Everything you need to know about California’s SB 79
mnolangray.substack.com
mnolangray.substack.com
> The bill only applies in urban transit counties. These are counties with 15 or more passenger rail stations. This includes the counties of Alameda, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara.
That already excludes most of the rural land in California. Some of those counties are still pretty big, however, so the next bit is also important:
> Within these counties, areas within a half-mile of most of the following stations are now designated as transit-oriented development (TOD) zones:
> Areas within a half-mile of all heavy rail (e.g., BART) and/or very high-frequency commuter rail stations—defined as stations that run 72 or more trains per day—are designated as Tier 1 TOD zones.
> Areas within a half-mile of all light rail (e.g., the San Diego Trolley), BRT, and/or high-frequency commuter rail stations—defined as stations that run 48 or more trains per day—are designated as Tier 2 TOD zones.
> In smaller cities, defined as cities with a population of less than 35,000 residents, only the quarter-mile area of the TOD zone is covered. And if a county becomes an urban transit county after January 1, 2026, only heavy rail, light rail, and eligible commuter rail will be covered—not BRT.
It is bad planning to build this kind of transportation and expect the area within 1/2 mile of the stations to stay “suburban,” (which really means single-family; there’s plenty of apartment buildings in suburbs around the world) much less “rural.”
Getting Prop 13 overturned is about as likely as California seceding from the US.
Actually, it might even be less likely than that.
That said, I fully agree with you that Prop 13 repeal for homeowners will "never" happen. The backlash would obviously be massive. But if they could keep it for homeowners and repeal it for all other types of property, including land, then that could be a major improvement because property owners would have to improve their properties to a "highest and best use" or sell it to pay the taxes.
There is no one simple solution to e.g. poor performance of US public schools. Repealing Prop 13 isn’t going to close the achievement gap, it’s not even going to slow the fall of performance since 1993, let alone the pandemic.
So not only is Prop 13 sort of being phased out naturally, the repeal would simply put a bunch of renters against rising costs from landlords in the places that actually matter like LA and SF, and you know, as much as I hate Prop 13 in principle, everything has settled on a delicate homeostasis where the people who want to get it repealed fully - which will never happen - will get way more than they bargained for.
I'm not sure how you're coming to this conclusion. When the property is transferred it is reassessed and the new buyer pays the full tax, but after that the taxes effectively decrease annually (increase at a rate lower than inflation). Everyone who owns a property more than a year or two in California benefits from Prop 13.
Nothing is phasing out and it has no sunset clause.
You'd have more luck persuading the Catholic Church to repeal the Bible.
Residential real estate isn't causing the big issue. It's been under Prop 13 long enough that people have died off and the properties are now sufficiently staggered that residential real estate reassesses even if it does so slowly. Consequently, it's not really religious to remove commercial real estate from Prop 13.
The problem is that Prop 13 is worth sooooo much money to entrenched California commercial real estate owners (like The Irvine Company) that you have to be prepared for a MASSIVE money firefight if you really want to go after commercial real estate on it.
And on the topic of residential, up until a few years ago if you died your heirs were allowed to inherit your tax basis, no strings attached, and so the "staggering" you're talking about has never really "staggered" en masse (if I'm understanding the way you're using that word). On top of that, even people who purchased property as late as 2020 are already massively benefiting from Prop 13. Each day home prices appreciate the new homeowner population just keeps replacing the dead in the anti-repeal camp for residential.
Edit: I was trying to put a footnote but it turned into italics so I just dropped the footnote
As used in Section 33700, “firearm barrel” means the tube, usually metal and cylindrical, through which a projectile or shot charge is fired. A firearm barrel includes any forging, casting, printing, extrusion, machined body, or similar article that has reached a stage in manufacture where it may readily be completed, assembled, or converted to be used as a firearm barrel, or that is marketed or sold to the public to become or be used as a firearm barrel once completed, assembled, or converted. A firearm barrel may have a rifled or smooth bore.Have you read the bill? It literally outlaws (without background check) any piece of pipe which you can readily fire a projectile from. You can do that with pretty much any pipe, just by adjusting the charge and projectile size/type.
Even the process used to make PVC pipes is explicitly called out, which is extrusion.
That is clearly not what the bill says, nor can it even be tortuously misconstrued as such.
They can drag in a potato cannon, maybe light it with some black powder if compressed air doesn't "count", and show that the PVC pipe readily expelled the projectile and thus the pipe by itself is a "firearm barrel" if it can readily be placed into such a potato gun. It would be no problem to prosecute someone for selling the PVC pipe to a plumber and 100% meet the letter of the law.
