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

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

#111

Post by elbasti » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 5:12 PM UTC

DevKoala wrote: post #109

I am of the idea that we need to focus on building new cities and more efficient roads to connect them. I don’t want to live in the Bay Area particularly, but when I have to go to SF, it sucks that sometimes it can take up to 2 hours to commute 30 miles. As a software architect, it feels as if the common recipe for solving a scalability problem is decentralization for which you need an awesome messaging system. I do…

> and more efficient roads.

The efficiency of roads is limited by the fact that the vehicles occupying them are large, individually piloted, and have slow reaction times.

Throughout is limited because, as cars go faster, they need to be spaced out more.

We have known this for seventy years. Automobile highways simply cannot work for ultra high throughput corridors.

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

#112

Post by fiter » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 5:12 PM UTC

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.

You're replying to someone that specifically mentioned pollution as a reason to keep certain uses in different zones. Did they edit their comment?

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

#113

Post by ghaff » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 5:13 PM UTC

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #71

jorts wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

None of those things are economically viable to put in an area that can support residential housing even at the single family level of density. The only way they get there is when housing is built up around them. If you're too lazy to fire up Google maps before you buy well then that's on you.

My town in MA has a turkey farm with a couple barns in basically a residential area. But then it's historically a fairly rural farm town.

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

#114

Post by JKCalhoun » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 5:16 PM UTC

DevKoala wrote: post #109

I am of the idea that we need to focus on building new cities and more efficient roads to connect them. I don’t want to live in the Bay Area particularly, but when I have to go to SF, it sucks that sometimes it can take up to 2 hours to commute 30 miles. As a software architect, it feels as if the common recipe for solving a scalability problem is decentralization for which you need an awesome messaging system. I do…

Yeah, double the occupant density of the city is only going to double the congestion on the (already heavily congested) freeways.

There needs to be a serious re-think on public transportation.

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

#115

Post by nitrogen » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 5:16 PM UTC

smohare wrote: post #105

voidfunc wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start naming those other places and we will tell you why they are not viable or comparable. If there are so many it should be easy.

I bet those other places are 115 Fahrenheit right now.

And/or the people already in them are trying to keep them secret lest they gain all the problems people are fleeing from in the first place.

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

#116

Post by lamontcg » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 5:17 PM UTC

They should just largely remove these kinds of zoning laws, raise the height restriction to at least 6 stories and maybe require a commercial ground floor for buildings over a certain footprint and/or on arterials. Allow builders to combine lots. Get rid of the parking and driveway requirements as well. At least do this in strips down arterials so that entire blocks could be converted to high density mixed residential/commercial.

Of course there goes your rents and home prices, but now if you actually lived in the surrounding area you'd be able to easier walk to shops and with rents being less that'd wind up eventually as lower prices and lower cost of living.

Its not surprising that the half-measures they're taking almost seems designed to not have a lot of actual uptake.

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

#117

Post by stackedinserter » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

greggman3 wrote: post #90

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.

Just a friendly reminder that walkability is not the only metric for quality of life.

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

#118

Post by rcpt » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

ArkanExplorer wrote: post #96

raldi wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

California voters approved such a law, 1963 Prop 14, but the supreme court struck it down.

But don't lose hope for direct democracy yet! A few years later Prop 13, which is arguably worse on minorities https://harvardcrcl.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/..., passed by a wide margin and continues to see strong support from voting demographics today.

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

#119

Post by austincheney » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #94

austincheney wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

> 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.

That has never occurred here. Increased availability results in higher prices. The only exception was the housing crash of 2008 when banks found themselves holding tremendous quantities of properties they didn’t want.

This isn’t the west coast. Geography for new construction is nearly unlimited. If the price of construction is too high in one area then nobody will build there when instead they can build everywhere else.

If you want to decrease housing prices here you stop allowing construction, both residential and commercial, which redirects growth to other areas, but that only works if exclusivity does not set in.

Perhaps it’s the inability of people on the west coast to tell the difference between pricing and availability that allows prices to run away to astronomical numbers.

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

#120

Post by DevKoala » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 5:22 PM UTC

elbasti wrote: post #111

DevKoala wrote: post #109

I am of the idea that we need to focus on building new cities and more efficient roads to connect them. I don’t want to live in the Bay Area particularly, but when I have to go to SF, it sucks that sometimes it can take up to 2 hours to commute 30 miles. As a software architect, it feels as if the common recipe for solving a scalability problem is decentralization for which you need an awesome messaging system. I do…

> and more efficient roads. The efficiency of roads is limited by the fact that the vehicles occupying them are large, individually piloted, and have slow reaction times. Throughout is limited because, as cars go faster, they need to be spaced out more. We have known this for seventy years. Automobile highways simply cannot work for ultra high throughput corridors.

Fine, let’s evolve our transportation units. We just need to rethink the problem as a whole.

I don’t want to go into conspiracy theory territory, but it does seem as if there are powerful entities that are invested in maintaining the status quo or perhaps it’s just incompetence.