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Bills before the California Legislature would crack down on NIMBYs

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Re: Bills before the California Legislature would crack down on NIMBYs

#31

Post by voxmatt »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #16

IMO, it's gotten bad enough in the Bay Area that local control of zoning ought to get abolished. Make a new regional zoning commission, put together some clear and consistent rules about what can be built and where, and rubber-stamp everything that meets those rules. Literal rubber-stamp here, as in "you give us an affidavit saying that your plan meets the specified rules, and you get a permit to build the same day,…

I couldn't agree more. I'm originally from the Twin Cities and we solved (parts of this) problem years ago with a regional government called the Metropolitan Council. When you have a metropolitan area that spans multiple local governments, coordinating efforts around transportation, development, and environment is critical. And coordination is difficult without some sort of central authority. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Council

Re: Bills before the California Legislature would crack down on NIMBYs

#32

Post by enraged_camel »

posixplz wrote: post #8
colordrops wrote: post #2

I'm making what I would think to be an upper middle class salary and I can't afford a home in a modestly decent neighborhood in L.A. It seems to me that there is definitely a problem and I support loosening development restrictions. It's not only restrictions though. Of the people I know who own property, many, if not the majority, own more than one property, some of them empty. I also know many remote Chinese that o…

You have hit the nail on the head. Unfortunately, i fear that any sufficiently strong measures to restrict empty homes or foreign investment (see: empty home taxes in British Columbia) will be met with strong resistance from Democrats. As a resident of the Pacific Northwest, the same property squeeze is happening here on a similarly massive scale, also driven by foreign "investment". In my experience, advocating for…

>>i fear that any sufficiently strong measures to restrict empty homes or foreign investment (see: empty home taxes in British Columbia) will be met with strong resistance from Democrats.

Uh, I'm not sure why Democrats would be against this, especially considering Prop 13 was passed by Reagan.

Re: Bills before the California Legislature would crack down on NIMBYs

#33

Post by golemotron »

Maybe the answer is to stop growing and let other parts of the country grow. The brain drain to SV has been disastrous for other communities. It's contributed to inequality and deep geographic/political polarization.

Yes, you can downvote me but consider formulating a counter-argument.

Re: Bills before the California Legislature would crack down on NIMBYs

#34

Post by ProfessorLayton »

Right now cities have all the incentive to create office space to bring in as many jobs as possible, and the taxes that come with them, while leaving housing and infrastructure as someone else's problem.

There needs to be an incentive in place for this not to happen. Perhaps we need to force the municipalities to split their employment tax with the city where the employee actually lives?

Admittedly I have no idea what legal mechanism would make that possible, but something like this would give cities an incentive to build more housing along with increasing their employment/tax base.

Re: Bills before the California Legislature would crack down on NIMBYs

#35

Post by Nav_Panel »

golemotron wrote: post #33

Maybe the answer is to stop growing and let other parts of the country grow. The brain drain to SV has been disastrous for other communities. It's contributed to inequality and deep geographic/political polarization. Yes, you can downvote me but consider formulating a counter-argument.

That's... not really how it works. Or, you could also argue that's what the area has been doing for the past 40 years, and look at the current state of housing.

EDIT: I didn't downvote you, but I will elaborate: there's very little you can do to stop people from moving to California, short of forcefully putting them on buses and sending them away (which is what some cities actually do[1][2]). What you can do is figure out a plan before they show up to provide them decent housing for a fair price, or else they'll figure something out, something likely to be illegal/extremely uncomfortable/look a lot like homelessness.

Some anecdotes: one friend of mine lived in a house-boat in Berkeley for 2 years while going to college. Another lived out of his van in Los Angeles. These are regular young people, both born in California, trying to make things work.

It has been extremely hard to build new buildings in hotspots throughout the state for quite a long time. You could argue that preventing growth to meet demand is, in a sense, what it means to "stop growing" (short of turning folks away at the state line). This is what I meant by my comment.

