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Bay Area homeowner is the face of California’s latest housing drama

sfchronicle.com

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Re: Bay Area homeowner is the face of California’s latest housing drama

#191

Post by leereeves »

rsync wrote: post #185
danaris wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What you will actually get is half-built cars. Everywhere. You will get mobile homes and immobile RVs. You will get horses. Not rich-people horses, but "Grandma died and she had a horse and nobody knew what to do with it so we fenced part of the front yard" horses. Someone will disconnect from city sewer because they "know how to build septic". Someone will get llamas. a) It sounds like what you're saying is "you'l…

All I am trying to share is that when rules are absent, behavior gets worse than you expect, in ways that beggar belief. That is not limited to “poor people” (your words).

> behavior gets worse than you expect, in ways that beggar belief.

Broken cars, RVs, mobile homes, and animals. How did that cause such trauma?

I'd take all of that over an intrusive HOA.

Re: Bay Area homeowner is the face of California’s latest housing drama

#192

Post by krisroadruck »

pigsty wrote: post #165
krisroadruck wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is factually incorrect and easily verifiable so. The vast majority - 80% of the US population prefers single family homes. There are 138 Million households in the US and fully half - 68 million - reside in owner occupied single family homes, another ~15% (about 44 million people) live in rented single family homes. This is just the people who have achieved the desired outcome. There are another 15% of people who…

You’ve made a few massive leaps by assuming a single family home can’t possibly have a shop nearby, and that if it did it’d mean people are dodging feces. Because you can literally go just about anywhere outside of America and see that people live in homes right next to businesses and… it’s fine. We’re not dodging feces and homeless people. Frankly, most places I’ve been to and lived have been much cleaner than my ol…

The feces and homeless comments were specifically geared towards the sort of people packing taking place in SF. I think there is some sort of rule about making assumptions about commentors, but as far as exposure, I have it in spades. First I was actually homeless in my teens, second through a combination of some time in the military, and a general wanderlust I've moved about 35 times in the 41 years I've been kicking around for including:

Seattle area (Seattle itself and most of the Puget sound - Olympia, Tacoma, Burien, Keyport, Bremerton, Poulsbo, bla bla too many to count here)

Several stents in California from San Diego to long beach and everything in between

Oregon, Michigan, Texas, Georgia, New Hampshire, Mexico (specifically 6 months in playa del carmen), North Carolina, Indiana

And of course the military bits like Kuwait, Iraq and a few other gnarlies

I'm sure I'm missing some here, but the point is I've lived in many more and varied places than the average joe. The only real assumption I made here is that we were talking about the US. I will grant you if you are talking about places outside of the US it changes the math quite a bit.

Re: Bay Area homeowner is the face of California’s latest housing drama

#193

Post by occz »

astrange wrote: post #58
occz wrote: post #3

Zoning laws broadly are probably still in effect, right? I doubt you could build something industrial in residential zones. It's just the bad parts of zoning that are disabled, if I understood the article correctly. Excellent development in any case. Hope a lot of good dense housing gets built.

Residential-only zoning is "the bad kind of zoning". It wasn't invented to keep factories away from homes; it was /literally/ invented in Berkeley to stop Chinese immigrants from being able to afford homes by running laundry businesses out of them.

I agree. Note how I didn't use residential only-zones, instead opting for residential zones, which can and should be mixed-use. This is not to say that there are some incompatible land uses to be considered - industrial uses can broadly be considered to be incompatible with residential uses, for example.

Re: Bay Area homeowner is the face of California’s latest housing drama

#194

Post by danaris »

rsync wrote: post #185
danaris wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What you will actually get is half-built cars. Everywhere. You will get mobile homes and immobile RVs. You will get horses. Not rich-people horses, but "Grandma died and she had a horse and nobody knew what to do with it so we fenced part of the front yard" horses. Someone will disconnect from city sewer because they "know how to build septic". Someone will get llamas. a) It sounds like what you're saying is "you'l…

All I am trying to share is that when rules are absent, behavior gets worse than you expect, in ways that beggar belief. That is not limited to “poor people” (your words).

None of the things you've listed—except possibly the ones trying to self-install a septic system when they already have municipal sewer access—sound like "bad behavior." (And, again, that has nothing to do with zoning.)

