211–220 of 228 posts
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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.
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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 im…
I don't know what it "sounds like" and I cannot speak to your stereotypes.
I no longer have any interaction with residential property, zoning, development, or any of these housing politics. I am not affected by "property values".
I look at these issues as an interested, outside observer and I have tremendous enthusiasm for urban spaces, walkable cities, mixed use environs, etc.
But at the same time I appreciate well regulated[1] single family neighborhoods/developments and while I don't live anywhere like that I appreciate the reasons that someone might have for preferring that.
I hope that it is useful and interesting to you to learn that there are a variety of practical and aesthetic reasons for (not agreeing with you) that come from ideas and experience that (aren't the stereotypes you have in mind).
[1] This is the correct term. Arguing for abolishment of residential zoning is arguing for deregulation.
median residential home prices in Solano County (just north-east of San Francisco) went up twenty one percent over one year in 2021. The county overall lost population (again) primarily due to residents moving out of California. source: Solano County Govt. Economic Report 2022
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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.
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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…
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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…
Yup. The anti sprawl people should understand that "densifying" and "building up" in neighborhoods of single family homes will just create a demand for new neighborhoods further out that don't have to deal with these issues. I currently live 25ish miles from a major city downtown. I've noticed a lot of interest from developers in building 3-4 story apartment buildings around here even though there doesn't seem to be…
In Japan, as discussed upthread, you often have single family homes next to 3 story apartment buildings close to the city and the further you go out, the more they become single family homes. There's space for all preferences.
Nobody wants to densify the outskirts of Kankakee. They want to densify SF and LA.
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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 im…
"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." I don't know what it "sounds like" and I cannot speak to your stereotypes. I no longer have any interaction with residential property, zoning, development, or any of these housing po…
I bet you do, unless you have moved to orbit.
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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.
You should clarify “in SF” since this isn’t true for the actual history of residential zoning (which originated in New York)
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I did a search to check the history of this claim, but maybe I wasn’t searching for the right thing. Would you mind sharing a link?
No it’s just completely untrue. This is a common tactic today to say something was created for purposes so the entire concept is bad naturally. See how activists say policing was invented to catch slaves or some ridiculous claim. There’s a bunch of others.
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I admittedly rolled my eyes at the WP link. To atone for this, I’ve copy and pasted the relevant references from that line in the History section: [1] Baldassari, Erin; Solomon, Molly (October 5, 2020). "The Racist History of Single-Family Home Zoning". NPR. Archived from the original on November 14, 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20201114004918/https://www.kqed.... [3] Hansen, Louis (March 1, 2021). "Is this the…
Accurate or not, I hate that all of these references are from one 6-month regional news cycle. They may as well be 1 citation, rather than 5. The excess just makes the inclusion of claim look more motivated by political investment than a desire to be informative.
Density Zoning and Class Segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas (2010) https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6237.2010.00724.x
Distributive politics, ward representation, and the spread of zoning (1993) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01047991
Urban Land Developers and the Origins of Zoning Laws: The Case of Berkeley (1986) https://escholarship.org/uc/item/26b8d8zh
Fifty Years of Zoning (1966) https://www.jstor.org/stable/25723800