In principle, I hate this. Cities should be able to plan their own growth.
In practice, coming from CA, I am 100% onboard. It's a mess of red tape and bullshit lawsuits.
In practice, coming from CA, I am 100% onboard. It's a mess of red tape and bullshit lawsuits.
So instead we have this dumb system where every city gets a target number from the state and can choose where the housing goes, as long as they can show they meet the target. "Local control!"
Most of them are choosing really dumb spots - Orinda is trying to put 200 low income homes on a freeway shoulder near the Caldecott Tunnel, Palo Alto has two Caltrain stations but is trying to put all the new apartments near the 101 freeway.
you make it sound like it is a bad thing.
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...
And as the state government has said -- cities can still plan their own growth! They just have to plan some growth rather than none, which, obviously, is the sticking point.
They are able to plan their own growth, but they aren't able to refuse to grow. Or at least, not through zoning; being located where potable water or sewer/septic are at capacity is probably still valid to restrict new building.
Further, the state is doing their job. If the town next to mine enacts restrictive housing measures, then my town is likely to become more burdened by the issue. If we then enact restrictive housing, the next town over now has to deal with the effects of 2 freeriders. Why should the rest of California allow Beverly Hills and Santa Monica to saddle us with the burden of housing everyone? So the wealthy can have their enclaves?
Because I don't see "California" as one entity like a sports team. I see it as various groups each competing with each other, like an ecosystem. Beverly Hills and Santa Monica just happen to be "winning" (rather arbitrarily). Using authority to punish them for (peacefully) winning is tyranny. Just let them win.
> The state is removing the restriction
That was enforced by a local democracy, for what is fundamentally local concern. The state should not be able to supersede local authority for local concerns, it's authoritarian.
> Beverly Hills and Santa Monica just happen to be "winning" (rather arbitrarily). Using authority to punish them for (peacefully) winning is tyranny. Just let them win.
The residents of those areas have been using authority to make their "wins" a fait accompli for nearly 100 years, but yeah, it's tyranny if we remove their priviliges.
> The state should not be able to supersede local authority for local concerns, it's authoritarian.
California voters elected the legislature and executive who signed off on it. If Santa Monica restricts housing, it affects neighboring cities. Please explain how it is authoritarian for the state to balance these concerns?
In this case, the locally-optimal choices cities are making is having deleterious effects on the quality of life of the citizens of the state as a whole. It is perfectly reasonable for the state to therefore act.
And yet very few will accept elderly starving in the streets en masse because their pensions were gutted or went bankrupt. And so some measure of intergenerational agreement is necessary, where each generation provides for the next.
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.
When you are a bunch of small, close by municipalities all operating in essentially the same economic context (job market, etc.) the regional issues always become someone else’s problem.
Wow, this is an odd definition of tyranny. The elected representatives of the people of our state wrote these laws. I personally think it's fair for us to make laws that apply across our state rather than having full autonomy at the city level.
Agreed. So why even allow the city to use its authority? Leave it to the property owner to decide.
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.
Besides, who's to say that these desirable places are not desirable because they are low-density? It's a chicken and egg problem.
If we're concerned about property rights, why can't the property owners build at a higher density? Or sell to a developer that will build at a higher density? The fact is the zoning at play _restricts_ property rights it doesn't protect them.
Anyway zoning was never static (it wasn't ordained by God after all), so changing it isn't really a big deal. People are angry and surprised of course, but the writing has been on the wall for a long time.
If this were true, you wouldn't need zoning, and people would just build low density because that's what everyone wants anyways.
I like the Strong Towns notion of "no massive changes anywhere, but lots of smaller changes everywhere", although in practice it's not always quite so smooth.
Being part of a democracy does not mean you get to control every single action that could impact you.
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.
"Don't build any apartments anywhere in this city" isn't.
There should be a range of options available for people, ranging from a house with a yard and no shared walls with anyone, to mid-rise apartment buildings, and many things in between.
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?
Also, the "builder's remedy" specifically avoids EIRs of almost all types, including traffic and parking.
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...
Also the whole idea behind the suburban experiment was the idea that it was a finished state. That there was absolutely no need to densify or plan for growth, because more suburban land could just be annexed.
I think it should really be decided at the metro area level. Since job markets exist at that level, having housing decisions there avoids the problem where a city benefits from a booming economy but refuses to provide housing to anyone participating in that economy, shoving that responsibility onto the other nearby cities.
They should, but they have very few incentives to do a great job, as they're funded either way.
What US city has actually done this though? More often than not, their councils are stacked with NIMBY types that let growing pains fester forever.
I reject this principle. Cities are not sovereign.