other reasons -- people with the most free time to attend city council meetings and run for positions in local government are much more likely to be landowners or landlords, so they are over-represented, while renters are under-represented).

If every city and town builds a some more housing, you can get a much more drastic increase in affordability than if only some are shouldering all the burden, without massive changes to any one place. Which is why I think it makes sense to handle this at the state level.

I'm not proposing allowing a chicken processing plant in a residential area, but it's no one else's business if you want to build a duplex on a lot you own.

So either you go right wing and you have no right to restrict developers on land they legitimately procure

Or you go left wing and you have no right to impose (?accidentally...ish?) racist, classist, and generationalist zoning results on people.

Or you go centrist and point out that population growth, livability, and cost for practically everyone is raging out of control because of zoning laws.

Now, that's all policy reasoning on idealistic grounds, which of course matters not at all! The real political calculus is rich (landed) vs the young / middle class / poor (priced out).

Otherwise it's a tyranny of the majority over the minority (of property owners) that want something not low-density.

If a landowner in a low density community wants to build high density housing on their property, why should the city be allowed to stop that?

The City of Monterey has a page[2] describing this as well as a published wait list [3], with the first project having submitted in 2003.

I don't know if they deny construction permits, but you'd have to be pretty foolish to actually construct residences that can't be legally occupied because they lack potable water.

[1] https://www.mpwmd.net/regulations/water-permits/water-meters... [2] https://www.monterey.org/city_hall/community_development/pla... [3] https://files.monterey.org/Document%20Center/CommDev/Plannin...

Near the freeway and in walking distance of downtown is one story, near the freeway and next to absolutely nothing else is another. https://eastbayforeveryone.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/20...

But on the other hand, the coalition of rich neighbors could organize a counter-offer to buy out neighbors who want to leave. A bit like lands are bought up by conservation groups to prevent development. Put a price on how much you want to preserve your neighborhood.

They could even buy out the developer who purchased a spite sale, unless there are deed restrictions in that sale. Most developers are also doing it as a business, not for idealism, so it there ought to be a price point where they see it is more lucrative to fold than to go forward with the building project.

I'm not sure I understand the economic effect of something like this. At first blush it almost seems like the same feedback loop as land value taxes. But, it also creates a game-theoretic scenario where the coalition is pumping up the price of their own neighborhood and increasing the potential gains for the next defector, at which point the values could rapidly unwind if the coalition loses its way.

You really do not realize how big (or small, rather) apartment complexes are. 100-unit building is the size of 6-7 single family homes (or maybe 3 McMansions), and maybe twice as high. It would barely be noticeable in such neighborhood.

See this for example: https://ctexaminer.com/2021/10/23/100-unit-apartment-complex...

School districts/boundaries being so unequal is at least partially the result of zoning policy that makes it harder for people of less financial means to move into affluent areas.

I saw a counterexample living in Munich, just in the sense that the differences between neighborhoods in apparent wealth were much less stark than in the US. Almost everywhere looked vaguely middling, very few places looked obviously rich or poor. And so it's no surprise that the differences between public schools was lesser too.

As an example, I live on a multi-dwelling lot (effectively town-homes without shared walls) in a predominately SFH neighborhood. It's very high density by California standards, but it's quite desirable and not apartment-block style living.