I don't see that as farcical but rather a straightforward application of the law. Maybe you find the law farcical/cranky but my interpretation isn't.
When time is money, such delays are takings from the applicant, and work like mafia protection money.
A firearm barrel includes any forging, casting, printing, extrusion, machined body, or similar article that has reached a stage in manufacture where it may readily be completed, assembled, or converted to be used as a firearm barrel
“firearm barrel” means the tube, usually metal and cylindrical, through which a projectile or shot charge is fired
Needed, won't fix housing next month or even next year.
Sometimes I wonder if a state went out and bought the input supply stocks (wood, particleboard, roofing materials) and sold them below cost at the longer base-line price, but exclusively to builders constructing homes, if they could prevent a grey market re-sale to the less housing oriented market. The problem with trying to drag supply prices back down is making secondary markets between your rate, and the market rate.
I am not believing there is an actual shortage worldwide of either construction grade lumber, or other inputs: Its shipping related, its logjams backing up because .. well .. the wheels fell off at the start of 2020 and we haven't got momentum back up.
Oh right. Ships. So maybe the state has to buy ships.. which demands steel.. which is hard to get right now...
I keep hearing this criticism but I think it’s less about home values and more about how many people - wealthy and not wealthy - simply value their quality of life and don’t want that to be damaged by forced rezoning.
It's utterly absurd looking from the outside that officials are claiming the permits are being "fast tracked" even now.
The duplex I'm in took... 4-5 years of permitting? Something like that.
Totally insane waits, I agree.
Many (most) have not yet had permits issued for rebuilding, most commonly because the owners can not meet, or are unwilling to meet, the standards for septic systems.
There have been decades of higher standards for all sorts of code. Nothing nearly as stringent for multifsmlt housing, a code which makes housing six times safer than single family housing. But still strict enough that four decades of no-growth policy left most people completely unaware of how hard it is to build housing.
It may be that the septic regulations are excessive, but oddly I've never heard anybody argue that the regulations are unnecessary, they just argue that they don't want to follow them because they didn't have to in the past. I'd be a bit more sympathetic to the mountain folks if they had an argument that the regulations were incorrect.
The real property seizure is what's happening to the public land so that people can live for cheap and not cover their own pollution. People still have the land. Though if they want to try to overturn Euclid v. Amber and make zoning illegal, I'm there to help them! Necessary environmental regulations are not something I want to overturn, however.
however, it is undeniable that there was a change in regulation and restriction, even if that is going from a river quality is optional to the priority.
Beneficiaries are happy to benefit, and if that takes away powers and property from others, so be it.
This is the dynamic that I am highlighting.
https://recovery.lacounty.gov/rebuilding/permitting-progress...
2162 permit applications received; 1916 applications have full plans submitted. 534 permits issued so far.
I don't think those people exist... State/City budgets have already been cut lean on this stuff and most places that aren't in the middle of a disaster are many months behind as it is.
You cannot add ~60 million foreign national people to the US population in the last 25 years without severely impacting the housing situation when the USA has only built 1.1 million housing units on average over that period; most of those being locked into high prices due to the massive inflation over that time.
What makes it even worse is this obsession with both concentrating populations and jobs in urban centers, while at the same time being concerned with climate change and environmental protection. They are mutually exclusive things. This is an iron triangle issue, you can only have two of three things: affordable housing, immigration, climate/environment protection.
Source: You made it up.
Being closer to where the things are so you can walk significantly drops the amount of fuel needed for transportation and opens up public transportation as a workable option.
> USA has only built 1.1 million housing units on average over that period;
That's a government issue, not a practical one. How many housing units did China build in that same amount of time?
Higher density housing -- and a lot of it -- solves for all three, right? If not, why not?
I benefit immensely financially from "immigrants", but that does not mean it is just and I have the integrity to be honest about that. You clearly do not. Stealing by abstraction and supporting it makes you a bad person, not at all the good person you think you are by supporting "immigration", regardless of whether I get richer today than you make in one year or not because of immigrants.
Relative to the rest of the area, for that specific pollutant, yes. Relative to a city dwelling of the same distance, no. Volume (ie Traffic) matters when comparing health impacts.
A suburbanite driving on their river of pollution for 50 miles every day is a much bigger impact than somebody taking the bus and train in the city. And even city streets do not see the level of pollution caused by freeways that snake through suburbs throughout the Bay Area and LA.
But honestly the gas stoves in most California kitchens are the true killer, yet nobody seems to even bother talking about that.
