95% of Bay Area Cities Lost Zoning Authority
darrellowens.substack.com
darrellowens.substack.com
(And not to toot my own horn but that title does a much better job of explaining what's going on)
...
> Local media speculates that this project may be out of spite by the young engineer regarding the NIMBY government of his town. Maybe, but it’s good nevertheless. Undoubtedly, this project will be sued by neighbors, but the courts have mostly ruled in favor of the Builder’s Remedy and other state housing laws so far.
More details about that part here: https://www.siliconvalley.com/2023/02/13/homeowner-invokes-b...
Zbrozek previously made the news with Los Altos Hills Community Fiber, after fighting a $210,000 Comcast quote for fiber internet service: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/comcast-wanted-2...
As a result you have (forgive me) old people who either remain in their homes or rent them out instead of selling them, long after they otherwise would.
I think this is still not as big a factor as the simple lack of building - but it sure doesn't help.
However I'm not sure about your proposed solution. You'd have to give up a fair bit of the difference in interest rate to incent the banks to agree to this. There would likely be a selection bias that most of the people who would take advantage of it were going to sell anyway, and now the bank is stuck carrying a sub-market-rate loan they otherwise would have gotten out of.
Where Prop 13 has been terrible is on commercial real estate. Most office complexes in Silicon Valley have dozens of sublease layers in order to avoid triggering a reassessment. Forcing those to unwind would be a gigantic boon.
Unfortunately, those people have a LOT of money to throw around. The last time this popped up on a proposition, the commercial real estate owners spent a FORTUNE to defeat it.
I actually rented in SF from somebody whose grandparents bought the home I rented. The value of the 1800 sq/ft rental home was around $1.8m, but the landlord was paying property tax on the value of the home from when his grandparents bought the property in the 70’s. The tax bill should have been about $20k/year, but it was only a few thousand because the tax rate was locked into the value of the home in the 70’s. Meanwhile a neighbor bought a $3m home next door and was paying $35k in property tax. For me it meant I got a slight discount on rent.
The whole thing is absurd.
Property prices are insane.
It's both unfair that the guy in the expensive home pays a huge amount in taxes as it is also unfair that the other guys property taxes are locked in to when property prices were less insane.
If a retired person was living in the $1.8m home in my example above and was paying a low tax based on the 1970's of the house, they might not be able to afford moving to a more practical $900k one-bedroom apartment/condo because their tax rate would increase and they may not have the cashflow to pay for that bill (even considering the proceeds from the sale of the home).
If you walk through SF, even really nice neighborhoods like St. Franciswood, you'll see large beautiful homes that are in severe states of disrepair because the owners don't have the cashflow to pay for the enormous costs of repairing their homes. They'd be better off moving to a smaller dwelling, but they won't because it could cost more and the incentives are more out of whack.
> It's very difficult to solve affordability today but much easier to solve it in the future.
I'm not sure what the reasoning behind this is. I see no reason that affordable housing should magically solve itself. The only possible explanation that comes to mind is if you think population will collapse, but the population of the US is projected to continue growing apace for the next 40 years: https://www.census.gov/data-tools/demo/idb/#/country?COUNTRY...
When a government interrupts that process for years on end by disallowing any new construction, you end up with a backlog, and can't afford to wait the decades it would take for affordable housing to be available.
In the future, given sane zoning, the process will work. For now, though, there's a dire need to fill in the gap with affordable housing today.
Why can't the millions of homes that exist today be the mid-range to affordable and just flood the market with market rate homes/
Subsidizes are fine, requirements are not.
Because you can’t get there from here. The only way to “flood the market” with any kind of homes is to build at higher density. But building market rate units at higher density won’t, itself, make lower-density units in the same area more affordable, as lower density is itself a thing people will pay a premium for; it will just allow more rich people to move in to an area and drive gentrification o the lower-density areas. (If preferentially done in urban cores to an extent that overwhelms other, particularly transportation, infrastructure, it may make lower density homes in peripheral areas less valuable simply by making jobs less accessible, but that also doesn’t solve the problem of housing affordability.)
If you flood the market with enough high density homes, some of those will be affordable. The ONLY true affordable housing is to make market rate affordable.
Don't get me wrong, I think BMR housing has a place, but morally, number of units is the most important metric. If we can build both, do so, but when you block market rate housing for the potential of affordable housing (that may never come), we just make the situation overall MUCH worse.
