[HN Gopher] Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
___________________________________________________________________
Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
Author : g8oz
Score : 207 points
Date : 2021-07-03 13:55 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sfchronicle.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sfchronicle.com)
| travisgriggs wrote:
| When I read articles like this, where the solutions proposed are
| to make it more efficient (legally, operationally, fiscally) for
| more people to live in smaller places, I'm curious how that
| resolves with others' sense of the desire for privacy.
|
| I realize the privacy conversation here usually revolves around
| ad tech, but for me at least, it's more general than that. And I
| find that the denser the population, no matter how optimal it is,
| creates more constraints for me as a human being.
|
| There's a sweet spot in the human equation for me, when I am the
| most liberty to enjoy self determination and free well, but also
| rub shoulders socially with enough of the rest of mankind that I
| enjoy the magnification that happens when we work together.
|
| So I applaud efforts to get people in equitable homes--I have a
| married daughter who takes care of my wonderful wonderful 20mo
| grand twins, and I fear and angst for their future housing
| prospects in this country--but if they're just cages for rent in
| the end, did we really get the real prize?
| gnopgnip wrote:
| A multi family home in practice is much larger than a
| comparably priced single family home. They can both be owned,
| or rented
| muststopmyths wrote:
| It's received wisdom on HN that the Bay Area housing crisis is
| caused by NIMBYs and restrictive zoning laws.
|
| On the other hand my sense, based on anecdata, is that a large
| proportion of the condos constructed in the past 15-ish years in
| eastern SF (Embarcadero, Rincon, etc.) and SOMA/Dogpatch are
| owned by absentee landlords as investment property. Since these
| folk are mostly rich SV types (or wealthy overseas investors),
| they can afford the eye-watering prices. Their renters are also
| well-paid techies, so they can pay the hyper-inflated rents.
|
| So I believe the housing crisis is instead a result of society
| deciding that no one actually has a right to a home of their own.
| Instead, it is in fact a good thing to engage in literally rent-
| seeking behavior[0] and we should all be in a race to accumulate
| the most wealth we can to pass down to our offspring, so that
| they can continue this cycle.
|
| If my analysis is correct, then more construction will just
| result in more of the same. Rich people buying 2 and 3rd homes
| that they rent out to people who are here for the short term and
| can afford inflated rents.
|
| It seems to me a good first step would instead be to slap a
| Vancouver-style 15% property tax on any home that is not occupied
| by the owner (not just foreigners). Of course, there is no way in
| hell Californians will actually do something that requires actual
| self-sacrifice, so that's never going to happen.
|
| ( I have more anecdata about SV residents buying 2 or 3 houses in
| the Austin area in order to capitalize on the real estate boom
| caused by other SV ex-residents moving there, further driving up
| costs in the area. But let's restrict the discussion to SF Bay
| Area for now).
|
| This theory is obviously based on feels rather than data, since I
| don't know of any way to actually get ownership/residence data
| broken down this way. That would probably violate all kinds of
| privacy laws.
|
| I would love to be disabused of my notions with data. Not
| motivated-reasoning "studies" by think-tanks who have vested
| interests, but actual data.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking (the rent seekers
| in this case being all the homeowners who resist any property tax
| reform which would affect their bottom line)
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| Since you bring up the notion of Vancouver's empty homes and
| speculation taxes I'll follow up with the impacts of that:
|
| * These taxes added 8000+ 'empty' homes to the rental pool
| overnight.
|
| * Many "luxury" condos in development changed into purpose
| built rental for locals.
|
| * The vacancy rate barely budged and remained stubbornly low.
|
| So while it was definitely worth while to bring in these taxes
| in order to instantly create more housing, and change the
| nature of what sort of housing was being created, effectively
| nothing has really changed in the grand scheme of things.
| Vancouver still has a housing scarcity problem, and near zero
| vacancy, and still needs to build much more housing.
|
| I encourage SF to do the same sort of things that Vancouver has
| done, but they will also need to increase apartment development
| massively.
| burlesona wrote:
| The number of people who want to move in to live and work in
| the Bay Area so vastly exceeds the supply of new housing that
| it is like a Sotheby's auction where only the richest can win.
| This is reinforced by the fact that it takes so long to get
| permission to build anything that you can only make money by
| developing super luxury property.
|
| In a well-functioning city you can make money building anything
| from mid-market up. Affordable housing is the stuff that was
| mid market 10-20 years ago, or luxury 20-40 years ago.
|
| If you want to see this in the real world, just look at the
| market for cars.
|
| More here: https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-
| build-your-...
| [deleted]
| closeparen wrote:
| Rich SV types don't seek housing because landlords appear to
| rent it to us. We seek housing because we get jobs. Each SV
| type who rents a new home is one who's not competing for an
| existing home.
|
| If you want to put a stop to the kind of development that is
| actually causing SV types to materialize, that would be
| offices. Offices are are generally popular and unobjectionable.
| imtringued wrote:
| Prop 13 killed tax revenue so local governments must obtain
| it through commercial property. It's pretty obvious what the
| problem is. A pro job bias that makes sure there are more
| jobs than housing.
| closeparen wrote:
| I don't think the populist spirit is making an inference as
| complex as "we need to get the tax revenue somewhere,
| better not object to offices even though they also create
| traffic." The bureaucrats might, but the bureaucrats don't
| have that much power; even when they support a housing
| development they get overridden by the community.
| larsiusprime wrote:
| You're basically half way through re-deriving Georgism from
| first principles. Here's a good (but long) primer on the
| subject:
|
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr...
| rcpt wrote:
| Shorter: https://www.landvaluetax.org/history/winston-
| churchill-said-...
| tedunangst wrote:
| So keep building more and more homes for rich people to buy
| until inflated rents collapse and everyone has affordable
| housing.
| wesleyy wrote:
| Rent seeking refers to economic rent, which is not the same
| thing as "housing rent". It has a very specific definition when
| used in the context of economic rent seeking. Renting out
| houses for people to live in is not rent seeking.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Economic rent takes its name from and is a generalization of
| land rent; land rent isn't just an example of economic rent,
| it is the paradigmatic example.
| larsiusprime wrote:
| According to certain economic philosophies, all rent on land
| (but not buildings) is economic rent.
| imtringued wrote:
| Exactly, you can even rent seek by buying a plot of land
| and intentionally keeping the number of units below what
| demand would suggest. E.g. you have a plot with enough
| demand to house 20 people but you only build a single
| family house for 4 people (2 parents 2 children) denying 16
| people the possibility to live there. The land is still
| priced as if it could support 20 people and you make your
| money off of the sale of the land. This is what people buy
| into when they buy their house as an "investment". They
| bank on population growth and increasing demand. If
| upzoning is impossible then you gain nothing from selling
| because you have to pay taxes and then buy another property
| that costs the same amount (which you cant afford because
| of the taxes), turning the real estate wealth into paper
| wealth that has to be paid (your mortgage) for but is
| difficult to draw from except via reverse mortgages.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| Wayback Machine:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20210301050437/https://www.sfchro...
| atomicfiredoll wrote:
| I think that single family housing, especially in cities dealing
| with lack of availability, likely needs to go. And other changes
| need to be made on top of that. But, assuming we were able to
| replace single family housing with 3 or 4 plexes, where does that
| leave home ownership?
|
| I'm concerned the transformation of single family homes to
| apartments would just present another opportunity wealth and
| property to move from private owners to conglomerated investment
| or the rich. Personally, my best experiences have always been
| renting with private owners, so if people have to rent in the
| future, hopefully they aren't stuck doing so from a comparatively
| small number of management companies that control the market.
| CincinnatiMan wrote:
| Something I like about this article is how it gets a bit into the
| financials and the complications that arise. I would love more
| information and detail on this though about the costs of SFH vs
| quadplex vs huge apartment building and so on. Like how do costs
| jump when you have to switch from timber frame to steel frame,
| and things of that nature. Would love to learn more on this if
| anyone knows where it can be found.
| Gimpei wrote:
| Article seems to suggest that SF lots aren't large enough for
| 4-plexes to be economically feasible. I wonder what the minimum
| height is for this to work. Five stories perhaps?
|
| The SF supervisor Mandelman who was mentioned in the article has
| been against all of Weiner's housing bills, so he has zero
| credibility in my book.
| burlesona wrote:
| I lived in a two-unit townhome in SF. The lot on one side was a
| large single family. The lot on the other side was an eight
| unit apartment. All the lots were the same size. They even all
| had parking.
|
| The lot sizes are not a physical problem. They may be a
| political problem (ie. the issue is people don't want new tall
| buildings built).
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Go further. Get rid of all zoning that's unrelated to pollution
| of some kind or strictly a safety issue.
|
| Why is the government involved in whether I can run a business
| from my home? Why is the government responsible for controlling
| where businesses might be located instead of the free market
| controlling that aspect more dynamically?
| jnwatson wrote:
| It has worked pretty well for Houston. Houston is as close to
| free market as you can get. It helps that much of what people
| call Houston isn't actually in any city boundary.
| cguess wrote:
| Except for the massive spread paved over most of the
| marshland and waterways in the area. Resulting in much of the
| city being under water (literally) for days in 2017 when a
| class 1 hurricane, which is pretty common, hit the area.
| rsync wrote:
| Genuinely curious as to how much time you have lived or
| worked in Houston ?
|
| I found many pieces of it - some of which were directly
| related to lack of zoning - to be _aesthetic disasters_.
|
| There seems to be a conception that support of zoning, and
| things like it, need be grounded in some scientific public-
| good maximalism that probably doesn't exist.
|
| I don't feel bound by that at all.
|
| The reason I am against ad-hoc liquor stores being run from a
| walled in front porch of a single-family home converted
| (badly) to a duplex[1] is because _I dislike them
| aesthetically_.
|
| [1] Houston, circa 1999.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| It's easy to value things like aesthetics when you've got
| yours. Rents are taxing people out onto the streets and
| raising the cost of everything, but heaven forbid we offend
| any NIMBY's personal aesthetic tastes.
| rsync wrote:
| "Go further. Get rid of all zoning that's unrelated to
| pollution of some kind or strictly a safety issue."
|
| I keep wondering: How soon until someone proposes that building
| codes drive up housing prices and that code enforcement
| unfairly impacts PoC ?
|
| It seems outlandish but ... part of me thinks it's just a
| matter of time.
| yao420 wrote:
| Well my neighbor works in construction and would park several
| of his giant dump trucks in the street parking and the crew
| would gather outside every morning making a ruckus while
| leaving for the day. It was terrible and I was glad the code
| department put a stop to that and made every person in that
| neighborhood happy.
|
| This reasoning is exactly why I stopped being a libertarian,
| the free market has no recourse mechanisms for actors making
| peoples lives worse.
| ericmay wrote:
| I wouldn't confuse this incident and the solution with
| libertarianism or any other government system because it
| would take a large systematic and philosophical analysis to
| really arrive at an agreed-upon "what is causing this"
| consensus.
|
| Annnnd from the perspective of the person you're complaining
| about this is an incentive for libertarianism, _you_ are
| making _their_ life worse by enacting arbitrary rules that
| make you happy and enforcing those rules with violence.
|
| And it could be that some other inane government rule made it
| so that they had to park trucks where they did in the first
| place.
| nateabele wrote:
| Did you and your neighbors every try _talking_ to the guy?
|
| Government policy and the marketplace aren't the _exclusive_
| ways of managing relationships between people.
| yao420 wrote:
| Of course we did. He told us to "suck an egg". Will
| probably always remember that phrase now.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > This reasoning is exactly why I stopped being a
| libertarian, the free market has no recourse mechanisms for
| actors making peoples lives worse.
|
| Nuisance law _is_ a recourse mechanism in the case you point
| out, and is included in any reasonable notion of "free
| market". (In the more radical notions of libertarianism, you
| and the other guy would simply submit the dispute to a
| mutually-trusted outside arbitrator, with a voluntary
| agreement to abide by the arbitrator's ruling.)
