The zoning in my neighborhood is actually fantasy. The zoning for residential has FAR limits that one would expect in the outer suburbs, whereas the actual housing is quite a bit more dense. Only a small percentage of buildings conforms to the zoning limits. Which means even the most trivial change requires a variance.
>Which means even the most trivial change requires a variance.
That's a feature, not a bug.
By forcing even mundane projects to go through a process where approval depends on the whims of the decision makers they have set themselves up to extract concessions from basically every project on a whim, fast track things they like (often things run by people they like) and stonewall things that they don't (don't get on their bad side if you want their approval in an expedient fashion).
Landowners are so deeply invested in their properties that they support the local politicians who create supply-restrictive policies to further inflate asset prices.
Or it's all a giant conspiracy that is closed to non-elite citizens. I actually have no idea how one would become the official who rewrites zoning laws anyway.
I think that effect only happens today in most places due to the pent up demand and restrictive zoning in place.
E.g.:
In Seattle when they upzone a small area it immediately goes up in value because a builder can put say four houses now and sell more units. There is nowhere else that can be done so that land has a premium on it due to the restrictive zoning in the rest of the city.
Now if the whole city was up zoned at the same time then the zoning would not affect the value of the land, only its amenity and location factors as per usual. In fact in this case land values would likely drop overall because now more units can be built everywhere allowing more people to live in the city in a variety of housing types, we reduced the supply demand gap and that affects the value of land overall.
it’s quite unlikely that land value will go down with upzoning. when you can build more, the value you can extract from a fixed amount of land goes up. but what may happen is that an individual unit on that land may sell for a little less for a short period of time.
If, and only if, you want to leverage the value of your land by selling or borrowing against it. If you don't want to (or don't need to) do either of these, loosening the zoning restrictions would only make your location less valuable (industry/dense housing moving into a formerly townhome exclusive neighborhood) to you.
Right now, the above is possible by regulatory capture, shifting the cost of preservation onto adjacent landowners who do want to build and the larger community for underutilizing a precious, shared resource (land).
Run for county/city elected office. Or even neighborhood zoning commission. A friend recently won a spot on his neighborhood’s planning commission in Columbus, OH. The vote counts were in the hundreds.
There is no conspiracy. Most homeowners who oppose further housing growth are far more concerned with quality of life issues (traffic, noise, crime, pollution) than with inflating their asset values. You can run for your local city council just like any other citizen but you're unlikely to win if you don't understand actual voters.
I will rally my friends and I to all run as a bloc and try to gain a majority on the council.
I'm sure some voters are concerned with the things you mentioned.
I'm also sure other voters are concerned with lowering the price of rent. This can be done by increasing supply of housing, which can be done by increasing both the number of people who can live in one lot, as well as increasing the number of lots.
In his Long Now talk and elsewhere, Saul Griffith makes the claim that because of restrictive zoning laws, solving climate change on a personal level is actually illegal (because of solar panel installation and wood-burning stove restrictions): http://longnow.org/seminars/02015/sep/21/infrastructure-and-...
That's a strong claim, but I like that Saul is talking about changing local building laws to make green infrastructure a possibility.
Yes. And by making it illegal for people to build living spaces near Work, they're contributing greatly to global warming because it increases commute lengths. Imagine a 4 mile commute vs 40 mile commute, the 40 miles we commute here in the bay area is 10 times more pollution!
Why do we have clearly divided zoned areas for work and residential again? What era did that start?
I understand if it was a pig slaughterhouse or night club or something like that. But even the early 1900s had office buildings, law offices, various small shops, and other quiet firms.
Seems like a heavy-handed approach in retrospect. If anything the laws should be related to the type of business or externalities (noise, smell, etc) it produces rather than on strict residential/work/industrial lines.
We should set it up so that it is based on air, water, noise pollution zoning: Law offices next to (or inside a single family house should be OK). However, if the law office attracts 50 cars per day, then obviously they are going to break noise/air pollution requirements.
Similarly there's no way for a quiet old couple that wants a quiet neighborhood to stay quiet unless the zoning allows for it. A lot of people would consider a Q1 zone anti-familyist but the REASON such a zone would be desireable is that's what rich people pay for - they only want to hear their own noise - so they end up buying 7 lots around their mansion.
We shouldn't make the need to want absolute peace and quiet a price but instead just let that group of people that want the same thing live next door to each other. Instead we encourage people to buy rural properties in a forest.
Sorry for that aside but zones for quiet level, air and water pollution levels - but traffic induced by business should be considered as part of the zoning, and then get rid of the residential / commercial separation - just focus on the pollutions.
I think the big problems are parking minimums and a lack of mixed-use zoning in many areas. Walkable areas encourage density, which helps reduce noise and air pollution.
I much prefer my traffic-free 0.9 mile commute. Previous jobs have been 4.5, 10.5, 4.3, 4.4, and 8.7 miles.
My secret is very small cities. They generally have suburban density, but aren't technically suburban because there isn't a rush-hour commute to a larger city. These places are also affordable. For example, median houses (typically about 1500 square feet on 0.25 acre) go for about $150,000 in Melbourne, FL.
please convince my employers and all other employers to move to those small cities. i don't think employees have much power to decide where they can work: employers have all the bargaining power. Why else would any company set up shop in places like SF, Palo alto, penninsula, etc?
It wouldn't matter if people could build living spaces near work. They'd still commute. People change jobs without changing homes.
There are various reasons: rent control would be lost, property tax control would be lost, kids would need to attend different schools, spouse would need a job in the same location, real estate agents eat 6% of home value, etc.
So it works for a person's first job, assuming a 1-income household. After a few years, there is a job change, and then never again is work close to home.
If you want to tackle commute distances you need to deal with all the reasons people refuse to move. You can't count on people staying with the same employer forever.
Several states have laws that override local law as it relates to solar panel install restrictions (See: Florida). They even override your HOA.
With regards to wood burning stoves, that's more of an insurance issue (homeowner's insurance providers do not care for wood burning stoves due to the fire risk).
If you've ever lived next door to someone who's had an high BTU wood burning stove you'll know why they have restrictions, I would never purchase property where a neighbor or someone close to the residence had one. Green energy source or not they're not something you want to live near unless you never open your windows or spend time outside, they stink.
Citation needed for the "just fine" claim. Heating options were a lot more limited in the past for many people. If your choice is between freezing to death soon or making it through the winter but doing long term serious damage to your health, you'll pick the later, but it has hard to call that "just fine".
> The biggest health threat from smoke is from fine particles, also called fine particulate matter or PM2.5. These microscopic particles can get into your eyes and respiratory system, where they may cause burning eyes, runny nose, and illnesses, such as bronchitis.
> Fine particles can make asthma symptoms worse and trigger asthma attacks. Fine particles can also trigger heart attacks, stroke, irregular heart rhythms, and heart failure, especially in people who are already at risk for these conditions.
The problem isn't just the smell. When lots of people install wood-burning stoves in a dense urban area, it causes a huge increase in air pollution with all the health issues inevitably that come with that.
Many people don't use wood burning stoves properly. If you condition and burn the wood correctly there's very little smell or smoke. But lots of people just toss anything in and don't even control the burn which leads to more byproducts.
Wait, what? How are wood-burning stoves considered "green"? They release tons of particulate matter into the air (health hazard, and I can't imagine that's good for the environment, either), are generally pretty dirty, don't scale, and require tons of labor (and deforestation) to feed.
Saul said had a relative with forested land that he could cut sustainably to make up for the energy he couldn't quite get from rooftop solar of his SF home (if I recall correctly).
Good article. I think I'm seeing the kind of breakdown that can occur from excessive zoning regulations in my own mainly SFH neighborhood in SF.
I live in a neighborhood south of 280 near a bart station. Historically, it was a middle income neighborhood, and it is zoned SFH. The houses almost all have a small front and back yard. The front setback for many of the houses is the length of a car, with a driveway in the middle and a small garden to each side. The ground floor was almost always originally an extended garage with perhaps a storage room.
I think you can see it all falling apart. The proximity of this neighborhood to the peninsula, downtown SF and south of market, and the location near Bart and several muni rail lines, along with the general housing crunch in SF, has simply rendered this land too valuable for SFH residences. SF is trying, and failing, to suppress the alternate use of this land that the market is increasingly demanding.
Now, I'm not arguing that land use regulations are inherently bad, and I believe that SF is bad at governing. But here's what's happened.
The bottom floor, what was once a garage and storage room, has almost always been converted to a ground floor apartment or flat. Some people have gone so far as to replace the garage door with a wall and a front door. With the garage space gone, people have paved over the front setbacks next to their driveway, in order to park three cars in front of the house. Although curb cuts are technically allowed only to access the driveway and garage, these residents do of course keep the curb cut as a reserved parking spot in front of their house.
I'm not sure what to make of it. But one thought I've had is that what we're seeing here is an attempt to convert an old SFH neighborhood in to multi unit dwellings, and it has actually been a bit of a disaster. Curb cuts are no longer used to provide access to a garage, but they do break street into small sections, all too small to legally park a car, so total parking is a wash (though it does provide residents with a reserved spot). The illegal but largely unenforced pave overs have led to higher volumes of water going into the combined storm and sewage system (an archaic but energy efficient gravity based system used in SF, possible because it's a hilly place), and the excess water, mixed with sewage, floods the lower level spots where the pipes bottleneck, severely damaging properties and subjecting residents to severe health and safety risks.
Fascinatingly, San Francisco remains very strict and expensive where it comes to permits, but there's a level of permit violation that SF seems to just not bother with. In other words, you can do an un-permitted remodel of your downstairs, add drains, pave over the soil filter, create a massive sewage flooding problem, and sf will do... nothing. But if you were to try to tear down a house and replace it with a properly engineered multi unit dwelling... are you kidding me? SF will charge you upwards of 20k inspection and permit fees just to remodel the downstairs within the existing footprint of the house, if you do it legally. Anything beyond that is a massive delay with massive fees, and in most places, converting to official Muti unit dwellings is a non-starter.
The result is lots of illegal in-laws, with dodgy electrical and plumbing, in an area that is likely to flood due to illegal pave overs. During one of the heavy rain episodes, someone's dog was electrocuted and died. Really, I'd give it even odds that someone is going to die from this situation before long.
When I look around, I see something that just isn't working anymore. And while I bought into a SFH neighborhood, I do see something deeply immoral about restricting development in an urban neighborhood with excellent public transportation options close to job centers, in a world where low income janitors and fast food workers engage in soul and family destroying commutes for hours from exurb sprawl. It's nearly inconceivab...
You're certainly not alone in that belief. SF is probably one of the most poorly governed cities in the world, especially when you consider its budget relative to what it accomplishes.
San Francisco's budget is an interesting thing. In some ways, I think it goes back to the city that fits into the box and the city that is trying to burst out of it.
I think SF still thinks of itself as a small, scenic city of 850000, a strange hybrid of cosmopolitan and provincial traits. It fits neatly into a small box. For this version of SF, a small, pleasant place with a stable population, a budget over 11 billion (last year's number) is huge. It's enough that SF gov't can burn hundreds of millions on programs that don't solve problems and still stay solvent.
I think the problem is that the 11+ billion dollar budget actually reflects a much bigger and more dynamic city that is outgrowing that small box, and you can see the strain. This San Francisco needs a vastly improved public transportation system. San Francisco's city streets are overwhelmed, and the NIMBYs near my neighborhood aren't wrong when they say traffic from higher density will grind to a halt with the higher density apartments the YIMBYs are asking for. We can't do this with our existing infrastructure, we can't do this if everyone's going to get to work in their own SUV with their own parking space, and I personally believe we're already seeing this paralysis even with our restrictive building codes (largely because in the absence of proper housing, 8 adults will cram into a single family house, and they'll all want to park somewhere). Public transportation needs to be safe and efficient, it needs to have a vastly greater coverage reach, much of it should ideally be underground in SF proper, and it needs to link suburban and exurban areas to allow people to reach job centers. I'm a parent, and SF park and rec summer camps filled up so fast that people are waiting by the computer, watching the international clock, and are content if they can fill up a third of their schedule (it's a real crapshoot). San Francisco needs vastly expanded services. We'll need a much better storm draining and sewage system, maybe with pumps in some areas, we need better drainage "sinks" and areas with more soil filter, probably expanded sewage treatment centers, we need to relieve bottlenecks. It goes on and on.
When you think about what SF needs to get done, 11 billion doesn't seem like so much. Unfortunately, as it stands, I think SF views it as a windfall that can buttress ineffective government and wasteful programs.
From what you've read, you can probably tell I'm not an anti-government type, though I am wary of excessive government programs, since I do think they have a tendency to be wasteful. SF needs good government and proper infrastructure badly, and it's going to cost $$.
Incompetent and corrupt government is an inevitable consequence of having a single-party political machine. Historically that has always been a problem at any scale of government from whole nation states down to cities.
To be clear, I'm not making a Republican versus Democrat argument here. The problem is the lack of a viable alternative rather than the particular party in power.
> you can do an un-permitted remodel of your downstairs, add drains, pave over the soil filter, create a massive sewage flooding problem, and sf will do... nothing. But if you were to try to tear down a house and replace it with a properly engineered multi unit dwelling... are you kidding me?
