I live in Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. Nearly every single home is multi-family, and the single families that do exist are usually $2 million and up. Take a stroll down one of our streets https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3130357,-71.1188873,3a,75y,1...
It is dense, walkable, and extremely beautiful. There is no reason every neighborhood with duplexes has to look like cookie cutter sprawl that makes people unhappy.
Seconded. I lived in JP for several years and it was easily my favorite of the Boston neighborhoods to live in. Absolutely gorgeous.
I lived in a 6 bed unit on the top level of a 3-story duplex that had 4 people living on the ground floor. It was a massive house that allowed for ten non-related people to live together on a street filled with similar houses, lined with massive oak trees and a five minute walk from a lovely pond. Gorgeous neighborhood.
Edit: I’ll add that I never experienced any negative effects in JP that I’d associate with such dense living. Unlike the more rowdy student oriented neighborhoods like Allston that were far more rough and messy.
It's for more mature and professional people than Allston, but there is a growing group of Northeastern students starting to populate things. I obviously can't prove this, but I believe because everything is so beautiful, people instinctively treat the location better. Whereas Allston is a party area and everything is grimy, so no one cares and joins into the debauchery and littering.
Also, for those not from the area, JP is indeed a "Boston neighborhood" but it's on the outskirts around parkland, the Arnold Arboretum, etc. and is about a 30 minute public transit ride [edit: on the Orange line not Green line]. So don't imagine this is in Boston in the way many might imagine. It probably has more in common with close in suburbs like Arlington than downtown.
The JP line is the orange line, and getting downtown takes less than 20 minutes. It is the second fastest and most reliable line after the blue line. Arlington is a car suburb and is not Boston proper.
Bleh. I knew that. Google did say 30 minutes when I looked. (I've never actually taken transit to JP.)
Of course, the reason that Arlington doesn't have better transit links is that they didn't want it when the Red line was extended to Alewife. JP is certainly less suburban than Arlington but it also doesn't (to me) really feel like it's in "the city."
I agree - it's more suburb than urban, but it is much more of an urban mix than almost all suburbs in the US. I would not say Arlington feels anything like being near the city, the amount of lights and traffic makes it take forever to get downtown. JP is very walkable and has pretty good nightlife if you wanna get blasted and walk home. I love JP.
>the amount of lights and traffic makes it take forever to get downtown
If I go into Cambridge after work, it takes me something like 45 minutes to get to Alewife near the Arlington line in pretty nominal reverse commute traffic. It takes me a good other half hour to go the last few miles. (And that's Cambridge. Boston would take even longer although I'd normally take a different route from my house)
Boston was incorporated two hundred years before Los Angeles. Of course it is going to have more beautiful, old houses. Of course it is going to have more walkable neighborhoods.
But what I'm more interested in is this:
> Nearly every single home is multi-family, and the single families that do exist are usually $2 million and up.
SFH are already 1 million and up in LA, really in SD, LA, SF, Seattle, and Vancouver. It will be interesting to see what happens to SFH values if they become scarcer. It seems like it might have the opposite effect that the NIMBYs generally fear, and make them even _more_ wealthy.
Yup, in other words, the last period of development before the interstate highway push and car-sprawl suburban experiment ruined and bankrupted the country.
In my experience, it’s a misconception that NIMBYS are motivated by property values directly. There are exceptions of course, but usually it’s either some sort of perceived lifestyle impact (traffic, shade, “neighborhood character”, etc) or just general anxiety over change.
Yeah I mean, what do you figure the value of a SFH would be in downtown Manhattan?
SFH's or rather, the underlying land the house sits on, is going to become insanely valuable as the amount available dwindles and population grows.
There is no unwinding this trend. The only thing that can be done is to ignore and not worry about the price of a SFH, and subdivide the land into more apartments so that more people can afford to live on that parcel of land.
JP isn't quite a suburb but I look to it as a fantastic example of how suburban development could be condensed without losing its character. With proper upzoning, suburbs could have denser cores of multi-family housing without impacting those that want less dense housing outside the core. These towns would be more walkable and prettier places to live.
That just looks like many older, low density suburbs (single family homes with some duplexes and ADUs sprinkled in) all across the US (especially older suburbs in the South).
>It is dense
It's absolutely not dense, probably less dense than newer suburbs with smaller lots.
>walkable, and extremely beautiful.
I'll give you that, it definitely looks beautiful.
>it's got more than twice the population density of Houston
You're comparing a neighborhood of Boston to one of the largest cities in the US.
A more apt comparison would be the West University Place suburb of Houston that has roughly the same population density and similar size as JP. It's an older Houston suburb.
A "dense" suburban area would be something Jamaica in Queens, NYC. That has something like 6 times the density of JP.
I agree it looks great. But the density is around 8500/sq mile, which happens to be almost the same as Los Angeles. So, this type of development wouldn’t do that much for housing affordability in LA. I feel like people seriously underestimate how dense Californian cities already are.
I suspect that JP's density is actually a bit higher than that today, given that it was 8500/sq mile based on 2010 population. Regardless, it's important to consider that JP is miles outside the city center. It isn't so much a model of super dense housing as it is a good way to up the density of neighborhoods that might otherwise only support 3500/sq mile. JP represents a good middle ground between the car-centric deep suburbs and the extremely dense city center.
Particularly in the era of remote work, I anticipate LA moving towards a denser downtown and West Side and relying on expanded suburbs in the inland empire and OC to provide the classic single family housing neighborhoods for those who want them.
It's already happening. In 2020, San Bernadio County had the largest growth in the entire country. 80% of the people who lived in California and moved in 2020 moved to somewhere else in California. LA and SF counties lost the most people, but in most cases they all went to neighboring counties.
As soon as you look at the zoning of LA, the housing problem there becomes clear as day, even for someone who doesn't visit very often.
I don't know what you would call this system but LA's problem is that the folks that have the power to fix housing have zero interest in doing because it would hurt their self interest. Housing is only a "problem" if you haven't bought a house yet, once you purchase a house, all the issues with housing there all of a sudden become benefits.
This is a small step in the right direction but California has really dug themselves into a hole here. California needs whole apartment blocks, not just duplexes, but apartments is something that is likely to never happen because of the above issue where no one will vote against their self interest. One could say the State should step in but that would be un-democratic. In fact this whole situation is weirdly democratic but un-democratic. Un-democratic in the sense that it casts out folks that don't live there, but democratic in the sense that the voices of those who own homes are clearly heard.
You guys and gals have an interesting problem on your hands.
Not just landlords, but everyday home owners too. People who got a $X00k mortgage on a house by-and-large are not going to actively support policies which may reduce the asset backing that loan.
There would absolutely be long-term benefits to lowering housing costs in parts of the country, but some people are going to have to feel the short-term pain to make that happen.
It all comes down to the belief that someone has a guaranteed rate of return on a purchase they deem an investment whether it's a house or a corporate bond there's a baked-in sense of entitlement that sometimes flourishes as absurd laws and regulations.
IMO its worse than that.. no asset has been "reduced" yet the tempers and decision making get worse and worse.. This is a fundementally divisive issue that brings out the worst in people. Community is nowhere to be seen when it comes to private property and the dollars that come with it. It is a bitter end-game of an explosive and wealthy 100 years of growth in this part of the world.
I think anti-profiteering laws could be helpful. If you bought land and built a house and want to live in a quiet neighborhood until you die, fine. But maybe if you vote against expanded housing you don't get to sell your house for more than you paid for it, or maybe don't get to sell it at all while you're alive.
Separating the homesteaders from the investors would do a lot of good.
This is something I've been thinking about a lot: how to make homes less of an "investment".
When I bought my house my realtor seemed unable to accept that I don't plan on ever selling. I bought this house because I like it and I want to live here, not because I think I can sell it in a few years. I work remote and I hate moving.
I know a lot of the HN crowd hates the thought of government regulation but I do agree that the individual interests are directly at odds with community interests and I'm not sure how to correct that without regulating the individuals.
And if you regulate those individuals, they will never trust an economic policy you push forward again, because you majorly pulled the rug, after building a ponzi scheme that they were monkeyed into taking part in.
Everyone is an investor at some point in a home. You may not realize your gains for a long time, but the idea that someone who purchases a house isn't allowed to sell it while alive will never fly.
I think this is a convenient caricature of why people want to keep single family zoning, but it doesn't match my experience. I am one of those people that favors single family zoning, and no one I know that shares the same view favors low-density zoning to drive value. Not one. The reason I hear consistently is that people want to preserve their way of life and quality of life. Introducing new zoning and higher density works against that. It brings an influx of newcomers that change local politics, it causes additional traffic beyond what driving infrastructure can support, it soaks up parking and makes businesses/neighborhoods less accessible to those living outside the immediate vicinity, it makes parks/amenities more crowded, it changes the sense of community, it affects safety, and so on. Those things are important to many people, not just current home owners, and I think it particularly matters to those who have lived in an area for a long time and helped make it what it is.
Peasants didn't vote for their lords. Somehow California's poor and renters have been convinced that building less housing is in their interests. (For example, see [1].)
Landlords (look at the word!) are not elected. Building more loosens their grip, and yes it’s counterproductive to go against that, but also land is de facto finite.
Today’s landlords are descended from a long line of landlords, lords, warlords, and eventually just assholes who said, “get off this piece of earth or I will murder you, it’s mine now.”
Of course this lineage is no longer exclusively hereditary, but it often is in practice and the economic externalities and ethical considerations are minimally different.
> Today’s landlords are descended from a long line of landlords, lords, warlords, and eventually just assholes who said, “get off this piece of earth or I will murder you, it’s mine now.”
What prevents anyone from being a landlord?
If it's capital, what prevents someone from seeking capital?
Renters are in general far less likely to vote. Many cities have higher property tax in areas with a lot of renters because the few people who vote in that neighborhood are no longer enough to matter to politicians. Even when they do vote, few renters see how property taxes turn into higher rent (though even for an economists this is tricky as supply and demand are important factors in rent)
I feel like there is a solution that everyone would be happy with. It is to allow many new homes to be built, but to compensate existing homeowners for the fact their property will go down in value due to the influx of new homes.
For example, the law could say "Property taxes on all properties built before 2021 will be reduced to zero, while all properties built after 2021 will have to pay property tax at 5% of the property value for 30 years, before dropping for to 0%".
Isn't this effectively what Prop 13 did in 1978? If anything it has greatly reduced the incentive to upzone, because homeowners in highly desirable areas don't pay taxes commensurate to the increasing desirability of the area they live in, while having the additional negative effect of burdening renters and newcomers with higher property taxes
But you have to combine it with "and we're going to remove all zoning restrictions and allow people to build any types of housing, however tall or dense the market will support, anywhere".
> I don't know what you would call this system but LA's problem is that the folks that have the power to fix housing have zero interest in doing because it would hurt their self interest.
If they upzone my single family home lot I will make out like a bandit. Developers will be all over this neighborhood, building townhouses galore. The last townhouse to sell in my neighborhood went for 2.1MM+.
Upzoning does not magically make housing affordable. Housing pricing is more complicated than a simple supply and demand curve, although that tells a story at the macro level. And truly affordable housing can only be created by mandating that units sell below market value. This shotgun approach to upzoning will alleviate issues in some neighborhoods—in others it will make developers and homeowners a lot of money.
These oversimplified narratives on HN are so tiring. Local conditions are much more complex and multifaceted than these "upzone everything" posts would have you believe.
> And truly affordable housing can only be created by mandating that units sell below market value.
That will only happen if the state guarantees to pay those "greedy developers" that they've been lambasting all over the media a bunch of money to build those units. A developer will simply refuse to build any housing at all if they're forced to sell the units at below rate when they can instead make more money building housing in some other market.
> These oversimplified narratives on HN are so tiring.
> Upzoning does not magically make housing affordable. Housing pricing is more complicated than a simple supply and demand curve, although that tells a story at the macro level. And truly affordable housing can only be created by mandating that units sell below market value.
Can you elaborate? "Affordable" housing only works as a hack within an artificially constrained market, how is building more housing not the ultimate fix?
Of course it's building more. But the question is what kind of more. Is artificially changing the density of every Single Family Home neighborhood going to create a more that depresses pricing? No. Because the housing will not all be built magically overnight. Units will come onto the market after: 1) The developer buys. 2) Tears down the SFH. 3) Builds a new multiplex. The capex in each of these steps guarantees that this will happen gradually (also as people are willing to sell) and since everything will be truly new construction (if you want to double density, say) it will come out on the highest end of the market.
This can make housing more dense and it can gradually lead to more units on the market. Potentially you could eventually reach competition dynamics that depress pricing. But in reality pricing is also dictated by: location, style, build quality, schools, and a hundred other factors. This is why trumpeting upzoning as though it will somehow depress pricing is dishonest or foolish. Since you can't double the density of LA overnight (even if you can double its theoretical denisty), it's naïve to pretend that this is a silver bullet.
My greater point was that the conversation around "housing affordability" has less to do with zoning than developer incentives. Developers need to be given the mandate (and the incentives) to build sub-market rate housing as part of much larger developments if you want affordability and a middle class in California cities.
> But in reality pricing is also dictated by: location, style, build quality, schools, and a hundred other factors.
All of those factors though are considered with respect to supply. If there are 11 homes and 10 buyers, then by necessity the prices for those homes must come down despite how good those homes are.
> This can make housing more dense and it can gradually lead to more units on the market. Potentially you could eventually reach competition dynamics that depress pricing.
You vastly overestimate the number of units that would need to be built to depress prices. Prices are set on the margin and a relatively small increase in supply (say 20% over 20 years which is quite feasible) can have a huge influence.
Going from 10 buyers chasing 9 homes to 10 buyers chasing 11 homes changes the dynamics an incredible amount.
that’s a very good point about pricing happening at the margin, but consider that housing isn’t nearly as fungible as laundry detergent, so there is still a fair bit of pricing friction in housing. that’s because the marginal pricing mechanism occurs at the sub-segment of truly comparable properties (that normalized measures like $/ft^2 can’t capture) not all properties in a locality.
> ...relatively small increase in supply (say 20% over 20 years which is quite feasible) can have a huge influence.
I think your framing of that number is a bit wrong, we've been under building demand by orders of magnitude for 40 years. Getting the sort of increase that might make housing "affordable", e.g. housing at only 3-6x the median household income, would require construction on an impossibly massive scale over the next 20 years.
To wit, the Sunset neighborhood in San Francisco has added 21 new homes since 2011. 12% of the city's land area has added just 21 new homes over the last decade. Generously 80 new residents of San Francisco, a city of over 750,000 people, have been added to 12% of the city's land area in a decade.
The amount of politics, money, and boots on the ground construction necessary to make housing affordable in West Coast cities is out of reach in any "business as usual" scenario in my mind. We'll need a crisis, until then, the mountain will remain unmoved I think.
you’re making a reasonable initial point and then veering into an unsupported conclusion. it’s reasonable to say that static analysis (upzoning reducing prices ‘overnight’) can’t capture real-world dynamics (prices will change more gradually at a macro scale, since development isn’t instant or uniform). but the idea that sub-market rate housing only comes through incentivizing/mandating developers is a wholly unsupported conclusion.
consider the thought experiment where most existing regulation, especially zoning limits on number/type of units, are removed in LA. you’d eventually reach a steady state where developers would make cost plus a small risk premium while prices generally go down as supply equilibrates with demand (housing starts equal net immigration). you’d get affordable housing without directly incentivizing developers at all. that’s because the market would be freed of distortionary burdens specifically designed to backstop housing prices.
that’s done by a number of regulatory mechanisms including zoning, ceqa, building codes, federal housing loans, distortionary incentive programs, etc. changing just one piece of that complex regulatory environment (developer incentives) guarantees nothing other than tilting the current market towards developers, not fixing the housing problem.
This is a great reply. Thank you for engaging instead of just dismissing me or downvoting.
I want to say I agree somewhat: regulatory environments, complex zoning and permissioning, leads to development overhead and ultimately higher prices for everyone. (Ironically I seem to be getting pushback from fiscal conservatives in these threads even though I think we mostly agree there.)
Where I disagree is from this point right here:
> you’d get affordable housing without directly incentivizing developers at all.
You'd get it somewhere. Not necessarily in the cities themselves, because the law of supply and demand is still going to outstrip however much you liberate the ability to build. Cities naturally become unaffordable. They concentrate wealth and economic output and then grow in value because there are not unlimited lots that are equally central to this concentration.
This means that affordability, particularly in the case of cities (like LA), which is the thrust of the upzoning argument, is not actually addressed merely by the removal of impediments to building or changing zoning. The economic regime cities build guarantees the displacement of middleclass dwellings over time. Eventually you reach a point at which all the hairdressers and school teachers no longer have a reasonable commute. The city eats itself in its ever-spiraling productivity.
When you have a large, high-traffic, high-output geographic area (like LA), you have to think more creatively about how to usurp market dynamics inside of that area. That requires below market-rate mandates, as far as I can see. The invisible handle of the market will not settle this because the affordable regions are naturally pushed outward over time.
In otherwords, I disagree with the premise of most of these comments: upzoning is not the final word, not even, in the majority, the most important word for affordability inside of cities. California as a whole will benefit from upzoning. The actual city of LA will not see pricing regress because, as you noted, there are actually many more barriers to building in terms of building codes, etc. and because of the realities I mention in my reply.
while LA (city) is denser than most people realize, LA (the region) is decidedly not dense overall, as large portions are low-to-mid density, choked by a tangled glut of roadways, and pockmarked with mini-downtowns intermittently. (poor) zoning is absolutely a significant factor in limiting supply artificially, which in turn backstops, and moreover propels, pricing.
you might be making more of a sociopolitical argument, that the rich are going to eat all the gains and more, while crowding out everyone else, through mechanisms like regulatory capture. that's possible, but the substance of that argument is not coming through very clearly amidst the economic tangents. it still doesn't support the idea that below-market mandates are necessary to bring prices to any natural, or artificially manipulated, affordable equilibrium. note that in a rich-eats-everything-world, we'd not have enough tax money to make housing artificially affordable. if the rich can dominate real estate in that way, they'd surely dominate tax policy in their favor as well.
The development you're describing is the whole goal of upzoning, and the intended effect. Where you once had a single family home, you now have multiple units.
The brand-new townhouses sell for many millions because they're brand new. But adding new units relieves price pressure on the rest of the market - every person that moves into a brand new townhouse is therefore not moving in to older houses in other neighborhoods.
You're making out like a bandit because you're creating new wealth. Where there was only one housing unit, there are now many. This is a win for everyone involved, it's net positive.
> Housing pricing is more complicated than a simple supply and demand curve
People say this, but it's not true. The U.S, particularly in growing areas, has not built enough homes per capita since the real estate bubble, and so prices go up[1]. It's as simple as that.
> If they upzone my single family home lot I will make out like a bandit.
Only if they only upzone your neighborhood, because if they upzone all of them then developers can buy any of them at existing prices instead of having to all bid on an artificially scarce subset.
And in the first case the money comes at the cost of housing prices for all the other neighborhoods they didn't upzone, who all fight against upzoning your neighborhood.
> And truly affordable housing can only be created by mandating that units sell below market value.
This is balderdash. Not only false, but inverted.
Where does the money to sell "below market value" come from? The rest of the housing market, increasing prices for everyone else, but especially for the people who make three cents too much money to be eligible for "affordable housing." Because then you separate housing into subsidized projects with concentrated poverty and luxury housing that lower middle class people can't afford.
> Only if they only upzone your neighborhood, because if they upzone all of them then developers can buy any of them at existing prices instead of having to all bid on an artificially scarce subset.
And yet some neighborhoods are more desirable than others. Is this not already obvious from the state of the market today? Developers go where the most money can be made—the neighborhoods which are already valuable.
> Where does the money to sell "below market value" come from?
Tax breaks, duh. You put money back in developers pockets. By the way, you don't need to separate the projects. You combine them. You make luxury units possible with a mandate that a percentage of the building be affordable. New York already does this. Why is this so hard to understand?
> And yet some neighborhoods are more desirable than others. Is this not already obvious from the state of the market today? Developers go where the most money can be made—the neighborhoods which are already valuable.
This is just a non-sequitur. Of course some neighborhoods are more valuable than others. But if you have twelve similarly-valuable neighborhoods within reasonable distance of each other, and you only upzone some of them, those will increase in value at the expense of the others.
Also, developers frequently choose the least valuable neighborhoods, because development makes the neighborhood more valuable, so they go where they can buy low and sell high.
> Tax breaks, duh.
So now the middle class gets to pay taxes to subsidize housing they're not eligible to live in, while not being able to afford the housing they are eligible to live in.
> You combine them. You make luxury units possible with a mandate that a percentage of the building be affordable.
Which dramatically increases the cost of the program because the opportunity cost of having more high value housing is so much larger than the cost of building lower cost housing in lower cost areas.
You also end up with the bizarre result and perverse incentive that people not eligible for affordable housing have to live somewhere worse than people who are, so making more money makes your life worse.
This also increases housing costs for the middle class because you under-produce luxury housing so the people who would have bought the luxury housing are now bidding against the middle class for ordinary housing.
housing reform has been a political third-rail for a while now and follows the same aggravating pattern.
- Home owners delight in 100k of equity per year on what amounts to bungalow property held together by stucco, as they have since the late seventies when neoliberal tax reforms at a republican behest elevated them to an untouchable landed gentry.
- Residents in the state bemoan "Reagans army," the indelible population of more than 70,000 homeless that shuffle through their suburban streets rifling through trash, defecating on sidewalks and stealing from unlocked vehicles.
- politicians promise relief and begin amassing considerable tax funds to house the homeless with various community initiatives resources. politicians secure boisterous agreement that this homeless issue must end in $timeline.
- the landed gentry respond in kind, refusing any and all housing relief or homeless shelter construction in their fiefdom as it may in turn pose a threat to their profiteering. lawsuits are filed and reformists hamstrung in court.
- The city directs their considerable housing funds to cleanup funds, periodically evacuating and sanitizing the overwhelming and seemingly endless number of encampments across freeway overpasses and abandoned investment properties. Homelessness is bad, but another outbreak of cholera or bubonic plague is worse.
- young men and women who cannot find affordable housing in the state simply leave after a decade, taking with them talent experience and acumen honed in the city of angels to cities that can better serve them.
its also worth mentioning that California is very friendly when it comes to investment property. there are hundreds of derelict, abandoned malls, clubs, bars, parking structures, and other edifices of commerce including giant grass and trash lots that just seem to exist. Theyre all owned by property management cabals or millionaires who refuse to do anything with the land because surprise, they dont need to. The landed gentry of homeowners will always go to bat, defending their right to chew up property and deliver nothing in return.
I live in a relatively low-income neighborhood in a west-coast city and I hear on social media all the time about how the local government doesn't prioritize us because of our relatively low average household income, but at the same time a lot of those folks are resistant to zoning for more apartment buildings in our neighborhood because of all the nimby classics (crime, diversity, etc.). Maybe I'm wrong (and if someone wants to enlighten me, I'm all ears, because this is definitely not my area of expertise) but it seems to me that an influx of residents into the area might give our neighborhood more pull in local elections as we'd form a voting-block with some aligned interests (services & infrastructure in our neighborhood) even if we differ in other interests.
It just seems like we're already in a losing position (w/r/t local politics), why not at least try to make ourselves more formidable.
To be honest, I think it would improve a lot of other things. In the past I've mentioned that my neighborhood acts more as a pass-through between the outlying suburbs & the metropolitan city-center, but I think more residents in the area would attract local businesses (can you believe there's not a sit-down cafe in my area other than maybe a starbucks? They're all drive-through kiosks!) because there'd be more of a local population. Once the businesses open up, fewer folks would have to commute to another neighborhood for work (we'll probably, unfortunately, never be rid of that) and we become less of a pass-through neighborhood. But, again, not my expertise. It's also a long-term plan, which seems to be off-putting in today's financial atmosphere.