> If preferentially done in urban cores to an extent that overwhelms other, particularly transportation
High density in urban cores makes commutes shorter and lowers the stress on transportation infrastructure per person.
Affordable housing subsidies help, because they enable both to be built.
So often in the bay area we see large market rate developments blocked for the potential of an affordable project that never comes. Let them build, because until we make up the MASSIVE shortage of housing, there is no getting around needing to build more.
Therefore the primary thing that matters is how many units are built. If there are N people and N-1 housing units, then if you build super cheap housing the poorest guy can move off the streets into it. But if you build a luxury unit, the richest guy moves out of his unit into the new one, which opens up rich guy's place for a not-quite-as-rich person, etc.
The price of housing is not dependent on how nice the housing is in aggregate, only how much of it there is. The argument for building "affordable" housing comes from landlords who own luxury housing not wanting the new housing to hurt their investments.
As the city metropolitan area expands, neighborhoods that used to be marginal, are now tony.
Brooklyn is turning into quite the yuppie stronghold. It used to be known as a fairly scrappy, affordable area.
Because the requirements on the local governments that the builder’s remedy deals are failures to provide affordable housing on a much shorter timescale than 30 years from now.
> ... As long as developments are 20% low-income or 100% middle-income and are environmentally sound ...
What's the difference between "environmentally sound" and the onerous environmental review that Bay Area construction projects had to go through?
My understanding of the wording there comes from https://abag.ca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2022-10/Bu...
which says
> The five findings which would allow denial of an eligible project can be summarized as follows:
> <snip>
> 4. The project is proposed on land zoned for agriculture or resource preservation that is surrounded on at least two sides by land being used for agriculture or resource preservation or there are not adequate water or sewage facilities to the serve the project.
but I am not an expert on these details whatsoever.
A trial court already has already ruled that it does and that environmental review has to be completed before a project enters the Buklder’s Remedy process.
Appeals and further legislation are likely.
Its all (with narrow exemptions) California construction projects, not most Bay Area prohects, and there is no difference; this sentence is referring to the fact that Builder’s Remedy projects are not exempt from CEQA.
(
20% low-income or
100% middle-income
) and environmentally sound
20% low-income or
(
100% middle-income and
environmentally sound
)CEQA overrides all this. Here's a person that spent five years in courts, because a neighbor didn't want a single family home to expand due to aesthetic concerns, that suddenly shifted to fake "environmental" concerns as soon as the city level obstruction failed.
https://twitter.com/tribtowerviews/status/162851785910113075...
The threat of years of lawsuit is enough to kill most projects, as that amount of uncertainty and risk will eliminate all financial backing for any but the very most motivated, such as those living in their own homes with tons of money to burn.
Discretionary approval of projects is definitely a corruption machine, as exposed recently in LA, and any politician that endorsed discretionary community review is almost certainly corrupt. However it's also the norm in California.
Even with that discretionary review, CEQA is still a powerful tool for stopping projects that improve the environment, due to the long decision timelines.
This kind of hypocrisy where CEOs look down from the stratosphere on the common rabble yet have their corporations espouse a kind of elitist morality about diversity, equity, and inclusion is dumbfounding and disgusting.
You're really missing the forest for the trees. Which is OK, because a lot of people are. On every side of this issue.
It's not hypocrisy, its just business. They don't give a shit because they see where society is going, and they want to make sure they remain as profitable as possible.
This is also why all the fighting and gnashing of teeth is pointless. CEOs aren't pushing the agenda. They're just following profits, like they always have. If you don't like that, well, welcome to the club, lots of us have been here for a very long time.
The problem with prepackaged political beliefs is that it leads to dissonance where ones view on society is at odds with "the free hand of the market", but capitalism does no wrong, so it has to be a conspiracy of CEOs and their personal politics.
Many, many middle class communities all over the United States have similar restrictions. This is what single family zoning looks like and it's not a function of these particular residents being billionaires.
Further, living in a prototypical single family zoned "nice neighborhood" is an aspirational goal for quite a bit of the lower middle or lower working class in the United States - including the racial and class cohorts in whose name much of this housing deregulation is being done.
Perhaps they all need to be educated in the errors of their thinking ?
I'm sure some of those will still eventually be judged out of compliance and builder's remedy may stand, but for now they're just pending review.