| Retric wrote:
| The reasonable justification is government builds public
| infrastructure like schools, highways, and subways based on
| assumptions about use and population density. It's much harder
| and more expensive to have reasonable infrastructure if you
| can't make accurate predictions.
|
| The de facto justification is indirect negative externalities
| exist like traffic congestion. Also known as _F U I got mine._
| fiter wrote:
| With uses segregated, the "reasonable" argument does not make
| sense to me: infrastructure will have to be maximized because
| there will be big migrations of people based on normal use
| times like going to work. You need twice as much parking,
| twice as much freeway throughput.
| Retric wrote:
| Don't just think in terms of low density around current
| American cities.
|
| Plopping down a subdivisions in a sleepy county can quickly
| overwhelm local school systems, sewage treatment, etc. Even
| just 7% annual growth doubles the local population every
| decade which requires incredible and increasing investments
| in infrastructure. Slowing that down slightly is hardly
| unreasonable and it can help avoid expensive and damaging
| boom / bust cycles.
| jorts wrote:
| Opening a chicken farm or leather tannery in a residential
| neighborhood sounds great.
| zo1 wrote:
| Yeah, but being allowed to have a couple chickens on your
| small plot is an example of allowing sustainable and
| relatively poor living. Can't have that! We want you
| supporting your local supermarket instead! The one that
| delivered that egg from that licensed farm 200km away in the
| middle of nowhere.
| bombcar wrote:
| California has more same regulations on backyard chickens
| than the rural town I'm now in which requires a $50 license
| per hen, max three.
|
| Though you can move just outside town if you want chickens
| I guess.
| markzzerella wrote:
| Having local restaurants and small businesses in walking
| distance instead of international mega corps in driving
| distance sounds horrible too.
| fiter wrote:
| You're replying to someone that specifically mentioned
| pollution as a reason to keep certain uses in different
| zones. Did they edit their comment?
| barney54 wrote:
| If it were possible, it would produce far better outcomes
| than what we are currently seeing in SF. No chicken farmer or
| tanner could afford to build in SF, so that's not much of a
| concern. And it would mean a far more diverse housing supply
| than what we currently have.
| winkeyless wrote:
| Extreme examples. In reality you'll see more service industry
| like bodega, accounting, cafe, etc
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| None of those things are economically viable to put in an
| area that can support residential housing even at the single
| family level of density.
|
| The only way they get there is when housing is built up
| around them.
|
| If you're too lazy to fire up Google maps before you buy well
| then that's on you.
| ghaff wrote:
| My town in MA has a turkey farm with a couple barns in
| basically a residential area. But then it's historically a
| fairly rural farm town.
| rcpt wrote:
| We have honest-to-god oil derricks right in the middle of
| residential neighborhoods in Los Angeles. They even pump oil
| directly from a school campus in Beverly Hills.
|
| But fourplexes? Not a chance.
| zachware wrote:
| I've developed several multifamily projects including my current
| focus, a 72-unit apartment development.
|
| Proposals like these, while admirable, usually miss the mark and
| have little to no impact on housing availability because they
| fail to accept that housing development isn't _just_ about
| zoning.
|
| Impact fees, planning regs (traffic, parking, etc), planning
| delays, NIMBY fights, labor costs...these are all inputs into the
| question of whether a multifamily development makes economic
| sense for a developer.
|
| There is a formula under which you can build market-rate and/or
| affordable housing (sometimes the same) and when that formula
| checks out, you see lots of development.
|
| All of that has to work out to a cost per door and that cost has
| to be recouped in rents that pay for opex and debt. The fourplex
| in the article would cost $562,500/door. A very basic calc of the
| necessary rents would be $4,950.
|
| California, particularly San Francisco, has pressures at every
| step of that formula. So if the Bay Area wants more housing, it
| has to be willing to look at the problem holistically.
| - What role do planning review delays play in increasing the
| costs and perceived risk of acquiring a parcel and going through
| the process? - What % of potential building sites are
| classified as historical properties? - What are the
| parking, traffic impact and roadway requirements that multifamily
| traffic counts will have to mitigate/build for? - What
| power do unions have to dictate building programs? - Who
| can object to proposals?
|
| I'm not suggesting that everything has to be Texas-style free
| markets, but to solve the problem one has to be willing to admit
| that it may require something a bit more comprehensive that
| simply changing zoning.
| lostsubways wrote:
| The zoning isn't everything, but it's definitely one of the
| things that has to change. If everywhere in California had
| Sacramento's ministerial housing ordinance (60-90 day
| approvals, everything as of right), AND zoning reform, AND
| major reduction in impact fees, you'd start to make a dent in
| the problem.
|
| Rezoning is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Currently about 3/4 of the land area of San Francisco is zoned
| to only allow single-family houses (or in some parts duplexes).
| All of the pale yellow areas in
| https://sfplanning.org/sites/default/files/resources/2019-02...
|
| Most of that area is not classified as historical, and a lot of
| it is filled with relatively cheaply constructed and not
| particularly beautiful buildings. The roads in most of that
| area are way wider than currently necessary, but public transit
| is inadequate. The zoning is basically "sleepy low-density
| beach town" rather than "cosmopolitan city".
|
| Changing the zoning of all of those areas to the purple or
| medium orange types is not the only change needed, but it would
| eventually allow something like doubling the population of the
| city without requiring anything taller than low-rise buildings.
| It would probably also force the city to make a bunch of public
| transit upgrades, as the whole western half of the city is
| currently pretty isolated from the more connected eastern half.
| andbberger wrote:
| Sure, single-family zoning is a necessary but not sufficient
| development for housing reform. Can't have density with it, but
| doesn't mean there isn't a laundry list of other things wrong
| with housing in the bay
| DevKoala wrote:
| I am of the idea that we need to focus on building new cities and
| more efficient roads to connect them. I don't want to live in the
| Bay Area particularly, but when I have to go to SF, it sucks that
| sometimes it can take up to 2 hours to commute 30 miles.
|
| As a software architect, it feels as if the common recipe for
| solving a scalability problem is decentralization for which you
| need an awesome messaging system. I do not get why we keep
| centralizing ourselves around the Bay Area. I am not an expert in
| the field so perhaps I am coming from a point of ignorance here,
| but I am genuinely curious as to why.
|
| The USA built the most new cities and roads during the time it
| prospered, and it seems that we stopped doing that. Not long ago,
| Elon Musk was highlighting how fast China continues building
| infrastructures to satisfy the demands of their growing
| population, and I had noticed that too thanks to friends who have
| tons of awesome things to say about their visits. Why we don't go
| that route? It seems like China is kicking our ass there.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| > more efficient roads
|
| It's not possible. It's a geometry problem. Cars take up too
| much space.
|
| And if you increase the size of the roads well, you simply
| induce demand, adding more space inefficient cars to clog up
| the road. This is why places like LA and Houston have never
| solved their traffic problems.
|
| There's only really one way to move people faster, and that's
| to focus on moving the person with more space efficient forms
| of transportation (ie. trains).
| toast0 wrote:
| > This is why places like LA and Houston have never solved
| their traffic problems.
|
| If you put a population cap on LA or wherever, you could
| solve traffic with construction. Instead, the goal is to
| increase road capacity inline with the increased trip demand
| that's largely driven by population growth.
|
| Sure, there are some trips that are taken when there's
| sufficient capacity, and not when there's not, and you can
| call discovery of those trips induced demand. But most of the
| demand increase is from population increase. LA is actually
| putting in a lot of mass transit, and it gets a surprisingly
| high (to me anyway) ridership, but it's pretty hard to
| provide a comprehensive solution to the commute needs of the
| area when there's no real centralization of workplaces or
| housing or even retail or amusement. All of those things are
| more or less distributed throughout the greater LA area, and
| people live in multi-income households, so relocating to be
| transit accessible for all earners is difficult. It's really
| hard to beat point to point time of a flexible, if congested,
| car vs inflexible transit lines if you have to make more than
| one transfer.
| DevKoala wrote:
| That's good too. Let's rethink transportation.
| scythe wrote:
| >I do not get why we keep centralizing ourselves around the Bay
| Area. I am not an expert in the field so perhaps I am coming
| from a point of ignorance here
|
| The background: other cities exist and have existed. Companies
| can locate anywhere.
|
| Centralization exists in many industries. It's not a phenomenon
| unique to tech, the Bay Area, or the United States.
|
| Desirable cities also exist in China. The government is
| constantly dreaming up ways to get people to stop moving to
| Beijing and Shanghai.
|
| This situation cannot be merely wished away. The tendency for
| an industry to concentrate in a particular city is historically
| broad and durable.
| DevKoala wrote:
| > This situation cannot be merely wished away. The tendency
| for an industry to concentrate in a particular city is
| historically broad and durable.
|
| We have never seen these population levels in the USA, and a
| country with a bigger population seems to be tackling the
| problem with a level of success by building more cities.
|
| Also, perhaps those other cities need to offer incentives for
| the companies to move. I just don't think we are tackling the
| problem the proper way.
| elbasti wrote:
| > and more efficient roads.
|
| The efficiency of roads is limited by the fact that the
| vehicles occupying them are large, individually piloted, and
| have slow reaction times.
|
| Throughout is limited because, as cars go faster, they need to
| be spaced out more.
|
| We have known this for seventy years. Automobile highways
| simply cannot work for ultra high throughput corridors.
| DevKoala wrote:
| Fine, let's evolve our transportation units. We just need to
| rethink the problem as a whole.
|
| I don't want to go into conspiracy theory territory, but it
| does seem as if there are powerful entities that are invested
| in maintaining the status quo or perhaps it's just
| incompetence.
| ericmay wrote:
| It's both. There's a lot of "we've always done it this way"
| and "what would I ever do without taking my car
| everywhere???" And then there are construction companies,
| automobile companies, and oil and gas companies that employ
| a lot of people. Kind of hard to employ those people if we
| built more sidewalks and bike lanes, and built medium-
| density mixed use neighborhoods.
|
| Where's the lobby against the automobile industry and all
| the deaths that cars cause? Aren't car wrecks the #1 cause
| of death of teenagers? "But utility of cars!!" Well that
| utility only exists because we've decided to create it, not
| that it's actually necessary.
|
| If in reading this comment you find yourself disagreeing,
| think about the alleyways and layout of Lago d'Orta for
| example. Oh but how do they live without 2 cars per
| household!?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, double the occupant density of the city is only going to
| double the congestion on the (already heavily congested)
| freeways.
|
| There needs to be a serious re-think on public transportation.
| plank_time wrote:
| People are stupid if they think this will fix things.
|
| I went to the peninsula looking at houses and the new trend is to
| add ADUs as part of the house or in the back.
|
| You know why?
|
| To help the owners pay off their $3M houses they used to be $1M 8
| years ago. This then figures into the calculus of how much you
| can afford to buy a house for. What is an unaffordable
| $8000/month mortgage now becomes $6000/month. So people keep
| bidding higher and higher.
|
| People in the Bay Area don't realize that every little thing that
| keeps costs low gets funneled back into house prices. Interest on
| mortgage is tax deductible? Oh that means I can afford more
| house. The public schools are good? That saves me $3000/month so
| I can funnel that into the mortgage. Commute is shorter by 20
| mins? That means $200/month extra I can spend on the house.
|
| There is no answer except for rich employers like Google and
| Facebook to spread out their headquarters across the world. Too
| many rich engineers with their stock going up 10-20x is what is
| fueling the housing crunch. Or create entire new cities along 280
| where there is plenty of space. Invest in new cities, not try to
| cram more people in the same small area.
| rytor718 wrote:
| This problem really does require competent city planning and a
| willing cohort of politicians to _step up_ and make some
| dramatic, timely changes (good luck with that tho). The market
| cannot and will not figure this out, unless we define solution
| as "whatever the wealthy want to do is fine, homelessness and
| rents higher than a mortgage be damned".
