Earlier quoted context omitted.
Earlier - this started in 1911 when the Supreme Court said that.
Highly progressive people continue to self segregate into very non-diverse neighborhoods when buying houses.
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Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
151–160 of 373 posts
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#152Is 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.
Tokyo has a great subway/rail system but it honestly doesn't feel especially more walkable than SF to me except for in some particular areas. (And, of course, SF walkability varies quite a bit by area as well.)
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#153Just 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.
Nothing stopping Blacks or Hispanics from moving to the suburbs except for the laws of supply and demand. It's no secret that Asians (a historically disadvantaged POC) flock to the suburbs.
By definition not racist.
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#154Earlier 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.
Nothing stopping Blacks or Hispanics from moving to the suburbs except for the laws of supply and demand. It's no secret that Asians (a historically disadvantaged POC) flock to the suburbs. By definition not racist.
The laws of supply and demand are being manipulated by the powerful: They're suppressing the ability of supply to rise to meet demand, which has the effect of granting windfall profits to the haves while keeping the have-nots away from areas of opportunity.
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#155Some 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…
Those are valid objections to fourplexes , but there are still plenty of things in between SFH and fourplexes -- including, most particularly, semi-detached duplexes, which are much easier and still double the density on the lot! I do agree that much of the hype about fourplexes is suspect (including the noise isolation of units that are one-atop-another), but there are many other possibilities, including ADUs. Also,…
Small elevators get to use a potentially cheaper and easier option. In a tall building the elevator is suspended from cables, because that's the only practical option, but with only three-four floors of rise you can use hydraulics from below instead, this also puts the equipment room down at the bottom of the shaft instead of on the roof, so now you don't need roof access for routine maintenance.
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#156Earlier 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…
Those parcels are sold to the public and zoned for housing, what outcome are you hoping for here?
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 neigh…
That proves that exclusionary zoning was around in 1971, but not that it wasn't used earlier. Massachusetts amended its constitution in 1918, literally one year after Buchanan, to enable cities to impose zoning. And the idea of using it to create racial segregation was specifically discussed at the time [0]:
Of particular concern was the fear that zoning would bring about racial and socioeconomic segregation in Massachusetts, which need not take the form of racial tests, as zoning could just as easily bring about segregation by regulating who could afford certain neighborhoods by income. Pro-zoning advocates... [went ahead anyways]
[0]: https://www.cambridgema.gov/~/media/Files/officeofthemayor/2...
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#158Some 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…
> Just because something is permitted doesn't mean it happens. It's very hard to find a vacant lot or tear down at a price that would work First you make things legal then you streamline them. > You would need to find a developer willing to take a risk on a minuscule profit and an architect who enjoys brain damage," he said. "They are complicated little projects. It's the absolute opposite of economy of scale." Once…
So we totally flip the rules and it will all work out once the new rules are in place because people will begin to optimize to the new rules. Sounds like a lot how people think the free market is supposed to work.
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#159Earlier 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.
Nothing stopping Blacks or Hispanics from moving to the suburbs except for the laws of supply and demand. It's no secret that Asians (a historically disadvantaged POC) flock to the suburbs. By definition not racist.
A law can be "not racist", but still be crafted with certain intentions in mind; it's easy to exploit certain correlations to achieve a certain end result. I don't think anyone would argue that there's something innate about one's skin color that would make them predisposed to living in apartments! But if you want to exclude certain people from your neighborhood, and those people happen to often be from a certain culture/socioeconomic class…
It's also worth noting that the same laws were applied to Asians - exclusionary zoning and housing policies led to the consolidation of populations within certain neighborhoods, like San Francisco's Chinatown: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/how-1800s-racism-...
It wasn't always the case that most Asians could (whether financially or politically) move to the suburbs.
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#160It'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…
Rich SV types don’t seek housing because landlords appear to rent it to us. We seek housing because we get jobs. Each SV type who rents a new home is one who’s not competing for an existing home.
If you want to put a stop to the kind of development that is actually causing SV types to materialize, that would be offices. Offices are are generally popular and unobjectionable.