101–110 of 133 posts
The problem with ant zoning laws is that they pick winners and losers. They need abolished state-wide to ever have a true affect. Otherwise, these limited pockets get bought up by investors and again, are limited to tiny areas. Abolish it state wide and people will over build and then true affordability will return.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This really shows how limited the effect of this bill is, but it's still much better than nothing.
A big question is whether these areas actually turn into denser housing, or whether something else in the process manages to bog it down. Plenty of housing bills have seemed like a big deal when you looked at the area they impacted, but in practice they led to little new housing.
For example, SB684 allowed building and subdividing up to 10 units on a multifamily lot. BUT, the lot wasn’t eligible if you had to knock down a building that had tenants in the past N years to avoid displacement of people.
You can probably guess how many multifamily lots are out there where you don’t have to tear down an existing building with tenants.
There are other issues too. Interest rates and tariffs make a lot of projects not viable financially.
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Nine stories anywhere in the state near a bus stop seems abit much, most small towns don't have anything over 2 or 3 stories(nor do they have a housing shortage). CA lawmakers seem to pass laws focused on cities, and ignore the fact that maybe this isn't such a good idea in smaller towns & rural areas.
The problem with ant zoning laws is that they pick winners and losers. They need abolished state-wide to ever have a true affect. Otherwise, these limited pockets get bought up by investors and again, are limited to tiny areas. Abolish it state wide and people will over build and then true affordability will return.
This bill barely passed (they got a majority +1, which they needed to pass) so a further reaching bill might have been difficult to sell. The LA area in particular, has some really bad elected officials in terms of housing.
LA in particular? Naaah, mate. Those elected officials are fucking everywhere.
Yours, an Eu resident.
I kind of wonder if this can be gamed, by closing train stations or moving bus stops, or bus lines.
> (e) “High-frequency commuter rail” means a commuter rail service operating a total of at least 48 trains per day across both directions, > (r) “Very high frequency commuter rail” means a commuter rail service with a total of at least 72 trains per day across both directions
I bet some schedules will be changed to fall below these requirements.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The people who want small, mid-sized towns are free to live literally anywhere they want outside major metro areas. There's 90+% of the state by land area left to them. This discussion is and has always been centered around the housing crisis in urban centers, where it's been illegal to build density for decades. This has caused issues where those urban centers can't afford for people to provide critical services ( l…
> The people who want small, mid-sized towns are free to live literally anywhere they want outside major metro areas. This is what I was referring to, in terms of HN’s attitudes on this topic. Why should a “major metro area” change to accommodate newcomers? It should just stay serving its current residents, who may want it to stay the size it is. The ones desiring to live there at a price they can afford are the enti…
This is anti-social, and puts the burden of housing all these workers on the rest of the region, as well as forcing the rest of the region to share transportation costs.
This is pretty obviously unfair. Why should poorer midsized towns and suburbs have to lose money so that large metro areas can maintain a housing density level that lets them cosplay as small towns while overbuilding commercial density?
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Single stair reform is something that helps in terms of making more family sized units (aka 'homes'). I saw the author of this book give a talk earlier this year and found his point of view pretty convincing: https://islandpress.org/books/building-people#desc
Single stair is one of the reforms I'd most like to see. At the time 2 stair requirements were adopted it was vital, with devastating urban fires a common occurrence. We have so many new options for both preventing fire and keeping evacuation routes accessible for hours that it's no longer required. The regulation has a huge impact on the layout and form it's possible to build, and I think it's a huge driver of the v…
On the one hand, maybe, but on the other hand, apartments (with the same number of bedrooms for the same COL-adjusted price) in the US are enormous compared to those in Asia and in Europe. I think the real source(s) of the visceral reaction(s) is, in no particular order, Americans' prioritization of personal independence over pragmatism (and I don't mean that pejoratively, though it can get stubborn at times), America's fairly weak renter protections/regulations, and the poor build quality of many American apartments (with dogshit sound and climate-proofing). I think it's a mix of a fundamentally American aversion to adding an additional person telling you what to do with genuine issues in the paradigm where you're paying up the ass for heating/cooling because your landlord doesn't particularly feel like installing double-pane windows, and at the same time your neighbors and neighborhood are obnoxiously loud.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This really shows how limited the effect of this bill is, but it's still much better than nothing.
A big question is whether these areas actually turn into denser housing, or whether something else in the process manages to bog it down. Plenty of housing bills have seemed like a big deal when you looked at the area they impacted, but in practice they led to little new housing.
The discourse around high density housing does not make it clear what specific type of development do advocates prefer. Its likely that the market will have to decide for itself, but if we end up with an abundance of just 1/2 bedroom rental apartments, targeted towards transient younger people, I fear it's just going to enrich the property management class, and families with kids/older parents looking for larger plac…
You don't think that younger people need housing too? How about all the empty nesters that are sitting on 4 bedroom homes but are unwilling to move. Are you going to propose legislation to make them? Will you propose legislation to specially encourage more multi bedroom homes? The attitude of "this doesn't benefit a narrow band of people that I want to benefit, therefore it must be stopped" is why California is in su…