My understanding is that California is short around a million housing units. Truly a staggering number that will take very long to catch up on. Not sure how many units are being allowed by builder's remedy but it surely isn't the full million.
Somehow we have grown a whole generation of people that thinks they are entitled to live wherever they want, when that has never been the case in world’s history.
I too want a penthouse in Manhattan, who do I need to mail to demand I am given a penthouse in Manhattan?
California clearly doesn’t have the capacity to serve the current population, let alone an increased population. All services are 3rd world quality, besides a few rich enclaves.
Somehow we have grown a whole generation of people that thinks they are entitled to tell their neighbors what they are allowed to build. I too want everyone around me to have a one story house so I can look over them from my balcony, but guess what, that would impede on their property rights. California absolutely has the capacity to serve the current population, they just need to fix the shit show that is their housing policy.
I mean, it stands to reason that there also need to be homes for those people to live in. Unless you're planning on executing or imprisoning them instead.
SF/LA has numerous programs that will give you housing if you're homeless. The issue is that many of the homeless refuse to take up these programs and insist on staying in their tents.... so... no?
I'm from Vancouver so I'm pretty familiar with this issue. They give you housing but don't allow drugs. Being able to own your own place where you can do drugs helps.
These people are addicts and homeless. We can cure homelessness with more homes, but we also need to help them get rid of addiction.
Stats like these are only true because the general public and policymakers/NGOs mean completely different populations of people when discussing "the homeless."
Private market housing in SF will not get most of the very visible & mentally ill off of the streets, this likely requires services and some level of compulsion.
If you redefine "homelessness" to only include those with addiction or mental illness problems, then you might have a point. But that's not a terrible useful definition, and many of those addiction and mental illness problems stem from not having housing and the extreme difficulty of that situation.
Other areas with higher rates of addiction, but cheaper housing, have lower rates of homelessness. Cheaper housing really does allow people to get off the streets.
Expensive housing is also correlated with better provisioning of services which draws people here.
I am not redefining anything, I am describing to you what people are colloquially talking about and why these conversations oftentimes are just people talking past each other because they have different issues in mind. When people in SF say "homelessness is out of control", they are typically talking about the population I am mentioning - one that is unlikely to be helped by changes to housing costs at the margin.
Note that homelessness is a constant flow of people. The services and compulsion removing people from the streets is currently happening. The problem is that the housing market is dumping more new homeless onto the street than our current system can handle. Turning off the faucet, so to speak, will make dealing with the existing homeless population a much simpler and more humane activity.
> Something tells me everyone who's homeless isn't a fentanyl addict. Especially given housing costs
SF/LA has numerous programs that will give you housing if you're homeless. The issue is that many of the homeless refuse to take up these programs and insist on staying in their tents.... because they're mentally ill.... because of drugs.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting a drug problem is a character defect nor am I implying that these people don't deserve a huge amount of empathy.
I'm just unsure if the root cause is the price of housing (despite there meaning numerous problems to house & relocate them) or if it's due to the drug addiction.
Anyway, obviously I'm for more housing to reduce the price of rent.
There's a youtube channel called Invisible People that interviews homeless people on the streets and the story is very frequently
had job -> got on highly addictive drugs -> everything is about getting another hit -> tried rehab multiple times and want to go to rehab again
And yeah I mean, heroine/meth/whatever is obviously super dangerous & addictive so you can't really blame them.
so i am dealing with this issue with a good friend of mine right now, who is homeless in the city of san francisco. No, this isnt true , theres a very very long waitlist for assistance. His credit is shot and he cannot find a new rental. so, hes been living in a hotel. Hes paying the daily, so he has money.
You should look at the often onerous restrictions that come with those programs, often including:
* No Pets
* No Visitors
* Curfew Time
* Limits on the number of people per unit (meaning, families and couples cannot always be accommodated together)
- and a host of others. Also in some places there is a requirement that you have a social worker, and/or receiving mental healthcare treatment - except there are long waiting periods.
For most long term homeless people telling them "you have to give up your dog" will keep them on the streets - its not "housing, no questions asked" its "housing with rules".
Building more housing will reduce the existing homeless population - because a significant portion of existing homeless are working poor, but more importantly, it will stall the creation of new homeless, the longer you're homeless the more likely you are to acquire an addiction, or other mental health issue.
I'm sure it can't be this simple, but I would love to hear what the problems are with building large apartment complexes on cheap land in the outskirts of cities, staffing them with security, social workers, medical workers, etc. and then letting people live there no questions asked.
You would of course still need some rules in these places and there would certainly be various issues and difficulties, but it seems a whole lot better than what we have happening now in city centers?
That's pretty much right on the nose when it comes to 'Housing First' approaches to the homeless. Most localities refuse to do that for political reasons more than practical ones: too many people take to crab-bucket complaining as soon as you just give homeless people homes.
There is opposition to it across the ideological spectrum, the right doesnt like it, because they feel people should do for themselves, parts of the left doesnt because of one of two reasons A) it doesnt provide an acceptable enough standard of living for those pushed into it B) it doesnt provide the 'comprehensive care' required to really help people (as seen from folks inside the homelessness industrial complex, which is to say, anyone with a vested interest in continuing the status quo).
In reality housing first solves a great many problems, and creates some others - but its better than anything else we're currently doing.
I want to predicate this with a statement, I believe there is no such thing as 'unworthy poor' all poverty is worth solving, because the broader societal costs in not solving poverty is corrosive on wider society. Poverty is at the roots of some of the causes of homelessness, but not all of them.
So, a generation ago, we warehoused people who had an inability to thrive in society in mental hospitals, now we do it with jails, or just leave them on the streets. I think it's a thought that upsets people (and runs into ideological issues across the spectrum), but essentially, there is some percentage of the population, that no matter the supports they are given, will fail to thrive. If we try to jail them all, or just ignore the problems, it creates a great number of externalities which effect all of us in a myriad of ways.
To further drill down, it's a spectrum of behaviors, some folks have enough problems that cash benefits and subsidized housing are not enough to allow them to follow the rules in general society.
In any case, to circle back around, it essentially creates an second class citizen and nuisances around these places, thats a solvable problem though, but rather authoritarian in how you'd have to solve it.
I've had extensive conversations for this with friends, and we've come to the conclusion (reluctantly) that the only complete fix for homelessness would be something the equivalent of civil commitment to a 'guided living' community, you'd have a large community on the edge of town, it'd have a mix of halfway houses, group living and individual apartments and has centers for mental health, social work, as well as sources of employment, shops and communal spaces.
The idea is, if simple housing supports wont get you out of homelessness, you could be sent there - there would be a way to graduate out of the program, but for some they would go and might never be able to leave.
Thanks for the very thoughtful comment. The solution you describe strikes me as so common sensical that I feel I must be missing something or else it would have already been implemented, considering how universally everyone seems to agree that the status quo is urgently unacceptable.
It's clear, as you say, that we need something that is not prison or a psych ward, but also not the streets of a city center.
It definitely seems that we're letting perfect be the enemy of good on this. It's like there's a burning building and everyone's standing around arguing about what the pH level of the water from the hoses should be rather than putting the damn thing out.
And while I agree with the concern about creating second class citizens, I'd say these people are in a worse situation than that currently, and they are bringing entire neighborhoods full of innocent people down with them.
There are a couple of factors I think in the way of adopting the solution I've outlined -
* It's incredibly authoritarian, ripe for abuse (as the commitment to mental hospitals was), and requires an evolution in legal thinking about what civil commitment can be used for.
* It offends a wide swath of people in an ideological way. No one really want to believe that some people cannot help themselves improve enough to exist in wider society (liberals assume everyone unless profoundly disabled can if given proper support, conservatives just assume people need to tug harder on those bootstraps). Similarly everyone on some level I've talked to about it is offended by the authoritarian nature of - it bothers people of all stripes once they think about it a little (including myself as a liberal with a general libertarian lean). Conservatives also object to spending money on such a venture (why should those people who contribute nothing to society eat better than I do?) for pretty obvious and consistent reasons.
* No one knows how to fund it, you need to either create new sources of revenue or deallocate money from someplace else, now, yes perhaps you could reduce funding allocated to policing - but there are existing stakeholders who will fight ardently to prevent it.
* Finally, there are existing stakeholders (the homeless industrial complex, as I glibly descried them) who want the status quo to persist for various reasons (for many organizations it is raison d'être - either for religious reasons, or more basal ones - money, they have workforces who are paid, and are a consumer of taxpayer grants).
I agree broadly with you, that the current illness is worse than the cure, but the cure isn't without its own side effects.
For what it's worth the example that I use of some people not being able to improve themselves is the Vanderbilt family, One of Cornelius Vanderbilt's great grandchildren was born into poverty. No matter what advantages afforded, some people will fail to thrive. (See https://www.amazon.com/Fortunes-Children-Fall-House-Vanderbi... for more information)
I agree with you, everyone is very busy arguing about either the PH of the water, the color of the water spout or if you should spray the base of the fire, or the top of the fire, and the fire rages further consuming people in its path and we never quite get around to putting the fire out.
There are a whole host of issues in society that are like this - where the optimal solution will never get significant political support behind it without the problem being perceived by voters as much worse than it is perceived now.
Some of these are:
* End of Life Care (from old age, chronic illness, etc)
* Cigarette Regulations (There are a ton of stakeholders who want to preserve the status quo of regressive taxes with general availability, when lower taxes with a gradually increasing age of purchase would be better for society)
* Overemphasis on safety in automobiles and other things (I did a cost benefit analysis on backup cameras, and it came out to something like 15,000 dollar per life saved, and most of these added burdens end up on the poor)
Perhaps a less authoritarian option than civil commitment could be to create this type of housing then incentivize it in various ways.
The biggest one is: if you’re going to have zones where hard drugs are de facto legalized, it should be in one of these places that are out of the way and designed to handle the externalities as well as possible rather than in the middle of cities.
It would also give police a place to take people who are creating quality of life issues for residents (tents, screaming, littering, using streets as toilets, etc.). Instead of the “bus out of town” or simply moving people around in the city, they could keep bringing people back to these facilities. Perhaps not all would stay, but I imagine many would.
Maybe the way to think about it is almost like a business serving customers. If homeless people don’t want to stay in this housing voluntarily, how can it be improved to change that? They have reasons for choosing the places that they do now, so if those factors can be replicated and improved upon, force might not generally be necessary.
I dont know that you can get people to stay without more.. coercion, particularly those who are homeless by choice. In some ways, they're the most libertarian of the libertarians, they dont like being told to what to do, they often (but not always) have various addictions - and move around. They're also the homeless who are least likely to cause trouble, leave a mess, they vary from addicts who are on the streets to 'urban campers'.
I think at least trying it would be better than what we're doing now, and I think we're on the same page about that.
You win victories against great social ills by convincing one person at a time that we need to try something different. I believe firmly that most of the ills our society has are caused by poverty, if we can solve 3/4 of poverty, we will end up with a richer, safer and happier world.
The provision of housing to the homeless can be refused for a lot of reasons. One being that the housing might be in a place where the person has no access or restricted access to other social programs such as food or jobs programs. The housing might make them feel unsafe, such as being crammed into a shelter. The housing might be overly restrictive, such as refusing to allow them to bring their pet which may be the only thing keeping them going emotionally. They may feel they don't have adequate support to transition to housing, if the housing demands they get off an addictive substance first (chicken and egg problem, because its much harder to get off an addiction if one is currently in crisis like being homeless).
Depends on what you mean by homeless. Regular people mean people living on the street. Policy types mean them but also people living in overcrowded conditions.
People enter homelessness and drug use from both directions. Many homeless are not addicts and more affordable housing will help get those off the street and keep more people at the margin in more stable housing situations. This will in turn help make services more available for the drug using homeless.
Why not both? And if the law fixes the prior, it will reduce overall homelessness. I'll take the progress and we can deal with the fentanyl issue in parallel for its own reasons.
NYC, HI, CA >40 per 100k homeless in 2020 (higher now)
States with lots of poverty but also extremely cheap housing at the bottom with a 5x lower rate of homelessness: LA, AL, MS
Similarly, WV very low on the list despite being high on all of the other supposedly causal factors such as mental health and drug problems
Poor people with mental health and addiction problems can still live with a roof over their head as long as they're not competing with tech salaries to buy any kind of shelter.
> You would then expect the percent of homeless per state to be roughly similar
No, I would expect the opposite. All the would be homeless in unappealing states leave and go to california or NYC because if they're not paying for housing they figure might as well go to the nicest area.
That's a very different model than 'prefer to live in the same places everyone else' -- you're saying that wherever housed people want to live, the homeless want to live there even more.
There are confounding factors at work here - for example, since 1979, people in NY have a legal right-to-shelter founded on the state constitution which does tend to generate a more encompassing homelessness policy than in, say, PA.
It's not really going to help the people that most imagine when they think of their personal experience of homelessness. i.e. people sleeping in the streets or on the subway, or the "crazy people" you cross the street to avoid.
For example, in NYC, more than 95% of the homeless are actually sheltered (whether in the city shelter system, or in other temporary situations like doubling up with friends or relatives), and more than 80% of homelessness is situational rather chronic. 30% of homeless families have at least one employed adult. 60% of all shelter residents are families.
Most spending on combating homelessness is invisible to us; and most improvements in affordable housing are going to have little impact on the (predominantly) male, drug-using and/or mentally-ill street sleepers.
> Over the course of the book, the researchers illustrate how absolute rent levels and rental vacancy rates are associated with regional rates of homelessness. Many other common explanations—drug use, mental illness, poverty, or local political context—fail to account for regional variation.
Other people have linked good articles, but a good way to think about it is in Japan and West Virginia they have almost no homelessness and in both those places its very easy to rent a studio for under 300$ a month. Even for someone addicted to drugs you can see how its possible to manage 300$ a month (or for say a charity or city organization to come up with the money) without solving the underlying issues.
"
And in the Bay Area, our time is almost up. HCD has made clear than any housing element that doesn’t zone feasibly for new housing especially in affluent areas will have their housing elements rejected. If they’re still in a rejected state by the deadline, their zoning disappears. If a city creates a good housing element and HCD approves, the builder’s remedy turns off and their local zoning is restored — but the projects approved under builder’s remedy will remain.
San Francisco frantically sought to avoid this, especially since HCD drew extra fire on the city and announced a special investigation into the slow housing approval process of San Francisco’s political system. The first ever housing investigation of its kind. Supervisors in the city cried they were being targeted and bullied by the state — but it worked. Fearing total loss of the highly sacred power to approve housing in San Francisco, the Board of Supervisors, the Planning Department & Commission, and the political activists of the city assembled quite a radical (but potentially lemon) housing element. One that proposes to upzone corridors in SF’s wealthier and lower density westside, something that was long believed to be politically impossible a year or two ago.
HCD reviewed SF’s housing element and said it “largely compiled” with the state’s rules, even though it was heavy on promises. As such, SF will not be subjected to the builder remedy on Wednesday. Shockingly, only a few other Bay Area jurisdictions can claim to keep their zoning as of writing this: Emeryville, Redwood City, and Alameda city.
"
The level of bureaucratic creep that has been imposed on property owners is actually unbelievable to me. I obviously understand some regulations (you can't built a chemical processing plant in a residential neighborhood, obviously), but cities have creeped themselves into all-powerful overseers.
Most cities now have the power to tell you what kind of house you can build, how you can paint it, how you can landscape it, what kinds of cars you can keep in your own driveway, what you can do in your leisure time on the property etc.
It is insane.
I honestly hope there is a property-rights case that abolishes all of this. If I own the property, then it's mine. If I want to collect old VW busses and park them in the front yard, I don't care what effect this has on my neighbors property value. This is my home. If you don't want to deal with living near other people, move to the country.
As a property owner, I've always found this to be remarkably short sighted.
If the city booms, land value goes up. E.g. Manhattan. Trying to keep your small suburb a small suburb isn't maximizing investor value.
edit: to responders, yes I'm aware houses have other value. My comment is in response the parent comment that specifically addresses investment value protection aspect.
I get some people want to live in a small suburb. Small suburbs are often quiet and peaceful. But small suburbs are also inefficient, environmentally unfriendly, and expensive to support so much road/electricity/water/etc infrastructure for so few people. Especially if the voting base of the suburb is effectively strangling their children by ensuring their kids will never be able to themselves afford a life there. It makes sense to me that the broader voting base is seeing they no longer benefit from a minority of suburban voters with a hold on city-level politics, and thereby vote in state-level politicians to force the issue.
edited to add: I'm sympathetic to the suburban homeowners near/in cities who are under pressure for their lifestyle and environment to end up rapidly changing within their generation due to economic local growth. I just don't think it's reasonable that that sympathy should extend to supporting their wants over the clear consequences of refusing to capitulate to the majority's needs for more housing.
If we taxed suburbs by how much they actually drain city budgets, no one would want to live in suburbs. It is by now a well-studied fact that suburbs are effectively subsidized by metropolitan cores. Makers and takers, indeed...
The folks at Strong Towns also talk a lot about productive land use measured as property tax income per square foot. They say it is the gold standard way to make sure your budget remains solvent and you can provide the services people need to make your city thrive. Obviously this means building up.
I hear that a lot from the StrongTowns-types, but I also observe many of the (financially independent) cities and towns that surround Boston are all financially doing extremely well, in contrast to the prediction that their lower density, less intensely urban development patterns would fall apart once the town/small city is fully built out and goes into maintenance mode.
Were they bulldozed and rebuilt into car-centric development?
From my understanding Strong Towns think "lower density, less intensely urban development" towns are fine. E.g. at 0:57 of the video, it's anything but intensely urban development.
"In this example, a 100-year-old commercial block, built in the traditional style of development, drastically outperformed a shiny new development, created in the modern car-centric style."
I would describe Arlington (1635), Belmont (1849), Waltham (1884), Watertown (1630), Lincoln (1754), Wellesley (1881), Newton (1688 town, 1874 city) as being substantially car-centric with respect to the majority of 21-65 year old residents of those towns/cities owning a car and using a car or car service more than 250 days out of the year. Arlington would be feasible to get by without a car in many of its areas. Others would be much more difficult in the majority of the land.
Speaking as an Arlington resident, I would not describe it as "car centric", although cars are accommodated far more than I would like. It's still a classical streetcar suburb. The majority of Arlington's housing stock is from multifamily buildings within a couple of minutes walk to high frequency bus service (~5 minute wait).
Rich suburbs do fine. Many suburbs of Boston have high income earners and high property values resulting in sane levels of property tax that actually fund those regions adequately. Most of the suburbs Strong Towns criticizes have $250k homes with household incomes between 40-50k and it’s impossible to tax those residents enough to pay for their infrastructure.
Arlington and Watertown are higher density than Lowellor Quincy. Newton and Waltham are not far behind. You're relying on intuition rather than data and it's showing.
I would really only categorize Lincoln and Wellesley "low density suburb". The rest certainly have car centric qualities but they're too built up to be called the exception to the rule.
Strong Towns are picking the outliers that are not doing well and trying to extrapolate to all suburbs. I quit reading them a few years ago when I realized the place they using as an example was a rural town an hour drive from anyplace that could be considered a city - yet somehow this was supposed to show why suburbs were insolvent.
Suburbs have existed for more than 100 years, start with thee streetcar suburbs (which often feature lots larger than what the new suburbs around me are building). They have already added sewer, water, telephone, eclectic, cable TV, internet, and some of those have been replaced as well. They have already replaced their roads many times over the years.
Sure there are some suburbs that have been badly managed and so haven't kept up. However that is a reflection on the short sighted voters, and not suburbs.
Your response makes me think you are not as familiar with Strong Towns' advocacy as you may wish to indicate. Their focus is not on density vs sprawl, and they are very careful to qualify that dichotomy against other dichotomies along which one may proceed with analysis. Their focus is rather on walkability and the accessibility of all kinds of services -- open public spaces a la parks, grocery and shopping stores, healthcare, schools, cultural offerings and nightlife, etc. To pretend that anything to which is attached the label "suburb", unqualified, is the target of their ire, is lazy.
I quit reading several years ago. Thier focus on walkabilty is good, but they also talk about how suburbs are not sustainable (or did then, and others seem to imply still do), and that position does not add up.
Same. I binge watched and binge read piles of related content on the topic several years ago and the overall message resonated quite a bit (in the “hell yeah, why don’t we do that?!” way).
Then I took that overall very positive lens and started to apply it to what I saw and the financial arguments didn’t hold up to what I could plainly see in the low-density, car-dominated towns and suburbs around me.
Because suburbs, despite lower taxes - often generate more tax income. Where I live the city itself has a large part of the downtown owned by the county, state and federal government (it is the state capital, plus various federal offices that all cities have). Half of the valuable downtown pays zero tax to the city, yet the city is still maintaining infrastructure for those lots. That is in addition to a few churches that pay no tax in the US, and a bunch of parks. Thus the city has the high value core which isn't paying for itself, and then the lower value ring around the core that has lower property values to generate tax income from. If they can annex a suburb just outside that with higher values the city gets more money (with their higher taxes), and probably can reduce the tax rates for everyone (still a tax increase for the annexed suburb!)
Strong Towns is talking about tax income vs tax expenditure efficiency (dollars received vs benefits realized). It is easily possible that receiving more money does not necessarily correspond to improved quality of life, if those funds are spent on projects that don't enable local prosperity.
The evidence strong towns presents is not convincing. They take rural towns far from cities and claim that towns issues represent suburbs. They cherry pick suburbs that have issues and claim it represents all. Nowhere do they apply statistical or scientific rigor.
Suburbs have existed for more than 100 years. They have rebuilt their roads many times. They have installed modern things like telephone, running water and so on over the years.
Would the suburbs be forced to pay city rates for their roads/water/etc departments? Plenty of low-middle income low density small towns with suburbia densities survive just fine, have great services, AND are affordable all on their own. My town had Gb fiber before the big cities rolled theirs out in scale, and we now have the choice of more than 2 providers. My water rates are cheap even though our waste water is held to much higher standards than big cities (last I knew coastal cities still got to pump a ton of sewage out to sea). My roads are plowed day of while the nearest big cities can take a week to get theirs under control. All with a much smaller tax base (but a much more accountable local government). The California everyone wants to go to survived this way with positive local budgets, and enough money that all of the roads were landscaped, back before hyper growth. I remember when highway 1 through Santa Cruz didn't look dystopian but was full of colorful flowers even into the 80s. And it was actually affordable to live there then too.
I'm not going to argue if this is generally true or not, but in my N=1, I don't see how this applies at all to something like sunnyvale or santa clara (where I live).
