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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

#181

Post by Ericson2314 »

mkoubaa wrote: post #21
softwaredoug wrote: post #5

Planning is a perverse set of incentives. First it’s usually longer term thinking, where decisions made now impact the shape of a city decades out. Second, the people that live in a place now have undue influence and veer conservative in how land is used (ie NIMBYism). This often gives rise to at least near term stagnation (on a historical scale) in established, wealthy cities and growth in up and coming metros that…

Among the most beautiful cities in world are those that were not planned, but were just allowed to happen. I don't know where we get the mindset that planning is necessary to begin with

This a very US-specific observation. While yes mid-century planners did some very stupid things and were kind of control freaks, the privately-held land baseline that preceded them is not at all universal. See the other posts' great examples.

Also, we now have the automobile to content with. The car is a like a gene drive, a self-perpetuating technology like we had never seen before, radically upending status-quo-ante system dynamics. (The reasons being a) Cars push everyone else off the streets, b) car-driven development spreads everything way to far apart for anything else to be practical.)

The market alone can't defeat cars any more than evolution can defeat gene drives. Only social failure / extension (and heaven forbid horizontal gene transfer!) can rain them in "endogenously".

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

#183

Post by Retric »

fiter wrote: post #101
Retric wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reasonable justification is government builds public infrastructure like schools, highways, and subways based on assumptions about use and population density. It’s much harder and more expensive to have reasonable infrastructure if you can’t make accurate predictions. The de facto justification is indirect negative externalities exist like traffic congestion. Also known as F U I got mine.

With uses segregated, the "reasonable" argument does not make sense to me: infrastructure will have to be maximized because there will be big migrations of people based on normal use times like going to work. You need twice as much parking, twice as much freeway throughput.

Don’t just think in terms of low density around current American cities.

Plopping down a subdivisions in a sleepy county can quickly overwhelm local school systems, sewage treatment, etc. Even just 7% annual growth doubles the local population every decade which requires incredible and increasing investments in infrastructure. Slowing that down slightly is hardly unreasonable and it can help avoid expensive and damaging boom / bust cycles.

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

#184

Post by closeparen »

nosianu wrote: post #45
lotsofpulp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People in the Bay Area don’t realize that every little thing that keeps costs low gets funneled back into house prices. Because the root cause is the demand for housing in Bay Area is far outstripping supply. You must tweak either or both of those to move the price. Addressing supply certainly does, but it might not be sufficient supply to overcome the demand. But it does help the situation.

My suspicion is that this might end up like more/wider streets and highways: You built it => it will be filled to capacity asap and there is no difference in the end, only more of the same (literally). Of course, this won't happen to infinity but far enough. In the end the area is just too attractive, combined with the industries there generate a lot of money.

1) A neighborhood with a lot more people in it has important qualitative differences compared to a sprawl suburb. It can be safe, pleasant, and interesting to walk around. It can support local retail and entertainment which do not require driving to access. It can support fast and frequent transit connections to the broader metro. It can support more variation in the age, life situation, and wealth of the households who live there. This is a far cry from “more of the same.”

2) The problem we’re trying to solve here is that the people who would fill those new units to capacity are instead locked (or pushed) out. Of course if that problem is solved they will instead be here. That’s the whole point of making anything cheaper or more abundant. So that more people can enjoy it.

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

#185

Post by Baeocystin »

smichel17 wrote: post #178
Baeocystin wrote: post #174

This seems like a good thread to link to https://missingmiddlehousing.com/ , which is a site I've seen discussed directly here on HN several times previous. I am still in the process of consolidating my opinions on this, but I did find it an interesting, useful read.

On the about page, I found > We call them “Missing” because they have typically been illegal to build since the mid-1940s but I could not easily find and further explanation about why this is, etc

They go in to further detail about that on https://missingmiddlehousing.com/about/how-to-enable .

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

#186

Post by ghaff »

rcpt wrote: post #141
seoaeu wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>But they're nowhere near affording a house in Mountain View, hence the busses.

The buses are because they want to live in the city rather than essentially suburban Mountain View. It's not like SF is cheap housing.

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

#187

Post by kingsuper20 »

I like the idea of building massive apartment complexes in the Bay Area. It was a PITA place to live 30 years ago and it's worse now

The thing is, if we can build giant ant mounds in just a few places it'll save the central coast and California north of the Golden Gate from destruction.

Step two would be to connect the giant metro areas to the rest of the state via a dirt road.

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

#188

Post by Bud »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #147
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.

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.

Neither Portland nor Seattle can match the Bay Area in terms of overall culture. Neither has a world-class orchestra or opera, to say nothing of the early-music scene in the Bay Area, which is easily the best in the US. Neither measures up to the Bay Area in the art scene, either. Or the restaurant scene. Or the wine scene.

Neither comes very close in terms of climate, although that argument is muted lately due to California being on fire for 4 months out of each year now. But Portland and Seattle are already experiencing their own climate-change-related impacts.

And no, neither measures up economically either. Comparing the tech industry in Portland or Seattle to the Bay Area (Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and basically all of the startup scene) is a joke.

I could go on, but really, there is no competition.

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

#189

Post by cguess »

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.

Except for the massive spread paved over most of the marshland and waterways in the area. Resulting in much of the city being under water (literally) for days in 2017 when a class 1 hurricane, which is pretty common, hit the area.

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

#190

Post by moosey »

jankyxenon wrote: post #110
Schiendelman wrote: post #20

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.

This is category error, at a minimum. 'highly progressive people' is an abstraction and cannot take action. It's imagine it's also inductive reasoning and out group bias.
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