> it seems to me that an influx of residents into the area might give our neighborhood more pull in local elections as we'd form a voting-block with some aligned interests (services & infrastructure in our neighborhood) even if we differ in other interests.
It might give more pull in local elections, but the one major benefit of having more residents is an increased tax base and being a more desirable place for businesses. There are lots of benefits of increasing the density of an area, like you mentioned. The NIMBY resistance has a lot of time and money on their side so it can be hard to overcome.
I'm also in a very similar spot as you, between expensive suburbs and a major urban core. Despite the city I live in voting to restrict new housing, they were able to approve an exception for my area. Definitely appears to be helping, lots of townhomes and apartments are going up and new businesses have been coming in.
New housing or old home sales are the only way to raise money for a city like Oakland. So many houses are subsidized by prop 13 that the revenue per capita is much lower here than SF which also includes a county.
> there are hundreds of derelict, abandoned malls, clubs, bars, parking structures, and other edifices of commerce including giant grass and trash lots that just seem to exist. Theyre all owned by property management cabals or millionaires who refuse to do anything with the land
The fact that developing the lot causes the property tax to be reassessed may have something to do with this. If you make someone pay a gigantic fine for putting something on their lot full of trash, they may opt not to.
It's even worse than that. Because LA is so spread out, merely living in apartment buildings doesn't solve the problem: the apartment-dwellers still need cars to live in LA. When you need 1-3 parking spots for every apartment, the economic efficiency of apartment buildings drops precipitously.
With rose-colored glasses, I can see a path forward; building free-standing parking garages that will eventually be demolished / repurposed when car ownership in a neighborhood goes below a certain level. But that's expensive, clunky, and ugly -- and folks aren't going to want to walk across a wide, busy street just to get to their cars. Probably not politically viable.
LA will never run out of water; it's not the major water user in CA state and it has a huge body of potentially drinkable water next to it and the cash to use it.
Yep. I'd point to crops like almonds (one of the thirstiest crops imaginable) being grown in the Central Valley. 10% of CA's water goes to this one crop. Unfortunately, farmers are doubling down on this lucrative product while they still can. Whatever happens when most of CA goes dry isn't their concern. I guess they'll retire to Florida.
Californians will never approve the energy generation projects required to unlock high volume desalination. They'll be drinking water pumped overland from Colorado until the Hoover Dam is dry.
Rail should have enough stops for continuous high-density housing, I strongly feel that is what makes a city. Trams for connecting routes and subways for the main transit through the city.
You'd save an order of magnitude more water by cutting back agricultural and landscaping usage. If those apartment buildings are professionally designed, they're likely to be more efficient than random houses with ±30 years age on fixtures.
What seems to be working well in LA is building up buses. When I was out last June I noticed buses with dedicated right-of-way (physically separated) and that seemed to be running well during peak times, which is quite eye-opening when you count and realize that the bus which just went by was carrying more people than all of the vehicles in the 4 lanes of stopped traffic.
there’s only one truly dedicated busway here in LA (orange line in the valley). some other buses (like silver line) have sections of busway, but are mostly traveling on shared streets. there’s been a back-and-forth on dedicated bus lanes and some plans for more busways, but there is a lot of misplaced pushback from drivers on this (that it would increase traffic).
i do think that buses are a good lower-cost mass transit option, but without the reliability/security that comes with dedicated infrastructure, it will be hard to get more angelenos to rely on the bus for daily use. currently metro is focused on removing fares, but all that will do is lower their budget (modestly) and worsen service, which will be counterproductive to the goal of increasing ridership.
I was out around the G Line, and not for a long trip but it definitely seemed to be working there. The traffic complaints are always amusing because it really shows how people don't want to accept that the current system just doesn't work. I grew up in Ventura and have family around LA, and there have been so many road projects which made traffic better for maybe as much as 6 months until usage increased to match.
Somewhere someone had proposed a new rule that would require all parking structures to be built on level floors, with the idea of allowing a future conversion when the conditions are right. Slanted floors negate this option from the start.
The additional work required to build a level floor over a slanted slab seems minor when compared to the total work involved in converting a garage to e.g. residential use.
When you need 1-3 parking spots for every apartment
Part of the problem is parking is heavily subsidized and the real costs not borne by drivers. Free public street-side parking in many urban and semi-urban zones. Parking minimums codified into building codes. Allowances for giant asphalt fields in suburban zones.
For a start, in downtown areas (both city and town), remove the parking requirements from building codes and let the market dictate how much parking is needed per apartment, per office, per shop. We currently over-allocate parking.
Developers are typically required to include on street parking in their developments before the right-of-way is deeded over to the public.
There's rarely any public subsidies for parking. That's largely a myth. It's paid for in the price of the development by the developer (and is usual a government or zoning requirement).
In brand new developments, that might be true. But, the state eventually ends up paying for maintenance of those spaces. In older urban areas, that parking has costs in terms of re-developing the roadway for alternative transit. And in both cases, that land could be better allocated to economically productive use.
And that's just on-street parking. There are also per-unit or per-sqft requirements for off-street parking that generally over-allocate space for cars.
Either way, we've created a market failure, in the sense that we over-allocate space (regardless of who pays for maintenance of that space) for parking.
Every development was new at some point. The space for parking wasn't public until the developer signed it over.
And maintenance costs money, but the increased tax revenue from the development more than offsets that. Which is why the city/ state is willing to accept maintenance responsibility for it as part of the dedication.
>that land could be better allocated to economically productive use.
Maybe, but it's not what it was deeded for.
But you actually see a lot of this nowadays, where the development doesn't dedicate the right of way to the public and assumes its own maintenance costs, specifically because they don't want to lose long term control over how the land is used.
If people keep seeing public on-street parking as a free lunch to turn into mass transit or bike lanes, you'll start seeing more and more private street developments.
No- it's part of the consideration in exchange for the developer generating increased tax revenue and dedicating the right of way to the city.
If that weren't the case, the developer would likely keep the parking and streets privately held. Which is something that you do see more and more of these days.
Additionally, we've decided as a society that providing public access and right-of-way to private property is a somewhat fundamental function of government.
Providing streets without places to stop or park would be like building interstates without exits.
But the analogy would be if someone built the intestate and exits, and the government subsequently closed your exit.
Does it matter if the street, but not the on-street parking, is made public right-of-way? Would it be equally acceptable for the government to repurpose off-street parking or parking garages?
Parking garages cost over $500k per space to build. Probably more in California. No one is building one with as part of a short term plan with the intent to tear it down in less than 30-40+ years.
that cost overstated by an order of magnitude. last i looked, it’s on the order of $30K/space, and roughly doubles/triples for underground parking (depending on depth).
i’m a huge advocate for putting all parking underground and leaving ground level space for humans to enjoy fully. it’s more expensive, but we’re a rich city/state/country and we should have nice things.
But that's still roughly double/triple or more what street parking will cost (where space efficiency approaches 100% since driveways and additional
access pavement aren't needed).
Correct on double to triple for underground, but likely more for buildings with compact or less than ideal footprints (inefficient layout and access) and where structural and utility considerations need to be made for the building overhead.
But commercial grade (concrete/lanscaped) surface parking can easily cost $30k+/space, even in non-urban areas. A recent multi-acre university parking lot we did was just shy of $50k/ space (which is why parking garages start making economic sense around that price point), and that was in a 5 digit population college town on the outskirts of campus.
But the point remains that structural parking costs > surface parking costs >> street parking.
And that street parking shouldn't be thought of as subsidized[1], because as soon as it is considered free lunch for other pet purposes, developers won't relinquish control of it, and will potentially set buildings back an additional 8-25' (parallel-angled, per side of the street) to stay outside of minimum right-of-way widths.
[1] In addition to the fact that the dedication and assumption of future maintenance costs is in contractual consideration of the value of the land and improvements dedicated, additional generated tax revenue and economic growth, and is typically required by govt building codes.
street parking is a subsidy when viewed through a wider socioeconomic lens because it externalizes a cost onto society in both space and time. in this case, there's a particularly high opportunity cost for that space, most obviously as livable area, but also for alternate modes of transportation (or simply recreational space). similarly, our setbacks and minimum right-of-ways are horrendously large. urban residential streets in LA (where i live) are often 40-50 feet wide curb-to-curb to account for parking on both sides. we're basically wasting not insubstantial bits of interstitial space everywhere in car-oriented cities like mine.
but street parking can easily be unsubsidized/internalized by simply pricing all of it, even for municipalities themselves. perhaps then my dream of putting all parking underground would make as much economic sense as it does social sense.
my area has a lot of long blocks, and i could totally envision cut-and-cover creating an underground alley right down the middle of the block with parking garages under the back yards of the houses. then you'd only need two cutouts for entry/access while also minimizing the amount of 'driveway' for each property. you could even run utility lines through that space as well.
Why is this a LA/California problem? New York City and all major cities have had high price housing that benefits owners for decades. What steps have Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Seoul, Shanghai, etc done to take their housing prices down to their national average?
In most of those places, zoning rules come from a state/national level. In California, the city has enormous power in zoning rules and the city council is beholden primarily to homeowners.
To add on, California has CEQA that allows for any person to demand long environmental reviews. This has been abused by neighbors (along with historic preservation) to prevent development.
The "historic" Mission laundromat is a classic example, as was the lawsuit against the tech shuttle system.
Tokyo is a notable exception to that list as housing prices have stayed steady even as population grew. It did this by building an enormous number homes over the years.
It's true that many cities face the same problem: by making it difficult to add new supply they make existing homes expensive. Even US cities that aren't famous for being expensive have the same problem (if at a lower scale). They lack the flood of new wealthy population but have the same lack of development.
NYC has high prices, but they are not nearly as high. NYC is not perfect, but it is a lot easier to build there, and thus housing is much cheaper. Housing in the middle of dense cities will always be expensive because it is a desirable place to live, but as you get out NYC starts to get affordable faster than in CA.
This article gives some insights on how other countries have addressed their housing shortages. [How to turn NIMBYs into YIMBYs](https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/09/11/h...). This is likely just one of many other explanations as to how.
> This is a small step in the right direction but California has really dug themselves into a hole here. California needs whole apartment blocks, not just duplexes, but apartments is something that is likely to never happen because of the above issue where no one will vote against their self interest
Incremental upzoning is what will get us there. So changing single family zoning to duplex zoning like what this does, and current multifamily zoning to much higher density zoning.
Going from single family to high-density apartments zoning overnight will cause a great deal of chaos, both in land valuation and also in political distrust.
California has actually built a huge number of apartment blocks in areas already zoned for that type of housing, and those have been providing most of the new housing supply in the state. Such places have picked up the slack for lower density places where exclusionary zoning has prevented higher density.
But housing has to be built in a wider array of formats because not everyone wants to live in a large apartment block. Today, even in urban California huge areas have single homes on large lots that should have the option of being converted to townhouses or multifamily dwellings. A lot of people (even families) would enjoy and even prefer townhouse style living.
This. It's been relatively successful (in terms of units built) in Northern VA. All along the Metro rail through Arlington and Fairfax Counties, we've changed zoning to allow dense multi-use development. Courthouse, Clarendon, and Ballston in Arlington were heavily redeveloped in the 90s and 00s. And Reston and Herndon's Transit Oriented Development Zones have been underway for 5-10 years and will continue for another decade.
Definitely not a cure-all, but a step in the right direction. At least there's office, retail, dining, and residential all on the same plot, which beats the previous massive parking lots and mid-rise office space.
Impossible to say - too complex to figure that out. You are correct that demand has grown faster than supply, so in aggregate, housing prices have continued to rise.
But, we have mixed-use where single-use/non-residential existed previously, so relatively speaking, we're better off (in terms of total housing units). And in terms of economic activity, those zones all appear to be successful.
EDIT - Also worth nothing the zoning changes are pretty limited - within a few city blocks of the metro stations. They make a good PoC for changes, but expanding them beyond their current boundaries will run into the same NIMBY issues we see across the large cities in CA.
That's pretty remarkable given its stature as a center of world power and influence.
That data doesn't answer the question about trajectory, though, which is what you asked. I can't find a graph that plots this stuff over time by metro, but it would be interesting to see no doubt.
Sorry for being so ignorant about particularities of American zoning (I hardly know more than what you pick up playing the original Sim City): could it be easier to shift commercial to high density residential? Of course the general threat to owners would still be there, "if we solve the housing crisis my Prophet might stop appreciating like mad". But that's true for any approach short of an October 1917 reenactment.
And are commercial acres actually valued higher than residential across all density ranges? If not, would regulation actually prevent repurposing? If only the latter was true I'd expect The Most American Thing to happen, finger to regulation in the shape of habitation-as-a-service companies (long term lease disguised as hotels) gobbling up unprofitable locations left and right. Call the company Beanberia if you feel particularly uncreative.
From what I can see, many cities are much more open to commercial zones being rezoned to high density mixed-use. There's quite a lot of empty strip malls and big box retailer spaces these days. Nearby businesses don't mind the change in zoning since it brings in a reliable customer base, and it's easier attracting people to live there since its conveniently located near shopping.
> could it be easier to shift commercial to high density residential?
In some places it's possible, as long as the commercial spaces naturally lend themselves to residential occupation, or in places with enough demand to justify the costs of tearing down existing commercial spaces and building residential structures.
But most unused (therefore in theory available) American commercial space isn't comprised of smaller 19th century brick warehouses that you can convert into chic lofts.
Rather, it's more like abandoned or underutilized suburban shopping malls that can't be easily repurposed into housing. The most basic issue is that these buildings don't have many exterior windows. After all, in an indoor shopping mall, the whole point generally is to create an environment that isolates you from the outdoors by keeping it at a large distance.
Apartment buildings need to keep more access to the outdoors, both for light and ventilation reasons.
When you rezone low density residential into high density residential the apartments wouldn't appear by repurposing existing structures either.
What I could imagine being a problem is rules applying to e.g. the land of an abandoned mall not allowing sufficient elevation. Because "high above" is what you'd want to offer potential residents in exchange for a not so nice ground environment. Perhaps even skip a few floors (between parking and living), empty space earmarked for possible future light commercial development. The elevators won't mind.
> When you rezone low density residential into high density residential the apartments wouldn't appear by repurposing existing structures either.
Many large homes could be converted to duplexes, and homes with large lots could add accessory dwelling units, or sometimes, an additional home to make a "freestanding condominium" development.
True, exactly the same thing happened all around my childhood home during and after my time there. I might be prone to take that as a given...
But that's still just a marginal density increase that is unlikely to reach any of the density thresholds where the density starts having benefits from the individual point of view, not only downsides. Benefits like walkable range amenities and necessities becoming economically viable. Without reaching those thresholds, the density increase is only beneficial on society level. On the individual level, you only get the drawbacks and none of the rewards.
I've seen this argument in many places yet I'm not sure the math holds up.
For example a house that costs 1000$ goes up in value by 20% = 1200$. Over the same period a 2000$ bigger house goes up by the same amount = 2400$. If you wanted to buy the bigger house before the increase you would have loaned 1000$, but now since the increase you'll have to pay 1200$.
Prices do not increase by the same amount in all price bands, for several reasons, but a major one being the cap on federally backed jumbo loans. Secondly, some states like CA tax properties on the purchase price, so the more expensive the property, the higher the tax bill will be, which again is factored into the financing along with interest rates etc.
At least in CA, home prices for typical working class folks have risen much faster than homes that were already expensive. This makes it possible to jump into the next price band once enough equity has been built up on a "starter" home.
Speaking as someone who doesn't own a house in California, apartments are not enough and never will be. Housing is an investment, and if I am put in a position to perpetually rent then I am excluded from a very stable and viable long term investment that is not easily replaced. What complicates this more, is if you shove all the affordable houses to the outskirts of the city where most companies are not then you create an entirely new class-based issue.
Edit: I don't care what kind of housing it is, but it needs to be for sale as opposed to for rent.
The vast majority of apartments I've seen are for rent, not for purchase. So, at the least I'm putting emphasis on the idea that they need to be apartments for sale.
The post I was replying to used the word "apartment". I wanted to be specific in case there's anyone out there that thinks that more rental properties will fix the issue.
>I don't it's possible for a multi-unit apartment building to sell single units.
Ok. I own one unit of a 4-unit building, which was as far as I know built to sell, not rent, roughly 30 years ago. It is definitively not a condo, in terms of the ownership structure and the portion that I own. No HOA either.
So your point is that it's not an apartment? Empirically, it is true that people don't call it an apartment. But it has the same square footage and decor as nearby apartments. The only thing approaching a fundamental difference is that it's on two levels, with bedrooms upstairs.
Even if housing you own is not a significantly appreciating investment, there's a lot to be said for the stability of owning a place that shields you from rent increases/forced moves and which you probably own outright by the time you retire.
The solution, of course, is that houses shouldn’t be investments. They should be things that you pay to live in. But that’s exactly what the parent commenter is saying that the current homeowners will never allow.
> In fact this whole situation is weirdly democratic but un-democratic. Un-democratic in the sense that it casts out folks that don't live there, but democratic in the sense that the voices of those who own homes are clearly heard.
This isn't undemocratic at all.
I know people hate this generally, but just to make a point: Democracy literally means "rule by the demos". The demos is (definitions from wiktionary because it was the first search result): "ordinary citizens, common people from a district, in a city-state” or "(political science) The common populace of a state or district, the people". So, the citizens or the populace. Meaning the people who live there.
That is to say, the will of "folks that don't live there" has nothing to do with Democracy. The citizens of an area voting for their self interest is completely democratic. It just doesn't end up with the results some people want.
Yes, but the conflict comes from what "here" means. If you draw the boundary around a neighbourhood, sure - it's democratic. But it's just as rational to consider L.A. itself and suddenly it's undemocratic because decisions aren't being made by the "demos" but by a small subset of them - with implications for the whole city. Similarly one could expand the boundary to the entire state.
On the other extreme the residents of a single block could decide it's in their interest to build a skyscraper on their one block. Democracy, right? The residents of an area (that block) are doing what's in their own interest.
You have to draw the boundary somewhere. Once you do, the people inside that boundary will vote for their self-interests and the people outside the boundary will be at a disadvantage. This happens at the level of cities with zoning laws but it also happens at the level of countries with immigration laws.
After living in Asia for the last several years where cities combine high density housing and good mass transit with door to door access to great shopping centers the US just looks comically dysfunctional to me.
Who wants to spend hours every day stuck in traffic and looking for parking and then pay outrageous rents for the privilege?
I grew up in such a house and honestly now if you gave me the choice of that vs living in a nice condo in Tokyo, Bangkok or Singapore it wouldn't even be close.
There's certainly a lot of iconography around that but I think that statement is dramatically overselling the strength and universality of that image. Millions of people have chosen suburbs since that was so heavily subsidized in the post-WWII era and limited supply meant there weren't good alternatives in many cases, but I would be careful assuming that this a deep preference rather than picking the default option.
In particular, I think you'd see very different responses when people were asked to choose realistic options: it's easy to say you like the idyllic image realtors promote with luxurious houses, perfect landscaping, happy kids at great schools, etc. but quite another to say you want to spend a couple hours a day stuck in an expensive car because there's almost nothing to do within walking distance, take on additional expenses (landscaping, lower density requires higher taxes for infrastructure, etc.), and otherwise live the actual suburban lifestyle for most people rather than the postcard version.
I too have this dream. Unfortunately the behavior here in mass transit is much different than what I experienced in Asia. This turns many people off to using it IMO.
> Who wants to spend hours every day stuck in traffic and looking for parking and then pay outrageous rents for the privilege?
I'm guessing you didn't live in Beijing or Shanghai. Though to their benefit, both had reasonable transit and lots of affordable taxis. But...I've never seen traffic as bad as Beijing in the USA, even in LA. And the wild parking is crazy: how can someone afford a black Audi A8 yet still have to park it on the road illegally because they lack a parking space for their apartment?
Yeah I've never been to mainland China. Traffic in Bangkok is also horrible but you can mostly avoid it if you live near a train station and plan your activities accordingly.
Traffic in Bangkok isn't that bad compare to Beijing. At least whenever we visited Thailand, it was like going from a super crowded mega city to a city that was less populated and much more mellow (not to mention, it had much cleaner air!).
Unfortunately, many Americans are under the spell of American Exceptionalism, and they believe in their heart of hearts that no other country on the planet can possibly do anything better than 'Merkuh does it.
We are building a ton of apartment buildings, but most of it is replacing light commercial, industrial or virgin lots. Adding duplex, triplex, and quadplex housing allows further density in established residential neighborhoods where you have no political chance of putting a 6 story apartment building. Additionally, duplex units can be sold, making a greater number of residents into invested homeowners.
The thing I don't get is why many SFH owners don't see the benefit of upzoning their lot: Overnight, their house is much more valuable because if they choose to, they can sell to a developer who can make MORE money by building more homes. And if they choose to keep their house as is, nobody is going to force them.
In the end, it boils down to cars, though. Many people see the free parking space in front of their house as an extension of their property, and more people on their street often means they have to compete for it. Make cars optional, and everything else falls into place.
I can tell you that when we were moving from SF to Seattle this past year, we were getting _crushed_ on any house that was sitting on an upzoned lot. Seattle's done a decent job of upzoning parts of neighborhoods around transit corridors, and we were looking at houses on those lots because I believe in the upside as you do. Well, so do others, and they have _cash_ to buy it - we did not!
We're now in a SFH in a mostly SFH neighborhood, but a block or so from an upzoned area that has townhouses and some apartments. The only issue that I have with this so far is that newer construction denser housing is not required to have parking for some reason, but people living in them do have cars. I'm hoping that larger projects start to require parking because transit here just isn't good enough to not have a car. I don't care if people park in front of my house or anything - we're all neighbors - but at some point we're going to run out of street parking. And a lot of people think that's a fake concern, and all I can say to that is, they've never visited Philadelphia.
The way to solve the parking problem is to price street parking, not to require new buildings to build parking while the existing houses get off scott free. It's the exact same supply and demand argument: limited supply so how do you reduce demand to the supply that exists? Increase prices.
I expect residential parking is pretty price-insensitive. Maybe more households would forgo owning a marginal second car. But if a households needs a car, they need a car. And if that means paying $100+/month that's just something they're going to have to eat.
With parking requirements, families who don't have/need/want a car still have to pay the extra price for a built-in feature they don't need. When we bought our first home, it was a condo in SoMa without car parking. We loved it because we didn't want or need a car, and we couldn't have comfortably afforded a place with parking included. Especially in metropolitan environments, minimum parking requirements are the near the core among the reasons many things don't work well (public service, street safety, runaway home prices...)
The parent was making a different point though which was that increasing the price of parking would decrease the demand. And while that is true almost by definition, mostly you'll just transfer money from all the people who want/need cars to someone or someones else. Most adults aren't going to forego a car because parking is too expensive. (Of course, they may decide just to live someplace else where parking is cheaper/free.)
There's definitely a core set of drivers who can't give up their cars, for whom any price increase will just be swallowed. However there's a big swath of gray cases at the boundary.
For example, when we moved to San Francisco, we kept our car and parked on the street. After two parking tickets within the first month (because we forgot the weekly sweep schedule), we decided it didn't make sense to keep the car. We sold it, and started using Caltrain/Muni/biking for most of our trips, with a few Zipcar rentals peppered in. Without those parking tickets, we would definitely have kept our car because there would be no downside.
There is a gray area. I know a couple who live in SF who don't have a car. (They actually have a parking space but they sublet it.) They take muni some although my observation when I visit is that they use a lot of Zipcars, regular rentals, deliveries, and Ubers.
