Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Berkeley's upzoning would be among nation's largest

darrellowens.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 289 posts

Re: Berkeley's upzoning would be among nation's largest

#231

Post by user9925 »

NoPedantsThanks wrote: post #219
theluketaylor wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly is this a "more handouts for developers"? Removing zoning restrictions just makes building possible, it doesn't create any subsidies for building. Handouts for developers is opening good agricultural land for development. Fixing generations of terrible zoning for infill development is just unlocking existing sites to be more than exclusively single family homes. > instead of mandating the redevelopment of…

Maybe you haven't looked into how these laws work, but they are handouts to developers because they guarantee that a developer can buy one house and put up 10 units (in CA, for example) without any opposition or time-consuming permitting process. So when an elderly person with out-of-state children dies, those children are going to sell to the quickest and most-secure bidder... a developer with a cash offer. And you…

> So when an elderly person with out-of-state children dies, those children are going to sell to the quickest and most-secure bidder... a developer with a cash offer.

But they put it on the market, so won't different developers compete and bid up the price, eating up potential profits? Calling it a handout is incorrect.

Re: Berkeley's upzoning would be among nation's largest

#232

Post by jeffbee »

lmm wrote: post #83
jahewson wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even top 25 in the US. Median household income in Berkeley, CA is $97,834.

Berkely is in the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward MSA, which had the fourth-highest per-capita income on the 2010 US census and is likely to place higher on the more recent one. It's absolutely one of the highest-income metropolitan areas in the world.

In addition, looking a college town median income is a demographic anomaly. There are 50000 people at the University with zero income.

If you look at prime-earning-age householders in the Census, Berkeley is way off the scale.

Re: Berkeley's upzoning would be among nation's largest

#233

Post by panick21_ »

NoPedantsThanks wrote: post #222
panick21_ wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More handouts for developers Just like giving homeless people food is just handouts to farmers. > targeting already-residential neighborhoods instead of mandating the redevelopment of blighted formerly-industrial and -commercial areas and dying malls with boarded-up Macy's and Fry's. No neighborhood should ever allowed to be only restricted single family home. There is absolutely no justification for that what so e…

False equivalency galore there. Talk about ridiculous. There's plenty of justification for allowing people to choose what type of neighborhood they want to live in. Downtown L.A. is not "full." If you want high-density living, that's already available. There's no reason to destroy already-residential neighborhoods when there are tracts of disused non-residential areas to convert into housing, or high-density areas th…

Your perspective that allowing things like four-plexes is 'destroying' neighberhoods is just complexly delusional. Having four-plexes is not 'high density', not even closes. And nobody is destroying anything, the existing houses mostly stay there and most will remain single family homes.

What we are talking about is going from ridiculously low density that was literately created to keep out 'negros' to another form of low density zoning.

That the actual reality, acting like 2 families living is the same as Hong Kong is just fearmongering.

> Nothing in these laws helps the homeless. Nothing. If you're eating from garbage cans,

See the problem is you don't actually understand homelessness. You have one image in your head of what homeless is, and you can't see beyond that.

There are lots of people who have jobs and live in their cars. And there are plenty of people who start out that way and their situation gets worse.

You have people now living in cheap apartment blocks, those people might have the money to move to a newly built four-plex. That leaves an opening in an apartment block. Then somebody from a shelter might be able to move in. People go from older buildings into newer, leaving those housing units available.

This is the actual mechanism that you need to employ on all level to lower rents and make more space available for affordable apartments.

> nor the ONE "affordable" unit they're required to include to get all kinds of waivers.

Forcing developers to build 'affordable' units is the wrong approach.

Re: Berkeley's upzoning would be among nation's largest

#234

Post by panick21_ »

theluketaylor wrote: post #96
panick21_ wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. The whole zoning code needs to be reworked. In addition to what you mentioned. There are also issues with building regulation as well. The city should work with architects to develop models for housing types that are pre-approved. Such as four-plex that fit into single family neighborhoods. So developers can just pick those up and get building in a short period of time.

> The city should work with architects to develop models for housing types that are pre-approved Maybe I'm late to the party, but I recently found out some cities are doing exactly that and I'd love to see it become extremely common. South Bend, IN is an example that has plans ready to be used of housing that is reasonably affordable to build. I'd love to see even more multi-family options, but let's not have perfect…

South Bend seems to be doing a lot. They are hosting a lot of talks and engage with all kinds of urbanist ideas. Great to see.

Re: Berkeley's upzoning would be among nation's largest

#236

Post by pfannkuchen »

earthwalker99 wrote: post #131
pfannkuchen wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right wing is broadly more about preserving tradition, not opposing change of any kind. If a change doesn’t conflict with a cultural tradition, opposing the change isn’t necessarily right wing IMO.