In any case: environmental metrics I had always thought about things that impact the environment: reduction of ecosystem, death of a particular types of animals (especially the ones we like), unhealthy water ways, etc. On all these, suburban life is absolutely horrific, urban and very rural life is pretty good. If you can drive to the Costco, you are probably living in the least environmentally friendly way possible.
As far as health metrics, whether from environmental effects or crime or the actual real killers: obesity, smoking, blood pressure, and heat disease, cities do better than rural areas:
https://schaeffer.usc.edu/research/rural-americans-dont-live...
Our cars are killing us in every way yet we refuse to acknowledge the massive health effects.
> A suburbanite driving on their river of pollution for 50 miles every day is a much bigger impact than somebody taking the bus and train in the city.
This is moving the goalpost. Now it's distance plus traffic to reach for a pre-decided conclusion.
> As far as health metrics, whether from environmental effects or crime or the actual real killers: obesity, smoking, blood pressure, and heat disease, cities do better than rural areas:
Rural is not the same as suburb and not rural. A suburb is generally still a city, albeit smaller...depending on how one wants to define "city", I guess.
I have health conditions, originating from congenital defect. I have an electric stove. I moved out of a SoCal city, as I was raised next to a major (5) interchange. I live in the largest city of my state, which would be called a suburb somewhere else and my medical care is EXCELLENT for reasons that are particular to my area.
There's an argument to be made that cars provide economic and financial mobility, leveraged by the upper classes, which is why cars are not properly demonized. That's a separate topic from health.
I hope this helps you make stronger arguments in your next exchange, because I share some of these views as well.
What goalpost was moved? The freeway is the major producer of pollution, the major concentration of it. This is well documented in the literature on PM2.5: being close to a freeway is a major risk factor but urban areas are not a major risk factor.
If there's a freeway, it's not an urban area, it's a suburban area.
> I hope this helps you make stronger arguments in your next exchange,
I have no idea how you think you poked any holes at all in my argument, but this statement clearly thinks you have! Could you clarify what you think I said was wrong and how?
Living next to a major interchange is definitely living a huuuuge health risk, but again it's mostly a suburban risk.
> There's an argument to be made that cars provide economic and financial mobility, leveraged by the upper classes, which is why cars are not properly demonized. That's a separate topic from health.
If there's an argument, it's very weak. Cars are very expensive, draining the bank accounts of those on the lower end of the economic scale. Yet because we have capped density, those same people on the lower end of the economic scale must travel long distances from farther away, instead of being allowed a place in a city. Density plus transit offer a cheaper alternative without the burden of large car payments, the huge repair bills of cheap used cars, the monthly car insurance payments, and the debt trap of having to buy a car to even get a job.
Short of seizing property and approvals for already lodged designs which were turned down for local opposition, it's all about time now. Time to start doing things under a new legal planning system.
Also, these new people would vote. The old NIMBYs are already opposing everything; how harder can they go? The demographic change might be enough to change local politics in some places.
When California for once does the right thing and stands up to NIMBYs, conservatives hold it up as an example of how liberals are ruining the state.
Why am I not surprised.
I wish the people of California the best of luck exceeding dwelling quotas in the upcoming seventh cycle! :P
Edit: I forgot how sensitive people can be to the word 'socialism'. I am not trying imply - with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer - that California is the Soviet Union. I am just genuinely amused by the language being used, speaking as someone with family history of living under socialism.
It's better than the alternative of letting local governments do what they want, but it very much is a socialist planning exercise.
That of course doesn't rebut your comment about RHNA reminding you of socialism, but bringing up socialism when this thread is about legislation that's about as capitalist as you're going to get in California is a bit ironic.
Edit: I'm not criticizing you by pointing out the irony, but since you said you're not that familiar with California I thought I'd mention how capitalist this legislation is.
(I will say that Wiener has had some missteps, on AI and restaurant fees, but they are pretty small compared to the good policy that he's gotten through.)
"If we, your landlords, own a LOT more housing, surely you can see how that will trickle down to YOU eventually owning a house. It's obvious isn't it? Our goal as investors is to build so many houses that prices will crash and everyone will be able to afford a house to live in. That's what we deeply want for all, and that's why we need to end zoning laws."
There's this weird tendency to treat people in new housing as not people, as non humans.
In reality we have a massive housing shortage, and tons of people living in crowded situations, and massive displacement of the working class out of California.
All those people exist, are real, and are helped massively by new housing. One doesn't have to own a home to be a human with needs.
Why do we have to be thankful and grateful for that?
The landlord lobby explicitly opposes this because new housing challenges their monopoly. They are pro-shortage for very obvious reasons, and this comment shows you have misunderstood the situation entirely.