This is a really good point. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this applies to US in general; not just SF. Cities will never inspect your house unless you give them a reason (e.g. apply for a permit).
The main deterrents to un-permitted work are: 1) if you need to sell the house, buyers don't like unpermitted work, and 2) your neighbors can file a complaint.
Why should a city have standing to inspect your house without a reason? "[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated"
I've bought two houses in my life. Both had obviously unpermitted work; I had no issue in either case as it was generally acceptable quality of work. If a shopper for my house has a problem with unpermitted work when I go to sell, they're free to move along and find a house without any.
Without a reason, they shouldn't. But there's an ambiguous area in there.
For instance, my house in SF actually shares a foundation with the two neighboring houses. This was an issue when I wanted to remodel to get better ceiling heights. I'd say I'm not free to do whatever I want with a shared foundation.
Also, when you share a wall, you do have an interest in verifying that the electrical and firewall work done next to your house is up to code.
It can get out of hand, but there are a lot of reasons for permits and inspections. I don't think entering someone's house, scheduled well in advance, with a very limited agenda to simply verify that recently added wiring in a dense, crowded neighborhood with shared walls, and leaving immediately afterwards, would qualify as an unreasonable search and seizure.
You're describing an inspection of work associated with a permit. I don't think anyone reasonably objects to that.
It sounded in your earlier post that you were suggesting (or lamenting the lack of) periodic inspections for the purposes of finding unpermitted work, which I (and probably many others) would find unreasonable and likely contrary to the 4th Amendment.
My biggest lament is the pave over of the external front setback (yard), as this is the really destructive practice on s large scale. When the practice becomes widespread, The loss of soil filter really does harm to the infrastructure. This could be inspected with a simple drive by. Sf actually does enforce this on a complaint driven basis with a fine, though there’s a backlog and a quick drive through many sf neighborhoods will suggest little to no enforcement.
Entering someone’s home is a big deal. Ideally there would be strong cause and very limited scope.
On a related note, I do think that if you Airbnb, you’ve left the realm of home and entered the realm of commercial property subject to audit for public safety.
I did not suggest any solutions (period inspections or what not).
I'm pointing out that the situation - that we have a set rules (zoning), but they aren't enforced - which causes people to knowingly build without a permit.
The parent comment provided legitimate reasons why cities have some zoning rules in place (shared sewage, flooding, etc..).
In Japan zoning laws only say the maximum annoyance a piece of land can have.
In other words, you can build small residential buildings anywhere, even in industrial zones if you want. But you can only build industrial if the zone allows it.
In America, people would build their houses around an industrial zone and then complain about the industry -- this happens all the time. For some nuisances, like airports, it has broader impacts beyond just the industrial zone.
Gotta love the people who think they're real estate geniuses for buying cheap houses near an airport then realizing the airport is loud so they try to close it.
Don't buy a house off the end of a runway unless you want to listen to my 230HP of bug smashing power...
An issue we hit recently was our place, while near-ish an airport (well, a couple of miles away), didn't have much issues. Then several years after we bought, they changed their software I guess (thats the story anyway) which decided all planes should go over our house, and at much lower altitude than they historically would.
So literally one day everything is fine, then the next its hell. Then people started saying "Well its your fault for buying near an airport". That wasn't great :(
You can talk to the FAA and the airport about it, though it helps to get educated about how it all works and come at it from the point of view of trying to help keep everyone happy.
Is it Bravo (big blue circles around it, major commercial airport), Charlie (medium maroon circles, large secondary commercial), Delta (small single dark blue dashed circle, small controlled airport), or uncontrolled (no circle or dashed magenta, local GA airport)?
If it's one of the first three, see if you can find the Standard Instrument Departures (SIDs) and Standard Terminal Arrival Routes (STARs) and see where they put aircraft in relation to you and at what altitudes (underlined altitudes are minimum, overlined are maximum).
This is just another type of arbitrage. Buy up property that's undervalued due to a nuisance, make the property more appealing by resolving the nuisance, then sell the property for a profit.
This isn't fundamentally different from fixing up some old house.
Shutting down a nuisance is doing the entire neighborhood a favor, and that land can be repurposed to provide more housing in an area that sorely needs it.
The airports and race tracks were almost certainly built in the middle of nowhere originally. They can relocate some place that's currently a middle of nowhere. Airports and race tracks should exist in areas where land is cheap and abundant, not in places where lots of people want to live.
The land owners make a huge profit from selling the land to developers, current residence see their property values go up, and more people have the opportunity to live closer to work.
Or we could zone appropriately for higher density housing to slow the spread of urban sprawl and not have to rebuild our airports every few years because people are incapable of doing basic research on their investments?
The freight trains that went by my college couldn't use their horns at night because of entitled transplants. Nevermind that these trains had been running before the college was founded, much less before any real development occurred in the area, clearly it's the poor homeowners who are suffering from the evil railroads because how can they be expected to do the least bit of research and find out that there's an active railway nearby when touring homes? Doesn't matter that it leads to more idiots who don't believe the crossing guards getting their cars destroyed, or that night shift workers still get to sleep through the horns during the day, the only thing that's important is their personal convenience because moving takes more effort than whining to the city council.
A big issue IMO is that cities insist on having one size fit all noise ordinances, and then use "guts feeling" to enforce it, or have "ambient noise" clauses to justify where they are enforced. That means without a LOT of research, you can never really know whats acceptable in an area, and you certainly cannot count on the real estate agent or neighbors to tell you, property value impact and all.
In my town, we have a noise ordinance where the max decibel is way too high for a quiet residential area, but way too low for the downtown neighborhoods. So you get a lot of "You live in a city, expect noise!". But not everywhere in the city is the same! So it's just enforced nilly willy. People can't easily make a choice. Some neighborhoods are obvious, some are not. Some parts of the city are only noisy in summer, some only in winter, and so on.
Noise ordinances should be tied to zoning in some way. Then if people buy a house near a train, they can't bitch about the train noise. At the same time, if someone wants a cheaper house and don't give a fuck about the noise, they just got themselves a great deal!
There's one catch: realistically, most people care about noise to some degree. Once you have it clearly "labeled", properties in less noisy areas will become more expensive and you'll have segregation by income. The rich will live in quiet areas, the poor in noisy ones. Oh, and then people with kids screaming louder than the train will claim it doesn't apply to them (even though 95% of the kids in the area will be doing just fine).
Its a tough problem, but IMO, the easier we make it for like minded people to live together, the better. Right now, regardless of your criterias, if you want to live in an area that meets criteria X for a long period of time, you have to get lucky AND go all NIMBY when things change. It just so happens that things like housing density is the topic of the day.
Zoning laws being absurdly restrictive is often used to explain why not enough is built (eg: single family housing). But if zoning forced skyscrappers, it would be just as restrictive.
I wish. I don't even remember the last time I opened my windows. I have a white noise machine, I live with headphones, I sleep with earplugs.
NOTHING stops the sound of kids screaming. Nevermind the jack hammers starting at 6:30 am (because fuck enforcing noise ordinances in a deadend of a usually quiet neighborhood!).
Made worse because I live in a city where even "high end" constructions are made out of cardboard (yeah, I'm planning on moving, but thats not easy, and who's to say the place I move to won't be just as bad?)
> idiots who don't believe the crossing guards getting their cars destroyed
I find it hard to accept that the kind of idiot that rolls through/around a downed crossing guard is suddenly going to be swayed into common sense by the sound of a horn. Both equally imply "impending train".
Here's a little thought experiment that I like to conduct about housing. Suppose you had two politicians in a race. Politician A gets up in front of the crowd and says:
> If you elect me I'm going to work for the people of this community, I'm going to make sure that your most valuable asset, your home, keeps its value. In fact not only is it going to stay valuable, if you elect me it's going to get more valuable, under me your house will appreciate 5% every year.
Politician B then gets up and says:
> If you elect me I'm going to make sure that you have to be rich to buy a home in our community. In fact I'm going to raise the bar and make sure that every year you need to be 5% richer to afford a home than you needed to be the year before.
Based just on these two snippets, most people I've asked would vote for Pol A, but what they're saying is essentially the same thing. And that gets at the very difficult issue we're broaching here. Our concept of housing as an investment can't coexist with a concept of housing as a commodity that should be affordable to the majority of the population. We need to let go of one of them to achieve the other.
Well, of course people aren't going to tell you they'd vote for Politician B, because that makes them look like jerks. But subconsciously, a lot of people do agree with Politician B. If you have a job in Palo Alto, do you genuinely want "Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel" to be able to move in next door? Have you seriously considered what sort of problems that would have on you and your fellow workers who want to get to sleep at a reasonable hour so you can be productive at work, when Cletus wants to shoot off fireworks all night?
>Have you seriously considered what sort of problems that would have on you and your fellow workers who want to get to sleep at a reasonable hour so you can be productive at work, when Cletus wants to shoot off fireworks all night?
i cant tell if this is satire or if you actually agree with it
The fact that he chooses the hypothetical bad neighbor Cletus makes me think he's satirizing the people who consider "devoid of any visible or audible evidence of people lower class than me" a prerequisite of a "good " neighborhood. See also: Poe's Law.
That said, his point is totally valid. When you say "affordable" most upper middle class people hear "poor people".
Just wanted to point out that Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel is a character from The Simpsons who satirizes the type of person that people generally refer to as "hillbilly".
Background: I grew up and spent my young adulthood in poverty. I used a hypothetical character from The Simpsons, but I have in mind some very much non-hypothetical characters, including some who threatened my family after I complained about their playing loud music with a subwoofer in the wee hours of the morning. Nowadays, I've clawed my way out of poverty, and I pay a (very large) premium to have a house where I don't have to worry about that kind of stuff any more. I'm sympathetic to the problem of housing affordability (duh: I've been on the other side), but before you address that, you have to come up with a reasonable alternative solution to make sure the people who like partying all night go in one place and the people who like sleeping all night go in another place. Nothing to do with race or class, and it's super unfortunate that in our capitalist society, class is the only proxy for accomplishing that cultural distribution.
There was backlash about buildings in New York having two different entrances, one for the posh people in the penthouses and one for the other schmoes. I thought it was rather a good idea, everybody gets to live downtown but don't have to run into each other. Sometimes liberals aren't realistic about how people actually live life. https://nypost.com/2013/08/18/upper-west-side-condo-has-sepa...
Well when are they supposed to shoot them off? They don't look nearly as impressive in the daytime. ;)
People always say "oh well if your neighbor did X you'd want zoning too". I've lived in those kinds of places and I mind the end-game of escalating lower class trashiness a lot less than I mind the endgame of upper middle class conformity. Bring on the fireworks, the ATVs, the loud music in languages I don't even speak and the drunken arguments.
I currently live in such a neighborhood that checks all those boxes. Honestly it doesn't bother me that much. An interior bedroom and solid brick exterior walls mean I don't hear much from outside while I'm asleep.
I agree zoning is the wrong way to address this. What's needed is a responsive police force that will address noise complaints. Unfortunately police in areas where these things tend to be a problem have more important things to attend to most of the time.
If you know of any, let me know. The problem is that any harness you buy will get more loose as it is warn, and panicked dogs can get out of a harness the same way you can get out of a t-shirt: line your head and arms up along the same axis and back up. A harness is only really effective if the dog is moving forward and away from you, not if they are backing away from you in a desperate panic.
On the 4th, it wasn't random. The days following? I can't predict when fireworks are going to go off. (That's irrelevant anyway, as the dog needs to go out regardless of the date.)
I don't know, but I will say that it's easy to indignant about these things when they don't happen to you.
When I grew up, we lived in an unincorporated area with minimal noise and other ordinances. A new neighbor moves in next store and basically spends 20-40 hours a week shooting at a bell and fixed targets from 7AM-?. They would use everything from .22s ("ding, ding, ..., ding") to various pistols, AK-47/SKS rifles, to hunting rifles daily. After church on Sunday most summers consisted of watermelon demolition via shotgun. My mom worked nights, and it made her life miserable.
Fast forward to my recent past. I live in a city, in a mixed neighborhood of 1-4 family houses. Some asshole decides to illegally convert his 2-family flat into a 10 unit SRO. So now we're stuck with people who are willing to live in that kind of situation (ie. mostly drug addicts and drunks) hanging around yucking it up all night. We were only able to shut it down when the slumlord guy decided to illegally convert the front porches into two more units, and when cited by the code officer chose to assault him.
I get the pushback to zoning, but it exists because of substantial minority of the population are assholes. My dad ran subsidized housing programs for years and built personal relationships with many of the stakeholders that I got to be a small part of -- the narrative on HN is that poor people are fighting zoning, the reality is that poor people are often the biggest advocates for it, but are denied due process. Nobody wants to live around slumlord apartments, or have industrial activity in their backyard -- but the most vulnerable people have the worst ability to secure representation and demand attention.