Nonsense. The terminology comes from the French Revolution, in which the right wing was for preserving the establishment monarchy. Ever since, "right wing" has colloquially meant support for preserving the established order.

Yes, and monarchy is a long standing cultural tradition going back long before the establishment of modern nation states and the bloated megalithic monarchies they produced. I don’t see how what I said goes against the origin of the term (which I am of course aware of).

Your definition is overly narrow. Were the Nazis left wing or were they fighting to preserve Weimar? Is the contemporary far right fighting to maintain the current status quo? Was overturning Roe v Wade aligned with left wing interests or right wing? Etc.

Re: Berkeley's upzoning would be among nation's largest

#237

Post by jerlam »

tptacek wrote: post #86
tzs wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if things work the same way in California as they do up here in Washington, but up here I see a large number of complaints from current home owners about rising house prices. That's because rising house prices means rising property taxes.

It's a huge problem here: the hottest areas of Chicagoland have the best schools, in large part because property tax levies fund the schools, which sets up a vicious cycle: voters will approve arbitrary levy increases for the schools because they assume (justifiably) that they're getting the money back in house values. Their kids graduate, they don't care about the schools anymore, so they sell their (appreciated) ho…

At least it sounds like you're funding good schools in Chicago.

California has a bizarre problem where the most expensive areas to live cannot fund their schools. Cupertino, the city of Apple's HQ, median home selling price over 2 million dollars - relies on state funds to pay for its public school district, since local property taxes aren't enough:

https://siliconvalleythings.medium.com/why-do-silicon-valley...

Re: Berkeley's upzoning would be among nation's largest

#238

Post by jjav »

CalRobert wrote: post #186
jjav wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is self-correcting. It can't be if the regulation prohibits building parking for each home, as in this case. Building housing units without parking just externalizes the problem and makes the whole neighborhood worse. People still need a car, so if they can't have parking they will have to find it on the streets somewhere, which is worse for everyone involved. I've lived in a neighborhood where apartment build…

This is a good reason to charge appropriately for street parking.

> This is a good reason to charge appropriately for street parking.

How would that solve it? There still aren't enough spots.

If you do unreserved spaces through parking meters or resident window stickers, people are still stuck doing all the same things (circling for hours, getting into fights).

To solve that you'd need to have reserved street spots so people are guaranteed which spot is theirs. So now you have to staff up enforcement and towing so the spots they reserved is available. But wait.. so we're back to dedicated spots, but in a less convenient and more cumbersome way. So to solve that, just have the apartment buildings themselves provide the spot for each resident. So we're full circle back to where we started.

As long as cars are needed (in the US, they are needed) the optimal solution is for each housing unit to provide it built-in, instead of externalizing the problem onto the neighborhood.

Re: Berkeley's upzoning would be among nation's largest

#239

Post by bobthepanda »

cyberax wrote: post #93
bobthepanda wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The land is valuable because it is the only land zoned that way. You can’t build a building that tall in Flushing NY. If you could build 100 floor skyscrapers in the entire metropolitan area, this advantage goes away.

Brooklyn's population density is only half of that in Manhattan, and there's plenty of new construction there. Guess what it does to prices?

Fun fact: during the Bloomberg administration, more land was actually downzoned and upzoned. https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/city-hall/story/201...

This had the effect of driving all the developers into fewer land parcels, hiking up prices. New York has not substantially deviated from this zoning model since then.

Re: Berkeley's upzoning would be among nation's largest

#240

Post by jjav »

astrange wrote: post #179
jjav wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, they still might revolt for other reasons, like not wanting undesirables like people poorer than themselves to move in next door, or not wanting to see as many houses in their morning walk, but from a financial sense, upzoning is a big positive for existing landowners. This is a very uncharitable take. People choose a place to live based on criteria they like. If you want to live in a super dense city you migh…

> This is a very uncharitable take. You should go to a city council meeting and see how NIMBY homeowners behave. It is impossible to be worse than they are and it's impossible to describe them uncharitably. You can say "they just like their neighborhoods" all you like but they hate poor people, young people, richer people, anyone who might park a car in front of their house, anyone who might use all the parking spots…

> but they hate

You paint with a very broad brush. I have no doubt that for each aspect you list, you can indeed find an example of some extremist who hates it.

But the average regular person doesn't particularly hate any of these, they just want to live in their home in an area they like.

> You can say "they just like their neighborhoods"

I assume you have selected place(s) to live? Did you have any criteria for selecting the area?

Most people have a list of things they absolutely want, and deal breakers they won't put up with. So you find a home that meets these. This is what I mean by they like the neighborhood they selected when making that decision.

Is it at all surprising that after they selected a suitable neighborhood, they don't particularly want it to transform into something completely different that no longer meets any of their criteria?

Post reply on HN