1: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/nyregion/29oneway.html

2: https://thinkprogress.org/nevada-gets-sued-for-dumping-homel...

Re: Bills before the California Legislature would crack down on NIMBYs

#36

Post by wfunction »

jkimmel wrote: post #29
wfunction wrote: post #23

Does the state have a plan for the water crisis that keeps getting worse if it were to make it easier and easier for more and more people to settle down in it?

Only ~10% of California's water use is residential/urban (varies a little bit year to year) [0]. The majority of non-environmental water is used to grow cash crops in the central valley, like almonds, which take 1 gal/almond. Overall, urban residents have far less impact on climate than exurban residents who drive around in SUVs. It is in the best interests of everyone on planet Earth to make our cities denser and mo…

Wouldn't you need to grow more food supporting the growing in-population though?

Re: Bills before the California Legislature would crack down on NIMBYs

#37

Post by tomcam »

cjensen wrote: post #28
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #16

IMO, it's gotten bad enough in the Bay Area that local control of zoning ought to get abolished. Make a new regional zoning commission, put together some clear and consistent rules about what can be built and where, and rubber-stamp everything that meets those rules. Literal rubber-stamp here, as in "you give us an affidavit saying that your plan meets the specified rules, and you get a permit to build the same day,…

Under existing rules, developers do not pay enough fees to allow the School Districts to build new schools to support the new housing. Now you'd like to rubber stamp this? For example there's a new development in Fremont of a few hundred houses: the school district had to zone it as "we'll provide school for you, but it'll be wherever we have space across the entire city." That's not good. To me the idiocy is this: t…

Wait, developers should pay for schools? What are property taxes for?

Re: Bills before the California Legislature would crack down on NIMBYs

#38

Post by tomcam »

colordrops wrote: post #2

I'm making what I would think to be an upper middle class salary and I can't afford a home in a modestly decent neighborhood in L.A. It seems to me that there is definitely a problem and I support loosening development restrictions. It's not only restrictions though. Of the people I know who own property, many, if not the majority, own more than one property, some of them empty. I also know many remote Chinese that o…

> I also know many remote Chinese

Hey, they're not all remote. Some of them are outgoing, a few even garrulous!

Re: Bills before the California Legislature would crack down on NIMBYs

#39

Post by panzer_wyrm »

School-Cotton wrote: post #6
colordrops wrote: post #2

I'm making what I would think to be an upper middle class salary and I can't afford a home in a modestly decent neighborhood in L.A. It seems to me that there is definitely a problem and I support loosening development restrictions. It's not only restrictions though. Of the people I know who own property, many, if not the majority, own more than one property, some of them empty. I also know many remote Chinese that o…

> afford a home Can you afford rent, though? Isn't a bit extreme to expect to be able to own property -- like some sort of medieval lord -- in a major city?

Not at all. Renting with no road to purchase turns you into serf. Owning your dwelling is the most basic form a security a human needs.

I own a condo that I rent and live renting in other part of my city. The rents cancel each other. It works very nice for me.

I definitely wish more people own their homes. I also love highrises.

Re: Bills before the California Legislature would crack down on NIMBYs

#40

Post by gumby »

For a bit of micro NIMBYism: my street in Palo Alto just instituted resident-only parking (I was the only one to object). Thus the people who cut our hair, serve our meals etc will have to walk even farther to work (my house is about 1.25 miles from downtown) while the wealthy shoppers park downtown for free.

Yes it was a pain having a lot of cars on the street but I didn't feel it was a hardship that I couldn't park in front of my house but occasionally (horrors) across the street.

As my passive aggressive neighbor put it, "well they can just buy a downtown permit. It's just a tax." So again, the minimum wage earners get the shaft. The discount permit for low earners is $100.

PS: my kid wants to buy up the extra parking permit allotment and offer them to folks parking the next street over.

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