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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

#611

Post by ipaddr »

hervature wrote: post #554
rnk wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> it's clear economically that wanting to limit building multi-unit housing near me enhances the value growth of my property 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 tu…

It lowers your house price but may increase the value of the land that has been sliced up.

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

#612

Post by dntrkv »

mancerayder wrote: post #489
xwdv wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good. Fuck your neighbors. The region is long overdue for more housing to fix the ridiculous situation that has formed down there. Hopefully the region will become more affordable as new housing floods the area and brings down prices and makes things generally more affordable.

High rises are for people who aren't light sleepers, don't mind hearing music and noise in adjacent walls or above or below, are tolerant of parties and generally sociable. Guess who fits that demographic? Young single people and young couples who go out. The average middle age crank needs a house without shared walls and space. There are individual preferences at play here. No one chooses a high rise, it's just more…

I've lived in many homes and a couple high-rises. The noise isolation in the high-rises was miles ahead of that in the homes. I'm guessing the concrete construction is a pretty big factor in this.

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

#613

Post by j_heffe »

kqr2 wrote: post #48

How would the builder's remedy work in a place like Atherton if the homeowners form a pact and refuse to sell to any developers? E.g. if Marc Andreessen ( https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andre... ) and Steph Curry ( https://therealdeal.com/2023/01/29/steph-curry-shoots-his-ni... ) form a coalition with other residents then they can effectively keep the city down zoned even if builder's remedy i…

I'd imagine Atherton would remain more or less the same with the exception of some homes being converted to duplexes and triplexes. At least in Minneapolis with the 2040 plan, more affluent neighborhoods tend to stay that way.

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

#614

Post by fnordpiglet »

thehappypm wrote: post #470
fnordpiglet wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truth is people want to live in a community of the character they choose when they moved into that community. The high density housing community seems to think everyone just needs an efficiency unit in a Soviet style housing block and anyone else is an entitled NIMBY. What the person said was developers don’t care about the community they’re building into. Loosening of community rules means they can move in start bui…

This is hardcore pearl-clutching. You know what’s really a problem? How dystopian America is. The opportunity and jobs are in big cities. But housing makes it impossible for many people to even live near the city. People want to solve this problem, but are blocked because people like that their neighborhood has street parking. It’s killing America and it’s really killing our ability to become a modern, progressive so…

I think the real problem is the density of opportunity and jobs in cities. I’m hopeful that remote work will break that tyranny to some extent. In five years when the emotions have cooled about return to office and the director of finance provides an analysis to the CFO about how much they could save and increase EPS while improving productivity using 2020/21 data and the CFO takes it to the board, that will be the end of the opportunity density in the cities.

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

#615

Post by steveklabnik »

brundolf wrote: post #608
jackson1442 wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have all this (and more!) in cities as well. Lived in Seattle for a bit and my apartment had several neighborhoods of single-family homes within a couple blocks: each with mature trees, yards, and low traffic streets. Sure, the yard maybe isn't as massive as you can get in a suburb, but there's still plenty of space (and far more public parks). Because they were so close to dense housing, they also had the ad…

Having lived in Texas my whole life this idea was mostly foreign to me, but last year I visited Brooklyn and had my eyes opened

... and I moved to Texas from Brooklyn, and I can assure you, longer term residents than me are still finding it foreign. That's slowly changing...

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

#616

Post by olddustytrail »

spookthesunset wrote: post #389
spacedcowboy wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were to stop 100 people on the street and ask them if they'd heard of hedgehogs, the positive answer percentage would be depressingly low, I feel...

Sonic was a hedgehog in a video game. Older people might get that reference.

Indeed.

From TFA: "The “builder’s remedy” is a very old law from the 1990s"

Ah, the ancient times!

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

#618

Post by twblalock »

softsound wrote: post #364

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 has lax zoning, but it looks the way it does only because people who live there want it to look that way.

Houston, which also has loose zoning, looks totally different because most Texans want to live in suburbs and drive cars.

In other words, zoning laws are generally an expression of what the majority of people already wanted.

I can tell you for sure that in most parts of California (and most of the rest of the USA) the majority of people want to live in a detached single-family home that they own, and prefer driving cars to public transit.

People who prefer a denser arrangement are an especially vocal minority on the internet, but if you put it to a vote, you'd end up with pretty much what we have today -- the fact that people wanted them is why they got built in the first place!

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

#619

Post by yamtaddle »

jackson1442 wrote: post #540
nlavezzo wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The answers are very uncomfortable. Are they? Isn't it possible that people who live in beautiful neighborhoods with mature trees, nice big yards, and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around, want to keep them that way for primarily those reasons? Of course their desires alone shouldn't be the final word on proposed changes to codes, but implying that all of these homeowners are primarily driven b…

You can have all this (and more!) in cities as well. Lived in Seattle for a bit and my apartment had several neighborhoods of single-family homes within a couple blocks: each with mature trees, yards, and low traffic streets. Sure, the yard maybe isn't as massive as you can get in a suburb, but there's still plenty of space (and far more public parks). Because they were so close to dense housing, they also had the ad…

Old narrow-street, maybe an alley in the back, grid-layout suburbs with the odd block corner zoned commercial and all-neighborhood-streets routes to all kinds of businesses and parks and libraries and such are a whole different beast from the twisty-road car-dependent mazes of post-70s suburbia. And they're so much damn nicer. Too bad no-one builds them anymore.

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

#620

Post by twblalock »

eddsh1994 wrote: post #436
cal5k wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I live in Palo Alto and saw a local ad for an acre of land with no house in Atherton going for $5.2M. The housing here is really screwed.

Atherton is the Beverley Hills of Northern California.
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