551–560 of 1001 posts
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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?
Looking at other countries like Japan with like barely any zoning laws, this looks great, I hope it leads to more mixed cities again and more walkable/liveable areas like before WW2. It is funny that America land of the free had so many restrictions, building up hundreds of zoning laws across the country did a lot of bad and led to a lot of urban sprawl leading to very poor cities and towns that literally cannot pay…
Tokyo is not a free-for-all. It does zone for different uses by forbidding certain uses above a certain nuisance or hazard level. For instance, in many areas you can’t just plop down a chemical factory. The cool thing about Tokyo zoning though is that anything below a nuisance level is pretty much allowed. Want to build a house next to a dump or above a discotheque? Go for it, no one is going to stop you.
Who covers the new costs for high-rise firetrucks, crews, and training?
What about high-pressure water supply for upper floors and high-capacity sewage management for the suddenly increased, ahem... effluence of these new living spaces?
What about suddenly dumping another 2,000 cars into a neighborhood without parking and traffic management for everyone leaving and returning at the same time? (magical thinking about mass transit?)
Surface and sub-surface infrastructure costs remain the hidden barrier to expansion and they can't be wished away. Real zoning is about managing capital investments and leveraging infrastructure for dual use where possible. Yes, it can be used for evil, but at the root, zoning is actually about central social management of scarce infrastructure resources.
So, I guess, hooray? You've unleashed a bunch of capitalist land barons who can now ignore local citizen oversight of their countryside and capital infrastructure spending?
You may not be happy with today, but the impact of this change is not well considered and I suspect the 7-year wailing will come from every optimistic constituent whose childlike expectations were obviously never possible through simple inspection of the proposal
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This has little to do with the existence of zoning laws themselves, but the specific zones that they define. Japan has zones, so does Spain. But there's just nothing anywhere near as Restrictive as most US cities' R1 zone. Many places have R2s and R3s that are still more restrictive than the least dense thing than a Spanish city has. Remove zones alone, and HOAs will get areas into legally binding covenants that are…
It's not that mysterious why people want this. For people of means, they want to preserve the quality of life that they see in having mostly single family homes and in the past keep it full of white people with money, hopefully the only whites thing has faded. Of course racism was a core issue in how these exclusions panned out in the US. If I'm in a city and and I own one of these houses, it's clear economically tha…
This argument never made sense for me. Being able to put more units in the same space drastically increases the value of the land. It of course reduces the value of other things like having towering buildings around your 2 story home which blocks your view. In this sense, home owners need to turn to zoning to prevent that despite it being detrimental to their land value.
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>Yes, society probably won't crumble if we cave to your whining and regulate your pet issue of the minute I disagree, and I think this sort of nonsense is a cornerstone of why society is crumbling. People don't look at their homes as homes they look at them as temporary investments that they hope to sell to somebody else for more money in the future. People don't end up investing (in the societal, emotional sense) in…
If housing ceases to be a relatively safe investment vehicle, what will become it? I dislike the idea of home-as-investment as much as the next guy, but I'd like to think about some consequences of houses stopping to be an investment, Japan-style.
> a very old law from the 1990s LOL. It's things like this that let me know how old I am.
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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…
This might be one of the craziest parts of it, and it makes me understand how a lot of neighborhoods in California just look sort of...dumpy. The system actively discourages you from improving a property!
My dream is to see the state property tax code flipped to land value tax. No penalties for improving the property, just purely tax the value of the land and penalize people who park their vacant lots for year after year.
> HCD reviewed SF’s housing element and said it “largely compiled” with the state’s rules, even though it was heavy on promises. As such, SF will not be subjected to the builder remedy on Wednesday. Shockingly, only a few other Bay Area jurisdictions can claim to keep their zoning as of writing this: Emeryville, Redwood City, and Alameda city.
SF zoned a bunch of the Richmond and Sunset (which aren't really "IMBY") for high density, sounds like. So no, this isn't going to radically change anything for SF.
This will be an interesting experiment. Nothing makes progressive people conservatives more quickly than threatening their housing values.