I can sleep at Burning Man with ear splitting sound camps blaring mere feet from my tent. It's called earplugs, they work well and they're very cheap. I've used them to equal success at home on the Fourth of July, too. It simply isn't a big deal. Let Cletus light firecrackers and work on his car in his own drive way. Who the hell are you to tell him otherwise? Go live in an HOA if you want to tell your neighbors how they can and can't behave on their own property.
There are those of us for whom 32db NRR earplugs are a necessity when sleeping in a normal house in a normal neighborhood, where we don't have such extremes of noise coming from the outside world.
We would be completely unable to survive in the world that you so casually dismiss.
I would encourage you to be very careful in choosing the kind of world that would be turned into your own personal hell.
Just because something works for you, it doesn't mean it works for everyone else, or that everyone else would even find it tolerable.
I have a lot of difficulty falling asleep (exacerbated by even the most comfortable of earplugs), and a decent amount of difficulty staying asleep once I do. It is absolutely not unreasonable to expect that people adhere to low noise levels at night. If you want to stay in a place where people are exploding things outside your house, knock yourself out. You are certainly in the minority.
Wait 'til they wake up your baby and toddler at OMG o'clock. At this point you value how considerate your neighbours are, because confrontation or police calls are inevitable if you don't have a good relationship with them.
Or your could tell your partner to stick earplugs in the baby's ears and see what happens...
The only actual choice being offered in this experiment is between having a guilty conscience or not, since A and B are substantively the same thing. As such, of course people are going to choose politician A. The choice of not treating housing as an investment wasn't even offered.
I think the point was to examine just these two politicians to show that the two messages are the same in different clothing. It wasn't to suggest that there wasn't alternatives.
I would even say that the alternatives have the same issue.
Politician C: I will make sure that housing remains affordable.
Politician D: I will make sure that your housing investment does grow.
But C is (loosely) the negation of B and D is (loosely) the negation of A. While there are other choices, the likely ones people vote are are the first group (A, B) verses the second group (C, D), normally with the options appearing in their nicer forms.
In short, affordable housing and having homes be worthwhile investments are at odds with each other in most issues.
That's what I was getting at. Politician C is making an argument similar to what the original article is making. If you tried to make the D argument: I would make sure that your housing investment doesn't (I think that's what you meant) grow. The NYTimes would probably have no interest in publishing it, but for all intents and purposes it's the same argument with different optics.
>Our concept of housing as an investment can't coexist with a concept of housing as a commodity that should be affordable to the majority of the population.
That doesn't have to be true. The old story is that existing areas go from rural to middle to urban, rising in price. Everyone keeps moving further out, so there are always new houses. This story depends on constant urbanization and population growth in all wealth levels. "All wealth levels" is the important part, there has to be a year-by-year increase in the number of rich people so that the acres of expensive land bought by rich people can also increase. This will fail if population growth or social mobility fails, and from what I've heard both are in the process of shutting down.
That was the model of LA and plenty of working class people retired with a considerable nest egg at the end of the process - in the 60s through the 90s.
The problem is you run out of rings. The three hour commute ring is unsustainable, unlivable and the trend-setters try to move into the center again, city size reaches a maximum and quickly thrown-up roads and bridges start to decay.
But this is the model the US set up and now it has painted itself into a corner in this fashion and many others.
Well, if the majority of a community are renters, politician A's pitch theoretically would fall short also, compared to "elect me and I will create lots of affordable housing, rent will fall or stay stable and you will get more of your most valuable possession - disposable income"
The problem is even in that situation, the money of the home owner and apartment house owner speaks more loudly than the interests of the apartment dwellers.
That doesn't accurately characterize voter motivations. Many long-term renters also oppose loosening zoning rules due to quality of life concerns (traffic, noise, crime, pollution). It's not always just a money issue.
Furthermore, many renters believe that if more housing is built it will only be luxury housing that they couldn't afford anyway. Sure basic economics tells us that increasing supply ought to drive down prices for everyone, but at the individual level it's tough for people to make the connection.
That doesn't accurately characterize voter motivations. Many long-term renters also oppose loosening zoning rules due to quality of life concerns (traffic, noise, crime, pollution). It's not always just a money issue.
Well, the question is how many of the host of worries US voters express (fear of XYZ evil-doers) are effectively just devices conveniently maintained and manipulated by media, consults and other moneyed interests.
In fact more housing will always be luxury. In 30 years it will be old and affordable, but only if the rich who buy new all the time move on which they will only do if they are allowed to build something new that is more luxurious.
> Sure basic economics tells us that increasing supply ought to drive down prices for everyone, but at the individual level it's tough for people to make the connection.
Basic economics tells us that more supply lowers prices if everything else remains the same. Which it won't if the area becomes more popular.
"The assumption behind a demand curve or a supply curve is that no relevant economic factors, other than the product’s price, are changing. Economists call this assumption ceteris paribus, a Latin phrase meaning 'other things being equal'. If all else is not held equal, then the laws of supply and demand will not necessarily hold."
But even in the case where the area becomes more popular, a larger supply will result in lower prices than if the area had become more popular and did not increase supply.
Not necessarily and not from an economic perspective. One can argue that, but it depends on how building affects the market. For example by shifting demographics. But even so renters, without rent control, are only interested in the part of the market they can afford where they live. That is, the quantity supplied at their income level. Which is even more susceptible to changes. The assumption people are making about "basic economics" just aren't true. More supply just isn't a solid argument for affordability without supporting evidence, and especially not when it comes to housing.
Also, people associate neighborhoods in which there is lots of new luxury housing with neighborhoods in which prices rise fast. And they are not wrong, there is a correlation. Nobody builds new luxury housing in dying towns! But the causation is, of course, mostly not from the buildings to the prices.
>Many long-term renters also oppose loosening zoning rules due to quality of life concerns (traffic, noise, crime, pollution). It's not always just a money issue.
Most people who moved into a neighborhood because they liked it don't want it to change. Enjoying where you live gets you labelled as a NIMBY though. It's easier to dismiss people if you give them a sweet nickname I guess.
> Sure basic economics tells us that increasing supply ought to drive down prices for everyone, but at the individual level it's tough for people to make the connection.
It should be telling that the "housing crisis" only exists in the most desirable places to live. I don't believe there is a practical amount of supply that can be built to satisfy the demand for housing in these places. The supply of upper middle class people who want to live in SV, Manhattan or San Diego is more than enough to make sure the poor can never afford it. In fact, the only people I ever see overly concerned with it are the middle class who are just on the cusp of affordability.
I mean we're pretty much all going to want to live as close as possible to the mountain of gold that is the jobs in those areas, poor or rich. A poorer person can more easily get a replacement job in SV than anywhere else. In fact when it was still somewhat affordable (I've moved away from SV) I've had a friend that was just a terrible employee, they couldn't hold a job - but they were NEVER unemployed, they stayed with some hotel or waitress position for about a month - got fired, hired again somewhere else before you could blink. Her husband, after living there long enough eventually got a software QA position and they finally moved up - poor to middle overnight. Mountain of gold.
The problem is what actually happens when there are a lot of renters is that politicians promise the existing renters they'll impose rent control, which is basically a cross-subsidy that transfers money from newer renters to older ones while increasing average rents. Tomorrow's new renters don't live in the jurisdiction yet, so they can't vote against it, and enough of a minority of existing renters can be convinced they'll come out ahead that way that when you combine them with the minority of land owners they achieve 51% of the vote.
Then the land owners can push through whatever price-exploding rules they want as long as they can maintain that 51% by promising the Judas tenants that their rents will stay the same.
I don't really have anything constructive to add to this conversation, but I wanted to drop a comment here to let you know how brilliant the term "Judas tenants" is - I am definitely going to find a way to use that (or something similar) in conversation on occasion.
I'd be happy with my home value simply remaining stable at this point. Around here (Florida), home appraisals seem completely random - either granting large amounts of "free" equity to buyers, or destroying equity and killing deals for sellers.
One small point - these may be identical positions, but the wording aims at two different groups. Homeowners, and those who wish to become homeowners.
Of course, those who wish to become homeowners also want those traits the moment they sign on the dotted line. Often, if you're purchasing a (first) home, it's for stability. Steady or increasing home value provides stability. Decreasing home value only causes instability (for example, should your mortgage go underwater you will lose that home).
I want my home to keep pace with inflation exactly. Since the only reason I would sell it would be to move to a different house I don't expect to get anything out of moving.
> should your mortgage go underwater you will lose that home
How did you arrive at that conclusion? I'm no expert in that field, but an underwater mortgage really means a decrease in mobility for a mortgage borrower (example: if they want to sell their home and relocate, then their sale proceeds will not cover their full liability). It should have no bearing on the ongoing affordability of that mortgage which is the primary cause of a mortgage borrower losing a home. What am I missing?
You're exactly right. You will not lose a home if the value of the house becomes less than you paid for it.
What happened during the crash was people bought homes they couldn't afford on "teaser rates" and assumed they could keep refinancing using the existing equity from the appreciating value as a way of getting a conforming mortgage at a better rate, or taking the equity out as a loan. When this didn't happen, they walked away from the home.
Many of these people who "lost their homes" didn't really lose anything! They were living in a house above their means, that they often bought with no money down, paying interest-only, or a "teaser" rate (sometimes with negative amortization!). Then when the house went underwater, they walked away, not owing a penny. _Then_ they declared: "woe is me--I lost my home!" when in reality they got a sweet deal.
Many even lived mortgage free for the year or two it took the bank to foreclose. Congress forgave the income tax on forgiven debt (normally taxable) and nobody was made to pay income tax on the imputed income of living rent/mortgage free while waiting for the bank to kick them out.
This is really unfair to those people who experienced it. From a financial sense you are of course right- they got use of a house for “free”. In a human sense, many people lost their homes- they were forced out of the places where the lived, where they’d invested their identity in, time, money, and emotion in decorating and “making their own.” Children were forced to change schools, and adults were essentially publicly shamed.
There were some people who definitely behaved the way you described, but many if not most experienced true suffering in a way that deserves compassion.
I've lived in a place with a significant number of Section 8 renters, and I would definitely have supported measures to require people in the area to be wealthier. No, wealthier people are not better people — but at the very least they have more to lose if, for example, they pass out drunk in one's front yard or burn down one's building.
And yes, of course, poor folks deserve to have homes to. But there was a period of several years where it was a nightmare to live where I was. The police were constantly present, one couldn't walk up to one's own front door without being accosted. It was terrible.
Thank you, now I understand why politicians are always only talking about subsidize housing!
They could get both sides votes, increase the price of houses and claim to do something for affordability without actually attacking the problem of supply and demand.
While I agree that we need abandon the idea of home value appreciation, there are many things that make home ownership an attractive investment even in a zero real dollar appreciation environment
1) Inflation hedge
2) Mortgage= Forced savings plan. Lots of HNers are good with money, but it turns out for the general pop this really is a good savings vehicle (provided you don’t increase your debt via refinancing).
3) Sweat equity- you can invest labor into your home, often in a somewhat enjoyable way.
4) You “should” save money over renting in most scenarios that don’t involve changing households often, as you get the recapture the value a landlord would have to charge to cover vacancies, management, minor repairs (sweat equity), and profit margin. Obviously the real world might be distorted, but the theory holds in many markets still.
So really, you can have both, just with a slightly different lens and set of expectations.
Number four is the most important. Even if it depreciates over time, a house's expected service lifetime is measured in decades, if not centuries in some areas, and it makes sense to get as much good use out of a home as you can if you own one. I know people who flip their PCs every few months or so, so they can get back most of their old PC's value in order to buy this month's new hotness. I don't understand this mindset, and I use computer equipment until it stops working. And then I try to find ways to repair/revive it.
I'd comment there's a third politician, who might assert that your home is NOT your most valued asset, and proceed with ideas accordingly, considering politicians A and B were equivalent.
Who is going to build those low income houses if it's not an investment? Only the government?
Most of the modern world was built on the of ROI, industry and investing in the future to better one's life and family. I don't see what correlation it has to low income housing or anything else. Housing will always be a thing of value which people with invest and trade in.
As long as there's people who want it there will people willing to build it. They can get a valuable return, even if it's a modest one, but making those buildings. The interest isn't the problem.
When you artificially constrain supply and massively increase cost/risk of those investments then the only buildings that get built will be expensive ones where the margins are higher. While simultaneously reducing construction and related jobs, reduce utility of a limited supply of land, significantly increasing the cost of living for people of lesser means who still need to work where the jobs are, create urban ghettos by only allowing gov to the feasible creator of low income housing in large centralized areas. It's not rocket science.
We don’t seem to have trouble producing any number of things that depreciate in value: cars, furniture, computer. The ROI is in the difference between the cost of the inputs and the cost of the finished product.
The problem with housing is that efficient use of one of the inputs (land) is illegal. Fix this and housing will be available at a variety of price points, just like cars are.
You could ask: Will you pursue policies that will make the cost of shelter higher or lower? In many areas the government is trying to do both simultaneously.
I agree. I recall being amazing at a speech by Obama where he was bragging about his efforts to “raise the price of your homes”. As a potential home buyer at the time, I was flabbergasted that a president would brag about increased prices. Clearly he had chosen a side between the home owner and the home renters-who-would-like-to-own-one-day.
