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The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability (2002)

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Re: The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability (2002)

#41

Post by Gibbon1 »

krausejj wrote: post #2

If you care about places like Silicon Valley or New York, or if you care about social justice across (and within) generations, it's time to research and understand why housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable in the most dynamic areas of the world. It's not due to lack of land. In California, we have a chance to fix things. SB-827 is a new bill that prevents local governments from banning density near public tra…

If you care about the rest of the country you should ask why the fire hose of investment money is directed at SF and New York and not elsewhere. Instead of asking what's wrong with San Francisco. Why not ask what's wrong with the rest of the US?

Sure I can name a bunch of reasons why little housing is built in California, we can start with the Libertarian wet dream that is Prop 13. Prop 13 does two things, removes any incentive for muni's to approve new housing. And starves the government of funding to pay for public goods like schools and mass transit. The zoning restrictions Libertarians bitch about are partly the direct result of that.

Okay fine. But then still the question is, even if we admit California has issues, why is it that corporations which are totally free to locate elsewhere aren't doing so? You would think with a large cost differential corporations would move. Why not?

Because neoliberal conservative dominated governments in the rest of the US means that VC's, engineers, and mangers don't want to live in those places at all. So they and their companies are paying a large premium not to.

No workers don't want to work in 'right to work state' They don't want to send their kids to schools that teach creationism and abstinence only sex education. They don't want to live in communities with bad family planning.

Re: The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability (2002)

#43

Post by rsync »

krausejj wrote: post #4
davidw wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's interesting is that you can make a very libertarian argument for a lot of this stuff too: http://marketurbanism.com/ although that probably doesn't play quite as well in much California. Still though, it's one issue where we all ought to be able to find some common ground and fix things.

absolutely. this is both liberal and libertarian. it's a massive social justice issue. it's also a policy-failure that can be addressed by simply reducing regulations, which this bill does (by preventing local governments from banning density near public transit, the exact place it needs to go).

"absolutely. this is both liberal and libertarian"

... but not necessarily democratic.

I am open minded about the housing policy debate in CA (and in Marin, where I live) but I am dismayed at the rejection of democratic outcomes when those outcomes are found to be inconvenient.

Re: The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability (2002)

#44

Post by eldavido »

Spooky23 wrote: post #13
krausejj wrote: post #2

If you care about places like Silicon Valley or New York, or if you care about social justice across (and within) generations, it's time to research and understand why housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable in the most dynamic areas of the world. It's not due to lack of land. In California, we have a chance to fix things. SB-827 is a new bill that prevents local governments from banning density near public tra…

I'd suggest that you research why it's necessary for companies to cram so much demand for housing in a few areas. It's seems absurd in this day and age that we're still concentrating business to such an extent in places like the NY Metro Area and the Bay Area. IBM in the olden times leveraged locating facilities in nowheresville as a competitive advantage. I'm surprised it isn't catching on now that engineers are bei…

The problem is that nobody is thinking long-term.

Think about how startups work today. Rather than leasing a commercial office at half the price, they pay exorbitant premiums for WeWork. Nobody does proper capacity planning on AWS (let alone physical infrastructure), everyone only hires the most senior people, everyone pays exorbitant premiums to recruiters rather than building inbound candidate flow.

It's incredible how far we've pushed the time premium for money. I'm honestly not sure whether it's rational or not. But I think there are two good lessons from this.

#1: Patience is a massive advantage if you can pull it off. You can get out of the environment that's pushing senior level dev salaries to 200k or higher, pay less for everything, etc.

#2: There is good money in selling time to financed startups. If you can do anything that would conceivably let young, cash-rich startups trade time for money, that's a business.

Re: The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability (2002)

#45

Post by lopmotr »

sampo wrote: post #19
gnarcoregrizz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since that's a marketing page for SB827, can someone explain to me how it doesn't ultimately create an incentive against public transit? All it would take to get around the zoning override would be to remove transit... I assume removing a bus stop (or even an entire route) is trivial. I could definitely foresee more homeowners blocking development of new routes/stations. With those considerations, it's possible we co…

> I could definitely foresee more homeowners blocking development of new routes/stations. Say, you own a piece of land with a house near public transit. Since the local township can no longer forbid building an apartment building on your land, you can probably sell your land to a developer for $$$$, so you make much more money than selling just a single house. And because you didn't want to live near public transit,…

This is happening where I live and the local people have all kinds of random reasons for opposing it. Some irrationally think their property will be worth less having an apartment building next door. Some don't care about value but just don't want the apartment building next door and refuse to move because they're settled in. Some think it'll create a slum. Some think the change is just an excuse for the local government to collect more money from more housing units. Most probably just don't like change because they're old and afraid of the unknown.

