The city zoning board denied me, saying that that 5-acre plot had been zoned for ONE house and an ADU of no larger than 300 sqft.
That was when I realized why housing is so expensive.
But then there is a corresponding increase in property tax revenues to pay for it, so this should require no approval and just be something that happens. The city pays for the new infrastructure from the taxes paid by the new people using it.
This is a conjecture that as far as I know does not match what actually happens, which is that the new infrastructure is paid by debt, and the 4 new taxpayers will not have paid off the debt before the infrastructure needs replacement, paid for by more debt.
If it was 600 new units rather than 4, maybe it works out that the corresponding taxes pay for the infrastructure, but property taxes just aren't high enough, and the people who live in these boondoggle houses aren't wealthy enough to pay the taxes for the infrastructure their houses need
If four taxpayers aren't paying the amount of taxes required to fund the infrastructure needed by four taxpayers then your city is already bankrupt and zoning and planning is irrelevant.
> If it was 600 new units rather than 4
If it was literally only 4 units then you shouldn't need any new infrastructure anyway. Nothing should be operating with margins that thin to begin with.
If it's 4 units here, 4 units there then it adds up to hundreds which is the thing you admit isn't a problem.
At least in the San Jose area, the sewage treatment was largely built 50 years ago, when it was doing a lot of agriculture, and flows are way lower with people than they were with food processing and other industrial processing. The new plant that's in progress needs and has way less capacity, even though the standards are much much much tighter.
At the one house per acre level though, you can likely manage with septic, which is incremental sewage treatment capacity, and not a huge municipal undertaking (there is record keeping and regulation and what not, so it's not nothing)
Precisely.
> Sewage treatment plants have finite capacity, can't be built on a 'serves 20 units' incremental scale
Nor would they need to be. If your sewage treatment plant has a capacity for 100,000 units and you have 99,981 existing units, you already need a new sewage treatment plant regardless of where you put the new units, unless your plan is to never approve any new construction anywhere in the city, which is manifestly unreasonable.
> and oftentimes new plants have much stricter requirements than grandfathered in one.
And whose doing is that?
Yes, they also got very sick from doing this.
How were any houses originally built?
Well, sometimes they were just built.
It's a good thing we've learned a few things since then. Not that city planning is perfect. Far from it. But it certainly does serve a purpose.
For example, you might have an acre of land, but if too much of the soil underneath is clay, or if the water table is too high, the wastewater might not drain fast enough, so it sits and stagnates or mixes with freshwater, despite having "lots of land". You generally need a surveyor to produce and sign off on a Topographical Survey to assess that.
So yeah, "there were no sewers once upon a time", sure. But if you try to build suburban-like densities out here without a solid plan signed off, you are likely to end up piping your own sewage right into your own water taps.
In theory, the state requires the city to allow for 2x population growth, and the zoning process directs where the growth should happen. In practice, the city pushes back so hard on everything, that the growth is going to happen wherever whoever has patience and money to spend on fighting the council wants to build. Everyone else is going to be frustrated by the long process of back and forth on pulling permits over many years and many dollars that actually the city won't let you do whatever you wanted to do anyway.