Bay Area homeowner is the face of California’s latest housing drama
sfchronicle.com
sfchronicle.com
I really like that quote. Unfortunately I'm concerned instead of drafting adequate plans the city will just use all of its resources to sue people for using builders remedy permits.
Plenty of other things beyond taxes add to costs as well. Onerous environmental review, having to add amenities like open courtyard space or balconies, how many elevators might be required, parking requirements, all adds to the cost per unit which leads to fewer units built per loan and the need for higher rents to make those costs pencil out. Even the amount of time things sit in review at city hall has costs. You could very well hit a situation where due to these constraints, not nearly as many builders take advantage of builders remedy as one might expect. This is part of the issue with allowing the onus of adding housing supply in our cities fall on an overregulated industry that depends on achieving a certain profit margin to function.
https://www.sfgate.com/green/article/MERCED-UC-expansion-pla...
If anything, that appears to be a successful use of CEQA, where a large and important building project was effectively balanced with the need to protect wildlife without major disruption to the final buildings.
Personally, I think they should just write down that anything inside the boundary of an incorporated city, built on a site that previously had something on it, is not a project.
In San Francisco and some neighboring cities, every permit is discretionary either directly or through ambiguity (https://law.ucdavis.edu/sites/g/files/dgvnsk10866/files/medi...), but it doesn’t have to be that way.
This is my favorite graph for explaining how I can be pro-environment without necessarily being pro-Environmentalism™ https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gentrification...
Also, the point isn't to build giant high rises in the middle of Los Altos. It is to bypass restrictive zoning that doesn't let you build anything at all other than single family houses on large lots. In a lot of Bay Area towns that will be townhouses and low-rise apartments. But this can make a massive difference to the local housing markets.
The builder's remedy is just one of many measures the state has passed in recent years. Others include automatic approval for building residential above commercial and bypassing zoning for lots with wide rights of way. It all adds up.
Another aspect to this is just because you have an approved project, as a builder, it doesn't mean you have to build it. It does give you a hell of a bargaining chip with the city over something else you want to build however.
All these Bay Area NIMBY enclaves have been fucking around and I imagine a large number of them are about to find out.
This week a viral video tour of a high school in Carmel, IN has been circulating [1]. For those who don't understand, particularly non-Americans, schools are funded primarily by local property taxes. This means wealthy towns have facilities like this and poorer communities have buildings that are falling apart.
This is economic segregation.
A lot of wealthy towns in CA have been fighting state housing mandates because they want to maintain their "character". This includes some ultra-wealthy towns like Atherton.
One reason I support what CA is doing here is because by allowing a mix of accomodation it will increase access to facilities like this beyond just the ultra-wealthy.
[1]: https://www.insider.com/carmel-high-school-tour-tiktok-publi...
Cities have various ways to stop projects. They can drag out things like demolition permits forever.
This was true historically, and may still be true in some states, but court cases since the 1970s [1] have been forcing reforms on school funding to be more equitable at the state level.
[1] https://edeq.stanford.edu/sections/section-4-lawsuits/landma...
https://www.z blozek.com
Also, does anyone know what legal recourse there is to block projects that are submitted under the current no-zoning state?
There's theoretically demand for millions of luxury penthouses but only a tiny level of actual demand at the pricepoint where it can be feasible delivered in any major city.
> Environmental review is one such way. Normally, cities perform one environmental review for a citywide or neighborhood-wide zoning plan. So long as project applications comply with those plans, they can piggyback on the parent environmental report. But since builder’s remedy applications often disregard local zoning, cities can ask developers to complete a full environmental impact report for a project. Once that’s done, cities can then claim that any impact — noise, shadows, pollution — in the report was insufficiently studied and demand costly redos. Community groups can also take builders to court.
> Cities can further pile on costs for builder’s remedy projects by requiring infrastructure upgrades like new sewer connections. Local governments can also potentially exact revenge by making other applications from developers more unpleasant — for instance, by subjecting them to additional scrutiny or longer processing times. This threat will likely dissuade many developers from pursuing a builder’s remedy project.
