Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
sfchronicle.com
Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
1–10 of 373 posts
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#2Just 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.
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#3They needed this decades ago.
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#4Some 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."
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#5Planning 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.
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#6Just 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.
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.
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#7There'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.
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#8There'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.
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.
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#9Something 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.
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#10There'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.
The primary objection is that "overpopulation" is badly defined when it comes to humanity.