| jahewson wrote:
| You're quite right that every saving ends up getting funnelled
| into mortgage payments.
|
| > Too many rich engineers with their stock going up 10-20x is
| what is fueling the housing crunch.
|
| But you've missed the mark here. We haven't seen rich engineers
| push up the price of Teslas or iPhones or Xfinity because these
| things are all in plentiful supply. If there were only 1000
| iPhones in the world, they would cost a fortune and all be
| owned by rich people or speculators. And that's the situation
| with housing, not just in the Bay Area but across much of
| America and Western Europe. The majority of the housing stock
| is owned by the baby boomers who neglected the need to build
| new housing for their children. And where does all this tech
| wealth end up? In that generation's bank accounts when they
| sell or rent.
|
| The people with means are not the problem. The people ripping
| them off are. They might even be your own parents.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| You are looking at this wrong. The point here is making it
| easier to build larger buildings _and smaller units_.
|
| Density and more building will increase _land_ values, yes. We
| shouldn 't strive for land values going down.
|
| But build enough, and _floor_ value go down. This is the
| _efficiency_ of land use increasing ahead of of demand,
| decreasing prices.
|
| Public housing is needed because it is quite the private sector
| cannot be relied upon building enough to decrease precises.
| Even without all he zoning bullshit, housing is still quite an
| inelastic marke.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > People in the Bay Area don't realize that every little thing
| that keeps costs low gets funneled back into house prices.
|
| Because the root cause is the demand for housing in Bay Area is
| far outstripping supply. You must tweak either or both of those
| to move the price. Addressing supply certainly does, but it
| might not be sufficient supply to overcome the demand. But it
| does help the situation.
| nosianu wrote:
| My suspicion is that this might end up like more/wider
| streets and highways: You built it => it will be filled to
| capacity asap and there is no difference in the end, only
| more of the same (literally). Of course, this won't happen to
| infinity but far enough. In the end the area is just too
| attractive, combined with the industries there generate a lot
| of money.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Yes, if SF/Bay Area is just that unique and that much more
| attractive to people than elsewhere, then the only solution
| would be to make another SF/Bay Area.
| selectodude wrote:
| Didn't you know the demand to live in the Bay Area is
| literally infinite and they could build 7 billion
| apartment units and the prices would continue to rise?
| It's truly a special place.
| closeparen wrote:
| 1) A neighborhood with a lot more people in it has
| important qualitative differences compared to a sprawl
| suburb. It can be safe, pleasant, and interesting to walk
| around. It can support local retail and entertainment which
| do not require driving to access. It can support fast and
| frequent transit connections to the broader metro. It can
| support more variation in the age, life situation, and
| wealth of the households who live there. This is a far cry
| from "more of the same."
|
| 2) The problem we're trying to solve here is that the
| people who would fill those new units to capacity are
| instead locked (or pushed) out. _Of course_ if that problem
| is solved they will instead be here. That's the whole point
| of making anything cheaper or more abundant. So that more
| people can enjoy it.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| > it will be filled to capacity asap and there is no
| difference in the end
|
| The difference is VOLUME
|
| House prices or commute times may only fall by the slimmest
| of margins but the number of people who have access to
| whatever the resource is at the same price point will be
| increased.
| seoaeu wrote:
| This is called induced demand. Evidence suggests that for
| housing increasing supply doesn't cause demand to rise as
| quickly[0][1][2].
|
| [0]: https://www.planetizen.com/news/2019/06/104783-doubt-
| cast-in...
|
| [1]: https://cityobservatory.org/another-housing-myth-
| debunked-ne...
|
| [2]: https://www.slowboring.com/p/induced-demand
| skybrian wrote:
| It won't move prices much by itself, but it's still more people
| living on the same amount of land, which counts for something.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Google is not the cause of the housing crisis. It's purely
| demographic. Count up all the people that graduated high school
| in your town and subtract the number of people who died, and
| that's how many houses you need to build that year. Simple
| demographics and this figure has been ignored in most Bay Area
| cities for fifty years.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Most of the people graduating in bay area cities are forever
| priced out of living in their hometowns already. Tech is
| largely to blame at this point because it fuels the extreme
| valuations. Without tech, prices would still be high because
| of lack of new supply for the growing population, but we left
| that price zone years ago.
| 34679 wrote:
| I don't think we should be pointing any fingers at locally
| employed people who purchase a home to live in while we're
| still allowing foreign investors to buy up multiple
| properties they'll never step foot in.
|
| >The percentage of California single-family homes bought in
| all-cash transactions has climbed in the past decade from
| 10 to 25 percent--and many of those are investors from
| Asia.
|
| https://calmatters.org/housing/2018/03/data-dig-are-
| foreign-...
| wumpus wrote:
| People buy homes in Menlo Park with all cash because
| there will be multiple bidders and not being contingent
| on mortgage approval is the only way to win the bidding.
|
| Most of them then go and get a mortgage.
|
| The calmaters article has zero data about "investors from
| Asia". It's an assumption.
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| The median resident doesn't work in tech; even here we're
| only something like 15% of the population. It's mostly cash
| investors who don't necessarily live here that can sustain
| these prices, at least for the moment.
| xienze wrote:
| Ehh I think it's a little more complicated than that, and
| I've argued this for years, that Google et al certainly plays
| a part. Consider their infamous busses, that allow employees
| who simply can't fathom the idea of living in Mountain View
| to easily live in SF and commute. Without those I think
| employees wouldn't be shielded from the consequences of the
| whole "live in the city, commute into the suburbs" thing.
| jeffbee wrote:
| What is "infamous" about a bus? It's a workaround for the
| Bay Area's awful/nonexistent transportation system. Why
| aren't you carping about VMWare's "infamous cars" or the
| millions of cars driven every day to other companies
| without buses?
|
| Anyway the buses only explain partially how Googlers and
| other tech employees can survive the housing crisis, not
| what caused it. The cause is extremely simple. Births -
| Deaths = Growth. Don't overthink it.
| seoaeu wrote:
| > What is "infamous" about a bus?
|
| They're considered a symbol of the class divide. Not a
| cause, but just a visible display of the income
| inequality present in the city. Poor people don't get a
| "workaround" for the the Bay Area's awful/nonexistent
| transportation system, they have to either rely on
| private cars or take public transit anyways.
| rcpt wrote:
| Which is kind of nuts considering that most people on
| those busses can't afford the South Bay houses they're
| commuting past. Otherwise there'd be no bus.
|
| disclaimer: the windows were shot out when I was riding
| the Google bus a couple years back
| seoaeu wrote:
| Eh, 20% of households in the Bay Area earn under
| $36k/year. Obviously shooting out bus windows isn't the
| right approach, but I think you may be underestimating
| just how much of a divide there is between even average
| tech workers and lower class people living in the region.
| rcpt wrote:
| The division between long time Californian landowning
| families and 20-something immigrant engineers somehow
| never comes up.
|
| Someone's whose been making 250k before taxes isn't poor
| by any stretch. But they're nowhere near affording a
| house in Mountain View, hence the busses.
| ghaff wrote:
| >But they're nowhere near affording a house in Mountain
| View, hence the busses.
|
| The buses are because they want to live in the city
| rather than essentially suburban Mountain View. It's not
| like SF is cheap housing.
| jeffbee wrote:
| SF housing is about 20% cheaper than Mountain View
| housing according to recent sales.
| rcpt wrote:
| The busses go to places besides SF
| blo81 wrote:
| Leaving the Bay Area was worth it simply to avoid
| expending emotional energy on arguing about housing
| policy to this extent, particularly to unconsciously
| defend a decision to live there. Continuing to live there
| seems to condemn one to this attitude and approach to
| life, and life is way too short to have constant knife
| fights on HN over which major capitalist entity screws
| over homeless people harder (with some prejudice mixed in
| throughout the thread from working at one of them).
|
| Maybe the market just sucks at housing in general. Keep
| fighting about it instead of admitting the situation is
| hopeless, I guess, and those of us who know better will
| snap up the $160k four bedroom mansions until you figure
| it out.
| rcpt wrote:
| The _actual_ answer is to tax land at it 's current market
| value instead of based on it's purchase price. Then it wouldn't
| be so attractive to park all the money in housing.
|
| Jobs aren't a problem. Bay Area housing has been a mess since
| we'll before the internet and other parts of California, where
| jobs are nowhere near as good, have the same problem.
| austincheney wrote:
| Is the bigger problem availability or pricing?
|
| Where I live (in the US) increasing housing availability drives
| up housing prices proportionally. The way that works is that
| demand is fairly constant due to people moving in driving up the
| population (about 22.4% decade over decade) but there aren't
| geographic limitations on construction. Real estate is a fixed
| resource though and you can only build so many houses before
| filling an area and pushing out the commute. In the spaces left
| over, after large scale housing developments, come the numerous
| large apartment complexes. The increased number of multi family
| dwellings drives up the price of single family houses. I have
| seen this pattern repeated various times in both median and
| extremely wealthy areas. Consequently, avoiding new construction
| either results in depreciation or merely delays the same pattern
| even by up 15 years.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > The increased number of multi family dwellings drives up the
| price of single family houses.
|
| Increased demand for single family homes drives up price of
| single family homes.
|
| People moving in drives up price of land and dwelling units,
| obviously because people need a place to live.
|
| The only thing that can move price down is demand decreasing
| (which will not happen if people are migrating in) or supply
| increasing sufficiently to accommodate demand.
|
| You obviously live in one of the most in demand places in the
| US right now, and so almost no amount of supply will keep up
| with demand to cause prices to stop going up. But at the end of
| the day, price is always a function of supply and demand.
|
| > Consequently, avoiding new construction either results in
| depreciation or merely delays the same pattern even by up 15
| years.
|
| Places that are not desirable to live in simply do not have
| construction. Why would people want to invest in areas that
| they predict will depreciate or stagnate? There is no
| construction in Cairo, IL, but they are not avoiding
| construction to prevent prices from increasing.
| austincheney wrote:
| Increased demand drives up construction rates before it
| drives up prices. The only thing close to what you are
| describing is approximate commute distance.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I do not know what commute distance has to do with
| anything. You can build a million dwelling units 5 hours
| west of Austin in the desert, and they will not sell for
| much if at all.
|
| > Increased demand drives up construction rates before it
| drives up prices.
|
| The rate of construction will go up if prices are going up,
| or the entities doing the construction believe prices will
| go up (and there is capacity to increase rate of
| construction, of course). These are all very fluid
| measures, but all are a function of supply and demand.
|
| There is no situation where increase in supply of a good
| alone by itself causes the price of the good to increase.
| austincheney wrote:
| None of that reflects reality here. Higher prices slow
| construction rates in an immediate area only to drive
| construction further out.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| If the probability that the cost of (land + permits
| (politics) + labor + supplies) will be more than the
| projected sale price is sufficiently high, then it can
| cause a decrease in construction.
|
| But that is irrelevant to the fact that more supply of a
| good relative to demand will not cause prices to rise.
| This might not be easily evident over 1 year, but on a
| longer timescale, if supply and demand is not behaving as
| expected, then there will be arbitrage that someone will
| likely take advantage of.
|
| It is possible that the high price of land in a highly
| desirable area is something there is a lot of demand for
| itself. The only way to bring prices of individual
| dwelling units down in this case is to build more dense
| housing, and that involves a lot of politics.
| austincheney wrote:
| > The only way to bring prices of individual dwelling
| units down in this case is to build more dense housing,
| and that involves a lot of politics.
|
| That has never occurred here. Increased availability
| results in higher prices. The only exception was the
| housing crash of 2008 when banks found themselves holding
| tremendous quantities of properties they didn't want.
|
| This isn't the west coast. Geography for new construction
| is nearly unlimited. If the price of construction is too
| high in one area then nobody will build there when
| instead they can build everywhere else.
