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

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

#131

Post by austincheney » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 5:35 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.

Where I live is considerably larger than SF at well above 900,000 people but only a pop density of a bit above 2.5k per square mile and with plenty more land to grow into.

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

#132

Post by Tiktaalik » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 5:38 PM UTC

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…

Since you bring up the notion of Vancouver's empty homes and speculation taxes I'll follow up with the impacts of that:

* These taxes added 8000+ 'empty' homes to the rental pool overnight.

* Many "luxury" condos in development changed into purpose built rental for locals.

* The vacancy rate barely budged and remained stubbornly low.

So while it was definitely worth while to bring in these taxes in order to instantly create more housing, and change the nature of what sort of housing was being created, effectively nothing has really changed in the grand scheme of things. Vancouver still has a housing scarcity problem, and near zero vacancy, and still needs to build much more housing.

I encourage SF to do the same sort of things that Vancouver has done, but they will also need to increase apartment development massively.

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

#133

Post by scythe » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 5:41 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…

>I do not get why we keep centralizing ourselves around the Bay Area. I am not an expert in the field so perhaps I am coming from a point of ignorance here

The background: other cities exist and have existed. Companies can locate anywhere.

Centralization exists in many industries. It's not a phenomenon unique to tech, the Bay Area, or the United States.

Desirable cities also exist in China. The government is constantly dreaming up ways to get people to stop moving to Beijing and Shanghai.

This situation cannot be merely wished away. The tendency for an industry to concentrate in a particular city is historically broad and durable.

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

#134

Post by DevKoala » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 5:41 PM UTC

Tiktaalik wrote: post #128

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…

> more efficient roads It's not possible. It's a geometry problem. Cars take up too much space. And if you increase the size of the roads well, you simply induce demand, adding more space inefficient cars to clog up the road. This is why places like LA and Houston have never solved their traffic problems. There's only really one way to move people faster, and that's to focus on moving the person with more space effic…

That’s good too. Let’s rethink transportation.

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

#135

Post by seoaeu » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 5:41 PM UTC

rcpt wrote: post #126

seoaeu wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is "infamous" about a bus? They're considered a symbol of the class divide. Not a cause, but just a visible display of the income inequality present in the city. Poor people don't get a "workaround" for the the Bay Area's awful/nonexistent transportation system, they have to either rely on private cars or take public transit anyways.

Which is kind of nuts considering that most people on those busses can't afford the South Bay houses they're commuting past. Otherwise there'd be no bus. disclaimer: the windows were shot out when I was riding the Google bus a couple years back

Eh, 20% of households in the Bay Area earn under $36k/year. Obviously shooting out bus windows isn't the right approach, but I think you may be underestimating just how much of a divide there is between even average tech workers and lower class people living in the region.

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

#136

Post by mercutio2 » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 5:47 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…

San Fransisco has already removed (b) as an issue [0].

When SF made that change, you had people saying the same thing “this won’t change anything because you can’t build the housing that’s needed”.

No one is saying that this, by itself, with zero other changes, will resolve the issue. I prefer to applaud individual incremental improvements than belabor the fact that this one change is not enough.

[0] https://www.livablecity.org/time-san-francisco-say-goodbye-m...

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

#137

Post by seoaeu » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 5:49 PM UTC

raldi wrote: post #125

seoaeu wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1917: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchanan_v._Warley

Housing discrimination persisted well beyond 1917. See, for instance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining It wasn't until the late 60's / early 70's that explicit racial discrimination was finally outlawed, and it's not a coincidence that exclusionary zoning took off immediately thereafter as a prima facie race-neutral way to achieve the same outcome.

No, you have the timeline wrong. Exclusionary zoning took off almost immediately after Buchanan. Some of the original designers specifically cited that Supreme Court case as their motivation for passing such laws. Redlining and racial covenants were also used around that time for similar purposes.

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

#138

Post by DevKoala » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 5:54 PM UTC

scythe wrote: post #133

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…

>I do not get why we keep centralizing ourselves around the Bay Area. I am not an expert in the field so perhaps I am coming from a point of ignorance here The background: other cities exist and have existed. Companies can locate anywhere. Centralization exists in many industries. It's not a phenomenon unique to tech, the Bay Area, or the United States. Desirable cities also exist in China. The government is constant…

> This situation cannot be merely wished away. The tendency for an industry to concentrate in a particular city is historically broad and durable.

We have never seen these population levels in the USA, and a country with a bigger population seems to be tackling the problem with a level of success by building more cities.

Also, perhaps those other cities need to offer incentives for the companies to move. I just don’t think we are tackling the problem the proper way.

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

#139

Post by gnopgnip » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 5:54 PM UTC

travisgriggs wrote: post #104

When I read articles like this, where the solutions proposed are to make it more efficient (legally, operationally, fiscally) for more people to live in smaller places, I'm curious how that resolves with others' sense of the desire for privacy. I realize the privacy conversation here usually revolves around ad tech, but for me at least, it's more general than that. And I find that the denser the population, no matter…

A multi family home in practice is much larger than a comparably priced single family home. They can both be owned, or rented

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

#140

Post by raldi » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 5:55 PM UTC

seoaeu wrote: post #137

raldi wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing discrimination persisted well beyond 1917. See, for instance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining It wasn't until the late 60's / early 70's that explicit racial discrimination was finally outlawed, and it's not a coincidence that exclusionary zoning took off immediately thereafter as a prima facie race-neutral way to achieve the same outcome.

No, you have the timeline wrong. Exclusionary zoning took off almost immediately after Buchanan. Some of the original designers specifically cited that Supreme Court case as their motivation for passing such laws. Redlining and racial covenants were also used around that time for similar purposes.

As the threat of litigation became a new constant, the San Francisco Planning Department slowly began to craft a new approach to development. The city’s 1971 Urban Design Plan was the first to codify the shift in values from the Modernist freeway-and-tower model toward a greater respect for San Francisco’s unique neighborhoods and their human-scale features. The plan focused on preserving and expanding existing neighborhood character

...

But the largest legislative achievement of this emerging anti-growth coalition would be the Residential Rezoning of 1978, a project to implement stricter controls across all of San Francisco’s neighborhoods. In addition to creating 40-foot building-height limits for most residential areas, the legislation included new setback rules (regulating how far a building could be from the public right-of-way), low-density requirements (limiting the number of housing units in a given building), and overall design guidelines aimed at preserving entire neighborhoods in amber.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90242388/the-bad-design-that-cre...