Which 'metropolitan core' are we leeching from? It's not San Jose - it famously has a higher nighttime population implying people leave to work (and it's obvs to locals based on traffic patterns). It's probably not San Francisco, we're 1 hour away.
The metro area in the Bay Area is a bit of an outlier as regards things like commute-sheds, etc. The problem with bandying about a one-size-fits-all label like "suburb" should be obvious.
If you need an explicit answer, generally speaking, SF is "the metro core" for the bay. Travel distances matter little compared to macro-economic "correlation" distances when considering metro areas.
At least from what I've personally seen, suburbs are not a drain. Do they cost more per person - yes. However, you have to look at the income side as well.
The people making money tend to leave cities because they want different property, fewer people, better services, less crime, etc. The people who can afford to do this are relatively well off. This ends up creating an area with fewer poor people and a higher tax income even if tax rates are lower. Cities have higher tax rates to have even similar (if that) per capita revenue because they have more poor people who cannot pay and must tax the ones who can at a higher rate. This is nothing against poorer people, just a reality of it works. You have a market force basically segregating people by income.
A local example for me is how Philadelphia County is extremely poor - the poorest in the state and has one of the highest rates of extreme poverty for any big city in the US. Some of the richest counties in the state are the ones immediately surrounding it, like Bucks, Chester, and Delaware. Even within these counties you have poor cities/towns and rich townships. The main difference isn't the tax rate, it's that the concentration of wealthy people.
As a suburban homeowner/parent, house prices have little bearing for me. I hope to live in my house for decades, so the sell price in the distant future doesn’t matter. It’s the “quiet and peaceful” part that I care about. West coast cities have repeatedly demonstrated that they are unwilling or unable to prevent crime and keep things clean, so I will continue fighting to my last breath to prevent my suburb from becoming like that.
> unwilling or unable to prevent crime and keep things clean
These things are typically solvable at a policy level but the policies are often fought against by the same people asking for the city to solve crime.
You cant just out-violence poverty. If someone has nothing to lose, you can't convince them to not risk it all.
How do you solve "people are too poor to survive to the homeowner's standards" without quoting mien kampf or socializing things and spending money on social projects? It typically feels like suburban communities lean towards the former. Very little empathy for people as long as they don't need to see them anymore.
I'm hoping this zoning change would work for the better. I know "missing middle" is a bit of a meme at this point but a few house sized quadplexes on a block would scale and provide a lot more housing. Its typically the "property value" crowd that fights against them, but sometimes its simply a racist generalization of "the poors" that would live in a multifamily home.
Small suburbs can work fine around small cities. Hypothetically, a ring starting 5 miles from the city center extending out another 10 miles = Pi * (15^2 - 5^2) = 628 square miles. At even 1k people per square mile you’re up to 600,000 people reasonably close to the urban core. People can easily commute into the core because the distance and traffic levels are reasonable.
The problem is as cities grow a smaller percentage of the overall population can live in a small suburb. Build up that first ring, and the next 10 mile ring is Pi * (25^5 -15^2) = less than double the area at 1,256 square miles and now needs a longer commute through the inner ring. Meanwhile that inner ring 15 mile radius can have easily ten or more times the population.
PS: Geography adds it’s own constraints. If the cities core in next to the ocean then much of the hypothetical low density ring is under water.
I agree with you. Also to me it's the larger cities that are environmentally unfriendly and hostile places like the parent described, not these smaller cities with suburbs. Just look at the 405 on a weekday. I live in a city of about 300k and it is perfect. Under 15 minutes anywhere in the city and I work from home so personally I don't even commute.
It definitely feels that way, unfortunately high rises are extremely energy, materials, and space efficient. Public transportation similarly reduces the needs for roads and fossil fuels.
NYC inner core may be toxic, but the average New Yorker’s environmental impact is well below the national average.
High rises are, but not very many people desire to live in a high rise. Hence the inefficiency. I mean if everyone lived in a 5x5 box it would be super efficient. But yeah, I think people would rather die first.
I'm also curious if you could actually back up that New York statement with some unbiased research.
“New York residents were using an average of 572 kWh a month in 2017.” NYC is so efficient that: “New York ranks 50th out of the 51 states and the District of Columbia. The only state with a lower per capita consumption is Rohde Island at 176 million Btu (MMBtu) or 51.6 MWh. The total 2016 U.S. consumption per capita was 301 million Btu (88.2 MWh).”
First you said environmental impact, not electricity usage which is very different.
Second that article makes it really unclear what is being included in "energy expenditures". In the earlier paragraphs it talks about electricity which makes sense given a.) it's extremely expensive in NY and b.) I'd imagine more heating comes from natural gas as opposed to AC in southern climates which comes from electricity.
It lacks a lot of critical information to measure environmental impact vs. other cities.
Lastly who is being included? Inner city residents only? Or metro area?
Edit: Feel free to do whatever research or literature review you want I don’t feel like trying to convince you.
Using electricity has an environmental impact. As does burning fossil fuels for heat etc, which is where the BTU numbers show up.
The biggest benefit is land use it’s self has an environmental impact. The ability to leave land for nature requires people not to be living on it. We don’t want wolves and buffalo walking through suburbs. Rabbits etc can’t graze on a paved roads, and drained swamps stop being swamps.
Even a look at current population densities destroys this argument as cities like San Francisco need far more density from this sort of inner ring. Keep in mind the actual core in this model is only 25 square miles so even if the core of San Francisco has 20 times the density of the suburbs it fits only 500,000 people. Your 5-15 mile ring fits only 600,000 people so you’ve gone 15 miles out from the centre of San Francisco and you’ve only fit 1,100,000 or so people of the 1.8 million that live in SF proper to say nothing of any of the people living in nearby cities or suburbs you’ve also hit.
San Francisco is extremely space constrained due to the Ocean, Bay, and Parks.
If you look at the actual population vs land available it needs a far higher density than I am talking about. 1k people per square mile is really low density. That’s single family homes with 1/2 acre back yard territory.
The thing that you and many prior comments mention is proximity, city size, density, and living in a specific place.
The problem isn't about land - there's plenty of that elsewhere. The problem is people all wanting to live in the same area and having high standards. You have a visous cycle where the denser places have the most jobs or the highest paying jobs, while the cost of living goes way up and the standard of living goes down.
It would be nice to have smaller cities. The real problem is how to convince businesses to reinvigorate the dying cities, or for people to change their preferences (either for locality or property type/size). These are being largely ignored in these conversations.
Funny, I live in a small suburbia style town in the mountains, our infrastructure prices are much cheaper than California's, we have no big city we parasite off of, and everything here is much cheaper/affordable including housing, with a much smaller property tax base. We had Gb fiber while the big city had horrible DSL (if you were close enough to the DSLAM or whatever it was). We now have multiple Gb fiber options in our neighborhoods. Housing prices are affordable.
Could you speak more about why your suburbia-style town in the mountains maintains its infrastructure prices? How is food, medicine, or construction goods delivered to you, and how do you pay for that transportation? I'm not asking out of skepticism: my understanding is that more remote locations are expensive partially because of logistical deliveries and maintenance costs, and I'd love to know how this is managed in well-maintained suburbia-style towns!
It would make sense if this town was in the proximity of major trucking/rail lines. Many towns in the foothills of the Sierras can be considered such. But then of course to pretend that the town is somehow "isolated" yet successful is certainly not accurate.
> We had Gb fiber while the big city had horrible DSL
So do you or do you not have a big city nearby?
> our infrastructure prices are much cheaper than California's
As always, the big question - how old is that infrastructure, and when was it last renewed? What is the budget/reserves/debt like of the town? Because if infrastructure doesn't cost a lot to build, it doesn't mean it's sustainable to maintain/renew in the medium/long term.
How's that deal with attached suburb-cities and town-in-city-enclaves? Are parts of major metro areas excluded? I bet 300-400 thousand of the people in my metro area live in such sub-50k "towns" but actually they live in the city—go a few blocks over and it looks exactly the same, but now you're "in the city" instead of "in a town". Perhaps that many again live in places far-flung enough that you could maybe count them as independent towns, but aside from local fast food workers they all commute to the city for work.
If you include the burbs as part of the definition of city then what are we even talking about? If they're completely detached then they're not suburbs.
That's the point, I think. Most metro areas are made up of a collection of many incorporated areas which collectively make up what people think of as the city. Some of those incorporated areas are large, some are small, and you might not realize you're driving from one to another since nothing changes except which legal entity collects the property taxes.
Yeah, my city totally surrounds several sub-50k "towns", plus has several others glommed on to the side of it that you'd be forgiven for not realizing are separate from the city, and it's not even an extreme case (see St. Louis for that)
A sibling comment of yours mentions Leander; there's only one train in Austin, and it goes from downtown to Leander. So you could even get there without a car. Good luck once you get there, though.
This is an incredibly misleading statistic. When you describe "a town of less than 50,000 people," what comes to mind most easily is some sort of rural town. But at your link, I recognize several of the places on that "fastest-growing" list. Leander is a suburb of Austin, Little Elm and Forney are both suburbs of Dallas, as are (scrolling down) Frisco and Farmers Branch, while Boerne is a suburb of San Antonio, and Georgetown is a suburb of Austin again.
Most of these, you wouldn't know you were in a separate city if you didn't pay close attention to roadside signs, and I suspect the same is true of a large percentage of that 61% figure.
That says something, since those people didn't choose to live closer to the central of the metro area, but it doesn't say as much as you're implying it does, because they're all examples of places for which, if someone outside of Texas asks where they live, they're going to say "Austin" or "Dallas" or "San Antonio," and only if asked where in Dallas will they respond Little Elm, just as they might otherwise respond Lakewood or Hamilton Park, which are neighborhoods but not separate cities.
Everybody (for certain values of "everybody", I guess I should specify because this is HN) wants 0.5-5 acres on the edge of a nice, compact city. A little land, no close neighbors, but still very close to everything and the city itself is nice & pleasant to visit.
But if too many people get it, you don't have a compact city anymore, you have a sprawl hellscape that's neither country nor city, but a habitat for cars.
Having to hop in a car to do either human things or nature things makes it the worst of both worlds. Not enough land to do anything with, view is just a bunch of cookie-cutter houses with boring landscaping, lawn-mower noises all weekend long. Anything worth doing starts with a 15 minute drive, minimum, each way, and the view out the window the whole way is mostly parking lots and roads. And fast food signs.
But I don't have enough money for private school for all the kids, and all the top 50% of school districts for like a 200 mile radius are in the burbs. So. I "love" them.
A little game theory may come to play though. If the whole city booms and just my neighborhood stays single-family large lot, my price/sqft may increase drastically, and I may get better return on any improvements I do to my property based on my investment profile.
If instead my neighborhood is converted to apartments or high-density condos, I might not have the capital to take advantage of those opportunities but my single family house becomes undesirable in that zone. I am forced to sell to a developer in order to maximize return. I probably still make money, but it might be less then I could have made in the other scenario, and I am unable to use the house for my own residence up until the time I need to liquidate.
No, it's almost entirely short-sighted, at least in terms of economics.
First, I've never heard of anyone being forced to sell, unless there's some truly huge and necessary infrastructure development. You are generally offered some money by a developer and you personally decide whether or not to take it. Sometimes people can be stubborn and there are plenty of examples of large high-rises built around tiny structures that wouldn't sell.
Also, your price per square foot goes up fastest directly adjacent to the largest developments. If your neighborhood can economically support larger buildings, that directly increases the amount of money developers will pay for your land. The less development you allow your neighborhood to have, the less your neighborhood will be able to support large developments. You want your neighborhood to support large developments.
You may want to hold on to YOUR house as an investment, and to keep from a property tax re-assessment, but it makes no economic sense to prevent your neighbors from building higher if they want to.
Maybe not in the USA but certain countries have a special emergency nationalisation procedure that has payment first, skips the consent and leaves the challenge to after-the-fact.
I never meant that anyone was forced to sell, legally. Only that the economics forced them to sell at a different schedule or terms than they would have preferred.
If you're already 5x leveraged into a single asset in a single location whose value is wholly outside of your control you don't need the extra risk of redevelopment
It can be when you can artificially induce a housing shortage.
E.g. I have a friend whose area has become extremely popular for city people and prices have gone up a ton over the past couple years.
Their father owns a bunch of property in the area and sits on a bunch of local board, and specifically lobbies to block housing development to protect their "future" that's locked up in these properties. (Mostly SFH in suburbs.) It's an explicit goal for some people.
As long as demand is high, b/c of mostly immutable factors, schools/weather/job opportunities etc and people have the money to spend then prices will go up if you keep housing supply low.
Um, sure. If you take away the property-owner lobby, the vast majority of truly bad zoning wouldn't exist. I'm comfortable ascribing causality directly to the force which, if removed, would eliminate the effect.
This is a great example of a financial misunderstanding. Land use restrictions reduce land value. Seriously, compare property prices per unit lot area in fancy, restricted communities (e.g. Atherton) to neighboring lots in less restricted, less fancy areas (e.g. Menlo Park or Fair Oaks, hah). Land in Atherton is worth less. Which makes sense — you can’t do as much with it.
At best, single family zoning preserves the value of a (depreciating!) house to a limited extent.
Zoning is also used to preserve the character of a neighborhood. Unfortunately, that typically includes racial character. The US has a long history of zoning as a proxy for redlining and racism [0].
Character is the worst part of any area. They are preserving old buildings that cannot be made energy efficient without a large investment, while making that investment illegal as well. All in name of preserving a building just because it is 'old'.
Sure there are a few buildings that are historic and should be preserved, but the vast majority are only old, and have no other historic value.
This position would be a lot more popular if 99% of new development wasn't hideous beyond words and an affront to human dignity.
People want to preserve old stuff because (and only when) it's beautiful, but there's no reason we couldn't and shouldn't be building beautiful stuff today!
> how you can landscape it, what kinds of cars you can keep in your own driveway
These two at least make some sense. The former, landscaping restrictions, can be used to prevent people from creating groundwater issues or flood risks, and the latter... no one wants a neighbor in a residential zone keeping broken-down trash cars out in the open.
Some things have to be regulated even in a relatively free society because otherwise the potential is too high for greedy or stupid people to ruin everyone else's life.
No, they don't. These exact sorts of "well nobody likes" arguments are why the bureaucracy has the reach it does and CA has the problems it does.
Yes, society probably won't crumble if we cave to your whining and regulate your pet issue of the minute but regulating in this manner is like littering in the park, if everyone does it the park is ruined.
If people are poisoning the groundwater or creating other "off their property" problems then fine them accordingly. If they aren't then screw off. None of this "the thing you want to isn't already on the approved list so you have to go through an onerous and expensive process of proving it won't hurt anything" garbage.
>Yes, society probably won't crumble if we cave to your whining and regulate your pet issue of the minute
I disagree, and I think this sort of nonsense is a cornerstone of why society is crumbling. People don't look at their homes as homes they look at them as temporary investments that they hope to sell to somebody else for more money in the future. People don't end up investing (in the societal, emotional sense) into their communities and their homes because they recognize that they don't really own them.
Give the rights back to the people to own their homes and they start to care again. Tell property investors that I'm sorry, but actually you might have to deal with a guy who doesn't give a shit about weeds and likes to work on his car in the driveway next to your investment and maybe houses stop being such a safe speculative vehicle.
If housing ceases to be a relatively safe investment vehicle, what will become it?
I dislike the idea of home-as-investment as much as the next guy, but I'd like to think about some consequences of houses stopping to be an investment, Japan-style.
If houses were no longer an investment but rather just poaces to live, the result might be that more and better housing would be constantly being built. This is one of the points of this article that was posted here the other day: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/actually-japan-has-changed...
so let me ask from a point of trying to see it the other way, why do you want broken-down trash cars out in the open of your house? if you're just playing devil's advocate, then whatever, but if you truly want trash cars, I truly want to hear why
but see, you're not being fair to the question. i'm not asking for justification. i'm asking why you want trash cars. it's no different than asking why your favorite food is what it might ever be. there's no judgement in my asking. i'm just trying to understand, you know, to get to know you. maybe you'll have a strong reason for it that convinces me to want trash cars in my yard too. but you'll never know because you take this immediate position of justification and non-answers
Not OP, but given enough time/money/land I'd probably have a dozen or so old trash cars on my property. It's fun to fix things, including buying a couple wrecked donor cars in order to (attempt to) build up one working one. It's one of my hobbies, although I don't have the time/money or room to go all out.
there's a difference between a parts car and a trash car. parts car implies what you are saying that there's a project car somewhere. trash car implies something else entirely.
Today's broken down car sitting in my driveway is my son's future "hey dad what's that if I get it running can me and my buddies drive it around?" and 8 years later it's a mechanical engineering degree.
They can potentially become a blight. I'm not talking about a single classic car you're restoring, I'm talking about 3+ vehicles, some parked on driveway, others on the grass. They're homes for vermin and other animals, they're a disaster aesthetically and probably dangerous to kids in the neighborhood (sometimes they're on jack stands). They're often accompanied by stacks of tires and other debris.
I've lived off-grid in the desert, and I've seen certain people become 'garbage collectors' - a few cars turns into 20+, with all the associated junk. In the desert, nobody really cares - but you'd be crazy to move in next to one of those junk yards.
It's not going to ruin anyone's life, but it's definitely not nice. It depends on the community and circumstances I suppose.
There are some properties in a neighboring county where a guy has been running junk yards in residential neighborhoods. 50+ rusted junkers stacked in a suburban yard, against local law. When the law finally is about to seize the land, he's moved it all to other residential properties in the area. Lawsuits have been going on since the 90s. I believe he's lost at least one house and possibly spent some time in jail, but it keeps going.
If that trash car is in the garage to be worked on, noone is going to care. If it is a trash car in the laneway that is being worked on and being kept in reasonable cosmetic condition, some are going to oppose it and some are going to accept it. Once you start collecting auto carcasses, leaving your property in disarray, and not doing much about it ... well, don't be surprised if people start viewing your property as an undesirable dump in the middle of a residential community.
People have limits. While some people push those limits too far (in either direction), there are times when those limits are realistic.
It makes perfect sense to me to regulate things that could potentially have an adverse effect on others that they can't easily opt out of. Loud noise in the middle of the night? Sure. Anything that creates pollution? Sure. Unleashed pit bulls that devour the neighborhood children? Depends on which children, but otherwise banning this makes sense.
But rules based on "it doesn't look nice"? That seems both subjective and ridiculous. If someone has garbage on their property and it's blowing into yours, that gives you a right to complain. But if you just think their property is ugly for whatever reason, well, maybe don't look at it? What made people think they should have any say over the visual appearance of what someone else owns?
I said elsewhere so sorry for repeating, but: you should find your city's code and read it. Almost all cities at this point have adopted things that used to be exclusive to HOAs.
>(you can't built a chemical processing plant in a residential neighborhood, obviously)
You can get darn close in some places. I mean, in Texas, residential damage and evacuations from chemical plant explosions are practically routine. I live in a neighborhood surrounded by biotech labs, which tend not to blow up, though we do joke a bit about being zombie-apocalypse-ground-zero (also, every available developable lot gets sucked up by a new lab project). And of course, in some rural areas, the proximity of farms waste lagoons and low-income neighborhoods is a serious issue.
Goodbye "high-rises can't be built in SF because they cast an unsightly shadow". But also hope it doesn't mean California gets to regulate San Jose's "green belt".
isn't building high-rises in SF precarious because the ground is soft, with inadequate bedrock? are there also concerns about aesthetics, if i understand?
From what I understand it's about the same as building in Tokyo. With modern technology and proper materials you can build a safe building. But the residential tower currently sinking into the ground indicates that either that isn't actually true or the rules aren't being enforced.
Yeah, that one was a case of taking shortcuts. The bedrock was 200"[1] down but the studies they used said that wasn't necessary. So NOW they are taking steps to introduce new pilons that go all the way down to bedrock and will be braced to the current, faultily installed ones.
[1] Not sure the exact depth, but whatever, they went like half way down to save on money.
I think it's more likely that corners were cut with the Millennium Tower, or the engineers made an error of some kind.
None of the other big buildings in SF are connected to the bedrock. None of the towers in LA have supports connected to the bedrock. Heck, the Burj Khalifa isn't connected to bedrock. They all use friction piles, and these can work fine if they're done properly.
I stand corrected! I got my information from a soil scientist who was explaining that the bedrock wasn't anywhere close to the surface in SF and LA and misunderstood that to mean that none of the towers went all the way down. I stand by my claim that the Burj Khalifa isn't on bedrock, however.
In one notable case, it was decided to not bore all the way down to bedrock, resulting is a sinking building and many lawsuits. More commonly, someone complains that a planned building will cast a shadow, and after spending millions the builders are not allowed to proceed.
If that were true, there wouldn't be any building in the New Orleans area more than a couple stories high. Everything south of the lake is built on an alluvial delta.
Most cities now have the power to tell you what kind of house you can build, how you can paint it, how you can landscape it, what kinds of cars you can keep in your own driveway, what you can do in your leisure time on the property etc.
In my experience, the city regulations around what you’ve listed are always sensible. It’s the HOA regulations that tend to be kooky and capricious.
Pretty much any city that was rich in at any point in the latter half of the 20th century has a ton of regulations that boil down to "if you couldn't get away with it in a gated community you can't get away with it here." No one regulation is onerous on its face but the sum total of them are damn near impossible to comply with unless being a high class homeowner is your hobby so this just results in discretionary enforcement which is complaint driven. And of course because the .gov doesn't want their snitches getting stitches they won't tell you who complained so you can't even go attempt to work things out with your neighbors. Karen complains about your shed and you're getting fined $50/day until you tear the thing down not knowing that she'd have been fine if you just painted it.
Your experience sounds outdated. It was like that 10 years ago, even 5 years ago in many cities, but in the last few years so many cities have gotten into HOA territory. Even small cities in places you wouldn't expect.
That kind of timeline is extreme and definitely doesn't pass the smell test. Sounds like a whitewashed variation of "big gubmint takin over as nanny state" reactionary predilections.
> If I want to collect old VW busses and park them in the front yard, I don't care what effect this has on my neighbors property value. This is my home. If you don't want to deal with living near other people, move to the country.
Many (most?) of these types of rules are imposed by HOAs made up of property owners, not the city.
I think most larger cities have rules against parking vehicles in a yard visible to the street. In the driveway is usually ok. And converting more of your yard into driveway is usually restricted by zoning as well.
> If you don't want to deal with living near other people, move to the country.