The last portion, where local governments might intentionally punish developers, may be why there's not a bunch of large experienced developers rushing to submit plans.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/builde...
Par for the course for government contracts.
Ill try to find a link, but basically this guy got initial approval to build a building and got hit with a typhoon of zoning laws and knew he was in the right, but a bunch of SF NIMBYS were fighting him forever and he got F'd...
This guy deserves something like a payout for someone imprisoned for no reason.
> Among large cities, only San Francisco is in compliance.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/builde...
For most places in the Bay Area, is there an existing affordability percentage requirement? How much of an increase is this? I'm not a development/construction insider, but a quick search pulls up a claim that builders often are in the range of 10-20% gross profit. Does a 20% affordable unit requirement swing a normal project to being unprofitable, even if cities can't block it for zoning reasons?
San Francisco has IZ set at between 20 and 33% depending on the project and this is widely seen as a blanket anti-development policy.
Now it could be doable with a lot of that red tape is gone.
source: Solano County Govt. Economic Report 2022
Excellent development in any case. Hope a lot of good dense housing gets built.
https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/ca-cities-to-lose-all-zo...
Basically, until these cities get a housing plan validated with the state, who is apparently sick of their crap like zoning in the middle of an active mall that will not be torn down, builder’s remedy is in place.
Great organizations to get involved with if you care about other people being able to afford a place to live.
I could see the cities just refusing to submit any plans at all. The state should then make its own housing plans with the developers directly. Cities should be cut out of the loop.
https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/bay-area-towns-mull-pla...
A bulletin from the Association of Bay Area Governments alludes to being able to use environmental laws to block the projects instead. https://abag.ca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2022-10/Bu...
The implication that this is anarchy is incorrect. Construction and zoning are still highly regulated, just by someone else this time (FWIW, I fully support this and hope many projects built and cities stop crying and get in compliance with the HCD).
https://smdp.com/2022/10/24/16-projects-4562-housing-units-h...
https://therealdeal.com/la/2023/01/18/shekhters-ws-communiti...
Here, for instance: "Santa Monica officials later indicated they would wait to respond until WSC filed its full project application, which is due six months from the preliminary filing."
Interesting that the developer that started the commotion is listing some of the sites they started the application process on for sale, but not necessarily indicative of it not going to happen - "Even as it prepares the listing WSC is still moving ahead with the full application, Walter confirmed this week." from this Jan 2023 article. Could just be looking to offload some risk to someone else who now thinks there's enough of a chance of these things getting built to pay more for the lots than they would've last year.
It's the first sentence in the History section
[1] Baldassari, Erin; Solomon, Molly (October 5, 2020). "The Racist History of Single-Family Home Zoning". NPR. Archived from the original on November 14, 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20201114004918/https://www.kqed....
[3] Hansen, Louis (March 1, 2021). "Is this the end of single-family zoning in the Bay Area? San Jose, Berkeley, other cities consider sweeping changes". San Jose Mercury News. https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/03/01/is-this-the-end-of-si...
[4] Ruggiero, Angela (February 24, 2021). "Berkeley to end single-family residential zoning, citing racist ties". San Jose Mercury News. https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/02/24/berkeley-to-end-singl...
[5] Yelimeli, Supriya (February 24, 2021). "Berkeley denounces racist history of single-family zoning, begins 2-year process to change general plan - Council unanimously approved a resolution that will work toward banning single-family zoning". Berkeleyside. https://web.archive.org/web/20210301140957/https://www.berke...
[8] Baldassari, Erin (March 13, 2021). "Facing Housing Crunch, California Cities Rethink Single-Family Neighborhoods". NPR. Archived from the original on March 31, 2021. https://web.archive.org/web/20210331194917/https://www.npr.o...
Also, as a sibling comment put it, it does weird me out that all cited sources are from such a limited pool.