One of the things that's probably true as well is that many people adjust their lifestyle to what's convenient. If you need to rent a car to go somewhere on the weekend, you probably tend to favor other activities.
People complain about parking requirements but, in most US cities (and indeed in a great deal of the world) most households have cars. If I lived in Seattle, even if I didn't need one day to day for work/errands/etc., I'd certainly own one for going out to the mountains and so forth on the weekends.
So let the market work. If people don't have a car, they're doing the environment a favor for all of us and clogging the roads less. It's only fair that they should get a discount: not forcing them to pay for automobile storage they're not using!
Isn't that the case already pretty much everywhere land is scarce? When I lived in Seattle, parking was an extra $300 a month on top of rent but I didn't have to pay that when I didn't have a car.
Yes I know. I'm responding to the "not forcing them to pay for automobile storage they're not using". This website says it costs 25-50k to build an underground parking spot [0] which when they can charge $3,600 per year it is totally profitable to build them without any subsidy by the renters not driving.
I should clarify: everywhere land is scarce and the government isn't moronically not charging what they should for street parking. I have an even worse example than yours: my brother and his gf live in lower manhattan and are somehow able to find and park their car completely free on the street somewhat close to them. My jaw dropped when I heard that as I think it is beyond ridiculous.
I think for many people, Zipcar or other car shares would cover their mountain needs. But for those who need one all the time, they can buy or rent a parking spot if street parking doesn't work for them.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to rent a car if you're only going to use it once a week or so? I mean, with the payment itself, plus insurance, plus gas, regular maintenance, is it worth the price?
It would probably be cheaper but less convenient. I was in a ski house once with people who lived in Manhattan (carless) and every weekend they came up there was lots of planning and overhead associated with the rental car.
Manhattan is obviously extreme but most people who can afford to do sso would rather just have a car they can jump into when they want to.
Personally, $8-10K/year seems expensive unless you aren't trying to economize. I have an 11 year old ~$40Kish vehicle that I wouldn't typically pay $1K/year for maintenance and less on insurance.
But there is certainly some point at which it makes economic sense to just rent, especially if you are paying to park the car. In a city with difficult parking I wouldn't pay to own a car to use every couple of months.
But if you're going to be paying a few thousand dollars for local rentals for trips, plus some Uber, plus deliveries, plus some Zipcar, it starts to become pretty attractive to just own a car if only for the convenience.
> 11 year old ~$40Kish vehicle that I wouldn't typically pay $1K/year
You have a high end bmw or something? New toyotas are cheaper than that with practically no maintenance. I myself spend $840 a year on insurance + 100 oil change/checkup and that is it besides gas.
Yup, I live in a somewhat dense area with decent transit and bike commuting options. A car is more of a luxury than a necessity here and they are taxed heavily (insurance is also expensive where I live). I rent cars maybe once every few months, uber about the same amount, and never really get delivery service unless I'm with others and alcohol is involved. I fortunately do have a garage, but I use it as a gym and workshop area.
I do plan on maybe getting a car at some point, but with my current lifestyle it just doesn't make sense. Also the car market seems to be in shambles right now.
I do, but the smaller slices don't come out to the same size as what they would if I owned a car myself. I use rentals, ubers, and delivery services sparingly. If I owned, I'm sure I would drive a decent bit more.
The other commenter said that 8-10k is expensive (which it is), the big hit there comes mainly from registration fees, taxes, insurance, and parking, all of which are not cheap where I live unless I were to buy a relatively old car that has significantly depreciated, since that's how those fees are assessed.
Well, how much does it cost you to rent a car for a weekend?
I just checked and it appears to be over $300 for the tiniest clown car available near me.
That is roughly triple the federal mileage reimbursement rate (assuming 10Kmi per year), so I'm guessing renting every week would be more expensive than owning.
Moreso if you drive very little, because insurance, gas, and maintenance are less when you drive less. They're not pets; they don't have to be fed and walked when you're not interacting with them.
But I would be more concerned about the cost of having things delivered. I'm not sure if the scenario you are thinking of is going to the store to get a week's groceries, or to the mountains to snowboard.
I'm also wondering whether the context is "every software engineer makes at least $500K" or "all the people with $1000 in their checking account will be first against the wall when the revolution comes".
> The only issue that I have with this so far is that newer construction denser housing is not required to have parking for some reason, but people living in them do have cars. I'm hoping that larger projects start to require parking because transit here just isn't good enough to not have a car.
Mandatory parking minimums make constructing new housing more difficult, raising the cost of housing. The city is making the tradeoff that affordable housing is more important than free parking. As density increases it will hit a point where you need to pay for parking. I live in Belltown and own a parking spot. Ultimately I think this is the right direction to go, the city shouldn't have to pay to store your car.
I envy the Tokyo system, where you're required to show you have your own parking spot in order to be able to purchase a car. No wonder their public transit is world class.
> Mandatory parking minimums make constructing new housing more difficult, raising the cost of housing. The city is making the tradeoff that affordable housing is more important than free parking. As density increases it will hit a point where you need to pay for parking. I live in Belltown and own a parking spot. Ultimately I think this is the right direction to go, the city shouldn't have to pay to store your car.
I get it, but Seattle public transportation isn't good enough to just tell people they shouldn't have a car. I have a driveway and a garage, so the problem is solved for me, and in theory means someone could put their car in front of my house on the street. But if they're putting 6 townhouses on a lot, that won't scale, and maybe they should instead build 4 and parking.
> the city shouldn't have to pay to store your car.
I agree, but that's pretty much what forcing people to park on the street is. I do get that mandating parking raises the cost of housing, which is also counterproductive. But if you drive through Ballard, street parking is pretty tight - I'm not saying people are going to start parking in the median on 8th and 15th, but I'm not sure how much more they can build w/o parking before it starts to look like S. Broad St in Philly!
I agree that we should invest in public transit. It is already good enough to get you a lot of places, but it could be better. We aren't New York or Tokyo. In fact, our energy should be spent on expanding transit, not expanding car ownership.
> I have a driveway and a garage, so the problem is solved for me, and in theory means someone could put their car in front of my house on the street.
I'm not sure what your objection here is then? Density won't impact your parking situation at all. The people moving in (or not moving in) after you can make the decision for themselves. By mandating a specific amount of parking, you are taking that decision from them.
I'm not saying people shouldn't have a car. I already said I have a car, but that I pay for a spot. My partner and I share that car and that spot. If couples downsized from two cars to one, thats already a 50% reduction.
Enacting parking minimums digs us deeper in the car hole. Building 6 units instead of 4 is preferable. Instead we should invest in expanding public transit.
> The only issue that I have with this so far is that newer construction denser housing is not required to have parking for some reason
The reason is that parking requirements massively add to the costs of building new apartments. It works out that everyone in the building has to pay extra, regardless of whether they actually use the parking. Parking minimums also mean that some projects just will never work economically.
> at some point we're going to run out of street parking
Sounds fine! The city doesn't need to provide free car storage to everyone.
The poster didn't say he wanted the city to provide free car storage. Parking on the street is being put on people because the city isn't putting in the realistic requirement that makes developers deal with the fact that people actually do have cars, especially in LA
Having car infrastructure paid for by the users is a much more fiscally responsible way to account for the cost of that infrastructure. If the option of building parking was left up to the developer, they would have to weigh whether the income from parking spaces would be greater than the income for residences. At a certain point, people will try to go from a 2 car household to 1 to save money, or go carless. The city shouldn't mandate how many people should have available parking, it makes more sense for the market to decide and allow people to have some flexibility if they so desire.
Making a requirement will just incentivize more people to drive and the costs will be baked in whether they do have a car or not, so they might as well get a car.
I live in Ballard, and bought a town home with a parking spot because I couldn't see the alternative working out (even though, in theory, our transit isn't that bad, living next to the D-line). I mean, there were some nice places that lacked spots, but until my kid is 10 or so years old, we need a car even if we only drive it occasionally.
I don't get why Seattle doesn't introduce permit street parking in our neighborhood though. It just seems like there are way too many cars vying for on street parking. And that's in places that aren't being overrun by RVs and vans.
And I would argue that's a good thing, save for those who overbought housing with the expectation of it continuing to rise in value. But it's not responsible to shape the housing market to favor those following the greater fool scheme.
Some people aren't solely motivated by the rise in their property. Evidence already suggests doing nothing increases it plenty.
On the other hand, some folks just don't like living in higher density neighborhoods. I can empathize with someone that bought a single family home decades ago, probably can't afford to buy a new one today even after selling it, and doesn't want to see their quiet neighborhood turn into a bustling urban environment.
As an example, my parents live in the suburbs of a midwestern city. It's almost entirely residential single family housing, with a downtown business district that sprung up along a rail line 100 years ago. The city has major highway access, but not close to the rail station.
There are plans to build a 400 unit apartment complex adjacent to the downtown area. Even with light rail to/from the major city, you still need a car to get around. Current residents are naturally livid that their quaint downtown they enjoy is going to change, and the streets around it that weren't designed to handle the daily commutes of hundreds of people are going to have far more traffic and road maintenance.
It has nothing to do with home prices, and everything to do with maintaining the community experiences that they bought into, sometimes decades ago.
This is pretty much it imo. There was some discussion on new housing and higher density in the town where my parents live a few years back, and apparently the standard "against" argument that got it shot down was "there's not enough parking and already too much traffic, we don't want more of either".
I think a lot of this comes down to generational dynamics. Boomers were until recently the largest generation and have only been passed by millennials two years ago. They have the wealth and will to be politically heard and aren't particularly concerned with the difficulties of younger generations unless they see it second-hand through their children.
Exactly. I'm an evil SFH owner. I don't give a single shit about how much it is worth, because I'm not a house flipper and I plan to live in this home for decades. I deliberately moved to this home, away from higher-density housing, primarily to get away from high population density and for the other various benefits of living in a SFH neighborhood. Some people like living in higher-density neighborhoods, and they should have a place to live that they like, too. There is not One True Correct style of home for everyone.
Respectfully: you bought your house — not the neighborhood around your house, and everything in it. It's true that it's OK to have mixed densities of housing, but I think it's an unrealistic and ungrounded expectation to buy a single family house in a city and expect your neighborhood around it to never change.
There are areas of the country where you can cheaply move to, outside of cities, that will likely never upzone (or land is so cheap you can buy everything around your house to ensure it never changes).
Nope. The far out suburbs. If it wasn’t for my job being near a city, I’d have moved even farther to the rural boonies. Now that remote work is getting normalized it’s tempting. To me, the idea of a SFH in the city is nonsensical. The whole point is getting away from having people everywhere and having your own place you don’t have to share walls, sounds, and drama with strangers.
One of the major considerations for me when I bought was “how likely is it urban development will reach this far out in my lifetime?”
Do you also apply this to a new Walmart, Amazon warehouse, fertilizer plant, Casino, steel mill, et. or is residential use the only inalienable use of property?
I don't think exercising your right to vote in local elections and ballot initiatives and speak your mind about local issues is "too much control." It's part of living in a democracy that has some measure of municipal autonomy.
In this particular case, most of the local opposition is because city government is fast-tracking the project while neglecting their own regulatory processes and distrust of the developer (for good reasons, frankly).. Not only do local residents want the community to keep certain qualities in that neighborhood, it's encoded into the law. That wasn't done by one person with too much control, it was done by an elected body with the consent of the governed.
But I don't want to get into the specifics, the gist is I can empathize with someone that wants to preserve the community they live in.
> Make cars optional, and everything else falls into place.
You’re forgetting all the other infrastructure that a person living in a house/apartment/duplex needs. Looking at a zoning map makes it easy to see why housing is so expensive to purchase, but in addition to roads how much additional water, electricity, internet, emergency services, whatever else, infrastructure would be required to service intensification? Does the local council have the competency and budget to manage that? How motivated do you think they’d be to challenge a status quo that prevents them from having to address those issues?
In terms of funding those services, and specifically in the case of California, newcomers to a city bear an outsized share of the burden, because Prop 13 locked in low tax rates for long term owners. So if anything, new development would facilitate providing and improving those services. You can see that, in practice, cities suffering municipal bankruptcies are those who fail to grow steadily.
From what I've read, infrastructure for SFH is much more expensive to build and maintain, because each mile serves so many fewer people, and because the land is basically under-utilized, so the city collects less property tax from it. (One million-dollar SFH vs 8 500k apartments in a 4-plex, for example)
The most expensive infrastructure, schools, actually mostly scale with the number of people, not the amount of land used for each house. So throwing in a bunch of high density apartments can quickly overwhelm the local school system, requiring a decade or two to catch up (and why property taxes generally scale with occupancy limits). Having kids take classes in trailers is a bit of a bummer.
because of a series of ballot measures over the past 2 decades, CA/LA has plenty of money to build schools, so that’s not a problem here (e.g., our billion dollar high school).
they’ve been continuously building schools in LA because of the luxurious funding. at least 3 new schools within walking distance have gone up in my neighborhood over the past decade. schools just aren’t a problem for densification here.
Has LA become particularly more dense over the last decade in your area? If not, then they should have no planning problems as long as they have funding. But someone decided to build a bunch of apartments over a few short years, you could quickly saturate your school infrastructure (and not to mention teacher hiring) until the school system could catch up.
to some extent, but that doesn't matter since the point is that we have plenty of schools and the money to build enough new schools, even if we built ten high rises in my neighborhood. sure, at the theoretical limit it could be a problem, but that isn't anywhere close to the primary limiting factor in the foreseeable future.
I didn’t mean for my comment to come off as a defence of the status quo there. I think it’s obviously a very stupid way to run a city. But fixing it requires very large capital expenditures, a decent amount of rather complicated planning, and taking on some big projects that could go wrong in any number of ways.
In addition to not being as simple as the only having to solve the stupid zoning problem, it presents a number of risks that you’d expect certain types of politicians to be averse to.
It also takes a long time for the benefits of any of those changes to manifest, which doesn’t really align with political incentives either. “If you elect me 2-3 more times then things will start to improve over the next 10 years or so” isn’t a very compelling campaign slogan.
> Overnight, their house is much more valuable because if they choose to, they can sell to a developer who can make MORE money by building more homes. And if they choose to keep their house as is, nobody is going to force them.
In normal states -- people oppose up-zoning, because if their lot becomes more valuable, they instantly lose a lot of money. Sure, it's on-paper higher, but if they stay, that just means higher property taxes instantly (it's not uncommon for taxes to double or more after a few years of gentrification have occurred), along with higher cost of living (every other thing around them, like child care and restaurants and such will all get more expensive, to cover the higher rent and higher cost of living for those folks). And that's before getting to all the other minor annoying issues (extra noise, less infrastructure per person, income inequality, etc)
And sure, in theory they could sell out. But how, for what? Sure, in California, you can always just assume there's a boring midwest/south place to escape to -- but for everyone already in the midwest/south, no such escape option exists. If those folks leave, they'll have to buy a new place somewhere else, and they're all expensive too. If your $50k house is now worth $500k on-paper, but every other place to live is now $800k and up, you can't afford to stay (property taxes + cost of living are eating your income) and you can't afford to leave (everywhere else is getting even more expensive, there's no where to 'sell out' to). And that's before getting to the fact that the average person literally can't move anywhere meaningfully different. (They have a job that forces them to stay in market, or are going to a specific university, or have kids, or have kids with divorced ex-spouses, or are caring for elderly parents, etc, etc)
---
This is of course, just for normal/boring states. California has this "never charge people actual property taxes" law weirdness that complicates things.
>LA's problem is that the folks that have the power to fix housing have zero interest in doing because it would hurt their self interest. Housing is only a "problem" if you haven't bought a house yet, once you purchase a house, all the issues with housing there all of a sudden become benefits.
I have an expression for this. "Solving the problem is only half the problem." Everyone knows how to fix the housing problem (build some f'ing houses). But solving that problem is only half the problem.
I have never heard this quote before, but I like it. It's a good point. So how about this to help lead the discussion. We, the HackerNews community, seem to have a general consensus that increasing supply is the best way to lower prices. Rather straight forward, really. But the reason why housing is currently limited is due to a conflict of interests; existing property owners want to stifle supply. And they have more political power than non-property owners in the state. So perhaps we can discuss ingenious policy ideas that would help feed their own self interests, but result in increased supply? The following article references how other countries were able to accomplish such a feat [How to turn NIMBYs into YIMBYs](https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/09/11/h...)
Is more housing really the answer? I keep thinking of induced demand increasing traffic on the roads, and I wonder whether California would just have more people consume the additional housing. Instead of increasing the supply, perhaps addressing the demand is the only way out.
> Is more housing really the answer?
> Instead of increasing the supply, perhaps addressing the demand is the only way out.
Prices are a reflection of supply and demand. There are only two ways to lower prices. Either increase supply or lower demand. One of them is a solvable issue, which is to increase supply. The other option, which is to lower demand, is either unrealistic or unfair. How, do you suppose, we lower demand? The only way you can lower demand is by getting people to change their mind. But how can you realistically expect people to change their mind? Everyone wants to move to L.A., the Bay Area, and other expensive cities because of the good jobs, universities, and career opportunities exist there.
> I keep thinking of induced demand increasing traffic on the roads
Induced demand is an interesting topic, but do not conflate it with the housing crisis. These are two fundamentally different economic situations. Induced demand is theoretically "induced" because the public good or service is free and utilizing the resource comes at no additional cost to the consumer. Homes on the other hand are not free. They come at a price. And therefore, there is nothing inducing its demand like you would theoretically see with widening a freeway.
Of course more people would consume the additional housing. Did you think the proponents planned for it to sit empty?
There is some rank ordering for access to housing in desirable places. They take in N households. In a market economy, a small value of N shows up as a high price. Of course a lower price would correspond to a higher value of N. That's not some kind of counterintuitive cause and effect relationship, it's the same fact.
The point is that more people get to satisfy their desires to live in cities. Living in a city stops being something reserved for the top N households.
> Un-democratic in the sense that it casts out folks that don't live there, but democratic in the sense that the voices of those who own homes are clearly heard.
The debate around legal immigration is very much the same. The people that want to immigrate have no voice.
> I don't know what you would call this system but LA's problem is that the folks that have the power to fix housing have zero interest in doing because it would hurt their self interest.
This is generally referred to as NIMBYism. And yeah, it’s a problem, but particularly in California where property values have skyrocketed to the point homeowners can’t afford to give up their nest egg because then they’d have nowhere to live.
Agree with you and I think of this problem similar to that of slavery (not nearly the same ethically though).
It does concern me however what it took to make people give up their advantages, the grossly more obvious inequities in that case (and solution), and how long it took.
My understanding is you are already allowed to build an ADU (additional dwelling unit) due to state laws.
What I've seen in my city (LA adjacent) is the city can find really creative ways of making adding an ADU very expensive. On my block the same contractor built 2 different ~500 sq ft units on two different lots. They both were a garage tear down replaced by a 1 bedroom unit above a garage.
The first unit was done right after the law change allowing ADUs, and cost ~140k. The second, started 18 months later was ~270k and the owner had to pay for things like repaving the ally and upgrading the sewers.
2/ adding 1 more unit to a plot is hardly going to make dent in the crisis.
We need to look at Asia to see how they offer affordable house: giant high density housing complexes with ground floor grocery stores and shopping malls for convenient access.
Case in point: my son and his music/business partner have just moved to Santa Fe, where housing for young/lower income people is almost impossible to find. Because of the "tradition" of building casitas here for centuries, we effectively have ADUs, and the only thing our son's friend could find that was affordable was essentially a very small ADU/casita.
Is it a dream home? No. Is it an acceptable living space while someone gets their feet on the ground, starts figuring out a new job/life? Absolutely.
Well, in part because agreement about what is better is hard to come by. More single family housing? Townhouses? Small apartment complexes? Large apartment complexes?
You could say "well, how about all of the above?" but that just elides the tension between sprawl-based development and increasing urban density, which is also not a matter of widespread agreement. Many people don't like sprawl, but they also don't want dramatically increased urban density (or at least, not near them).
No Single family housing; We can't create more land.
No Townhouses; because they are not dense, lack the ability to easily co-mingle commercial and residential zoning (which is important b/c walkable cities means you don't need a car to get to work or the grocery store).
No small apartment complexes; not high dense enough.
Large apartment complexes with ground-level commercial space <- winner winner chicken dinner.
The homeless. The poor. Young students. Artists. Elderly. Refugees.
That is anyone who can't get anything better. ADUs are useful housing for those who are on the edges, but pretty much all of the above wants better - they just can't afford it.
If money wasn't a limit how would that change your housing? Indoor pool? Bowling alley off your bedroom? servant quarters? Everyone has a limit - I listed things that most of us would be not sure if they are worth it or not, but with money not being the limit maybe we would. However because money is a limit most of us don't seriously look at those things even though it is possible now (you might need a zoning variance to fit a bowling alley on your lot, but if you are reading this it probably is an affordable addition if you really want it)
There are a lot of people who want their own space, but can't afford their own apartment. It is ridiculously easy to rent out spaces like this in Southern CA. If you post an ad for it on Craigslist on Friday, it will be rented by Sunday. Multiple people will be interested.
They can't afford the apartment, because there are very few apartments to rent. In Vietnam or Hong Kong houses millions of low income people in apartments.
The State govt could take back development authority from local governments. Otherwise the only hope is that the railroads eminent domain some land and building giant housing complexes with a train station attached.
Put differently, "affordable housing" and "housing as investment" are at odds. People don't acknowledge this tension enough, I suspect because many people want to switch to the housing-as-investment team.
Imagine if we restricted how many cars could be made a year, with the predictable result of new and used car prices steadily increasing every year. And then when anyone suggested what maybe we should let car makers make more cars, you got a bunch of people complaining about the property values of the cars they already owned, or that this would ruin car culture.
Ironically, people do kind of do this, with discussions about traffic, except that nobody benefits. Everyone wants to drive, and no one wants to be stuck in traffic. Restrictions on driving like tolls or special driving zones, bus lanes, etc. all seem to meet the same kinds of headwinds in the US. Maybe this is too far of a stretch for a connection, but your comment got me thinking.
Well, yes. Americans have sort of a brain block when it comes to driving vs any other mode of transportation.
It’s at least partially rational, though: usually non-car transportation is hilariously impractical wherever they currently live, and also wherever they’ve lived in the past.
The struggle is to get people to see what could be possible when they have minimal to no experience with it.
> Un-democratic in the sense that it casts out folks that don't live there, but democratic in the sense that the voices of those who own homes are clearly heard.
> Un-democratic in the sense that it casts out folks that don't live there, but democratic in the sense that the voices of those who own homes are clearly heard.
California’s housing crisis has given me a clear perspective on the debate between centralized and distributed powers, a topic I have long struggled to resolve. It harkens back to debates as old as federalism vs anti-federalism. States rights versus federal rights. Similarly, in this case, it’s about county rights versus the state’s right. Debates on this topic usually resolves around one or the other, leading to rather binary positions. But really, the discussion should be about the appropriate balance between the two. I find we are well informed about the tyranny of centralized power by the state. As a specific example, there is a narrative that the Robert Moses era of the mid-20th century lead to massive civil projects, such as freeways, that put the interests of the state ahead of individual neighborhoods, leading to destroyed and fractured communities. It appears there has been a political whiplash against this era which has lead us to the predicament we find ourselves with today, which is that powers are now heavily distributed. What can and cannot be built is now dictated by the counties and the neighborhoods within it. This is wonderful in the sense that you, as an individual property owner, have much greater control on what goes on in your community. But this also has a systemic effect of acting as a problem that the federalists originally warned about in their own debates, which is the tyranny of the majority. Because powers are so heavily distributed, it has lead to an artificially constructed zero-sum game, as you point out in your post, where everyone who owns a home is content and will do whatever they can to limit supply as doing so feeds their natural own self-interests. In this regard, I think it is clear that we have an improper balance between distributed and centralized power. I believe it weighs too heavily on the distributed side. This results in the trampling of interests of both developers, who wish to produce supply, and individuals themselves who wish to participate in the society, but cannot due to unaffordability. This is a shift in position that I would say is rather unique for me. I tend to advocate for the inverse, a reduction in centralized power. But in this particular case, I think centralization is an appropriate step.