|
| If you want to decrease housing prices here you stop
| allowing construction, both residential and commercial,
| which redirects growth to other areas, but that only
| works if exclusivity does not set in.
|
| Perhaps it's the inability of people on the west coast to
| tell the difference between pricing and availability that
| allows prices to run away to astronomical numbers.
| greggman3 wrote:
| Not sure where you're referring to but as an example the
| population density of the top 10 wards of Tokyo are 51k, 50k,
| 46k, 44k, 41k, 41k, 41k, 41k, 40k, 40k per square mile. San
| Francisco's is 17k. So arguably, by those comparisons, there's
| room for 2x to 3x the people in the same space.
|
| SF is more walkable than most USA cities. Tokyo is more
| walkable than SF.
| austincheney wrote:
| Where I live is considerably larger than SF at well above
| 900,000 people but only a pop density of a bit above 2.5k per
| square mile and with plenty more land to grow into.
| ghaff wrote:
| Tokyo has a great subway/rail system but it honestly doesn't
| feel especially more walkable than SF to me except for in
| some particular areas. (And, of course, SF walkability varies
| quite a bit by area as well.)
| stackedinserter wrote:
| Just a friendly reminder that walkability is not the only
| metric for quality of life.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| This seems like a good thread to link to
| https://missingmiddlehousing.com/ , which is a site I've seen
| discussed directly here on HN several times previous. I am still
| in the process of consolidating my opinions on this, but I did
| find it an interesting, useful read.
| smichel17 wrote:
| On the about page, I found
|
| > We call them "Missing" because they have typically been
| illegal to build since the mid-1940s
|
| but I could not easily find and further explanation about why
| this is, etc
| Baeocystin wrote:
| They go in to further detail about that on
| https://missingmiddlehousing.com/about/how-to-enable .
| guruz wrote:
| By coincidence, I watched this video about missing middle
| houses this morning:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCOdQsZa15o
| xivzgrev wrote:
| Has anyone SEEN a typical SF plot? They're basically enough for a
| small 1000-2000 sq ft home, a parking spot, and a little back
| yard.
|
| No one ain't building a four plex on that, unless a) the height
| restriction is also raised b) one parking space per unit no
| longer required and c) some fancy footwork somehow incentivizing
| adjoining plots to combine.
|
| If you had two plots and lifted the restrictions, then I could
| see making 4 units comfortably out of that. But seeing how
| unlikely it is two neighbors sell at the same time, seems
| unlikely
|
| I think this would be more meaningful in other cities, where
| there are a lot of ranch style homes / bigger plots
| mercutio2 wrote:
| San Fransisco has already removed (b) as an issue [0].
|
| When SF made that change, you had people saying the same thing
| "this won't change anything because you can't build the housing
| that's needed".
|
| No one is saying that this, by itself, with zero other changes,
| will resolve the issue. I prefer to applaud individual
| incremental improvements than belabor the fact that this one
| change is not enough.
|
| [0] https://www.livablecity.org/time-san-francisco-say-
| goodbye-m...
| seibelj wrote:
| In Boston and surrounding areas the "triple decker" is very
| common - three 1000 square foot condos, driveway leading to
| compact car parking in back, small yard or none at all. The
| buildings are not connected but the space between is the
| driveway on one side and a small path on the other to store
| trash cans. There are tens of thousands of these if not
| hundreds of thousands.
| Lammy wrote:
| Relevant: https://fiftythree.studio/blogs/news/lets-talk-about-
| why-la-...
|
| "The small apartment buildings that triggered this revolt are
| called are called 'dingbats'. They're those boxy buildings you
| see all over the place with pompous names like 'La Traviata' or
| 'Chateau Antoinette'. These kinds of housing weren't pretty, but
| they were no-frills apartments you could afford if you were an
| actor, or a grocery clerk, or a secretary. This scared the hell
| out of homeowners in rich neighborhoods, because apartments were
| for poor people and minorities. So, we voted for politicians who
| reduced the zoning of LA bit by bit, effectively freezing the
| status quo in place. And after 1970, rich communities just
| stopped building new housing, period. You can see the results
| from the population table below."
| PostThisTooFast wrote:
| This is more pro-developer shilling.
|
| "This scared the hell out of homeowners in rich neighborhoods,
| because apartments were for poor people and minorities"
|
| Bullshit. The fact is that they're ugly, they block out the sun
| from neighboring structures and yards, and they promote an
| influx of people that the community may not be prepared to
| handle.
|
| These "good" bills are full of developer handouts like this:
|
| "Off-street parking of up to one space per unit, except that a
| local agency shall not impose parking requirements in either of
| the following instances:
|
| (A) The parcel is located within one-half mile walking distance
| of either a high-quality transit corridor, as defined in
| subdivision (b) of Section 21155 of the Public Resources Code,
| or a major transit stop, as defined in Section 21064.3 of the
| Public Resources Code.
|
| (B) There is a car share vehicle located within one block of
| the parcel."
|
| These bills regard a single bus stop as "transit," knowing full
| well that it's useless to the vast majority of people. And that
| "car share vehicle" provision is straight-up insulting. WTF, a
| single shared car for FOUR BLOCKS of apartment buildings? And
| what happens when that car gets removed or wrecked? Tear the
| buildings down?
|
| So now you have a shitload of new people and cars taking all
| the street parking from existing residents.
|
| The country isn't "full." What kind of fool promotes rolling
| out the welcome mat for MORE people in an area headed into yet
| another historic drought? We can't support the people who are
| already here, and these shills want to pack MORE in?
|
| Insulting and stupid.
| dheera wrote:
| From TFA
|
| > But while the movement to allow multifamily buildings in
| zones previously limited to single-family homes
|
| How is this even a thing? Couldn't two families just define
| themselves as a big extended family? They could for example
| just have two people marry for a day, move into the upstairs
| and downstairs respectively, and then get divorced the next day
| to hack the system.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| It's 100% a thing in law. Denver up until very recently only
| allowed _2_!!!
|
| They shouldn't have to. That's a ton of work.
|
| At one point in time black people could vote if they 'hacked
| the system' by paying or passing a test.
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| I don't think the "land/development prices are too high to build
| a lot" from the developers will hold if 4plex zoning goes
| through. Land prices for this are high because there are
| extremely few opportunities to do this right now under existing
| zoning, under the new regime there are many more opportunities so
| the market tilts a bit from seller power to buyer power. As for
| construction costs, they suck to build because no one builds
| these right now so each one is basically bespoke, but if they
| suddenly become legal you're going to see a cohort of developer
| specializing in these, learning how to do them well, and cashing
| in big time. You see this in other market (Portland) who have
| made the change already. It seems to be the SF developers are
| just too brain poisoned from the past entirety of their careers
| to see that a better world is actually possible.
| lamontcg wrote:
| They should just largely remove these kinds of zoning laws, raise
| the height restriction to at least 6 stories and maybe require a
| commercial ground floor for buildings over a certain footprint
| and/or on arterials. Allow builders to combine lots. Get rid of
| the parking and driveway requirements as well. At least do this
| in strips down arterials so that entire blocks could be converted
| to high density mixed residential/commercial.
|
| Of course there goes your rents and home prices, but now if you
| actually lived in the surrounding area you'd be able to easier
| walk to shops and with rents being less that'd wind up eventually
| as lower prices and lower cost of living.
|
| Its not surprising that the half-measures they're taking almost
| seems designed to not have a lot of actual uptake.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| I would add removing car parking requirements AND
| simultaneously pay for public transport, dedicated protected
| bike lanes etc to serve this new density.
|
| Like you mention importance of stores.
|
| I would maybe subsidize grocers & shops with tax breaks for a
| few years to get the walkability cycle going. The cart before
| horse problem, build it and they will come theory.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Exactly, make it all walkable/bikable with mass transit down
| the arterials, and incentives and density to attract the
| commerce. Particularly for mom+pop stores/restaurants.
|
| And have it all near enough school and offices that a <10
| minute bus ride can get you to those campuses.
|
| And you can still have islands of SFH/Townhouses that are
| within ~4 blocks of high density (I'd probably prefer that
| since I'm quite introverted most of the time).
| LurkersWillLurk wrote:
| Just going to point out - ending single family zoning doesn't
| mean building a single family house is prohibited, it just means
| that you can build things other than a single family home on a
| particular plot of land.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| This is a very good step, but I wouldn't mind an outright
| prohibition either.
| catern wrote:
| That's hubris. The reason we're in this situation, where a
| lack of dense housing is causing housing prices to rise, is
| because earlier planners were confident 50 years ago that
| single-family homes were the best option, and they weren't
| content to just follow that strategy then and there. They
| decided that this had to be enforced on future people too -
| us, that is.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I didn't say the ban had to be indefinite.
|
| We really need to densify a lot, and do so quickly, and I
| am skeptical the market will get us the quick enough.
|
| Zoning is bad, but don't forget all our good unplanned
| construction was also pre-auto. Looking at e.g. parts of
| Texas, I worry that the self-perpetuation dynamics of cars
| --- which are very strong --- will make a market-based
| transition away from low density too quite tenuous.
|
| I have 0 problem saying in Core areas single family family
| homes have no place, and we should ban them outright. SFH
| zoning is bad because it causes land too be wasted, such
| that future generations have to pay the costs of
| redevelopment rather than building right on "unimproved"
| land. Conversely, "too much density", if there even is such
| a thing, would waste very little land, meaning that a
| mandated switch back to SFH suburbia would be cheap, just
| as it was 50+ years ago.
|
| It's not hubris, it's learning from our mistakes.
| mnouquet wrote:
| > because earlier planners were confident 50 years ago that
| single-family homes were the best option
|
| SFH _IS_ the best options, nobody WANTS to live in an
| apartment if given the choice.
| Sacho wrote:
| You really can't make a categorical statement like that.
| I prefered living in an apartment because the housing
| density meant I had a grocery store, a farmer's market,
| and multiple other commercial hubs within walking
| distance. It also meant that street planning gave
| priority to public transport and pedestrians. There were
| plenty of jobs available within reasonable commute times.
| My neighbours gave me an easy-to-access network of people
| that you could befriend and somewhat rely on.
|
| There's so many positives to living in an apartment that
| are pretty much direct effects of the denser housing.
| raldi wrote:
| Right. A better term would be Apartment Prohibition, which
| swept the country in the 1970s after the Supreme Court said you
| can't just directly exclude people by race.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| wow this got long, but I'm in Denver and we have like 4
| ballot measures to vote on that revolve around this issue of
| race, class, development. Specifically Apartment
| Prohibition!! If anyone is interested. -- denver is going to
| vote on a ballot measure soon to repeal the repeal of
| apartment prohibition and I feel it is similarly driven by
| race & class bias, driven by largely white home owners who
| literally say they want to protect their wealth (below).
|
| Our city council only recently changed zoning to allow an
| increase from only _2_!!! non-related adults living in the
| same place to 5. It 's crazy to me that was ever a limit in
| the first place.
|
| No 3 bed apartments for non-blood relatives?!
|
| The old zoning that was fixed also made it harder and limited
| certain types of group homes, rehabs etc too, especially the
| number of and locations.
|
| One of the filers of this repeal said the following in a
| press article - clear intent imho.
|
| "This affects their very wealth. Their very wealth," said
| George E. Mayl, one of the five voters who officially filed
| to create a referendum committee. "And not only that, their
| children's, their heirs' wealth. Someone's home is their
| single largest investment of their life."
|
| also the way they use 'neighborhood' to me is not so veiled
| language in the context of race and class - just like the
| many policies and laws in the past. It's used as a rhetorical
| excuse just like 'protecting the kids' is often used.
|
| Similarly like Trump & Reps in 2020 made 'protect the suburbs
| from' or 'border invasion' a key message.
|
| There are another 2 housing measures on the ballot that are
| competing.