What it sounds like is the stereotypical upper-middle-class white suburban boogeyman of "Those People" that you don't want around, because they bring down property values, with a healthy helping of implied racism and explicit classism.

Furthermore, there's no reason why zoning laws couldn't be selectively adjusted and relaxed—for instance, to ensure no heavy industry goes in right in the middle of a residential area, where it's more likely to be disruptive to sleep and potentially polluting.

Acting like relaxing zoning laws to allow for corner stores and similar things will bring us to a Mad Max-style wasteland is exactly the kind of rampant NIMBYism that got us into this mess in the first place.

Re: Bay Area homeowner is the face of California’s latest housing drama

#196

Post by harambae »

samstave wrote: post #46

This is just a play from high-powered NIMBY SF players to placate the devs, landlords, scumlords and hedgies (like blackRock) Nothing more. REPLY TO BELOW: - If they are not hedge funds, then what are they, BE SPECIFIC.

blackstone - private equity / alternative investments company (originally mediated M&A deals)

blackrock - primarily sells shares in index funds; one of the big 3 index managers (started as a partnership between blackstone and others... that's why the similar name)

Re: Bay Area homeowner is the face of California’s latest housing drama

#197

Post by howinteresting »

throw009 wrote: post #161
krisroadruck wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is factually incorrect and easily verifiable so. The vast majority - 80% of the US population prefers single family homes. There are 138 Million households in the US and fully half - 68 million - reside in owner occupied single family homes, another ~15% (about 44 million people) live in rented single family homes. This is just the people who have achieved the desired outcome. There are another 15% of people who…

That's all very nice but the calculations would change quite quickly if people had to pay for the upkeep of the roads they use for their cars. Cities for the most part use their productive core to subsidise the unproductive suburbs until they inevitably go bankrupt when the roads build 40 years ago need to be replaced.

This. The preferences are obviously driven by the widespread subsidies provided to suburban living. Take that away and those preferences will shift rapidly.

Re: Bay Area homeowner is the face of California’s latest housing drama

#198

Post by fragmede »

abeppu wrote: post #68
samstave wrote: post #65

That guy in the Mission District of SF who fought this for decades should deserve a windfall... Ill try to find a link, but basically this guy got initial approval to build a building and got hit with a typhoon of zoning laws and knew he was in the right, but a bunch of SF NIMBYS were fighting him forever and he got F'd... This guy deserves something like a payout for someone imprisoned for no reason.

But SF is _not_ one of the cities affected by the builder's remedy currently. The article says: > Among large cities, only San Francisco is in compliance.

SF managed to delay it for 8 years until the next review with lots and lots of promises, but if it doesn't actually manage to build more units, builders remedy is coming for SF in 2030.

Re: Bay Area homeowner is the face of California’s latest housing drama

#199

Post by Macha »

Lammy wrote: post #47
GalenErso wrote: post #4

The next target should be CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act. NIMBYs can endlessly delay new construction by requesting CEQA assessments. I am hugely pro-environment, mind you, but an environmental assessment for a new development should be relatively fast and easy to complete, and it shouldn't prevent new builds wholesale except in the direst cases.

> NIMBYs can endlessly delay new construction by requesting CEQA assessments. This is my favorite graph for explaining how I can be pro-environment without necessarily being pro-Environmentalism™ https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gentrification...

Here are some of my favourite graphs: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

Re: Bay Area homeowner is the face of California’s latest housing drama

#200

Post by MichaelZuo »

asdff wrote: post #62
Analemma_ wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that they can still be delayed by CEQA lawsuits, which NIMBYs have become very good at, but at least CEQA usually only delays projects instead of blocking them entirely.

Sometimes the delay or threat of delay is enough to take a project from being profitable to being unprofitable for any local developer. This sometimes explains why you have vacant lots in areas like the bay area where any and all land would be in demand. Doesn't matter how much demand there would be if you can't afford to capture it at the pricepoint it exists at.

So there's not enough demand then?

There's theoretically demand for millions of luxury penthouses but only a tiny level of actual demand at the pricepoint where it can be feasible delivered in any major city.

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