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

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

#261

Post by flurben » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:06 PM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #231

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

How do you streamline real estate availability? Blow up mountains or expand into the ocean?

Eliminate minimum requirements on parking and restrictions on height. Make demolitions easier. Eliminate the neighbors ability to stop any project that they don't like. Reduce the number of permits required, reduce the permit fees, reduce the time it takes to issue a permit.

In the case of San Francisco, they also need a centralized, online planning/permits database. They are still doing things on paper, and they've got a backlog of thousands of permits. It can take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars simply to navigate the permitting process.

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

#262

Post by Ericson2314 » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:11 PM UTC

lr4444lr wrote: post #250

Ericson2314 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Sure, they like it when numbers in account books get bigger, but

Why are they NIMBYs when they could make much more money redeveloping their best-positioned neighborhoods as massive apartments they rent out?

Why did they not let wages grow, when the resulting increase in consumption will make them more profit?

If rich people as a class really were interested in max growth, they would have stayed Fordist-Keynesianist, but that did not happen. And indeed growth, while still present, hasn't been what it was in the past.

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

#263

Post by someguydave » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:15 PM UTC

jimbob45 wrote: post #211

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 best thing would be to ban AirBNB and rental housing. Those two artificially restrict the supply of housing to an absurd extent and drive up the costs of everyone else’s housing. I’m not alone in this - several cities have already banned AirBNB.

lol how do you figure that rental housing restricts total supply?

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

#264

Post by mnouquet » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:23 PM UTC

Sacho wrote: post #260

mnouquet wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-acces…

You can disagree all you want, I'm making the statement. If people (ie. real people, with families, not SV urbanite idealists who think they got it all figured) loved concrete life so much so much, SFH wouldn't be that popular.

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

#265

Post by Lammy » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:27 PM UTC

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?

> Get rid of all zoning that’s unrelated to pollution

I would still be skeptical of this since I've learned the racial views of many famous environmental figures (like John Miur) and the various organizations brought up in their wake. Obviously correlation != causation but check out the trajectories and intersection between the usage of "segregationist" and "environmentalist" in American English publications. They cross over right around the time of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (1973):

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gentrification...

(Sorry for gross huge URL. You might have to focus the input box and hit Enter to see the results. Here's a screenshot otherwise: https://i.imgur.com/kP8ugvH.png )

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

#266

Post by epistasis » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:28 PM UTC

lr4444lr wrote: post #250

Ericson2314 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

There are plenty of wealthy people that are more focused on maintaining relative position in the hierarchy than they are on increasing their absolute amount of wealth.

Prime example is oil wealth. With their massive coffers, fossil fuel companies could be leading the transition to renewable energy, massive increasing human wealth as they drive the cost of energy down and drive their former competitors out of business by acquiring all the new renewables startups that will become the large companies of the future.

Tech, and the HN crowd in general, pursues a strategy of generally increasing the pie size, of disrupting themselves before somebody else disrupts them. But that is not the case for the majority of the economy in developed countries. And in undeveloped countries it's painfully easy to see so many wealthy people maximizing their own position in society over maximally growing their wealth.

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

#267

Post by epistasis » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:31 PM UTC

grandmczeb wrote: post #197

nugget wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The people who value the “exclusivity” of the Bay Area tend to be a very narrow demographic. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not a particular representative group.

I agree that it is a narrow group, but unfortunately it is a very powerful narrow group that controls local politics and has enacted these exclusionary policies. The Calvin Welch school of thought in SF is a prime example.

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

#268

Post by eloff » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:33 PM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #254

eloff wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's because you didn't look.

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

#269

Post by ta2164 » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:34 PM UTC

dillondoyle wrote: post #221

ta2164 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Correlation does not imply causation. >But if you want to exclude certain people from your neighborhood, and those people happen to often be from a certain culture/socioeconomic class… No doubt, no one wants to live around low class riff raff. That's not race spe…

You don't think we have laws that are currently racist?

If there are so many racist laws in systemically racist USA, you should have no issues pointing out some laws that are racist, no?

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

#270

Post by xdennis » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:35 PM UTC

jorts wrote: post #35

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?

Opening a chicken farm or leather tannery in a residential neighborhood sounds great.

Even without zoning, it doesn't make economic sense to start a farm in a residential area.