|
| A big developer spent like $20 million or something to buy
| rights for a golf course in the city that they want to
| develop.
|
| They bought it with a green space park easement... But to be
| profitable they have to repeal the easement so they can built
| over the park. They gambled on their power to change the law.
|
| So they filed a measure to allow them to build more (to be
| fair they still plan on having a park, but less green space
| than currently protected in an easement).
|
| So now there is a competing measure in response to protect
| the park.
|
| I'm for it we don't have a ton of open green space in Denver
| and we can't build more. Let's change laws and remove red
| tape to build UP.
|
| What happens if they both pass? who in the world will be able
| to decipher the two when voting?
|
| And what does it say that corporations & white homeowners
| consistently and so plainly manipulate the law directly for
| their bottom line (oil and gas is a big one here)?
|
| Another one on the ballot around homelessness. HUGE problem,
| we have tents in residential neighborhoods and lots of theft.
|
| But it's pretending to address the problem while really
| making more laws and regulations to criminalize homelessness
| and disallow solutions.
|
| They're so brave to invest in allowing homeless to sleep in
| parking lots lol...
|
| While simultaneously making it harder to create group living
| and the rehab that a ton of homeless individuals would
| greatly benefit from.
|
| Thankfully we do have some push by Rep. DeGette and a few
| others to buy old motels. That's a good investment and would
| actually help.
| ta2164 wrote:
| Nothing stopping Blacks or Hispanics from moving to the
| suburbs except for the laws of supply and demand. It's no
| secret that Asians (a historically disadvantaged POC) flock
| to the suburbs.
|
| By definition not racist.
| raldi wrote:
| The laws of supply and demand are being manipulated by the
| powerful: They're suppressing the ability of supply to rise
| to meet demand, which has the effect of granting windfall
| profits to the haves while keeping the have-nots away from
| areas of opportunity.
| ta2164 wrote:
| Not arguing that, but that is decidedly not racist.
|
| It's why educated Blacks in the US are moving back to red
| Southern states more so than they're moving to blue
| Northeast and Western ones. It's much cheaper and easier
| to build new housing in suburban Dallas or Atlanta versus
| San Francisco, New York, or LA.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| A big thing I've noticed - especially on HN which is
| mostly white and male - is we perhaps fundamentally
| disagree on what 'racist' means.
|
| To me I view racism as a larger umbrella. Includes bias,
| both on the surface but also more broadly what has been
| cultivated as a society. Context is very important in my
| definition viewpoint. centuries of historic oppression,
| which led to unequal wealth, opportunity, and more.
| ongoing bias which discriminates in hiring and
| opportunity and more.
|
| I view this context as a kind of 'prior' (to use a ML
| term I don't fully understand lol) when assessing whether
| or not something is 'racist.'
|
| While on the other hand it seems like some view racism as
| solely a person knowingly and vocally treating one
| ethnicity differently and discriminating openly.
|
| To me I agree with parent and I hold the larger
| viewpoint.
|
| Because of centuries of oppression BIPOC have less money,
| less opportunity, own less housing, communities are
| segregated don't have nearly as much ownership in the
| 'single family neighborhoods' & that community which
| drives the policy we are talking about.
|
| I don't think one can ignore that context, and its
| implicit bias, when looking at why these laws,
| regulations, zoning were (and are) being passed.
|
| And plus many times it's also explicitly racist like the
| latter viewpoint; like the language Trump & Republicans
| use about 'invading' the suburbs.
| JamilD wrote:
| A law can be "not racist", but still be crafted with
| certain intentions in mind; it's easy to exploit certain
| correlations to achieve a certain end result. I don't think
| anyone would argue that there's something innate about
| one's skin color that would make them predisposed to living
| in apartments! But if you want to exclude certain people
| from your neighborhood, and those people happen to often be
| from a certain culture/socioeconomic class...
|
| It's also worth noting that the same laws were applied to
| Asians - exclusionary zoning and housing policies led to
| the consolidation of populations within certain
| neighborhoods, like San Francisco's Chinatown:
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-
| america/how-1800s-racism-...
|
| It wasn't always the case that most Asians could (whether
| financially or politically) move to the suburbs.
| ta2164 wrote:
| >A law can be "not racist", but still be crafted with
| certain intentions in mind; it's easy to exploit certain
| correlations to achieve a certain end result.
|
| Correlation does not imply causation.
|
| >But if you want to exclude certain people from your
| neighborhood, and those people happen to often be from a
| certain culture/socioeconomic class...
|
| No doubt, no one wants to live around low class riff
| raff. That's not race specific, and so, is by definition
| not racist.
|
| >It's also worth noting that the same laws were applied
| to Asians - exclusionary zoning and housing policies led
| to the consolidation of populations within certain
| neighborhoods, like San Francisco's Chinatown
|
| Now you're straw manning hard. No one is making the claim
| that laws of the past weren't racist. Now, they're not,
| and so Asians, Indians, Africans (as in recent African
| immigrants) all flood to the suburbs because suburbs are
| decidedly not racist, and are free of the riff raff.
|
| >It wasn't always the case that most Asians could
| (whether financially or politically) move to the suburbs.
|
| Same for whites. Many/most were locked away in perpetual
| poverty in rural areas.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| You don't think we have laws that are currently racist?
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| Playing the devils' advocate, is the key to affordable
| housing to allow neighborhoods, builders etc. to exclude by
| race?
|
| Folks might not be able to choose where they live, but at
| least they will get cheap housing? Is that a fair trade?
| dillondoyle wrote:
| I don't understand what you are (rhetorically) advocating
| for?
| rcpt wrote:
| California voters approved such a law, 1963 Prop 14, but
| the supreme court struck it down.
|
| But don't lose hope for direct democracy yet! A few years
| later Prop 13, which is arguably worse on minorities
| https://harvardcrcl.org/wp-
| content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/..., passed by a wide
| margin and continues to see strong support from voting
| demographics today.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| Earlier - this started in 1911 when the Supreme Court said
| that.
| raldi wrote:
| https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/fair-housing-
| ac...
| jankyxenon wrote:
| Highly progressive people continue to self segregate into
| very non-diverse neighborhoods when buying houses.
| moosey wrote:
| This is category error, at a minimum. 'highly progressive
| people' is an abstraction and cannot take action. It's
| imagine it's also inductive reasoning and out group bias.
| carom wrote:
| This was my experience working at Google. Very liberal
| until you start talking about upzoning, then suddenly
| "some neighborhoods should keep their character".
| [deleted]
| imtringued wrote:
| They also complain about ghettoization as soon as certain
| people come to their neighborhood.
| seoaeu wrote:
| 1917: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchanan_v._Warley
| raldi wrote:
| Housing discrimination persisted well beyond 1917. See,
| for instance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
|
| It wasn't until the late 60's / early 70's that explicit
| racial discrimination was finally outlawed, and it's not
| a coincidence that exclusionary zoning took off
| immediately thereafter as a prima facie race-neutral way
| to achieve the same outcome.
| seoaeu wrote:
| No, you have the timeline wrong. Exclusionary zoning took
| off almost immediately after Buchanan. Some of the
| original designers specifically cited that Supreme Court
| case as their motivation for passing such laws. Redlining
| and racial covenants were also used around that time for
| similar purposes.
| raldi wrote:
| _As the threat of litigation became a new constant, the
| San Francisco Planning Department slowly began to craft a
| new approach to development. The city's 1971 Urban Design
| Plan was the first to codify the shift in values from the
| Modernist freeway-and-tower model toward a greater
| respect for San Francisco's unique neighborhoods and
| their human-scale features. The plan focused on
| preserving and expanding existing neighborhood character_
|
| ...
|
| _But the largest legislative achievement of this
| emerging anti-growth coalition would be the Residential
| Rezoning of 1978, a project to implement stricter
| controls across all of San Francisco's neighborhoods. In
| addition to creating 40-foot building-height limits for
| most residential areas, the legislation included new
| setback rules (regulating how far a building could be
| from the public right-of-way), low-density requirements
| (limiting the number of housing units in a given
| building), and overall design guidelines aimed at
| preserving entire neighborhoods in amber._
|
| https://www.fastcompany.com/90242388/the-bad-design-that-
| cre...
| seoaeu wrote:
| That proves that exclusionary zoning was around in 1971,
| but not that it wasn't used earlier. Massachusetts
| amended its constitution in 1918, literally one year
| after Buchanan, to enable cities to impose zoning. And
| the idea of using it to create racial segregation was
| specifically discussed at the time [0]:
|
| _Of particular concern was the fear that zoning would
| bring about racial and socioeconomic segregation in
| Massachusetts, which need not take the form of racial
| tests, as zoning could just as easily bring about
| segregation by regulating who could afford certain
| neighborhoods by income. Pro-zoning advocates... [went
| ahead anyways]_
|
| [0]: https://www.cambridgema.gov/~/media/Files/officeofth
| emayor/2...
| raldi wrote:
| Yep, my position isn't that EZ was invented in the 70's;
| that's just when it swept the nation, and in particular,
| the Bay Area.
| slothtrop wrote:
| They needed this decades ago.
| mhb wrote:
| _The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second
| best time is now._
| rdxm wrote:
| lol...good luck with that....tech is already bailing....i can't
| imagine one reason to domicile a business in the bay area at this
| point....it's over.....
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Some of the objections from the article:
|
| _Sean Kieghran, president of San Francisco 's Residential
| Builders Association, said he supports getting rid of single-
| family only zoning but doesn't think it will result in many new
| units. Kieghran said that building fourplexes requires either two
| staircases or a staircase and an elevator, which takes up too
| much of the site._
|
| _And, unless the city streamlined the process of building a
| fourplex on a single-family lot, builders would run into too many
| bureaucratic obstacles, Kieghran said. "With how long it takes to
| get through planning and fire and DPW and all the other red tape
| it's not likely we are going to see anybody building fourplexes
| anytime soon," he said._
|
| ...
|
| _One of the few architects to design fourplexes on single-family
| sized lots in the last few decades is Daniel Solomon, who has
| worked on three such projects..._
|
| _" These are nifty little projects, but they won't make a big
| dent in the housing need," Solomon said. "That zoning is a tool
| to create housing production is a widely held and completely
| fallacious idea. Just because something is permitted doesn't mean
| it happens. It's very hard to find a vacant lot or tear down at a
| price that would work."_
|
| _He said the fourplexes he designed and built were profitable,
| but barely. And they took as much time to design and execute as
| the 100-unit complexes his firm, Mithun, is known for._
|
| _" You would need to find a developer willing to take a risk on
| a minuscule profit and an architect who enjoys brain damage," he
| said. "They are complicated little projects. It's the absolute
| opposite of economy of scale."_
| eloff wrote:
| I want to point out some evidence for the theory can be found
| in Vancouver where the entire city was rezoned for fourplexes
| (a duplex where each side has a rental unit.)
|
| It has added barely any new supply at all.
|
| I think it didn't go far enough. Rezone for 4-10 story
| apartment buildings, and now you're getting somewhere.
|
| This single family home thing just doesn't work in cities with
| as much demand as San Francisco and Vancouver.
|
| If you want to tackle the problem from the supply side, you
| need to be more aggressive about it. You need for the potential
| profit to be great enough to justify buying multiple adjacent
| homes, tearing them down, and combining the lots.
|
| Even then, it might not be enough to solve the problem, but
| it's a start.
| austincheney wrote:
| That sounds like an epic value destroyer. It won't lower
| prices. Instead it will drive out owners to be replaced by
| leasers incapable of owning property. The only people that
| win are owners of multi-tenant properties, which are often
| commercial businesses.
| eloff wrote:
| If they're condos, you can own it, at least as much as you
| can own half a duplex.
|
| If they're rental units, that's also ok, more supply brings
| down rents and lower rent causes more landlords to sell.
| Extra supply does add downward pressure on prices one way
| or another.
|
| I don't see where the "value destroyer" is.
