Maybe Oakland will do it and become an economic superstar...
Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
241–250 of 373 posts
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds like an epic value destroyer. It won’t lower prices. Instead it will drive out owners to be replaced by leasers incapable of owning property. The only people that win are owners of multi-tenant properties, which are often commercial businesses.
If they're condos, you can own it, at least as much as you can own half a duplex. If they're rental units, that's also ok, more supply brings down rents and lower rent causes more landlords to sell. Extra supply does add downward pressure on prices one way or another. I don't see where the "value destroyer" is.
> more supply brings down rents
People say that on here all the time, but I have never seen that happen. Do you have an example where increased housing supply lowered prices aside from a natural or market disaster? Maybe, Detroit where people simply abandoned their homes with no intent to sell.
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#243Some 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…
building fourplexes requires either two staircases or a staircase and an elevator Wow. That means they can get away with one staircase in San Fran. Wouldn't fly where I'm from. His material point is correct though. Real estate development is about money. Where I live, you can generally only make money on fourplexes where land prices are low enough. I don't know much about San Fran real estate, but from what I've hear…
Typically the emergency staircase is attached to the front of the building in SF, like so: https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-fire-escape-san-franc...
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#244Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20210301050437/https://www.sfchro...
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#245Earlier 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.
Singapore, Shenzhen to start.
If we blow it in the US there are plenty of people ready to work for TikTok or whatever other overseas company takes over.
Though I am surprised NYC doesn't have more tech jobs
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
The people who currently live in neighborhoods full of $5M single-family houses may value “exclusivity”, but I have met plenty of young people with ordinary jobs sleeping in bunk beds, 4 adults to a 2-bedroom house and still paying most of their paychecks to rent, who would much prefer to be living in separate 1–2 bedroom flats instead, with more little shops in their neighborhood and better transit.
Sure but they could move almost literally anywhere else. If someone said you could live in one of the most desirable places in the entire world on an 'ordinary' job but you had to share a room (which TBH could just be your significant other anyway) that would seem like a great deal right?
A city cannot function without sanitation workers, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, house painters, road maintenance workers, teachers, librarians, gardeners, bus drivers, janitors, delivery drivers, taxi drivers, shop clerks, wholesale merchants, mechanics, cooks, firefighters, paramedics, accountants, bank tellers, municipal bureaucrats, musicians, bartenders, ...
When many categories of essential workers start to be priced out of living locally and need to commute long distances from undesirable far-flung suburbs, it is (a) a grossly inefficient use of resources, and (b) makes the city much less pleasant and effective. A city where all of the residents are wealthy professionals with other workers as second-class commuters is not a very nice place to live, more like a theme park or resort hotel than a real city.
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they're condos, you can own it, at least as much as you can own half a duplex. If they're rental units, that's also ok, more supply brings down rents and lower rent causes more landlords to sell. Extra supply does add downward pressure on prices one way or another. I don't see where the "value destroyer" is.
> more supply brings down rents People say that on here all the time, but I have never seen that happen. Do you have an example where increased housing supply lowered prices aside from a natural or market disaster? Maybe, Detroit where people simply abandoned their homes with no intent to sell.
That's microeconomics 101, so it's theoretically sound.
Is there some effect in real life that prevents it from working the way the theory predicts?
I don't think so. I would put the burden of proof on you, if you want to go against a solid theory. It seems self evident that more housing supply means houses stay on the market longer (there is lots of evidence for that) and that means sellers have more incentives to lower the price to get a quicker sale (lots of evidence for that too.) Look for historical real estate inventory reports that include prices and you should see the effect when time on market increases.
It's important to note that prices would only fall if the change in supply overwhelmed the change in demand. In cities like Vancouver the demand is increasing at such a rate that increased supply only means prices don't rise as much as they would have otherwise. Time on market is always short. There was a brief dip in prices early in the pandemic and then things compensated back in the other direction.
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#248They 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 residentia…
I would add removing car parking requirements AND simultaneously pay for public transport, dedicated protected bike lanes etc to serve this new density. Like you mention importance of stores. I would maybe subsidize grocers & shops with tax breaks for a few years to get the walkability cycle going. The cart before horse problem, build it and they will come theory.
Exactly, make it all walkable/bikable with mass transit down the arterials, and incentives and density to attract the commerce. Particularly for mom+pop stores/restaurants.
And have it all near enough school and offices that a And you can still have islands of SFH/Townhouses that are within ~4 blocks of high density (I'd probably prefer that since I'm quite introverted most of the time).
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#249I've developed several multifamily projects including my current focus, a 72-unit apartment development. Proposals like these, while admirable, usually miss the mark and have little to no impact on housing availability because they fail to accept that housing development isn't just about zoning. Impact fees, planning regs (traffic, parking, etc), planning delays, NIMBY fights, labor costs...these are all inputs into…
Sure, single-family zoning is a necessary but not sufficient development for housing reform. Can't have density with it, but doesn't mean there isn't a laundry list of other things wrong with housing in the bay
Re: Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're confusing the incentives of all developers and people who might become developers collectively with the incentives of entrenched large players already existing in the market. It's like in many industries; the interests of the group as a whole push towards deregulation, while the interests of the biggest, politically well-connected firms is to increase regulation that will be harder for competitors to deal with…
People in general lack the imagination to grow the pie too. Getting / keeping a big slice allows you lord it over others, and do so immediately. A big lie spread under capitalism is that the wealthy and powerful actually like growth.
Do you know why you're getting down voted? Because this "insight" flies in the face of reality: economic growth (despite arguably unfair distribution of it) has defined the last 150+ years of the most powerful nations on earth, aside from a few blips during a war period or brief speculative asset collapse.
The rich and powerful "don't like" growth? Well, they've been failing spectacularly for quite some time: maybe they aren't so powerful? It makes no sense.