Re: The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability (2002)

#46

Post by chipotle_coyote »

snomad wrote: post #15
krausejj wrote: post #2

If you care about places like Silicon Valley or New York, or if you care about social justice across (and within) generations, it's time to research and understand why housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable in the most dynamic areas of the world. It's not due to lack of land. In California, we have a chance to fix things. SB-827 is a new bill that prevents local governments from banning density near public tra…

Every time I see this posted, I ask about noise. Dense housing near rapid-transit, particularly rail, has led to lots of people getting exposed to massive volumes of noise, even at night. This is the type of long-term negative that get people to move out to the suburbs (e.g. self-defeating the policy) or call for more construction such as sound walls. You can see Reno for a perfect example of this. Everyone moved out…

Dense housing near rapid transit, particularly rail, has led to lots of people getting exposed to massive volumes of noise, even at night. You can see Reno for a perfect example of this.

Reno, Nevada hasn't had a rail system since 1927, and there is exactly one "rapid" bus line (out of 30 routes total) Are you really arguing that significant numbers of downtown residents were so outraged by inescapable bus noise that they migrated to...whatever constitutes a "suburb" of Reno, or are you suggesting that Reno is the suburb people were fleeing to, and if so, from where? Or is there some other Reno we're talking about here?

Re: The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability (2002)

#47

Post by TheCoelacanth »

rsync wrote: post #43
krausejj wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

absolutely. this is both liberal and libertarian. it's a massive social justice issue. it's also a policy-failure that can be addressed by simply reducing regulations, which this bill does (by preventing local governments from banning density near public transit, the exact place it needs to go).

"absolutely. this is both liberal and libertarian" ... but not necessarily democratic. I am open minded about the housing policy debate in CA (and in Marin, where I live) but I am dismayed at the rejection of democratic outcomes when those outcomes are found to be inconvenient.

CA is also a democracy, so it's just one democratic outcome overriding a different democratic outcome.

Re: The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability (2002)

#48

Post by st26 »

sampo wrote: post #19
gnarcoregrizz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since that's a marketing page for SB827, can someone explain to me how it doesn't ultimately create an incentive against public transit? All it would take to get around the zoning override would be to remove transit... I assume removing a bus stop (or even an entire route) is trivial. I could definitely foresee more homeowners blocking development of new routes/stations. With those considerations, it's possible we co…

> I could definitely foresee more homeowners blocking development of new routes/stations. Say, you own a piece of land with a house near public transit. Since the local township can no longer forbid building an apartment building on your land, you can probably sell your land to a developer for $$$$, so you make much more money than selling just a single house. And because you didn't want to live near public transit,…

That's how it's supposed to work, but at least in Portland it's not panning out:

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/9/revisiting-what...

Re: The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability (2002)

#49

Post by lopmotr »

afpx wrote: post #35
gnarcoregrizz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. If nimbys don't want stuff built, imo they should buy the land themselves. I don't know what happened to property rights in CA.

Under that logic, if individual property rights are all that matter, you might as well throw out 90% of the San Francisco City code while you’re at it. Like, if your neighbor decides to jackhammer at 2 AM, well, it’s her property.

That's too extreme an example. Noise restrictions affect what comes into your property so it's fair to have them. Sunlight, views and privacy are more reasonable things to be concerned about. People should be able to buy a guarantee of those things, I think. I suppose they can by putting a covenant on he neighboring properties but most people get them for free so they wouldn't feel it's fair to have to pay just to guarantee it.

Re: The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability (2002)

#50

Post by seanp2k2 »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #41
krausejj wrote: post #2

If you care about places like Silicon Valley or New York, or if you care about social justice across (and within) generations, it's time to research and understand why housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable in the most dynamic areas of the world. It's not due to lack of land. In California, we have a chance to fix things. SB-827 is a new bill that prevents local governments from banning density near public tra…

If you care about the rest of the country you should ask why the fire hose of investment money is directed at SF and New York and not elsewhere. Instead of asking what's wrong with San Francisco. Why not ask what's wrong with the rest of the US? Sure I can name a bunch of reasons why little housing is built in California, we can start with the Libertarian wet dream that is Prop 13. Prop 13 does two things, removes an…

The vast majority of the US (by landmass) sucks to actually live in, and the economies of those areas are also awful. This is why many who can move to the coast do. Even within “the coasts”, outside of NYC, the east coast doesn’t have a comparable economic area to the Bay Area + LA + Seattle + Portland.
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