I also want to make one additional disclaimer. By centralization of power, I don’t mean the state should be involved in housing construction itself. This is a position often proposed by progressive advocates. Instead what I mean is that the state should have the power to override local interests so that the market can do its job, which is its interest to increase supply. In other words, the state should do what it can to remove the local bureaucracy that stifles development.
as with many man-made constructs, we inadvertently introduced discontinuities into an otherwise continuous function: artificial governing units (city, county, state, country) when governance ranges continuously from the individual to the world. this is a self-inflicted problem of trying to wedge the ‘right’ level of government for each and every governance issue. rather than the federalism/anti-federalism dichotomy, we should be thinking about how to create a more continuous governance structure matched to the continuous scope of governance issues.
for instance, the state largely delegates zoning and housing starts to cities, but that’s turned into a regional concern as cities try to offload housing onto nearby cities to preserve existing stock and dedicate the rest to commercial property. so then, the right place to institute zoning/housing is not at the city level, or even the county level, but at the regional level. however, we don’t have a regional governance structure, so it gets wedged into existing city/county frameworks.
but apartments is something that is likely to never happen because of the above issue where no one will vote against their self interest.
Several dozen massive apartment complexes have been constructed in L.A. in the past 4 years, and more are being constructed as we speak.
It turns out the problem was never actually zoning; it's simply that it's extremely expensive to build in L.A. when taking into account cost of land (limited supply), cost of materials (excess demand), cost of labor (excess demand), and the extra architectural and structural demands resulting from the dozens of fault lines criss-crossing the L.A. basin.
I wonder what would happen to the market if suddenly the population was quartered or halved? We have omincron now, I’m just waiting for a variant do mutate and become something ugly like Ebola. I’m also thinking of places like Japan where thousands of houses are abandoned. Surely there are things that could crush the market aren’t there?
Montréaler here; I live in a neighbourhood which is uniquely composed of plexes - 3 to 8 units per "plex", with the typical number being 3, thus the term "triplex".
Honestly, it's the ideal density IMHO. I get the convenience factors of urban density, but without (most) of the downsides of a high-rise condominium building.
Most cities and urban areas would be much better off with a preponderance of middle-density housing! But, as has been mentioned elsewhere, protectionism in zoning laws and rampant NIMBYism is a difficult wave to break.
Our love affair with middle-density housing is a bit of a cultural/historical oddity; there really aren't other places in Canada where this is wide-spread norm.
I've lived on the 2nd and 3rd floors of triplexes in the plateau and it was one of the best living experiences I've had. Really awesome location, price, size, etc.
Yeah, it's hard to describe to people that haven't lived in them before. Couple that with the fact that everyone typically gets their own private entrance/exit to outddoors due to the exterior staircases, and it's a fantastic combination of privacy, density, convenience, and urbanization IMO.
Those exterior staircases are such a unique feature, certainly the way they are positioned. Love your city very much, one of the best in North America.
Boston-area is loaded with them. Within 10 miles of Boston’s Downtown Crossing (which includes many, very dense adjacent cities) it’s unquestionably the most dominant type of building for residences.
Duplexes, triplexes and tenements dominate any decent sized city (100K+) in Massachusetts. It’s just what tends to happen when cities were founded 350-400+ years ago.
High-rise is not the only other way to reach density. I think major European cities like Paris, Barcelona, Berlin have a very livable and lively format of continuous blocks of 5-8 story buildings.
I lived almost all my life on neighborhoods of "walk up apartments" (3 or 4 floor high condo buildings without a lift, typically with 2 units per floor), and I agree completely. It is small enough density to be calm and quiet, but high enough density to support small local businesses at walking distance.
I agree with all the points. If only sound insulation was better in these old plexes. Hearing someone sneezing (and not only) on the upper floor is not much fun.
Or kids roller skating on the floor above you while you're trying to work or sleep. Roller skates on a normal floor are... deafening to the people on the floor below.
It’s horrible when you have small children being above people.
Kids are noisy, they walk hard and jump a lot. You can lecture /punish all you want. That doesn’t change their nature.
For a time we were apologizing to the grouchy old lady living alone below us in a 3 bedroom. Hitting ceiling with broom at every noise.
But at a certain point. Look 3 bedrooms are for people with family. I’m not going to force a 2 year to sit still 24 hours a day.
After one absurd ceiling episode we started family jumping exercises for every broom whack.
Never going back to multi-tenant if I can help it.
I have a family member with small kids that bought a condo flat in Montreal in one of those ubiquitous stick-framed midcentury quadplexes. The downstairs neighbor complained aggressively about "kids too noisy" and sued my family member. The family member was unable to work it out with the neighbor, and faced with the prospect of the suit actually going to trial, their lawyer recommended settling by selling the unit to the downstairs neighbor for a $100K CAD haircut. Closing that sale was a huge relief to them after having endured almost two years of constant harassment by the downstairs neighbor. Sharing to warn others.
It’s not even old ones. Brand new ones often are made so cheaply and to such low standards that they have the same issues.
It’s why I never consider living in townhouses, duplexes, or apartments anymore. I have to not share a wall - otherwise I will definitely hear the neighbor. It’s guaranteed. Even in SFH, I still hear my neighbors - just don’t hear them walking around their house like I would in another type of home.
I'm moving into a "plex" in a southern city that has become heavily "plexed" over the last 15 years. There are two strategies basically: "plexing" or "tall and skinnying" (the latter is to make very slim houses that have very small easements between them, the advantage of which is that each lot is fully owned by an individual party).
It's got pros and cons. I think the big issue I observe here is that it doesn't help affordability in any noticeable way. Whenever the single family units are destroyed, they are typically the older / lower end variety first, which had previously been attractive as rentals for lower income people but now they have massive value as teardowns so they can be carved up. Those houses get replaced with high end new construction. So this results in increased real estate value and ultimately a concentration of amenities around these areas that are being "plexed." No affordable housing is built (since this is a southern US city, all low income housing is pushed away from the city core to the exurbs, with long car drive commutes).
Another con is that this town does not have public transportation, and their roads are ill suited for 2-3x the old density. This results in the dreaded "stroads" that have numerous stoplights, carry 5-6 lanes of traffic, and are lined by strip malls as the only connectors.
And finally, when a neighborhood gets "plexed," all the existing foliage is destroyed because it is in the way. So the newly plexed zones are barren with only small shrubs and decorative plants, no trees at all.
I think town home style developments make a lot of sense conceptually. They provide easier access than an apartment building and are much cheaper to build. The density improvements are real, although though not as large as an apartment. I just worry that the way it's being done is rather careless and with little thought for the future, at least in the southern US town I am staying in.
Obviously I support these kind of movements - the housing crisis is no joke. But every time I see an article about multifamily homes, I think: ok, but we really need is are hundreds of tall high rises with 500+ units, like in New York or Boston, each of which uses land much more efficiently than LA (2x more residents per square mile).
There's truth to that, but Paris and Barcelona are some of the densest cities on the planet. People really underestimate how much you can get just with 5 stories or so if you do it consistently. As anyone who's been to those places knows there's no sacrifice of beauty, sun, or livability really.
> People really underestimate how much you [density] can get just with 5 stories or so if you do it consistently.
This is the rub, right? We can only redevelop a block or two at a time, so the only choice is for 10+ story towers. Especially because land is so expensive in these cities.
I'm curious if new residential buildings (non-luxury if that even exists) in Paris or Barcelona are only 5-6 stories high.
> We can only redevelop a block or two at a time, so the only choice is for 10+ story towers. Especially because land is so expensive in these cities.
That's not necessarily true: it's much easier to build a duplexes/triplexes than a high-rise. Companies that can build the former cannot necessarily build the latter. IIRC when Bloomberg downzoned many "missing middle" outer-borough neighborhoods and upzoned core areas to support high-rises in NYC, many small building companies couldn't transition and just folded.
> I'm curious if new residential buildings (non-luxury if that even exists) in Paris or Barcelona are only 5-6 stories high.
I'm curious to see actual data on this, but many (most? almost all?) European cities have zoning rules that prevent building much taller than that in residential areas. It's especially true near the city center, where the restriction may apply to all buildings. So my guess would be it's still pretty common to not build high-rises in European cities -- similar to many NYC neighborhoods outside Manhattan (that weren't downzoned by Bloomberg).
This is _it_. There are so many good examples of dense but verdant urbanism in the US. But they all predate cars.
Funny thing is, people still will pay top dollar to either live in these neighborhoods, or visit them on vacation (Savanah, Charleston, New Orleans, Ashville, ...).
It's a complete tragedy, the answer is right there. Just do the same thing they did then, but today.
Many people are in denial that neighborhoods like these are possible despite them existing in pockets of the US (I live in one in SF) and ALL over the world. All you need to do is not surrender space to cars and allow density - and have the demand to support the density - and it just works.
I prefer living in the burbs and working remote. I do think that zoning should be much more lenient for housing in urban areas though. Not everything has to be one size fits all. NIMBYs definitely need to go though.
Supposed you have 300 people living in a square kilometer on a single floor. If you double the number of floors by 5, you get 1500 people per square kilometer.
If you build more dense and closer to work and shops, people can travel smaller distances. Public transport, walking and biking will become viable alternatives, resulting in fewer car trips. You could have less traffic when planning it well.
So, it is about rebuilding whole infrastructure from the ground: public transport, walking, biking, office spaces, not just building high condo complexes.
- LA is already building various large expansions of public transit, as well as walking/biking infrastructure.
- Generally the shops basically come along with the housing. "Activating" the ground floor - putting retail or other public uses into the ground floor of buildings that are residential above is standard practice when building those taller residential buildings along main arteries, on busy corners, and so on.
> LA is already building various large expansions of public transit
which suffers from many difficulties and cost overruns because of existing layout.
I think it would be more cost efficient to build another city/town nearby from the ground, and people decide where they want to live given differences in cost and lifestyle.
On paper. However in the real world cities are only built next to other cities. You could build a "perfect" city like LA in ability to support population and jobs in Oklahoma for pretty cheap - but nobody will come.
That is ignoring the fact that in our perfect city above, just a few years later we will discover something new we forgot to account for and now our city is imperfect.
What if we don't? Instead we zone more and more suburbs farther and farther out.
We still need to build ways for all the new people in those new suburbs to get to the rest of the city. Building to dense neighborhoods is a lot cheaper than father out ones (because we need a lot more distance to get them) As a bonus transit works better as you become dense.
And in general many of the denser areas of New York City are some of the most expensive while parts of Queens and pretty much all of Staten Island are less dense and cheaper. So it's by no means a direct relationship between density and cost.
There isn’t a housing crisis, there is a jobs location crisis. Apartments are terrible, there is plenty of space out there for people to have their own and not be crammed in like sardines.
Cities though have the problem of allowing much more space for jobs than they have for housing. You don’t want high density housing in your city? Fine, cap your employer zoning.
It’s a big country out there and people need to decentralize and stop trying to turn nice places into hong kong density.
Nobody needs to use land “efficiently” by packing more people into it.
> You may not want to live like that, but plenty of people do. We should allow them.
I suspect that number is a lot lower than is claimed. It's only a very loud set of vocal urbanist activitsts who clamor for these changes and create the illusion of that demand. The reality is most people grow out of wanting to live in dense areas and walkability is very overrated. In fact walk scores basically don't matter when people actually shop for a house compared to other factors (price, size, location, schools, etc). And as people age and want to establish a family, the urban life quickly loses its attractiveness.
The real question is why should any neighborhood have to 'allow' anyone who wants to live there to do so? Am I entitled to living beachfront in Maui just because I want to? Should they have to change their zoning to permit that? I feel like incumbent residents have a right to maintain their neighborhood character, density, and quality of life. Those things get eroded when you have an influx of new residents and different density - you end up with streets, parks, and other amenities that no longer work the way they're supposed to. What I see happening is that a city will build itself over time into something very attractive, and newcomers want a piece of that, so they demand zoning changes at the cost of the incumbents who made that place attractive in the first place.
> walk scores basically don't matter when people actually shop for a house compared to other factors (price, size, location, schools, etc)
This is not supported by home prices in many housing markets. The walkable parts of cities tend to be among the most expensive in every metro area. Realtors even have a phrase for not being able to afford to live in the dense metro core: "drive until you qualify" (for a mortgage, given your income).
This is also weird thing to note given that real estate websites pay to license walk scores presumably because they believe that home buyers want this information.
> The walkable parts of cities tend to be among the most expensive in every metro area.
That doesn't prove anything. We don't allow very many walkable spaces, so by supply and demand it only takes a few people who actually like walkable spaces to drive the prices up.
I think the idea that people like walkable spaces is correct, but it is hard to prove it.
From a US perspective, I think walkability score is overrated because walkability scores are ridiculously inflated. There are like 5 places in the entire country I would consider actually walkable (and they aren't affordable), yet many places will have a good or great "walkability score".
And walkability is a tradeoff for space. Pretty much everyone in my family are Single-family home for life kind of people, but they all enjoy visiting walkable places and talk about how nice they are. I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's not that people don't value walkability, it's that there are very, very few good walkable places to live. Would even go as far to say close to none, but I'm sure some smaller towns are out there that go under the radar.
I agree that walkability is bad. IMO, it should be 0-100 based on the minutes to walk to a grocery store with the score being minutes it takes to walk to a grocery store. The lower the better.
> You don’t want high density housing in your city? Fine, cap your employer zoning.
The political incentive is to do the opposite. Make it cheaper and more attractive to employers, then make residential housing scarce. You get huge demand for housing, then employers have to pay more (generating more income tax revenues) even though all the money goes to landlords, then landlords have to pay more in property taxes. From the perspective of the self-interested government bureaucrat, this is the system working as intended.
> Nobody needs to use land “efficiently” by packing more people into it.
Except that then things are more spread out, and what you're using inefficiently then is transportation.
If you have a twenty story building with shops at the bottom and housing at the top, anyone in that building can walk to any of those shops, or any of the ones across the street.
There is enough land that we could build all of that stuff across a hundred square miles, but then everybody needs a car. And many people don't want that, but restrictive zoning prohibits the thing they do want.
There isn't a traffic crisis, there's a sprawl crisis. Cars are terrible, we know perfectly well how to make human habitats that don't require $8k/year 2-ton death traps.
Cities though have a problem of allowing much more surface area than people can reasonably traverse. You don't want traffic in your city? Fine, stop adding subdivisions.
We're not farmers. We benefit from other people, not from land. Stop this fantasy that everyone can have a country estate 15 minutes from the city center. It's geometrically impossible.
Nobody needs to use time "efficiently" by going 60 miles an hour. If you can't reach what you need on foot or bicycle, that is a land use problem, not a transportation problem.
Super dense cities are efficient in some ways, but they have tons of other problems and they externalize tons of costs. What we're missing in the U.S. is human-scale density, especially in the form of cohousing arrangements.
Tall high-rises are not actually efficient. You know how much energy it takes to have elevators going up and down 40 floors along with all the other stuff? Land is not the single factor to calculate when we want efficiency.
dense city is efficient, but density doesn't have to mean high-rises. It can be modest-rises, floors that are enough for people to still use steps to get to the top, so under 10 stories and dense, and that's probably in aggregate more efficient than high-rises. High-rises have serious problems and issues that are not just additive, and they are far harder to adapt, to change to adjust to changing contexts.
If the sound proofing is essentially 100% then I'm fine with apartments, but every apartment I've lived in you could hear people noises all around and it's annoying and sometimes anxiety inducing when you're trying to get some sleep or concentrate on a task, hence I live in the burbs where I might hear the occassional loud car go by but never people stomping, fighting, or f..king
> hundreds of tall high rises with 500+ units, like in New York or Boston
Notably, those cities have been very expensive for decades because they also slowed their pace of housing construction below demand.
Meanwhile, cities like Houston have kept prices down by granting tons of building permits. For the purposes of pricing (as opposed to urban design), it doesn't matter what form the new units take, as long as they get built.
High rises generally aren't a good way at providing density. That's because the footprint of most skyscrapers needs to be a lot much larger then the tower itself. Otherwise, the skyscraper will sink into the ground, something that only gets worse when you have several skyscrapers close together.
NYC is one of the few places that can have a lot of super tall buildings really close to each other. That's because the bedrock is so shallow and the ground can take more weight. Los Angeles, by comparison, has a much deeper bedrock, which makes it difficult to build tall buildings very close together.
If you want to get a lot of housing, medium density is the way to go. Medium density is cheaper to build and maintain, can be built in more locations, and is more pleasant to live in.
Obviously, the discussion above (read: comment thread elsewhere) about "middle density housing" is the same armchair urban planning as your comment, but middle density seems like a much more "moderate" solution by comparison to your proposal.
I'm somewhat surprised at this given the intensity of California housing NIMBYism but I'm pleased to see it happen. Allowing fourplexes in some cases is a nice plus.
This won't end the housing crisis. It'll take a long time for this to have a large impact but it's still an important step.
To anyone saying you need high rise apartments like NYC, it's not as simple as that. You can't just plop a 500 unit high rise in the middle of a city like LA and hope for the best. There are a lot of considerations. For example:
1. How will you deal with all those cars;
2. Will there be enough public services in the area?
3. Is that even a good idea given that LA is an earthquake zone. Sure Japan has high rises but it's extremely land-constrained and people live in much smaller units, which partially offsets the higher costs of building in an earthquake zone.
LA has been spending billions on a rail network and continues to do so. I don't know LA but I've heard people say it doesn't take you anywhere useful. There has also been resistance for adding stations in richer areas (eg Santa Monica) because it brings the riffraff in.
But if you are going to build higher-density housing, the obvious place to do it is around train stations. You'll be less car dependent and you'll increase ridership of the light rail.
The same applies to the Bay Area. Higher density housing should be a no-brainer along the SF to SJ Caltrain corridor.
Tragedy of the commons. California is an issue but this is a nationwide problem. Solve it in only one place and folks just move in and recreate it. Hence the lack of will.
Good grief. Not everything is a "crisis". This type of alarmist language games needs to stop. This is less a housing crisis and more an entitlement crisis. There is an entire country between the coasts. There are jobs available over the country. There is open land and housing all over the country. It's more that people feel entitled to a certain location, a certain line of work, a certain income level, a certain proximity to [friends, family, or whatever] and are upset they can't have it. But there's nothing stopping people from making a living and thriving elsewhere, and it would also be beneficial for the country by driving a more distributed and decentralized economy.
Sure, but the entitlement goes both ways. The current landowners feel entitled to enjoy massive appreciation gains while paying very little property tax, just because they settled there first. But I agree we are lucky in that we have other places to move, but that might not always be true.
Actually, no, they can't. You can't vote for change in a place you don't live yet. It is a flaw or an unfair downside of federalism. Call it tyranny of localism (or something)
Why should someone be able to vote for change in a place they don't live in? It's not a flaw, but a thoughtful and smart design from my perspective. Having that locality is what lets people with many different perspectives and ways of life to coexist in the same country. People who don't like one way of doing things can go elsewhere.
Sure, it is a smart design, probably the best we have thus far, but it is not a perfect system. We are fortunate to live in an era where it doesn't matter, we can move somewhere else and be fine. But we could face a situation were the locals control important natural resources, and the locals may not want to share with those outside the boundaries. Then wars usually result.
I am very skeptical of both the surveys quoted in this article and the purported benefits this legislation is supposed to produce.
Nobody wants their street to switch from single family homes to quad housing units. Nobody. Well, the only people who might want this would be those who are intent on moving elsewhere and want to maximize rental revenue. I would definitely do this because we would go from a singe rental revenue stream to four or five (the law sounds like you can build four additional units).
The fallacy here is that rental rates don't come down as a function of n --n defined as the number of units on a lot. It isn't a linear relationship at all. If I had to guess, the rental cost per unit might be somewhere around 50% to 80% of what one might get by renting the entire home as a single unit. Taking the low side on that and assuming we build 5 units, this means the gross rent income for the property just went up 2.5x to 4.0x. If construction costs fit the model, this could be a great deal.
Nobody is going to rent one of these units for less than the prevailing rent for similar units in existing apartment buildings. So, no, rents will not come down by a significant margin.
The other angle is to just build an n-plex and sell the units. My guess on that one is that you'll make far more on the property than if you sold the single family home. I would further postulate that the cost per unit will track with comparable properties and will not really make things more affordable. I mean this in the sense that you are going to pay per square foot whatever anyone is paying per square foot elsewhere in the area. This law will not magically create a 50% discount per square foot. One of the reasons for this being as simple as: Construction, materials and permit costs keep going up, not down. In very rough terms, construction costs are in a range between $150 and $400 per square foot (depending on location, design, quality, low-end, high-end, etc.). That quickly becomes a very real lower bound on property valuation. The ONLY way to make home more affordable is to, at a minimum, reduce construction, regulatory and permit costs.
And then there's the issue of what happens to a street and a neighborhood when you multiply the population by four or five. I am trying to imagine my street with 5x the vehicles. It is unimaginable. However, it goes beyond that. The sewage system, power, gas and water distribution systems were not designed to support five times the demand.
Simple example: Our water comes from a large water tank atop a hill serving this neighborhood. That tank, while large, was sized based on regional planning approved many decades ago, which, of course, consisted of single family homes almost exclusively. There is no way this tank and the system that feeds it (pumps, aqueduct, etc.) is sized to support a 5x growth in demand.
Similar issues with power and other utilities.
Then there's the issue of traffic. We already have high traffic density and glorious traffic jams in the immediate region on a daily basis. A 5x explosion in population would turn this into nothing less than a living hell experience. Here's a data point. Many years ago I had to drive 50 miles to go work at a client's facility. I did this for two years. When the contract started I could do the 50 miles in about 45 minutes --so long as I left at 6:00 AM. Towards the end of the contract it was taking 2 hours. If I left at 5 AM I had a chance to cover the distance in an hour. A few minutes later and it got ugly quick. It was not uncommon to spend three hours on the road to get back.
I won't even go into the likely in increase in crime. No, this isn't a judgement on the quality of people who would move in. It's a simple reality, increase the population five-fold and you will have an increase in crime. Simple example: More cars parked on the streets means lots more opportunities to break into them for profit.
If you've been or have lived in Los Angeles you would already know plenty of neighborhoods in LA already have this and almost nobody wants to live in these neighborhoods but do so out of necessity. All the giant craftsman homes in South Park are duplexes and they do not look inviting. This seemingly addresses nothing, the price of housing is the crux of the issue.
I can't believe I had to scroll down this far to find this.
If anything, this law will make the problem worse. LA is already packed with people and it takes 30 minutes to drive 3 miles on the city streets. If implemented, this will bring yet more people to the neighborhoods, increase density and make the situation far worse.
But, like you said, the crux of the problem is the price and not anything else.
I find it interesting that the majority of democrats were in favor of the duplexes, republicans were split, and the LA city council (14/15 democrats) were all opposed to the new law.
