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Builder's Remedy goes into effect in many California cities tomorrow

darrellowens.substack.com

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Re: Builder's Remedy goes into effect in many California cities tomorrow

#491

Post by gamblor956 »

cal5k wrote: post #433
LynxInLA wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an expert, but I lean towards relaxing zoning laws but not getting rid of them completely. Look to Houston to see what happens when there are no zoning laws at all.

Median sale price in Houston is currently $310,500, vs $441,250 in Sacramento, $917,500 in LA and $1.3MM in SF. Aesthetic judgments aside, seems like a winning strategy for housing affordability?

He's referring to the hundreds of houses that were knowingly built in a floodplain, because Houston does not have the kind of zoning that would have prevented that. Those houses are at high risk of flooding any time there is a storm, and many of them did flood during last year's storms.

It's easy to have cheap housing when you ignore common sense and just build wherever. (Also, part of the expense for LA and SF is that we have earthquakes, and our buildings have to be built to withstand earthquakes. For example: a 5.4 earthquake in 2011 caused over $300 million in damage on the East Coast. A series of CA earthquakes stronger than that in 2019, including 6.4 and 7.1 quakes, only caused a few thousand in damage near the epicenter. A 5.1 earthquake earlier this year in SoCal caused so little damage that most people slept through it and only know it happened because the news reported it. Note that each "magnitude" is about 30x difference in strength, so the 6.4 quake was 30x stronger than the 5.4 quake, and the 7.1 quake was nearly 900x stronger.)

Re: Builder's Remedy goes into effect in many California cities tomorrow

#492

Post by TulliusCicero »

ericmay wrote: post #464
TulliusCicero wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is real harm done, and it is anti-democratic in some ways to take state or national laws and have those supercede (micromanage in this case) local building rules or regulations. No, it's really not. There's nothing fundamentally anti-democratic about higher government overriding lower government. Often, deciding rules at a lower level doesn't work well, and this is a good example of that. Deciding housing den…

> There's nothing fundamentally anti-democratic about higher government overriding lower government. > It'd probably be better to decide this with a metro-level authority rather than the state, but the state is still better than the city. What about if the state of Ohio overrides Columbus' gun restrictions? (ex) What if the state of Nevada mandates cities provide 2 parking spaces per dwelling? You're just picking and…

> What about if the state of Ohio overrides Columbus' gun restrictions? (ex)

> What if the state of Nevada mandates cities provide 2 parking spaces per dwelling?

Those are bad because the ideas are bad, not because they're "anti-democratic".

> You're just picking and choosing when the "higher" government overrides the "local" government. When you agree with it, it's good. When you disagree it's presumably still good right?

You're shifting the argument. I was talking about anti-democratic or not, not good or bad. Just because a law was passed democratically doesn't mean it's a good idea. Please try to stay on your own topic.

Re: Builder's Remedy goes into effect in many California cities tomorrow

#493

Post by saltcured »

fragmede wrote: post #128
whimsicalism wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am excited to see how well a coalition of rich people performs once they start getting massive bids.

Especially when they fight with each other, as neighbors do. The wealthy aren't always a monolithic block of undifferentiated piles of money so, not that I know what the future holds, but imagine you've been squabbling with your neighbor for decades; you've always wanted to move back east. What better giant finger to that neighbor than selling your multi-acre estate to be replaced by a 30 or 100-unit apartment comple…

Right, a "spite" transaction.

But on the other hand, the coalition of rich neighbors could organize a counter-offer to buy out neighbors who want to leave. A bit like lands are bought up by conservation groups to prevent development. Put a price on how much you want to preserve your neighborhood.

They could even buy out the developer who purchased a spite sale, unless there are deed restrictions in that sale. Most developers are also doing it as a business, not for idealism, so it there ought to be a price point where they see it is more lucrative to fold than to go forward with the building project.

I'm not sure I understand the economic effect of something like this. At first blush it almost seems like the same feedback loop as land value taxes. But, it also creates a game-theoretic scenario where the coalition is pumping up the price of their own neighborhood and increasing the potential gains for the next defector, at which point the values could rapidly unwind if the coalition loses its way.

Re: Builder's Remedy goes into effect in many California cities tomorrow

#494

Post by CydeWeys »

lovecg wrote: post #302
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't want to deal with people deciding together that they want their community to have certain guidelines, move to the country Shouldn’t this be the message to a suburban homeowner clinging to the past? Move to the country. Buy land around you. Don’t tell others what they can and cannot do on property you don’t own.