Density Zoning and Class Segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas (2010) https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6237.2010.00724.x
Distributive politics, ward representation, and the spread of zoning (1993) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01047991
Urban Land Developers and the Origins of Zoning Laws: The Case of Berkeley (1986) https://escholarship.org/uc/item/26b8d8zh
Fifty Years of Zoning (1966) https://www.jstor.org/stable/25723800
https://economics21.org/history-zoning-america-flexible-hous...
Looks to me like another example of HN guy pushing a narrative and pretending it’s fact. Or maybe someone just made a mistake and a more charitable reading would show that there is perhaps not a conspiracy going on but instead just a misunderstanding.
TLDR: the real estate developer that founded Claremont (Mason-McDuffie Co spearheaded by Duncan McDuffie) imposed conditions in its titles that explicitly bared non-whites and prohibited commercial enterprises. However, those title conditions couldn't control neighboring areas, so McDuffie pushed to get zoning laws passed that were explicitly inspired by anti-chinese laundry regulations in LA. The Berkley regulation was "expedited" to prevent a "negro dance hall" from opening.
To me, the existence of the anti-commercial provisions in the McDuffie title restrictions in addition to explicit racial exclusions indicates that racial exclusion was not the only motivating factor in adopting single family zoning laws. However, the context and immediate usage does make it pretty clear that racial exclusion was a significant part of the motivation.
See how activists say policing was invented to catch slaves or some ridiculous claim. There’s a bunch of others.
The history is there, it is what it is, as ridiculous as that is. You might argue that modern police have far outgrown their origins, and then it would be up to readers to decide which whether your claim is also ridiculous, given how many police departments generally exhibit qualities consonant with their origins.
I already mentioned that northern states had union-busting squads who formed the basis of modern police forces, so yes, I'm aware of Boston, too.
Once again, you use that word. I agree that it's ridiculous to compare today's policing to anything like historic policing or ancient slave patrols. Today's police are far less accountable, more violent, and heavily armed.
Within the great city, there were, as you pointed out, police. As I pointed out, they were mostly there for fire-fighting and as a slave patrol, and were themselves made up of mostly-slaves. But you might be thinking, what about investing crimes? That's what police do when there aren't traffic stops to make, right?
In that great city, if you wanted a crime investigated, you did it yourself. Evidence gathered? Find it yourself. If you wanted to accuse someone of something, you grabbed them and at least one witness and dragged them before a judge. So justice, what there was of it, was largely available to the wealthy, who could afford to hire people to drag other people before judges, and if you were a poor person wanting to accuse a rich person of a crime, well, good luck with that.
So modern cops might have a really poor clearance rate for most crimes, barely exceeding half even for murder[0], but at least they try, which is more than can be said for Roman vigiles urbani. And at least they pretend to be impartial, even if one can clearly see that crimes are prosecuted unevenly, and that US prisons are filled with more than their fair share of the poor.
0. https://www.statista.com/statistics/194213/crime-clearance-r...
I've yet to see a good counter-example.
She's the one quoted in the LA Times article: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-01-19/single-fam...
Full disclosure, I was so impressed with Prof. Hirt's book that I wrote her Wikipedia page.
It's just that you can build a duplex on a "single-family residential lot".
But you still can't teach piano lessons out of your house without one of your neighbors constantly calling the city and complaining about how you're causing traffic problems, right?
And you definitely can't wash other people's clothes or dishes in your house, right??
"Nobody thought enough about us to want to eliminate us."
In SF where people have discovered "left-NIMBYism", people will now argue that keeping it is fighting racism, but then if you go into the suburbs they'll still happily argue the original position.
Consider the microwave magnetron: invented to mess with radar, but now in every kitchen.
Maybe the reasons haven't changed in thisinstance, but holding that as a rule seems pretty incorrect.
I do think a lot of people want to keep single family zoning because they think it makes their properties more valuable but 1. historical segregation is part of that and 2. if your home price goes up, that only makes you richer as long as you don't want to buy any other homes that've also gone up.
Sounds like they should change the building code instead.
You might be fine with a given backyard in a suburb, but not with a highrise next door that can see right into it.