The reverse could also be said - if you don't want to deal with people deciding together that they want their community to have certain guidelines, move to the country. You can do pretty much whatever you want in rural areas without significantly impacting your neighbors.
People living together in a small area do get to decide together what they want that area to be like within reason. Creating some guidelines to create a desirable, pleasant and safe environment for them and their families is totally reasonable and has been the historical norm for most of the history of civilization.
Of course things can get out of hand and over-reaching. If the people decide together to change it though, they can. I don't think the solution is just nuking all zoning regulations from orbit.
Where this breaks down is cities that do not even have space for their own offspring. Again sticking with my own city of Berkeley, demographic processes, birth rate combined with increasing longevity, means that Berkeley has been exporting young people for 50 years, causing housing crises in those places, too. In what way is that equitable to either the offspring in question or the people who already lived in the other places?
All developed countries have negative demographic growth, if people want to get into very few places this does not make it right. At the opposite end you find the example of hundreds of villages in Italy that are deserted (and many more in less famous countries), do you say they are also exporting population?
Again this is where we are getting into what it means to own something. Do I own the property or not? If my neighbors want to get together and buy my house from me because they want to do something with it, then they are by all means allowed to do so.
Nobody in the US, and indeed most of the world, "owns" their property. Try not paying your property taxes, and see where that gets you. You lease the right to usus, mostly fructus, and to some extent abusus from the state.
Maybe in theory, but functionally it is the same. You don't pay your property taxes, you get a lien, and can eventually, in extreme circumstances, be foreclosed on.
I do not understand your point, really. Obviously, from a legal standpoint, ownership exists. But you say, no, no, no, that's not _reaaaal_ ownership, since I have to pay property taxes.
When most people talk about ownership, when the law talks about ownership, it exists, and I think that is enough for it to exist.
That's okay, it requires some knowledge of rather niche economic philosophies. I'd suggest reading into some philosophy of property, labor, and ownership. Specifically in the right-libertarian and left-anarchist traditions. Start with John Locke and Adam Smith, then move into thinkers such as Marx, Proudhon, George (Henry, of Georgism fame), Nozick, Rothbard, and writers on similar topics.
This is a great example of how framing makes a big difference.
If I used the same framing, I would say LVT are an incentive to tear down the land (introduce toxic waste, endangered species that can't legally be disturbed, etc).
Or I could say Property taxes are a disincentive to hoarding buildings.
No, you don't own the property. Under what coherent system of thought could you possibly own something that was there before humans existed and will be there after humans are gone, and which you did nothing to create or maintain? Property ownership is a societal construct that we agree to use to improve our lives together. If it's not serving our needs we can change it.
You maintain the property to make it suitable for your needs. But if you didn't "maintain" it, nothing would actually happen to it. It would still be completely usable in 1 million years.
That is no different from ownership of anything else, including one’s own body. The government has an interest in property and may tax it, but how is that different from auto registration, income tax, or any other tax liability? Someone can be imprisoned for daily to pay income tax, but the government doesn’t own their job or work.
> I don't think the solution is just nuking all zoning regulations from orbit.
It has to be, because the in-group, i.e. the people already living there don't accrue the cost as that falls on the out-group, the people who need to live there (job etc) but cannot. Its the essence of a "f** you i got mine attitude"
Same thing with building codes. Make them more onerous to increase construction costs. Then lol all the way to the bank when you grandfather your own house in, increasing your own property value as it is now impossible to build a house as economically as your own. Sprinkle in some "think of the safety of the children" for good measure, no matter the fact your own house is justified as safe enough to stand.
To be clear, my comment was more a reaction to what I perceived as the idea that any zoning of residential areas by the community that lives there is unacceptable and that you should be able to do literally anything that's not actively endangering your neighbors. That would result in most neighborhoods being much less pleasant due to a few owners deciding to do things against the interests of the many.
I think the "community" can also extend to something as large as California. If California as a community decides it's in the best interest of that community to loosen some zoning restrictions in particularly high demand areas, fine. Do it with thoughtfulness and as much respect for existing owners' interests as possible while still accomplishing the desired objective. That's similar to a smaller community deciding to change the rules to account for some new undesirable behavior of certain community members.
San Francisco is 2/3rds renters, all of whom can vote. You shouldn't pretend that they have no say in how their city is run.
If they want more rentals and more density, they have the power to vote for people who can make it happen. Instead they vote for people who talk a lot about preserving the character of San Francisco.
Everyone can vote? American Samoans, green card holders, various non-citizen immigrants? I thought SF was unusually immigrant rich.
There are a ton of people in SF who are paying sizeable taxes and rents with no vote in these matters. It's quite likely they are disproportionately renters.
> don't want to deal with people deciding together that they want their community to have certain guidelines, move to the country
Shouldn’t this be the message to a suburban homeowner clinging to the past? Move to the country. Buy land around you. Don’t tell others what they can and cannot do on property you don’t own.
I mean… there's a balance, right? People should be able to mostly do what they want with their own property. At the same time, they should be able to come together to make collective decisions about their towns/cities/neighborhoods. Each of those has a bad outcome if taken to the extreme.
Sure, but we should apply 'strict scrutiny' to that. Strict scrutiny is a legal term meaning in general that isn't a right the community should have, but we will make exceptions for really bad things only. (you have free speech, but you can't just yell fire in a crowded area. There are things you cannot do on your land, but they should be very limited.
> At the same time, they should be able to come together to make collective decisions about their towns/cities/neighborhoods.
That's exactly what's happening here. Californians have collectively decided that zoning laws need to change. If the current actions by the state are somehow unreasonable, how could the original zoning provisions ever have been considered reasonable in the first place?
Devil’s advocate: they did. 50+ years ago they moved to a sleepy suburban town that through no fault of their own became a center of a worldwide tech revolution. Things change, sometimes dramatically. A place in the country you move to today can also transform 50 years in the future if you’re unlucky.
There's no right to be free from change. You may need to keep moving around if you're after a specific ethos or aesthetic on the land you don't own. Your early arrival shouldn't have permanent supremacy over your neighbors plot of land. Don't want a building there? Buy the land. Can't afford it? Prepare some welcome gifts for your new neighbors.
They didn’t. If they bought the block, or easements on it, they would have. But they bought a plot. Others bought adjacent plots. Now they’re arguing they get to tell the adjacent plots what they can and cannot do.
That may have been the purchaser's expectation, but their deal was with the seller (and bank), not the community in general. In none of the legal papers I signed when purchasing my home was any arrangement with the city constraining future construction nearby. That's done with my vote (so without much effect) and any political action I can spur.
Devil's devil's advocate: The world is not static. No one can reasonably expect nothing to change over the course of half a century. The only constant is change itself, and you have to deal with changing situations. Maybe it made sense as farmland 50 years ago, but if it makes sense as apartment blocks now, by God put apartment blocks on it then. The collective value to all those new tenants massively outweighs the downside to the single existing landowner (who stands to make a huge payday anyway!).
And at the cost of the character of their neighborhood changing, their property valuation rose to the point that they can now live almost wherever they would like to. Countless people have to see their neighborhood change without the financial windfall they got.
This is America, land of the free, home of the property rights. It's a weird imposition to say that I can't build exactly what I want on my property (assuming it's safe). It's a totally fair thing to say that if you want full control over what can be built adjacent to your house buy a ranch in Montana.
Don't want a skyscraper in downtown SF? Buy the plot. Can't afford it? Sorry, you're getting neighbors. You shouldn't try and bog them down with a nightmare bureaucratic process of shade measurement and bird counting.
> What’s wrong with the alternative of sane zoning instead of “just buy the plot”?
Honestly, this is sane zoning. The Japanese model is very effective. They saw roughly 0% growth in housing prices from 1990 to present. Housing in downtown Tokyo is affordable. You'll be hard pressed to find someone who thinks Tokyo is an abomination, it's a top-10 world city is basically every ranking.
> All people want is to live in a quiet and a nice place after all.
Some of them! Not all of them. Some of them want a place to live within an hour of work, and for them that's more important.
For those that want that they can (a) buy the land around them necessary to make that happen (b) lobby the city around them to buy the land necessary to make that happen (a 'park') or (c) move somewhere like-minded people live.
> Why someone who doesn’t even live there but has a bigger buck should decide?
Why should the person who got there first decide what other people get to do? That's not even democracy, that's just gerontocracy.
Obviously not the 14M people who live in Tokyo. Those buildings aren't empty! Population of Santa Monica is 91,000, which is what the population of Tokyo would be if nobody wanted to live there :)
If the density becomes problematic, buy the land, or mosey on.
This to me is the least compelling counter-argument. "Nobody wants to live in a big dense city" is like saying "nobody drives in New York, there's too much traffic!" You personally don't, but obviously, we can tell by inspection that's simply not a true statement in general.
Which brings us back to "but I got here first!" which is to me, the second-least compelling argument.
>All people want is to live in a quiet and a nice place after all.
People want all sorts of things. Walkability, transit, cafes, restaurants, recreation, jobs. Some do prefer the particular brand of quiet offered by the suburban form, but because it's the only thing you're allowed to build, lots of us who do not want it are forced into it.
An important caveat here is that these small groups are only "nuked from orbit" for the time period that they're out of compliance with a law that has existed for 50 years.
I totally agree that "people living together in a small area" can pretty much do what they want. The only issue is when that starts to screw over other folks, and when all the other small areas get together to do the same.
Then it's pretty reasonable for the state to go "you can't just never build houses. That's a decision that screws the rest of the state" and enforce that decision
> Then it's pretty reasonable for the state to go "you can't just never build houses. That's a decision that screws the rest of the state" and enforce that decision
Totally agree. The state or larger city, etc. is also a community that should be able to make rules that promote the welfare of the great majority over the objections of a small minority, as long as they take care to not harm the small minority unnecessarily. I just think the solution is thoughtful modification of existing codes, possibly forced by larger jurisdictions, and not just a free for all where almost anything goes as was proposed by the parent commenter.
>People living together in a small area do get to decide together what they want that area to be like within reason.
This argument ignores 100 years of research in game theory and development economics. No community is an island, okay except Alameda, but even they are a component of a wider metropolis. The way you set zoning laws and transportation infrastructure influences who comes into and passes through your community — no municipality in the core of a metropolitan area can ever truly behave like a single community organizing its residents' lifestyles.
So you see, for example, an attempt to increase the total property value per resident because it leads to a better school district. You see attempts to block new developments and transit stops because relative popularity may transiently increase the local cost of living, even if it benefits the affordability of the metro as a whole. You see militarized police departments who realize they can't outrun crime but they can certainly outrun Emeryville.
None of these are the products of a community of people democratically deciding what kind of lifestyle fits their particular interests. They are the choices of a faction jockeying for status in the desperate power struggle that characterizes the great modern balkanized American Combined Statistical Area.
Is this a question of jurisdiction? I mean the people living together in a slightly larger area get to decide together what they want the collective area to be like as well right? Surely local politics can be overruled when the policies start having a material effect on individuals outside of the local jurisdiction.
So you can live in the actual countryside, or the population center curated to be like countryside. So many choices!
What about those of us who actually want to live in cities? The only way cities come to be is incrementally; if an already-settled place cannot intensify then cities cannot exist.
The idea that property rights are totally inviolable doesn't really hold water when you think about it a little more. Stuff like electricity, running water, trash and recycling, roads, parks, schools, public safety, the technology behind your fridge/oven/heating/AC etc. only exist because of decades or even hundreds of years of robust public investment. Without any of that, you wouldn't even have a house!
The relationship is that private property only exists because of a system that enforces it and provides many of the services that lend it value. Whatever you think of this system, the two are deeply intertwined.
And, crucially, the relevant services all have easements that supercede your desires to do whatever you want on your property. You don't have the right to NOT have a powerline going down the street on your property, or a city sewer line, or a sidewalk, etc.
So the next logical step would be that property tax to be extended over all your property, not just real estate. We already pay property tax on cars in Europe, but not yet on bank accounts, clothes on our back, collection of family photos, etc. Probably with you guys, it's already on the way.
I agree that the distinction between property and other forms of wealth doesn't make a lot of sense from the perspective of taxation and mostly exists for historical reasons. Especially because the wealthier the individual, the smaller the percentage of their wealth that is derived from property. Small amounts of wealth like clothes and family photos probably shouldn't be taxable in the same way that small amounts of income aren't.
> If I want to collect old VW busses and park them in the front yard, I don't care what effect this has on my neighbors property value. This is my home. If you don't want to deal with living near other people, move to the country.
I don't like that we have to have laws like this in society anymore than you do. But you're kind of ignoring Chesterton's fence here.
I've lived next to places like you're describing, and I don't mean trash heaps like you see in rural parts of America, though I've lived next to them, too. I mean collectors who simply fall behind on preventative maintenance for mundane reasons. So I don't care until I'm forced to... Which is typically when the rats show up.
This argument is a strawman though. Reasonable restrictions are fine, but in practice you get neighbors arguing about what kind of tile you’re allowed to put on your porch roof. If you ever listen in on local city planning/design meetings it’s pretty illuminating.
We have some refineries right up against homes in Wilmington and the bad parts of Long Beach.
In either case, the fact that zoning laws aren't stopping this but are taken as seriously as laws of physics when it comes to apartments shows that they're mostly a scam
Yeah, no kidding, no residential zoning at all? Hard to believe it's CA, but good for them! This will vastly improve the housing situation, if CA has sense enough to keep it this way.
Actually it strips power away from the people making us less democratic. What will happen is developers with political connection/money to get their people elected, will have fewer barriers to their profits now.
This is a transfer of power from the people, that is democracy, to the oligarchy.
> I don't care what effect this has on my neighbors property value.
That is such an awful attitude and a big problem of what is wrong in the country today. We live in communities and communities agree to certain values. It's about well more than just you and what you want to do.
I'm always of the mind that it's harder for developers to have connections at a state level compared to a local level. It's more believable that a local developer has connections to city council in a single city and the amount of palms to grease is much less. Moving up to state level (especially in CA) the amount of money / influence would greatly increase to be able to influence the new zoning regulators. Not saying it can't happen, but it would be more of an undertaking (imo).
San Francisco is a good case study in what happens when you don't build enough housing - people who were previously able to afford cheap apartments now can't and do all of their business out in the street.
Other cities and states have worse problems with drug use but don't have problems with homelessness because housing is more affordable there.
I'd like people with substance problems to get help for their problems, and I'd like for everyone in the richest country in the world to be able to sleep with a roof over their head, instead of in the cold and rain.
I can absolutely agree with you on both of those things. Until everyone in North America has adequate food, shelter, and medical care, we need to insist that our children and country-people come first.
Yeah man I was shocked here in Texas on how much crap I had to go through with the city to build a small workshop in my backyard. It was absolutely ridiculous since it was a permanent structure (stone and wood with concrete foundation). Good for California and I hope other states follow suit. Austin has two failed attempts to set up rezoning in the past 15 years or so, millions of dollars spent on the plans that ultimately failed.
I'm assuming you are U.S. citizen and not super familiar with the common law; apologies up front if that isn't the case.
Property law principles in the common law are vastly more complicated than this. There are all sorts of ways that your right to use real estate as you wish can be affected by past practices, hazy conventions, etc. Check out "easements", "mineral rights", "air rights", "adverse possession", and the sometimes elaborate processes of establishing title and specific property interests in particular jurisdictions.
And many of those limitations are logically prior to U.S. specific legislation around zoning, restrictive covenants, etc.
> you can't built a chemical processing plant in a residential neighborhood, obviously
Lots of people disagree with this! There are tons of chemical processing facilities that pop up near my neighborhood, particularly rail car cleaning.
Can smell a different chemical every day depending on what they’re spraying out of the rail cars.
La Porte, TX
Pasadena, TX
Lake Jackson, TX
There are both new subdivisions and new processing facilities going up all the time. ProPublica ran some big articles on it, absolutely skyrocketing cancer rates around here.
Yeah, it's a hamfisted solution, but only because it has to be.
And as the state government has said -- cities can still plan their own growth! They just have to plan some growth rather than none, which, obviously, is the sticking point.
Exactly right. The cities had a long time to implement less clumsy plans but kept caving to local political groups funded by wealthy people. I'm not against those people having their opinions be part of a solution, but up until now it's been almost entirely driven by that group, and they were unwilling to give up enough to find workable middle ground. It was always token concessions. Maybe this will be a wake-up call.
They are able to plan their own growth, but they aren't able to refuse to grow. Or at least, not through zoning; being located where potable water or sewer/septic are at capacity is probably still valid to restrict new building.
American citizens with the freedom of movement? If you want to remain low-density go settle where California City is, I guarantee you will stay small. Santa Monica, however, is going to have to build housing.
freedom of movement != freedom over the personal property of others, or freedom from binding agreements. You can walk the streets of any neighbourhood you please. Using state authority to overrule local decisions about local matters is what I'm objecting to here.
No one is taking their personal property? The state is removing the restriction around what a developer can build on their own property.
Further, the state is doing their job. If the town next to mine enacts restrictive housing measures, then my town is likely to become more burdened by the issue. If we then enact restrictive housing, the next town over now has to deal with the effects of 2 freeriders. Why should the rest of California allow Beverly Hills and Santa Monica to saddle us with the burden of housing everyone? So the wealthy can have their enclaves?
Because I don't see "California" as one entity like a sports team. I see it as various groups each competing with each other, like an ecosystem. Beverly Hills and Santa Monica just happen to be "winning" (rather arbitrarily). Using authority to punish them for (peacefully) winning is tyranny. Just let them win.
> The state is removing the restriction
That was enforced by a local democracy, for what is fundamentally local concern. The state should not be able to supersede local authority for local concerns, it's authoritarian.
This is a tragedy of the commons type thing. If every local democracy votes in favor of local concerns (no new housing), then the problem doesn't solve itself; California has a bunch of angry residents that can't find anywhere to live. Whatever you think is right or wrong, there is still an elected government at the state level, and it's not only homeowners that vote in those elections. So their hand is forced to do something given the gridlock at the local level. (If it was only Santa Monica that refused to build new housing, then this wouldn't have become a state-level issue. But every locale is making the exact same decision, because it's in their current residents' best interests. The state has to take into account the views of everyone.)
It's really convenient for you to not see California as one entity. Unfortunately for you, that's not reality and we are, in fact, part of a single entity.
> Beverly Hills and Santa Monica just happen to be "winning" (rather arbitrarily). Using authority to punish them for (peacefully) winning is tyranny. Just let them win.
The residents of those areas have been using authority to make their "wins" a fait accompli for nearly 100 years, but yeah, it's tyranny if we remove their priviliges.
> The state should not be able to supersede local authority for local concerns, it's authoritarian.
California voters elected the legislature and executive who signed off on it. If Santa Monica restricts housing, it affects neighboring cities. Please explain how it is authoritarian for the state to balance these concerns?
All politics is local. Every citizen of a city is also a citizen of the state. "Local" is a demarcation drawn where ever it's convenient for the speaker. A smaller group should not be able to supersede the superior authority at the larger polity's expense.
In this case, the locally-optimal choices cities are making is having deleterious effects on the quality of life of the citizens of the state as a whole. It is perfectly reasonable for the state to therefore act.
My house is worthless to me if they put a batch asphalt plant next door, as my whole purpose for my house was to raise my children in. They tried to get a variance. Luckily I come from California, so I am not adverse to raising friction and gathering a coalition and was able to get enough people to the planning meeting to keep zoning rules enforced and not allow that exception.
What is the point of your anecdote, no one is suggesting that we remove industrial zoning? This law removes specific residential housing restrictions which require single-family in areas that have enough demand that developers will build multi-tenant buildings. You can still raise your children fine in a slightly more dense neighborhood, everything will adapt.
And why should an individual not be able to build whatever they want (including apartments) on land they own? Why should local decisions override individual freedom?
then they should enforce 1 child per family while they're at it. their kids have to live somewhere right? I live in a rural city in Utah that doesn't like building new homes yet it's a Mormon town where families are about 5 kids on average. if you want grandkids nearby then more homes need built. period.
Or people whom the community has no room for can leave. I think this comes from an axiomatic disagreement about what being born/alive entitles a person to. My view is that we are all born owning nothing, and that everything we acquire we must acquire via consensual exchange.
According to that line of thinking, older generations should also stop receiving support from welfare and social security. Let them sell their houses and leave their communities if they can't afford to acquire the goods and services they need through consensual exchange.
And yet very few will accept elderly starving in the streets en masse because their pensions were gutted or went bankrupt. And so some measure of intergenerational agreement is necessary, where each generation provides for the next.
Given that people are paying into Social Security their entire life, I imagine they'd take some offense if you took it away and said it was because the young'uns were tired of paying for them. They might be of the opinion that they did in fact fund the investment for their retirement.
This comes about from job openings in places that don't have housing, so, basically a disagreement about where people should work and live, acted out on the housing and job markets.
I see a lot of validity in this line of thought and agree with it in principle, but in practice it has led to a lot of problems in California.
For one, California is split up into many smaller towns/cities in large metro areas, so each having their own policies leads to locally-optimal but regionally-suboptimal policies of trying to get as much commercial development as possible with as little residential development as possible. This is a direct contributor to gentrification (if you are “lucky” and able to soak up the commercial demand without increasing residential supply, you’ve created a mismatch between jobs and people in your area), ghettoisation (the people priced out of where they were before have to go somewhere), traffic (people have to commute into their jobs), and affordability (even the bad communities can’t increase housing much because they have the weakest tax base, plus all the restricted supply where jobs and taxes actually are).
The right solution to this problem is to recognize the whole local-optimization problem and make it so every municipality has to solve the problem at once, to prevent the adverse selection of solving the problem in only one municipality. Which is what the state of CA is doing.
This could also be addressed from the other side, which is a complete political non-starter, of trying to limit job growth. Obviously nobody wants to do that. But the problem by and large is not just that CA has a lot of low density communities that want to remain that way, but also that those low density communities are creating more jobs than they can house.
I agree with your premise. I just disagree that the use of authority is the solution here. I don't see any reason why the state needs to intervene. Just let the locally-optimal solutions (peacefully) compete and sort themselves out. Let there be winners and losers, and don't get in the way. Using authority to force cooperation is tyranny. We're not all on the same team. We're self-interested, in-group focused, animals and there's nothing wrong with that.
The locally-optimal solution is always to try to get as much commercial tax base as possible (since it increases the tax base without much increase in spending) and as little resident tax base as possible (since it increases spending). So I don’t really see how it will sort itself out.
When you are a bunch of small, close by municipalities all operating in essentially the same economic context (job market, etc.) the regional issues always become someone else’s problem.