Devil’s advocate: they did. 50+ years ago they moved to a sleepy suburban town that through no fault of their own became a center of a worldwide tech revolution. Things change, sometimes dramatically. A place in the country you move to today can also transform 50 years in the future if you’re unlucky.

Devil's devil's advocate: The world is not static. No one can reasonably expect nothing to change over the course of half a century. The only constant is change itself, and you have to deal with changing situations. Maybe it made sense as farmland 50 years ago, but if it makes sense as apartment blocks now, by God put apartment blocks on it then. The collective value to all those new tenants massively outweighs the downside to the single existing landowner (who stands to make a huge payday anyway!).

Re: Builder's Remedy goes into effect in many California cities tomorrow

#495

Post by nickspag »

scop wrote: post #263
mullingitover wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much of the problems with housing in the state stem from the fact that lots of community members are valuing their investment in their own house over everything else. Housing can either be affordable or it can be a good investment, it really can't be both. At this point the market has been so perverted by entrenched interests blocking new development that I would be okay with a dictatorship of developers for a sol…

This is a point I don't often see discussed. I have friends and family in CA whose primary asset is their home, with little to nothing invested elsewhere (perhaps because of the high cost of living)...resulting in a mortgage they have no intention of ever paying off, little retirement savings, and fingers crossed for a cash-out down the line.

That's not all of it, either. Older buyers have gotten the lionshare of their wealth from housing appreciation by preventing new housing and pay a lower tax burden than new buyers due to Prop 13. There's a reason that when it made it to the supreme court Justice Stevens called it medeival and referred to entrenched owners as Squires. "During the two past decades, California property owners have enjoyed extraordinary prosperity. As the State's population has mushroomed, so has the value of its real estate. Between 1976 and 1986 alone, the total assessed value of California property subject to property taxation increased tenfold. Simply put, those who invested in California real estate in the 1970s are among the most fortunate capitalists in the world.Proposition 13 has provided these successful investors with a tremendous windfall and, in doing so, has created severe inequities in California's property tax scheme. These property owners (hereinafter "the Squires) are guaranteed that, so long as they retain their property and do not improve it, their taxes will not increase more than 2% in any given year. As a direct result of this windfall for the Squires, later purchasers must pay far more than their fair share of property taxes." https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/90-1912.ZD.html

Re: Builder's Remedy goes into effect in many California cities tomorrow

#496

Post by ladberg »

xyzelement wrote: post #361

I am not an expert in California but I don't love this concept in general. Here in New York, the Governor is attempting to drive higher housing density in certain places regardless of what the local people think and want. I think this is a sort of obvious effort at a form of gerrymandering - if the assumption is that the residents of higher-density dwellings are more likely to vote Democrat on average vs the current…

As someone who grew up in California and is now in NY, I don't think that hypothesis is correct at all. And even if it was, isn't it actually less gerrymandering? Uniformly spreading the different populations is much fairer than artificially restricting them to an "already-super Blue city".

Re: Builder's Remedy goes into effect in many California cities tomorrow

#499

Post by Labienus »

It's unlikely to change development significantly.

California NIMBYs still have enormous autonomy through CEQA. It enables any individual to contest developments for years, obligating developers enormous sums of money and time to study "environmental impacts".

Last winter, the law was expanded through a ruling in Berkeley. If a development adds a sizable number of people, it can be seen as an environmental impact and denied.

Development will remain costly, time consuming, and ultimately as unpredictable as the law allows. Wealthy and well connected developers might get by, but it won't be a Japan-like situation. For those wishing reform on an "environmental law" it will be a lot more politically costly. We'll likely get another Houston situation where "no zoning" doesn't imply what it should imply.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/signature-...

https://calmatters.org/commentary/2023/01/how-environmental-...

Re: Builder's Remedy goes into effect in many California cities tomorrow

#500

Post by rcme »

cal5k wrote: post #433
LynxInLA wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an expert, but I lean towards relaxing zoning laws but not getting rid of them completely. Look to Houston to see what happens when there are no zoning laws at all.

Median sale price in Houston is currently $310,500, vs $441,250 in Sacramento, $917,500 in LA and $1.3MM in SF. Aesthetic judgments aside, seems like a winning strategy for housing affordability?

You can't compare prices across geographic areas like that. For instance, property taxes are way higher in Houston. Assuming everything else was equal, the price of real estate in Houston would be less simply because it has higher carrying costs. That's just one of many possible differences unrelated to zoning.
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