This matches my experiences in SF and other parts of the country. I’ll ignore the irony that republicans are voting against expanded property rights and transparently are voting simply for class interests…
I am not sure why democratic elected officials are so opposed to these rules, whether it’s not in the lawmakers’ best interests directly (ie maybe since they are on average much wealthier, they think the law will hurt them. Or result in redistricting, etc.), bog-standard graft and corruption, or whether they legitimately think the measures are unpopular and likely to result in non getting re-elected. NIMBYs are certainly loud but they actually aren’t the majority. I am so tired of hearing tortured, nonsensical explanations for why new housing must be denied or become onerously hard to get approved. So at this point I’m leaning less towards thinking politicians are (incorrectly) following what they think their constituents think, and more towards suspecting some kind of inherent conflict of interest between lawmakers and the prospect of expanded housing.
Yes, and a lot of Democrats want open borders but no housing for them or existing younger generations.
I understand some may not want to hear, but it is a direct aspect of the problem, and not unsubstantial. Nothing against immigrants of course, they'll surely need a place to live—just like everyone else. The "not in my backyard" strategy of (14/15) is not a solution.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments? You've unfortunately been doing that a lot lately, and it's not what this site is for.
As you've suggested the dissonance between democrats largely polling in favor of the measure but city council democrats rejecting could be because the city council members have conflicting personal interests or are being influenced/lobbied by a minority who oppose the law.
So perhaps the distinction of democrat is too broad and unhelpful in this situation and it should be broken down into finer demographics. 26% of Americans identify as democrat and there is bound to be a lot of diversity of opinion within such a large body of people.
Republicans should be in favor in theory because of property rights and the free market/consumer demand, but in practice they’re opposed to density for lifestyle reasons: they really like car-only lifestyles, and they’re not above using the government to force their neighbors to go along with it. They talk a lot about free market principles, but just like with Facebook or Twitter, the instant it goes against their interests, suddenly their principles are nowhere to be seen.
Democrats aren’t as outright averse to density, and in theory should be for more housing because it would massively help the working class, but in practice they’re only okay with pre-existing density, because new density means redeveloping areas that probably already have people there, which means displacement. Plus, they hate the fact that new housing is more expensive than old housing, so every time a new development goes up you get a bunch of people yelling about “luxury condos”.
Party line is a poor indicator of property interests. It is correlated, but not causal.
The causal variable is property ownership vs renting. City council members are older (regardless of party membership) will be property owners, and thus because this issue impacts them personally and very directly, they will always vote to increase their property values (ie less construction / less supply).
Democratic leaders are still usually older, and thus owners - and since this issue impacts them very very personally, they will vote against their constituency.
Seems like single family homes are going to skyrocket in value. Especially ones that are on bigger lots. The law removed the owner occupancy requirement, so the ones that will be making the most money is investors and developers, like always.
(Stealing this argument from a friend who I discussed something similar with ...)
It's hard to see how allowing duplexes will do _anything_ to address housing issues. We have a similar law here in Minneapolis which allows triplexes on any property.
But what are the economics of this? Surely there's not a lot of vacant land in LA or Mpls just waiting for a new plex to be built. Instead, all the plots are already occupied. So that means either converting an existing house or tearing it down and building something new.
What would it cost to convert a single family home to a duplex? I'd say a _very_ conservative estimate is c. $200,000. And what does it rent for? A typical house might be converted into a 700-900 square foot rental. Looking at Zillow, it seems like you'd get maybe $2,000-2,500 for that. Let's be optimistic and say $2,500. So it's $30,000 per year. You'll make a profit in ... 7 years ... after the construction work is done, which could itself take 6+ months. And I suspect my cost estimate is way too low.
Seven years for a positive ROI doesn't seem like a very strong incentive. And if this is your own home that you live in, it'll be unliveable for much of the construction time. That means you'll have to live elsewhere and that cost further delays a positive ROI.
I can't imagine a developer seriously investing in duplexes or triplexes, or even quads. What they would want is to tear down several adjacent houses and build an apartment building in the same space, and to really make it worth it that building probably needs to be 3+ floors.
Is the ROI on that worth it? Again, I think we're looking at $200k in construction costs for $2,500/month in rental income. Also, one other thing I forgot is that this construction will probably increase your property taxes, further pushing out a positive ROI.
Yes. You build the ADU, rent it out and then when you are ready to move on or out you can move into it and rent the main house or sell or whatever. I would do this in a heartbeat. It gives people transitional options. It may not though stop inter-generational property transfer though but that could be taxed fairly.
Those are some crazy numbers. I could build a garage apartment for a bit over 100k in Milwaukee. I could divide my house into 2 units with a few walls and electrical work. Lots of houses have unused or underused attic/garage/conditioned space that can be converted relatively cheaply. My "fully built out" neighborhood has plenty of tear-downs, houses on double or triple lots, and even a few truly vacant lots.
This is not going to double the density of neighborhoods, but it opens options for residents and makes it much easier to add units. Sometimes that won't be worth it economically - even if you want to - but the numbers will work out in many cases.
> *I could divide my house into 2 units with a few walls and electrical work. Lots of houses have unused or underused attic/garage/conditioned space that can be converted relatively cheaply.
A few walls, some electrical work, an entirely new kitchen, and a new master bath unless you happen to have a house with two full bathrooms.
nah. you'd do a 3 story and get 3.5kft out of it per unit. would cost around a million for the 2units with today's material prices. rent it for 6000-8000/mo. affordable housing never starts with new built unless there are major incentives.
it absolutely is just political theater, at least for duplexes and accessory dwelling units (adu), two laws recently passed here in CA. it’s a show of ‘doing something’ while not changing the landscape at all. less than 1% of LA will upgrade to duplexes from single-family homes because of the underwhelming economics. what we need is a minimum of 4+1 (quadplex plus adu) by right on an R1-zoned property, and scaling up from there.
10 year treasures are yielding 1.453%, the SP 500 has P/E ratio of 28.83 indicating a yield of like 3.5% and you think a 14% yield is not a strong incentive???
Huh, nice to see Los Angeles, a city of some 4 million people catching up with... uh, Bend, Oregon, which recently passed its city code changes to allow up to fourplexes thanks to HB2001. Bend recently hit 100,000 people!
And you wonder why California has a housing crisis.
It does. It'll take a while for changes like this to help, but it's good to see them happening. And while I dislike the NIMBY-ish "don't move to Oregon" stuff, it is undeniable that California is exporting their own housing crisis up and down the entire west coast.
A place like LA should have enacted this kind of incremental change years ago.
Yes, you are correct. All of the Californians should sell their over valued houses and move to Oregon. There is no sales tax, and you don't have to pump your own gas. I hear that Bend is nice!
We used to go out of our way to support the homeless and families (and had a lower median income than most surrounding cities) but since the selfish jerk proportion went up (IMHO in the dot com boom) the city has turned into “I’ve got mine, jack, so fuck off”
What is the end solution to this housing crisis? The solutions will all hurt existing homeowners or multi-homeowners and are not likely to be implemented. The duplex in a single family lot is not going to move the needle on this crisis much, as building 2 houses on a existing lot will require a teardown of the original structure, then a buildup of the new duplex, all very costly. It will run at least $500K+ and I don't see many middle class owners using this route, also construction workers are scarce in the state due to high housing costs.
What would truly fix things right away:
#1. Prohibit Companies/Entities/hedgefunds from buying houses and renting them, ala zillow, blackrock etc.
#2. Repeal CA prop. 13, all housing should be taxed at current market value. (exclusions for older retirees and the disabled)
#3. Homeowners that wish to own a second property should be taxed at a very high rate.
#4. Mandate real estate commissions to be halved, currently its 6%(3% buyer, 3% seller) it should be closer to 3% total, this would allow greater mobility and encourage more buying and selling of houses.
#5. Rezone unused commercial(3 years unused) to residential to allow for more units to be built.
None of these solutions above would change the makeup of a neighborhood by introducing high density housing which some owners don't want, and could easily be implemented by a few laws being crafted and passed. I bet 10-15% of the housing market would free up right away and prices would come down 20-30% within a year or two.
But the root of the problem is just the people who are intentionally moving to southern California due to the mild climate. They know how crowded and dry[lack of water](and also expensive) it is but move here anyways contributing to the congestion. They don't want to move to other areas even when there are jobs there, and this issue will always be there.
#1 will be challenged in court the highest level. Think "corporations are people".
#2 will pass only if a majority of California residents are renters and decide that they want to band together on this one issue.
#3 could work since it would ensure support from people who are currently renting but want to buy a home soon.
#4 is small compared to how much home prices appreciate. The real problem is supply.
#5 this would open up more space for residential development. If it is zoned mix-use with a mandate for minimum density, then it could definitely add more supply.
That forces people who shouldn't own a house to buy one. Renting vs buying as which is a better investment is a complex calculation, but for some people renting is clearly better, and you have just ensured they are forced to make a bad investment.
you'd want to incentivize the private market to purchase, maintain, market to distribute housing to the masses and the government does that through favorable taxes. Making them unprofitable would put the burden on the renters + government with no private money capital injection.
Trying not to throw the older/helpless out into the street. Its no fault of theirs that the house they own increased from $40k to $3M(know 2 elderly people in this exact situation) and they would now incur a gigantic tax bill(if prop-13 was repealed). They could sell but would most likely be forced to move out of the area and away from all family/community and would be devastating to a person of advanced age or who was disabled.
Also the thinking would be "oh they will have so much money!", #1 the majority of the windfall would be taxed at max tax rate, and #2 I imagine people preying on these forced out older "millionaires" ie. family members and con artists.
Who cares if they're taxed at the max tax rate? One of the main effects of repealing Prop 13 would be to start actually collecting taxes. I don't think that the fact that people who are forced out (because they can't pay their yearly taxes) now have to pay taxes, which they CAN pay because they're now liquid, something we should be concerned about after making the decision to repeal Prop 13?
Old people get a lot of protections. Protections they put in place themselves. Prop 13 is one of those protections. Perpetuating it just means that the protections will never go away. Maybe they can just move in with their children - the ones that are apparently a driving factor of why they can't leave the region.
Trains that don’t even reach their intended destinations.
45-minute to 1-hour drive to a nonexistent but planned train stations times TWO (for end-waypoints) just to enjoy a two-hour (or less) time-saving trip across the California farmland makes about much sense as skydiving off a plane to reach your destination.
For older retirees, they can get money out of the house without having to move in their remaining years. The tax will be proportional to the value, so the numbers cancel out.
For someone that's disabled, are we helping equivalent renters too? Or only the homeowning disabled? And I feel like this is a bad way to help them in general.
Two things I would add to your list:
- CEQA reform to now allow single individuals to hold up project
- State level zoning guidance (similar to SB 9 / SB 50), where if a developer meets certain zoning guidance, local communities cannot oppose
4 out of your 5 suggestions don't improve supply, which means they probably won't move the needle much. (At least #2 might allow some existing empty buildings to enter the active housing market.)
SB9 and SB10 are meant to be small improvements. It's understood it won't completely solve the crisis. SB50 would have made a big impact but it didn't pass.
Prop 13 can easily be fixed by
a) Limiting it to primary homes.
b) Removing it from commercial properties.
c) Make it means based and if the homeowner can't afford the taxes, tally it up and assess it at death or final sale w/o an equivalent purchase.
Do these California laws (or other laws in CA) address restrictive covenants that would prohibit duplexes in a neighborhood regardless of city zoning?
You often hear about how Houston, for example, "doesn't have zoning", but a huge fraction of new housing in Texas (Houston and elsewhere) is in planned neighborhoods covered by restrictive covenants that prohibit all sorts of things. In those neighborhoods, it's unlikely that anyone would be able to tear down a single family house and build a duplex on the lot. (Or even paint the existing house a different color without approval of the HOA board.)
You have some of most inept local politicians you can imagine, who are more focused on taking glamor shots in front of half a million dollar per unit homeless shelters.
If it's really costing half a million dollars to house a single homeless family, why not just give them $5,000 to move?
Even for someone like myself, and I do consider myself to be somewhat upper middle class, LA is a bad deal. Deal. The bare minimum to afford a place to live plus transportation ends up being around 3,200 per month. That's about $2400 for a 1 bdrm + 800$ for a car payment / insurance/ gas.
Compared to Chicago where a 1bdrm in a fantastic metro accessible area can be had for 1300$ or so. 100$ metro pass gets you around.
LA and much of California is past saving, get out while you still can.
> If it's really costing half a million dollars to house a single homeless family, why not just give them $5,000 to move?
I'm sure they would if they could, but with all the greyhound buses full of people going to LA from places like Texan prisons, how do you prevent them from coming back? Also, I don't think $5k provides as much influence these days as you think it does, even to someone who is homeless.
> LA and much of California is past saving, get out while you still can.
Yes, LA has too many people with more coming, housing prices are too high, and again growing. Chicago is losing people, so it is much easier to live there.
5k is more than enough to get established in a more reasonable state.
I'd say offer families a one time lump sum if they want to relocate. After that forbid them from ever receiving another dime in assistance. While you'll have some who try to take the money and come back anyway, I imagine many would find better places to live.
> I'd say offer families a one time lump sum if they want to relocate.
You say families, but these already get the most help from the system via welfare and other programs. The real problem are the single homeless people who have addiction or mental illness problems. And they are incredibly mobile, they'll take your $5k, buy a bunch of drugs, and be back next week. And your solution to cut off the funding spigot...well, why not just do that already? I think it is a great idea, the fact that homeless people flock to cities with the best services and benefits means that the problem can never hoped to be solved at the local level anyways.
> California is losing people
Yes, finally. When you look at the population graph for the last 80 years (starting of which California and Texas had about the same amount of people), you'd think the boom had to end sometime. It is time for the other slacker states like Texas take some people.
But my guess is that the LA area and Bay area will start growing again once the pandemic subsides. People simply have no sense, the "its too crowded so no one goes there anymore" contradiction will never go away (since...if it really does become less crowded, more people will decide to fill the empty space).
I'm optimistic more people will look at moving to places where they can afford to pay rent.
The average income in LA is only around $70,000 for a household, but the rent keeps skyrocketing every single year. Back when I was a bit younger could still find an apartment in LA for $600, try doing that now.
I very much miss the working class city of my youth. It was such a fun, funky place.
While you do have tons of homeless people who have no interest in changing their situation, many are just stuck. Help people who want to relocate relocate. I'm extremely fortunate in that I make enough money where I can just up and move to practically anywhere in the United States. But if you're working class, this is near impossible.
It wouldn't be a bad thing if people fled LA en mass for the next 20 years or so while housing catches up. Then in 2040 the city might have a middle class again.
The only city that comes close to $600 is Fargo ND.
> While you do have tons of homeless people who have no interest in changing their situation, many are just stuck.
Those are the easiest homeless cases to solve and I'm not convinced that they aren't being solved already (by public services and/or charities).
> I'm extremely fortunate in that I make enough money where I can just up and move to practically anywhere in the United States.
People are extremely mobile when they don't have roots (either an owned house or job or family or a kid in school that they like). It actually is pretty easy to just pick up and move. And that's what has happened throughout history (including the original Okies that moved to California during the great depression).
> It wouldn't be a bad thing if people fled LA en mass for the next 20 years or so while housing catches up. Then in 2040 the city might have a middle class again.
I agree, but the law of supply and demand probably means that will never happen. If people fled LA, there is enough demand from people wanting to live there that other people would move in and keep things about the same as they are now. As long the wish is "I hope LA becomes less popular so I can move there", it is simply never going to happen.
This. Texas once openly bragged about how they've solved their homeless problem by simply buying their homeless a bus fare to L.A. (See Gov Rick Perry bragging about this during one of the GOP presidential candidate debates.) While they don't openly brag anymore, this is still their primary policy for dealing with the homeless...
We know this because while writing a series of LA Times articles a few years ago on the homeless situation in Hollywood, George Lopez (the reporter, not the comedian) discovered that most of the homeless people he was interviewing weren't even L.A. locals. The overwhelming majority of the homeless came from the Midwest (mostly: Texas), because someone bought them a ticket and told them the weather here was great.
And the bigger problem: when offered shelter, most homeless refuse because almost all shelters in L.A. are sober facilities that do not allow contraband (i.e., booze or drug paraphenelia) and they would rather keep their drugs/alcohol than have housing. This is why L.A. is attempting to introduce new rules that would prohibit individuals from camping in public areas if there is shelter space available and they refuse shelter.
> they've solved their homeless problem by simply buying their homeless a bus fare to L.A.
They don't even have to do that. If you get released from prison without family to pick you up, they give you an open bus ticket to go wherever. And...they really don't have many choices if they want to survive without support.
One of the most powerful NIMBY arguments against more density is traffic. And unfortunately they're right. We see it again and again in the cities and suburbs that grew since the car became mainstream. The roads can only take so much volume before the residents become really unhappy. And so of course they don't want more density, they're tired of waiting on red lights, looking for parking, and all the other problems of a car dependent society that has too many cars.
Buses have failed for a variety of reasons. Rail and BRT (bus with dedicated lane) are good and should be greatly expanded, but they only help with connecting major areas. We need to stop looking at Asian mega cities as an example. It just won't work here. Those super dense cities are designed for walking + public transit. The "last mile" problem in those cities are solved by walking because they're super dense enough that you can get to public transit easily by walking less than a mile. And also don't look at NYC or any old east coast city as an example. Those were designed before the car. Most people in the US live in places that were designed for the car.
Rail + BRT along major routes is part of the solution. But in the past, it hasn't worked well because of the "last mile" issue, which is more like the "last few miles" issue in the typical American suburban design. If someone has to still have a car to drive the few miles from their home to the park-and-ride, that doesn't do anything to fix the local road congestion issue. When they get on the train, it helps with freeway traffic, but does nothing for the local traffic. And the "last few miles" is too far to walk. And again, buses/shuttles have failed to fix this for a lot of reasons.
When ride-share was introduced, some thought that this was the solution. If someone depends on ride-share to get to places, that certainly helps reduce parking requirements. But, the traffic on the roads doesn't change, and may even increase due to idling ride-share cars waiting for rides. Uber Pool tries to help with this, but it's just not enough.
With the rise of electric micromobility (e-scooters and e-bikes), we finally have something that can fix this "last few miles" issue. But it will require a big step from the government and society as well. We have to be willing to sacrifice a lane in all the local roads. The current bike lanes are simply not extensive enough, not wide enough, and not safe enough. The only way to achieve true effectiveness for e-micromobility is to dedicate an entire lane of roads to them. It's a radical idea that would get a lot of opposition. People already upset with traffic don't want to lose a lane to make it worse. That can only be countered with a critical mass of people who own an e-microbility solution (e-scooter or e-bike).
Is it ever going to happen? Maybe if there's a city brave enough to try it and show it can work. But true support and infrastructure for e-bikes and e-scooters is the only way to get real density in the typical suburban sprawl layout without a disastrous increase in traffic and parking shortage.
Accordingly, if a lot is over 2,400 sqft, one could split the lot into 2 (minimum 1,200 sqft is needed per part), and build a duplex, an ADU (Accessory Dwelling Unit) and a JADU (Junior Accessory Dwelling Unit) in each part, ending up with 8 units in total.
In another HN thread a couple of days ago, someone mentioned Ambler v Euclid, the landmark SCOTUS case that set the stage for zoning back in the 1920s. There's lots to be said about that case, industrial development, racism and more, but in reading the decision I came across the court's description of the impact of apartments on single family housing. Even if you allow for some level of racial motivation in this non-racial piece, the court's position really makes clear the core position, over a century old, that has underscored housing issues in the US:
"With particular reference to apartment houses, it is pointed out that the development of detached house sections is greatly retarded by the coming of apartment houses, which has sometimes resulted in destroying the entire section for private house purposes; that in such sections very often the apartment house is a mere parasite, constructed in order to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of the district. Moreover, the coming of one apartment house is followed by others, interfering by their height and bulk with the free circulation of air and monopolizing the rays of the sun which otherwise would fall upon the smaller homes, and bringing, as their necessary accompaniments, the disturbing noises incident to increased traffic and business, and the occupation, by means of moving and parked automobiles, of larger portions of the streets, thus detracting from their safety and depriving children of the privilege of quiet and open spaces for play, enjoyed by those in more favored localities-until, finally, the residential character of the neighborhood and its desirability as a place of detached residences are utterly destroyed. Under these circumstances, apartment houses, which in a different environment would be not only entirely unobjectionable but highly desirable, come very near to being nuisances."
If you're an American like me, this is your SCOTUS at work!
I live in Washington and I don't understand how anybody can live in LA unless they have a physical job or family that is tying them there.
If you like hot weather, there are many better places to live, like Scottsdale or Naples. If you must live in California, why not Palm Springs?
If you are concerned about taxes and cost of living and you don't need California's weather, virtually any other state has a safe community for you to live in.
Palm Springs and Scottsdale are magnitudes hotter than LA. When I used to live in Scottsdale, every day between early May and end of September will be above 100. LA weather barely gets into the 90s. Most days it is between 75-85. Also, Palm Springs and Scottsdale do not have beaches, do not have nearly the same level of entertainment (music venues, clubs, bars, nightlife, two football teams, two basketball teams, stories baseball teams). Not to mention access to nature, wine countries, international airports etc. I lived in LA for 2 years, even with all its traffic problems, it is a 10x more interesting place to live than Scottsdale
To each their own. I used to live in Seattle and had some reservations about LA, but my opinion changed after living there, on the west side specifically. I've since moved, but I do miss 70° and sunny everyday, all the diversity of food, and generally blissful living. Weekend trips for skiing, palm springs, malibu, even vegas were great too. There's a lot to like.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 292 ms ] threadIt is dense, walkable, and extremely beautiful. There is no reason every neighborhood with duplexes has to look like cookie cutter sprawl that makes people unhappy.
I lived in a 6 bed unit on the top level of a 3-story duplex that had 4 people living on the ground floor. It was a massive house that allowed for ten non-related people to live together on a street filled with similar houses, lined with massive oak trees and a five minute walk from a lovely pond. Gorgeous neighborhood.
Edit: I’ll add that I never experienced any negative effects in JP that I’d associate with such dense living. Unlike the more rowdy student oriented neighborhoods like Allston that were far more rough and messy.
Also, for those not from the area, JP is indeed a "Boston neighborhood" but it's on the outskirts around parkland, the Arnold Arboretum, etc. and is about a 30 minute public transit ride [edit: on the Orange line not Green line]. So don't imagine this is in Boston in the way many might imagine. It probably has more in common with close in suburbs like Arlington than downtown.
Of course, the reason that Arlington doesn't have better transit links is that they didn't want it when the Red line was extended to Alewife. JP is certainly less suburban than Arlington but it also doesn't (to me) really feel like it's in "the city."
If I go into Cambridge after work, it takes me something like 45 minutes to get to Alewife near the Arlington line in pretty nominal reverse commute traffic. It takes me a good other half hour to go the last few miles. (And that's Cambridge. Boston would take even longer although I'd normally take a different route from my house)
But what I'm more interested in is this:
> Nearly every single home is multi-family, and the single families that do exist are usually $2 million and up.
SFH are already 1 million and up in LA, really in SD, LA, SF, Seattle, and Vancouver. It will be interesting to see what happens to SFH values if they become scarcer. It seems like it might have the opposite effect that the NIMBYs generally fear, and make them even _more_ wealthy.
SFH's or rather, the underlying land the house sits on, is going to become insanely valuable as the amount available dwindles and population grows.
There is no unwinding this trend. The only thing that can be done is to ignore and not worry about the price of a SFH, and subdivide the land into more apartments so that more people can afford to live on that parcel of land.
JP isn't quite a suburb but I look to it as a fantastic example of how suburban development could be condensed without losing its character. With proper upzoning, suburbs could have denser cores of multi-family housing without impacting those that want less dense housing outside the core. These towns would be more walkable and prettier places to live.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/is-mass-timber-the-buildin...
