Facing housing crisis, L.A. voters back duplexes in single-family neighborhoods • Hacker News Board

Re: Facing housing crisis, L.A. voters back duplexes in single-family neighborhoods

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Post by throwawaysea » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 9:38 PM UTC

francisofascii wrote: post #234

sjg007 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People can vote for change.

Actually, no, they can't. You can't vote for change in a place you don't live yet. It is a flaw or an unfair downside of federalism. Call it tyranny of localism (or something)

Why should someone be able to vote for change in a place they don't live in? It's not a flaw, but a thoughtful and smart design from my perspective. Having that locality is what lets people with many different perspectives and ways of life to coexist in the same country. People who don't like one way of doing things can go elsewhere.

Re: Facing housing crisis, L.A. voters back duplexes in single-family neighborhoods

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Post by xxpor » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 9:39 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #181

xxpor wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way to solve the parking problem is to price street parking, not to require new buildings to build parking while the existing houses get off scott free. It's the exact same supply and demand argument: limited supply so how do you reduce demand to the supply that exists? Increase prices.

I expect residential parking is pretty price-insensitive. Maybe more households would forgo owning a marginal second car. But if a households needs a car, they need a car. And if that means paying $100+/month that's just something they're going to have to eat.

If everyone just swallows it, the price is still too low.

Re: Facing housing crisis, L.A. voters back duplexes in single-family neighborhoods

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Post by deepakhj » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 9:51 PM UTC

subsubzero wrote: post #130

What is the end solution to this housing crisis? The solutions will all hurt existing homeowners or multi-homeowners and are not likely to be implemented. The duplex in a single family lot is not going to move the needle on this crisis much, as building 2 houses on a existing lot will require a teardown of the original structure, then a buildup of the new duplex, all very costly. It will run at least $500K+ and I don…

SB9 and SB10 are meant to be small improvements. It's understood it won't completely solve the crisis. SB50 would have made a big impact but it didn't pass.

Prop 13 can easily be fixed by a) Limiting it to primary homes. b) Removing it from commercial properties. c) Make it means based and if the homeowner can't afford the taxes, tally it up and assess it at death or final sale w/o an equivalent purchase.

You can see how subsidies work due to prop 13 in the map here https://www.taxfairnessproject.org/.

Re: Facing housing crisis, L.A. voters back duplexes in single-family neighborhoods

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Post by greedo » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 9:52 PM UTC

Causality1 wrote: post #87

baby wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m convinced that this is the reason behind SF housing problems as well. There’s just too much value for landlords.

I think anti-profiteering laws could be helpful. If you bought land and built a house and want to live in a quiet neighborhood until you die, fine. But maybe if you vote against expanded housing you don't get to sell your house for more than you paid for it, or maybe don't get to sell it at all while you're alive. Separating the homesteaders from the investors would do a lot of good.

Everyone is an investor at some point in a home. You may not realize your gains for a long time, but the idea that someone who purchases a house isn't allowed to sell it while alive will never fly.

Re: Facing housing crisis, L.A. voters back duplexes in single-family neighborhoods

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Post by gkop » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 9:54 PM UTC

treeman79 wrote: post #313

RHSeeger wrote: post #282

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Or kids roller skating on the floor above you while you're trying to work or sleep. Roller skates on a normal floor are... deafening to the people on the floor below.

It’s horrible when you have small children being above people. Kids are noisy, they walk hard and jump a lot. You can lecture /punish all you want. That doesn’t change their nature. For a time we were apologizing to the grouchy old lady living alone below us in a 3 bedroom. Hitting ceiling with broom at every noise. But at a certain point. Look 3 bedrooms are for people with family. I’m not going to force a 2 year to…

I have a family member with small kids that bought a condo flat in Montreal in one of those ubiquitous stick-framed midcentury quadplexes. The downstairs neighbor complained aggressively about "kids too noisy" and sued my family member. The family member was unable to work it out with the neighbor, and faced with the prospect of the suit actually going to trial, their lawyer recommended settling by selling the unit to the downstairs neighbor for a $100K CAD haircut. Closing that sale was a huge relief to them after having endured almost two years of constant harassment by the downstairs neighbor. Sharing to warn others.

