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

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

#251

Post by jlmorton » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 10:34 PM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #242

eloff wrote: post #240

Earlier 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.

We just ran a massive experiment, called Covid-19, which caused about 10% of San Francisco residents to leave the city.

This is not quite the same thing as an immediate increase in supply, but instead a large drop in demand. The net result is the exact same thing: a large increase in the vacancy rate, which resulted in a rapid and dramatic decrease in median rents.

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

#252

Post by rcpt » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 10:40 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #145

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.

The "greed lobby" originated in Utah and was named Howard Jarvis. All of California became a real estate investment hellscape after he left his mark.

Dot com has nothing to do with it

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

#253

Post by arcticbull » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 10:41 PM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #242

eloff wrote: post #240

Earlier 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.

Japan is the classical example where they have national zoning rules permitting residential development in each zone. You can get a place in downtown Tokyo for like $300K USD. [1]

> While the cost of housing is climbing in many global cities, the average middle-class family in Tokyo can still afford to buy a new, single-family detached home for $300,000. That’s right. The typical Tokyo starter home is a brand new three-bedroom.

Their national zoning rules allow supply to meet demand without city-level meddling. Houses there sell for roughly the cost of construction.

The reason housing is so nuts in SF is because the city added half as many new houses as required to meet demand over the last say 30 years. [2]

[1] https://archive.curbed.com/2017/2/3/14496248/tokyo-real-esta...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_housing_shortage

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

#254

Post by austincheney » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 10:42 PM UTC

eloff wrote: post #247

austincheney wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 l…

Right, but do you have any historic examples? I see none.

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

#255

Post by rcpt » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 10:45 PM UTC

larsiusprime wrote: post #142

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...

Shorter: https://www.landvaluetax.org/history/winston-churchill-said-...

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

#256

Post by gumby » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 10:45 PM UTC

rcpt wrote: post #252

gumby wrote: post #145

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.

The "greed lobby" originated in Utah and was named Howard Jarvis. All of California became a real estate investment hellscape after he left his mark. Dot com has nothing to do with it

I get your point, but I'm talking about Palo Alto specifically.

Even in the 90s Palo Alto had SRO housing for the homeless, required section 8 housing in new developments, and a lower median income than neighboring Menlo Park or Los Altos (and I read actually MV too, though I find that hard to believe). There was more tolerance for goofball behavior, though perhaps less than the 70s or 80s.

But 21st century Palo Alto is a different beast, and much more boring. People moved here to gain wealth (rather than nerd out) and once they had it, flaunt it. It's a real shame; there are plenty of other places to do that.

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

#257

Post by lostsubways » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 10:46 PM UTC

zachware wrote: post #238

I'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…

The zoning isn't everything, but it's definitely one of the things that has to change. If everywhere in California had Sacramento's ministerial housing ordinance (60-90 day approvals, everything as of right), AND zoning reform, AND major reduction in impact fees, you'd start to make a dent in the problem.

Rezoning is a necessary but not sufficient condition.

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

#258

Post by arcticbull » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 10:48 PM UTC

nugget wrote: post #170

BurningFrog wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those developers just want to keep the code complex so that only 100 unit projects are viable so that huge firms are the only ones who can execute projects. Strong disagreement. The best thing for developers would be minimal zoning, Houston style. As the Bay Area built to expand from 7M people to, say, 20M in a decade, enormous fortunes and livelihoods would be made from all that construction work.

The people I know who live in the Bay Area don’t particularly want it to expand. Part of the value of living there is its relative exclusivity.

I own property in downtown SF and I want it to expand massively. The current system is completely untenable. This is not to my direct/immediate benefit of course, the current situation is just straight-up SF city mismanagement.

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

#259

Post by jacobolus » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 10:49 PM UTC

zachware wrote: post #238

I'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…

Currently about 3/4 of the land area of San Francisco is zoned to only allow single-family houses or duplexes. All of the pale yellow areas in https://sfplanning.org/sites/default/files/resources/2019-02... (RH-1 and RH-2 zones).

Most of that area is not classified as historical, and a lot of it is filled with relatively cheaply constructed and not particularly beautiful buildings (property values have increased a lot in the past few decades). The residential streets in most of that area are way wider than currently necessary and there is a lot of free or cheap street parking everywhere, but some arterial roads are a bottleneck during commute hours and public transit is inadequate. The zoning is basically “sleepy low-density beach town” rather than “cosmopolitan city”.

Changing the zoning of most of those areas to the purple (NCT) or medium orange (RM, RC, RTO) types is not the only change needed, and it won’t make a difference overnight, but it would eventually allow something like doubling the population of the city without requiring anything taller or larger than 4–10-unit low-rise buildings. It would probably also force the city to make a bunch of public transit upgrades, as the whole western half of the city is currently pretty isolated from the more connected eastern half.

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

#260

Post by Sacho » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 10:53 PM UTC

mnouquet wrote: post #232

catern wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's hubris. The reason we're in this situation, where a lack of dense housing is causing housing prices to rise, is because earlier planners were confident 50 years ago that single-family homes were the best option, and they weren't content to just follow that strategy then and there. They decided that this had to be enforced on future people too - us, that is.

> because earlier planners were confident 50 years ago that single-family homes were the best option SFH IS the best options, nobody WANTS to live in an apartment if given the choice.

You really can't make a categorical statement like that. I prefered living in an apartment because the housing density meant I had a grocery store, a farmer's market, and multiple other commercial hubs within walking distance. It also meant that street planning gave priority to public transport and pedestrians. There were plenty of jobs available within reasonable commute times. My neighbours gave me an easy-to-access network of people that you could befriend and somewhat rely on.

There's so many positives to living in an apartment that are pretty much direct effects of the denser housing.