I remember that Sanbornton quake. We lived in rural NH. At first I thought it was the clothes washer...then the house really started shaking.
From my understanding wood is actually pretty good for earthquakes.
>It is dense
It's absolutely not dense, probably less dense than newer suburbs with smaller lots.
>walkable, and extremely beautiful.
I'll give you that, it definitely looks beautiful.
You're comparing a neighborhood of Boston to one of the largest cities in the US.
A more apt comparison would be the West University Place suburb of Houston that has roughly the same population density and similar size as JP. It's an older Houston suburb.
A "dense" suburban area would be something Jamaica in Queens, NYC. That has something like 6 times the density of JP.
I don't know what you would call this system but LA's problem is that the folks that have the power to fix housing have zero interest in doing because it would hurt their self interest. Housing is only a "problem" if you haven't bought a house yet, once you purchase a house, all the issues with housing there all of a sudden become benefits.
This is a small step in the right direction but California has really dug themselves into a hole here. California needs whole apartment blocks, not just duplexes, but apartments is something that is likely to never happen because of the above issue where no one will vote against their self interest. One could say the State should step in but that would be un-democratic. In fact this whole situation is weirdly democratic but un-democratic. Un-democratic in the sense that it casts out folks that don't live there, but democratic in the sense that the voices of those who own homes are clearly heard.
You guys and gals have an interesting problem on your hands.
There would absolutely be long-term benefits to lowering housing costs in parts of the country, but some people are going to have to feel the short-term pain to make that happen.
IMO its worse than that.. no asset has been "reduced" yet the tempers and decision making get worse and worse.. This is a fundementally divisive issue that brings out the worst in people. Community is nowhere to be seen when it comes to private property and the dollars that come with it. It is a bitter end-game of an explosive and wealthy 100 years of growth in this part of the world.
As the size of the loans go up, the stakes go up.
Separating the homesteaders from the investors would do a lot of good.
When I bought my house my realtor seemed unable to accept that I don't plan on ever selling. I bought this house because I like it and I want to live here, not because I think I can sell it in a few years. I work remote and I hate moving.
I know a lot of the HN crowd hates the thought of government regulation but I do agree that the individual interests are directly at odds with community interests and I'm not sure how to correct that without regulating the individuals.
With all the homeless people in the city I'm not sure why they would want to preserve that.
Peasants didn't vote for their lords. Somehow California's poor and renters have been convinced that building less housing is in their interests. (For example, see [1].)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29419007
A sufficient number of poor voters (the young likely) think they will hit the lottery and don't want the system closed to them.
By the time you realize the racket, the next generation comes along to be sold the big lie.
Today’s landlords are descended from a long line of landlords, lords, warlords, and eventually just assholes who said, “get off this piece of earth or I will murder you, it’s mine now.”
Of course this lineage is no longer exclusively hereditary, but it often is in practice and the economic externalities and ethical considerations are minimally different.
What prevents anyone from being a landlord?
If it's capital, what prevents someone from seeking capital?
For example, the law could say "Property taxes on all properties built before 2021 will be reduced to zero, while all properties built after 2021 will have to pay property tax at 5% of the property value for 30 years, before dropping for to 0%".
They only did one half...
If they upzone my single family home lot I will make out like a bandit. Developers will be all over this neighborhood, building townhouses galore. The last townhouse to sell in my neighborhood went for 2.1MM+.
Upzoning does not magically make housing affordable. Housing pricing is more complicated than a simple supply and demand curve, although that tells a story at the macro level. And truly affordable housing can only be created by mandating that units sell below market value. This shotgun approach to upzoning will alleviate issues in some neighborhoods—in others it will make developers and homeowners a lot of money.
These oversimplified narratives on HN are so tiring. Local conditions are much more complex and multifaceted than these "upzone everything" posts would have you believe.
That will only happen if the state guarantees to pay those "greedy developers" that they've been lambasting all over the media a bunch of money to build those units. A developer will simply refuse to build any housing at all if they're forced to sell the units at below rate when they can instead make more money building housing in some other market.
> These oversimplified narratives on HN are so tiring.
I agree and you're making another one of them.
Can you elaborate? "Affordable" housing only works as a hack within an artificially constrained market, how is building more housing not the ultimate fix?
This can make housing more dense and it can gradually lead to more units on the market. Potentially you could eventually reach competition dynamics that depress pricing. But in reality pricing is also dictated by: location, style, build quality, schools, and a hundred other factors. This is why trumpeting upzoning as though it will somehow depress pricing is dishonest or foolish. Since you can't double the density of LA overnight (even if you can double its theoretical denisty), it's naïve to pretend that this is a silver bullet.
My greater point was that the conversation around "housing affordability" has less to do with zoning than developer incentives. Developers need to be given the mandate (and the incentives) to build sub-market rate housing as part of much larger developments if you want affordability and a middle class in California cities.
All of those factors though are considered with respect to supply. If there are 11 homes and 10 buyers, then by necessity the prices for those homes must come down despite how good those homes are.
> This can make housing more dense and it can gradually lead to more units on the market. Potentially you could eventually reach competition dynamics that depress pricing.
You vastly overestimate the number of units that would need to be built to depress prices. Prices are set on the margin and a relatively small increase in supply (say 20% over 20 years which is quite feasible) can have a huge influence.
Going from 10 buyers chasing 9 homes to 10 buyers chasing 11 homes changes the dynamics an incredible amount.
I think your framing of that number is a bit wrong, we've been under building demand by orders of magnitude for 40 years. Getting the sort of increase that might make housing "affordable", e.g. housing at only 3-6x the median household income, would require construction on an impossibly massive scale over the next 20 years.
To wit, the Sunset neighborhood in San Francisco has added 21 new homes since 2011. 12% of the city's land area has added just 21 new homes over the last decade. Generously 80 new residents of San Francisco, a city of over 750,000 people, have been added to 12% of the city's land area in a decade.
The amount of politics, money, and boots on the ground construction necessary to make housing affordable in West Coast cities is out of reach in any "business as usual" scenario in my mind. We'll need a crisis, until then, the mountain will remain unmoved I think.
consider the thought experiment where most existing regulation, especially zoning limits on number/type of units, are removed in LA. you’d eventually reach a steady state where developers would make cost plus a small risk premium while prices generally go down as supply equilibrates with demand (housing starts equal net immigration). you’d get affordable housing without directly incentivizing developers at all. that’s because the market would be freed of distortionary burdens specifically designed to backstop housing prices.
that’s done by a number of regulatory mechanisms including zoning, ceqa, building codes, federal housing loans, distortionary incentive programs, etc. changing just one piece of that complex regulatory environment (developer incentives) guarantees nothing other than tilting the current market towards developers, not fixing the housing problem.
I want to say I agree somewhat: regulatory environments, complex zoning and permissioning, leads to development overhead and ultimately higher prices for everyone. (Ironically I seem to be getting pushback from fiscal conservatives in these threads even though I think we mostly agree there.)
Where I disagree is from this point right here:
> you’d get affordable housing without directly incentivizing developers at all.
You'd get it somewhere. Not necessarily in the cities themselves, because the law of supply and demand is still going to outstrip however much you liberate the ability to build. Cities naturally become unaffordable. They concentrate wealth and economic output and then grow in value because there are not unlimited lots that are equally central to this concentration.
This means that affordability, particularly in the case of cities (like LA), which is the thrust of the upzoning argument, is not actually addressed merely by the removal of impediments to building or changing zoning. The economic regime cities build guarantees the displacement of middleclass dwellings over time. Eventually you reach a point at which all the hairdressers and school teachers no longer have a reasonable commute. The city eats itself in its ever-spiraling productivity.
When you have a large, high-traffic, high-output geographic area (like LA), you have to think more creatively about how to usurp market dynamics inside of that area. That requires below market-rate mandates, as far as I can see. The invisible handle of the market will not settle this because the affordable regions are naturally pushed outward over time.
In otherwords, I disagree with the premise of most of these comments: upzoning is not the final word, not even, in the majority, the most important word for affordability inside of cities. California as a whole will benefit from upzoning. The actual city of LA will not see pricing regress because, as you noted, there are actually many more barriers to building in terms of building codes, etc. and because of the realities I mention in my reply.
you might be making more of a sociopolitical argument, that the rich are going to eat all the gains and more, while crowding out everyone else, through mechanisms like regulatory capture. that's possible, but the substance of that argument is not coming through very clearly amidst the economic tangents. it still doesn't support the idea that below-market mandates are necessary to bring prices to any natural, or artificially manipulated, affordable equilibrium. note that in a rich-eats-everything-world, we'd not have enough tax money to make housing artificially affordable. if the rich can dominate real estate in that way, they'd surely dominate tax policy in their favor as well.
The brand-new townhouses sell for many millions because they're brand new. But adding new units relieves price pressure on the rest of the market - every person that moves into a brand new townhouse is therefore not moving in to older houses in other neighborhoods.
You're making out like a bandit because you're creating new wealth. Where there was only one housing unit, there are now many. This is a win for everyone involved, it's net positive.
> Housing pricing is more complicated than a simple supply and demand curve
People say this, but it's not true. The U.S, particularly in growing areas, has not built enough homes per capita since the real estate bubble, and so prices go up[1]. It's as simple as that.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/us-underbuilding-housing-ove...
Only if they only upzone your neighborhood, because if they upzone all of them then developers can buy any of them at existing prices instead of having to all bid on an artificially scarce subset.
And in the first case the money comes at the cost of housing prices for all the other neighborhoods they didn't upzone, who all fight against upzoning your neighborhood.
> And truly affordable housing can only be created by mandating that units sell below market value.
This is balderdash. Not only false, but inverted.
Where does the money to sell "below market value" come from? The rest of the housing market, increasing prices for everyone else, but especially for the people who make three cents too much money to be eligible for "affordable housing." Because then you separate housing into subsidized projects with concentrated poverty and luxury housing that lower middle class people can't afford.
And yet some neighborhoods are more desirable than others. Is this not already obvious from the state of the market today? Developers go where the most money can be made—the neighborhoods which are already valuable.
> Where does the money to sell "below market value" come from?
Tax breaks, duh. You put money back in developers pockets. By the way, you don't need to separate the projects. You combine them. You make luxury units possible with a mandate that a percentage of the building be affordable. New York already does this. Why is this so hard to understand?
This is just a non-sequitur. Of course some neighborhoods are more valuable than others. But if you have twelve similarly-valuable neighborhoods within reasonable distance of each other, and you only upzone some of them, those will increase in value at the expense of the others.
Also, developers frequently choose the least valuable neighborhoods, because development makes the neighborhood more valuable, so they go where they can buy low and sell high.
> Tax breaks, duh.
So now the middle class gets to pay taxes to subsidize housing they're not eligible to live in, while not being able to afford the housing they are eligible to live in.
> You combine them. You make luxury units possible with a mandate that a percentage of the building be affordable.
Which dramatically increases the cost of the program because the opportunity cost of having more high value housing is so much larger than the cost of building lower cost housing in lower cost areas.
You also end up with the bizarre result and perverse incentive that people not eligible for affordable housing have to live somewhere worse than people who are, so making more money makes your life worse.
This also increases housing costs for the middle class because you under-produce luxury housing so the people who would have bought the luxury housing are now bidding against the middle class for ordinary housing.
- Home owners delight in 100k of equity per year on what amounts to bungalow property held together by stucco, as they have since the late seventies when neoliberal tax reforms at a republican behest elevated them to an untouchable landed gentry.
- Residents in the state bemoan "Reagans army," the indelible population of more than 70,000 homeless that shuffle through their suburban streets rifling through trash, defecating on sidewalks and stealing from unlocked vehicles.
- politicians promise relief and begin amassing considerable tax funds to house the homeless with various community initiatives resources. politicians secure boisterous agreement that this homeless issue must end in $timeline.
- the landed gentry respond in kind, refusing any and all housing relief or homeless shelter construction in their fiefdom as it may in turn pose a threat to their profiteering. lawsuits are filed and reformists hamstrung in court.
- The city directs their considerable housing funds to cleanup funds, periodically evacuating and sanitizing the overwhelming and seemingly endless number of encampments across freeway overpasses and abandoned investment properties. Homelessness is bad, but another outbreak of cholera or bubonic plague is worse.
- young men and women who cannot find affordable housing in the state simply leave after a decade, taking with them talent experience and acumen honed in the city of angels to cities that can better serve them.
its also worth mentioning that California is very friendly when it comes to investment property. there are hundreds of derelict, abandoned malls, clubs, bars, parking structures, and other edifices of commerce including giant grass and trash lots that just seem to exist. Theyre all owned by property management cabals or millionaires who refuse to do anything with the land because surprise, they dont need to. The landed gentry of homeowners will always go to bat, defending their right to chew up property and deliver nothing in return.
I live in a relatively low-income neighborhood in a west-coast city and I hear on social media all the time about how the local government doesn't prioritize us because of our relatively low average household income, but at the same time a lot of those folks are resistant to zoning for more apartment buildings in our neighborhood because of all the nimby classics (crime, diversity, etc.). Maybe I'm wrong (and if someone wants to enlighten me, I'm all ears, because this is definitely not my area of expertise) but it seems to me that an influx of residents into the area might give our neighborhood more pull in local elections as we'd form a voting-block with some aligned interests (services & infrastructure in our neighborhood) even if we differ in other interests.
It just seems like we're already in a losing position (w/r/t local politics), why not at least try to make ourselves more formidable.
To be honest, I think it would improve a lot of other things. In the past I've mentioned that my neighborhood acts more as a pass-through between the outlying suburbs & the metropolitan city-center, but I think more residents in the area would attract local businesses (can you believe there's not a sit-down cafe in my area other than maybe a starbucks? They're all drive-through kiosks!) because there'd be more of a local population. Once the businesses open up, fewer folks would have to commute to another neighborhood for work (we'll probably, unfortunately, never be rid of that) and we become less of a pass-through neighborhood. But, again, not my expertise. It's also a long-term plan, which seems to be off-putting in today's financial atmosphere.
It might give more pull in local elections, but the one major benefit of having more residents is an increased tax base and being a more desirable place for businesses. There are lots of benefits of increasing the density of an area, like you mentioned. The NIMBY resistance has a lot of time and money on their side so it can be hard to overcome.
I'm also in a very similar spot as you, between expensive suburbs and a major urban core. Despite the city I live in voting to restrict new housing, they were able to approve an exception for my area. Definitely appears to be helping, lots of townhomes and apartments are going up and new businesses have been coming in.
The fact that developing the lot causes the property tax to be reassessed may have something to do with this. If you make someone pay a gigantic fine for putting something on their lot full of trash, they may opt not to.
With rose-colored glasses, I can see a path forward; building free-standing parking garages that will eventually be demolished / repurposed when car ownership in a neighborhood goes below a certain level. But that's expensive, clunky, and ugly -- and folks aren't going to want to walk across a wide, busy street just to get to their cars. Probably not politically viable.
Reality: LA runs out of water as climate change intensifies in the Rockies.
What seems to be working well in LA is building up buses. When I was out last June I noticed buses with dedicated right-of-way (physically separated) and that seemed to be running well during peak times, which is quite eye-opening when you count and realize that the bus which just went by was carrying more people than all of the vehicles in the 4 lanes of stopped traffic.
i do think that buses are a good lower-cost mass transit option, but without the reliability/security that comes with dedicated infrastructure, it will be hard to get more angelenos to rely on the bus for daily use. currently metro is focused on removing fares, but all that will do is lower their budget (modestly) and worsen service, which will be counterproductive to the goal of increasing ridership.
Part of the problem is parking is heavily subsidized and the real costs not borne by drivers. Free public street-side parking in many urban and semi-urban zones. Parking minimums codified into building codes. Allowances for giant asphalt fields in suburban zones.
For a start, in downtown areas (both city and town), remove the parking requirements from building codes and let the market dictate how much parking is needed per apartment, per office, per shop. We currently over-allocate parking.
There's rarely any public subsidies for parking. That's largely a myth. It's paid for in the price of the development by the developer (and is usual a government or zoning requirement).
And that's just on-street parking. There are also per-unit or per-sqft requirements for off-street parking that generally over-allocate space for cars.
Either way, we've created a market failure, in the sense that we over-allocate space (regardless of who pays for maintenance of that space) for parking.
And maintenance costs money, but the increased tax revenue from the development more than offsets that. Which is why the city/ state is willing to accept maintenance responsibility for it as part of the dedication.
>that land could be better allocated to economically productive use.
Maybe, but it's not what it was deeded for.
But you actually see a lot of this nowadays, where the development doesn't dedicate the right of way to the public and assumes its own maintenance costs, specifically because they don't want to lose long term control over how the land is used.
If people keep seeing public on-street parking as a free lunch to turn into mass transit or bike lanes, you'll start seeing more and more private street developments.
If that weren't the case, the developer would likely keep the parking and streets privately held. Which is something that you do see more and more of these days.
Providing streets without places to stop or park would be like building interstates without exits.
But the analogy would be if someone built the intestate and exits, and the government subsequently closed your exit.
Does it matter if the street, but not the on-street parking, is made public right-of-way? Would it be equally acceptable for the government to repurpose off-street parking or parking garages?
i’m a huge advocate for putting all parking underground and leaving ground level space for humans to enjoy fully. it’s more expensive, but we’re a rich city/state/country and we should have nice things.
But that's still roughly double/triple or more what street parking will cost (where space efficiency approaches 100% since driveways and additional access pavement aren't needed).
Correct on double to triple for underground, but likely more for buildings with compact or less than ideal footprints (inefficient layout and access) and where structural and utility considerations need to be made for the building overhead.
But commercial grade (concrete/lanscaped) surface parking can easily cost $30k+/space, even in non-urban areas. A recent multi-acre university parking lot we did was just shy of $50k/ space (which is why parking garages start making economic sense around that price point), and that was in a 5 digit population college town on the outskirts of campus.
But the point remains that structural parking costs > surface parking costs >> street parking.
And that street parking shouldn't be thought of as subsidized[1], because as soon as it is considered free lunch for other pet purposes, developers won't relinquish control of it, and will potentially set buildings back an additional 8-25' (parallel-angled, per side of the street) to stay outside of minimum right-of-way widths.
[1] In addition to the fact that the dedication and assumption of future maintenance costs is in contractual consideration of the value of the land and improvements dedicated, additional generated tax revenue and economic growth, and is typically required by govt building codes.
but street parking can easily be unsubsidized/internalized by simply pricing all of it, even for municipalities themselves. perhaps then my dream of putting all parking underground would make as much economic sense as it does social sense.
my area has a lot of long blocks, and i could totally envision cut-and-cover creating an underground alley right down the middle of the block with parking garages under the back yards of the houses. then you'd only need two cutouts for entry/access while also minimizing the amount of 'driveway' for each property. you could even run utility lines through that space as well.
The "historic" Mission laundromat is a classic example, as was the lawsuit against the tech shuttle system.
It's true that many cities face the same problem: by making it difficult to add new supply they make existing homes expensive. Even US cities that aren't famous for being expensive have the same problem (if at a lower scale). They lack the flood of new wealthy population but have the same lack of development.
Incremental upzoning is what will get us there. So changing single family zoning to duplex zoning like what this does, and current multifamily zoning to much higher density zoning.
Going from single family to high-density apartments zoning overnight will cause a great deal of chaos, both in land valuation and also in political distrust.
California has actually built a huge number of apartment blocks in areas already zoned for that type of housing, and those have been providing most of the new housing supply in the state. Such places have picked up the slack for lower density places where exclusionary zoning has prevented higher density.
But housing has to be built in a wider array of formats because not everyone wants to live in a large apartment block. Today, even in urban California huge areas have single homes on large lots that should have the option of being converted to townhouses or multifamily dwellings. A lot of people (even families) would enjoy and even prefer townhouse style living.
This. It's been relatively successful (in terms of units built) in Northern VA. All along the Metro rail through Arlington and Fairfax Counties, we've changed zoning to allow dense multi-use development. Courthouse, Clarendon, and Ballston in Arlington were heavily redeveloped in the 90s and 00s. And Reston and Herndon's Transit Oriented Development Zones have been underway for 5-10 years and will continue for another decade.
Definitely not a cure-all, but a step in the right direction. At least there's office, retail, dining, and residential all on the same plot, which beats the previous massive parking lots and mid-rise office space.
But, we have mixed-use where single-use/non-residential existed previously, so relatively speaking, we're better off (in terms of total housing units). And in terms of economic activity, those zones all appear to be successful.
EDIT - Also worth nothing the zoning changes are pretty limited - within a few city blocks of the metro stations. They make a good PoC for changes, but expanding them beyond their current boundaries will run into the same NIMBY issues we see across the large cities in CA.
That's pretty remarkable given its stature as a center of world power and influence.
That data doesn't answer the question about trajectory, though, which is what you asked. I can't find a graph that plots this stuff over time by metro, but it would be interesting to see no doubt.
And are commercial acres actually valued higher than residential across all density ranges? If not, would regulation actually prevent repurposing? If only the latter was true I'd expect The Most American Thing to happen, finger to regulation in the shape of habitation-as-a-service companies (long term lease disguised as hotels) gobbling up unprofitable locations left and right. Call the company Beanberia if you feel particularly uncreative.
In some places it's possible, as long as the commercial spaces naturally lend themselves to residential occupation, or in places with enough demand to justify the costs of tearing down existing commercial spaces and building residential structures.
But most unused (therefore in theory available) American commercial space isn't comprised of smaller 19th century brick warehouses that you can convert into chic lofts.
Rather, it's more like abandoned or underutilized suburban shopping malls that can't be easily repurposed into housing. The most basic issue is that these buildings don't have many exterior windows. After all, in an indoor shopping mall, the whole point generally is to create an environment that isolates you from the outdoors by keeping it at a large distance.
Apartment buildings need to keep more access to the outdoors, both for light and ventilation reasons.
What I could imagine being a problem is rules applying to e.g. the land of an abandoned mall not allowing sufficient elevation. Because "high above" is what you'd want to offer potential residents in exchange for a not so nice ground environment. Perhaps even skip a few floors (between parking and living), empty space earmarked for possible future light commercial development. The elevators won't mind.
Many large homes could be converted to duplexes, and homes with large lots could add accessory dwelling units, or sometimes, an additional home to make a "freestanding condominium" development.
But that's still just a marginal density increase that is unlikely to reach any of the density thresholds where the density starts having benefits from the individual point of view, not only downsides. Benefits like walkable range amenities and necessities becoming economically viable. Without reaching those thresholds, the density increase is only beneficial on society level. On the individual level, you only get the drawbacks and none of the rewards.
https://www.galleryatdomain.com/gallery-at-domain-austin-tex...
It's called a cartel to artificially inflate housing for the benefit of existing owners.
So what if you want to have a family and need to move to a bigger place ? Is it not a problem then ?
For example a house that costs 1000$ goes up in value by 20% = 1200$. Over the same period a 2000$ bigger house goes up by the same amount = 2400$. If you wanted to buy the bigger house before the increase you would have loaned 1000$, but now since the increase you'll have to pay 1200$.
Is there a catch I'm missing somewhere or what ?
At least in CA, home prices for typical working class folks have risen much faster than homes that were already expensive. This makes it possible to jump into the next price band once enough equity has been built up on a "starter" home.
Edit: I don't care what kind of housing it is, but it needs to be for sale as opposed to for rent.
I feel like it's asking why there aren't there any tropical storms with sustained wins of 100mph. There are, we just call them hurricanes.
Ok. I own one unit of a 4-unit building, which was as far as I know built to sell, not rent, roughly 30 years ago. It is definitively not a condo, in terms of the ownership structure and the portion that I own. No HOA either.