From what perspective is that optimal at all? Certainly humans care about more in life than the tax revenue of their municipal government. I can't speak for you but that's not my goal in life
People generally don’t try to block offices or retail the way they try to block housing. Many of the NIMBY concerns like having to build more schools don’t apply.
> Using authority to force cooperation is tyranny.
Wow, this is an odd definition of tyranny. The elected representatives of the people of our state wrote these laws. I personally think it's fair for us to make laws that apply across our state rather than having full autonomy at the city level.
I don't think you should be blindly downvoted for this -- I think it is a totally valid question, and one that the YIMBY movement needs to find a way to answer consistently.
Personally, I would say that lots of low-density communities do remain low-density. And generally, that's because people don't want to move to them.
But if you're a small town in Northern California, one of the most desirable places in the world, saying "we want to remain low density" is basically saying "we got here first, so it's ours -- nobody else gets to have this!"
And I think that's a fundamentally wrong way for us to organize our places. Desirable communities shouldn't be able to keep out people who want to come in, just because they want to stay exclusive.
But I don't think that's a settled point, and there is a lot of nuance to basically every adjective I just used.
It seems pretty clear cut given the focus on property rights in the States that whoever got there first does get to call the shots. There are maybe some overrides like eminent domain but it seems the only non-coercive way to change this is to get your own land and make your own rules (e.g. HOAs, incorporate towns with better rules, etc).
Besides, who's to say that these desirable places are not desirable because they are low-density? It's a chicken and egg problem.
Property rights absolutism would mean landowners can build what they want. Zoning has already moved the question of allowed building types into the realm of public policy; now we’re talking about what the policy should be.
> It seems pretty clear cut given the focus on property rights in the States that whoever got there first does get to call the shots.
If we're concerned about property rights, why can't the property owners build at a higher density? Or sell to a developer that will build at a higher density? The fact is the zoning at play _restricts_ property rights it doesn't protect them.
Anyway zoning was never static (it wasn't ordained by God after all), so changing it isn't really a big deal. People are angry and surprised of course, but the writing has been on the wall for a long time.
At a certain point, it starts to be like "two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner" when you get some of these communities that don't want anyone else there. And that's fundamentally unfair.
I like the Strong Towns notion of "no massive changes anywhere, but lots of smaller changes everywhere", although in practice it's not always quite so smooth.
My answer comes from more of a Libertarian perspective it is quite simple. The community does not own the privately held land. If every landowner in the community opposed development, zoning would be unnecessary. If some individuals want to sell to Developers, zoning is just oppression of the minority by Democratic means.
Being part of a democracy does not mean you get to control every single action that could impact you.
The majority can also buy out someone who wants to sell to a developer. I know a neighborhood where everyone pitched in to buy land that would have been developed and ruined their view, depreciating property prices. But they put their money where their mouths were by buying the land themselves.
That's another reason that people are frustrated with Central planning. Your community might have a very strong opinion, but they're not willing to pay for it. This means that they will settle for making it illegal.
If you want low density, you're going to pay for it by not being in the center of a major hub of civilization.
Places like Gilroy and Morgan Hill will probably be mostly left alone in this, and this will probably apply downward pressure on their housing prices, making it more affordable for people to live in low density neighborhoods, while not having a 3 hour commute from the central valley.
Obviously developers could target those cities, but they would probably start with more desirable ones first.
In California, all city authority is granted to the cities by the state. The state sees overall growth and wants to provide for it. It's reasonably fair to allocate for growth in residential units in a region among all the communities in the region. The status quo of most communities in areas where people want to live refusing residential growth is clearly not working for the state, and they've been gradually increasing the pressure on local government to resolve the issue, so this is just the next step in escalation.
I personally love low density living, and I live on a 9 acre lot as a result. But, I can't keep my neighbors from subdividing their lots. Locally, my city (in WA) has places that would be better suited to higher density living and places that are not so well suited; but city council drags their feet on all new construction, so we're not meeting state growth targets here, and I suspect we'll eventually end up with something like described in this article. That would be unfortunate, IMHO, because increasing density in a desirable place to live is inevitable and I think it's better to have (expanding) pockets of high density rather than greatly mixed densities. It's easier to add 30 residences where there's municipal water and sewer than to extend municipal water and sewer 2 miles to a new project site where neighbors are on private wells and septic, which doesn't tend to work well for a 4 story condo building.
Because the community's governance is granted to it by the state. Nowhere in the constitution are the rights of city councils enumerated, and states are sovereign entities.
As such, any power your local community has to govern itself is just largess from its state. When it stops governing in a way that the state approves of, there is nothing preventing the state from stepping in.
Because it's regulatory capture. We hate it when big corporations do it, small towns shouldn't be able to either. If they were to fairly pay for it, maybe we could talk, but when things like Prop 13 exist, it's clear they are not paying for it.
Housing near job centers is a scarce resource, we shouldn't put up with people hoarding housings anymore they we would put up with someone hoarding water during a drought.
What is the legal standing of a "community" in American or state law?
Looking at this abstractly, buying a plot of land grants you ownership over that plot, nothing more. So on what basis should an owner of one plot be able to dictate what others can do with their own plot?
Scaling up to a community, what % of plot owners need to share an opinion for that opinion to outweigh the property rights of disagreeing plot owners?
To my knowledge, the relevant collective management levels recognized under law are municipal, state, and federal.
Where does "community" mean anything beyond being a manufactured scope of convenience for NIMBYs? They can't get the entire city to agree with them, so they draw an artificial boundary where the majority agree with them and call it a neighbourhood.
Housing is most people's largest purchase in life. Zoning is put in place to make sure that that purchase is suitable for the purpose intended so people feel comfortable making that large investment. They tried to get a variance to my local zoning to put in an asphalt plant, that would spew crap into the air my kids breath. That makes my house unsuitable to the use I purchased it for, and that the county promised it would be for via zoning, as my entire purpose was to raise kids in a healthy environment.
"Don't build an asphalt plant near residential zones" is an extremely reasonable zoning restriction. That's what zoning should be doing.
"Don't build any apartments anywhere in this city" isn't.
There should be a range of options available for people, ranging from a house with a yard and no shared walls with anyone, to mid-rise apartment buildings, and many things in between.
I think it's entirely possible for a rule that seems plausible and fair to create bad outcomes, making it a bad rule. Saying that the people of a community may vote to decide to to allow anyone else in seems fair... until too many communities do it, leading to people not having anywhere affordable to live that is reasonably close to employment opportunities.
And it's a sort of collective coordination problem, too. People can move from city to city, and if a city decides to allow lots of new housing, they'll get lots of new people, which not only increases density, but also lowers rents in other cities by a little bit, while not lowering the rents/property prices in their own city by as much as they would if inter-city migration weren't a thing.
So when a city allows more housing, it benefits other cities. It's best if every city does this -- but because the incentives are a bit messed up, most cities in California have decided to "defect" and block construction. (There are other reasons -- people with the most free time to attend city council meetings and run for positions in local government are much more likely to be landowners or landlords, so they are over-represented, while renters are under-represented).
If every city and town builds a some more housing, you can get a much more drastic increase in affordability than if only some are shouldering all the burden, without massive changes to any one place. Which is why I think it makes sense to handle this at the state level.
Well they don't have any rights over property they don't own. Why should a narrow majority or as is often the case a small but highly motivated minority have a veto over any conceivable use of your property just because it happens to be near them.
I'm not proposing allowing a chicken processing plant in a residential area, but it's no one else's business if you want to build a duplex on a lot you own.
I think this is only applicable if said community is isolated enough. But most communities in the Bay Area (for example) are not isolated. People live in one city, work in another, on the weekends they drive out to some other cities for R&R.
If you're going down the slippery slope of libertarianism (on a strange collective/communist level), then who are the rest of us to stop an individual property owner from selling his lot to someone that wants to build 5+1 multiunit housing?
So either you go right wing and you have no right to restrict developers on land they legitimately procure
Or you go left wing and you have no right to impose (?accidentally...ish?) racist, classist, and generationalist zoning results on people.
Or you go centrist and point out that population growth, livability, and cost for practically everyone is raging out of control because of zoning laws.
Now, that's all policy reasoning on idealistic grounds, which of course matters not at all! The real political calculus is rich (landed) vs the young / middle class / poor (priced out).
Of course it's all a scale and there are infinite points along that scale. Wanting democracy at the lowest possible level doesn't preclude wanting to avoid going all the way to the "every man for himself" option. I guarantee some folks want it to be dictated at the federal level, even.
If I understand correctly, the Monterey Peninsula Water Management District is subject to an order from the (California) State Water Resources Control Board which prevents it from allowing new water meters[1]. New house construction in most communities with municipal water service will not be issued final approval without being connected to the water service; so this effectively prevents new construction. I strongly suspect (but have no evidence) that an onsite private well would be prohibited as well.
The City of Monterey has a page[2] describing this as well as a published wait list [3], with the first project having submitted in 2003.
I don't know if they deny construction permits, but you'd have to be pretty foolish to actually construct residences that can't be legally occupied because they lack potable water.
Agreed, there should be a strict framework within such planning happens, to avoid the housing crisis that CA cities have created for those that don't own land. Japan is a great inspiration for planning like this. US planning, the entire field, is absolutely abhorrent, and should really be scrapped and rebuilt from scratch.
The other lesson might be that 'city' is too broad a term. Some cities are standalone, some are just arbitrary boundaries within a metropolis. Maybe the latter should be eliminated and replaced with a metropolis-wide city.
This is actually the compromise position - California proposed SB 50, which would have unilaterally set density standards near transit and permitted fourplexes in single family zones. Cities fiercely opposed this.
So instead we have this dumb system where every city gets a target number from the state and can choose where the housing goes, as long as they can show they meet the target. "Local control!"
Most of them are choosing really dumb spots - Orinda is trying to put 200 low income homes on a freeway shoulder near the Caldecott Tunnel, Palo Alto has two Caltrain stations but is trying to put all the new apartments near the 101 freeway.
It's not dumb, it's cynical. Pushing less well off people into the most polluted areas rather than sharing space is a pattern that keeps reappearing in US society.
Housing right next to highways is pretty bad. There's a huge amount of pollution, both particulate and noise, and depending on the layout, also light. Constant exposure to all of those will quickly lead to a variety of chronic conditions and generally make one miserable.
That's what HCD is trying to enforce -- that cities aren't just putting all the low-income housing in undesirable areas but are instead spreading it throughout.
It isn't horrible but I don't think you can argue that it'd be better to put the high-rises near the Caltrain stations. If you don't then you are just requiring people to have cars which also makes it harder to afford the housing.
You can read our letter about the Caldecott site - it's in a fire zone, there are no amenities, utilities would likely need to be pulled across the freeway and active BART line.
In theory cities planning their own growth sounds good. In practice it fails miserably.
I think it should really be decided at the metro area level. Since job markets exist at that level, having housing decisions there avoids the problem where a city benefits from a booming economy but refuses to provide housing to anyone participating in that economy, shoving that responsibility onto the other nearby cities.
This isn't some unknown town that put in a lot of planning, money, and effort to create demand. The only thing of "value" that happened was that a state full of good weather and jobs was monopolized early with low density housing. I don't know of any small towns that don't want more growth. Asking for more planning is only used in areas of rampant speculation.
Also the whole idea behind the suburban experiment was the idea that it was a finished state. That there was absolutely no need to densify or plan for growth, because more suburban land could just be annexed.
Maybe if they actually planned growth. In practice they just prevent growth. I'd rather err on the side of property rights--if you buy some land you can build stuff on it (within reason).
I mean, California already has both a massive homelessness problem and a major housing shortage. The prices from the latter have driven a ton of migration out of the state. Is your solution to just do nothing?
When I visited, I found Seoul to be an amazing city. While there was higher density there, I would not describe it as 'congested' because they had planning for how to manage (mostly) foot traffic.
I would be very happy if Sunnyvale/Santa Clara started to look a bit more like seoul.
If you want your own undisturbed 10,000 sqft domain, like a British lord of old, you can move to Idaho. Or pay a huge premium to compete for a limited pool of available low density land.
Have you ever been to Mumbai? Have you been inside their newer luxury buildings?
It has many issues, but the modern tall buildings in Mumbai are amazing and are the solution to many of their issues.
If the US would start to build new buildings like Mumbai or Singapore more Americans would realize just what luxury and space a condo could have!
Mumbai needs more walkability (through super blocks and such), better trash etiquette (more trash cans - especially for the middle classes new fascination with dogs), and it needs 1000x more livable square feet.
I would probably create a bridge or something over the slums. Cheap enough toll to not be much for the people living in the condos, but expensive enough those living in squalor below find it unaffordable. Then you could pretty much live your life going from middle class+ establishment to the next without having to think about the slums below. The bridge would also double as a shelter over any leaking tarp roofs below.
The “toll” to be on the bridge is the cost of ownership of motorized transport. Wealth segregation by neighborhood is also a thing. This segregation is executed similarly to how it is in North America or Europe.
FWIW, in Mumbai they differentiate a bridge to be road over water and a flyover to be road over other road or residence.
It's sad that people assume density must mean mega cities instead of gentle density like Paris suburbs. You could double the Bay Area's density by approving duplexes, fourplexes, and sixplexes + a few more more apartment buildings.
All of these can look like they fit in the neighborhood too quite easily.
From my observation, these new housing developments are built without adequate parking and without improvements to the streets, leading to congested messes and worsening already bad traffic. How people can see this as a positive is unknown to me.
One of the problems with new construction in some places (eg LA county) is that new construction has a requirement of too many parking spaces, not too few.
On my street, a parcel with one home was just rezoned for 24 homes - with zero on site parking. 24 homes without parking will add ~ 50 cars to on street parking. There is room for maybe 30 cars on the local streets without having to cross a 6 lane highway. Interesting to see how this will play out.
Building neighborhoods with parking can lead to worse traffic, the further out you build things, the more likely people need to drive. Roads cannot become infinitely wide, so if there's a shopping center in the middle of a city, but houses spread out for tens of miles, all those people in the radius will drive, causing more traffic. If everyone is in a denser location where more trips don't need to be done with driving, people will opt out of a car, or use a car way less, thus less congestion.
San Jose is mostly zoned single family homes with lots of parking, yet there's plenty of traffic. Maybe it's the ample space devoted to parking and driving that's the real problem, as it forces you to drive.
I think the next step is providing more services closer to people in these upzoned areas, as well as good transit to commercial centers so they can opt out of driving entirely.
This is an important element - if developers don't have to take into account the infrastructure needs of their buildings, then won't it just lead to the tragedy of the commons?
You weren’t worried about traffic when people built who knows how many thousands of single family homes many miles from anything people might actually want to go to, making traffic in many US cities a complete disaster. And now that people are considering a mode of development that’s just slightly more sane - a little less car centric and a little more dense… suddenly this is what’s going to somehow push the traffic over the edge. It’s so precisely backwards it’s honestly funny.
For these cities that lose their local authorities, does that include building code requirements for things like parking minimums and mixed commercial/residential buildings?
> The city councils and zoning boards had zero authority to deny the projects. Zero.
How did this authority come to be in the first place? How did cities magically get this authority to dictate how people should build. I imagine such laws didn’t always exist, how far back does this stuff go? Likewise how did states get authority over the cities on local matters that have to be obeyed?
In the US states are the ultimate unit of law (at least pre civil war). States can supersede the authority of their cities and counties with near impunity since there is no Bill of Rights between each state and its constituent parts.
That’s interesting that we have county and city governing bodies at all. It’s natural things like those bodies would unfold but to go this long with the state staying out of these affairs and stepping in when needed is pretty fascinating to see in real time like this.
It goes back to the late 1800's and Early 1900's and like many legal overreaches in the US, zoning laws were primarily spawned from a desire to discriminate on the basis of race or class.
I generally avoid citing Wikipedia directly but in this case I feel it gives a pretty digestible overview while being fairly well sourced throughout. Even if it's not perfectly Fair & Balanced^tm I don't think people in the early 1900s using the law to suppress minorities/the poor is a such contested viewpoint that we need to hunt for the perfectly centrist perspective to get a rough idea.
The logical move would seem to be to submit lots of proposals for super tall massive ugly developments on Wednesday. No need to actually have the cash arranged to build them. Propose 100 floor tiny apartments everywhere.
Then, they get approved.
Then the city gets it's zoning laws in place and regrets the approval of your massive ugly development.
But then you go to the city with an offer... Send in a new, more reasonable plan. If they approve the new plan, great. If they don't, you're gonna build what they originally approved, and they hate.
So when and if this takes effect, what do self proclaimed YIMBYs think is going to happen to everything in these cities that aren’t housing? Schools, roads, grocery stores, public transit, parks, etc. Is the thinking that they’re just going to magically be expanded to meet the massively higher density than these areas were ever planned to built for?
I mean, I don't think the YIMBY movement always speaks with a single voice, but I do think there's an understanding that infrastructure will have to keep up.
The thing is that in order to expand infrastructure, you need
- public pressure and demonstrated need for that expansion
- tax dollars to fund the expansion
and the quickest way to get both of those is... to build more homes and put people in them. I don't think there's any magic involved, just time and necessity.
The cities will have increased property taxes (at full rate, not 1978 rates) which they can use to expand services. It'll take a few years of pain, but that's the price cities like Santa Monica get to pay for trying to avoid doing their fair share.
> The cities will have increased property taxes (at full rate, not 1978 rates) which they can use to expand services.
No, the maximum property tax rate is much less than the 1978 rates under Prop 13 rate caps, which is the reason Prop 13 led to local government being dependent on state funding transfers.
You mean taxed based in full value for the first year, then decaying (as a share of full value) thereafter, because of the Prop 13 assessment increase limit to the lower of 2% or the rate of inflation. But maintenance cost increases over time aren't capped the way prooertt taxes are, even if property taxes were adequate to initially maintain infrastructure.
I live in Berkeley. Berkeley was originally zoned, when zoning was invented, for about a quarter million people. Berkeley has the water and sewer supply for this population. Berkeley has three subway stations that were planned to serve this population. But, in a reactionary spasm by White people suddenly faced with a rapidly growing Black population between 1950 and 1970, the city down-zoned itself in 1975, cutting the ultimate resident population capacity in half. We have an abundance of infrastructure and not enough people to exploit it or, crucially, to fund its maintenance.
Prop 13, the favourite legislation of NIMBYs, is the main reason why the infrastructure in California is lagging. Presumably more construction = more apartments = more tax = more infrastructure
> So when and if this takes effect, what do self proclaimed YIMBYs think is going to happen to everything in these cities that aren’t housing?
They think that, as Santa Monica did, cities will quickly file compliant housing plans and get their zoning power back, with very few (compared to need or current size, not past pace of new development) builders remedy units, and after this initial round, cities won't play chicken with the law anymore.
No magic, just incentives driving city planning priorities.
The new larger tax base can have their taxes spent on schools, roads, and public transit. Also public transit benefits a lot from density so it should get more efficient per taxpayer, not less.
If a city still refuses to comply, they will just be shooting themselves in the foot.
"
There’s a lot of questions still unanswered, though. This will all be legally challenged since we’re in new territory with the HAA. Many developers still can’t believe it and aren’t sure to propose nor have readied capital to propose projects. Other builders since the Santa Monica news appear quite excited to build apartments in exclusive, expensive enclaves they’ve always wanted to. There’s a political question too about whether HCD will let substandard housing elements through just to not anger cities and incite backlash.
"
Very likely the 'political question' will not be limited to 'whether HCD will let substandard housing elements through'.
Especially when they fight with each other, as neighbors do. The wealthy aren't always a monolithic block of undifferentiated piles of money so, not that I know what the future holds, but imagine you've been squabbling with your neighbor for decades; you've always wanted to move back east. What better giant finger to that neighbor than selling your multi-acre estate to be replaced by a 30 or 100-unit apartment complex?
But on the other hand, the coalition of rich neighbors could organize a counter-offer to buy out neighbors who want to leave. A bit like lands are bought up by conservation groups to prevent development. Put a price on how much you want to preserve your neighborhood.
They could even buy out the developer who purchased a spite sale, unless there are deed restrictions in that sale. Most developers are also doing it as a business, not for idealism, so it there ought to be a price point where they see it is more lucrative to fold than to go forward with the building project.
I'm not sure I understand the economic effect of something like this. At first blush it almost seems like the same feedback loop as land value taxes. But, it also creates a game-theoretic scenario where the coalition is pumping up the price of their own neighborhood and increasing the potential gains for the next defector, at which point the values could rapidly unwind if the coalition loses its way.
Seems like there would be massive, easy arbitrage in buying the home and saying you are moving in then changing your mind and building multi-family, then taking the buyout from the coalition of rich neighbors.
Free money for defection and could easily exhaust the resources of this coalition.
> What better giant finger to that neighbor than selling your multi-acre estate to be replaced by a 30 or 100-unit apartment complex?
You really do not realize how big (or small, rather) apartment complexes are. 100-unit building is the size of 6-7 single family homes (or maybe 3 McMansions), and maybe twice as high. It would barely be noticeable in such neighborhood.
It's not really the size of the building, it's the size of the parking lot and the resulting traffic. That's what *everyone* hates.
With parking minimums of 2 spots per unit, your standard 800 sq ft apartment requires another 600 sq ft of parking. And units can be stacked relatively cheaply, parking can't.
In my country parking spaces for residential buildings are all underground, outside parking is considered subpar, thanks to the climate. I've seen residential buildings with 3 underground levels, to accommodate all the parking requirements. But in case of 100-unit thing that should not be necessary, one level is enough.
Putting on the red team NIMBY hat, could they try and use private deed restrictions (https://www.carealtytraining.com/blogs/deed-restrictions-wha...) ? E.g. reuse the same mechanism that the city plans to use: "proposed building are deed-restricted to low income residents who make at or less than 80% the area median income."
Virtually every affluent residential neighborhood in Houston has strict private deed restrictions — and, remarkably many of those deed restrictions can be enforced by the city. That’s why River Oaks, Houston’s wealthiest neighborhood, doesn’t have apartment buildings or office buildings in the middle of the neighborhood.
That would only work if the state allowed those deed restrictions to stand, which it likely wouldn't. Just because Houston allows such a clause doesn't mean California would.
Those deed covenants go back to the KKK and whites-only policies imposed by the builder during lot subdivision. The game-theory doesn't work for retroactively imposing them on your neighbours. Why would someone selling promise to give up upside when they are moving away anyway? Like, are Anderson and Curry gonna show up on your lawn at midnight in hoods?
Eventually, people die, and sometimes the children were not part of the monopoly...