I recall thinking, “would a president ever say such a thing about a gallon of milk? Or a loaf of bread?”
Overly restrictive land use policies is one of the reasons I'm running for DCCC in San Francisco. The DCCC chooses who the "official" Democrat is in a race, which almost always translates into that person winning their race. The DCCC is controlled by NIMBYs, which is why we only elect NIMBY politicians. If you want this to change, we have to get pro-growth people on the SF DCCC.
If we get enough YIMBYs and pro-reform Democrats on the DCCC, then the type of candidate the Democratic party supports will fundamentally change. The DCCC on my side of the city (East side) has 14 seats, so we have to run and elect as many pro-growth people as possible.
Enacting this vision will take years of diligent hard work, but that's what I'm signing up for.
For legalizing construction of new apartments, the strategy is multi-pronged:
1) ballot props to make development by-right (must be a ballot prop rather than legislation because the problems are in the city charter which can only be changed by ballot prop)
2) adjust fees and inclusionary zoning requirements to be realistic. Right now the inclusionary zoning requirement is more than the market can bear, so development is drying up.
3) rezone all of SF to allow greater densities and heights. This is a combination of legislation and ballot props. Rezoning by ballot allows skipping a years/decade long environmental review.
4) CEQA and other environmental regulation reform. CEQA was designed in the 70s to preserve open space, it now encourages sprawl because nobody can sue you with CEQA if your new development doesn't have existing neighbors. And CEQA considers decreased traffic speeds as a negative impact, so any new development in a city can be stopped due to adding traffic.
5) eliminate parking minimums
6) reform or eliminate discretionary review, which allows any person to stop a project for years
7) change the scope of authority of the planning commission. It has dictatorial power over what gets built, does not reflect the demographics of the city, and is unelected. They should not have as much power as they do. More details in my article: https://medium.com/yimby/the-staggering-inequity-of-the-san-...
There are more policy directions, but this is just off the top of my head.
I don’t see how this is a federal issue. There is a constitutional dimension, if for example zoning codes were used to discriminate against families with LGBT members. But in general? Regulation of land one of the archetypal state issues.
The article itself is talking about the constitutionality of discriminating based on familial relationship under the US Constitution, so that would be a federal issue.
But in general, housing affordability is a federal problem insofar as the federal government already subsidizes housing and transportation. Since the federal government already subsidizes housing (mortgage interest deduction, imputed rent exemption on income tax, and capital gains tax exemptions for the sale of houses), it has an interest in ensuring that these funds aren’t wasted on bidding up land prices in high-rent areas, and it has an interest in ensuring that these funds benefit both the rich and the poor. And since the federal government already pays for transportation, it has an interest in ensuring that these transportation infrastructure isn’t wasted on exclusionary cities.
Zoning laws are absurd, but if anyone thinks getting the Feds even more involved is going to make it better, just ask yourself if it would be a good thing to give congress even more stuff to fight about and be ineffective at handling.
Generally, laws that effect large groups of people are going to be less onerous than ones which effect only a few. Local governments are notoriously petty and rife with corruption/favoritism. I've seen local laws get passed just because someone on the board had a personal vendetta. People are assholes.
Also, Congress would offload responsibility to an agency, likeHouse & Urban Development. So I doubt they'd fight too much over day-to-day matters.
The problem with owning a home in the United States, and it's relation to restrictive zoning, is that it's such a valuable asset. I'd wager the true price of home ownership is not reflected in property taxes, assessments, or retail price.
In many areas the access to a school district and the expected lifetime earnings of a child who attends that district is worth more than the median home in the district.
Ownership allows access to powerful neighborhood associations to wield and maintain the status quo.
I commend recent efforts by local and state legislators to eliminate single family zoning, however we have a long way to go to decouple public education and home ownership. It's not simply about funding either -- many urban school districts have great funding per student but still lack in comparison to the suburbs in terms of class size, arguably the most important metric when considering schools.
It's ironic that this piece ended up running on the same day as this other article in the same paper, which quotes a bunch of residents complaining about the construction of apartment towers on Manhattan's Upper East Side: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/nyregion/yorkville-tall-b...
On the other side of the coin, I'm in an area with NO zoning restrictions at all (other than a homophobic county-wide prohibition on pornographic bookstores). The town planning board has no power to disallow any type of building or business as long as it passes a very basic environmental survey. There's been a lot of bad feeling lately about a proposed motocross track/RV park in what is a very quiet farming community. I pity the neighbors who will have to suffer it, but there's hardly anything that can be done to stop it. I guess that's the price a community pays for constantly voting against zoning ordinances.
Zoning laws are absurdly restrictive, and sometimes just absurd. A few examples I've seen:
- homeowner (me) can't install a duplex addition for a home zoned duplex without turning the front yard into a 4-car parking lot. It doesn't matter that I have one car and could decide to only rent to people with one car, the driveway would need to fit four cars instead of the current two.
- most homes are limited to building one ADU (accessory dwelling unit). Only one ~800-sq foot ADU is allowed regardless of whether you have a 3,000 sq foot house on 4,500 sq foot lot, or a 2,000 sq foot house on a 100,000 sq foot lot.
- if you want to have a home-based day care business, zoning sets a max number of kids that can attend. In California, this is 14 kids. It doesn't matter if your home is 1,500 square feet or 5,000 square feet, whether you're in the middle of downtown SF or in a rural area, or whether you have 2 parking spaces or 20.
I think zoning seriously infringes on people's property rights. You should be able to do whatever you want to your property if it doesn't really hurt anyone. Zoning feels like EULAs to me: you "buy" something, but you don't really own it because another party has a lot of say in what you can and cannot do.
Zoning laws enacted after a property purchase can infringe on property rights. Zoning laws that exist prior to a purchase merely form the foundation upon which you should expect to exercise the property rights in your purchase. (Just as you are prevented from operating a junkyard on your property, your neighbor is also prevented from operating a junkyard on theirs, protecting your property rights [assuming you don't want to live next to a junkyard].)
If you want unencumbered use of your property, buy out in an unincorporated area with no zoning laws. When you do, don't be surprised when your neighbor decides to start a pig farm...
The junkyard on my neighbor's property doesn't hurt me - as long as my neighbor is careful to prevent oil leaks and other sources of pollution. It might be ugly, but ugly is a first amendment right.
If you buy a nice little SFR for $X and the day after closing, your neighbor opens up a new junkyard, do you think your house is still worth $X on the market? That is part of why people buy in areas with zoning and, more extreme example, why people buy in areas with HOA regulations.
Yes it will be. I've compared houses with junkyards next to them to houses without and it made no difference. Junkyards next to your house implies a rural area, where your neighbors will have horses and tractors. Your house isn't that close to theirs in the first place. Either that or the junkyard has been there for years - the neighborhood is probably bad, but the junkyard isn't the cause it is the effect.
"Not living next to a junk yard" is protecting a property right in any way property rights are recognized. There are such things as nuisances, but they generally require concrete harms of a type recognized at common law. (Stuff like health and safety, not aesthetics.)
Zoning is not a part of property rights. Zoning was something invented in the early 20th century, because property law wasn't sufficient to enact the kind of racist controls people wanted.
> Zoning laws enacted after a property purchase can infringe on property rights. Zoning laws that exist prior to a purchase merely form the foundation upon which you should expect to exercise the property rights in your purchase.
The first problem with this is that most existing zoning rules don't actually meet your premise. They were imposed on whoever owned the property when they were enacted, regardless of their consent.
The second problem is that even for things like HOAs where all the properties were owned by one entity that originally consented to the restrictions, what you then get is essentially a local government-style entity where only land owners get a vote. This is clearly not a particularly egalitarian style of governance.
And you should! The problem is as long as you have neighbors (even distant ones), it's very hard to do ANYTHING that doesn't impact them -somehow-. It might be indirect, but it does. Heck, lets not forget that just the act of building or renovating at all (anything!) can be hell for the neighbors.
It's all gray areas and you have to draw the line somewhere. People work together to draw those lines, but obviously not everyone agrees on where to draw it. Even when they do, it's frequently short sighted. Not just for the NIMBYs either. A lot of "affordable housing" initiatives just make things worse for everyone, too.
The law has a rich articulation of what things are "harms." Almost nothing modern zoning codes address would qualify as a harm. (That is to say, absent the zoning code, it's not something you could sue someone over.)
In Chicago we're fighting just to get ADU's built period. A handful of them exist in the city that have been grandfathered in and can be rented/lived in legally, but no new ones may be created.
It's a shame, really; they can provide affordable housing in "safe" neighborhoods or be used to keep family members together as an alternative to the so-called "Mother In-Law" basement apartments that pepper the city.
I hope they do it right, though; if they put the same height restrictions on them as they do (new) garages in the city, unless you have a double-lot it'll be impossible to have an ADU above your garage.
I'm new to the term "ADU", but if you're referring to coach houses those are some of the most desirable apartments in the city, and you can't build more of them.
The most egregious zoning ordinance in Chicago is that in many residential districts an existing structure cannot be subdivided into multiple units, but multiple units can be combined into a larger unit. This is a legal bias in favor of rising prices and falling access.
Same even in Olympia WA. A project called the Missing Middle (to increase the viability of medium density housing)...
Many property owners were irate, screaming that people would be demolishing their homes to put up fourplexes in every street, etc.
But the most heinous venom was reserved for the study that showed that with the increase in housing volume and availability that their homes would go from an expected 9% year over year increase to 4.8%, and that somehow infringed on their rights as property owners (I'm still confused as to which clause of the Constitution relates to your rights to have your property value exceed inflation by a certain value). There was no prediction that it'd depress home values - they'd still appreciate. Just not as fast. But you'd think the government was asking them to turn off life support on their children.
Zoning laws are defaults. By default, you have to provide a certain amount of parking, or are only allowed to put up one additional unit, without additional planning authority. That's an important phrase. If you start building a bunch of houses on your land, you may overload available transportation, utility, and public service capacity. That is why you must first go to a planning commission.
You know what happens 90% of the time when someone with a hundred thousand sqft lot wants to add another house? You fill out some paperwork requesting a zoning variance and get your answer in a few weeks.
FWIW I tried going to the zoning board for the parking issue mentioned above, and I got different answers from different people (which is a big problem in and of itself), but basically the answer I got from city officials was "you have to do this if you want to build a duplex." The lot is already zoned/approved for duplex, and whether there are 2 or 4 parking spots won't affect things like utility capacity.
This isn't the sort of thing you talk to "city officicals" about. There is almost certainly a political entity in your city/county made up of appointed or elected citizens called something like a planning commission. You do not talk to the city employees, they implement policy. You need to talk to the politicians who make policy, and have the policy modified for your project, if it will serve the community's interest.
> If you start building a bunch of houses on your land, you may overload available transportation, utility, and public service capacity.
If you build a bunch of houses then you have a larger customer base and tax base and have the money to provide more services.
The real issue is that if you get a bunch of new lower income residents who consume more in services than they pay in taxes then it raises costs on the existing residents who have to make up the difference. But if that's the concern then better to use flat-rate service fees so that new lower income residents are at least paying for what they consume than to do something even more regressive with zoning by effectively excluding them from the community entirely.
I am living through the effects of allowing excessively fast growth right now. For most of this year and possibly into the next, my driveway is almost unusable while the road is ripped up and utilities completely overhauled because there was just no choice anymore. The whole neighborhood had shit water pressure and constant sewer issues because the city council 20 years ago approved a few too many apartment buildings. It's not about income levels, it's about planning.
Planning shouldn't require approvals. If people are building a bunch of apartment buildings, the city can be aware of that without being able to prohibit it. And if the city planning office then chooses to wait until there is low water pressure before upgrading the infrastructure instead of doing it at the same time as the new buildings they're aware of are going up, whose fault is that?
They didn't know they went too far at the time, and it didn't become obvious for years. But they knew they were getting close at least, and stopped. We'd be worse off if they hadn't denied subsequent projects.
> They didn't know they went too far at the time, and it didn't become obvious for years.
That's just bad engineering. You should know how many pipes and pumps you have of what kind and where, and from that know how many residents it can support. Then you can predict when the infrastructure will become insufficient and start the upgrade in time to finish it before that happens. With enough margin of safety that you're still in the clear even if your estimates are off within the typical range that estimates have been off for similar past projects.
It's no surprise that some places get that wrong from time to time, but the solution is to do better next time. If you're at the point that you have to halt housing construction because your infrastructure can't keep up with it, the point where you screwed up was several years in the past.
The practical effect of what you suggest is that I have to suffer from overtaxed infrastructure because individuals around me made poor judgements. Which is exactly why these rules exist. The planning process is how society manages its infrastructure.
Hey! Stop using logic and real world experience! Stop! People here don't deal with municipalities to any real caliber. They don't know. Thus, you can't use real world experiences to explain to them that they need to shut their mouths about things they don't understand.
Yea, out of doing contracting work in 4 states (WA, OR, CO and FL), it's not too difficult (depending on what) to overturn some zoning laws. As long as you are being smart about it. My personal experience, zoning laws are mostly there to make sure idiots are least capable of accomplishing extreme stupidity. If you're careful and smart, you typically hate code enforcement because it's a waste of time for you. But holy shit, are they needed for a lot of contractors.