Re: Facing housing crisis, L.A. voters back duplexes in single-family neighborhoods

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Post by deepakhj » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 9:56 PM UTC

what_is_orcas wrote: post #186

nimbius wrote: post #37

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housing reform has been a political third-rail for a while now and follows the same aggravating pattern. - Home owners delight in 100k of equity per year on what amounts to bungalow property held together by stucco, as they have since the late seventies when neoliberal tax reforms at a republican behest elevated them to an untouchable landed gentry. - Residents in the state bemoan "Reagans army," the indelible popula…

This is so frustrating. I live in a relatively low-income neighborhood in a west-coast city and I hear on social media all the time about how the local government doesn't prioritize us because of our relatively low average household income, but at the same time a lot of those folks are resistant to zoning for more apartment buildings in our neighborhood because of all the nimby classics (crime, diversity, etc.). Mayb…

New housing or old home sales are the only way to raise money for a city like Oakland. So many houses are subsidized by prop 13 that the revenue per capita is much lower here than SF which also includes a county.

Re: Facing housing crisis, L.A. voters back duplexes in single-family neighborhoods

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Post by mrep » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 9:57 PM UTC

xboxnolifes wrote: post #322

throwawaysea wrote: post #67

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> You may not want to live like that, but plenty of people do. We should allow them. I suspect that number is a lot lower than is claimed. It's only a very loud set of vocal urbanist activitsts who clamor for these changes and create the illusion of that demand. The reality is most people grow out of wanting to live in dense areas and walkability is very overrated. In fact walk scores basically don't matter when peop…

From a US perspective, I think walkability score is overrated because walkability scores are ridiculously inflated. There are like 5 places in the entire country I would consider actually walkable (and they aren't affordable), yet many places will have a good or great "walkability score". And walkability is a tradeoff for space. Pretty much everyone in my family are Single-family home for life kind of people, but the…

I agree that walkability is bad. IMO, it should be 0-100 based on the minutes to walk to a grocery store with the score being minutes it takes to walk to a grocery store. The lower the better.

Re: Facing housing crisis, L.A. voters back duplexes in single-family neighborhoods

#348

Post by kwere » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 9:57 PM UTC

subsubzero wrote: post #130

What is the end solution to this housing crisis? The solutions will all hurt existing homeowners or multi-homeowners and are not likely to be implemented. The duplex in a single family lot is not going to move the needle on this crisis much, as building 2 houses on a existing lot will require a teardown of the original structure, then a buildup of the new duplex, all very costly. It will run at least $500K+ and I don…

#6. limit foreign (even other states) residential real estate investments. (exception maybe for high density ones)

Re: Facing housing crisis, L.A. voters back duplexes in single-family neighborhoods

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Post by deepakhj » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 9:58 PM UTC

SmellTheGlove wrote: post #131

ihaveajob wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing I don't get is why many SFH owners don't see the benefit of upzoning their lot: Overnight, their house is much more valuable because if they choose to, they can sell to a developer who can make MORE money by building more homes. And if they choose to keep their house as is, nobody is going to force them. In the end, it boils down to cars, though. Many people see the free parking space in front of their hous…

I can tell you that when we were moving from SF to Seattle this past year, we were getting _crushed_ on any house that was sitting on an upzoned lot. Seattle's done a decent job of upzoning parts of neighborhoods around transit corridors, and we were looking at houses on those lots because I believe in the upside as you do. Well, so do others, and they have _cash_ to buy it - we did not! We're now in a SFH in a mostl…

The only way to reduce the dependency on cars is to build units w/o parking and then raise money to improve transit.

Re: Facing housing crisis, L.A. voters back duplexes in single-family neighborhoods

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Post by greedo » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 9:59 PM UTC

foofoo4u wrote: post #257

IIAOPSW wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>LA's problem is that the folks that have the power to fix housing have zero interest in doing because it would hurt their self interest. Housing is only a "problem" if you haven't bought a house yet, once you purchase a house, all the issues with housing there all of a sudden become benefits. I have an expression for this. "Solving the problem is only half the problem." Everyone knows how to fix the housing problem…

I have never heard this quote before, but I like it. It's a good point. So how about this to help lead the discussion. We, the HackerNews community, seem to have a general consensus that increasing supply is the best way to lower prices. Rather straight forward, really. But the reason why housing is currently limited is due to a conflict of interests; existing property owners want to stifle supply. And they have more…

Is more housing really the answer? I keep thinking of induced demand increasing traffic on the roads, and I wonder whether California would just have more people consume the additional housing. Instead of increasing the supply, perhaps addressing the demand is the only way out.