| austincheney wrote:
| > more supply brings down rents
|
| People say that on here all the time, but I have never
| seen that happen. Do you have an example where increased
| housing supply lowered prices aside from a natural or
| market disaster? Maybe, Detroit where people simply
| abandoned their homes with no intent to sell.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Japan is the classical example where they have national
| zoning rules permitting residential development in each
| zone. You can get a place in downtown Tokyo for like
| $300K USD. [1]
|
| > While the cost of housing is climbing in many global
| cities, the average middle-class family in Tokyo can
| still afford to buy a new, single-family detached home
| for $300,000. That's right. The typical Tokyo starter
| home is a brand new three-bedroom.
|
| Their national zoning rules allow supply to meet demand
| without city-level meddling. Houses there sell for
| roughly the cost of construction.
|
| The reason housing is so nuts in SF is because the city
| added half as many new houses as required to meet demand
| over the last say 30 years. [2]
|
| [1] https://archive.curbed.com/2017/2/3/14496248/tokyo-
| real-esta...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_housing_s
| hortage
| eloff wrote:
| That's microeconomics 101, so it's theoretically sound.
|
| Is there some effect in real life that prevents it from
| working the way the theory predicts?
|
| I don't think so. I would put the burden of proof on you,
| if you want to go against a solid theory. It seems self
| evident that more housing supply means houses stay on the
| market longer (there is lots of evidence for that) and
| that means sellers have more incentives to lower the
| price to get a quicker sale (lots of evidence for that
| too.) Look for historical real estate inventory reports
| that include prices and you should see the effect when
| time on market increases.
|
| It's important to note that prices would only fall if the
| change in supply overwhelmed the change in demand. In
| cities like Vancouver the demand is increasing at such a
| rate that increased supply only means prices don't rise
| as much as they would have otherwise. Time on market is
| always short. There was a brief dip in prices early in
| the pandemic and then things compensated back in the
| other direction.
| austincheney wrote:
| Right, but do you have any historic examples? I see none.
| jlmorton wrote:
| We just ran a massive experiment, called Covid-19, which
| caused about 10% of San Francisco residents to leave the
| city.
|
| This is not quite the same thing as an immediate increase
| in supply, but instead a large drop in demand. The net
| result is the exact same thing: a large increase in the
| vacancy rate, which resulted in a rapid and dramatic
| decrease in median rents.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| > Instead it will drive out owners to be replaced by
| leasers incapable of owning property.
|
| Isn't that exactly the point? These are the people that
| can't afford to live in the city now.
| hungrygs wrote:
| If Vancouver overall is as dense as SF then 4 plexes won't
| matter much. But there are many other cities - even LA -
| where I would think it would. Yet LA has vast amount of low
| rise commercial on 4 lane streets with bus lines that could
| support widespread 1+5 podium style designed buildings.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| These don't read so much as objections as pointing out that the
| zoning change is necessary but not sufficient.
| [deleted]
| bilbo0s wrote:
| _building fourplexes requires either two staircases or a
| staircase and an elevator_
|
| Wow. That means they can get away with one staircase in San
| Fran. Wouldn't fly where I'm from.
|
| His material point is correct though. Real estate development
| is about money. Where I live, you can generally only make money
| on fourplexes where land prices are low enough. I don't know
| much about San Fran real estate, but from what I've heard, land
| is not very cheap.
|
| I would think in San Fran larger apartment complexes would be
| more profitable. Of course then there are all kinds of other
| headaches, like getting all the lots you need in the exact same
| contiguous area. Which also doesn't sound cheap in San Fran. So
| maybe what I meant is luxury condos instead of apartments?
| Point is that however it happens the money math has to work.
| ozzydave wrote:
| Typically the emergency staircase is attached to the front of
| the building in SF, like so:
| https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-fire-escape-san-
| franc...
| slothtrop wrote:
| Houses are bought and destroyed to make way for tri-plex blds
| and condos at a pretty consistent pace where I live, because
| the returns are that good. I'm surprised that this would be any
| different in SF.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Demolition and construction are nearly completely regulated
| out of existence here.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| I suspect where you live doesn't have environmental impact
| studies and objection by basically anyone in the entire city
| requiring design review. Fixing the zoning is a first step,
| but won't solve all the other issues.
| xnx wrote:
| Can previously-approved plans be used as precedence for
| design review, or is everything in design review de novo?
| almost_usual wrote:
| Also scarcity of contractors, architects, and essentially
| anyone who works on homes. Even with the project approved
| costs are going to be high in the Bay Area.
| beerandt wrote:
| Addressing the regulations, but not the financing, means
| this scarcity doesn't change.
|
| Dodd Frank made speculative financing so difficult, that
| the industry either scaled up, as was mentioned in the
| article, to make it worth the trouble of pacifying HUD,
| or scaled down and run a business that essentially relies
| on clients to finance the projects. Most builders (and
| others in the industry) were forced to scale down.
|
| These were the builders that might have considered 4-plex
| or other small multifamily projects, but they've
| essentially been barred from the market.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| This is the stupid tax at work.
|
| They should have pulled their heads out of their butts
| and respected people's property rights 20, 30yr ago when
| the problems were becoming obvious. But they didn't so
| they're gonna have to pay up.
|
| Repealing some zoning is a small step in the right
| direction but they're gonna continue hemorrhaging money
| until they start tackling the other ideologically driven
| inefficiency (of which the person you are replying to has
| named a few types) before they really start seeing
| improvement.
| jeffbee wrote:
| You don't have to live in the city of the project you want
| to stop. You don't even have to live in the state, in the
| United States, or even be a natural person. The
| requirements for standing under CEQA are so loose that
| anyone can sue on any basis. This was made perfectly clear
| when the California Supreme Court allowed "Save the Plastic
| Bag Coalition" to sue Manhattan Beach. Yes, you read that
| correctly.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| but if the CEQA proceedings are fact-based, a broader
| requirement for standing is not a bad thing, right?
|
| An opposite example might be, in the East Bay hills, on a
| steep area of dense old vegetation, a developer wants to
| bulldoze the entire thing, add heavy landscaping and
| drainage, and built four dozen "premium" homes. If the
| city council member is looking at the hundreds of
| millions of dollars that will change hands, over an are
| that is literally no dollars now, then the plan gets
| approved. You might guess, this is a true example and a
| developer from Hong Kong put their name on the project
| and it was built.
|
| The case of a beach is also not-obvious, as it is world-
| scale irreplaceable.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Developing a bunch of enormous single-family homes in
| hillside slide zones is just about the only thing that is
| legal by-right in all East Bay cities. That's the sick
| joke!
|
| I'm not sure if you are referring to the big tacky
| mansions on Highland Terrace in Fremont, but if you are
| those are now the most heavily-assessed properties in
| Alameda County.
| closeparen wrote:
| Those parcels are sold to the public and zoned for
| housing, what outcome are you hoping for here?
| blamazon wrote:
| One issue (of many) in California compared to other locations
| is the requirement for water sprinkler fire suppression
| systems in new buildings. This eats a lot of money and space
| in each building.
|
| Between California and Bay Area regulations it is very
| challenging to turn a profit on demolitions except at the
| highest echelons of the housing market.
| burlesona wrote:
| If enough red tape was cleared it would be common in SF too.
| But the regulatory environment is so oppressive that it's not
| worth doing a project unless it's going to be a huge money-
| maker, which generally means large-scale.
|
| Changing the zoning is a good first step, but not the only
| (or even the most significant) obstacle.
| imtringued wrote:
| It sounds like the problem isn't just the law but also the
| frivolous interruptions that delay permitting. Those aren't
| written into the law but they still matter a great deal.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| It can take 250k in permits and 5 years just to renovate
| a duplex. It is insane
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| > Just because something is permitted doesn't mean it happens.
| It's very hard to find a vacant lot or tear down at a price
| that would work
|
| First you make things legal then you streamline them.
|
| > You would need to find a developer willing to take a risk on
| a minuscule profit and an architect who enjoys brain damage,"
| he said. "They are complicated little projects. It's the
| absolute opposite of economy of scale."
|
| Once you've gotten the streamlining part right, new actors can
| come in to make this cheaper. Those developers just want to
| keep the code complex so that only 100 unit projects are viable
| so that huge firms are the only ones who can execute projects.
| austincheney wrote:
| How do you streamline real estate availability? Blow up
| mountains or expand into the ocean?
| [deleted]
| closeparen wrote:
| A legal framework that enables the land you do have to be
| less like Atlanta and more like Paris.
| georgeplusplus wrote:
| So we totally flip the rules and it will all work out once
| the new rules are in place because people will begin to
| optimize to the new rules. Sounds like a lot how people think
| the free market is supposed to work.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > _Those developers just want to keep the code complex so
| that only 100 unit projects are viable so that huge firms are
| the only ones who can execute projects._
|
| Strong disagreement.
|
| The best thing for developers would be minimal zoning,
| Houston style.
|
| As the Bay Area built to expand from 7M people to, say, 20M
| in a decade, enormous fortunes and livelihoods would be made
| from all that construction work.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| You wouldn't have to go all the way to Houston style
| zoning. SF's regulations are so onerous that going just
| half way would help massively.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Houston still has also sorts of housing covenant and
| other thing. Texas is still a low density mess, too.
|
| We do need to get rid of stupid zoning, but also cannot
| rely on a housing market to do the right thing. We need
| to force a shift to anti-car rather than pro-car
| development (and it really is a dichotomy, with the
| midpoint being a highly unstable equilibrium).
|
| The fact that they are talking about 4-plexes shows they
| really don't get the scale of density that is needed.
| Everything should be 5 stories minimum. _Maybe_ some
| shorter Victorians can be grandfathered in, but the
| Sunset and western half more broadly needs to be almost
| entirely redeveloped.
| [deleted]
| justanotherguy0 wrote:
| We don't need to force a shift. We just need to get rid
| of incentives for cars, like off street parking
| requirements and free parking.
|
| The government shouldn't be telling people what they can
| or can't build (beyond safety)
| ericd wrote:
| Disagree with the last one, one of government's main
| responsibilities is to regulate peoples' externalities so
| they don't infringe on other peoples' rights. Noise and
| pollution especially negatively affect neighbors.
|
| It'd be great if this was done parametrically (Eg setting
| max noise output at your property boundaries, particulate
| output, etc,), but I guess it's been historically more
| convenient to do it via broad zoning instead. Japan's
| max-use zoning seems like a good compromise.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| > We just need to get rid of incentives for cars, like
| off street parking requirements and free parking.
|
| The Bay Area cannot hope to cancel all the car
| subsidization done at the state and national level. More
| active measures are needed.
|
| > The government shouldn't be telling people what they
| can or can't build (beyond safety)
|
| I really fundamentally disagree. Even if we accept
| liberatarianism for individual and business choices by
| default, land is a public good in finite supply in fixed
| position. Isolated actors developing land as they please
| _can_ cause public harm because the utility of land is
| based on how surrounding land is used.
|
| We need to collectively agree cars and single family
| homes hold the bay area back, and then collectively work
| to move away from both, to replace wholesale self-
| perpetuating car culture with self-perpetuating public
| transit apartment culture.
| l1tany11 wrote:
| The reason they are talking about 4-plexes is that's the
| reality of redeveloping a single family residence one at
| a time. If you could do it city block by city block there
| would be huge savings, and WAY more developer interest.
| The problem is it's too hard and expensive to assemble
| that much land to make such projects actually happen. No
| one wants to move, no one wants change.
|
| The headlines will read "Poor Betty was forced from her
| home by the evil mayor and money grubbing developer".
|
| They set the table when they built it, and to undo all of
| that is going to be crazy expensive and difficult.
|
| Some people dream of a car free utopia. Some people like
| their SFR. Those things may not be compatible.
|
| Things like the Miami tower collapse will make things
| worse. A lot of people don't want their life dictated by
| their neighbors. HOAs are well known to be horrendous.
