Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by xnx » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 4:40 PM UTC

compiler-guy wrote: post #48

slothtrop wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suspect where you live doesn’t have environmental impact studies and objection by basically anyone in the entire city requiring design review. Fixing the zoning is a first step, but won’t solve all the other issues.

Can previously-approved plans be used as precedence for design review, or is everything in design review de novo?

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

#92

Post by jeffbee » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 4:42 PM UTC

mistrial9 wrote: post #70

jeffbee wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to live in the city of the project you want to stop. You don't even have to live in the state, in the United States, or even be a natural person. The requirements for standing under CEQA are so loose that anyone can sue on any basis. This was made perfectly clear when the California Supreme Court allowed "Save the Plastic Bag Coalition" to sue Manhattan Beach. Yes, you read that correctly.

but if the CEQA proceedings are fact-based, a broader requirement for standing is not a bad thing, right? An opposite example might be, in the East Bay hills, on a steep area of dense old vegetation, a developer wants to bulldoze the entire thing, add heavy landscaping and drainage, and built four dozen "premium" homes. If the city council member is looking at the hundreds of millions of dollars that will change hand…

Developing a bunch of enormous single-family homes in hillside slide zones is just about the only thing that is legal by-right in all East Bay cities. That's the sick joke!

I'm not sure if you are referring to the big tacky mansions on Highland Terrace in Fremont, but if you are those are now the most heavily-assessed properties in Alameda County.

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

#93

Post by Ericson2314 » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 4:42 PM UTC

sys_64738 wrote: post #23

What about the increases in cars and foot traffic this creates, and how will increases to road congestion and transport services be mitigated? How will electric, sewer and water services handle this increases in utilization? There seems to be a multitude of factors at play in this.

Cars are bad. Walk, bike and take public transport --- aka learn from the large cities that already exist.

If we presume everyone drives, then all the de-zoning and other measures will never succeed, and e.g. SF is already at max density. If we believe we can make car usage go down, our current streets will be good enough for 10x growth.

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

#94

Post by lotsofpulp » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 4:44 PM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #74

lotsofpulp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not know what commute distance has to do with anything. You can build a million dwelling units 5 hours west of Austin in the desert, and they will not sell for much if at all. > Increased demand drives up construction rates before it drives up prices. The rate of construction will go up if prices are going up, or the entities doing the construction believe prices will go up (and there is capacity to increase rat…

None of that reflects reality here. Higher prices slow construction rates in an immediate area only to drive construction further out.

If the probability that the cost of (land + permits (politics) + labor + supplies) will be more than the projected sale price is sufficiently high, then it can cause a decrease in construction.

But that is irrelevant to the fact that more supply of a good relative to demand will not cause prices to rise. This might not be easily evident over 1 year, but on a longer timescale, if supply and demand is not behaving as expected, then there will be arbitrage that someone will likely take advantage of.

It is possible that the high price of land in a highly desirable area is something there is a lot of demand for itself. The only way to bring prices of individual dwelling units down in this case is to build more dense housing, and that involves a lot of politics.

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

#95

Post by seibelj » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 4:44 PM UTC

xivzgrev wrote: post #89

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 ma…

In Boston and surrounding areas the “triple decker” is very common - three 1000 square foot condos, driveway leading to compact car parking in back, small yard or none at all. The buildings are not connected but the space between is the driveway on one side and a small path on the other to store trash cans. There are tens of thousands of these if not hundreds of thousands.

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

#96

Post by ArkanExplorer » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 4:45 PM UTC

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.

Playing the devils' advocate, is the key to affordable housing to allow neighborhoods, builders etc. to exclude by race?

Folks might not be able to choose where they live, but at least they will get cheap housing? Is that a fair trade?

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

#97

Post by Ericson2314 » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 4:45 PM UTC

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.

Even if the population went down dramatically, we should should still stay dense. Density is good. Mutual defense did jump-start density before, let's hope something other than violence can cause it this time.

Car Suburbia is damaging and wasteful no matter the population size.

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

#98

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 4:45 PM UTC

burlesona wrote: post #84

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…

[deleted]

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

#99

Post by jeffbee » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 4:46 PM UTC

irrational wrote: post #69

BurningFrog wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those developers just want to keep the code complex so that only 100 unit projects are viable so that huge firms are the only ones who can execute projects. Strong disagreement. The best thing for developers would be minimal zoning, Houston style. As the Bay Area built to expand from 7M people to, say, 20M in a decade, enormous fortunes and livelihoods would be made from all that construction work.

Why would the Bay Area grow so much in the next decade? Now that remote working is becoming more normal, and considering the cost of living in the Bay Area, why would that many people want to move there? There are plenty of other places with comparable natural beauty, vibrant communities, cultural resources, etc.

For the same reason the Bay Area has been growing for the last 50 years: the birth rate is still close to 2 and longevity is still expanding.

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

#100

Post by Ericson2314 » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

_-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.

Wow, this is so exactly wrong and dangerously so. Any land humans use at above hunter-gatherer impact is highly damaged. The goal is always thus to use as little land as possible.