I do wonder if anti-trust could be applied against such a "don't sell" pact, especially if it was successful enough to capture an entire town. Probably not, but that sort of anti-competitive behavior should most definitely be illegal, with stiff penalties for those who participate.
I think that's fine. I dont think the point of this is to confiscate land that people own and build condos on it. But realistically real estate ownership is pretty disperse, even in small town called Atherton there are going to be thousands of individuals that own 1 acre plots and maybe a hundred that own larger plots. It just takes a couple people to choose to sell their land or to die.
And the average home in America is owned for what, like 5-7 years? If someone is moving out of the community, are they really going to ignore a windfall payment from a developer?
And how about estate sales? Are the out-of-state heirs going to care to who their parent's property is sold? Or are they just going to go for the top dollar?
Put me on team top dollar. Hell, I'd even consider accepting a lower offer from a developer if I knew they were gonna build more properties in it (though of course this is extremely unlikely to happen as the developer planning on building more units stands to make more profit and the land is thus worth more to them).
How would a coalition work here? They have no power to stop anyone from defecting. Unless Marc and Steph offer to buy any property in Atherton at absurd values they're powerless to stop a developer from buying someones house.
School districts/boundaries being so unequal is at least partially the result of zoning policy that makes it harder for people of less financial means to move into affluent areas.
I saw a counterexample living in Munich, just in the sense that the differences between neighborhoods in apparent wealth were much less stark than in the US. Almost everywhere looked vaguely middling, very few places looked obviously rich or poor. And so it's no surprise that the differences between public schools was lesser too.
I'm talking about the area boundaries that determine where people go to school. Many terrible school districts or schools in the US actually have plenty of money (the DC school district is a famous example).
Yep. Eventually the rich die and their kids have zero interest in living in the town and sell the property on an open market and huzzah now there is the potential start to open up the opportunities for more people to live in the gated community.
I'd imagine Atherton would remain more or less the same with the exception of some homes being converted to duplexes and triplexes. At least in Minneapolis with the 2040 plan, more affluent neighborhoods tend to stay that way.
We aren't going to force anyone to sell their property. But realistically, Atherton has many property owners (including many that are far less rich than the ones you mentioned). The chance that none of them ever agree to sell is zero.
The part that I'm sure many here are skimming for:
> HCD reviewed SF’s housing element and said it “largely compiled” with the state’s rules, even though it was heavy on promises. As such, SF will not be subjected to the builder remedy on Wednesday.
(But it's an interesting piece in general and you should read the whole thing for important context!)
The whole "heavy on promises" thing makes me nervous. But the HCD has been super intensely focused on San Francisco in particular -- the article mentions the special investigation they opened into the city's Board of Supervisors -- and so I'm hoping that if they think it's good, then it's actually good.
The "local control" freaks have misapprehended the entire situation. The state of California is not analogous to the federal system of the United States. Cities have no powers other than those granted by the state, no natural right to exist, and continue to exist only at the sufferance of the state legislature. The legislature can disincorporate any city with a simple majority. Cities like Santa Monica should be relieved if land use planning is the only power they lose. The state would be well within its rights and powers to conclude that the existence of Santa Monica is not in the public interest and to assign their lands to Los Angeles.
One of the few things Twitter does well is turn city council meetings into a digestible summary, and it is absolutely hilarious to see all the upset, privileged citizens thinking that if they just fight back hard enough, the law will not apply to them. And it's sad to see the loca politicians that pander to this obviously incorrect belief, as several politicians that did try to follow state law were ejected by their constituents.
And to some degree, the citizens have been right, when fighting individual projects. Delay a project long enough, and the financial incentive to build can be eliminated, so the developer moves on. Frivolous, baseless lawsuits are a great way to do that. But when it comes to fighting the State, there is no financial incentive to disappear and make the State stop fighting. There is only the law.
I strongly recommend Darrell Owens' substack (and Twitter). He's a young guy who got involved in housing politics in Berkeley back in high school and is studying data analytics. The blog has real data analysis of housing issues, not just polemics or the latest gossip (though there is a bit of that).
The article doesn't specify that it will open to commercial zoning. Just that there is no limit to residential. So if someone has the capital there is no height limit to build in a residential area... I don't see much changing here. Most people won't add on a second, third, or fourth floor.
New builds however...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I get not wanting to suddenly put an extra five hundred families onto a road that was only designed for a hundred single-family dwellings. What I don't get is being so nimby that you'd rather have your streets utterly full of homeless people and human waste.
I don't think that it's a preference either/or for nimby people. It's important to steelman arguments to better understand the incentives of people. My understanding is that there is a personal desire not to have one's personal life rapidly disrupted by increased demand of communal resources such as road space. There's a desire to consistently put off this rapid change. The second-order effects like an increased presence of homelessness doesn't intuitively have to do with not building an apartment: you can reason to yourself as a homeowner that these are people not even from your suburb community, but strangers invading it and ruining it, adding to the notion that more people decreases your quality of life personally.
This is not my understanding. 70% of the homeless in SF had an apartment before they became homeless. They had income, but weren't able to continue to afford the apartment. There's certainly a portion of people who have no desire to be productive, but it's far from all of the homeless or even a majority.
Imagine if there was a law that only permitted the construction of cars that cost over $100,000 per year, and then think about the effects of that on used car prices
Alternatives/"solutions" aren't always better than that which they seek to replace or fix and may very well be noticeably worse.
Homeless people are an annoyance but so is extremely dense housing to the point that local resources and infrastructure are overloaded. In addition, I'm skeptical that the new housing developments will even resolve the homeless problem, as its not really targeting the root cause of the issue. Most of the homeless aren't keen on helping themselves, either. You'd have more luck shipping them off to coal mines to work than this, I reckon.
If you want to end homelessness in California build affordable housing everywhere and hire the homeless to be go-fors on construction projects.
There is absolutely no reason that there should be sub five story buildings in downtown San Francisco when there are people living on the street.
Imagine if people could start building these cool buildings from AI: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-01-31/architect... but for large scale residential housing. You could have a whole new generation of architectural firms building the future of urban living.
It's easy to despondent at the political norms and the status quo in the United States at present but honestly what you're seeing with what CA is doing here gives me hopes that good things can still happen.
For a bit of background, a big problem with housing in the US is that people became property owners and the whole system became financialized so the voters became incentivized to oppose housing to increase the value of their own homes. They also voted themselves massive generational tax breaks (eg Prop 13).
The net effect is that almost all the polices you see around this are demand side, making it easier to buy a home. Why? Because this increases values. It's ineffective and everyone knows it. They just don't care.
But what CA is doing here is one of the first large scale supply side policies with actual teeth and it's great to see. These cities have really fucked around and are now finding out. You see the same tactics too. Complaints about "maintaining character" and focusing new housing on poorer areas, which are both exclusionary and discriminatory policies.
Well-intentioned laws in CA have been effectively weaponized to fight more and new housing (eg CEQA). Approvals processes can take years and really add to the cost. Even things like parking minimums are intentionally used to kill higher density housing (eg in LA).
The builder's remedy mentioned here bypasses all local zoning and allows a court to approve plans. When Santa Monica fell out of compliance it saw approvals for thousands of new units. I really hope this happens in much of the Bay Area.
What I find particularly disheartening is many self-identified "progressives" are the biggest NIMBYs. Denying people affordable housing is state violence.
This is a great article about great news (except for the first sentence calling it "A little known law" -- it's been quite contentious).
Palo Alto has fought these rules and I'm glad they will be enforced. When I first moved to Palo Alto in the early 80s it had a very progressive climate: a couple of SRO buildings, lower average income than some of the neighboring towns, a lot of social support programs, and decidedly un-fancy retail. But the flood of gold-seeking people who showed up for the dotcom boom allowed the real estate interests to seize control of the city council and in general made the town much snootier. The SRO hotels turned into boutique hotels and a lot of long term residents were ejected. Well those assholes are reaping what they have sown, thank goodness. Perhaps we'll recover some of the chill experimental vibe thanks to an influx of new people.
I hadn't realised the housing shortage issue stretched back decades. It sets an interesting context for Prop 13 (basing the tax base on the purchase price, not generally on assessed value) since the zoning rules were so exclusionary. Basically, shows that the State's tax difficulties are themselves the consequence of exclusion.
I wonder how this will work outside the dense areas. For example, Calaveras county has a shrinking population, but the main sources of jobs and taxes is construction. With no constraints on construction will there be a small boom in new development, tearing down virgin forest in order to make empty developments?
It won't make economic sense to try a builder's remedy project in lower land value jurisdictions, especially when you consider the legal headache. This is why we saw so many in Santa Monica and few in, say, the Inland Empire.
If I were to stop 100 people on the street and ask them if they'd heard of hedgehogs, the positive answer percentage would be depressingly low, I feel...
I would wager money that members of the general public are at least five times as likely to have heard of the Java programming language as the Housing Accountability Act.
My guess is that a lot will in the short term, which will result in streamlining changes to CEQA rules specifically applying to them. It probably won't be a straight exemption like SB288 and SB922 provided for certain projects.
And if the pressure for a statewide emergenct declaration on the housing crisis bears out, well, a lot could happen without legislative change.
The article doesn’t mention it, but it’s my understanding that this auto-approval only happens within a certain distance of public transit as well. I know that’s been a part of prior laws by Wiener, but I could totes be wrong that it’s a part of this one as well.
The developers still have to abide by construction laws - safety, and I think environmental impact. All that’s released (AFAIK?) is the zoning-based “no” from cities (and when within a certain distance from public transit hubs, maybe).
I think you are referring to AB 2097, which allows more housing near transit hubs. It was passed in the latest legislative session, but is distinct from the Builder's Remedy and has height restrictions unlike the topic of this article. The same author wrote about it here:
Maybe "little know outside of California" is more accurate. I certainly haven't heard anything about this, and it seems like the article is aiming for the broader audience
>With no constraints on construction will there be a small boom in new development, tearing down virgin forest in order to make empty developments?
Prior to these changes, so much new housing was forced into the urban-wildland interface that entire neighborhoods regularly burned in our seasonal wildfires. The hope is these rule changes will force cities that use land inefficiently to densify rather than encourage more sprawl.
> With no constraints on construction will there be a small boom in new development, tearing down virgin forest in order to make empty developments?
Probably? I live in Michigan, which (with the exception of two spots) has no meaningful limits on construction. Even the cities that technically have-and-enforce zoning, waive all the rules constantly anytime a developer asks.
And yes -- it means developers can build almost anything they want, almost anywhere they want. (Truly anything, I live next to a 15-story concrete castle apartment building that a developer built on what was once a trailer park).
Unfortunately, it does not mean you get lower cost of housing (prices here are still astronomical, and while they look cheaper in comparison to California, is only because of the severely reduced income locals make -- prices are still at record-all-time highs)
But it does mean, developers routinely cut down entire forests or farmland for new suburbs anytime they'd like. If you want a house made of sticks and cardboard, we have loads and loads of them for 'just' $450k. Years worth of 'inventory' here.
> Unfortunately, it does not mean you get lower cost of housing
You don't believe in supply and demand? I'm not saying you have cheap housing. I'm saying you would have more expensive housing if there were fewer of them, the same way GPUs are more valuable when there are fewer of them.
What you're not factoring in is the cost of labor and materials. They are both already quite expensive and when you have a building boom the costs of both will skyrocket. What will happen is you'll end up with cheaply constructed housing made from the worst materials. And that's the good outcome.
The bad outcome is the rich who are looking for alternate investments will buy up all the labor and materials and build construction for themselves and will build rentals. That's the bad outcome.
The awful outcome, and likely outcome is that the labor and materials will be bought by newly formed real estate companies that will build rental property that is ugly and expensive - because they control the market more and more as they merge into 2 super landlord companys.
The cost of the house itself is nothing compared to the cost of the land. Houses don't appreciate in value because of the houses (which deteriorate over time) - they appreciate because of the scarcity of land.
Sure, but houses don't depreciate as quickly as you might think. There's a few reasons for this:
- Constructing a new building isn't as cheap as when the existing structure was built. For instance, my home cost about $15,000 to build 100 years ago. Today the structure itself is worth more than that. Inflation matters here.
- People maintain and improve their homes. New kitchens, roofs, flooring, furnaces, siding, etc. In essence you are rebuilding a home 1 piece at a time from the day it is made. If you don't then the house gets to a point it can't be lived in.
People who haven't looked at new build prices for 10 years are shocked at what it costs today.
Nothing you're saying is wrong, but it doesn't change the fact that the land is an order of magnitude more valuable than the building (I'm speaking broadly and for residential real estate).
We still have more lumber than land. In a very hand-wavy way we have more labor than land. The limiting factor is always what drives the price.
This is not accurate outside of a handful of broken housing markets. In Philadelphia[1] land is often 1/5 of the total value. There are definitely some parcels that are undeveloped[2] or underdeveloped[3], but most properties are more balanced.
[1] I chose Philly because of a good clickable property tax browser https://property.phila.gov/?p=881576550, and because it keeps separate land vs. improvement assessments.
Single-unit buildings close to downtown can have higher land costs. But single-unit buildings in single-unit neighborhoods are, again, around 1/5 land cost.
These are definitely better examples than you previously used. That said, I think the tax assessments don't accurately state the value of the land vs the building. I don't think OnlineGladiator is correct about the universality of >10x land:building, but I don't think you're right about ~0.2x in these neighborhoods either. I do think OG is correct about housing as an appreciating asset being primarily about the land value.
1) The nominal land cost has huge jumps up and down. From 2016->2017, all of these properties had their land value lowered 60-70%: $150k->$44k; $166k->$59k; $75k->$32k; $279k->$96k. I find it hard to believe that property prices swung that much, especially since the total appraised value remained constant.
2) The price of the land depends on the zoning of the land. A lot which can't be subdivided further or which can't have multi-unit housing will be constrained by what a single family is willing to pay for the lot. If you compare the last property ($140k land assessment / 19k ft2) to a smaller lot nearby [0] ($50k land / 2.4k ft2), you can see a huge difference in the land price per ft2: $6.7/ft2 vs $20.4/ft2. This price difference reflects legal constraints on what can be done with the lot. If the larger lot could be subdivided, it should be closer in price per ft2 to the smaller lot and would be worth ~$390k. If the total assessed value remained constant, that would be 1.25:1 for land:building.
3) Furthermore, the price of the building itself depends on the scarcity of housing. With plentiful land to build new housing, old housing loses value quicker. An old house in a constricted market has more value because it's existing housing on a scarce plot of land. Even though the value is assigned to the building, that building is more valuable because of the plot of land it's associated with.
I used to believe this and then I got into the area. It depends on the area of course but it turns out that the cost of the house is quite significant. House construction costs are $200-500 per square foot, putting even a medium-sized house at around a quarter of a million dollars. When you look at the costs of empty plots of land versus similar plots of land with houses on them, you'll see that the housed plots of land cost the same as the empty plots plus the construction costs of a similar-sized house. In the areas where I looked, the costs of the house dominated, such that the land value is about 20% of the total value of the plot. Even the variance that occurs at that level can be further explained by the value of potential future plots of land on the space -- a plot of land that has one house but could hold a second (for whatever reason) is more valuable than an otherwise-identical plot that can only support one house.
Induced demand is a thing, as (and much more common) are demand curves that are flat enough that shifting the supply curve to the right by some large fraction of the current market clearing quantity has no discernable effect on the market clearing price.
Real life supply and demand involves more than the simplest Econ 101 illustrative examples of the general direction of the ideal relation.
There's a certain cost to build a house. It's not like the houses themselves are more in CA (well, maybe a little), it's the land. For example, my house is appraised around $300k but the land is appraised at $1.2 million.
My 4 bedroom house in Oakland had a replacement cost/value of about $400k. That seemed high but not unreasonable. Then the Santa Rosa fire burned down 1000 homes and insurers realized that construction costs in California are insane (especially when you are trying to build a thousand in a year). Replacement cost jumped to $750k in one year. The land used to be worth quite a good fraction of the property, and then it wasn't.
My home’s replacement cost is way higher than what the insurer appraised it as, but asking for a higher appraisal counts as warning bells in their eyes (are they planning on burning down their home?).
That may be what your used house is worth in an appraisal but if you wanted to build it new, it would cost significantly more I imagine. It depends a lot on finishes and framing complexity of course (number of windows, roof, etc).
A lot of people I know in Colorado found this out when their homes burned down. They had the structure insured for like $500,000 and found out that rebuilding their home that was built 20 years ago would cost around $1,000,000.
A friend recently had a multi story addition put on his house, and of course additions always cost more because there's some amount of demolition and working on an existing site, so the new footings have to be underpinned, etc. It's also a large kitchen and the existing kitchen space had to be demo'd and rebuilt into a new, basic room. The upstairs connected to a hallways but there was some work. Anyways, the cost, all in was over $500k. Even if he didn't use Marvin windows, Wold appliances, nice cabinetry, etc it would have been like $400k. And yes you can go lower. But don't be fooled. A lot of the cheaper construction you see is not only made with awful materials and lazy/inexperienced tradesmen, but is also track housing or similar no modifications allowed type things.
> Unfortunately, it does not mean you get lower cost of housing (prices here are still astronomical, and while they look cheaper in comparison to California, is only because of the severely reduced income locals make -- prices are still at record-all-time highs)
Are you taking into account the inflation we've experienced? If the mental anchor against which you compare this "all time high" is 2015, for example, then we've seen over 20% inflation. Over 33% inflation since 2008.
> (prices here are still astronomical, and while they look cheaper in comparison to California, is only because of the severely reduced income locals make -- prices are still at record-all-time highs)
I'm in Austin. I believe there to be inconsistency in zoning here because I'm on the top floor of a 10+ floor residential building looking down on a neighborhood park, single family homes, a motel, and smaller apartment buildings.
The building occurring downtown is insane. I haven't seen anything like it since the booms in Shanghai and Dubai.
My very first thought there was 'here's an example of what could have been ambitious, interesting architecture, except all the public space is devoted to cars instead of people'.
>Basically, shows that the State's tax difficulties are themselves the consequence of exclusion.
I'm not sure what you mean by tax difficulties, if you mean the state has trouble raising revenue, that's certainly not the case. CA is running a large budget surplus right now. If they only relied on property tax it could be an issue, but they also have an income tax, so the revenue outlook in CA is pretty good right now.
Fari enough: let me clarify. Because California gets so little tax from property, it must get more from income taxes. That has a couple of negative consequences.
The nice thing about property taxes is that housing prices change slowly, even in boom/bust cycles -- essentially they are coupled to a dashpot. While income, especially in California with a progressive system coupled with most of the high earners paying cap gains, leading to large swings (further influenced by the Fed).
Also property taxes are the main source of municipal and school funding; with property taxes artificially pulled low, the state needs to step in instead. In addition, the structure of Prop 13 discourages people from moving which reduces the availability of housing stock.
Prop 13 wouldn't be so bad if it excluded commercial buildings (including rental properties) and didn't have the huge inheritance loophole. But neither of those is likely to change.
The reason I mentioned the coupling between prop 13 and exclusion: Californians voided all restrictive covenants in the 60s, which lead to more selective zoning restrictions; Prop 13 came from conservative southern californians and (due to the stickiness mentioned above, including a retroactive valuation reduction and the inheritance loophole) locked a lot of "those" buyers out of the existing neghborhoods.
Your point about moving is really important: there are a ton of boomers sitting in houses which are much larger than they need without children living at home but in many cases they're doing exactly what the system incentivizes. Accessory dwelling units (ADUs) can help somewhat if they have enough space and want to get in the landlord business (or have family who need it) but really we need to make it easy for people to downsize without financial precarity.
I think now seniors can keep their Prop 13 tax exemption if they move anywhere in the state. However, that is a law that only passed a few years ago. Before then, I believe you were restricted to moving only within the same county.
On one hand I’m sympathetic to the individualist argument that it’s unfair for these people to have to vacate their 30+ year residences just because a bunch of people moved to their area.
On the other, I agree that it’s ridiculous someone can be paying 10-20% what their neighbor pays in property taxes, and that this causes an inefficient allocation of resources.
If we ever want to solve this we IMO need some kind of gradual phase out. We can immediately/over a 5-20 year interval move the taxes to what they should be on commercial and non-primary residences. But for actual primary homes probably the only way we can do it is if we let the property taxes be deferred until the current homeowner dies. No matter how much pain the policy causes we must under no circumstances cause a single grandma to lose her home.
A lot of this also comes back to the “just build more housing” point: an 80 year old probably doesn't want to have to be responsible for a house, but if the choice is considerably more expensive or moving away from everyone & everything they've known for 40+ years they'll do it. If there were reasonably-sized options nearby, they'd probably have a different answer.
Where I live now has a couple of nice options for aging in place – dedicated 55+ apartment building, with government support for low-income; and a co-op where the units are smaller but they have more shared space. A lot of older neighbors have spoken glowingly the latter because it's all ages and it since they see their neighbors more they don't feel lonely the way someone in a detached suburban home might. I wish we'd build a lot more stuff like that where someone has an option which doesn't break the bank and avoids those other downsides.
Great point. Prop 13 creates a lot of illiquidity/friction that probably keeps people in places they wouldn’t stay in otherwise. Not just old folks. It’s probably just as much of a problem for people who inherit property or get a job an hour away.
Prop 19 passed in 2020 IIUC partially solves the problem you mention because people 55+ can maintain lower tax rates after moving, but of course it is just a bandaid. Definitely the better solution would be for the real estate market to not be so expensive that people can’t afford to move/live in the general type of housing they want though.
> It’s probably just as much of a problem for people who inherit property or get a job an hour away.
My knowledge is stale - I moved away from California a decade ago - but I think you’re right about downsizing at least to the extent that they can actually find a cheaper place.
Funny enough, Texas is basically the opposite: there's no income tax, and so it has to get taxes from property. That also has a couple of negative consequences:
There's a "homesteading exemption" for taxes on a primary residence. This means your property taxes can't shoot up massively if your property suddenly gets more expensive.
This pushes even more of the property tax burden onto investment properties, which sounds good to some in theory, but one affect it has is that rental properties are investment properties. So rents go up a lot. This means renters end up paying a lot of property taxes, which is, uh... a surprising outcome.
The Lebowski loophole is partially closed on large enough values. But I doubt it prevents corporations/trusts from being a simple workaround. Then they added new loopholes to make it so old people can move and keep their low property taxes.
Prop 13 is IMO the biggest problem that California faces, because it’s the most intractable to solve (it would be political suicide to try to roll it back now that so many people are paying way lower taxes than they would without it) but is also a major contributor to a lot of other problems in the housing market. I can think of ways to roll it back slowly, but let’s be real, people will freak out if they think they’ll have to start paying 5x what they currently pay in property taxes, even if it’s after they die or in 20 years from now.
