I'm not an expert, but I lean towards relaxing zoning laws but not getting rid of them completely. Look to Houston to see what happens when there are no zoning laws at all.
Houston technically has no zoning laws, but it has a combination of other laws that end up behaving similarly to exactly how zoning laws work. Giving you a link to City Beautiful which works as a great primer.
Aesthetic judgments aside, seems like a winning strategy for housing affordability?
even at our grossly inflated land costs, simply allowing density throughout the Bay Area would enable much more housing affordability, allow more transit, and reduce our emissions and enhance our social contact. But a side benefit of broad legalization of density would be that those land costs would drop dramatically too, as there would be a much greater supply.
- Is it a desirable location, and the zoning laws cause the prices to skyrocket because not all the people that want to live there can
- Is it desirable because the zoning laws make sure it's a certain type of environment, and the desirability is what causes the price to increase
- Is it a combination of the two.
I think any reasonable person would say it's a combination of the two. And removing the zoning laws would both make it less desirable _and_ lower the price of housing. It would not leave it just as desirable, but with more people living there.
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.)
Specifically, Texas just uses the ICC's IRC, while California has the California Building Standards Code, which has additional requirements to account for our many earthquakes (https://peer.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/peer2019-05_ss...).
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.
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.
That's what zoning laws are.
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...