| And the Miami disaster just goes to show that not only
| can your HOA affect your sanity, but also your life
| safety.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I think you are accurately describing a current political
| reality, but this is deeply disappointing and not a
| response that will go behind virtue signalling ("zoning
| is racist") to actually solving the problem, or even
| right a wrong: ("there is so much cheap housing the non-
| white proportion of SF/Berekley/etc. goes up.")
|
| > The reason they are talking about 4-plexes is that's
| the reality of redeveloping a single family residence one
| at a time.
|
| I wish they could at least talk about 2 lots at a time!
|
| > If you could do it city block by city block there would
| be huge savings, and WAY more developer interest.
|
| Amen.
|
| > The problem is it's too hard and expensive to assemble
| that much land to make such projects actually happen.
|
| If only we could do just one, and then for the next one
| give people units and free moving in the prior one. That
| can become a virtuous cycle.
|
| > No one wants to move, no one wants change.
|
| Very true, but for all those perks and a nice cache out
| people can be persuaded. We would need some eminent
| domain for the stragglers, however.
|
| > The headlines will read "Poor Betty was forced from her
| home by the evil mayor and money grubbing developer".
|
| Just gotta talk about how Better is getting $5M, a condo,
| and the elevator she will need anyways as she gets older.
|
| > Some people dream of a car free utopia. Some people
| like their SFR. Those things may not be compatible.
|
| They aren't! Spineless compromises as described in
| https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/09/18/cars-and-
| train... (pork for both sides!) is spineless politics
| that will diffuse outrage now, but at the cost mutually-
| undermining investment that just makes people disrespect
| government more later.
|
| > Things like the Miami tower collapse will make things
| worse.
|
| :(
|
| > A lot of people don't want their life dictated by their
| neighbors. HOAs are well known to be horrendous.
|
| The irony is suburbia is full of annoying HOAs. Just like
| the fact that without more broad economic growth
| homeowners will have a hard time paying off their
| mortgage in their lifetimes means that it is a lot closer
| to paying rent than they would like to think.
| secabeen wrote:
| Minimal zoning would be a bit much, but I think Japanese-
| style highest-allowed use zoning with few single-family
| home zones would be good.
| nugget wrote:
| The people I know who live in the Bay Area don't
| particularly want it to expand. Part of the value of living
| there is its relative exclusivity.
| arcticbull wrote:
| I own property in downtown SF and I want it to expand
| massively. The current system is completely untenable.
| This is not to my direct/immediate benefit of course, the
| current situation is just straight-up SF city
| mismanagement.
| jacobolus wrote:
| The people who currently live in neighborhoods full of
| $5M single-family houses may value "exclusivity", but I
| have met plenty of young people with ordinary jobs
| sleeping in bunk beds, 4 adults to a 2-bedroom house and
| still paying most of their paychecks to rent, who would
| much prefer to be living in separate 1-2 bedroom flats
| instead, with more little shops in their neighborhood and
| better transit.
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| Sure but they could move almost literally anywhere else.
|
| If someone said you could live in one of the most
| desirable places in the entire world on an 'ordinary' job
| but you had to share a room (which TBH could just be your
| significant other anyway) that would seem like a great
| deal right?
| jacobolus wrote:
| A city cannot function without sanitation workers,
| plumbers, carpenters, electricians, house painters, road
| maintenance workers, teachers, librarians, gardeners, bus
| drivers, janitors, delivery drivers, taxi drivers, shop
| clerks, wholesale merchants, mechanics, cooks,
| firefighters, paramedics, accountants, bank tellers,
| municipal bureaucrats, musicians, bartenders, ...
|
| When many categories of essential workers start to be
| priced out of living locally and need to commute long
| distances from undesirable far-flung suburbs, it is (a) a
| grossly inefficient use of resources, and (b) makes the
| city much less pleasant and effective. A city where all
| of the residents are wealthy professionals with other
| workers as second-class commuters is not a very nice
| place to live, more like a theme park or resort hotel
| than a real city.
| watwut wrote:
| No, living with partner is not the same as living with
| roomate and 3 flatmates. The two are actually massively
| different.
| grandmczeb wrote:
| The people who value the "exclusivity" of the Bay Area
| tend to be a very narrow demographic. Nothing wrong with
| that, but it's not a particular representative group.
| handmodel wrote:
| I disagree.
|
| Developers who are entrenched _enjoy_ the fact it is hard
| to get a permit. Then, the specialty becomes navigating the
| system (which the surviving developers are de facto good
| at). It is hard for the best developers from other cities,
| who may be amazing at cheap /efficient/quality construction
| to challenge the incumbents in SF.
|
| It is like saying that government contractors who build
| websites want the bid system to be simpler. In some ways
| they do, since on paper they would save a lot of money if
| they could get rid of their dozen employees who specialize
| in navigating it. At the same time, most government website
| contractors probably are not the best web developers - jsut
| the best at navigating the system.
| wernercd wrote:
| You disagree but it sounds like you make the same points.
|
| The post you reply too says "we need minimal zoning". You
| say "its hard to work because of too many restrictions".
|
| Am I reading it wrong, but you disagree but seem to agree
| on the main points: Government needs to get out of the
| way to allow progress.
| [deleted]
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Developers as a whole, sure.
|
| The handful of developers who are working in the current
| environment? No.
|
| You see this with every regulated industry. The people who
| pissed away a ton of time and money to get into the club
| don't want the club to fall apart.
| irrational wrote:
| Why would the Bay Area grow so much in the next decade? Now
| that remote working is becoming more normal, and
| considering the cost of living in the Bay Area, why would
| that many people want to move there? There are plenty of
| other places with comparable natural beauty, vibrant
| communities, cultural resources, etc.
| voidfunc wrote:
| Start naming those other places and we will tell you why
| they are not viable or comparable. If there are so many
| it should be easy.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Uhh, Portland or Seattle?
|
| They're political similar, economically as similar as
| you'll get (silicon forest in Hillsboro and Seattle's
| whole tech scene rivals SF), and geographically similar
| in terms of climate to parts of the bay area.
| Bud wrote:
| Neither Portland nor Seattle can match the Bay Area in
| terms of overall culture. Neither has a world-class
| orchestra or opera, to say nothing of the early-music
| scene in the Bay Area, which is easily the best in the
| US. Neither measures up to the Bay Area in the art scene,
| either. Or the restaurant scene. Or the wine scene.
|
| Neither comes very close in terms of climate, although
| that argument is muted lately due to California being on
| fire for 4 months out of each year now. But Portland and
| Seattle are already experiencing their own climate-
| change-related impacts.
|
| And no, neither measures up economically either.
| Comparing the tech industry in Portland or Seattle to the
| Bay Area (Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and basically
| all of the startup scene) is a joke.
|
| I could go on, but really, there is no competition.
| clairity wrote:
| that sounds like the koolaid talking. while SF offers a
| lot of "culture", portland and seattle have great
| "scenes" too. restaurants in both cities easily rival
| those of SF, which tend to be long on cost and short on
| flavor. but in CA, LA outdoes SF for food, weather, art,
| music, entertainment, fashion, and shopping, with a more
| diverse (not tech-centric) economy to boot.
| smohare wrote:
| I bet those other places are 115 Fahrenheit right now.
| wavefunction wrote:
| If those places can suddenly hit 115F then so can the Bay
| Area. I am not saying it is likely but who would have
| said it is likely that Portland would hit 115.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| It's true in general. What really surprised me though was
| the recent/current heat wave across all of the west coast
| - it has been foggy and cool the entire time in the Bay
| Area. I hope that holds even as the climate changes,
| though I don't know if it will.
| nitrogen wrote:
| And/or the people already in them are trying to keep them
| secret lest they gain all the problems people are fleeing
| from in the first place.
| rcpt wrote:
| Singapore, Shenzhen to start.
|
| If we blow it in the US there are plenty of people ready
| to work for TikTok or whatever other overseas company
| takes over.
|
| Though I am surprised NYC doesn't have more tech jobs
| zip1234 wrote:
| Part of the reason for the cost of living there is the
| cost of housing being high because of artificially
| restricted supply. Why live there? Plentiful jobs and
| mild weather seem like good enough reasons.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I don't think remote work would become that common fast
| enough.
|
| Even if it did, remote-work-driven sprawl would be
| terrible for humanity. We should still congregate for
| environmental reasons, whether that means 5 story
| walkable towns, or 20 story city. No where does SFH fit
| in the picture. Li-on will not save us.
| jeffbee wrote:
| For the same reason the Bay Area has been growing for the
| last 50 years: the birth rate is still close to 2 and
| longevity is still expanding.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| The best thing would be to ban AirBNB and rental housing.
| Those two artificially restrict the supply of housing to an
| absurd extent and drive up the costs of everyone else's
| housing.
|
| I'm not alone in this - several cities have already banned
| AirBNB.
| jnwatson wrote:
| Reducing red tape would help a lot, but Houston has
| geography on its side. Looking at a map of Beltway 8
| superimposed over the SF Bay [1], it is easy to visualize
| why land is cheap. That's not even the outer loop for
| Houston.
|
| SF and adjacent cities need to both reduce the approval
| process and encourage higher density.
|
| 1. https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/as-if-you-
| needed...
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| You're confusing the incentives of all developers and
| people who might become developers collectively with the
| incentives of entrenched large players already existing in
| the market.
|
| It's like in many industries; the interests of the group as
| a whole push towards deregulation, while the interests of
| the biggest, politically well-connected firms is to
| increase regulation that will be harder for competitors to
| deal with and will allow them to get or maintain a
| stranglehold over the market.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| People in general lack the imagination to grow the pie
| too. Getting / keeping a big slice allows you lord it
| over others, and do so immediately.
|
| A big lie spread under capitalism is that the wealthy and
| powerful actually _like_ growth.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Do you know why you're getting down voted? Because this
| "insight" flies in the face of reality: economic growth
| (despite arguably unfair distribution of it) has defined
| the last 150+ years of the most powerful nations on
| earth, aside from a few blips during a war period or
| brief speculative asset collapse.
|
| The rich and powerful "don't like" growth? Well, they've
| been failing spectacularly for quite some time: maybe
| they aren't so powerful? It makes no sense.
| scythe wrote:
| Those are valid objections to _fourplexes_ , but there are
| still plenty of things in between SFH and fourplexes --
| including, most particularly, semi-detached duplexes, which are
| much easier and still double the density on the lot! I do agree
| that much of the hype about fourplexes is suspect (including
| the noise isolation of units that are one-atop-another), but
| there are many other possibilities, including ADUs.
|
| Also, small elevators are definitely something that could
| benefit from an economy of scale, and anyway make a big
| difference in accessibility for any building above one story.
| Likewise, the possible designs of multi-unit homes on small
| lots could become more standardized. And the regulations could
| improve, and the regulatory institutions could gain more
| experience handling these kinds of projects.
|
| All of that starts with the zoning.
| newsclues wrote:
| Or midrises that are between 4plexes and large condos, are
| another option
| orthoxerox wrote:
| Five-over-ones are nice medium density units, but they
| depend on public transit to be viable. If you can't get to
| work without a car (let's suppose those ground floor stores
| cover all your shopping needs) you need a parking spot,
| everyone and their partner needs a parking spot, and now
| the whole complex is surrounded by a huge parking lot.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Small elevators get to use a potentially cheaper and easier
| option. In a tall building the elevator is suspended from
| cables, because that's the only practical option, but with
| only three-four floors of rise you can use hydraulics from
| below instead, this also puts the equipment room down at the
| bottom of the shaft instead of on the roof, so now you don't
| need roof access for routine maintenance.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Planning is a perverse set of incentives. First it's usually
| longer term thinking, where decisions made now impact the shape
| of a city decades out. Second, the people that live in a place
| now have undue influence and veer conservative in how land is
| used (ie NIMBYism). This often gives rise to at least near term
| stagnation (on a historical scale) in established, wealthy cities
| and growth in up and coming metros that don't have a reason to
| preserve the current city planning policies.
|
| I don't know if there's a solution. Cities may just go through
| decade long cycles of stagnation and revitalization as NIMBY
| generations die off, there's less "romance" around the current
| character/ the place falls into disrepair, the city wants to
| attract new folks, and newer generations have strong demand for
| different modes of living.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Among the most beautiful cities in world are those that were
| not planned, but were just allowed to happen. I don't know
| where we get the mindset that planning is necessary to begin
| with
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| How do you determine if planning or not planning is a
| causative factor? Maybe it's just luck and maybe most
| unplanned cities do not survive to be viewed as beautiful.
|
| I am sure scale of planning matters too, and that there was
| at least a little bit of planning, but perhaps smaller in
| scale.
|
| The more evident factor in "beautiful" cities is probably
| that they came about before the advent of personal
| automobiles. They are much more pleasant to be in outside of
| a vehicle, and hence more "beautiful" simply because there
| were no vehicles at the time, and so whatever developed,
| planned or unplanned, had parameters that only considered
| people not in big boxes moving at high speeds.
| sologoub wrote:
| Paris is usually cited as a beautiful city and it definitely
| has undergone some serious transformation: https://en.m.wikip
| edia.org/wiki/Haussmann's_renovation_of_Pa...
