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Bills before the California Legislature would crack down on NIMBYs

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Re: Bills before the California Legislature would crack down on NIMBYs

#211

Post by mbillie1 »

wfunction wrote: post #36
jkimmel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only ~10% of California's water use is residential/urban (varies a little bit year to year) [0]. The majority of non-environmental water is used to grow cash crops in the central valley, like almonds, which take 1 gal/almond. Overall, urban residents have far less impact on climate than exurban residents who drive around in SUVs. It is in the best interests of everyone on planet Earth to make our cities denser and mo…

Wouldn't you need to grow more food supporting the growing in-population though?

That's not really how food distribution works, in the US or most other first world countries, so no.

Re: Bills before the California Legislature would crack down on NIMBYs

#212

Post by lightbyte »

golemotron wrote: post #87
closeparen wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you can get a Constitutional amendment to legalize and then implement controls on internal migration, this isn't an option you have. People are already moving here faster than housing is being built, and they have been for a long time. Maintaining a housing shortage doesn't prevent migration, it just means that when migration happens it results in a pressure-cooker of a housing market. We'd need an enormous am…

You don't stop growth by limiting it, you slow it by creating more attractive alternatives. Consider start-up zones in the interior of the US wired with fiber and zero taxation for 10 years. It is something the federal government could do to start alternative hubs.

Are you suggesting the federal government intentionally sabotage our biggest economies in order to try and redistribute people? That sounds like gross federal overreach.

Re: Bills before the California Legislature would crack down on NIMBYs

#213

Post by surrealize »

rplst8 wrote: post #183
erispoe wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SF city occupies approximatively the same area as Paris, with only a third of the population. Most of Paris is developed with a 37m ceiling, hardly skyscrapers. Cost of land goes up with density, but that's the point. You build more and spread that cost among more units. Up to a point, it is economical to build higher in that situation (then for skyscrapers you start to see cost per unit going up again). Look at all…

> Look at all the 3 or 4 stories apartment buildings sprouting in the city right now. Most of them could be double the height without increasing construction costs per unit. I'm not sure that's correct. I think the reason that you see a lot at that height is because building codes change quite a bit as you go past a certain height and the costs go up as well.

The height limit you're thinking of is higher. The IBC allows for five stories of wood construction over a multi-story concrete podium (often one or two stories).

http://www.structuremag.org/?p=10934

The main height limit is local politics around density, not building codes.

Re: Bills before the California Legislature would crack down on NIMBYs

#214

Post by ChefDenominator »

cjensen wrote: post #28
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #16

IMO, it's gotten bad enough in the Bay Area that local control of zoning ought to get abolished. Make a new regional zoning commission, put together some clear and consistent rules about what can be built and where, and rubber-stamp everything that meets those rules. Literal rubber-stamp here, as in "you give us an affidavit saying that your plan meets the specified rules, and you get a permit to build the same day,…

Under existing rules, developers do not pay enough fees to allow the School Districts to build new schools to support the new housing. Now you'd like to rubber stamp this? For example there's a new development in Fremont of a few hundred houses: the school district had to zone it as "we'll provide school for you, but it'll be wherever we have space across the entire city." That's not good. To me the idiocy is this: t…

This situation exists only because Sunnyvale has been blessed with a soil that is better for growing jobs.

Re: Bills before the California Legislature would crack down on NIMBYs

#215

Post by refurb »

dismantlethesun wrote: post #178
abalashov wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure this rather dated precept is compatible with the exigencies of 21st century economics, and the flexibility, mobility and long hours demanded. For one thing, houses are cash sinks. It doesn't make sense for highly paid professionals to spend enormous amounts of time or money reshingling roofs, painting, mowing lawns, treating weeds, trimming hedges, repairing plumbing, etc. The deep specialisation and con…

Since the value appreciates in land, condos do not tend to gain value over time. At best a condo will have the same value because of exhaustive maintenance.

That's not true at all. Condo prices rise just like single family homes. And when you own a condo, you own a fraction of the land it sits on.