So your point is that it's not an apartment? Empirically, it is true that people don't call it an apartment. But it has the same square footage and decor as nearby apartments. The only thing approaching a fundamental difference is that it's on two levels, with bedrooms upstairs.
So, in short, L.A. needs a lot of "apartments"(world)/"condos"(USA). And you are right, "apartments"(USA) don't help.
This isn't undemocratic at all.
I know people hate this generally, but just to make a point: Democracy literally means "rule by the demos". The demos is (definitions from wiktionary because it was the first search result): "ordinary citizens, common people from a district, in a city-state” or "(political science) The common populace of a state or district, the people". So, the citizens or the populace. Meaning the people who live there.
That is to say, the will of "folks that don't live there" has nothing to do with Democracy. The citizens of an area voting for their self interest is completely democratic. It just doesn't end up with the results some people want.
On the other extreme the residents of a single block could decide it's in their interest to build a skyscraper on their one block. Democracy, right? The residents of an area (that block) are doing what's in their own interest.
Who wants to spend hours every day stuck in traffic and looking for parking and then pay outrageous rents for the privilege?
In particular, I think you'd see very different responses when people were asked to choose realistic options: it's easy to say you like the idyllic image realtors promote with luxurious houses, perfect landscaping, happy kids at great schools, etc. but quite another to say you want to spend a couple hours a day stuck in an expensive car because there's almost nothing to do within walking distance, take on additional expenses (landscaping, lower density requires higher taxes for infrastructure, etc.), and otherwise live the actual suburban lifestyle for most people rather than the postcard version.
I'm guessing you didn't live in Beijing or Shanghai. Though to their benefit, both had reasonable transit and lots of affordable taxis. But...I've never seen traffic as bad as Beijing in the USA, even in LA. And the wild parking is crazy: how can someone afford a black Audi A8 yet still have to park it on the road illegally because they lack a parking space for their apartment?
In the end, it boils down to cars, though. Many people see the free parking space in front of their house as an extension of their property, and more people on their street often means they have to compete for it. Make cars optional, and everything else falls into place.
We're now in a SFH in a mostly SFH neighborhood, but a block or so from an upzoned area that has townhouses and some apartments. The only issue that I have with this so far is that newer construction denser housing is not required to have parking for some reason, but people living in them do have cars. I'm hoping that larger projects start to require parking because transit here just isn't good enough to not have a car. I don't care if people park in front of my house or anything - we're all neighbors - but at some point we're going to run out of street parking. And a lot of people think that's a fake concern, and all I can say to that is, they've never visited Philadelphia.
For example, when we moved to San Francisco, we kept our car and parked on the street. After two parking tickets within the first month (because we forgot the weekly sweep schedule), we decided it didn't make sense to keep the car. We sold it, and started using Caltrain/Muni/biking for most of our trips, with a few Zipcar rentals peppered in. Without those parking tickets, we would definitely have kept our car because there would be no downside.
One of the things that's probably true as well is that many people adjust their lifestyle to what's convenient. If you need to rent a car to go somewhere on the weekend, you probably tend to favor other activities.
Here's a map of places that have eliminated parking mandates in some way: https://parkingreform.org/resources/mandates-map/
[0]: https://www.dbsg.com/blog/surface-parking-vs-underground-par....
In Cambridge it's $25/year and that's a city with absolutely no surplus of parking spaces.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to rent a car if you're only going to use it once a week or so? I mean, with the payment itself, plus insurance, plus gas, regular maintenance, is it worth the price?
Manhattan is obviously extreme but most people who can afford to do sso would rather just have a car they can jump into when they want to.
$8-10k a year in savings is usually what I come out to.
Personally, $8-10K/year seems expensive unless you aren't trying to economize. I have an 11 year old ~$40Kish vehicle that I wouldn't typically pay $1K/year for maintenance and less on insurance.
But there is certainly some point at which it makes economic sense to just rent, especially if you are paying to park the car. In a city with difficult parking I wouldn't pay to own a car to use every couple of months.
But if you're going to be paying a few thousand dollars for local rentals for trips, plus some Uber, plus deliveries, plus some Zipcar, it starts to become pretty attractive to just own a car if only for the convenience.
You have a high end bmw or something? New toyotas are cheaper than that with practically no maintenance. I myself spend $840 a year on insurance + 100 oil change/checkup and that is it besides gas.
I do plan on maybe getting a car at some point, but with my current lifestyle it just doesn't make sense. Also the car market seems to be in shambles right now.
The other commenter said that 8-10k is expensive (which it is), the big hit there comes mainly from registration fees, taxes, insurance, and parking, all of which are not cheap where I live unless I were to buy a relatively old car that has significantly depreciated, since that's how those fees are assessed.
I just checked and it appears to be over $300 for the tiniest clown car available near me.
That is roughly triple the federal mileage reimbursement rate (assuming 10Kmi per year), so I'm guessing renting every week would be more expensive than owning.
Moreso if you drive very little, because insurance, gas, and maintenance are less when you drive less. They're not pets; they don't have to be fed and walked when you're not interacting with them.
But I would be more concerned about the cost of having things delivered. I'm not sure if the scenario you are thinking of is going to the store to get a week's groceries, or to the mountains to snowboard.
I'm also wondering whether the context is "every software engineer makes at least $500K" or "all the people with $1000 in their checking account will be first against the wall when the revolution comes".
Mandatory parking minimums make constructing new housing more difficult, raising the cost of housing. The city is making the tradeoff that affordable housing is more important than free parking. As density increases it will hit a point where you need to pay for parking. I live in Belltown and own a parking spot. Ultimately I think this is the right direction to go, the city shouldn't have to pay to store your car.
I get it, but Seattle public transportation isn't good enough to just tell people they shouldn't have a car. I have a driveway and a garage, so the problem is solved for me, and in theory means someone could put their car in front of my house on the street. But if they're putting 6 townhouses on a lot, that won't scale, and maybe they should instead build 4 and parking.
> the city shouldn't have to pay to store your car.
I agree, but that's pretty much what forcing people to park on the street is. I do get that mandating parking raises the cost of housing, which is also counterproductive. But if you drive through Ballard, street parking is pretty tight - I'm not saying people are going to start parking in the median on 8th and 15th, but I'm not sure how much more they can build w/o parking before it starts to look like S. Broad St in Philly!
> I have a driveway and a garage, so the problem is solved for me, and in theory means someone could put their car in front of my house on the street.
I'm not sure what your objection here is then? Density won't impact your parking situation at all. The people moving in (or not moving in) after you can make the decision for themselves. By mandating a specific amount of parking, you are taking that decision from them.
I'm not saying people shouldn't have a car. I already said I have a car, but that I pay for a spot. My partner and I share that car and that spot. If couples downsized from two cars to one, thats already a 50% reduction.
Enacting parking minimums digs us deeper in the car hole. Building 6 units instead of 4 is preferable. Instead we should invest in expanding public transit.
The reason is that parking requirements massively add to the costs of building new apartments. It works out that everyone in the building has to pay extra, regardless of whether they actually use the parking. Parking minimums also mean that some projects just will never work economically.
> at some point we're going to run out of street parking
Sounds fine! The city doesn't need to provide free car storage to everyone.
Making a requirement will just incentivize more people to drive and the costs will be baked in whether they do have a car or not, so they might as well get a car.
I don't get why Seattle doesn't introduce permit street parking in our neighborhood though. It just seems like there are way too many cars vying for on street parking. And that's in places that aren't being overrun by RVs and vans.
This only works due to scarcity. If everybody could do this, the values would stop increasing and could potentially drop.
On the other hand, some folks just don't like living in higher density neighborhoods. I can empathize with someone that bought a single family home decades ago, probably can't afford to buy a new one today even after selling it, and doesn't want to see their quiet neighborhood turn into a bustling urban environment.
As an example, my parents live in the suburbs of a midwestern city. It's almost entirely residential single family housing, with a downtown business district that sprung up along a rail line 100 years ago. The city has major highway access, but not close to the rail station.
There are plans to build a 400 unit apartment complex adjacent to the downtown area. Even with light rail to/from the major city, you still need a car to get around. Current residents are naturally livid that their quaint downtown they enjoy is going to change, and the streets around it that weren't designed to handle the daily commutes of hundreds of people are going to have far more traffic and road maintenance.
It has nothing to do with home prices, and everything to do with maintaining the community experiences that they bought into, sometimes decades ago.
I think a lot of this comes down to generational dynamics. Boomers were until recently the largest generation and have only been passed by millennials two years ago. They have the wealth and will to be politically heard and aren't particularly concerned with the difficulties of younger generations unless they see it second-hand through their children.
Respectfully: you bought your house — not the neighborhood around your house, and everything in it. It's true that it's OK to have mixed densities of housing, but I think it's an unrealistic and ungrounded expectation to buy a single family house in a city and expect your neighborhood around it to never change.
There are areas of the country where you can cheaply move to, outside of cities, that will likely never upzone (or land is so cheap you can buy everything around your house to ensure it never changes).
One of the major considerations for me when I bought was “how likely is it urban development will reach this far out in my lifetime?”
In this particular case, most of the local opposition is because city government is fast-tracking the project while neglecting their own regulatory processes and distrust of the developer (for good reasons, frankly).. Not only do local residents want the community to keep certain qualities in that neighborhood, it's encoded into the law. That wasn't done by one person with too much control, it was done by an elected body with the consent of the governed.
But I don't want to get into the specifics, the gist is I can empathize with someone that wants to preserve the community they live in.
You’re forgetting all the other infrastructure that a person living in a house/apartment/duplex needs. Looking at a zoning map makes it easy to see why housing is so expensive to purchase, but in addition to roads how much additional water, electricity, internet, emergency services, whatever else, infrastructure would be required to service intensification? Does the local council have the competency and budget to manage that? How motivated do you think they’d be to challenge a status quo that prevents them from having to address those issues?
In addition to not being as simple as the only having to solve the stupid zoning problem, it presents a number of risks that you’d expect certain types of politicians to be averse to.
It also takes a long time for the benefits of any of those changes to manifest, which doesn’t really align with political incentives either. “If you elect me 2-3 more times then things will start to improve over the next 10 years or so” isn’t a very compelling campaign slogan.
The product they're buying with the SFH form is Exclusivity.
With a SFH surrounded by other SFHs you have few neighbours and you're (mostly) guaranteed that they're the same class as you.
SFH owners oppose apartments because apartments bring more people and (gasp) poorer people.
Development is work. Paying for it is risk. Easier to just bank land and watch your equity grow (tax free).
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3146986
In normal states -- people oppose up-zoning, because if their lot becomes more valuable, they instantly lose a lot of money. Sure, it's on-paper higher, but if they stay, that just means higher property taxes instantly (it's not uncommon for taxes to double or more after a few years of gentrification have occurred), along with higher cost of living (every other thing around them, like child care and restaurants and such will all get more expensive, to cover the higher rent and higher cost of living for those folks). And that's before getting to all the other minor annoying issues (extra noise, less infrastructure per person, income inequality, etc)
And sure, in theory they could sell out. But how, for what? Sure, in California, you can always just assume there's a boring midwest/south place to escape to -- but for everyone already in the midwest/south, no such escape option exists. If those folks leave, they'll have to buy a new place somewhere else, and they're all expensive too. If your $50k house is now worth $500k on-paper, but every other place to live is now $800k and up, you can't afford to stay (property taxes + cost of living are eating your income) and you can't afford to leave (everywhere else is getting even more expensive, there's no where to 'sell out' to). And that's before getting to the fact that the average person literally can't move anywhere meaningfully different. (They have a job that forces them to stay in market, or are going to a specific university, or have kids, or have kids with divorced ex-spouses, or are caring for elderly parents, etc, etc)
---
This is of course, just for normal/boring states. California has this "never charge people actual property taxes" law weirdness that complicates things.
I have an expression for this. "Solving the problem is only half the problem." Everyone knows how to fix the housing problem (build some f'ing houses). But solving that problem is only half the problem.
Prices are a reflection of supply and demand. There are only two ways to lower prices. Either increase supply or lower demand. One of them is a solvable issue, which is to increase supply. The other option, which is to lower demand, is either unrealistic or unfair. How, do you suppose, we lower demand? The only way you can lower demand is by getting people to change their mind. But how can you realistically expect people to change their mind? Everyone wants to move to L.A., the Bay Area, and other expensive cities because of the good jobs, universities, and career opportunities exist there.
> I keep thinking of induced demand increasing traffic on the roads
Induced demand is an interesting topic, but do not conflate it with the housing crisis. These are two fundamentally different economic situations. Induced demand is theoretically "induced" because the public good or service is free and utilizing the resource comes at no additional cost to the consumer. Homes on the other hand are not free. They come at a price. And therefore, there is nothing inducing its demand like you would theoretically see with widening a freeway.
There is some rank ordering for access to housing in desirable places. They take in N households. In a market economy, a small value of N shows up as a high price. Of course a lower price would correspond to a higher value of N. That's not some kind of counterintuitive cause and effect relationship, it's the same fact.
The point is that more people get to satisfy their desires to live in cities. Living in a city stops being something reserved for the top N households.
The debate around legal immigration is very much the same. The people that want to immigrate have no voice.
This is generally referred to as NIMBYism. And yeah, it’s a problem, but particularly in California where property values have skyrocketed to the point homeowners can’t afford to give up their nest egg because then they’d have nowhere to live.
It does concern me however what it took to make people give up their advantages, the grossly more obvious inequities in that case (and solution), and how long it took.
What I've seen in my city (LA adjacent) is the city can find really creative ways of making adding an ADU very expensive. On my block the same contractor built 2 different ~500 sq ft units on two different lots. They both were a garage tear down replaced by a 1 bedroom unit above a garage.
The first unit was done right after the law change allowing ADUs, and cost ~140k. The second, started 18 months later was ~270k and the owner had to pay for things like repaving the ally and upgrading the sewers.
So even the small steps are being impeded.
2/ adding 1 more unit to a plot is hardly going to make dent in the crisis.
We need to look at Asia to see how they offer affordable house: giant high density housing complexes with ground floor grocery stores and shopping malls for convenient access.
Is it a dream home? No. Is it an acceptable living space while someone gets their feet on the ground, starts figuring out a new job/life? Absolutely.
You could say "well, how about all of the above?" but that just elides the tension between sprawl-based development and increasing urban density, which is also not a matter of widespread agreement. Many people don't like sprawl, but they also don't want dramatically increased urban density (or at least, not near them).
Large apartment complexes with ground-level commercial space <- winner winner chicken dinner.
The homeless. The poor. Young students. Artists. Elderly. Refugees.
That is anyone who can't get anything better. ADUs are useful housing for those who are on the edges, but pretty much all of the above wants better - they just can't afford it.
If money wasn't a limit how would that change your housing? Indoor pool? Bowling alley off your bedroom? servant quarters? Everyone has a limit - I listed things that most of us would be not sure if they are worth it or not, but with money not being the limit maybe we would. However because money is a limit most of us don't seriously look at those things even though it is possible now (you might need a zoning variance to fit a bowling alley on your lot, but if you are reading this it probably is an affordable addition if you really want it)
They would prefer to live in an ADU instead of a private apartment?
Why can't society give them something better by building more affordable housing rather than living in a tiny home in someone's backyard?
We don't have to settle for less.
Imagine if we restricted how many cars could be made a year, with the predictable result of new and used car prices steadily increasing every year. And then when anyone suggested what maybe we should let car makers make more cars, you got a bunch of people complaining about the property values of the cars they already owned, or that this would ruin car culture.
It’s at least partially rational, though: usually non-car transportation is hilariously impractical wherever they currently live, and also wherever they’ve lived in the past.
The struggle is to get people to see what could be possible when they have minimal to no experience with it.
And the voices of those who own land?
This is a form of "ownership" in which you don't control the property and you have to pay rent on it every year. What's left?
California’s housing crisis has given me a clear perspective on the debate between centralized and distributed powers, a topic I have long struggled to resolve. It harkens back to debates as old as federalism vs anti-federalism. States rights versus federal rights. Similarly, in this case, it’s about county rights versus the state’s right. Debates on this topic usually resolves around one or the other, leading to rather binary positions. But really, the discussion should be about the appropriate balance between the two. I find we are well informed about the tyranny of centralized power by the state. As a specific example, there is a narrative that the Robert Moses era of the mid-20th century lead to massive civil projects, such as freeways, that put the interests of the state ahead of individual neighborhoods, leading to destroyed and fractured communities. It appears there has been a political whiplash against this era which has lead us to the predicament we find ourselves with today, which is that powers are now heavily distributed. What can and cannot be built is now dictated by the counties and the neighborhoods within it. This is wonderful in the sense that you, as an individual property owner, have much greater control on what goes on in your community. But this also has a systemic effect of acting as a problem that the federalists originally warned about in their own debates, which is the tyranny of the majority. Because powers are so heavily distributed, it has lead to an artificially constructed zero-sum game, as you point out in your post, where everyone who owns a home is content and will do whatever they can to limit supply as doing so feeds their natural own self-interests. In this regard, I think it is clear that we have an improper balance between distributed and centralized power. I believe it weighs too heavily on the distributed side. This results in the trampling of interests of both developers, who wish to produce supply, and individuals themselves who wish to participate in the society, but cannot due to unaffordability. This is a shift in position that I would say is rather unique for me. I tend to advocate for the inverse, a reduction in centralized power. But in this particular case, I think centralization is an appropriate step.
I also want to make one additional disclaimer. By centralization of power, I don’t mean the state should be involved in housing construction itself. This is a position often proposed by progressive advocates. Instead what I mean is that the state should have the power to override local interests so that the market can do its job, which is its interest to increase supply. In other words, the state should do what it can to remove the local bureaucracy that stifles development.
for instance, the state largely delegates zoning and housing starts to cities, but that’s turned into a regional concern as cities try to offload housing onto nearby cities to preserve existing stock and dedicate the rest to commercial property. so then, the right place to institute zoning/housing is not at the city level, or even the county level, but at the regional level. however, we don’t have a regional governance structure, so it gets wedged into existing city/county frameworks.
Several dozen massive apartment complexes have been constructed in L.A. in the past 4 years, and more are being constructed as we speak.
It turns out the problem was never actually zoning; it's simply that it's extremely expensive to build in L.A. when taking into account cost of land (limited supply), cost of materials (excess demand), cost of labor (excess demand), and the extra architectural and structural demands resulting from the dozens of fault lines criss-crossing the L.A. basin.
Honestly, it's the ideal density IMHO. I get the convenience factors of urban density, but without (most) of the downsides of a high-rise condominium building.
Our love affair with middle-density housing is a bit of a cultural/historical oddity; there really aren't other places in Canada where this is wide-spread norm.
Duplexes, triplexes and tenements dominate any decent sized city (100K+) in Massachusetts. It’s just what tends to happen when cities were founded 350-400+ years ago.
Kids are noisy, they walk hard and jump a lot. You can lecture /punish all you want. That doesn’t change their nature.
For a time we were apologizing to the grouchy old lady living alone below us in a 3 bedroom. Hitting ceiling with broom at every noise. But at a certain point. Look 3 bedrooms are for people with family. I’m not going to force a 2 year to sit still 24 hours a day.
After one absurd ceiling episode we started family jumping exercises for every broom whack.
Never going back to multi-tenant if I can help it.
It’s why I never consider living in townhouses, duplexes, or apartments anymore. I have to not share a wall - otherwise I will definitely hear the neighbor. It’s guaranteed. Even in SFH, I still hear my neighbors - just don’t hear them walking around their house like I would in another type of home.
It's got pros and cons. I think the big issue I observe here is that it doesn't help affordability in any noticeable way. Whenever the single family units are destroyed, they are typically the older / lower end variety first, which had previously been attractive as rentals for lower income people but now they have massive value as teardowns so they can be carved up. Those houses get replaced with high end new construction. So this results in increased real estate value and ultimately a concentration of amenities around these areas that are being "plexed." No affordable housing is built (since this is a southern US city, all low income housing is pushed away from the city core to the exurbs, with long car drive commutes).
Another con is that this town does not have public transportation, and their roads are ill suited for 2-3x the old density. This results in the dreaded "stroads" that have numerous stoplights, carry 5-6 lanes of traffic, and are lined by strip malls as the only connectors.
And finally, when a neighborhood gets "plexed," all the existing foliage is destroyed because it is in the way. So the newly plexed zones are barren with only small shrubs and decorative plants, no trees at all.
I think town home style developments make a lot of sense conceptually. They provide easier access than an apartment building and are much cheaper to build. The density improvements are real, although though not as large as an apartment. I just worry that the way it's being done is rather careless and with little thought for the future, at least in the southern US town I am staying in.
This is the rub, right? We can only redevelop a block or two at a time, so the only choice is for 10+ story towers. Especially because land is so expensive in these cities.
I'm curious if new residential buildings (non-luxury if that even exists) in Paris or Barcelona are only 5-6 stories high.
That's not necessarily true: it's much easier to build a duplexes/triplexes than a high-rise. Companies that can build the former cannot necessarily build the latter. IIRC when Bloomberg downzoned many "missing middle" outer-borough neighborhoods and upzoned core areas to support high-rises in NYC, many small building companies couldn't transition and just folded.
> I'm curious if new residential buildings (non-luxury if that even exists) in Paris or Barcelona are only 5-6 stories high.
I'm curious to see actual data on this, but many (most? almost all?) European cities have zoning rules that prevent building much taller than that in residential areas. It's especially true near the city center, where the restriction may apply to all buildings. So my guess would be it's still pretty common to not build high-rises in European cities -- similar to many NYC neighborhoods outside Manhattan (that weren't downzoned by Bloomberg).
Pre-1920s neighborhoods in the USA are dense, yet spacious. So much of the density problems in America are due to our over-reliance on cars.
Funny thing is, people still will pay top dollar to either live in these neighborhoods, or visit them on vacation (Savanah, Charleston, New Orleans, Ashville, ...).
It's a complete tragedy, the answer is right there. Just do the same thing they did then, but today.
The problem is that building like that has been outlawed with euclidean zoning.
- LA is already building various large expansions of public transit, as well as walking/biking infrastructure.
- Generally the shops basically come along with the housing. "Activating" the ground floor - putting retail or other public uses into the ground floor of buildings that are residential above is standard practice when building those taller residential buildings along main arteries, on busy corners, and so on.
which suffers from many difficulties and cost overruns because of existing layout.
I think it would be more cost efficient to build another city/town nearby from the ground, and people decide where they want to live given differences in cost and lifestyle.
That is ignoring the fact that in our perfect city above, just a few years later we will discover something new we forgot to account for and now our city is imperfect.
We still need to build ways for all the new people in those new suburbs to get to the rest of the city. Building to dense neighborhoods is a lot cheaper than father out ones (because we need a lot more distance to get them) As a bonus transit works better as you become dense.
Cities though have the problem of allowing much more space for jobs than they have for housing. You don’t want high density housing in your city? Fine, cap your employer zoning.
It’s a big country out there and people need to decentralize and stop trying to turn nice places into hong kong density.
Nobody needs to use land “efficiently” by packing more people into it.
You may not want to live like that, but plenty of people do. We should allow them.
I suspect that number is a lot lower than is claimed. It's only a very loud set of vocal urbanist activitsts who clamor for these changes and create the illusion of that demand. The reality is most people grow out of wanting to live in dense areas and walkability is very overrated. In fact walk scores basically don't matter when people actually shop for a house compared to other factors (price, size, location, schools, etc). And as people age and want to establish a family, the urban life quickly loses its attractiveness.