As a proportion of net state product it’s property taxes are low. Compared to most other states, California provides a lot of services and looks after a lot of land (has a lot of thinly-settled land — people there need services too). It’s a major net contributor to the federal budget.
It should have a better mix of tax sources.
Remember the size of the state’s economy and population would make it one of the large EU countries.
The income+sales taxes are so high in CA partially because prop 13 reduces the amount of funding able to be gathered from property taxes. The reliance on income taxes, as the other reply mentions, means that CA gets streaks of extra tax from capital gains sometimes (leading to occasional budget surpluses).
IMO Prop 13 is at the root of a lot of dysfunction in CA, but personally I hate it because these extra income+sales taxes put a lot of tax burden on new residents and young professionals.
PA has random pockets of new development, like on Alma St & Page Mill across from where AOL was.
Mountain View has much more around the San Antonio Shopping Center where it's starting to look like SF.
I'm wondering if there will be random developments that will sink property values because big city blight comes with : homeless camping, property crime, and so forth.
Palo Alto is unique in California in that it is/was legal to dwell in a vehicle because it wasn't criminalized since the law had to be rolled back due to a Ninth Circuit ruling about another law in LA.
SROs went out of style throughout the USA because they provided poor returns for the property used and were a huge hassle for whoever was running them, not to mention being magnates for crime. It’s sad, since an SRO is better than a tent. The socialization of lower tier housing (via HUD) also played a role as SROs didn’t really fit what was expected once the government got involved.
China has a lot of options for cheap housing, none at all legal, but rule of law isn’t really a thing there so just keep things quiet. In Beijing, you can rent a windowless sub-basement room for a few hundred kuai a month, mold is an issue, but it’s better than other options. Waitresses also often crash on the floors of the restaurants they are working in, so the windows are all blinded over in cardboard after closing time. This is all working poor, it is really hard to be a vagabond in China because the social safety net just isn’t there for it (and you can’t just crash under an overpass because the police are already in to that).
> It sets an interesting context for Prop 13 (basing the tax base on the purchase price, not generally on assessed value)
Prop 13 uses assessed value, but only allows unlimited assessment increases at sales, some other non-exempt transfers, and a few other qualifying events, otherwise, the year-over-year increase in tax basis value is limited to 2% or the rate of inflation, whichever is lower.
But, also missed in most discussions of Prop 13, is that it capped property tax rates at 1%, which (even before considering the value missed by the assessment cap) is not only way below the common rates prior to Prop 13, its way below the national average effective property tax rate.
Prop 13 isn't a result of exclusive zoning, it is—like exclusive zoning—a measure that protects status quo elites at the expense of everyone else.
> For example, Calaveras county has a shrinking population, but the main sources of jobs and taxes is construction. With no constraints on construction will there be a small boom in new development, tearing down virgin forest in order to make empty developments?
Neither Calaveras County nor any city therein has a noncompliant housing element, so “no constraints” due to builder's remedy is not an issue. OTOH, other places in the state getting more housing is more likely to accelerate Calaveras County population loss.
For all of California's huge dysfunctions (which are frequently the side-effects of its huge successes), this is a good example of what the state gets right.
To people who are freaked out that this is going to turn into the opening scenes from Pixar's "Up", more often than not, in suburban areas, this will just result in a few dwellings per lot, imagine 2-3 town homes on what is now a .25 acre single family lot.
The 20% affordable component of Builder's Remedy means you need to propose at least 5 homes so one of them can be affordable.
That said, a "missing middle" program is a really helpful thing to help cities get their Housing Element into compliance so if you think there is a place where this density would be helpful, send a comment to your city council and cc HousingElements@hcd.ca.gov.
Perhaps it's less lucrative, but it would still allow for increasing the housing stock without putting a 50 unit building in the midst of an existing SFH neighborhood. Developers will also need to weigh the desirability of what they build into the equation. There's quite possibly a sweet spot of desirability and affordability at 3 dwellings per lot.
As an example, I live on a multi-dwelling lot (effectively town-homes without shared walls) in a predominately SFH neighborhood. It's very high density by California standards, but it's quite desirable and not apartment-block style living.
Unfortunately, many California cities are so incredibly far behind what's actually needed for equitable housing costs that the only practical way for them to catch up is a lot of 50-unit buildings built yesterday.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 909 ms ] threadI too want a penthouse in Manhattan, who do I need to mail to demand I am given a penthouse in Manhattan?
California clearly doesn’t have the capacity to serve the current population, let alone an increased population. All services are 3rd world quality, besides a few rich enclaves.
Is the homeless problem due to the cost of housing? Or is it moreso due to fentanyl?
These people are addicts and homeless. We can cure homelessness with more homes, but we also need to help them get rid of addiction.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2356643-we-can-reduce-h...
Private market housing in SF will not get most of the very visible & mentally ill off of the streets, this likely requires services and some level of compulsion.
Other areas with higher rates of addiction, but cheaper housing, have lower rates of homelessness. Cheaper housing really does allow people to get off the streets.
I am not redefining anything, I am describing to you what people are colloquially talking about and why these conversations oftentimes are just people talking past each other because they have different issues in mind. When people in SF say "homelessness is out of control", they are typically talking about the population I am mentioning - one that is unlikely to be helped by changes to housing costs at the margin.
SF/LA has numerous programs that will give you housing if you're homeless. The issue is that many of the homeless refuse to take up these programs and insist on staying in their tents.... because they're mentally ill.... because of drugs.
- They're homeless
- Because they're mentally ill
- Because they're on drugs
- Because they're mentally ill
- Because they're homeless
I'm just unsure if the root cause is the price of housing (despite there meaning numerous problems to house & relocate them) or if it's due to the drug addiction.
Anyway, obviously I'm for more housing to reduce the price of rent.
There's a youtube channel called Invisible People that interviews homeless people on the streets and the story is very frequently
had job -> got on highly addictive drugs -> everything is about getting another hit -> tried rehab multiple times and want to go to rehab again
And yeah I mean, heroine/meth/whatever is obviously super dangerous & addictive so you can't really blame them.
* No Pets
* No Visitors
* Curfew Time
* Limits on the number of people per unit (meaning, families and couples cannot always be accommodated together)
- and a host of others. Also in some places there is a requirement that you have a social worker, and/or receiving mental healthcare treatment - except there are long waiting periods.
For most long term homeless people telling them "you have to give up your dog" will keep them on the streets - its not "housing, no questions asked" its "housing with rules".
Building more housing will reduce the existing homeless population - because a significant portion of existing homeless are working poor, but more importantly, it will stall the creation of new homeless, the longer you're homeless the more likely you are to acquire an addiction, or other mental health issue.
You would of course still need some rules in these places and there would certainly be various issues and difficulties, but it seems a whole lot better than what we have happening now in city centers?
In reality housing first solves a great many problems, and creates some others - but its better than anything else we're currently doing.
So, a generation ago, we warehoused people who had an inability to thrive in society in mental hospitals, now we do it with jails, or just leave them on the streets. I think it's a thought that upsets people (and runs into ideological issues across the spectrum), but essentially, there is some percentage of the population, that no matter the supports they are given, will fail to thrive. If we try to jail them all, or just ignore the problems, it creates a great number of externalities which effect all of us in a myriad of ways.
To further drill down, it's a spectrum of behaviors, some folks have enough problems that cash benefits and subsidized housing are not enough to allow them to follow the rules in general society.
In any case, to circle back around, it essentially creates an second class citizen and nuisances around these places, thats a solvable problem though, but rather authoritarian in how you'd have to solve it.
I've had extensive conversations for this with friends, and we've come to the conclusion (reluctantly) that the only complete fix for homelessness would be something the equivalent of civil commitment to a 'guided living' community, you'd have a large community on the edge of town, it'd have a mix of halfway houses, group living and individual apartments and has centers for mental health, social work, as well as sources of employment, shops and communal spaces.
The idea is, if simple housing supports wont get you out of homelessness, you could be sent there - there would be a way to graduate out of the program, but for some they would go and might never be able to leave.
It's clear, as you say, that we need something that is not prison or a psych ward, but also not the streets of a city center.
It definitely seems that we're letting perfect be the enemy of good on this. It's like there's a burning building and everyone's standing around arguing about what the pH level of the water from the hoses should be rather than putting the damn thing out.
And while I agree with the concern about creating second class citizens, I'd say these people are in a worse situation than that currently, and they are bringing entire neighborhoods full of innocent people down with them.
* It's incredibly authoritarian, ripe for abuse (as the commitment to mental hospitals was), and requires an evolution in legal thinking about what civil commitment can be used for.
* It offends a wide swath of people in an ideological way. No one really want to believe that some people cannot help themselves improve enough to exist in wider society (liberals assume everyone unless profoundly disabled can if given proper support, conservatives just assume people need to tug harder on those bootstraps). Similarly everyone on some level I've talked to about it is offended by the authoritarian nature of - it bothers people of all stripes once they think about it a little (including myself as a liberal with a general libertarian lean). Conservatives also object to spending money on such a venture (why should those people who contribute nothing to society eat better than I do?) for pretty obvious and consistent reasons.
* No one knows how to fund it, you need to either create new sources of revenue or deallocate money from someplace else, now, yes perhaps you could reduce funding allocated to policing - but there are existing stakeholders who will fight ardently to prevent it.
* Finally, there are existing stakeholders (the homeless industrial complex, as I glibly descried them) who want the status quo to persist for various reasons (for many organizations it is raison d'être - either for religious reasons, or more basal ones - money, they have workforces who are paid, and are a consumer of taxpayer grants).
I agree broadly with you, that the current illness is worse than the cure, but the cure isn't without its own side effects.
For what it's worth the example that I use of some people not being able to improve themselves is the Vanderbilt family, One of Cornelius Vanderbilt's great grandchildren was born into poverty. No matter what advantages afforded, some people will fail to thrive. (See https://www.amazon.com/Fortunes-Children-Fall-House-Vanderbi... for more information)
I agree with you, everyone is very busy arguing about either the PH of the water, the color of the water spout or if you should spray the base of the fire, or the top of the fire, and the fire rages further consuming people in its path and we never quite get around to putting the fire out.
There are a whole host of issues in society that are like this - where the optimal solution will never get significant political support behind it without the problem being perceived by voters as much worse than it is perceived now.
Some of these are:
* End of Life Care (from old age, chronic illness, etc)
* Cigarette Regulations (There are a ton of stakeholders who want to preserve the status quo of regressive taxes with general availability, when lower taxes with a gradually increasing age of purchase would be better for society)
* Overemphasis on safety in automobiles and other things (I did a cost benefit analysis on backup cameras, and it came out to something like 15,000 dollar per life saved, and most of these added burdens end up on the poor)
The biggest one is: if you’re going to have zones where hard drugs are de facto legalized, it should be in one of these places that are out of the way and designed to handle the externalities as well as possible rather than in the middle of cities.
It would also give police a place to take people who are creating quality of life issues for residents (tents, screaming, littering, using streets as toilets, etc.). Instead of the “bus out of town” or simply moving people around in the city, they could keep bringing people back to these facilities. Perhaps not all would stay, but I imagine many would.
Maybe the way to think about it is almost like a business serving customers. If homeless people don’t want to stay in this housing voluntarily, how can it be improved to change that? They have reasons for choosing the places that they do now, so if those factors can be replicated and improved upon, force might not generally be necessary.
I think at least trying it would be better than what we're doing now, and I think we're on the same page about that.
You win victories against great social ills by convincing one person at a time that we need to try something different. I believe firmly that most of the ills our society has are caused by poverty, if we can solve 3/4 of poverty, we will end up with a richer, safer and happier world.
NYC, HI, CA >40 per 100k homeless in 2020 (higher now)
States with lots of poverty but also extremely cheap housing at the bottom with a 5x lower rate of homelessness: LA, AL, MS
Similarly, WV very low on the list despite being high on all of the other supposedly causal factors such as mental health and drug problems
Poor people with mental health and addiction problems can still live with a roof over their head as long as they're not competing with tech salaries to buy any kind of shelter.
No, I would expect the opposite. All the would be homeless in unappealing states leave and go to california or NYC because if they're not paying for housing they figure might as well go to the nicest area.
Not obvious that there's evidence for that
For example, in NYC, more than 95% of the homeless are actually sheltered (whether in the city shelter system, or in other temporary situations like doubling up with friends or relatives), and more than 80% of homelessness is situational rather chronic. 30% of homeless families have at least one employed adult. 60% of all shelter residents are families.
Most spending on combating homelessness is invisible to us; and most improvements in affordable housing are going to have little impact on the (predominantly) male, drug-using and/or mentally-ill street sleepers.
> Over the course of the book, the researchers illustrate how absolute rent levels and rental vacancy rates are associated with regional rates of homelessness. Many other common explanations—drug use, mental illness, poverty, or local political context—fail to account for regional variation.
San Francisco frantically sought to avoid this, especially since HCD drew extra fire on the city and announced a special investigation into the slow housing approval process of San Francisco’s political system. The first ever housing investigation of its kind. Supervisors in the city cried they were being targeted and bullied by the state — but it worked. Fearing total loss of the highly sacred power to approve housing in San Francisco, the Board of Supervisors, the Planning Department & Commission, and the political activists of the city assembled quite a radical (but potentially lemon) housing element. One that proposes to upzone corridors in SF’s wealthier and lower density westside, something that was long believed to be politically impossible a year or two ago.
HCD reviewed SF’s housing element and said it “largely compiled” with the state’s rules, even though it was heavy on promises. As such, SF will not be subjected to the builder remedy on Wednesday. Shockingly, only a few other Bay Area jurisdictions can claim to keep their zoning as of writing this: Emeryville, Redwood City, and Alameda city. "
It's difficult to tell who's backing what.
The level of bureaucratic creep that has been imposed on property owners is actually unbelievable to me. I obviously understand some regulations (you can't built a chemical processing plant in a residential neighborhood, obviously), but cities have creeped themselves into all-powerful overseers.
Most cities now have the power to tell you what kind of house you can build, how you can paint it, how you can landscape it, what kinds of cars you can keep in your own driveway, what you can do in your leisure time on the property etc.
It is insane.
I honestly hope there is a property-rights case that abolishes all of this. If I own the property, then it's mine. If I want to collect old VW busses and park them in the front yard, I don't care what effect this has on my neighbors property value. This is my home. If you don't want to deal with living near other people, move to the country.
If the city booms, land value goes up. E.g. Manhattan. Trying to keep your small suburb a small suburb isn't maximizing investor value.
edit: to responders, yes I'm aware houses have other value. My comment is in response the parent comment that specifically addresses investment value protection aspect.
edited to add: I'm sympathetic to the suburban homeowners near/in cities who are under pressure for their lifestyle and environment to end up rapidly changing within their generation due to economic local growth. I just don't think it's reasonable that that sympathy should extend to supporting their wants over the clear consequences of refusing to capitulate to the majority's needs for more housing.
Here's a video about some of the studies done to come to this conclusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
The folks at Strong Towns also talk a lot about productive land use measured as property tax income per square foot. They say it is the gold standard way to make sure your budget remains solvent and you can provide the services people need to make your city thrive. Obviously this means building up.
They suggest it takes almost 30 years for the maintenance burden to actually have a fiscal impact.
From my understanding Strong Towns think "lower density, less intensely urban development" towns are fine. E.g. at 0:57 of the video, it's anything but intensely urban development.
"In this example, a 100-year-old commercial block, built in the traditional style of development, drastically outperformed a shiny new development, created in the modern car-centric style."
But then I look at the housing prices. TimPC's explanation seems legit.
I would really only categorize Lincoln and Wellesley "low density suburb". The rest certainly have car centric qualities but they're too built up to be called the exception to the rule.
http://www.usa.com/rank/massachusetts-state--population-dens...
https://www.towncharts.com/Massachusetts/Top-25-Cities-in-Ma...
Suburbs have existed for more than 100 years, start with thee streetcar suburbs (which often feature lots larger than what the new suburbs around me are building). They have already added sewer, water, telephone, eclectic, cable TV, internet, and some of those have been replaced as well. They have already replaced their roads many times over the years.
Sure there are some suburbs that have been badly managed and so haven't kept up. However that is a reflection on the short sighted voters, and not suburbs.
Then I took that overall very positive lens and started to apply it to what I saw and the financial arguments didn’t hold up to what I could plainly see in the low-density, car-dominated towns and suburbs around me.
If that's true, why do cities annex suburbs?
Suburbs have existed for more than 100 years. They have rebuilt their roads many times. They have installed modern things like telephone, running water and so on over the years.
Which 'metropolitan core' are we leeching from? It's not San Jose - it famously has a higher nighttime population implying people leave to work (and it's obvs to locals based on traffic patterns). It's probably not San Francisco, we're 1 hour away.
If you need an explicit answer, generally speaking, SF is "the metro core" for the bay. Travel distances matter little compared to macro-economic "correlation" distances when considering metro areas.
The people making money tend to leave cities because they want different property, fewer people, better services, less crime, etc. The people who can afford to do this are relatively well off. This ends up creating an area with fewer poor people and a higher tax income even if tax rates are lower. Cities have higher tax rates to have even similar (if that) per capita revenue because they have more poor people who cannot pay and must tax the ones who can at a higher rate. This is nothing against poorer people, just a reality of it works. You have a market force basically segregating people by income.
A local example for me is how Philadelphia County is extremely poor - the poorest in the state and has one of the highest rates of extreme poverty for any big city in the US. Some of the richest counties in the state are the ones immediately surrounding it, like Bucks, Chester, and Delaware. Even within these counties you have poor cities/towns and rich townships. The main difference isn't the tax rate, it's that the concentration of wealthy people.
These things are typically solvable at a policy level but the policies are often fought against by the same people asking for the city to solve crime.
You cant just out-violence poverty. If someone has nothing to lose, you can't convince them to not risk it all.
How do you solve "people are too poor to survive to the homeowner's standards" without quoting mien kampf or socializing things and spending money on social projects? It typically feels like suburban communities lean towards the former. Very little empathy for people as long as they don't need to see them anymore.
I'm hoping this zoning change would work for the better. I know "missing middle" is a bit of a meme at this point but a few house sized quadplexes on a block would scale and provide a lot more housing. Its typically the "property value" crowd that fights against them, but sometimes its simply a racist generalization of "the poors" that would live in a multifamily home.
The problem is as cities grow a smaller percentage of the overall population can live in a small suburb. Build up that first ring, and the next 10 mile ring is Pi * (25^5 -15^2) = less than double the area at 1,256 square miles and now needs a longer commute through the inner ring. Meanwhile that inner ring 15 mile radius can have easily ten or more times the population.
PS: Geography adds it’s own constraints. If the cities core in next to the ocean then much of the hypothetical low density ring is under water.
NYC inner core may be toxic, but the average New Yorker’s environmental impact is well below the national average.
I'm also curious if you could actually back up that New York statement with some unbiased research.
“New York residents were using an average of 572 kWh a month in 2017.” NYC is so efficient that: “New York ranks 50th out of the 51 states and the District of Columbia. The only state with a lower per capita consumption is Rohde Island at 176 million Btu (MMBtu) or 51.6 MWh. The total 2016 U.S. consumption per capita was 301 million Btu (88.2 MWh).”
It’s consistent across different countries, here’s UK’s data: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49639003
Second that article makes it really unclear what is being included in "energy expenditures". In the earlier paragraphs it talks about electricity which makes sense given a.) it's extremely expensive in NY and b.) I'd imagine more heating comes from natural gas as opposed to AC in southern climates which comes from electricity.
It lacks a lot of critical information to measure environmental impact vs. other cities.
Lastly who is being included? Inner city residents only? Or metro area?
Using electricity has an environmental impact. As does burning fossil fuels for heat etc, which is where the BTU numbers show up.
The biggest benefit is land use it’s self has an environmental impact. The ability to leave land for nature requires people not to be living on it. We don’t want wolves and buffalo walking through suburbs. Rabbits etc can’t graze on a paved roads, and drained swamps stop being swamps.
If you look at the actual population vs land available it needs a far higher density than I am talking about. 1k people per square mile is really low density. That’s single family homes with 1/2 acre back yard territory.
The problem isn't about land - there's plenty of that elsewhere. The problem is people all wanting to live in the same area and having high standards. You have a visous cycle where the denser places have the most jobs or the highest paying jobs, while the cost of living goes way up and the standard of living goes down.
It would be nice to have smaller cities. The real problem is how to convince businesses to reinvigorate the dying cities, or for people to change their preferences (either for locality or property type/size). These are being largely ignored in these conversations.
> We had Gb fiber while the big city had horrible DSL
So do you or do you not have a big city nearby?
> our infrastructure prices are much cheaper than California's
As always, the big question - how old is that infrastructure, and when was it last renewed? What is the budget/reserves/debt like of the town? Because if infrastructure doesn't cost a lot to build, it doesn't mean it's sustainable to maintain/renew in the medium/long term.
61% of Americans live in a town of less than 50,000 people.[1]
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/05/america-a-nat...
So uh, apparently the answer is "it doesn't.'
Most of these, you wouldn't know you were in a separate city if you didn't pay close attention to roadside signs, and I suspect the same is true of a large percentage of that 61% figure.
That says something, since those people didn't choose to live closer to the central of the metro area, but it doesn't say as much as you're implying it does, because they're all examples of places for which, if someone outside of Texas asks where they live, they're going to say "Austin" or "Dallas" or "San Antonio," and only if asked where in Dallas will they respond Little Elm, just as they might otherwise respond Lakewood or Hamilton Park, which are neighborhoods but not separate cities.
But if too many people get it, you don't have a compact city anymore, you have a sprawl hellscape that's neither country nor city, but a habitat for cars.
But I don't have enough money for private school for all the kids, and all the top 50% of school districts for like a 200 mile radius are in the burbs. So. I "love" them.
If instead my neighborhood is converted to apartments or high-density condos, I might not have the capital to take advantage of those opportunities but my single family house becomes undesirable in that zone. I am forced to sell to a developer in order to maximize return. I probably still make money, but it might be less then I could have made in the other scenario, and I am unable to use the house for my own residence up until the time I need to liquidate.
So its not necessarily illogical.
First, I've never heard of anyone being forced to sell, unless there's some truly huge and necessary infrastructure development. You are generally offered some money by a developer and you personally decide whether or not to take it. Sometimes people can be stubborn and there are plenty of examples of large high-rises built around tiny structures that wouldn't sell.