Fun joke, how do you know if someone has never been on a construction site?
> You fill out some paperwork requesting a zoning variance and get your answer in a few weeks.
That may be true in some (many?) locales, but it's not for places like California, where the housing shortages are hurting most.
Here, even if you don't need a variance, and your plans are exactly up to code as-is, you should expect to spend 1-2 years fighting NIMBY landowners who don't want anything to change, and use various laws and community comment periods as blunt instruments to delay your building plans to the point that you run out of money while fighting and give up.
I have a question. If these painful, legalistic processes of local government didn't exist, do you think your bad neighbors would just stop bothering you, or do you think maybe they'd just shoot you to get rid of the problem?
All these things you make sound "bad" are exactly how we solve interpersonal problems without violence.
> homeowner (me) can't install a duplex addition for a home zoned duplex without turning the front yard into a 4-car parking lot. It doesn't matter that I have one car and could decide to only rent to people with one car, the driveway would need to fit four cars instead of the current two.
Once it is a duplex it is a duplex. You cannot make those assurances for the next homeowner, or the one after that. Even you yourself aren't obliged to stick to your self-imposed rental limitations. Your argument essentially boils down to a hypothetical (that extra cars won't always be needed) but ignores that zoning laws are designed for the common case (that extra cars will scale with number of dwellings).
> if you want to have a home-based day care business, zoning sets a max number of kids that can attend. In California, this is 14 kids. It doesn't matter if your home is 1,500 square feet or 5,000 square feet, whether you're in the middle of downtown SF or in a rural area, or whether you have 2 parking spaces or 20.
So a property not designed to hold a large number of people, isn't allowed to hold a large number of people. That seems reasonable. Just from a fire-safety perspective alone it makes a lot of sense to require custom-built commercial facilities after a certain number of kids.
Plus parking (drop off/pick up), noise, pollution, and so on.
> You should be able to do whatever you want to your property if it doesn't really hurt anyone.
I agree. But all of your examples hurt someone else.
> Once it is a duplex it is a duplex. You cannot make those assurances for the next homeowner, or the one after that.
I don't think that is true, or at least it doesn't have to be true. First, imagine a world where instead of "you need four parking spots if you want a duplex," the law was more flexible and said something like "the # of cars registered to an address cannot be greater than the # of parking spots at that address." That would solve the problem but also allow the duplex owner to rent to at least some subset of tenants instead of not being able to rent at all. Second, my understanding is older houses are grandfathered in, so if I owned a duplex built 50 years ago that wouldn't pass duplex code today, I would still be able to use it as a duplex without bringing it up to code. That means there are already duplexes with two parking spots that are legal, but I just can't have one if I build it today with more modern, safer building methods. (IANA real estate laywer, but this grandfathering is my understanding of how zoning law works.)
> So a property not designed to hold a large number of people, isn't allowed to hold a large number of people. That seems reasonable. Just from a fire-safety perspective alone it makes a lot of sense to require custom-built commercial facilities after a certain number of kids.
I understand the need for some requirements, like fire safety. That's very important and there are separate rules for that. But California requires something like 35 indoor sq feet per child in a home day care facility. That means you can have 14 kids in a 1,000 square foot home, but can't have 15 kids in a 3,000 square foot home. These laws are very blunt instruments.
> the law was more flexible and said something like "the # of cars registered to an address cannot be greater than the # of parking spots at that address."
Your original complaint was that your property rights were infringed. Now you're arguing that they should be able to infringe one kind of property right (vehicle ownership) in order to satisfy another (property ownership).
Plus that restriction would be trivial to work around. Just register the vehicle with a friend/parent/PO Box/a registered business/etc.
> That means there are already duplexes with two parking spots that are legal, but I just can't have one if I build it today with more modern, safer building methods.
So your argument for improving your property rights is to take property rights away from other properties that got grandfathered in, potentially evicting people in those duplexes? Isn't that the type of infringement you were arguing against?
> I understand the need for some requirements, like fire safety. That's very important and there are separate rules for that.
There are. But these rules are also for that. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
I'm not saying any of the things you're attributing to me.
1) What vehicle ownership infringement are you talking about? All I said that if I have two parking spots and own one car, I should be allowed to rent out half of the duplex to someone who also has just one car, and without having to build two additional parking spots in order to specify an arbitrary law. I would understand not being allowed to rent to someone with 3 cars if I only have one free parking spot, as that would infringe to some extent on my neighbors.
2) I absolutely don't want to take property rights from people whose properties are grandfathered in. I want more property rights for everyone, not fewer. And I don't know why you thought I was suggesting evictions. I'm suggesting that unless there is a safety issue, then new properties should have similar rights as well.
1) Let's let the number of street parking spots in a city be equal to 10. Currently your new duplex would keep that number 10, assuming 2 cars per household. Under your plan, that would reduce the number of street parking spots to 8, assuming the same number of cars per household. Of course now that the law has been changed, more people want to build duplexes, to take advantage of thier property. 4 more duplexes are built in the city. Now you have zero street parking spaces remaining. So where do new vehicle owners park? They have to pay. So your new rule has transferred what was previously a public expense to a private expense. Basically upping expenses on vehicles for others is ownership infringement. It would be similar if someone built a factory next to your house which used up 99% of the water in the city and then said..."how am I infringing on water usage? I paid for it." Well, yes but no one else can use water now, or you have upped the cost of water for the neighborhood.
2) People often use cars to generate income through being able to drive to work.
The mere existence of a house on the other side of even a fairly big town can affect the fire safety of your house, because it affects the likelihood that emergency responders in the area will be overloaded by an excessive number of fires or medical calls.
In the case of the parking, how is someone else harmed as long as they are aware of the parking before any purchasing/leasing decisions are made? Signing up for any paid service fiscally hurts someone, but the vast majority of people have no problem as long as there is full agreement on the extent of that harm before signup. Only when the harm is hidden in fine print or not disclosed at all is it an issue.
I guess to say it another way: you should be able to do whatever you want to your property if it doesn't really hurt anyone without their consent. As for what constitutes consent, that is an entire planet of canned worms waiting to be opened.
In many if not most places, the amount of street parking is at least sometimes less than the number of people who'd like to park on the street. If owners add more housing units without enough parking for the people who would move in, street parking becomes even more scarce. This hurts (or, at least, adversely affects) people in the neighborhood.
So if I'm understanding your argument, by only adding 2 and not 4 parking spaces, there is the possibility that a future owner may decide to buy the house and at some point decide to use up more street parking due to the lack of available parking, thus hurting the neighborhood.
If this is correct, then I see a few problems.
First, the actions of the home owner at the time the street parking is being used are the one causing the harm. If I put up a bill board criticizing a politician, and someone upon seeing it decides to engage in politically motivated violence, I am not responsible for that harm as there was a free willed human intervening between the actions and the harm. There is a legal term for this but I forget it for now.
Second, the idea that using parking spaces counts as harm. If so, wouldn't this mean that all use of parking spaces is causing harm? And if the argument is that use under the rules doesn't constitute harm, then that should also apply in this case and the home owner is only causing harm if they are not following the rules of the public parking spaces, something which there should already be a remedy for at the time the rule is broken.
Second part two, if we continue with the idea that use of public parking spaces is a harm, I think we would see a number of negative consequences that are not agreeable with our modern sensibilities.
Third, wouldn't this mean that building a parking lot with only 4 spaces can also cause harm as it is possible for a house to have more than two cars. How does one determine what level of harm is justified enough to be banned, as I find the level of harm between 2 and 4 parking spaces to be so small that I doubt it is actually the exact level of harm that justifies banning something.
Third, this is assuming a new variable which wasn't in the original argument. Thus if this is a road without public parking, this example wouldn't constitute harm. So even if we accept the argument as justified, it only applies to some cases and thus the overall law is still not justified in other cases. While we don't normally formalize a sentence such as 'this law is justified' any further, I think if we were then the formalization would be far closer to 'this law is justified in all cases' 'this law is justified in some cases', as in the latter case we would say the law is unjustified in some cases and generally considered it an unjust law.
> Yet where progressives argue for openness and inclusion as a cudgel against President Trump, they abandon it on Nob Hill and in Beverly Hills. This explains the opposition to SB 50, which aimed to address the housing shortage in a very straightforward way: by building more housing.
> What Republicans want to do with I.C.E. and border walls, wealthy progressive Democrats are doing with zoning and Nimbyism. Preserving “local character,” maintaining “local control,” keeping housing scarce and inaccessible — the goals of both sides are really the same: to keep people out.
> “We’re saying we welcome immigration, we welcome refugees, we welcome outsiders — but you’ve got to have a $2 million entrance fee to live here, otherwise you can use this part of a sidewalk for a tent,” said Brian Hanlon, president of the pro-density group California Yimby. “That to me is not being very welcoming. It’s not being very neighborly.”
> But other cities, like Plano, Tex. — where more than 4,000 residents have mobilized to overturn similar plans — have taken steps backward.
I take issue with this. I grew up in Plano, Texas. I loved it and I loved the people. This article is a negative comment about those people "taking steps backward", when they are really mobilizing themselves to take part in local politics and democratically help make the city how they want it to be. Is Plano perfect? No. But the people there do believe in being active in local government and in trying to make changes that the people in the community _want_. It's a special kind of place, and they care. They've done this again and again.
> As a zoning official, I’m usually the last person to advocate for federal intrusion into local decision-making. But the problems of housing inequality and segregation are too big for localities to tackle piecemeal.
That last excerpt is simply an emotional appeal "acknowledging" the author's supposed credentials of opposing big government---- while supporting it. But zoning laws are one of the most impactful things that a local government actually manages, and why shouldn't you be able to help shape your community, especially when we usually want people to participate _more_ in local politics, and zoning laws are one of the ways you can make a real difference in your community. But if you take away any really meaningful power that a local government has, why would anyone care at all to participate?
I take the same issue whenever I see zoning issues about my locality (Denver) brought up by online communities who tend "YIMBY" but have little, if any, horse in the race of local politics. There this un-nuanced thousand-miles-removed view of zoning issues propagated in media and places like Reddit and HN, and then there's the opposing boots-on-the-ground version where those of us living in the community, who would have to live with the changes, fight against destructive zoning proposals and corrupted officials.
Starting a sentence with "as a zoning official" has no value. Having personally met with a number of zoning officials, historic commission members, city planners, and council-members, their allegiances and political views vary from one to the next. Some ran on campaigns almost entirely funded by out-of-state-developer donations; while others, sure, are a reflection of elite country-club voters wanting to keep out the "riff-raff". There's a whole swath of viewpoints in between the extremes, and the only thing consistent among every national story about "NIMBY"ism is that it is far, far too disconnected from the communities to adequately capture any of those viewpoints.
Indeed, laws and structural (backbone) planning are necessary and complimentary.
However as others have pointed out and (I saw them while reading further down after) I also replied about Japanese style zoning, which is based on a combination of large scale planning and allowing "Up to X nuisance" in a zone and otherwise letting market forces dictate what actually gets build.
Houston does have polices that have a similar effect to zoning though (parking minimums).
> Also, the city has enacted development regulations that specify how lots are subdivided, standard setbacks, and parking requirements. The regulations have contributed to the city's automobile-dependent sprawl, by requiring the existence of large minimum residential lot sizes and large commercial parking lots.
In san francisco, zoning doesn't mean shit. Basically it comes down to who you know and can you hold your nose and bribe. With these capabilities, the zone and code can say whatever you want. Clearly this is all about the $$$.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] threadThat's a feature, not a bug.
By forcing even mundane projects to go through a process where approval depends on the whims of the decision makers they have set themselves up to extract concessions from basically every project on a whim, fast track things they like (often things run by people they like) and stonewall things that they don't (don't get on their bad side if you want their approval in an expedient fashion).
Or it's all a giant conspiracy that is closed to non-elite citizens. I actually have no idea how one would become the official who rewrites zoning laws anyway.
E.g.:
In Seattle when they upzone a small area it immediately goes up in value because a builder can put say four houses now and sell more units. There is nowhere else that can be done so that land has a premium on it due to the restrictive zoning in the rest of the city.
Now if the whole city was up zoned at the same time then the zoning would not affect the value of the land, only its amenity and location factors as per usual. In fact in this case land values would likely drop overall because now more units can be built everywhere allowing more people to live in the city in a variety of housing types, we reduced the supply demand gap and that affects the value of land overall.
Money is not the only value land has.
For example, here is an example of homeowners paying a developer to not build on an adjacent lot to preserve their preferences: https://therealdeal.com/2019/07/22/chelsea-residents-paid-ga...
Right now, the above is possible by regulatory capture, shifting the cost of preservation onto adjacent landowners who do want to build and the larger community for underutilizing a precious, shared resource (land).
I'm sure some voters are concerned with the things you mentioned.
I'm also sure other voters are concerned with lowering the price of rent. This can be done by increasing supply of housing, which can be done by increasing both the number of people who can live in one lot, as well as increasing the number of lots.
That's a strong claim, but I like that Saul is talking about changing local building laws to make green infrastructure a possibility.
