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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

#141

Post by rcpt »

seoaeu wrote: post #135
rcpt wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The division between long time Californian landowning families and 20-something immigrant engineers somehow never comes up.

Someone's whose been making 250k before taxes isn't poor by any stretch. But they're nowhere near affording a house in Mountain View, hence the busses.

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

#142

Post by larsiusprime »

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…

You're basically half way through re-deriving Georgism from first principles. Here's a good (but long) primer on the subject:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr...

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

#143

Post by larsiusprime »

wesleyy wrote: post #102
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…

Rent seeking refers to economic rent, which is not the same thing as "housing rent". It has a very specific definition when used in the context of economic rent seeking. Renting out houses for people to live in is not rent seeking.

According to certain economic philosophies, all rent on land (but not buildings) is economic rent.

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

#144

Post by yao420 »

nateabele wrote: post #108
yao420 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mechani…

Did you and your neighbors every try talking to the guy? Government policy and the marketplace aren't the exclusive ways of managing relationships between people.

Of course we did. He told us to “suck an egg”. Will probably always remember that phrase now.

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

#145

Post by gumby »

Shockingly Palo Alto joined a lawsuit to try and prevent this kind of thing being mandated.

The progressive city I used to live in (section 8 housing, homeless housing, source of random bands like Grateful Dead, Joan baez, grace slick) was taken over by the greed lobby when the dot com boom hit and has become an “I got mine, jack” colony.

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

#146

Post by pdonis »

notacoward wrote: post #75

Most of the land in my (Massachusetts) town is zoned for single-family homes. There are several identifiable square-mile or larger areas with nothing but homes plus maybe one school and one church. Maybe a gas station / Dunkin Donuts within fifteen-minute walking distance. That's no way to live. I'd love to change it, with greater zoning diversity and particularly that which allows higher density, but there valid obj…

> I'd love to change it

The simplest way to change your own situation is to move. Different towns, cities, rural areas, etc. with different land uses exist so that people with different preferences can all find some place that reasonably matches their preferences. Making them all the same just so they match your personal preferences makes the situation worse, not better.

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

#147

Post by Der_Einzige »

voidfunc wrote: post #79
irrational wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Uhh, Portland or Seattle?

They're political similar, economically as similar as you'll get (silicon forest in Hillsboro and Seattle's whole tech scene rivals SF), and geographically similar in terms of climate to parts of the bay area.

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

#148

Post by rsync »

jnwatson wrote: post #129
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?

It has worked pretty well for Houston. Houston is as close to free market as you can get. It helps that much of what people call Houston isn't actually in any city boundary.

Genuinely curious as to how much time you have lived or worked in Houston ?

I found many pieces of it - some of which were directly related to lack of zoning - to be aesthetic disasters.

There seems to be a conception that support of zoning, and things like it, need be grounded in some scientific public-good maximalism that probably doesn't exist.

I don't feel bound by that at all.

The reason I am against ad-hoc liquor stores being run from a walled in front porch of a single-family home converted (badly) to a duplex[1] is because I dislike them aesthetically.

[1] Houston, circa 1999.

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

#149

Post by toast0 »

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…

> This is why places like LA and Houston have never solved their traffic problems.

If you put a population cap on LA or wherever, you could solve traffic with construction. Instead, the goal is to increase road capacity inline with the increased trip demand that's largely driven by population growth.

Sure, there are some trips that are taken when there's sufficient capacity, and not when there's not, and you can call discovery of those trips induced demand. But most of the demand increase is from population increase. LA is actually putting in a lot of mass transit, and it gets a surprisingly high (to me anyway) ridership, but it's pretty hard to provide a comprehensive solution to the commute needs of the area when there's no real centralization of workplaces or housing or even retail or amusement. All of those things are more or less distributed throughout the greater LA area, and people live in multi-income households, so relocating to be transit accessible for all earners is difficult. It's really hard to beat point to point time of a flexible, if congested, car vs inflexible transit lines if you have to make more than one transfer.

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

#150

Post by rsync »

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?

"Go further. Get rid of all zoning that’s unrelated to pollution of some kind or strictly a safety issue."

I keep wondering: How soon until someone proposes that building codes drive up housing prices and that code enforcement unfairly impacts PoC ?

It seems outlandish but ... part of me thinks it's just a matter of time.

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