Zoning handles this in the same way that it handles preferences about people not wanting to live next to industrial shops or giant supercenters. It does this by restricting what can be developed, even if someone moving away doesn't care what happens to their old lot, and could make more money on the sale otherwise.
Whether we should respect those preferences is a fine question, but zoning is pretty much the only tool to enforce these kinds of commons-oriented preferences.
In Japan, as discussed upthread, you often have single family homes next to 3 story apartment buildings close to the city and the further you go out, the more they become single family homes. There's space for all preferences.
Nobody wants to densify the outskirts of Kankakee. They want to densify SF and LA.
It's important to pay attention to the reasons things were invented, especially things that allow different kinds of social control.
Both of these things can be true at the same time.
I wish I could mind-meld with you and transmit the memories and experiences of growing up in a residential area with no zoning.
You know that sci-fi trope where the empath gets the memory dump and breaks away screaming and crying because they can't handle the trauma that comes through ?
It would be like that.
You think you'll get cute shops and pop-ups and delightful mixed-use and stimulating workshop spaces and crafty folks doing things artisanally.
What you will actually get is half-built cars. Everywhere. You will get mobile homes and immobile RVs. You will get horses. Not rich-people horses, but "Grandma died and she had a horse and nobody knew what to do with it so we fenced part of the front yard" horses. Someone will disconnect from city sewer because they "know how to build septic". Someone will get llamas.
You think I'm making this up and I promise you I am not.
You've lived so long in a nicely regulated, rules-based order that you have no idea the kind of bullshit people engage in the minute the rules go away.
As to whether or not zoning laws are what prevent people from owning horses, that's not clear to me. But a law saying you can't build a bookstore or apartment on the lot doesn't seem very related.
Or, at the very least, to not do anything out of the ordinary.
Hint: it's not Tokyo, which actually does have a fair number of old ugly poorly-maintained buildings scattered around random nice neighborhoods. Which is fine and not hurting anyone.
Cause suburban Americans are famous busybodies. There's no way you can outdo them. They think anyone walking past their house is casing it for a robbery and will call the police and post on Nextdoor about it.
Anyway, those older, ugly, poorly-maintained buildings eventually get torn down and replaced with something better, because the land value is very high. It's much more laissez-faire than the US and property rights are much, much stronger (the idea that you should mostly be able to do what you want with your property).
There's no space for people to have a horse.
There's plenty of places that I think everyone would call a "shack" made from old tin that's probably been around since the 50s or so, and is not really any different from a mobile home. So that exists here and people are generally OK with it.
People wouldn't disconnect from the sewer to do septic. That isn't a zoning issue, it's a public health one, and it's obviously illegal.
Honestly, none of the hypotheticals described have to do with zoning. Social pressure to do the right thing is a thing here, but not the only reason that things aren't super chaotic.
Everyone thinks they want to "get rid of zoning" but, of course, there are "obvious" rules we would all need to follow and "of course you can't do that" ... and it quickly becomes murky as to where "zoning" begins and ends and which regulations are "legitimate" or not.
Either people can communally decide what rules they want to enact or they can't.
If they can, restricting multi-family housing is as legitimate as anything else in a democracy. Like allowing or disallowing horses. Or limits to vehicles-on-blocks-in-the-front-yard. Or ad-hoc septic systems.
How big is this community? Who decides that?
a) It sounds like what you're saying is "you'll get poor people". There are several things wrong with that, the first one being the rampant classism inherent in it.
b) So you'll get horses, and mobile homes. So what? Oooh, are you afraid your property values will drop? Deal with it. That's a small price to pay to enable the kinds of walkable neighborhoods mixed zoning allows, and the kind of rejuvenated communities it creates.
c) Allowing residential and commercial zones to mix has nothing to do with people trying to build their own septic systems.
All in all, it sounds to me like you experienced what happens when you live in a lower-income area, that happens not to have strong zoning laws, and your takeaway from that experience is that the lack of zoning caused the lower-income parts. Correlation is not causation, and not letting rich people stuff poor people away in a corner and forget about them is absolutely part of what we need to do.