The cities that are likely to actually be subjected to builder's remedy (which will be challenged in court, which might cause delays for any developers trying to use it, but is still a useful bargaining chip) are those marked as "NEW CYCLE". Those cities did not prepare any housing permitting plan submission to the HCD at all by the deadline.
| 96 of 101 Bay Area municipalities had their housing elements rejected
Then TFA discusses one in particular at some length that did get their HE in by the deadline and had it rejected.
"The housing element is important. The Builder’s Remedy is nice, but we want compliant housing elements to house population growth, combat segregation, reduce home prices and combat sprawl."
I was surprised to see "sprawl" called out in the op because that is directly opposed to the flattening of building restrictions and the deregulation that is being pursued by both the state and housing activists.
I thought that sprawl and homogenization of built environments and the flattening of transitions between built spaces was a necessary evil that has been conceded in order to pursue housing deregulation.
So ... I'm surprised to see it mentioned - especially as a pejorative - and it seems incoherent in this context.
Strange. I understand sprawl (especially suburban sprawl) to be the direct result of housing regulations. The "natural" ("unregulated") trend seems for cities to become denser and for buildings to become higher (e.g. single family homes getting replaced by multi apartment buildings). Density being the opposite of sprawl.
More housing in an already populated area leads to denser populations leads to less sprawl.
I agree with that.
Further, I would like to see cities like San Francisco and Oakland and San Jose become denser/taller in just the ways you are describing.
However, the article speaks of the entire Bay Area which runs the gamut from Point Reyes Station to Atherton to Strawberry to Dublin - and everything in between.
I don't live in a residential area and I have no financial exposure to residential housing in the Bay Area - so this is purely academic for me - but I really don't see why our inability to make San Francisco denser means people in Atherton (for instance) can't decline apartment high rises.
That outcome is, in fact, sprawl.
Further, the impacts of that sprawl go beyond the aesthetic: it starves infrastructure advances that depend on a critical mass of density.
Every unit of housing that gets distributed outside of the city center is a missing unit of density that would have gotten us closer to another subway, another terminal connection, another tunnel, another rebuilt blighted area, etc.
Additionally more housing options that result from a deregulation in urban spaces is thought to weaken the profit motive for further development in deregulated suburban environments, and thus limit sprawl. Whether this is true I'm less sure, though laying it out as an explanation because it's at least part of the typical environmentalist and urbanist argument for deregulation in urban areas.
The coastal regions are already over-crowded at current prices. The overall cost is just too high. It's wasteful compared to building in other regions. And, it's unnecessary because so much of modern work can be done remotely.
Instead of allowing 80% of housing at market rate to subsidize 20% low-income housing in an unsustainable growth pattern, California should mandate that large employers offer at least 20% of their office employees the opportunity to work remotely. Creating an escape valve for local demand would slow the growth of housing costs without adding new infrastructure requirements.
It's in CA best long term interest to support as many people as possible. Remote work isn't going to solve the problem that someone who works at Walgreens cannot afford to live within 20 mi of the city.
Tech jobs adjust for col though ? Its maybe 3k more/month at high estimate. I know bay area jobs in tech ajdust for 35k more for sure.
This seems like an extreme example. I have friends raising 2 kids in Pleasanton, CA working for bigtech. They bought their houses at ~ 1M before the housing craziness started. They made a similar move from suburbs of chicago with 3k extra monthly mortgage for the new house in CA, with a salary bump of over 100k.
"Only 1M"
And I mean sure I could have bought a big house in Palo Alto for 50k or whatever in 1950 but that's not really relevant anymore.
Maybe dual tech worker couples can make it work but but there isn't a large pay increase for most other fields in the Bay.
But at the same time if you can make it happen it has a huge impact on your net worth/retirement/kids college ect.
Even in this example, ppl in bay area gained a million in networth in just home price while the 400k person didn't make any gains. I don't know where houses are 400k these days though.
If there’s a solution to the problem, I am not aware of it.
This is a function of supply (and demand), increase the supply the market will offer less.
When a building is proposed, the benefactors are diffuse - any of the people looking for a home will benefit from its existence. But the people who oppose it are concentrated - anyone who lives near the new building. For too long our planning system has only considered the latter, and nobody has spoken for the person who will be seeking a home in the future (though groups like SFBARF come to mind).
Definitely feels true for kids growing up without siblings too. I know we would have had more than one probably if housing wasn't such an enormous consideration.