The real question is why should any neighborhood have to 'allow' anyone who wants to live there to do so? Am I entitled to living beachfront in Maui just because I want to? Should they have to change their zoning to permit that? I feel like incumbent residents have a right to maintain their neighborhood character, density, and quality of life. Those things get eroded when you have an influx of new residents and different density - you end up with streets, parks, and other amenities that no longer work the way they're supposed to. What I see happening is that a city will build itself over time into something very attractive, and newcomers want a piece of that, so they demand zoning changes at the cost of the incumbents who made that place attractive in the first place.
This is not supported by home prices in many housing markets. The walkable parts of cities tend to be among the most expensive in every metro area. Realtors even have a phrase for not being able to afford to live in the dense metro core: "drive until you qualify" (for a mortgage, given your income).
This is also weird thing to note given that real estate websites pay to license walk scores presumably because they believe that home buyers want this information.
That doesn't prove anything. We don't allow very many walkable spaces, so by supply and demand it only takes a few people who actually like walkable spaces to drive the prices up.
I think the idea that people like walkable spaces is correct, but it is hard to prove it.
And walkability is a tradeoff for space. Pretty much everyone in my family are Single-family home for life kind of people, but they all enjoy visiting walkable places and talk about how nice they are. I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's not that people don't value walkability, it's that there are very, very few good walkable places to live. Would even go as far to say close to none, but I'm sure some smaller towns are out there that go under the radar.
For a closer example, visit Washington DC, and another poster recommended Montreal.
The political incentive is to do the opposite. Make it cheaper and more attractive to employers, then make residential housing scarce. You get huge demand for housing, then employers have to pay more (generating more income tax revenues) even though all the money goes to landlords, then landlords have to pay more in property taxes. From the perspective of the self-interested government bureaucrat, this is the system working as intended.
> Nobody needs to use land “efficiently” by packing more people into it.
Except that then things are more spread out, and what you're using inefficiently then is transportation.
If you have a twenty story building with shops at the bottom and housing at the top, anyone in that building can walk to any of those shops, or any of the ones across the street.
There is enough land that we could build all of that stuff across a hundred square miles, but then everybody needs a car. And many people don't want that, but restrictive zoning prohibits the thing they do want.
Cities though have a problem of allowing much more surface area than people can reasonably traverse. You don't want traffic in your city? Fine, stop adding subdivisions.
We're not farmers. We benefit from other people, not from land. Stop this fantasy that everyone can have a country estate 15 minutes from the city center. It's geometrically impossible.
Nobody needs to use time "efficiently" by going 60 miles an hour. If you can't reach what you need on foot or bicycle, that is a land use problem, not a transportation problem.
Super dense cities are efficient in some ways, but they have tons of other problems and they externalize tons of costs. What we're missing in the U.S. is human-scale density, especially in the form of cohousing arrangements.
Tall high-rises are not actually efficient. You know how much energy it takes to have elevators going up and down 40 floors along with all the other stuff? Land is not the single factor to calculate when we want efficiency.
Most folks would prefer the “missing middle” if ever given a chance to experience it.
What's so hellish about a large building?
Notably, those cities have been very expensive for decades because they also slowed their pace of housing construction below demand.
Meanwhile, cities like Houston have kept prices down by granting tons of building permits. For the purposes of pricing (as opposed to urban design), it doesn't matter what form the new units take, as long as they get built.
NYC is one of the few places that can have a lot of super tall buildings really close to each other. That's because the bedrock is so shallow and the ground can take more weight. Los Angeles, by comparison, has a much deeper bedrock, which makes it difficult to build tall buildings very close together.
If you want to get a lot of housing, medium density is the way to go. Medium density is cheaper to build and maintain, can be built in more locations, and is more pleasant to live in.
Obviously, the discussion above (read: comment thread elsewhere) about "middle density housing" is the same armchair urban planning as your comment, but middle density seems like a much more "moderate" solution by comparison to your proposal.
https://nitter.kavin.rocks/ShaneDPhillips
His book Affordable City was published last year:
https://islandpress.org/books/affordable-city
He hosts the "Creating More Affordable Cities" podcast https://elgl.org/podcast-creating-more-affordable-cities-wit...
He's with the UCLA Lewis Center's housing programme: https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/programs/housing/
Excellent information and insights on housing policy, both for LA and more generally.
This won't end the housing crisis. It'll take a long time for this to have a large impact but it's still an important step.
To anyone saying you need high rise apartments like NYC, it's not as simple as that. You can't just plop a 500 unit high rise in the middle of a city like LA and hope for the best. There are a lot of considerations. For example:
1. How will you deal with all those cars;
2. Will there be enough public services in the area?
3. Is that even a good idea given that LA is an earthquake zone. Sure Japan has high rises but it's extremely land-constrained and people live in much smaller units, which partially offsets the higher costs of building in an earthquake zone.
LA has been spending billions on a rail network and continues to do so. I don't know LA but I've heard people say it doesn't take you anywhere useful. There has also been resistance for adding stations in richer areas (eg Santa Monica) because it brings the riffraff in.
But if you are going to build higher-density housing, the obvious place to do it is around train stations. You'll be less car dependent and you'll increase ridership of the light rail.
The same applies to the Bay Area. Higher density housing should be a no-brainer along the SF to SJ Caltrain corridor.
Nobody wants their street to switch from single family homes to quad housing units. Nobody. Well, the only people who might want this would be those who are intent on moving elsewhere and want to maximize rental revenue. I would definitely do this because we would go from a singe rental revenue stream to four or five (the law sounds like you can build four additional units).
The fallacy here is that rental rates don't come down as a function of n --n defined as the number of units on a lot. It isn't a linear relationship at all. If I had to guess, the rental cost per unit might be somewhere around 50% to 80% of what one might get by renting the entire home as a single unit. Taking the low side on that and assuming we build 5 units, this means the gross rent income for the property just went up 2.5x to 4.0x. If construction costs fit the model, this could be a great deal.
Nobody is going to rent one of these units for less than the prevailing rent for similar units in existing apartment buildings. So, no, rents will not come down by a significant margin.
The other angle is to just build an n-plex and sell the units. My guess on that one is that you'll make far more on the property than if you sold the single family home. I would further postulate that the cost per unit will track with comparable properties and will not really make things more affordable. I mean this in the sense that you are going to pay per square foot whatever anyone is paying per square foot elsewhere in the area. This law will not magically create a 50% discount per square foot. One of the reasons for this being as simple as: Construction, materials and permit costs keep going up, not down. In very rough terms, construction costs are in a range between $150 and $400 per square foot (depending on location, design, quality, low-end, high-end, etc.). That quickly becomes a very real lower bound on property valuation. The ONLY way to make home more affordable is to, at a minimum, reduce construction, regulatory and permit costs.
And then there's the issue of what happens to a street and a neighborhood when you multiply the population by four or five. I am trying to imagine my street with 5x the vehicles. It is unimaginable. However, it goes beyond that. The sewage system, power, gas and water distribution systems were not designed to support five times the demand.
Simple example: Our water comes from a large water tank atop a hill serving this neighborhood. That tank, while large, was sized based on regional planning approved many decades ago, which, of course, consisted of single family homes almost exclusively. There is no way this tank and the system that feeds it (pumps, aqueduct, etc.) is sized to support a 5x growth in demand.
Similar issues with power and other utilities.
Then there's the issue of traffic. We already have high traffic density and glorious traffic jams in the immediate region on a daily basis. A 5x explosion in population would turn this into nothing less than a living hell experience. Here's a data point. Many years ago I had to drive 50 miles to go work at a client's facility. I did this for two years. When the contract started I could do the 50 miles in about 45 minutes --so long as I left at 6:00 AM. Towards the end of the contract it was taking 2 hours. If I left at 5 AM I had a chance to cover the distance in an hour. A few minutes later and it got ugly quick. It was not uncommon to spend three hours on the road to get back.
I won't even go into the likely in increase in crime. No, this isn't a judgement on the quality of people who would move in. It's a simple reality, increase the population five-fold and you will have an increase in crime. Simple example: More cars parked on the streets means lots more opportunities to break into them for profit.
The consequences of these ...
If anything, this law will make the problem worse. LA is already packed with people and it takes 30 minutes to drive 3 miles on the city streets. If implemented, this will bring yet more people to the neighborhoods, increase density and make the situation far worse.
But, like you said, the crux of the problem is the price and not anything else.
This matches my experiences in SF and other parts of the country. I’ll ignore the irony that republicans are voting against expanded property rights and transparently are voting simply for class interests…
I am not sure why democratic elected officials are so opposed to these rules, whether it’s not in the lawmakers’ best interests directly (ie maybe since they are on average much wealthier, they think the law will hurt them. Or result in redistricting, etc.), bog-standard graft and corruption, or whether they legitimately think the measures are unpopular and likely to result in non getting re-elected. NIMBYs are certainly loud but they actually aren’t the majority. I am so tired of hearing tortured, nonsensical explanations for why new housing must be denied or become onerously hard to get approved. So at this point I’m leaning less towards thinking politicians are (incorrectly) following what they think their constituents think, and more towards suspecting some kind of inherent conflict of interest between lawmakers and the prospect of expanded housing.
I understand some may not want to hear, but it is a direct aspect of the problem, and not unsubstantial. Nothing against immigrants of course, they'll surely need a place to live—just like everyone else. The "not in my backyard" strategy of (14/15) is not a solution.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
So perhaps the distinction of democrat is too broad and unhelpful in this situation and it should be broken down into finer demographics. 26% of Americans identify as democrat and there is bound to be a lot of diversity of opinion within such a large body of people.
Democrats aren’t as outright averse to density, and in theory should be for more housing because it would massively help the working class, but in practice they’re only okay with pre-existing density, because new density means redeveloping areas that probably already have people there, which means displacement. Plus, they hate the fact that new housing is more expensive than old housing, so every time a new development goes up you get a bunch of people yelling about “luxury condos”.
The causal variable is property ownership vs renting. City council members are older (regardless of party membership) will be property owners, and thus because this issue impacts them personally and very directly, they will always vote to increase their property values (ie less construction / less supply).
Democratic leaders are still usually older, and thus owners - and since this issue impacts them very very personally, they will vote against their constituency.
It's hard to see how allowing duplexes will do _anything_ to address housing issues. We have a similar law here in Minneapolis which allows triplexes on any property.
But what are the economics of this? Surely there's not a lot of vacant land in LA or Mpls just waiting for a new plex to be built. Instead, all the plots are already occupied. So that means either converting an existing house or tearing it down and building something new.
What would it cost to convert a single family home to a duplex? I'd say a _very_ conservative estimate is c. $200,000. And what does it rent for? A typical house might be converted into a 700-900 square foot rental. Looking at Zillow, it seems like you'd get maybe $2,000-2,500 for that. Let's be optimistic and say $2,500. So it's $30,000 per year. You'll make a profit in ... 7 years ... after the construction work is done, which could itself take 6+ months. And I suspect my cost estimate is way too low.
Seven years for a positive ROI doesn't seem like a very strong incentive. And if this is your own home that you live in, it'll be unliveable for much of the construction time. That means you'll have to live elsewhere and that cost further delays a positive ROI.
I can't imagine a developer seriously investing in duplexes or triplexes, or even quads. What they would want is to tear down several adjacent houses and build an apartment building in the same space, and to really make it worth it that building probably needs to be 3+ floors.
This plex stuff seems like political theater.
I’m guessing it does over the long run, but haven’t tried it myself.
This is not going to double the density of neighborhoods, but it opens options for residents and makes it much easier to add units. Sometimes that won't be worth it economically - even if you want to - but the numbers will work out in many cases.
A few walls, some electrical work, an entirely new kitchen, and a new master bath unless you happen to have a house with two full bathrooms.
it absolutely is just political theater, at least for duplexes and accessory dwelling units (adu), two laws recently passed here in CA. it’s a show of ‘doing something’ while not changing the landscape at all. less than 1% of LA will upgrade to duplexes from single-family homes because of the underwhelming economics. what we need is a minimum of 4+1 (quadplex plus adu) by right on an R1-zoned property, and scaling up from there.
And you wonder why California has a housing crisis.
A place like LA should have enacted this kind of incremental change years ago.
We used to go out of our way to support the homeless and families (and had a lower median income than most surrounding cities) but since the selfish jerk proportion went up (IMHO in the dot com boom) the city has turned into “I’ve got mine, jack, so fuck off”
What would truly fix things right away:
#1. Prohibit Companies/Entities/hedgefunds from buying houses and renting them, ala zillow, blackrock etc.
#2. Repeal CA prop. 13, all housing should be taxed at current market value. (exclusions for older retirees and the disabled)
#3. Homeowners that wish to own a second property should be taxed at a very high rate.
#4. Mandate real estate commissions to be halved, currently its 6%(3% buyer, 3% seller) it should be closer to 3% total, this would allow greater mobility and encourage more buying and selling of houses.
#5. Rezone unused commercial(3 years unused) to residential to allow for more units to be built.
None of these solutions above would change the makeup of a neighborhood by introducing high density housing which some owners don't want, and could easily be implemented by a few laws being crafted and passed. I bet 10-15% of the housing market would free up right away and prices would come down 20-30% within a year or two.
But the root of the problem is just the people who are intentionally moving to southern California due to the mild climate. They know how crowded and dry[lack of water](and also expensive) it is but move here anyways contributing to the congestion. They don't want to move to other areas even when there are jobs there, and this issue will always be there.
#1 will be challenged in court the highest level. Think "corporations are people".
#2 will pass only if a majority of California residents are renters and decide that they want to band together on this one issue.
#3 could work since it would ensure support from people who are currently renting but want to buy a home soon.
#4 is small compared to how much home prices appreciate. The real problem is supply.
#5 this would open up more space for residential development. If it is zoned mix-use with a mandate for minimum density, then it could definitely add more supply.
you'd want to incentivize the private market to purchase, maintain, market to distribute housing to the masses and the government does that through favorable taxes. Making them unprofitable would put the burden on the renters + government with no private money capital injection.
Why the exclusions? Is there a reason to give extra help for the disabled to own homes (and, implicitly, not help disabled renters a similar amount)?
Older retirees could sell off a third of their house's value and cover property taxes for something like 20 years.
Also the thinking would be "oh they will have so much money!", #1 the majority of the windfall would be taxed at max tax rate, and #2 I imagine people preying on these forced out older "millionaires" ie. family members and con artists.
Old people get a lot of protections. Protections they put in place themselves. Prop 13 is one of those protections. Perpetuating it just means that the protections will never go away. Maybe they can just move in with their children - the ones that are apparently a driving factor of why they can't leave the region.
It doesn’t need more. It’ll just blow it on more trains that don’t run or such.
100% tax rate would not be enough for many politicians.
45-minute to 1-hour drive to a nonexistent but planned train stations times TWO (for end-waypoints) just to enjoy a two-hour (or less) time-saving trip across the California farmland makes about much sense as skydiving off a plane to reach your destination.
For older retirees, they can get money out of the house without having to move in their remaining years. The tax will be proportional to the value, so the numbers cancel out.
For someone that's disabled, are we helping equivalent renters too? Or only the homeowning disabled? And I feel like this is a bad way to help them in general.
Prop 13 can easily be fixed by a) Limiting it to primary homes. b) Removing it from commercial properties. c) Make it means based and if the homeowner can't afford the taxes, tally it up and assess it at death or final sale w/o an equivalent purchase.
You can see how subsidies work due to prop 13 in the map here https://www.taxfairnessproject.org/.
You often hear about how Houston, for example, "doesn't have zoning", but a huge fraction of new housing in Texas (Houston and elsewhere) is in planned neighborhoods covered by restrictive covenants that prohibit all sorts of things. In those neighborhoods, it's unlikely that anyone would be able to tear down a single family house and build a duplex on the lot. (Or even paint the existing house a different color without approval of the HOA board.)
You have some of most inept local politicians you can imagine, who are more focused on taking glamor shots in front of half a million dollar per unit homeless shelters.
If it's really costing half a million dollars to house a single homeless family, why not just give them $5,000 to move?
Even for someone like myself, and I do consider myself to be somewhat upper middle class, LA is a bad deal. Deal. The bare minimum to afford a place to live plus transportation ends up being around 3,200 per month. That's about $2400 for a 1 bdrm + 800$ for a car payment / insurance/ gas.
Compared to Chicago where a 1bdrm in a fantastic metro accessible area can be had for 1300$ or so. 100$ metro pass gets you around.
LA and much of California is past saving, get out while you still can.
I'm sure they would if they could, but with all the greyhound buses full of people going to LA from places like Texan prisons, how do you prevent them from coming back? Also, I don't think $5k provides as much influence these days as you think it does, even to someone who is homeless.
> LA and much of California is past saving, get out while you still can.
Yes, LA has too many people with more coming, housing prices are too high, and again growing. Chicago is losing people, so it is much easier to live there.
I'd say offer families a one time lump sum if they want to relocate. After that forbid them from ever receiving another dime in assistance. While you'll have some who try to take the money and come back anyway, I imagine many would find better places to live.
California is losing people
https://ktla.com/news/california/california-sees-its-populat...
You say families, but these already get the most help from the system via welfare and other programs. The real problem are the single homeless people who have addiction or mental illness problems. And they are incredibly mobile, they'll take your $5k, buy a bunch of drugs, and be back next week. And your solution to cut off the funding spigot...well, why not just do that already? I think it is a great idea, the fact that homeless people flock to cities with the best services and benefits means that the problem can never hoped to be solved at the local level anyways.
> California is losing people
Yes, finally. When you look at the population graph for the last 80 years (starting of which California and Texas had about the same amount of people), you'd think the boom had to end sometime. It is time for the other slacker states like Texas take some people.
But my guess is that the LA area and Bay area will start growing again once the pandemic subsides. People simply have no sense, the "its too crowded so no one goes there anymore" contradiction will never go away (since...if it really does become less crowded, more people will decide to fill the empty space).
The average income in LA is only around $70,000 for a household, but the rent keeps skyrocketing every single year. Back when I was a bit younger could still find an apartment in LA for $600, try doing that now.
I very much miss the working class city of my youth. It was such a fun, funky place.
While you do have tons of homeless people who have no interest in changing their situation, many are just stuck. Help people who want to relocate relocate. I'm extremely fortunate in that I make enough money where I can just up and move to practically anywhere in the United States. But if you're working class, this is near impossible.
It wouldn't be a bad thing if people fled LA en mass for the next 20 years or so while housing catches up. Then in 2040 the city might have a middle class again.
What cities in the USA could you still find an apartment for $600? Inflation has long blown past those prices. According to:
https://www.rent.com/research/cheapest-rent-in-the-us/
The only city that comes close to $600 is Fargo ND.
> While you do have tons of homeless people who have no interest in changing their situation, many are just stuck.
Those are the easiest homeless cases to solve and I'm not convinced that they aren't being solved already (by public services and/or charities).
> I'm extremely fortunate in that I make enough money where I can just up and move to practically anywhere in the United States.
People are extremely mobile when they don't have roots (either an owned house or job or family or a kid in school that they like). It actually is pretty easy to just pick up and move. And that's what has happened throughout history (including the original Okies that moved to California during the great depression).
> It wouldn't be a bad thing if people fled LA en mass for the next 20 years or so while housing catches up. Then in 2040 the city might have a middle class again.
I agree, but the law of supply and demand probably means that will never happen. If people fled LA, there is enough demand from people wanting to live there that other people would move in and keep things about the same as they are now. As long the wish is "I hope LA becomes less popular so I can move there", it is simply never going to happen.
We know this because while writing a series of LA Times articles a few years ago on the homeless situation in Hollywood, George Lopez (the reporter, not the comedian) discovered that most of the homeless people he was interviewing weren't even L.A. locals. The overwhelming majority of the homeless came from the Midwest (mostly: Texas), because someone bought them a ticket and told them the weather here was great.
And the bigger problem: when offered shelter, most homeless refuse because almost all shelters in L.A. are sober facilities that do not allow contraband (i.e., booze or drug paraphenelia) and they would rather keep their drugs/alcohol than have housing. This is why L.A. is attempting to introduce new rules that would prohibit individuals from camping in public areas if there is shelter space available and they refuse shelter.
They don't even have to do that. If you get released from prison without family to pick you up, they give you an open bus ticket to go wherever. And...they really don't have many choices if they want to survive without support.
Buses have failed for a variety of reasons. Rail and BRT (bus with dedicated lane) are good and should be greatly expanded, but they only help with connecting major areas. We need to stop looking at Asian mega cities as an example. It just won't work here. Those super dense cities are designed for walking + public transit. The "last mile" problem in those cities are solved by walking because they're super dense enough that you can get to public transit easily by walking less than a mile. And also don't look at NYC or any old east coast city as an example. Those were designed before the car. Most people in the US live in places that were designed for the car.
Rail + BRT along major routes is part of the solution. But in the past, it hasn't worked well because of the "last mile" issue, which is more like the "last few miles" issue in the typical American suburban design. If someone has to still have a car to drive the few miles from their home to the park-and-ride, that doesn't do anything to fix the local road congestion issue. When they get on the train, it helps with freeway traffic, but does nothing for the local traffic. And the "last few miles" is too far to walk. And again, buses/shuttles have failed to fix this for a lot of reasons.
When ride-share was introduced, some thought that this was the solution. If someone depends on ride-share to get to places, that certainly helps reduce parking requirements. But, the traffic on the roads doesn't change, and may even increase due to idling ride-share cars waiting for rides. Uber Pool tries to help with this, but it's just not enough.
With the rise of electric micromobility (e-scooters and e-bikes), we finally have something that can fix this "last few miles" issue. But it will require a big step from the government and society as well. We have to be willing to sacrifice a lane in all the local roads. The current bike lanes are simply not extensive enough, not wide enough, and not safe enough. The only way to achieve true effectiveness for e-micromobility is to dedicate an entire lane of roads to them. It's a radical idea that would get a lot of opposition. People already upset with traffic don't want to lose a lane to make it worse. That can only be countered with a critical mass of people who own an e-microbility solution (e-scooter or e-bike).
Is it ever going to happen? Maybe if there's a city brave enough to try it and show it can work. But true support and infrastructure for e-bikes and e-scooters is the only way to get real density in the typical suburban sprawl layout without a disastrous increase in traffic and parking shortage.
https://www.livablecalifornia.org/sb-9-allows-8-units-on-all...
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/sb-9-it-s-not-a-duplex-bil...
Accordingly, if a lot is over 2,400 sqft, one could split the lot into 2 (minimum 1,200 sqft is needed per part), and build a duplex, an ADU (Accessory Dwelling Unit) and a JADU (Junior Accessory Dwelling Unit) in each part, ending up with 8 units in total.
"With particular reference to apartment houses, it is pointed out that the development of detached house sections is greatly retarded by the coming of apartment houses, which has sometimes resulted in destroying the entire section for private house purposes; that in such sections very often the apartment house is a mere parasite, constructed in order to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of the district. Moreover, the coming of one apartment house is followed by others, interfering by their height and bulk with the free circulation of air and monopolizing the rays of the sun which otherwise would fall upon the smaller homes, and bringing, as their necessary accompaniments, the disturbing noises incident to increased traffic and business, and the occupation, by means of moving and parked automobiles, of larger portions of the streets, thus detracting from their safety and depriving children of the privilege of quiet and open spaces for play, enjoyed by those in more favored localities-until, finally, the residential character of the neighborhood and its desirability as a place of detached residences are utterly destroyed. Under these circumstances, apartment houses, which in a different environment would be not only entirely unobjectionable but highly desirable, come very near to being nuisances."
If you're an American like me, this is your SCOTUS at work!
If you like hot weather, there are many better places to live, like Scottsdale or Naples. If you must live in California, why not Palm Springs?
If you are concerned about taxes and cost of living and you don't need California's weather, virtually any other state has a safe community for you to live in.