"affordable" homes are just a give away to people on a magic list. I am all for more supply but spending significant quantities of cash on this is wasteful and counter-productive...
Bay Area homeowner is the face of California’s latest housing drama
201–210 of 228 posts
Re: Bay Area homeowner is the face of California’s latest housing drama
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll throw out I also know a guy who is a developer, they have had enough bad issues working in Oregon alone that they have 0 intention of ever touching anything in CA with a 10ft pole, simply because it isn't worth it to deal with the hassle and the headaches.
A sinister part of the hassle and headaches are that sometimes they are designed to be so convoluted such that only certain favorite developers are even qualified to take up the project at all. Keeping your friend out of the market is sometimes the point.
> A sinister part of the hassle and headaches are that sometimes they are designed to be so convoluted such that only certain favorite developers are even qualified to take up the project at all.
Par for the course for government contracts.
Re: Bay Area homeowner is the face of California’s latest housing drama
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
If only you knew how bad things really are.
Re: Bay Area homeowner is the face of California’s latest housing drama
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gosh, growing up near Cleveland I always thought zoning "started" in Euclid Heights. I guess there are lots of different firsts?
Feels a bit like the oddly pervasive "Our city is x on the top 10 list of places Russia would nuke first because of local industry y" myth that existed in places all across America.
Imagine the post WWIII disappointment while walking around your pristine neighborhood.
"Nobody thought enough about us to want to eliminate us."
Re: Bay Area homeowner is the face of California’s latest housing drama
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
But also people want single family housing because US made apartments are complete shit. They're poorly insulated to heat and sound which means all sorts of unnecessary interaction with your immediate neighbors, making apartment living that much worse, driving the demand of single family housing up.
If people wanted single family housing that bad they wouldn't have to mandate it via zoning. Sounds like they should change the building code instead.
People want single family homes in neighborhoods of single family homes, though; the value is highly contingent on the neighborhood those homes are in.
You might be fine with a given backyard in a suburb, but not with a highrise next door that can see right into it.
Zoning handles this in the same way that it handles preferences about people not wanting to live next to industrial shops or giant supercenters. It does this by restricting what can be developed, even if someone moving away doesn't care what happens to their old lot, and could make more money on the sale otherwise.
Whether we should respect those preferences is a fine question, but zoning is pretty much the only tool to enforce these kinds of commons-oriented preferences.
Re: Bay Area homeowner is the face of California’s latest housing drama
#206Earlier 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).
Living in an RV or a mobile home is "bad behavior"?
Re: Bay Area homeowner is the face of California’s latest housing drama
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
An earlier Chronicle article anticipates some ways projects will be blocked. It sounds like this isn't the unambiguous green light that some articles suggest. > Environmental review is one such way. Normally, cities perform one environmental review for a citywide or neighborhood-wide zoning plan. So long as project applications comply with those plans, they can piggyback on the parent environmental report. But since…
I'll throw out I also know a guy who is a developer, they have had enough bad issues working in Oregon alone that they have 0 intention of ever touching anything in CA with a 10ft pole, simply because it isn't worth it to deal with the hassle and the headaches.
Famously, the French corporation that builds high-speed railways abandoned the Californian project and moved to Morocco, claiming that Moroccan bureaucracy is much easier to work with.
Re: Bay Area homeowner is the face of California’s latest housing drama
#208Does this work in say HOA zoned areas?
HOAs are just agreements between homeowners. They cannot exempt or override law.
Re: Bay Area homeowner is the face of California’s latest housing drama
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shelters are a temporary means of keeping people alive. They are not long-term housing and don't solve the problem. Also, they aren't cheap and they aren't scalable. We need and want shelters to exist, but only as a means of temporary housing.
Yes they should have cheaper housing for everybody. Not expensive housing for homeless.
And that is one of the primary things that YIMBY Action is working on.
Re: Bay Area homeowner is the face of California’s latest housing drama
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Everyone says that until their neighbor’s hobby includes heavy machinery at 6am. Then they say “well no that’s this other non-zoning, non-HOA type of law we really do need”.
But really, people want to do what they want, and other folks don’t get to. That’s the whole of it.