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Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning

sfchronicle.com

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

#81

Post by yao420 »

vlovich123 wrote: post #28

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?

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.

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

#82

Post by markzzerella »

jorts wrote: post #35
vlovich123 wrote: post #28

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?

Opening a chicken farm or leather tannery in a residential neighborhood sounds great.

Having local restaurants and small businesses in walking distance instead of international mega corps in driving distance sounds horrible too.

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

#83

Post by Ericson2314 »

plank_time wrote: post #11

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…

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.

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

#84

Post by burlesona »

muststopmyths wrote: post #78

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 investo…

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-...

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

#85

Post by blo81 »

jeffbee wrote: post #52
xienze wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 = Gr…

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.

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

#86

Post by burlesona »

Gimpei wrote: post #80

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.

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).

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

#87

Post by 34679 »

01100011 wrote: post #61
jeffbee wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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-...

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

#88

Post by burlesona »

slothtrop wrote: post #18
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.

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.

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

#89

Post by xivzgrev »

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

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

#90

Post by greggman3 »

austincheney wrote: post #12

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 befor…

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.

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