That's one point, but another is that the careers of many young people force them to migrate across the country or even across continents. Academia and IT are particularly known for this, but also other industries like moviemaking have their world-wide-known centers.
Early settler homes were typically a single room and not much bigger than a modern living room, and they had many kids living there. Space is a wonderful luxury, but hardly a necessity.
You may be able to get away with it with just adults. Kids talk, sooner or later some 'well meaning' individual reports them to CPS for 'inadequate shelter' and the whole thing destruct.
side-note: one of the convicted defendants in the USC pay-to-play scandal paid a couple of hundred thousand dollars for their two kids to get placement in a prestigious college. His job title? Director of a property title clearing house in San Diego county. hundreds of thousands of dollars in "envelope" money.. get the idea of how profitable it has been to do this real estate market stuff ?
Eh, I mean, for a lot of homeowners in the bay area, because they so little amount of housing compared to market price, they usually can (and do for some communities) front large down payements for their kids' houses. That's how you see so many people in their late 20s affording houses you have two have two or three of: two good incomes, frugal mindset, good RSUs / IPOs, or parental help.
Obviously it sucks for people who do not have upper middle class parents, and that's why we need to fix this stupid housing crisis.
But do the grandparents want to know the kids? If they did, they would not oppose new housing near theirs.
> It enriches homeowners at the expense of other's misery.
This is a profoundly subjective view, because homeowners could turn around and accuse new residents of enriching themselves at the expense of homeowners; adding traffic, pollution, destroying nature, maybe bringing crime, increasing population which increases distance and reduces oversight of schools and politics, requiring more police. So a lot of people who want to keep their town small and close knit would disagree with the premise at the outset. Do communities have rights too?
> This is a profoundly subjective view, because homeowners could turn around and accuse new residents of enriching themselves at the expense of homeowners
Nothing is happening “at the expense of the homeowners.” The homeowners are the ones getting rich.
If it's not an investment property then homeowners don't get any benefits from higher home value other than a larger tax bill.
(Or if you retire to a country with a lower cost-of-living and no housing bubble, buying a similarly-sized house there for lower than the original purchase-price of your home in the US. Which is exactly how every retiree you see in e.g. Thailand lives like they do: they're not living off a pension; they're living off the "nest egg" they naturally accumulated by holding a house in the West for 20+ years before selling it to move there.)
You've never heard of a HELOC?
Nope[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13
The person with a $1.8M property holds a very valuable illiquid asset. They cannot convert the value to cash trivially (they could perhaps take out a home equity credit or remortgage the house). Effectively none of the value of asset is available to them to meet any other needs, and will only be fully realized when the house (their home) is sold.
The person who can pay the mortgage on a $1.8M property has substantial income and/or cash reserves, which are liquid assets and thus distinctly different from the property owned by the previously discussed person. They may not have a net worth of $1.8M but they are much more easily able to shift financial resources aound to meet their needs.
Im a homeowner and this is just ludicrous. Rich? Please. This kind of added drama makes me discount everything you say.
https://patch.com/california/cupertino/cupertino-councilmemb...
Many of those vilified "high-paying tech jobs" are young and have school-age kids. I am one of them (well, except I'm not that young), and almost all my friends in the SV area are the same. I go to work and half of the team have a kid or two.
It's not tech workers pushing out parents: they want to be parents and settle down. It's old grandmas in three bedroom single houses refusing to move out.
> The school board had cited declining enrollment, funding issues and voters’ rejection of a parcel tax as reasons for closing the two schools.
I'm very intrigued that the Cupertino voters rejected a parcel tax, I've seen so many of those in my town and they all pass. They typically go something like "shall the City of Cupertino collect a parcel tax at rate XYZ for the next ZZZ years to replace aging air conditioning and plumbing and other aging building facilities?".
No one is forcing grandpa to sell his house by rezoning the land (the property tax won't go up due to pro 13). If your argument is that the house will appreciate in value and that grandpa is "forced" to sell his house because he likes money, well I have no argument.
1. Massively increased rent, if he is renting 2. Massively increased cost of local goods and services and change in who those services cater to 3. Predatory tactics by real estate developers targeting lower income individuals in the community, if he owns the property 4. Loss of friends/community due to cohort being forced to leave by 1-3
1. Rent increase
2. Consumption price increase
3. Big real estate will use thugs and trickery to force people to sell
4. More people in the community leads to less friends
Increased housing supply almost universally decreased housing prices.