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| This a very US-specific observation. While yes mid-century
| planners did some very stupid things and were kind of control
| freaks, the privately-held land baseline that preceded them
| is _not_ at all universal. See the other posts ' great
| examples.
|
| Also, we now have the automobile to content with. The car is
| a like a gene drive, a self-perpetuating technology like we
| had never seen before, radically upending status-quo-ante
| system dynamics. (The reasons being a) Cars push everyone
| else off the streets, b) car-driven development spreads
| everything way to far apart for anything else to be
| practical.)
|
| The market alone can't defeat cars any more than evolution
| can defeat gene drives. Only social failure / extension (and
| heaven forbid horizontal gene transfer!) can rain them in
| "endogenously".
| maccard wrote:
| I live in one of those cities (Edinburgh). The old town
| (completely unplanned, grew naturally) is a beautiful place
| but utterly impractical for the size of the city now. The new
| town was meticulously planned and has fared much better.
|
| Meanwhile, all of the brownfield sites that are appearing are
| being turned into student accomodation en masse; even with
| planning restrictions. I can only Imagine the state of the
| city if we just blindly allowed building.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Maybe Oakland will do it and become an economic superstar...
| gumby wrote:
| Shockingly Palo Alto joined a lawsuit to try and prevent this
| kind of thing being mandated.
|
| The progressive city I used to live in (section 8 housing,
| homeless housing, source of random bands like Grateful Dead, Joan
| baez, grace slick) was taken over by the greed lobby when the dot
| com boom hit and has become an "I got mine, jack" colony.
| rcpt wrote:
| The "greed lobby" originated in Utah and was named Howard
| Jarvis. All of California became a real estate investment
| hellscape after he left his mark.
|
| Dot com has nothing to do with it
| gumby wrote:
| I get your point, but I'm talking about Palo Alto
| specifically.
|
| Even in the 90s Palo Alto had SRO housing for the homeless,
| required section 8 housing in new developments, and a lower
| median income than neighboring Menlo Park or Los Altos (and I
| read actually MV too, though I find that hard to believe).
| There was more tolerance for goofball behavior, though
| perhaps less than the 70s or 80s.
|
| But 21st century Palo Alto is a different beast, and much
| more boring. People moved here to gain wealth (rather than
| nerd out) and once they had it, flaunt it. It's a real shame;
| there are plenty of other places to do that.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| I like the idea of building massive apartment complexes in the
| Bay Area. It was a PITA place to live 30 years ago and it's worse
| now
|
| The thing is, if we can build giant ant mounds in just a few
| places it'll save the central coast and California north of the
| Golden Gate from destruction.
|
| Step two would be to connect the giant metro areas to the rest of
| the state via a dirt road.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| What about the increases in cars and foot traffic this creates,
| and how will increases to road congestion and transport services
| be mitigated? How will electric, sewer and water services handle
| this increases in utilization? There seems to be a multitude of
| factors at play in this.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Cars are bad. Walk, bike and take public transport --- aka
| learn from the large cities that already exist.
|
| If we presume everyone drives, then all the de-zoning and other
| measures will never succeed, and e.g. SF is already at max
| density. If we believe we can make car usage go down, our
| current streets will be good enough for 10x growth.
| notacoward wrote:
| Most of the land in my (Massachusetts) town is zoned for single-
| family homes. There are several identifiable square-mile or
| larger areas with _nothing_ but homes plus maybe one school and
| one church. Maybe a gas station / Dunkin Donuts within fifteen-
| minute walking distance. That's no way to live.
|
| I'd love to change it, with greater zoning diversity and
| particularly that which allows higher density, but there valid
| objections to doing it all at once. Roads would need to be
| upgraded and then maintained, at direct town expense, plus
| dealing with increased traffic. Ditto for water and sewer lines,
| minus the traffic issue. Electrical, gas, and communications are
| better in that they're not at town expense but worse in that more
| parties have to be involved (and they tend to cheap out even more
| than the town does). And then there's schools - the town's crown
| jewels and the main reason anyone lives here. They're excellent
| but already overcrowded. Work is under way to fix that, but we
| really can't afford to add even more stress to that system.
|
| These are very real issues that I'm sensitive to, even though I
| also think there are other issues - especially racial and income
| diversity - that we _must_ address in the longer term. These same
| issues recur many other places, I 'm sure including the Bay Area.
| It has to be not only allowable but profitable for developers to
| do the actual building, or else they won't, and then the town
| needs property-tax revenue from each tranche before they begin
| the next. It's a very tricky dance, and I do not at all envy the
| people on zoning/planning boards trying to reconcile all these
| conflicting needs.
| whymauri wrote:
| >There are several identifiable square-mile or larger areas
| with nothing but homes plus maybe one school and one church.
| Maybe a gas station / Dunkin Donuts within fifteen-minute
| walking distance.
|
| This is just suburban America in general.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> I 'd love to change it_
|
| The simplest way to change your own situation is to move.
| Different towns, cities, rural areas, etc. with different land
| uses exist so that people with different preferences can all
| find some place that reasonably matches their preferences.
| Making them all the same just so they match your personal
| preferences makes the situation worse, not better.
| notacoward wrote:
| You're assuming infinite variety exists, or can exist. That's
| so absurd that it's hard to believe it was meant in good
| faith. No, I can't just select from a menu. What if I want
| good schools and other facilities that few towns have, _and_
| proximity to the people /places that matter to me, _and_ a
| town that 's not so much single-family-home wasteland
| everywhere but the center? What if I want other people who
| aren't millionaires to have access to some of these things?
| Oops, me moving doesn't solve that. Sometimes you have to
| _build_ the kind of place you want (or think should exist)
| and there 's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Every town
| that already exists has been shaped by the conscious choices
| of people who live there and vote there and serve in offices
| there. I have just as much right to push for what I want as
| any of them did.
|
| P.S. Almost forgot to point out the "making them all the
| same" strawman. Never suggested that, champ.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Almost forgot to point out the "making them all the
| same" strawman. Never suggested that, champ_
|
| If you succeeded in making your desired changes in your
| town, what would happen to the people that didn't want them
| --that like things the way they are now?
| pdonis wrote:
| _> You 're assuming infinite variety exists, or can exist._
|
| I'm assuming no such thing. I'm only assuming that there
| are places that would match your preferences better than
| where you currently live (or, if you want to be really
| precise, enough better to justify the costs of moving).
| Since people move all the time, for precisely that reason
| (I've done it myself, several times), that does not seem to
| me like a very extravagant assumption.
|
| It is true that no place will be perfect: no place will
| satisfy literally _all_ of someone 's preferences. (There
| may be rare people that _can_ find such a place, but they
| are going to be rare enough that we can ignore them for
| this discussion.) But I did not claim that you could find a
| place that would be perfect for you. I only claimed that
| you could find a place that would be better than where you
| currently are.
|
| _> Every town that already exists has been shaped by the
| conscious choices of people who live there and vote there
| and serve in offices there._
|
| That's true. And if you think enough other people in your
| town would support your desired changes, you can of course
| get them to help you enact them, and then you won't have to
| move. But that is likely to take a lot more time and effort
| than moving to a place that already matches your
| preferences better than where you are now. I didn't say
| moving was the _only_ solution to your problem. I only said
| it was the _simplest_ one.
| spodek wrote:
| There's so much to object to about the idea that Earth is
| overpopulated. Then you get it and it hits you like a ton of
| bricks. The signs are everywhere and couldn't be more clear. But
| we're addicted to growth and efficiency, ignoring our limits, and
| our addiction blinds us to seeing what's plainly all around.
| raldi wrote:
| When you prevent housing from being constructed in cities, the
| families that would've lived there don't disappear; they sprawl
| elsewhere and -- as confirmed by statistics -- go on to have
| more children than they otherwise would've.
| imtringued wrote:
| Calculate a standard of living index for every square mile on
| earth. Then add a slider that only shows you all areas greater
| than the chosen standard of living. When you crank it all the
| way up to California living standards the earth does look
| overpopulated.
|
| Of course when all we want is the mere existence of humans then
| there can be as many additional humans as rats on the planet
| and they'll get to live the same quality of life.
| pitaj wrote:
| The primary objection is that "overpopulation" is badly defined
| when it comes to humanity.
| eplanit wrote:
| It's a taboo topic because of people's fears and anxieties
| that it triggers.
|
| A (cold) rational perspective sees that many (if not most)
| challenges facing society share a root cause of there being
| simply too many people.
| _-david-_ wrote:
| Earth is not overpopulated. The problem is that certain places
| have too much population density. If everyone spread out across
| the world there wouldn't be any of these issues. For a variety
| of reason people can't or won't spread out.
| bittercynic wrote:
| It's not that there isn't space for all the humans, but that
| we are very industrious and consume an impressive level of
| resources. I think it is reasonable to be concerned when a
| significant fraction of the planet's energy budget is
| diverted by a single species.
| pacifist wrote:
| > Earth is not overpopulated
|
| Beg to differ. Exhibit A: climate change. Your solution would
| not ameliorate climate change. In fact it would likely
| exacerbate it. We need as much of the land as possible to be
| rewilded(left alone to maximize CO2 absorption and heal the
| planet). And stop having babies. Do you really want to bring
| a child into the nightmare we are barreling towards?
| exporectomy wrote:
| Plants are carbon neutral, not carbon sinks. They don't put
| the fossil fuels back into the ground because they
| decompose before they're buried.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Wow, this is so exactly wrong and dangerously so. Any land
| humans use at above hunter-gatherer impact is highly damaged.
| The goal is always thus to use as little land as possible.
| shipman05 wrote:
| Spreading out would be the worst case scenario for the
| environment. (And I'm afraid we might see it due to easy
| remote work)
|
| A single apartment building uses far fewer resources per
| person than the equivalent number of people would if they all
| had 10 acre lots in the countryside. The habitat destruction
| alone would be an ecological disaster.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Even if the population went down dramatically, we should should
| still stay dense. Density is good. Mutual defense did jump-
| start density before, let's hope something other than violence
| can cause it this time.
|
| Car Suburbia is damaging and wasteful no matter the population
| size.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Here's one definition I like: if not everyone can live
| comfortably and happily, even with infrastructure densification
| using current tech, without pushing the environment over
| carrying capacity then we're overpopulated.
|
| Could everyone in the world own property without pushing the
| environment to the brink? Probably not.
| eplanit wrote:
| Why fill to capacity?
|
| Even at small scale, a venue might hold 500 people, but it's
| probably a nicer experience if there are far less than that
| many there.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Indeed.
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