I understand if it was a pig slaughterhouse or night club or something like that. But even the early 1900s had office buildings, law offices, various small shops, and other quiet firms.
Seems like a heavy-handed approach in retrospect. If anything the laws should be related to the type of business or externalities (noise, smell, etc) it produces rather than on strict residential/work/industrial lines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1916_Zoning_Resolution
Similarly there's no way for a quiet old couple that wants a quiet neighborhood to stay quiet unless the zoning allows for it. A lot of people would consider a Q1 zone anti-familyist but the REASON such a zone would be desireable is that's what rich people pay for - they only want to hear their own noise - so they end up buying 7 lots around their mansion.
We shouldn't make the need to want absolute peace and quiet a price but instead just let that group of people that want the same thing live next door to each other. Instead we encourage people to buy rural properties in a forest.
Sorry for that aside but zones for quiet level, air and water pollution levels - but traffic induced by business should be considered as part of the zoning, and then get rid of the residential / commercial separation - just focus on the pollutions.
If you really, really want to know: https://www.amazon.com/Zoning-Rules-Economics-Land-Regulatio...
My secret is very small cities. They generally have suburban density, but aren't technically suburban because there isn't a rush-hour commute to a larger city. These places are also affordable. For example, median houses (typically about 1500 square feet on 0.25 acre) go for about $150,000 in Melbourne, FL.
That 40 mile commute is definitely a choice.
There are various reasons: rent control would be lost, property tax control would be lost, kids would need to attend different schools, spouse would need a job in the same location, real estate agents eat 6% of home value, etc.
So it works for a person's first job, assuming a 1-income household. After a few years, there is a job change, and then never again is work close to home.
If you want to tackle commute distances you need to deal with all the reasons people refuse to move. You can't count on people staying with the same employer forever.
With regards to wood burning stoves, that's more of an insurance issue (homeowner's insurance providers do not care for wood burning stoves due to the fire risk).
https://www.epa.gov/burnwise/wood-smoke-and-your-health
Life expectancy once you're middle-aged has gone up quite modestly: https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Life-e.... For someone my age (late 30s), life expectancy has only gone up by about 13 years since 1850.
Citation needed for the "just fine" claim. Heating options were a lot more limited in the past for many people. If your choice is between freezing to death soon or making it through the winter but doing long term serious damage to your health, you'll pick the later, but it has hard to call that "just fine".
> Health effects of wood smoke
> The biggest health threat from smoke is from fine particles, also called fine particulate matter or PM2.5. These microscopic particles can get into your eyes and respiratory system, where they may cause burning eyes, runny nose, and illnesses, such as bronchitis.
> Fine particles can make asthma symptoms worse and trigger asthma attacks. Fine particles can also trigger heart attacks, stroke, irregular heart rhythms, and heart failure, especially in people who are already at risk for these conditions.
https://www.epa.gov/burnwise/wood-smoke-and-your-health#heal...
I never really thought about the possible harm, but the above video is great. It’s originally from a Sam Harris essay.
I live in a neighborhood south of 280 near a bart station. Historically, it was a middle income neighborhood, and it is zoned SFH. The houses almost all have a small front and back yard. The front setback for many of the houses is the length of a car, with a driveway in the middle and a small garden to each side. The ground floor was almost always originally an extended garage with perhaps a storage room.
I think you can see it all falling apart. The proximity of this neighborhood to the peninsula, downtown SF and south of market, and the location near Bart and several muni rail lines, along with the general housing crunch in SF, has simply rendered this land too valuable for SFH residences. SF is trying, and failing, to suppress the alternate use of this land that the market is increasingly demanding.
Now, I'm not arguing that land use regulations are inherently bad, and I believe that SF is bad at governing. But here's what's happened.
The bottom floor, what was once a garage and storage room, has almost always been converted to a ground floor apartment or flat. Some people have gone so far as to replace the garage door with a wall and a front door. With the garage space gone, people have paved over the front setbacks next to their driveway, in order to park three cars in front of the house. Although curb cuts are technically allowed only to access the driveway and garage, these residents do of course keep the curb cut as a reserved parking spot in front of their house.
I'm not sure what to make of it. But one thought I've had is that what we're seeing here is an attempt to convert an old SFH neighborhood in to multi unit dwellings, and it has actually been a bit of a disaster. Curb cuts are no longer used to provide access to a garage, but they do break street into small sections, all too small to legally park a car, so total parking is a wash (though it does provide residents with a reserved spot). The illegal but largely unenforced pave overs have led to higher volumes of water going into the combined storm and sewage system (an archaic but energy efficient gravity based system used in SF, possible because it's a hilly place), and the excess water, mixed with sewage, floods the lower level spots where the pipes bottleneck, severely damaging properties and subjecting residents to severe health and safety risks.
Fascinatingly, San Francisco remains very strict and expensive where it comes to permits, but there's a level of permit violation that SF seems to just not bother with. In other words, you can do an un-permitted remodel of your downstairs, add drains, pave over the soil filter, create a massive sewage flooding problem, and sf will do... nothing. But if you were to try to tear down a house and replace it with a properly engineered multi unit dwelling... are you kidding me? SF will charge you upwards of 20k inspection and permit fees just to remodel the downstairs within the existing footprint of the house, if you do it legally. Anything beyond that is a massive delay with massive fees, and in most places, converting to official Muti unit dwellings is a non-starter.
The result is lots of illegal in-laws, with dodgy electrical and plumbing, in an area that is likely to flood due to illegal pave overs. During one of the heavy rain episodes, someone's dog was electrocuted and died. Really, I'd give it even odds that someone is going to die from this situation before long.
When I look around, I see something that just isn't working anymore. And while I bought into a SFH neighborhood, I do see something deeply immoral about restricting development in an urban neighborhood with excellent public transportation options close to job centers, in a world where low income janitors and fast food workers engage in soul and family destroying commutes for hours from exurb sprawl. It's nearly inconceivab...
You're certainly not alone in that belief. SF is probably one of the most poorly governed cities in the world, especially when you consider its budget relative to what it accomplishes.
I think SF still thinks of itself as a small, scenic city of 850000, a strange hybrid of cosmopolitan and provincial traits. It fits neatly into a small box. For this version of SF, a small, pleasant place with a stable population, a budget over 11 billion (last year's number) is huge. It's enough that SF gov't can burn hundreds of millions on programs that don't solve problems and still stay solvent.
I think the problem is that the 11+ billion dollar budget actually reflects a much bigger and more dynamic city that is outgrowing that small box, and you can see the strain. This San Francisco needs a vastly improved public transportation system. San Francisco's city streets are overwhelmed, and the NIMBYs near my neighborhood aren't wrong when they say traffic from higher density will grind to a halt with the higher density apartments the YIMBYs are asking for. We can't do this with our existing infrastructure, we can't do this if everyone's going to get to work in their own SUV with their own parking space, and I personally believe we're already seeing this paralysis even with our restrictive building codes (largely because in the absence of proper housing, 8 adults will cram into a single family house, and they'll all want to park somewhere). Public transportation needs to be safe and efficient, it needs to have a vastly greater coverage reach, much of it should ideally be underground in SF proper, and it needs to link suburban and exurban areas to allow people to reach job centers. I'm a parent, and SF park and rec summer camps filled up so fast that people are waiting by the computer, watching the international clock, and are content if they can fill up a third of their schedule (it's a real crapshoot). San Francisco needs vastly expanded services. We'll need a much better storm draining and sewage system, maybe with pumps in some areas, we need better drainage "sinks" and areas with more soil filter, probably expanded sewage treatment centers, we need to relieve bottlenecks. It goes on and on.
When you think about what SF needs to get done, 11 billion doesn't seem like so much. Unfortunately, as it stands, I think SF views it as a windfall that can buttress ineffective government and wasteful programs.
From what you've read, you can probably tell I'm not an anti-government type, though I am wary of excessive government programs, since I do think they have a tendency to be wasteful. SF needs good government and proper infrastructure badly, and it's going to cost $$.
To be clear, I'm not making a Republican versus Democrat argument here. The problem is the lack of a viable alternative rather than the particular party in power.
This is a really good point. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this applies to US in general; not just SF. Cities will never inspect your house unless you give them a reason (e.g. apply for a permit).
The main deterrents to un-permitted work are: 1) if you need to sell the house, buyers don't like unpermitted work, and 2) your neighbors can file a complaint.
I've bought two houses in my life. Both had obviously unpermitted work; I had no issue in either case as it was generally acceptable quality of work. If a shopper for my house has a problem with unpermitted work when I go to sell, they're free to move along and find a house without any.
For instance, my house in SF actually shares a foundation with the two neighboring houses. This was an issue when I wanted to remodel to get better ceiling heights. I'd say I'm not free to do whatever I want with a shared foundation.
Also, when you share a wall, you do have an interest in verifying that the electrical and firewall work done next to your house is up to code.
It can get out of hand, but there are a lot of reasons for permits and inspections. I don't think entering someone's house, scheduled well in advance, with a very limited agenda to simply verify that recently added wiring in a dense, crowded neighborhood with shared walls, and leaving immediately afterwards, would qualify as an unreasonable search and seizure.
It sounded in your earlier post that you were suggesting (or lamenting the lack of) periodic inspections for the purposes of finding unpermitted work, which I (and probably many others) would find unreasonable and likely contrary to the 4th Amendment.
My biggest lament is the pave over of the external front setback (yard), as this is the really destructive practice on s large scale. When the practice becomes widespread, The loss of soil filter really does harm to the infrastructure. This could be inspected with a simple drive by. Sf actually does enforce this on a complaint driven basis with a fine, though there’s a backlog and a quick drive through many sf neighborhoods will suggest little to no enforcement.
Entering someone’s home is a big deal. Ideally there would be strong cause and very limited scope.
On a related note, I do think that if you Airbnb, you’ve left the realm of home and entered the realm of commercial property subject to audit for public safety.
I'm pointing out that the situation - that we have a set rules (zoning), but they aren't enforced - which causes people to knowingly build without a permit.
The parent comment provided legitimate reasons why cities have some zoning rules in place (shared sewage, flooding, etc..).
In other words, you can build small residential buildings anywhere, even in industrial zones if you want. But you can only build industrial if the zone allows it.
Don't buy a house off the end of a runway unless you want to listen to my 230HP of bug smashing power...
So literally one day everything is fine, then the next its hell. Then people started saying "Well its your fault for buying near an airport". That wasn't great :(
Start with what type of airport is it here: https://skyvector.com/
Is it Bravo (big blue circles around it, major commercial airport), Charlie (medium maroon circles, large secondary commercial), Delta (small single dark blue dashed circle, small controlled airport), or uncontrolled (no circle or dashed magenta, local GA airport)?
If it's one of the first three, see if you can find the Standard Instrument Departures (SIDs) and Standard Terminal Arrival Routes (STARs) and see where they put aircraft in relation to you and at what altitudes (underlined altitudes are minimum, overlined are maximum).
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/digital_... (can also find them on skyvector for your airport)
Also try to see if they've been changed lately as this is the most likely culprit.
If it's an uncontrolled airport, try talking to them about noise abatement and see if you might be able to work something out.
This isn't fundamentally different from fixing up some old house.
The airports and race tracks were almost certainly built in the middle of nowhere originally. They can relocate some place that's currently a middle of nowhere. Airports and race tracks should exist in areas where land is cheap and abundant, not in places where lots of people want to live.
The land owners make a huge profit from selling the land to developers, current residence see their property values go up, and more people have the opportunity to live closer to work.
Sometimes things have to change for the better.
Why not both zone for higher density and get rid of small urban airports? Airports are antithetical to high-density living.
In my town, we have a noise ordinance where the max decibel is way too high for a quiet residential area, but way too low for the downtown neighborhoods. So you get a lot of "You live in a city, expect noise!". But not everywhere in the city is the same! So it's just enforced nilly willy. People can't easily make a choice. Some neighborhoods are obvious, some are not. Some parts of the city are only noisy in summer, some only in winter, and so on.
Noise ordinances should be tied to zoning in some way. Then if people buy a house near a train, they can't bitch about the train noise. At the same time, if someone wants a cheaper house and don't give a fuck about the noise, they just got themselves a great deal!
There's one catch: realistically, most people care about noise to some degree. Once you have it clearly "labeled", properties in less noisy areas will become more expensive and you'll have segregation by income. The rich will live in quiet areas, the poor in noisy ones. Oh, and then people with kids screaming louder than the train will claim it doesn't apply to them (even though 95% of the kids in the area will be doing just fine).
Its a tough problem, but IMO, the easier we make it for like minded people to live together, the better. Right now, regardless of your criterias, if you want to live in an area that meets criteria X for a long period of time, you have to get lucky AND go all NIMBY when things change. It just so happens that things like housing density is the topic of the day.
Zoning laws being absurdly restrictive is often used to explain why not enough is built (eg: single family housing). But if zoning forced skyscrappers, it would be just as restrictive.
If I shut my windows I should NOT be able to hear the kids screaming outside nor other loud outside things (emergency sirens/etc).