If you don't want renter Grandpa to be forced out, build more
Neighborhoods change. What was once farm land and a few houses becomes suburban. What was once suburban becomes medium density. What was once medium density becomes dense city core. That's how cities have always worked. As the value of the land changes existing owners cash out and developers infill or rebuild. As density grows the justification (and budget) for city services like subways and parks grows.
Excessively restrictive zoning cuts off that natural process after the farmland-to-suburb step.
In free market terms if you cared so much about what your neighbor does with their own property you should have bought an interest in that property. Who are you to tell someone else they can't build a bigger building on property they own?
In reality there are few true free markets and externalities exist but in property rights terms zoning is a rather large government imposition to benefit other landowners often without any compensation to the owners who want to build. In an ideal world people who want to keep single family zoning should be paying land value fees to their neighbors who want to build density to compensate for the restriction. You couldn't possibly make such a scheme work in the real world though.
> Its (Los Altos) zoning prohibits multifamily housing, whether apartments, townhomes or condos, along with commercial stores and shops in the entirety of its city limits.
The asymmetry of how cities/neighborhoods interact with each other is what creates the need for interventions like this. Some cities are more than happy to open up commercial and office spaces without allowing additional housing, eating up all the tax revenue, all the while pushing the burden of housing and other infrastructure on others. Meanwhile cities like Los Altos make any commercial development not possible in their neighborhood but will have its residents happily go to other neighborhoods to fulfill their need of a $7 artisanal coffee. Cities like Oakland will try to push high density housing in areas that don’t really add any value, simply because these are rich neighborhoods and you get election votes for doing it, meanwhile, plenty of medium/low income neighborhoods would benefit more from new high density housing with commercial space and the infrastructure upgrades that come from it. There’s all kinds of selfish interests and there needs to be a check on them.
People follow the jobs. Give companies a subsidy for starting in a new town/city/village and the people will certainly follow it. And you'll get all the benefits of starting with a clean slate: you could make it walkable, bikable, keep land costs low by not limiting it(enough supply to keep costs low)
Starting an empty town doesn’t do that. Why doesn’t everyone just stay at home with their parents and just commute into a meta verse version of the Bay Area where everyone can have a fake home?
I personally don't like living in a city, too much traffic, too many assholes and I don't trust modern police, of which cities have an abundance of.
Hopefully, if this remote working sticks and we don't go back to driving to an office everyday, it will be a net positive for a lot of problems we are facing: overcrowding of cities, skyrocketing rents, pollution, unnecessary carbon emissions, etc.
Furthermore, for people already living in, say, the Bay Area, they probably have friends and/or family there and it's not like the Bay Area is a hellhole so the default for a lot of people is to stay there, in spite of the high housing prices, rather than move to a cornfield in Iowa.
negative density tax is the way.
unfortunately new suburbs are an unsustainable addiction in this regard. it incentivizes everyone for optimizing for cars and backyard-driven life-development.
There's already tons of cheap housing around the US. It's just that a lot of it isn't where many people most want to live.
Successful towns have historically been built near some natural resource (rivers, deltas, lakes, mines, forests, etc). Jobs / corporate mini-HQs are not a natural resource.
So we give existing house owners a subsidy by creating artificial housing scarcity, and then we give companies a subsidy to fix the house owner subsidy by starting new towns?
Who pays for this? Productive young people earning income? Again?
Who's paying for that? And why?
I think it was Elon Musk who made me ponder this. Somewhere he blasted the notion that most of the Silicon Valley venture capital gets blown on housing costs. That made me ponder what other alternatives could be found and what other productive uses that money could have been spent on. It's a fascinating train of thought with big directions it could go. That's an interesting idea about encouraging the subsidization of a town, I'd like to see that experiment tried if it hasn't yet.
We used up all the good places.
Probably very difficult to get this right.
The point is that we have to make a trade-off between free internal migration and NIMBY. If you mix those two ideas together, you get misery. In deciding which is worth prioritizing, perhaps you should consider that free internal migration is a literal bedrock principle of the American state, dating back prior to the Constitution, enshrined legally in the Constitution, on which huge quantities of American legal and economic life have been built for the last 250 years, whereas NIMBY is an ad-hoc political coalition of wealthy homeowners and crotchety neighborhood activists who'd rather no one new get to live in their city.