It's more like trashy (rural coded?) middle class people I think. Collectors of broken cars and llamas aren't that poor! Similarly, you see pictures of people in, say, West Virginia with tons of stuff in their yard and kinda messy houses, but they're homeowners in a rich first world country and I suspect they're often pretty well off for the area. It's more of a personality thing.
The confusing part for me was that there are mobile homes and RVs everywhere in Silicon Valley because there aren't enough homes due to the super strict zoning.
That is not limited to “poor people” (your words).
Broken cars, RVs, mobile homes, and animals. How did that cause such trauma?
I'd take all of that over an intrusive HOA.
But really, people want to do what they want, and other folks don’t get to. That’s the whole of it.
What it sounds like is the stereotypical upper-middle-class white suburban boogeyman of "Those People" that you don't want around, because they bring down property values, with a healthy helping of implied racism and explicit classism.
Furthermore, there's no reason why zoning laws couldn't be selectively adjusted and relaxed—for instance, to ensure no heavy industry goes in right in the middle of a residential area, where it's more likely to be disruptive to sleep and potentially polluting.
Acting like relaxing zoning laws to allow for corner stores and similar things will bring us to a Mad Max-style wasteland is exactly the kind of rampant NIMBYism that got us into this mess in the first place.
I don't know what it "sounds like" and I cannot speak to your stereotypes.
I no longer have any interaction with residential property, zoning, development, or any of these housing politics. I am not affected by "property values".
I look at these issues as an interested, outside observer and I have tremendous enthusiasm for urban spaces, walkable cities, mixed use environs, etc.
But at the same time I appreciate well regulated[1] single family neighborhoods/developments and while I don't live anywhere like that I appreciate the reasons that someone might have for preferring that.
I hope that it is useful and interesting to you to learn that there are a variety of practical and aesthetic reasons for (not agreeing with you) that come from ideas and experience that (aren't the stereotypes you have in mind).
[1] This is the correct term. Arguing for abolishment of residential zoning is arguing for deregulation.
I bet you do, unless you have moved to orbit.
We've lived with Zoning over a century and we ought to have an understanding of what unwanted changes could come about if that were suddenly lifted. It's not that we _should not_ do it but we should make changes in a measured, purposeful and understood manner so we don't end up like unregulated favelas (not in the sense of being mostly poor, but in the sense that anything goes.)
I'd also expect more people who have space for ADUs to build them, although many of the lots aren't the right size or shape to fit one.
The really big, dense housing projects are being built on commercial land -- stuff like what is being built in downtown Sunnyvale, Santa Clara Square, Lawrence Station, and the proposed replacement of Cambrian Plaza.
Notably, all that big stuff is either already finished, or in the process of building, and didn't need the builder's remedy to get done.
Nothing more.
REPLY TO BELOW:
- If they are not hedge funds, then what are they, BE SPECIFIC.
Care to point me somewhere?
Blackstone is buying houses (though it's more an effect of the housing crisis than the cause of it); BlackRock runs ETFs you can buy in your retirement fund and is known for asking corporations to care about climate change.
blackrock - primarily sells shares in index funds; one of the big 3 index managers (started as a partnership between blackstone and others... that's why the similar name)
Of course land in the bay is valuable enough that nobody will do what you suggest. However that is economics, it shouldn't be law.
Where I live, a lot of zoning laws are really ordinances, and the enforcement of different aspects of sanitation is split between the zoning ordinance and other ordinances. I wonder how the new anti-zoning law law handles that.
If someone invents a way to do it safely, they should have the burden of safely proving that first.
If someone wants to stockpile 100 tons of explosive material in my neighborhood, I don't want my estate to use the courts to find remedy after my section of the neighborhood gets leveled/cratered. I want the obviously harmful activity to be stopped before the hazard is created.
Also, given prevailing rents that would likely lose them money over renting it out, though you can certainly regulate your way into that being the best option if you "protect" renters enough.