Maybe people should live literally anywhere else?
How many people should we try to pack into that area? Double the current housing? Triple it? Where do you stop?
I very much doubt SF is limited in expanded by water pipe capacity. Total water use, sure, but people use less water in a city then the suburbs anyways so it will be a net savings of water.
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.
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.
I grew up in a town with an economic implosion. Very few people born here during the '70s stayed, and there was not, is not, and should not be a mechanism to bend the economics of the entire country to enable them to do so (if for no other reason than their industry collapsed for a compelling counter-concern: it was killing us. Pollution controls went in and the best companies in town could no longer compete while maintaining air quality standards and shuttered operations. So now people were out of work but the work was also not shortening their lives by a decade).
2) Reducing obstacles to building is free (in the long term, it's revenue-positive). Propping up a dying town is expensive.
SF: 1.49
SJ: 1.59
Thank about what the Fertility rate means.
>the TFR is based on the age-specific fertility rates of women in their "child-bearing years", which in conventional international statistical usage is ages 15–44.
>The TFR is, therefore, a measure of the fertility of an imaginary woman who passes through her reproductive life subject to all the age-specific fertility rates for ages 15–49 that were recorded for a given population in a given year. The TFR represents the average number of children a woman would potentially have, were she to fast-forward through all her childbearing years in a single year, under all the age-specific fertility rates for that year. In other words, this rate is the number of children a woman would have if she was subject to prevailing fertility rates at all ages from a single given year and survives throughout all her childbearing years.
Look at the figures: https://www.newgeography.com/content/007550-total-fertility-....
Imgur: https://imgur.com/a/FQ7tVqs
SF: 1.49
SJ: 1.59
That's not growth, it's decline.
In any case, the California Department of Finance gives counts of births and deaths by county, and you are wrong: https://dof.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/Forecasting/Demographi...
> A rate of 2.1 children per woman is necessary to maintain a population at its current level (immigration and migration aside). California and the nation had fertility rates near population replacement levels in 2008, but every state falls below those levels today. California has fallen faster than most, dropping from 2.15 to 1.52
Well below replacement rates on births. I imagine a very large portion of the births are immigrant births as well, which would push the rate even lower.
1: https://www.ppic.org/blog/californias-plunging-birth-rates/
People can live longer, and natural population increase can persist long after fertility drops below replacement.
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…
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.
Building more doesn't stop the makeup of a community from changing. If anything it accelerates 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)
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.
Society creates laws that affect each other and zoning is no different.
If I live in a cute little community and my neighbors all agree that we like it how it is, we can collectively agree to keep it like that.
If that little neighborhood had a dense block of apartment buildings, many of the people who originally lived there wouldn’t want to stay.
Now, all that in mind, I generally agree that we need to fix zoning. I’m not a homeowner and want to buy property in places that are currently too expensive for me..
But I completely understand that people would be upset to build a community somewhere, then gradually be pushed away because a few of their neighbors sold to a big company, and their neighborhood doesn’t fit their needs anymore.
Even if the majority want to stay, they get forced away by a few using their land in ways that are bad for the rest of the group.
Builder's remedy or state-imposed zoning has no power if no one ever sells to a developer, right?
Plus you're comparing living in a more dense neighborhood to cooking meth. I can't take you seriously at all.
And I do prefer dense walkable neighborhoods personally, but I just also understand the frustration of a community living somewhere because of some quality of that neighborhood, then having that quality ripped away just because a small number of previous inhabitants left.
If "quality of neighborhood" is so important then said neighborhood should, as I stated above, put their money where their mouth is. Maintain a common fund, and commit to match any offer for any house going up for sale in the community. Stop using everyone else's taxpayer dollars to have cities pass and enforce laws to do it.
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?
We don't need a housing market where buying a small fixer upper costs millions. That's unjust.
But you have an inherent right to deny someone to live somewhere?