How would net migration in push out existing residents? This makes no sense.
>This is a profoundly subjective view, because homeowners could turn around and accuse new residents of enriching themselves at the expense of homeowners; adding traffic, pollution, destroying nature, maybe bringing crime, increasing population which increases distance and reduces oversight of schools and politics, requiring more police. So a lot of people who want to keep their town small and close knit would disagree with the premise at the outset. Do communities have rights too?
This is true. I would say 1% of the population shares your subjective view, while 99% don't. Literally the OVERALL majority wants cheaper houses while 1% are worried about their rich enclaves having crime go up and getting messier.
Yeah as a minority of the population YOU would love to have your imitation-of-the-country-side suburbia stay the same and have good nature and all that but keep in mind it exists because an UNFAIR advantage to a small minority of rich people: YOU.
The overall quality of your living standards must go down if you want to be fair. The luxuries you fight to preserve is a literal crime against humanity. This is the only way. But keep in mind if you own a home it's not like you LOSE any part of your home. It's just your neighborhood becomes more populated, that's the main difference.
But I did nothing wrong. The people who actively prevent Boston from building more housing are the reason my presence here is at someone else's expense.
My cousins and I grew up in a band from Monterey to Sacramento. Our parents all still live in the homes they had decades ago. But None of our generation live in northern California any more, except for my sister who bought in Sacramento during the recession (she had a state job which made it a lot easier to get a mortgage!)
I think that's bad. I'd like to be able to afford to live in norcal. I moved away from California for multiple reasons but one of them was affordability.
Also, I hate traffic too! It's a good thing I am not a car! Ideally we could build places like culdesac.com or bloommerwede.nl and allow people to live completely car free.
And no, in my view, "communities" do not have rights.
I find it odd how people can be pro-immigration and anti-migration. Keeping people out of your community is similar to keeping people out of your country.
What you are painting as the cause is actually the effect.
Assuming they are renters, how does that happen? Increase in housing will decrease rents, so even if their current apartment / house gets replaced with a bigger one they can just rent something in the same neighborhood? Unless the only reason they can still afford to live in said neighborhood is because of rent control.
Having rent control plus very strict zoning laws is the most asinine housing policy. It basically means that after a new neighborhood has been built you just freeze its state eternally - only allowing new people in when one family dies and their kids or some friends move in. The privilege to live in a neighborhood isn't then determined by wealth but by kinship - a harmful form of socialism that calcifies communities.
This was the precise thesis of Milton and Rose Friedmans' "Tyranny of the Status Quo"
It often doesn't matter who the renting class votes for, and politicians who represent their interests are less likely to collect campaign donations, which affects their likelihood of holding office
> It enriches homeowners
Homeowners own the land, not just the building. If your property is worth X dollars when anyone buying is only allowed to (re)build a single family home on it, it must be worth more if they can also build a tall condo complex on it instead. Dense neighborhoods almost always more valuable on a per-unit-land basis than less dense ones, so upzoning is going to increase land value, lining the pockets of incumbent homeowners. This all makes perfect sense but everyone seems to go around pretending the opposite.
Now what does happen is that poorer people will live in these condos and apartment buildings, and send their kids to the same schools as incumbent families, use the same services, etc. I strongly suspect that's why people are so against upzoning, and I think that is an important moral issue in itself.
I do think that some parts of the YIMBY side at its worst sometimes downplays the rights of the present land owners though, and I think your “enriches homeowners” comment plays into that. We need to respect and honor both sets of stakeholders. I think most homeowners are not money-grubbers as you suggest, they chose a particular neighborhood vibe because that is where they want to live, and they don’t want to lose that. That is valid! Moving house is incredibly disruptive, particularly considering school districts. (To be clear though, I do agree that YIMBY is directionally appropriate for most neighborhoods).
One angle I don’t see discussed often is “rate of change”. I think some people would like to preserve their neighborhoods character indefinitely, and that is unrealistic clinging. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that if you buy a house in a quiet suburban neighborhood, that it’ll have that character for, say, a decade or maybe two while your kids grow up or whatever.
I think a lot of infill can happen without changing the character too much, and this middle ground is probably hurt by polarization.
