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Single Family Zoning is now banned in California

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Re: Single Family Zoning is now banned in California

#41

Post by kortilla »

kadoban wrote: post #27
kortilla wrote: post #23

> A study by UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation found that the new law likely would add, at most, fewer than 700,000 housing units across California. A good, a pointless divisive bill that does nothing to fundamentally address the issues. It’s almost as if California politicians have discovered it’s better to have a bill that makes a lot of noise to make it seem like work is being done while simultane…

700,000 is not a tiny amount.

It’s tiny when it’s the max end of the estimation in a state of 40 million people.

Re: Single Family Zoning is now banned in California

#42

Post by creato »

esrauch wrote: post #28
dado3212 wrote: post #24

Just in case people don't understanding zoning laws, this doesn't mean you can't have single family homes. It just allows people to split existing lots (with criteria around 3 years of tenancy and some other caveats) and in general removes places where you can only have single family homes. As a general question, I think this means that people who currently own single family homes around the Bay Area are going to mak…

I'm not sure about that last part. In general the people who own single family homes in the Bay Area have had nimby opposition to more dense housing being constructed since more supply lowers prices.

That only works when they can get together and ban higher density via zoning or whatever other mechanism. If individual homeowners can "defect" without their neighbors blocking the construction, the "union" will quickly fall apart.

Re: Single Family Zoning is now banned in California

#43

Post by [deleted] »

dado3212 wrote: post #24

Just in case people don't understanding zoning laws, this doesn't mean you can't have single family homes. It just allows people to split existing lots (with criteria around 3 years of tenancy and some other caveats) and in general removes places where you can only have single family homes. As a general question, I think this means that people who currently own single family homes around the Bay Area are going to mak…

[deleted]

Re: Single Family Zoning is now banned in California

#44

Post by anonuser123456 »

poopypoopington wrote: post #19
personjerry wrote: post #11

I remember reading article about San Francisco being the "mercenary city": Young professionals come here, live in tiny apartments, get big tech wages for a couple of years, then move somewhere more affordable. With the remote situation, people are getting out of SF faster than ever. Won't this bill drive up the price of a single family home while driving down the price of multifamily homes? But the dream for most Ame…

Your comment makes no sense. Building more housing means that housing costs will go down, making it way more likely that you WILL "be able to afford a single family home -- the American dream when you settle down..."

The bill will likely make single family residences more expensive. Since single family residences will now compete for multifamily, and multifamily uses land so much more efficiently, multifamily development will be able to outbid single family construction.

Not that this is a problem. The goal of housing policy is to house people, not give a certain fraction of the population exactly what they want and telling everyone else ‘sucks to be you, I got mine’

Re: Single Family Zoning is now banned in California

#45

Post by freshpots »

WaxProlix wrote: post #15
personjerry wrote: post #11

I remember reading article about San Francisco being the "mercenary city": Young professionals come here, live in tiny apartments, get big tech wages for a couple of years, then move somewhere more affordable. With the remote situation, people are getting out of SF faster than ever. Won't this bill drive up the price of a single family home while driving down the price of multifamily homes? But the dream for most Ame…

I wonder how many people will go from "I can afford a single family house in SF" to "I cannot afford a single family house in SF" as a result of this bill.

I think you have it backwards. More housing reduces housing pressure and prices.

Re: Single Family Zoning is now banned in California

#46

Post by jeffbee »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #31
esrauch wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about that last part. In general the people who own single family homes in the Bay Area have had nimby opposition to more dense housing being constructed since more supply lowers prices.

More supply also increases traffic. This isn't just about everyone worrying about their housing prices (there are a lot of NIMBY reasons beyond that).

More housing where the jobs are creates less traffic. Putting your jobs in Berkeley and your housing in Vacaville is what creates more traffic. A Berkeley with 300k people - which is the population that would support the number of jobs already in Berkeley today - would have noticeably less traffic. Same for a San Francisco with two million people etc.

Re: Single Family Zoning is now banned in California

#47

Post by ryukafalz »

esrauch wrote: post #28
dado3212 wrote: post #24

Just in case people don't understanding zoning laws, this doesn't mean you can't have single family homes. It just allows people to split existing lots (with criteria around 3 years of tenancy and some other caveats) and in general removes places where you can only have single family homes. As a general question, I think this means that people who currently own single family homes around the Bay Area are going to mak…

I'm not sure about that last part. In general the people who own single family homes in the Bay Area have had nimby opposition to more dense housing being constructed since more supply lowers prices.

It lowers housing prices, not necessarily property prices. If you own a single family home right next to an apartment building, and it's permitted to build an apartment building there, that lot's probably worth a lot more than it would be if you could only build a single family home there.

Imagine a neighborhood with only two single family homes in it; you can only have two families live there, so if more than two families want to live there, they're going to bid up the price. In this case, the cost of the property is the cost of housing in general in that neighborhood, since it's one home per lot.

Now imagine one of those SFHs is replaced by an apartment building with 40 units. Now 41 families can live in that neighborhood, so there's comparatively less competition for housing, which drives down the cost to live there. But the landlord for that apartment building can make a lot more in rent from the units in that building than they could from renting a house to one family, because it's distributed across 40.

If there's enough demand for housing in that area (and in general right now there is in many places due to lack of supply), there are probably lots of people who'd be interested in replacing that second house with another apartment building, and the property values would reflect that. So yeah basically: housing prices go down, property values go up.

Re: Single Family Zoning is now banned in California

#48

Post by tcmart14 »

javagram wrote: post #36
remarkEon wrote: post #26

If I wanted to move to California and live in a single family home (my wife is from there), won’t this legislation just make those dwellings even more expensive now? Because California government says no more future supply. I get the urgency on addressing the housing situation in California, but this feels to me like “we must do something, and this is something, so we will do it”.

I think you're confusing "Banning single family homes" and "Banning single family zoning". Nothing about this law prevents you buying land and building a SFH on it, so your characterization as "no more future supply" is inaccurate. It simply gives you the right to, in certain circumstances, build an additional home on your property.

Wouldn't it also allow developers to build apartments in places that previously they couldn't have because the ritzy neighborhood down the street can't bear the site of 'em?

Re: Single Family Zoning is now banned in California

#49

Post by philosopher1234 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #31
esrauch wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about that last part. In general the people who own single family homes in the Bay Area have had nimby opposition to more dense housing being constructed since more supply lowers prices.

More supply also increases traffic. This isn't just about everyone worrying about their housing prices (there are a lot of NIMBY reasons beyond that).

I think many of the reasons are rationalizations or invented primarily in support of protecting net worth, even if they have some truth.

Re: Single Family Zoning is now banned in California

#50

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

kortilla wrote: post #40
dado3212 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6% increase in housing units isn't nothing [1]. That said, I think you're right that more aggressive measures would need to be taken to resolve the shortage. Is there a link to recommendations that would have larger impact? I know CEQA's brought up a lot, but is there some paper that's been written around proposals and estimated housing units? [1] https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/california/housing-stat...

That’s effectively nothing when everything is so constrained already. A 3bd/2ba house in Sunnyvale runs for a couple of million dollars. Do you think 6% is going to bring it down to 300-500k like other suburbs in the country (e.g. around Indianapolis, Atlanta, Dallas)?

I don't think anyone believes this bill will single-handedly solve the housing crisis or intended it to do so. The hope is that it will be a good incremental step, and encourage other reforms to promote more housing as people discover that multifamily units aren't a big deal.
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