Also, your price per square foot goes up fastest directly adjacent to the largest developments. If your neighborhood can economically support larger buildings, that directly increases the amount of money developers will pay for your land. The less development you allow your neighborhood to have, the less your neighborhood will be able to support large developments. You want your neighborhood to support large developments.
You may want to hold on to YOUR house as an investment, and to keep from a property tax re-assessment, but it makes no economic sense to prevent your neighbors from building higher if they want to.
Maybe not in the USA but certain countries have a special emergency nationalisation procedure that has payment first, skips the consent and leaves the challenge to after-the-fact.
If you're already 5x leveraged into a single asset in a single location whose value is wholly outside of your control you don't need the extra risk of redevelopment
E.g. I have a friend whose area has become extremely popular for city people and prices have gone up a ton over the past couple years.
Their father owns a bunch of property in the area and sits on a bunch of local board, and specifically lobbies to block housing development to protect their "future" that's locked up in these properties. (Mostly SFH in suburbs.) It's an explicit goal for some people.
As long as demand is high, b/c of mostly immutable factors, schools/weather/job opportunities etc and people have the money to spend then prices will go up if you keep housing supply low.
Supported. Individual property owners rarely have external zoning power.
At best, single family zoning preserves the value of a (depreciating!) house to a limited extent.
Now with large corporate ownership in residential real estate the problem has gotten worse as houses are investments not places for people to live.
0. https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2021/06/17/...
Sure there are a few buildings that are historic and should be preserved, but the vast majority are only old, and have no other historic value.
People want to preserve old stuff because (and only when) it's beautiful, but there's no reason we couldn't and shouldn't be building beautiful stuff today!
These two at least make some sense. The former, landscaping restrictions, can be used to prevent people from creating groundwater issues or flood risks, and the latter... no one wants a neighbor in a residential zone keeping broken-down trash cars out in the open.
Some things have to be regulated even in a relatively free society because otherwise the potential is too high for greedy or stupid people to ruin everyone else's life.
Yes, society probably won't crumble if we cave to your whining and regulate your pet issue of the minute but regulating in this manner is like littering in the park, if everyone does it the park is ruined.
If people are poisoning the groundwater or creating other "off their property" problems then fine them accordingly. If they aren't then screw off. None of this "the thing you want to isn't already on the approved list so you have to go through an onerous and expensive process of proving it won't hurt anything" garbage.
I disagree, and I think this sort of nonsense is a cornerstone of why society is crumbling. People don't look at their homes as homes they look at them as temporary investments that they hope to sell to somebody else for more money in the future. People don't end up investing (in the societal, emotional sense) into their communities and their homes because they recognize that they don't really own them.
Give the rights back to the people to own their homes and they start to care again. Tell property investors that I'm sorry, but actually you might have to deal with a guy who doesn't give a shit about weeds and likes to work on his car in the driveway next to your investment and maybe houses stop being such a safe speculative vehicle.
I dislike the idea of home-as-investment as much as the next guy, but I'd like to think about some consequences of houses stopping to be an investment, Japan-style.
I wonder where the investment of the "nest egg" investments would go.
That's a pretty ironic comparison, because laws against littering are exactly the sort of quality-of-life regulation that you seem to oppose.
Do those neighbors care what I want?
Even so, today's trash car that does not look posh can be a tomorrow's restored historical car that does.
I've lived off-grid in the desert, and I've seen certain people become 'garbage collectors' - a few cars turns into 20+, with all the associated junk. In the desert, nobody really cares - but you'd be crazy to move in next to one of those junk yards.
It's not going to ruin anyone's life, but it's definitely not nice. It depends on the community and circumstances I suppose.
People have limits. While some people push those limits too far (in either direction), there are times when those limits are realistic.
But rules based on "it doesn't look nice"? That seems both subjective and ridiculous. If someone has garbage on their property and it's blowing into yours, that gives you a right to complain. But if you just think their property is ugly for whatever reason, well, maybe don't look at it? What made people think they should have any say over the visual appearance of what someone else owns?
Hahaha the GP is misattributing the issue. These are usually HOA strictures, and HOA will require green lawns in the middle of a desert.
For instance, this is west des moines, Iowa: https://www.wdm.iowa.gov/government/public-services/communit...
Terms like "Junk and debris in the yard." get tortured to mean almost literally anything. Also 10" of weeds can grow in a matter of days after a rain.
So free.
What justifiable reason is there for this?
You can get darn close in some places. I mean, in Texas, residential damage and evacuations from chemical plant explosions are practically routine. I live in a neighborhood surrounded by biotech labs, which tend not to blow up, though we do joke a bit about being zombie-apocalypse-ground-zero (also, every available developable lot gets sucked up by a new lab project). And of course, in some rural areas, the proximity of farms waste lagoons and low-income neighborhoods is a serious issue.
See also: Charleston, West Virginia.
Locals sometimes call the Kawawha Valley "Chemical Valley."
Kids growing up learn different lyrics to The Mickey Mouse Club:
Because the plants always got built on the outskirts and then the outskirts expanded.
The same thing used to happen in the formerly industrial parts of CA before CA kicked out most of its heavy industry over the decades.
[1] Not sure the exact depth, but whatever, they went like half way down to save on money.
None of the other big buildings in SF are connected to the bedrock. None of the towers in LA have supports connected to the bedrock. Heck, the Burj Khalifa isn't connected to bedrock. They all use friction piles, and these can work fine if they're done properly.
Absolutely not true.
Salesforce Tower, Park Tower and 181 Fremont all being examples of tall buildings in the immediate vicinity that do go to bedrock.
Whether or not friction piles are a good idea is another matter.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/10/san-francisc...
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8105988/
In short, shortcuts, or more charitably, miscalculations. They really thought they had enough margin to work with but obviously that wasn’t the case.
In my experience, the city regulations around what you’ve listed are always sensible. It’s the HOA regulations that tend to be kooky and capricious.
Many (most?) of these types of rules are imposed by HOAs made up of property owners, not the city.
The reverse could also be said - if you don't want to deal with people deciding together that they want their community to have certain guidelines, move to the country. You can do pretty much whatever you want in rural areas without significantly impacting your neighbors.
People living together in a small area do get to decide together what they want that area to be like within reason. Creating some guidelines to create a desirable, pleasant and safe environment for them and their families is totally reasonable and has been the historical norm for most of the history of civilization.
Of course things can get out of hand and over-reaching. If the people decide together to change it though, they can. I don't think the solution is just nuking all zoning regulations from orbit.
When most people talk about ownership, when the law talks about ownership, it exists, and I think that is enough for it to exist.
If I used the same framing, I would say LVT are an incentive to tear down the land (introduce toxic waste, endangered species that can't legally be disturbed, etc).
Or I could say Property taxes are a disincentive to hoarding buildings.
"legally" is an acknowledgement that the ownership is conditional on someone else who has authority about the ownership (ie the practical owner).
This is a reasonable point of view, in theory.
Yes, for the duration that you (and your crew) can defend it.
It has to be, because the in-group, i.e. the people already living there don't accrue the cost as that falls on the out-group, the people who need to live there (job etc) but cannot. Its the essence of a "f** you i got mine attitude"
I and many others who don't live in the Bay Area see ourselves as an in-group relative our out-group -- the people who have to live there.
I think the "community" can also extend to something as large as California. If California as a community decides it's in the best interest of that community to loosen some zoning restrictions in particularly high demand areas, fine. Do it with thoughtfulness and as much respect for existing owners' interests as possible while still accomplishing the desired objective. That's similar to a smaller community deciding to change the rules to account for some new undesirable behavior of certain community members.
If they want more rentals and more density, they have the power to vote for people who can make it happen. Instead they vote for people who talk a lot about preserving the character of San Francisco.
There are a ton of people in SF who are paying sizeable taxes and rents with no vote in these matters. It's quite likely they are disproportionately renters.
Shouldn’t this be the message to a suburban homeowner clinging to the past? Move to the country. Buy land around you. Don’t tell others what they can and cannot do on property you don’t own.
That's exactly what's happening here. Californians have collectively decided that zoning laws need to change. If the current actions by the state are somehow unreasonable, how could the original zoning provisions ever have been considered reasonable in the first place?
They didn’t. If they bought the block, or easements on it, they would have. But they bought a plot. Others bought adjacent plots. Now they’re arguing they get to tell the adjacent plots what they can and cannot do.
And they did. The decision by the people was to "nuke" current zoning regulations.
Don't want a skyscraper in downtown SF? Buy the plot. Can't afford it? Sorry, you're getting neighbors. You shouldn't try and bog them down with a nightmare bureaucratic process of shade measurement and bird counting.
It's a good thing.
All people want is to live in a quiet and a nice place after all.
Why someone who doesn’t even live there but has a bigger buck should decide?
Honestly, this is sane zoning. The Japanese model is very effective. They saw roughly 0% growth in housing prices from 1990 to present. Housing in downtown Tokyo is affordable. You'll be hard pressed to find someone who thinks Tokyo is an abomination, it's a top-10 world city is basically every ranking.
> All people want is to live in a quiet and a nice place after all.
Some of them! Not all of them. Some of them want a place to live within an hour of work, and for them that's more important.
For those that want that they can (a) buy the land around them necessary to make that happen (b) lobby the city around them to buy the land necessary to make that happen (a 'park') or (c) move somewhere like-minded people live.
> Why someone who doesn’t even live there but has a bigger buck should decide?
Why should the person who got there first decide what other people get to do? That's not even democracy, that's just gerontocracy.
If the density becomes problematic, buy the land, or mosey on.
This to me is the least compelling counter-argument. "Nobody wants to live in a big dense city" is like saying "nobody drives in New York, there's too much traffic!" You personally don't, but obviously, we can tell by inspection that's simply not a true statement in general.
Which brings us back to "but I got here first!" which is to me, the second-least compelling argument.
If you don't own a car, you don't determine when to wash it.
If you don't own a property, you totally still get to determine what to do with it by being a whiny neighbor. Why is this OK?
I'm very-much onboard with the "put up or shut up" model of zoning. If you want the place to be empty, you should own it and keep it empty.
People want all sorts of things. Walkability, transit, cafes, restaurants, recreation, jobs. Some do prefer the particular brand of quiet offered by the suburban form, but because it's the only thing you're allowed to build, lots of us who do not want it are forced into it.
I totally agree that "people living together in a small area" can pretty much do what they want. The only issue is when that starts to screw over other folks, and when all the other small areas get together to do the same.
Then it's pretty reasonable for the state to go "you can't just never build houses. That's a decision that screws the rest of the state" and enforce that decision
Totally agree. The state or larger city, etc. is also a community that should be able to make rules that promote the welfare of the great majority over the objections of a small minority, as long as they take care to not harm the small minority unnecessarily. I just think the solution is thoughtful modification of existing codes, possibly forced by larger jurisdictions, and not just a free for all where almost anything goes as was proposed by the parent commenter.
This argument ignores 100 years of research in game theory and development economics. No community is an island, okay except Alameda, but even they are a component of a wider metropolis. The way you set zoning laws and transportation infrastructure influences who comes into and passes through your community — no municipality in the core of a metropolitan area can ever truly behave like a single community organizing its residents' lifestyles.
So you see, for example, an attempt to increase the total property value per resident because it leads to a better school district. You see attempts to block new developments and transit stops because relative popularity may transiently increase the local cost of living, even if it benefits the affordability of the metro as a whole. You see militarized police departments who realize they can't outrun crime but they can certainly outrun Emeryville.
None of these are the products of a community of people democratically deciding what kind of lifestyle fits their particular interests. They are the choices of a faction jockeying for status in the desperate power struggle that characterizes the great modern balkanized American Combined Statistical Area.
What about those of us who actually want to live in cities? The only way cities come to be is incrementally; if an already-settled place cannot intensify then cities cannot exist.
I don't like that we have to have laws like this in society anymore than you do. But you're kind of ignoring Chesterton's fence here.
I've lived next to places like you're describing, and I don't mean trash heaps like you see in rural parts of America, though I've lived next to them, too. I mean collectors who simply fall behind on preventative maintenance for mundane reasons. So I don't care until I'm forced to... Which is typically when the rats show up.
Actually we have oil derricks in the middle of residential neighborhoods in Los Angeles.
Source: Grew up in Texas surrounded by mostly harmless pump jacks and then moved to Louisiana in Cancer Alley.
In either case, the fact that zoning laws aren't stopping this but are taken as seriously as laws of physics when it comes to apartments shows that they're mostly a scam
Houston has both petrochem refining and chemical plants with people living in "sacrifice zones".
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-03-05/deserte...
Modern epidemiology also enables really accurate tracking of the increase in asthma and other health problems near wells:
https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/articles/2021-06-02/urban...
This is a transfer of power from the people, that is democracy, to the oligarchy.
> I don't care what effect this has on my neighbors property value.
That is such an awful attitude and a big problem of what is wrong in the country today. We live in communities and communities agree to certain values. It's about well more than just you and what you want to do.
Other cities and states have worse problems with drug use but don't have problems with homelessness because housing is more affordable there.
I'm assuming you are U.S. citizen and not super familiar with the common law; apologies up front if that isn't the case.
Property law principles in the common law are vastly more complicated than this. There are all sorts of ways that your right to use real estate as you wish can be affected by past practices, hazy conventions, etc. Check out "easements", "mineral rights", "air rights", "adverse possession", and the sometimes elaborate processes of establishing title and specific property interests in particular jurisdictions.
And many of those limitations are logically prior to U.S. specific legislation around zoning, restrictive covenants, etc.
Lots of people disagree with this! There are tons of chemical processing facilities that pop up near my neighborhood, particularly rail car cleaning.
Can smell a different chemical every day depending on what they’re spraying out of the rail cars.
La Porte, TX
Pasadena, TX
Lake Jackson, TX
There are both new subdivisions and new processing facilities going up all the time. ProPublica ran some big articles on it, absolutely skyrocketing cancer rates around here.
In practice, coming from CA, I am 100% onboard. It's a mess of red tape and bullshit lawsuits.
And as the state government has said -- cities can still plan their own growth! They just have to plan some growth rather than none, which, obviously, is the sticking point.
They are able to plan their own growth, but they aren't able to refuse to grow. Or at least, not through zoning; being located where potable water or sewer/septic are at capacity is probably still valid to restrict new building.
Further, the state is doing their job. If the town next to mine enacts restrictive housing measures, then my town is likely to become more burdened by the issue. If we then enact restrictive housing, the next town over now has to deal with the effects of 2 freeriders. Why should the rest of California allow Beverly Hills and Santa Monica to saddle us with the burden of housing everyone? So the wealthy can have their enclaves?
Because I don't see "California" as one entity like a sports team. I see it as various groups each competing with each other, like an ecosystem. Beverly Hills and Santa Monica just happen to be "winning" (rather arbitrarily). Using authority to punish them for (peacefully) winning is tyranny. Just let them win.
> The state is removing the restriction
That was enforced by a local democracy, for what is fundamentally local concern. The state should not be able to supersede local authority for local concerns, it's authoritarian.
> Beverly Hills and Santa Monica just happen to be "winning" (rather arbitrarily). Using authority to punish them for (peacefully) winning is tyranny. Just let them win.
The residents of those areas have been using authority to make their "wins" a fait accompli for nearly 100 years, but yeah, it's tyranny if we remove their priviliges.
> The state should not be able to supersede local authority for local concerns, it's authoritarian.
California voters elected the legislature and executive who signed off on it. If Santa Monica restricts housing, it affects neighboring cities. Please explain how it is authoritarian for the state to balance these concerns?
In this case, the locally-optimal choices cities are making is having deleterious effects on the quality of life of the citizens of the state as a whole. It is perfectly reasonable for the state to therefore act.
And yet very few will accept elderly starving in the streets en masse because their pensions were gutted or went bankrupt. And so some measure of intergenerational agreement is necessary, where each generation provides for the next.
For one, California is split up into many smaller towns/cities in large metro areas, so each having their own policies leads to locally-optimal but regionally-suboptimal policies of trying to get as much commercial development as possible with as little residential development as possible. This is a direct contributor to gentrification (if you are “lucky” and able to soak up the commercial demand without increasing residential supply, you’ve created a mismatch between jobs and people in your area), ghettoisation (the people priced out of where they were before have to go somewhere), traffic (people have to commute into their jobs), and affordability (even the bad communities can’t increase housing much because they have the weakest tax base, plus all the restricted supply where jobs and taxes actually are).
The right solution to this problem is to recognize the whole local-optimization problem and make it so every municipality has to solve the problem at once, to prevent the adverse selection of solving the problem in only one municipality. Which is what the state of CA is doing.
This could also be addressed from the other side, which is a complete political non-starter, of trying to limit job growth. Obviously nobody wants to do that. But the problem by and large is not just that CA has a lot of low density communities that want to remain that way, but also that those low density communities are creating more jobs than they can house.
When you are a bunch of small, close by municipalities all operating in essentially the same economic context (job market, etc.) the regional issues always become someone else’s problem.
Wow, this is an odd definition of tyranny. The elected representatives of the people of our state wrote these laws. I personally think it's fair for us to make laws that apply across our state rather than having full autonomy at the city level.
Agreed. So why even allow the city to use its authority? Leave it to the property owner to decide.
Personally, I would say that lots of low-density communities do remain low-density. And generally, that's because people don't want to move to them.
But if you're a small town in Northern California, one of the most desirable places in the world, saying "we want to remain low density" is basically saying "we got here first, so it's ours -- nobody else gets to have this!"
And I think that's a fundamentally wrong way for us to organize our places. Desirable communities shouldn't be able to keep out people who want to come in, just because they want to stay exclusive.
But I don't think that's a settled point, and there is a lot of nuance to basically every adjective I just used.
Besides, who's to say that these desirable places are not desirable because they are low-density? It's a chicken and egg problem.
If we're concerned about property rights, why can't the property owners build at a higher density? Or sell to a developer that will build at a higher density? The fact is the zoning at play _restricts_ property rights it doesn't protect them.
Anyway zoning was never static (it wasn't ordained by God after all), so changing it isn't really a big deal. People are angry and surprised of course, but the writing has been on the wall for a long time.
If this were true, you wouldn't need zoning, and people would just build low density because that's what everyone wants anyways.
I like the Strong Towns notion of "no massive changes anywhere, but lots of smaller changes everywhere", although in practice it's not always quite so smooth.
Being part of a democracy does not mean you get to control every single action that could impact you.
Places like Gilroy and Morgan Hill will probably be mostly left alone in this, and this will probably apply downward pressure on their housing prices, making it more affordable for people to live in low density neighborhoods, while not having a 3 hour commute from the central valley.
Obviously developers could target those cities, but they would probably start with more desirable ones first.
I personally love low density living, and I live on a 9 acre lot as a result. But, I can't keep my neighbors from subdividing their lots. Locally, my city (in WA) has places that would be better suited to higher density living and places that are not so well suited; but city council drags their feet on all new construction, so we're not meeting state growth targets here, and I suspect we'll eventually end up with something like described in this article. That would be unfortunate, IMHO, because increasing density in a desirable place to live is inevitable and I think it's better to have (expanding) pockets of high density rather than greatly mixed densities. It's easier to add 30 residences where there's municipal water and sewer than to extend municipal water and sewer 2 miles to a new project site where neighbors are on private wells and septic, which doesn't tend to work well for a 4 story condo building.
As such, any power your local community has to govern itself is just largess from its state. When it stops governing in a way that the state approves of, there is nothing preventing the state from stepping in.
Housing near job centers is a scarce resource, we shouldn't put up with people hoarding housings anymore they we would put up with someone hoarding water during a drought.
Looking at this abstractly, buying a plot of land grants you ownership over that plot, nothing more. So on what basis should an owner of one plot be able to dictate what others can do with their own plot?
Scaling up to a community, what % of plot owners need to share an opinion for that opinion to outweigh the property rights of disagreeing plot owners?
To my knowledge, the relevant collective management levels recognized under law are municipal, state, and federal.
Where does "community" mean anything beyond being a manufactured scope of convenience for NIMBYs? They can't get the entire city to agree with them, so they draw an artificial boundary where the majority agree with them and call it a neighbourhood.
"Don't build any apartments anywhere in this city" isn't.
There should be a range of options available for people, ranging from a house with a yard and no shared walls with anyone, to mid-rise apartment buildings, and many things in between.
And it's a sort of collective coordination problem, too. People can move from city to city, and if a city decides to allow lots of new housing, they'll get lots of new people, which not only increases density, but also lowers rents in other cities by a little bit, while not lowering the rents/property prices in their own city by as much as they would if inter-city migration weren't a thing.
So when a city allows more housing, it benefits other cities. It's best if every city does this -- but because the incentives are a bit messed up, most cities in California have decided to "defect" and block construction. (There are other reasons -- people with the most free time to attend city council meetings and run for positions in local government are much more likely to be landowners or landlords, so they are over-represented, while renters are under-represented).
If every city and town builds a some more housing, you can get a much more drastic increase in affordability than if only some are shouldering all the burden, without massive changes to any one place. Which is why I think it makes sense to handle this at the state level.
I'm not proposing allowing a chicken processing plant in a residential area, but it's no one else's business if you want to build a duplex on a lot you own.
So either you go right wing and you have no right to restrict developers on land they legitimately procure
Or you go left wing and you have no right to impose (?accidentally...ish?) racist, classist, and generationalist zoning results on people.
Or you go centrist and point out that population growth, livability, and cost for practically everyone is raging out of control because of zoning laws.
Now, that's all policy reasoning on idealistic grounds, which of course matters not at all! The real political calculus is rich (landed) vs the young / middle class / poor (priced out).
Otherwise it's a tyranny of the majority over the minority (of property owners) that want something not low-density.
If a landowner in a low density community wants to build high density housing on their property, why should the city be allowed to stop that?
Also, the "builder's remedy" specifically avoids EIRs of almost all types, including traffic and parking.
The City of Monterey has a page[2] describing this as well as a published wait list [3], with the first project having submitted in 2003.
I don't know if they deny construction permits, but you'd have to be pretty foolish to actually construct residences that can't be legally occupied because they lack potable water.
[1] https://www.mpwmd.net/regulations/water-permits/water-meters... [2] https://www.monterey.org/city_hall/community_development/pla... [3] https://files.monterey.org/Document%20Center/CommDev/Plannin...
They should, but they have very few incentives to do a great job, as they're funded either way.
So instead we have this dumb system where every city gets a target number from the state and can choose where the housing goes, as long as they can show they meet the target. "Local control!"