The implication here is that if housing were abundant and more affordable in the bay area, then both grandparents and grandkids can live in the same city and visit each other often, rather than one side living far away in some suburbs. (In some cases, it's the grandparents living in suburbs and parents/kids living in the city for jobs; in other cases, it's grandparents living in the city because they've lived there forever and don't want to move, while parents/kids move to a suburb further away for better life/more space).
The thing is, growth of a city/a region brings along many other issues (in addition to lack of housing driving prices up), including safety, traffic, crowds, decrease in quality of life. Just because housing is affordable doesn't mean that both grandparents and grandkids would still want to live in the city.
Instead of building out even more housing in an already dense area (because jobs are concentrated in that area), I would've liked it if we have a far more diverse set of growing cities across the country where the job markets thrive in all of them, rather than deeply concentrated in a couple of places (SF Bay, NY, etc.).
[Edit] To clarify, I am in the group where the grandparents want to live in SFBA because they've been there forever and don't want to move away. I'm saying, the job market made SFBA grow too much, and building more housing in SFBA to make them cheaper won't necessarily make me want to keep living there because there are other problems that come with more people. Hence, if job markets weren't so deeply concentrated in one area, the country could see more evenly distributed growth across many cities/metropolitan areas, and SFBA/NY wouldn't be so lopsided and ridiculously unaffordable.
No matter what you or I might think about it, people like the suburban single family home.
People want to live near their jobs, their schools, shops, doctors, all the things they need, and where that kind of density exists, they're willing to pay for it.
The demand is there.
Being able to make rules about how the area you live is used are a fundamental part of both of those.
Fully externalizing the benefits of an action never has positive social outcomes. No one would bother making their neighborhood nice if they thought that as soon as they did, a million people who had nothing to do with making it nice in the first place would move in and screw it up.
So definitely _not_ socially beneficial.
It's interesting to me how people argue from a left-leaning angle(think of the children, it's immoral, etc.) about this topic while essentially having a pro-colonialism mindset that the current residents need to just suck it up or leave.
How many people should we try to pack into that area? Double the current housing? Triple it? Where do you stop?
We "stop" where it is natural to, like any other place in human history: lack of resources, lack of space*, there's better places to move to, etc. And if the only thing holding back the Bay Area's development is artificial zoning laws -- we are certainly not at its "natural" equilibrium.
While CA has had its generational water supply issues, only 10% of it is used for residential purposes; 90% of it is used for agriculture. Adding more people in SF, or Palo Alto or Berkeley, does not put special strain on CA versus anywhere else. Not to mention, single family homes often consume _much_ more water per family than those in apartments or condos (yards, many bathrooms, etc).
*Lack of space, for what is a _city_, is not "it's too populated here for me to have a backyard without paying a ton of money"
And? There are dozens of cities that don't have a housing shortage. Living in the city of your choice isn't a human right.
It seems like you're defining "where you grew up" with long/lag proximity, while attaching lots of unrelated personal concepts to it. How much can an area change before you've, for all practical purposes, moved somewhere else.
I'm fine with communities deciding for themselves how they grow and change. I really only take issue when they decide to grow office space and not housing, or when employers take office space meant for 100 workers and cram 300 into it.
That being said - I do wish my children were able to see their extended family more than once a year (travel costs/calendar coordination/ etc... being the impediments)
The local native population without an influx would not be in such dire housing situation.
Yes, the area is very attractive and is a magnet but without that influx the population would have plateaued.
Typically people’s lifetimes overlap their kids’ significantly. I mean most people meet their grandparents, so if you have a fertility rate of 1, and an area becomes attractive to early-career people who are just settling down and starting families, and the existing housing become taken up by that group, then I guess the area will have to house the original population, plus their kids, plus their grandkids, so we’ll need housing for 175% of the original population, total.
Of course the area is, by not accepting new immigrants to get back to replacement rate, setting itself up for long-term unpleasantness as the tax base ages into retirement. But hey I guess that’s their right…
After this zoning change goes through and new houses are built, I'd wager those new houses will still be still priced out of reach of people that want to live in a given area. I'm not saying it's not going to help, but it's not going to magically create 10x the housing density in a given area and bring housing prices down to the point where a low income worker can afford a home. That's a pipe dream.
[EDIT] And that's putting aside that "right" just means "thing we like a bunch", anyway.
I asked OP why the people who don't own that property, and have no ties to it (other than potentially living near it), should be able to decide that others _can't_ live there through restrictive zoning.