NOTHING stops the sound of kids screaming. Nevermind the jack hammers starting at 6:30 am (because fuck enforcing noise ordinances in a deadend of a usually quiet neighborhood!).
Made worse because I live in a city where even "high end" constructions are made out of cardboard (yeah, I'm planning on moving, but thats not easy, and who's to say the place I move to won't be just as bad?)
I find it hard to accept that the kind of idiot that rolls through/around a downed crossing guard is suddenly going to be swayed into common sense by the sound of a horn. Both equally imply "impending train".
> If you elect me I'm going to work for the people of this community, I'm going to make sure that your most valuable asset, your home, keeps its value. In fact not only is it going to stay valuable, if you elect me it's going to get more valuable, under me your house will appreciate 5% every year.
Politician B then gets up and says:
> If you elect me I'm going to make sure that you have to be rich to buy a home in our community. In fact I'm going to raise the bar and make sure that every year you need to be 5% richer to afford a home than you needed to be the year before.
Based just on these two snippets, most people I've asked would vote for Pol A, but what they're saying is essentially the same thing. And that gets at the very difficult issue we're broaching here. Our concept of housing as an investment can't coexist with a concept of housing as a commodity that should be affordable to the majority of the population. We need to let go of one of them to achieve the other.
i cant tell if this is satire or if you actually agree with it
That said, his point is totally valid. When you say "affordable" most upper middle class people hear "poor people".
Just wanted to point out that Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel is a character from The Simpsons who satirizes the type of person that people generally refer to as "hillbilly".
People always say "oh well if your neighbor did X you'd want zoning too". I've lived in those kinds of places and I mind the end-game of escalating lower class trashiness a lot less than I mind the endgame of upper middle class conformity. Bring on the fireworks, the ATVs, the loud music in languages I don't even speak and the drunken arguments.
I agree zoning is the wrong way to address this. What's needed is a responsive police force that will address noise complaints. Unfortunately police in areas where these things tend to be a problem have more important things to attend to most of the time.
it seems like people should be buying better harnesses
that's life
When I grew up, we lived in an unincorporated area with minimal noise and other ordinances. A new neighbor moves in next store and basically spends 20-40 hours a week shooting at a bell and fixed targets from 7AM-?. They would use everything from .22s ("ding, ding, ..., ding") to various pistols, AK-47/SKS rifles, to hunting rifles daily. After church on Sunday most summers consisted of watermelon demolition via shotgun. My mom worked nights, and it made her life miserable.
Fast forward to my recent past. I live in a city, in a mixed neighborhood of 1-4 family houses. Some asshole decides to illegally convert his 2-family flat into a 10 unit SRO. So now we're stuck with people who are willing to live in that kind of situation (ie. mostly drug addicts and drunks) hanging around yucking it up all night. We were only able to shut it down when the slumlord guy decided to illegally convert the front porches into two more units, and when cited by the code officer chose to assault him.
I get the pushback to zoning, but it exists because of substantial minority of the population are assholes. My dad ran subsidized housing programs for years and built personal relationships with many of the stakeholders that I got to be a small part of -- the narrative on HN is that poor people are fighting zoning, the reality is that poor people are often the biggest advocates for it, but are denied due process. Nobody wants to live around slumlord apartments, or have industrial activity in their backyard -- but the most vulnerable people have the worst ability to secure representation and demand attention.
Err, right, that's pretty much what I said in my post. Please don't run to legislators and banning HOAs.
We would be completely unable to survive in the world that you so casually dismiss.
I would encourage you to be very careful in choosing the kind of world that would be turned into your own personal hell.
I have a lot of difficulty falling asleep (exacerbated by even the most comfortable of earplugs), and a decent amount of difficulty staying asleep once I do. It is absolutely not unreasonable to expect that people adhere to low noise levels at night. If you want to stay in a place where people are exploding things outside your house, knock yourself out. You are certainly in the minority.
Or your could tell your partner to stick earplugs in the baby's ears and see what happens...
I would even say that the alternatives have the same issue.
Politician C: I will make sure that housing remains affordable.
Politician D: I will make sure that your housing investment does grow.
But C is (loosely) the negation of B and D is (loosely) the negation of A. While there are other choices, the likely ones people vote are are the first group (A, B) verses the second group (C, D), normally with the options appearing in their nicer forms.
In short, affordable housing and having homes be worthwhile investments are at odds with each other in most issues.
That doesn't have to be true. The old story is that existing areas go from rural to middle to urban, rising in price. Everyone keeps moving further out, so there are always new houses. This story depends on constant urbanization and population growth in all wealth levels. "All wealth levels" is the important part, there has to be a year-by-year increase in the number of rich people so that the acres of expensive land bought by rich people can also increase. This will fail if population growth or social mobility fails, and from what I've heard both are in the process of shutting down.
The problem is you run out of rings. The three hour commute ring is unsustainable, unlivable and the trend-setters try to move into the center again, city size reaches a maximum and quickly thrown-up roads and bridges start to decay.
But this is the model the US set up and now it has painted itself into a corner in this fashion and many others.
The problem is even in that situation, the money of the home owner and apartment house owner speaks more loudly than the interests of the apartment dwellers.
Furthermore, many renters believe that if more housing is built it will only be luxury housing that they couldn't afford anyway. Sure basic economics tells us that increasing supply ought to drive down prices for everyone, but at the individual level it's tough for people to make the connection.
Well, the question is how many of the host of worries US voters express (fear of XYZ evil-doers) are effectively just devices conveniently maintained and manipulated by media, consults and other moneyed interests.
Basic economics tells us that more supply lowers prices if everything else remains the same. Which it won't if the area becomes more popular.
"The assumption behind a demand curve or a supply curve is that no relevant economic factors, other than the product’s price, are changing. Economists call this assumption ceteris paribus, a Latin phrase meaning 'other things being equal'. If all else is not held equal, then the laws of supply and demand will not necessarily hold."
https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/microec...
Most people who moved into a neighborhood because they liked it don't want it to change. Enjoying where you live gets you labelled as a NIMBY though. It's easier to dismiss people if you give them a sweet nickname I guess.
> Sure basic economics tells us that increasing supply ought to drive down prices for everyone, but at the individual level it's tough for people to make the connection.
It should be telling that the "housing crisis" only exists in the most desirable places to live. I don't believe there is a practical amount of supply that can be built to satisfy the demand for housing in these places. The supply of upper middle class people who want to live in SV, Manhattan or San Diego is more than enough to make sure the poor can never afford it. In fact, the only people I ever see overly concerned with it are the middle class who are just on the cusp of affordability.
There's no housing crisis in Blythe.
Then the land owners can push through whatever price-exploding rules they want as long as they can maintain that 51% by promising the Judas tenants that their rents will stay the same.
Of course, those who wish to become homeowners also want those traits the moment they sign on the dotted line. Often, if you're purchasing a (first) home, it's for stability. Steady or increasing home value provides stability. Decreasing home value only causes instability (for example, should your mortgage go underwater you will lose that home).
How did you arrive at that conclusion? I'm no expert in that field, but an underwater mortgage really means a decrease in mobility for a mortgage borrower (example: if they want to sell their home and relocate, then their sale proceeds will not cover their full liability). It should have no bearing on the ongoing affordability of that mortgage which is the primary cause of a mortgage borrower losing a home. What am I missing?
What happened during the crash was people bought homes they couldn't afford on "teaser rates" and assumed they could keep refinancing using the existing equity from the appreciating value as a way of getting a conforming mortgage at a better rate, or taking the equity out as a loan. When this didn't happen, they walked away from the home.
Many of these people who "lost their homes" didn't really lose anything! They were living in a house above their means, that they often bought with no money down, paying interest-only, or a "teaser" rate (sometimes with negative amortization!). Then when the house went underwater, they walked away, not owing a penny. _Then_ they declared: "woe is me--I lost my home!" when in reality they got a sweet deal.
Many even lived mortgage free for the year or two it took the bank to foreclose. Congress forgave the income tax on forgiven debt (normally taxable) and nobody was made to pay income tax on the imputed income of living rent/mortgage free while waiting for the bank to kick them out.
There were some people who definitely behaved the way you described, but many if not most experienced true suffering in a way that deserves compassion.
And yes, of course, poor folks deserve to have homes to. But there was a period of several years where it was a nightmare to live where I was. The police were constantly present, one couldn't walk up to one's own front door without being accosted. It was terrible.
They could get both sides votes, increase the price of houses and claim to do something for affordability without actually attacking the problem of supply and demand.
1) Inflation hedge 2) Mortgage= Forced savings plan. Lots of HNers are good with money, but it turns out for the general pop this really is a good savings vehicle (provided you don’t increase your debt via refinancing). 3) Sweat equity- you can invest labor into your home, often in a somewhat enjoyable way. 4) You “should” save money over renting in most scenarios that don’t involve changing households often, as you get the recapture the value a landlord would have to charge to cover vacancies, management, minor repairs (sweat equity), and profit margin. Obviously the real world might be distorted, but the theory holds in many markets still.
So really, you can have both, just with a slightly different lens and set of expectations.
Most of the modern world was built on the of ROI, industry and investing in the future to better one's life and family. I don't see what correlation it has to low income housing or anything else. Housing will always be a thing of value which people with invest and trade in.
As long as there's people who want it there will people willing to build it. They can get a valuable return, even if it's a modest one, but making those buildings. The interest isn't the problem.
When you artificially constrain supply and massively increase cost/risk of those investments then the only buildings that get built will be expensive ones where the margins are higher. While simultaneously reducing construction and related jobs, reduce utility of a limited supply of land, significantly increasing the cost of living for people of lesser means who still need to work where the jobs are, create urban ghettos by only allowing gov to the feasible creator of low income housing in large centralized areas. It's not rocket science.
The problem with housing is that efficient use of one of the inputs (land) is illegal. Fix this and housing will be available at a variety of price points, just like cars are.
I recall thinking, “would a president ever say such a thing about a gallon of milk? Or a loaf of bread?”
https://buss2020.org for some details, and https://buss2020.org/donate if you want to chip in!
Enacting this vision will take years of diligent hard work, but that's what I'm signing up for.
1) ballot props to make development by-right (must be a ballot prop rather than legislation because the problems are in the city charter which can only be changed by ballot prop)
2) adjust fees and inclusionary zoning requirements to be realistic. Right now the inclusionary zoning requirement is more than the market can bear, so development is drying up.
3) rezone all of SF to allow greater densities and heights. This is a combination of legislation and ballot props. Rezoning by ballot allows skipping a years/decade long environmental review.
4) CEQA and other environmental regulation reform. CEQA was designed in the 70s to preserve open space, it now encourages sprawl because nobody can sue you with CEQA if your new development doesn't have existing neighbors. And CEQA considers decreased traffic speeds as a negative impact, so any new development in a city can be stopped due to adding traffic.
5) eliminate parking minimums
6) reform or eliminate discretionary review, which allows any person to stop a project for years
7) change the scope of authority of the planning commission. It has dictatorial power over what gets built, does not reflect the demographics of the city, and is unelected. They should not have as much power as they do. More details in my article: https://medium.com/yimby/the-staggering-inequity-of-the-san-...
There are more policy directions, but this is just off the top of my head.
But in general, housing affordability is a federal problem insofar as the federal government already subsidizes housing and transportation. Since the federal government already subsidizes housing (mortgage interest deduction, imputed rent exemption on income tax, and capital gains tax exemptions for the sale of houses), it has an interest in ensuring that these funds aren’t wasted on bidding up land prices in high-rent areas, and it has an interest in ensuring that these funds benefit both the rich and the poor. And since the federal government already pays for transportation, it has an interest in ensuring that these transportation infrastructure isn’t wasted on exclusionary cities.
Also, Congress would offload responsibility to an agency, likeHouse & Urban Development. So I doubt they'd fight too much over day-to-day matters.
Local governments can be petty, but that is the human condition. Congress has been known to be petty and corrupt, and so have federal agencies.
In many areas the access to a school district and the expected lifetime earnings of a child who attends that district is worth more than the median home in the district.
Ownership allows access to powerful neighborhood associations to wield and maintain the status quo.
I commend recent efforts by local and state legislators to eliminate single family zoning, however we have a long way to go to decouple public education and home ownership. It's not simply about funding either -- many urban school districts have great funding per student but still lack in comparison to the suburbs in terms of class size, arguably the most important metric when considering schools.
a. mandated homeschooling
b. free teleportation
Without one of those, house location and choice of school are unavoidably tied together.
Sure there is. Buy the land. If you want to be able to insist on how something is used, ownership wins hands-down every single time.
- homeowner (me) can't install a duplex addition for a home zoned duplex without turning the front yard into a 4-car parking lot. It doesn't matter that I have one car and could decide to only rent to people with one car, the driveway would need to fit four cars instead of the current two.
- most homes are limited to building one ADU (accessory dwelling unit). Only one ~800-sq foot ADU is allowed regardless of whether you have a 3,000 sq foot house on 4,500 sq foot lot, or a 2,000 sq foot house on a 100,000 sq foot lot.