I would agree that condos tend to be more volatile than single family homes. More of them can be built quickly and when real estate prices start to drop it often starts with the condos.

Re: Bills before the California Legislature would crack down on NIMBYs

#216

Post by coredog64 »

golemotron wrote: post #87
closeparen wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you can get a Constitutional amendment to legalize and then implement controls on internal migration, this isn't an option you have. People are already moving here faster than housing is being built, and they have been for a long time. Maintaining a housing shortage doesn't prevent migration, it just means that when migration happens it results in a pressure-cooker of a housing market. We'd need an enormous am…

You don't stop growth by limiting it, you slow it by creating more attractive alternatives. Consider start-up zones in the interior of the US wired with fiber and zero taxation for 10 years. It is something the federal government could do to start alternative hubs.

The optics of that are terrible. We create low tax zones to bring employment back to disaster areas and blighted communities with buy in across the political spectrum. But to do the same for a bunch of rich white yuppies who get offers that put them in the top 2% out of college? Good luck with that.

Re: Bills before the California Legislature would crack down on NIMBYs

#217

Post by ChefDenominator »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #141
Tempest1981 wrote: post #84

Some of us just wanted a 3 bedroom house on a 5000 sq ft lot -- so we could have a small yard with room for a dog and BBQ. Maybe a kid playing outside. Now we're being told we're greedy, and our neighborhoods should be replaced with 3 story townhouses on 1200 sq ft lots. No room for Fido. Makes me wonder what we're working insane hours for -- to settle for permanent apartment style living. At least we don't have cage…

Heavy down votes, wow. Did I offend someone?

You are twisting what people want to do. I don't think the goal is to force people out of the homes they own, but to allow property owners to build on the property what the property owner wants to build. If that ends up being a condo or apartment complex where there used to be houses, that is the choice of the property owner.

Re: Bills before the California Legislature would crack down on NIMBYs

#218

Post by watwut »

hpaavola wrote: post #158
timr wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Not really. There's plenty of room to build a ton more in San Francisco." "Anti-building regulations are the only meaningful reason why the housing supply is so restricted." Prove your claim. The GP is right that there is essentially no undeveloped land in SF; a huge part of the housing moratorium debate centered on the fact that there are only a half-dozen or so vacant parcels in the Mission. This is true across th…

"or the owner of the land doesn't want to redevelop it" I don't know the English terms here, but that kind of situation where individuals are earning massive profits because everybody else built city around them, is just wrong. That unearned rise in the property value should be taxed away. So, just zone more apartments in that area and put big enough property tax on underdeveloped land area. That way the economic inc…

"that kind of situation where individuals are earning massive profits because everybody else built city around them"

Like so what? Your property value, whether house or some artistic drawing, can go up or down based on other peoples actions. There is nothing wrong with that, that is how ownership of anything works.

When people loose business or work because those around them abandoned area or supermarket appears, they get no reimbursement. It is market force in practice. Therefore, when the same people earn on others coming in, they should not be punished either.

Re: Bills before the California Legislature would crack down on NIMBYs

#219

Post by tehlike »

ceejayoz wrote: post #186
wbl wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should we restrict selling homes to people abroad who will never use them? It's a wonderful export market.

Turning vibrant cities into investment property ghost towns isn't a great idea.

But they are renting these properties. For less than what the mortgage monthly would have been!

Re: Bills before the California Legislature would crack down on NIMBYs

#220

Post by golemotron »

pcwalton wrote: post #59
golemotron wrote: post #9

It's a very anti-democratic move by California. They are willing to destroy local control of people in their communities to foster growth that will lead to further deterioration of living standards. Wouldn't it be better to try to grow tech outside of California in places like the Dakotas and Idaho where there is plenty of land and people in need of work? The American heartland could be a place rich in opportunity if…

It's perfectly democratic. Our elected state legislature is doing what they were elected to do. I'm sorry that you didn't like the result, but it's not undemocratic .

I meant to say it breaks the principle of subsidiarity. It's a strain that runs through governance.
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