Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning

sfchronicle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 373 posts

Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning

#11

Post by plank_time »

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.

Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning

#12

Post by austincheney »

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.

Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning

#13

Post by bradleyjg »

pmoriarty wrote: post #4

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 buil…

These don’t read so much as objections as pointing out that the zoning change is necessary but not sufficient.

Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning

#14

Post by _-david-_ »

spodek wrote: post #7

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.

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.

Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning

#15

Post by bilbo0s »

pmoriarty wrote: post #4

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 buil…

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.

Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning

#16

Post by 0xB31B1B »

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.

Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning

#17

Post by slothtrop »

spodek wrote: post #7

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.

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.

Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning

#18

Post by slothtrop »

pmoriarty wrote: post #4

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 buil…

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.

Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning

#19

Post by shipman05 »

_-david-_ wrote: post #14
spodek wrote: post #7

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.

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.

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.

Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning

#20

Post by Schiendelman »

raldi wrote: post #6
LurkersWillLurk wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Earlier - this started in 1911 when the Supreme Court said that.
Post reply on HN