- if you want to have a home-based day care business, zoning sets a max number of kids that can attend. In California, this is 14 kids. It doesn't matter if your home is 1,500 square feet or 5,000 square feet, whether you're in the middle of downtown SF or in a rural area, or whether you have 2 parking spaces or 20.
I think zoning seriously infringes on people's property rights. You should be able to do whatever you want to your property if it doesn't really hurt anyone. Zoning feels like EULAs to me: you "buy" something, but you don't really own it because another party has a lot of say in what you can and cannot do.
If you want unencumbered use of your property, buy out in an unincorporated area with no zoning laws. When you do, don't be surprised when your neighbor decides to start a pig farm...
Zoning is not a part of property rights. Zoning was something invented in the early 20th century, because property law wasn't sufficient to enact the kind of racist controls people wanted.
The first problem with this is that most existing zoning rules don't actually meet your premise. They were imposed on whoever owned the property when they were enacted, regardless of their consent.
The second problem is that even for things like HOAs where all the properties were owned by one entity that originally consented to the restrictions, what you then get is essentially a local government-style entity where only land owners get a vote. This is clearly not a particularly egalitarian style of governance.
And you should! The problem is as long as you have neighbors (even distant ones), it's very hard to do ANYTHING that doesn't impact them -somehow-. It might be indirect, but it does. Heck, lets not forget that just the act of building or renovating at all (anything!) can be hell for the neighbors.
It's all gray areas and you have to draw the line somewhere. People work together to draw those lines, but obviously not everyone agrees on where to draw it. Even when they do, it's frequently short sighted. Not just for the NIMBYs either. A lot of "affordable housing" initiatives just make things worse for everyone, too.
It's a shame, really; they can provide affordable housing in "safe" neighborhoods or be used to keep family members together as an alternative to the so-called "Mother In-Law" basement apartments that pepper the city.
I hope they do it right, though; if they put the same height restrictions on them as they do (new) garages in the city, unless you have a double-lot it'll be impossible to have an ADU above your garage.
The most egregious zoning ordinance in Chicago is that in many residential districts an existing structure cannot be subdivided into multiple units, but multiple units can be combined into a larger unit. This is a legal bias in favor of rising prices and falling access.
Many property owners were irate, screaming that people would be demolishing their homes to put up fourplexes in every street, etc.
But the most heinous venom was reserved for the study that showed that with the increase in housing volume and availability that their homes would go from an expected 9% year over year increase to 4.8%, and that somehow infringed on their rights as property owners (I'm still confused as to which clause of the Constitution relates to your rights to have your property value exceed inflation by a certain value). There was no prediction that it'd depress home values - they'd still appreciate. Just not as fast. But you'd think the government was asking them to turn off life support on their children.
Zoning laws are defaults. By default, you have to provide a certain amount of parking, or are only allowed to put up one additional unit, without additional planning authority. That's an important phrase. If you start building a bunch of houses on your land, you may overload available transportation, utility, and public service capacity. That is why you must first go to a planning commission.
You know what happens 90% of the time when someone with a hundred thousand sqft lot wants to add another house? You fill out some paperwork requesting a zoning variance and get your answer in a few weeks.
If you build a bunch of houses then you have a larger customer base and tax base and have the money to provide more services.
The real issue is that if you get a bunch of new lower income residents who consume more in services than they pay in taxes then it raises costs on the existing residents who have to make up the difference. But if that's the concern then better to use flat-rate service fees so that new lower income residents are at least paying for what they consume than to do something even more regressive with zoning by effectively excluding them from the community entirely.
That's just bad engineering. You should know how many pipes and pumps you have of what kind and where, and from that know how many residents it can support. Then you can predict when the infrastructure will become insufficient and start the upgrade in time to finish it before that happens. With enough margin of safety that you're still in the clear even if your estimates are off within the typical range that estimates have been off for similar past projects.
It's no surprise that some places get that wrong from time to time, but the solution is to do better next time. If you're at the point that you have to halt housing construction because your infrastructure can't keep up with it, the point where you screwed up was several years in the past.
Yea, out of doing contracting work in 4 states (WA, OR, CO and FL), it's not too difficult (depending on what) to overturn some zoning laws. As long as you are being smart about it. My personal experience, zoning laws are mostly there to make sure idiots are least capable of accomplishing extreme stupidity. If you're careful and smart, you typically hate code enforcement because it's a waste of time for you. But holy shit, are they needed for a lot of contractors.
Fun joke, how do you know if someone has never been on a construction site?
They're a libertarian.
That may be true in some (many?) locales, but it's not for places like California, where the housing shortages are hurting most.
Here, even if you don't need a variance, and your plans are exactly up to code as-is, you should expect to spend 1-2 years fighting NIMBY landowners who don't want anything to change, and use various laws and community comment periods as blunt instruments to delay your building plans to the point that you run out of money while fighting and give up.
All these things you make sound "bad" are exactly how we solve interpersonal problems without violence.
> homeowner (me) can't install a duplex addition for a home zoned duplex without turning the front yard into a 4-car parking lot. It doesn't matter that I have one car and could decide to only rent to people with one car, the driveway would need to fit four cars instead of the current two.
Once it is a duplex it is a duplex. You cannot make those assurances for the next homeowner, or the one after that. Even you yourself aren't obliged to stick to your self-imposed rental limitations. Your argument essentially boils down to a hypothetical (that extra cars won't always be needed) but ignores that zoning laws are designed for the common case (that extra cars will scale with number of dwellings).
> if you want to have a home-based day care business, zoning sets a max number of kids that can attend. In California, this is 14 kids. It doesn't matter if your home is 1,500 square feet or 5,000 square feet, whether you're in the middle of downtown SF or in a rural area, or whether you have 2 parking spaces or 20.
So a property not designed to hold a large number of people, isn't allowed to hold a large number of people. That seems reasonable. Just from a fire-safety perspective alone it makes a lot of sense to require custom-built commercial facilities after a certain number of kids.
Plus parking (drop off/pick up), noise, pollution, and so on.
> You should be able to do whatever you want to your property if it doesn't really hurt anyone.
I agree. But all of your examples hurt someone else.
I don't think that is true, or at least it doesn't have to be true. First, imagine a world where instead of "you need four parking spots if you want a duplex," the law was more flexible and said something like "the # of cars registered to an address cannot be greater than the # of parking spots at that address." That would solve the problem but also allow the duplex owner to rent to at least some subset of tenants instead of not being able to rent at all. Second, my understanding is older houses are grandfathered in, so if I owned a duplex built 50 years ago that wouldn't pass duplex code today, I would still be able to use it as a duplex without bringing it up to code. That means there are already duplexes with two parking spots that are legal, but I just can't have one if I build it today with more modern, safer building methods. (IANA real estate laywer, but this grandfathering is my understanding of how zoning law works.)
> So a property not designed to hold a large number of people, isn't allowed to hold a large number of people. That seems reasonable. Just from a fire-safety perspective alone it makes a lot of sense to require custom-built commercial facilities after a certain number of kids.
I understand the need for some requirements, like fire safety. That's very important and there are separate rules for that. But California requires something like 35 indoor sq feet per child in a home day care facility. That means you can have 14 kids in a 1,000 square foot home, but can't have 15 kids in a 3,000 square foot home. These laws are very blunt instruments.
Your original complaint was that your property rights were infringed. Now you're arguing that they should be able to infringe one kind of property right (vehicle ownership) in order to satisfy another (property ownership).
Plus that restriction would be trivial to work around. Just register the vehicle with a friend/parent/PO Box/a registered business/etc.
> That means there are already duplexes with two parking spots that are legal, but I just can't have one if I build it today with more modern, safer building methods.
So your argument for improving your property rights is to take property rights away from other properties that got grandfathered in, potentially evicting people in those duplexes? Isn't that the type of infringement you were arguing against?
> I understand the need for some requirements, like fire safety. That's very important and there are separate rules for that.
There are. But these rules are also for that. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
1) What vehicle ownership infringement are you talking about? All I said that if I have two parking spots and own one car, I should be allowed to rent out half of the duplex to someone who also has just one car, and without having to build two additional parking spots in order to specify an arbitrary law. I would understand not being allowed to rent to someone with 3 cars if I only have one free parking spot, as that would infringe to some extent on my neighbors.
2) I absolutely don't want to take property rights from people whose properties are grandfathered in. I want more property rights for everyone, not fewer. And I don't know why you thought I was suggesting evictions. I'm suggesting that unless there is a safety issue, then new properties should have similar rights as well.
2) People often use cars to generate income through being able to drive to work.
Everything is interconnected.
In the case of the parking, how is someone else harmed as long as they are aware of the parking before any purchasing/leasing decisions are made? Signing up for any paid service fiscally hurts someone, but the vast majority of people have no problem as long as there is full agreement on the extent of that harm before signup. Only when the harm is hidden in fine print or not disclosed at all is it an issue.
I guess to say it another way: you should be able to do whatever you want to your property if it doesn't really hurt anyone without their consent. As for what constitutes consent, that is an entire planet of canned worms waiting to be opened.
If this is correct, then I see a few problems.
First, the actions of the home owner at the time the street parking is being used are the one causing the harm. If I put up a bill board criticizing a politician, and someone upon seeing it decides to engage in politically motivated violence, I am not responsible for that harm as there was a free willed human intervening between the actions and the harm. There is a legal term for this but I forget it for now.
Second, the idea that using parking spaces counts as harm. If so, wouldn't this mean that all use of parking spaces is causing harm? And if the argument is that use under the rules doesn't constitute harm, then that should also apply in this case and the home owner is only causing harm if they are not following the rules of the public parking spaces, something which there should already be a remedy for at the time the rule is broken.
Second part two, if we continue with the idea that use of public parking spaces is a harm, I think we would see a number of negative consequences that are not agreeable with our modern sensibilities.
Third, wouldn't this mean that building a parking lot with only 4 spaces can also cause harm as it is possible for a house to have more than two cars. How does one determine what level of harm is justified enough to be banned, as I find the level of harm between 2 and 4 parking spaces to be so small that I doubt it is actually the exact level of harm that justifies banning something.
Third, this is assuming a new variable which wasn't in the original argument. Thus if this is a road without public parking, this example wouldn't constitute harm. So even if we accept the argument as justified, it only applies to some cases and thus the overall law is still not justified in other cases. While we don't normally formalize a sentence such as 'this law is justified' any further, I think if we were then the formalization would be far closer to 'this law is justified in all cases' 'this law is justified in some cases', as in the latter case we would say the law is unjustified in some cases and generally considered it an unjust law.
(2014) http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html
Previously linked here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540845
> Yet where progressives argue for openness and inclusion as a cudgel against President Trump, they abandon it on Nob Hill and in Beverly Hills. This explains the opposition to SB 50, which aimed to address the housing shortage in a very straightforward way: by building more housing.
> What Republicans want to do with I.C.E. and border walls, wealthy progressive Democrats are doing with zoning and Nimbyism. Preserving “local character,” maintaining “local control,” keeping housing scarce and inaccessible — the goals of both sides are really the same: to keep people out.
> “We’re saying we welcome immigration, we welcome refugees, we welcome outsiders — but you’ve got to have a $2 million entrance fee to live here, otherwise you can use this part of a sidewalk for a tent,” said Brian Hanlon, president of the pro-density group California Yimby. “That to me is not being very welcoming. It’s not being very neighborly.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/opinion/california-housin...
I take issue with this. I grew up in Plano, Texas. I loved it and I loved the people. This article is a negative comment about those people "taking steps backward", when they are really mobilizing themselves to take part in local politics and democratically help make the city how they want it to be. Is Plano perfect? No. But the people there do believe in being active in local government and in trying to make changes that the people in the community _want_. It's a special kind of place, and they care. They've done this again and again.
> As a zoning official, I’m usually the last person to advocate for federal intrusion into local decision-making. But the problems of housing inequality and segregation are too big for localities to tackle piecemeal.
That last excerpt is simply an emotional appeal "acknowledging" the author's supposed credentials of opposing big government---- while supporting it. But zoning laws are one of the most impactful things that a local government actually manages, and why shouldn't you be able to help shape your community, especially when we usually want people to participate _more_ in local politics, and zoning laws are one of the ways you can make a real difference in your community. But if you take away any really meaningful power that a local government has, why would anyone care at all to participate?
Starting a sentence with "as a zoning official" has no value. Having personally met with a number of zoning officials, historic commission members, city planners, and council-members, their allegiances and political views vary from one to the next. Some ran on campaigns almost entirely funded by out-of-state-developer donations; while others, sure, are a reflection of elite country-club voters wanting to keep out the "riff-raff". There's a whole swath of viewpoints in between the extremes, and the only thing consistent among every national story about "NIMBY"ism is that it is far, far too disconnected from the communities to adequately capture any of those viewpoints.
However as others have pointed out and (I saw them while reading further down after) I also replied about Japanese style zoning, which is based on a combination of large scale planning and allowing "Up to X nuisance" in a zone and otherwise letting market forces dictate what actually gets build.
> Also, the city has enacted development regulations that specify how lots are subdivided, standard setbacks, and parking requirements. The regulations have contributed to the city's automobile-dependent sprawl, by requiring the existence of large minimum residential lot sizes and large commercial parking lots.