If it's actually a free market, and people have interest and money to afford to live in an area, and a property owner has property and interest to build housing they can afford, why should people with no interest in the property get to decide they should live elsewhere?
But you have an inherent right to deny someone to live somewhere?
We don't need a housing market where buying a small fixer upper costs millions. That's unjust.
You're confusing your ideas of property rights with actual US democratic ideals, which are not equal at all. In fact the idea of property rights is explicitly left out of the Declaration of Independence; where Locke would declare "Life, Liberty, and Property" as inalienable human rights, Jefferson changes "Property" to "Pursuit of Happiness". (Quite a strange distinction for a man who owned slaves!) This is because there was great debate about property and lordship in the New World. Property holders were seen as the tyrants who oppressed the colonists, and prevented the Americans from doing what they needed to do to live, in pursuit of their own profits and investments. So, the idea of a democratic government's eminent domain is absolutely the point: to keep the land available for public good and not for the sole-benefit of the few.
We need to allow the mob to steal everything - it's the most democratic social process possible!
It's very much like the "first speaker" issue with free speech "advocates"; somehow the first homeowner/speaker has greater rights than the newer homeowner/speaker.
The lack of self-awareness is breathtaking sometimes.
But yeah, these rules are draconian and surpass their intended spirit, creating regulatory capture for the construction industry and preventing perfectly acceptable possibilities that the community would want.
For example, I want to create a summer camp for kids here on my farm, but zoning and other over-regulation actively prevents me from building any of the needed dorms, classrooms, or kitchen/bathing facilities. Countless possibilities like this are being crushed every day. I personally have given up trying.
Seems like there's a spectrum (even if the dividing line is in the wrong place on that spectrum right now).
Many suburbs prohibit owning roosters (they wake your neighbors at dawn) though female chickens are OK. I think it's OK if you can't open a slaughterhouse next door in an urban or other dense area. It's also reasonable to require that new construction be up to code, as your close-by building not to fire code could threaten my home.
At the other extreme are restrictions on how you paint your house or operating a slaughterhouse in a low density agricultural area is none of your (distant) neighbors' business, assuming the roads are up to the new traffic.
Increasing infill density doesn't seem bad to me, but even then, you need adequate utility and road capacity, and it's easy for NIMBYs in town to prevent that from being upgraded.
In this scenario you and folks who want more building are the justice system: you want defection, you want building. You say, "how is it moral for prisoners to constrain each other's actions?" but they voted for it freely because mutual cooperation is better than mutual defection, even if they personally would defect given the choice.
there's a balance to be struck, and at the moment it seems the scale has been heavily tilted towards wealthy home-owners deciding what their neighbors can do on their own property
The local government has been deemed a failure. They have repeatedly been told they need to fix zoning, and each time the local government fails differently. Now their authority has been revoked.
This is very reminiscent of the political distracting and gerrymandering cases currently in flight.
This is hilarious. I hope these people who voted for the communists and ran companies that allowed the commissars to take over are happy to reap what they have sown. They now have the gall to act surprised by all of this. It's probably time to take inclusionary housing policy to the Supreme Court because it's clearly unconstitutional.
This idea that we have to elevate all power to the state or federal government is antidemocratic. It doesn't matter if it's zoning, education, building codes, etc.
Historically, the state/federal government has acted as a facilitator of local control, but more and more it seems as though one of the goals is to take local control away.
I am not for this. Not because I'm against housing, but because I'm against taking away local control.
But unfortunately it doesn't. It means the worst sort of leisurely fools who happen to be your neighbors monopolizing local power, at everyone's expense.
This is the problem with "democracy" as such. In the american mythology it's about self-governance, but the more "direct, local" one makes it, the more absurd such a proposition becomes. As an empirical matter, people cannot govern themselves.
People are too poor in time, energy, concern, care, etc. to do so; and those who arent are the least fit to do it.
Democracy was never, nor should be, about "self-governance". It's about accountability. It's simply a mechanism to prevent tyranny.
The right "level" of democracy is one which maximises one's daily experienced freedom. And "local democracy" so often is a daily oppression on those who experience it.
America is overwhelmed by local corruption, housing-associations, and the like. It's one of the major reasons I would never live there.
How elitist.
That is literally how it should work. That is why I (living in Austin) do not vote for local elections in Berlin.
Obviously my comment was about American cities.