Most of them are choosing really dumb spots - Orinda is trying to put 200 low income homes on a freeway shoulder near the Caldecott Tunnel, Palo Alto has two Caltrain stations but is trying to put all the new apartments near the 101 freeway.
you make it sound like it is a bad thing.
Near the freeway and in walking distance of downtown is one story, near the freeway and next to absolutely nothing else is another. https://eastbayforeveryone.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/20...
I think it should really be decided at the metro area level. Since job markets exist at that level, having housing decisions there avoids the problem where a city benefits from a booming economy but refuses to provide housing to anyone participating in that economy, shoving that responsibility onto the other nearby cities.
I reject this principle. Cities are not sovereign.
Also the whole idea behind the suburban experiment was the idea that it was a finished state. That there was absolutely no need to densify or plan for growth, because more suburban land could just be annexed.
What US city has actually done this though? More often than not, their councils are stacked with NIMBY types that let growing pains fester forever.
I would be very happy if Sunnyvale/Santa Clara started to look a bit more like seoul.
If you want your own undisturbed 10,000 sqft domain, like a British lord of old, you can move to Idaho. Or pay a huge premium to compete for a limited pool of available low density land.
It has many issues, but the modern tall buildings in Mumbai are amazing and are the solution to many of their issues.
If the US would start to build new buildings like Mumbai or Singapore more Americans would realize just what luxury and space a condo could have!
Mumbai needs more walkability (through super blocks and such), better trash etiquette (more trash cans - especially for the middle classes new fascination with dogs), and it needs 1000x more livable square feet.
The “toll” to be on the bridge is the cost of ownership of motorized transport. Wealth segregation by neighborhood is also a thing. This segregation is executed similarly to how it is in North America or Europe.
FWIW, in Mumbai they differentiate a bridge to be road over water and a flyover to be road over other road or residence.
All of these can look like they fit in the neighborhood too quite easily.
Feb 1st is the deadline and court challenges need to see their way through.
San Jose is mostly zoned single family homes with lots of parking, yet there's plenty of traffic. Maybe it's the ample space devoted to parking and driving that's the real problem, as it forces you to drive.
I think the next step is providing more services closer to people in these upzoned areas, as well as good transit to commercial centers so they can opt out of driving entirely.
How did this authority come to be in the first place? How did cities magically get this authority to dictate how people should build. I imagine such laws didn’t always exist, how far back does this stuff go? Likewise how did states get authority over the cities on local matters that have to be obeyed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning_in_the_United_States#Or...
Then, they get approved.
Then the city gets it's zoning laws in place and regrets the approval of your massive ugly development.
But then you go to the city with an offer... Send in a new, more reasonable plan. If they approve the new plan, great. If they don't, you're gonna build what they originally approved, and they hate.
Same energy as states who pay for their homeless to come to California and then blast hit pieces about how terrible California is to live in.
The thing is that in order to expand infrastructure, you need
- public pressure and demonstrated need for that expansion
- tax dollars to fund the expansion
and the quickest way to get both of those is... to build more homes and put people in them. I don't think there's any magic involved, just time and necessity.
No, the maximum property tax rate is much less than the 1978 rates under Prop 13 rate caps, which is the reason Prop 13 led to local government being dependent on state funding transfers.
You mean taxed based in full value for the first year, then decaying (as a share of full value) thereafter, because of the Prop 13 assessment increase limit to the lower of 2% or the rate of inflation. But maintenance cost increases over time aren't capped the way prooertt taxes are, even if property taxes were adequate to initially maintain infrastructure.
They think that, as Santa Monica did, cities will quickly file compliant housing plans and get their zoning power back, with very few (compared to need or current size, not past pace of new development) builders remedy units, and after this initial round, cities won't play chicken with the law anymore.
No magic, just incentives driving city planning priorities.
If a city still refuses to comply, they will just be shooting themselves in the foot.
" There’s a lot of questions still unanswered, though. This will all be legally challenged since we’re in new territory with the HAA. Many developers still can’t believe it and aren’t sure to propose nor have readied capital to propose projects. Other builders since the Santa Monica news appear quite excited to build apartments in exclusive, expensive enclaves they’ve always wanted to. There’s a political question too about whether HCD will let substandard housing elements through just to not anger cities and incite backlash. "
Very likely the 'political question' will not be limited to 'whether HCD will let substandard housing elements through'.
But on the other hand, the coalition of rich neighbors could organize a counter-offer to buy out neighbors who want to leave. A bit like lands are bought up by conservation groups to prevent development. Put a price on how much you want to preserve your neighborhood.
They could even buy out the developer who purchased a spite sale, unless there are deed restrictions in that sale. Most developers are also doing it as a business, not for idealism, so it there ought to be a price point where they see it is more lucrative to fold than to go forward with the building project.
I'm not sure I understand the economic effect of something like this. At first blush it almost seems like the same feedback loop as land value taxes. But, it also creates a game-theoretic scenario where the coalition is pumping up the price of their own neighborhood and increasing the potential gains for the next defector, at which point the values could rapidly unwind if the coalition loses its way.
Free money for defection and could easily exhaust the resources of this coalition.
You really do not realize how big (or small, rather) apartment complexes are. 100-unit building is the size of 6-7 single family homes (or maybe 3 McMansions), and maybe twice as high. It would barely be noticeable in such neighborhood.
See this for example: https://ctexaminer.com/2021/10/23/100-unit-apartment-complex...
With parking minimums of 2 spots per unit, your standard 800 sq ft apartment requires another 600 sq ft of parking. And units can be stacked relatively cheaply, parking can't.
This "hack" is apparently used in famous "no zoning" Houston to keep exclusive neighborhoods exclusive (https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/houston-doesnt-have-zoning... )
Virtually every affluent residential neighborhood in Houston has strict private deed restrictions — and, remarkably many of those deed restrictions can be enforced by the city. That’s why River Oaks, Houston’s wealthiest neighborhood, doesn’t have apartment buildings or office buildings in the middle of the neighborhood.
https://www.cnet.com/culture/george-lucas-to-build-affordabl...
I do wonder if anti-trust could be applied against such a "don't sell" pact, especially if it was successful enough to capture an entire town. Probably not, but that sort of anti-competitive behavior should most definitely be illegal, with stiff penalties for those who participate.
And how about estate sales? Are the out-of-state heirs going to care to who their parent's property is sold? Or are they just going to go for the top dollar?
If nobody wants to sell, nobody wants to sell.
But eventually...
Change will happen, people would gladly pay a normal Bay Area house cost to get 1/10 of an Atherton house and live in that school district
School districts/boundaries being so unequal is at least partially the result of zoning policy that makes it harder for people of less financial means to move into affluent areas.
I saw a counterexample living in Munich, just in the sense that the differences between neighborhoods in apparent wealth were much less stark than in the US. Almost everywhere looked vaguely middling, very few places looked obviously rich or poor. And so it's no surprise that the differences between public schools was lesser too.
> HCD reviewed SF’s housing element and said it “largely compiled” with the state’s rules, even though it was heavy on promises. As such, SF will not be subjected to the builder remedy on Wednesday.
(But it's an interesting piece in general and you should read the whole thing for important context!)
LOL. It's things like this that let me know how old I am.
And to some degree, the citizens have been right, when fighting individual projects. Delay a project long enough, and the financial incentive to build can be eliminated, so the developer moves on. Frivolous, baseless lawsuits are a great way to do that. But when it comes to fighting the State, there is no financial incentive to disappear and make the State stop fighting. There is only the law.
Homeless people typically have zero income. They will qualify for exactly zero of the new housing these "unzoning" laws permit.
This is not my understanding. 70% of the homeless in SF had an apartment before they became homeless. They had income, but weren't able to continue to afford the apartment. There's certainly a portion of people who have no desire to be productive, but it's far from all of the homeless or even a majority.
Homeless people are an annoyance but so is extremely dense housing to the point that local resources and infrastructure are overloaded. In addition, I'm skeptical that the new housing developments will even resolve the homeless problem, as its not really targeting the root cause of the issue. Most of the homeless aren't keen on helping themselves, either. You'd have more luck shipping them off to coal mines to work than this, I reckon.
If you want to end homelessness in California build affordable housing everywhere and hire the homeless to be go-fors on construction projects.
There is absolutely no reason that there should be sub five story buildings in downtown San Francisco when there are people living on the street.
Imagine if people could start building these cool buildings from AI: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-01-31/architect... but for large scale residential housing. You could have a whole new generation of architectural firms building the future of urban living.
Oh and we just figured out how to make Roman concrete https://www.popsci.com/science/roman-concrete/.
You have no idea how exciting this is.
For a bit of background, a big problem with housing in the US is that people became property owners and the whole system became financialized so the voters became incentivized to oppose housing to increase the value of their own homes. They also voted themselves massive generational tax breaks (eg Prop 13).
The net effect is that almost all the polices you see around this are demand side, making it easier to buy a home. Why? Because this increases values. It's ineffective and everyone knows it. They just don't care.
But what CA is doing here is one of the first large scale supply side policies with actual teeth and it's great to see. These cities have really fucked around and are now finding out. You see the same tactics too. Complaints about "maintaining character" and focusing new housing on poorer areas, which are both exclusionary and discriminatory policies.
Well-intentioned laws in CA have been effectively weaponized to fight more and new housing (eg CEQA). Approvals processes can take years and really add to the cost. Even things like parking minimums are intentionally used to kill higher density housing (eg in LA).
The builder's remedy mentioned here bypasses all local zoning and allows a court to approve plans. When Santa Monica fell out of compliance it saw approvals for thousands of new units. I really hope this happens in much of the Bay Area.
What I find particularly disheartening is many self-identified "progressives" are the biggest NIMBYs. Denying people affordable housing is state violence.
Palo Alto has fought these rules and I'm glad they will be enforced. When I first moved to Palo Alto in the early 80s it had a very progressive climate: a couple of SRO buildings, lower average income than some of the neighboring towns, a lot of social support programs, and decidedly un-fancy retail. But the flood of gold-seeking people who showed up for the dotcom boom allowed the real estate interests to seize control of the city council and in general made the town much snootier. The SRO hotels turned into boutique hotels and a lot of long term residents were ejected. Well those assholes are reaping what they have sown, thank goodness. Perhaps we'll recover some of the chill experimental vibe thanks to an influx of new people.
I hadn't realised the housing shortage issue stretched back decades. It sets an interesting context for Prop 13 (basing the tax base on the purchase price, not generally on assessed value) since the zoning rules were so exclusionary. Basically, shows that the State's tax difficulties are themselves the consequence of exclusion.
I wonder how this will work outside the dense areas. For example, Calaveras county has a shrinking population, but the main sources of jobs and taxes is construction. With no constraints on construction will there be a small boom in new development, tearing down virgin forest in order to make empty developments?
From TFA: "The “builder’s remedy” is a very old law from the 1990s"
Ah, the ancient times!
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/signature-...
And if the pressure for a statewide emergenct declaration on the housing crisis bears out, well, a lot could happen without legislative change.
The developers still have to abide by construction laws - safety, and I think environmental impact. All that’s released (AFAIK?) is the zoning-based “no” from cities (and when within a certain distance from public transit hubs, maybe).
That article doesn't mention it because that's not correct. It's not tied to transit.
https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/yimby-triumph-in-califor...
Prior to these changes, so much new housing was forced into the urban-wildland interface that entire neighborhoods regularly burned in our seasonal wildfires. The hope is these rule changes will force cities that use land inefficiently to densify rather than encourage more sprawl.
Probably? I live in Michigan, which (with the exception of two spots) has no meaningful limits on construction. Even the cities that technically have-and-enforce zoning, waive all the rules constantly anytime a developer asks.
And yes -- it means developers can build almost anything they want, almost anywhere they want. (Truly anything, I live next to a 15-story concrete castle apartment building that a developer built on what was once a trailer park).
Unfortunately, it does not mean you get lower cost of housing (prices here are still astronomical, and while they look cheaper in comparison to California, is only because of the severely reduced income locals make -- prices are still at record-all-time highs)
But it does mean, developers routinely cut down entire forests or farmland for new suburbs anytime they'd like. If you want a house made of sticks and cardboard, we have loads and loads of them for 'just' $450k. Years worth of 'inventory' here.
You don't believe in supply and demand? I'm not saying you have cheap housing. I'm saying you would have more expensive housing if there were fewer of them, the same way GPUs are more valuable when there are fewer of them.
The bad outcome is the rich who are looking for alternate investments will buy up all the labor and materials and build construction for themselves and will build rentals. That's the bad outcome.
The awful outcome, and likely outcome is that the labor and materials will be bought by newly formed real estate companies that will build rental property that is ugly and expensive - because they control the market more and more as they merge into 2 super landlord companys.
- Constructing a new building isn't as cheap as when the existing structure was built. For instance, my home cost about $15,000 to build 100 years ago. Today the structure itself is worth more than that. Inflation matters here.
- People maintain and improve their homes. New kitchens, roofs, flooring, furnaces, siding, etc. In essence you are rebuilding a home 1 piece at a time from the day it is made. If you don't then the house gets to a point it can't be lived in.
People who haven't looked at new build prices for 10 years are shocked at what it costs today.
We still have more lumber than land. In a very hand-wavy way we have more labor than land. The limiting factor is always what drives the price.
[1] I chose Philly because of a good clickable property tax browser https://property.phila.gov/?p=881576550, and because it keeps separate land vs. improvement assessments.
[2] This is in no way a statement that Rittenhouse Square should be developed. Parks are good. https://property.phila.gov/?p=885705260
[3] https://property.phila.gov/?p=881520352
https://property.phila.gov/?p=492129100 https://property.phila.gov/?p=581427500 https://property.phila.gov/?p=212348000 https://property.phila.gov/?p=344136100
1) The nominal land cost has huge jumps up and down. From 2016->2017, all of these properties had their land value lowered 60-70%: $150k->$44k; $166k->$59k; $75k->$32k; $279k->$96k. I find it hard to believe that property prices swung that much, especially since the total appraised value remained constant.
2) The price of the land depends on the zoning of the land. A lot which can't be subdivided further or which can't have multi-unit housing will be constrained by what a single family is willing to pay for the lot. If you compare the last property ($140k land assessment / 19k ft2) to a smaller lot nearby [0] ($50k land / 2.4k ft2), you can see a huge difference in the land price per ft2: $6.7/ft2 vs $20.4/ft2. This price difference reflects legal constraints on what can be done with the lot. If the larger lot could be subdivided, it should be closer in price per ft2 to the smaller lot and would be worth ~$390k. If the total assessed value remained constant, that would be 1.25:1 for land:building.
[0] https://property.phila.gov/?p=344121100
3) Furthermore, the price of the building itself depends on the scarcity of housing. With plentiful land to build new housing, old housing loses value quicker. An old house in a constricted market has more value because it's existing housing on a scarce plot of land. Even though the value is assigned to the building, that building is more valuable because of the plot of land it's associated with.
Induced demand is a thing, as (and much more common) are demand curves that are flat enough that shifting the supply curve to the right by some large fraction of the current market clearing quantity has no discernable effect on the market clearing price.
Real life supply and demand involves more than the simplest Econ 101 illustrative examples of the general direction of the ideal relation.
See e.g. https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/market-rate-development-...
A lot of people I know in Colorado found this out when their homes burned down. They had the structure insured for like $500,000 and found out that rebuilding their home that was built 20 years ago would cost around $1,000,000.
A friend recently had a multi story addition put on his house, and of course additions always cost more because there's some amount of demolition and working on an existing site, so the new footings have to be underpinned, etc. It's also a large kitchen and the existing kitchen space had to be demo'd and rebuilt into a new, basic room. The upstairs connected to a hallways but there was some work. Anyways, the cost, all in was over $500k. Even if he didn't use Marvin windows, Wold appliances, nice cabinetry, etc it would have been like $400k. And yes you can go lower. But don't be fooled. A lot of the cheaper construction you see is not only made with awful materials and lazy/inexperienced tradesmen, but is also track housing or similar no modifications allowed type things.
Are you taking into account the inflation we've experienced? If the mental anchor against which you compare this "all time high" is 2015, for example, then we've seen over 20% inflation. Over 33% inflation since 2008.
By these numbers, up about 78% since 2008 and 2015, which almost matched.
Up 50% since the previous peak in 2005, so yeah all-time high.
You are confusing cause & effect here.
The building occurring downtown is insane. I haven't seen anything like it since the booms in Shanghai and Dubai.
Ah, the good ol' Grandville castle.
It boggles my mind every time I drive past that someone decided to spend tens of millions to build... whatever the hell this is. https://cdngeneral.rentcafe.com/dmslivecafe/3/610177/DJI_018...
I think that I'm missing something here unless there happens to be an infinite supply of people looking to move to your city.
I'm not sure what you mean by tax difficulties, if you mean the state has trouble raising revenue, that's certainly not the case. CA is running a large budget surplus right now. If they only relied on property tax it could be an issue, but they also have an income tax, so the revenue outlook in CA is pretty good right now.
The nice thing about property taxes is that housing prices change slowly, even in boom/bust cycles -- essentially they are coupled to a dashpot. While income, especially in California with a progressive system coupled with most of the high earners paying cap gains, leading to large swings (further influenced by the Fed).
Also property taxes are the main source of municipal and school funding; with property taxes artificially pulled low, the state needs to step in instead. In addition, the structure of Prop 13 discourages people from moving which reduces the availability of housing stock.
Prop 13 wouldn't be so bad if it excluded commercial buildings (including rental properties) and didn't have the huge inheritance loophole. But neither of those is likely to change.
The reason I mentioned the coupling between prop 13 and exclusion: Californians voided all restrictive covenants in the 60s, which lead to more selective zoning restrictions; Prop 13 came from conservative southern californians and (due to the stickiness mentioned above, including a retroactive valuation reduction and the inheritance loophole) locked a lot of "those" buyers out of the existing neghborhoods.
On the other, I agree that it’s ridiculous someone can be paying 10-20% what their neighbor pays in property taxes, and that this causes an inefficient allocation of resources.
If we ever want to solve this we IMO need some kind of gradual phase out. We can immediately/over a 5-20 year interval move the taxes to what they should be on commercial and non-primary residences. But for actual primary homes probably the only way we can do it is if we let the property taxes be deferred until the current homeowner dies. No matter how much pain the policy causes we must under no circumstances cause a single grandma to lose her home.
Where I live now has a couple of nice options for aging in place – dedicated 55+ apartment building, with government support for low-income; and a co-op where the units are smaller but they have more shared space. A lot of older neighbors have spoken glowingly the latter because it's all ages and it since they see their neighbors more they don't feel lonely the way someone in a detached suburban home might. I wish we'd build a lot more stuff like that where someone has an option which doesn't break the bank and avoids those other downsides.
Prop 19 passed in 2020 IIUC partially solves the problem you mention because people 55+ can maintain lower tax rates after moving, but of course it is just a bandaid. Definitely the better solution would be for the real estate market to not be so expensive that people can’t afford to move/live in the general type of housing they want though.
My knowledge is stale - I moved away from California a decade ago - but I think you’re right about downsizing at least to the extent that they can actually find a cheaper place.
There's a "homesteading exemption" for taxes on a primary residence. This means your property taxes can't shoot up massively if your property suddenly gets more expensive.
This pushes even more of the property tax burden onto investment properties, which sounds good to some in theory, but one affect it has is that rental properties are investment properties. So rents go up a lot. This means renters end up paying a lot of property taxes, which is, uh... a surprising outcome.
Prop 13 is IMO the biggest problem that California faces, because it’s the most intractable to solve (it would be political suicide to try to roll it back now that so many people are paying way lower taxes than they would without it) but is also a major contributor to a lot of other problems in the housing market. I can think of ways to roll it back slowly, but let’s be real, people will freak out if they think they’ll have to start paying 5x what they currently pay in property taxes, even if it’s after they die or in 20 years from now.
https://taxfoundation.org/state-property-taxes-per-capita-20...
California property taxes for $1620 per capita, which is average. How does this translate to “so little tax from property”?
It should have a better mix of tax sources.
Remember the size of the state’s economy and population would make it one of the large EU countries.
IMO Prop 13 is at the root of a lot of dysfunction in CA, but personally I hate it because these extra income+sales taxes put a lot of tax burden on new residents and young professionals.
Mountain View has much more around the San Antonio Shopping Center where it's starting to look like SF.
I'm wondering if there will be random developments that will sink property values because big city blight comes with : homeless camping, property crime, and so forth.
Palo Alto is unique in California in that it is/was legal to dwell in a vehicle because it wasn't criminalized since the law had to be rolled back due to a Ninth Circuit ruling about another law in LA.
China has a lot of options for cheap housing, none at all legal, but rule of law isn’t really a thing there so just keep things quiet. In Beijing, you can rent a windowless sub-basement room for a few hundred kuai a month, mold is an issue, but it’s better than other options. Waitresses also often crash on the floors of the restaurants they are working in, so the windows are all blinded over in cardboard after closing time. This is all working poor, it is really hard to be a vagabond in China because the social safety net just isn’t there for it (and you can’t just crash under an overpass because the police are already in to that).
Prop 13 uses assessed value, but only allows unlimited assessment increases at sales, some other non-exempt transfers, and a few other qualifying events, otherwise, the year-over-year increase in tax basis value is limited to 2% or the rate of inflation, whichever is lower.
But, also missed in most discussions of Prop 13, is that it capped property tax rates at 1%, which (even before considering the value missed by the assessment cap) is not only way below the common rates prior to Prop 13, its way below the national average effective property tax rate.
Prop 13 isn't a result of exclusive zoning, it is—like exclusive zoning—a measure that protects status quo elites at the expense of everyone else.
> For example, Calaveras county has a shrinking population, but the main sources of jobs and taxes is construction. With no constraints on construction will there be a small boom in new development, tearing down virgin forest in order to make empty developments?
Neither Calaveras County nor any city therein has a noncompliant housing element, so “no constraints” due to builder's remedy is not an issue. OTOH, other places in the state getting more housing is more likely to accelerate Calaveras County population loss.
To people who are freaked out that this is going to turn into the opening scenes from Pixar's "Up", more often than not, in suburban areas, this will just result in a few dwellings per lot, imagine 2-3 town homes on what is now a .25 acre single family lot.
That said, a "missing middle" program is a really helpful thing to help cities get their Housing Element into compliance so if you think there is a place where this density would be helpful, send a comment to your city council and cc HousingElements@hcd.ca.gov.
As an example, I live on a multi-dwelling lot (effectively town-homes without shared walls) in a predominately SFH neighborhood. It's very high density by California standards, but it's quite desirable and not apartment-block style living.