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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

#781

Post by dahfizz »

xp84 wrote: post #655
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…

many others have pointed out how tunnel-vision you are being, but just wanted to add: Low traffic → Less cars driving How do you get less cars driving? People need realistic options. How do you get those options? Density to support transit and Density to support having businesses close to everyone's homes so they can just walk or bike. Car-dependent suburbia IS the problem, and the more of it you have in the city the…

This is a very simplistic view. Less people per unit land also means less cars per unit land. Depending on how the roads are designed, you can get a spread out neighborhood with no traffic on your street.

I grew up on a cul-de-sac. There were 8 houses on the street. The only time there was a car on the street is when someone from one of those 8 houses went somewhere. There was zero traffic and the street was safe for kids to play in.

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

#782

Post by adrr »

enaaem wrote: post #575
hibikir wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

First thing to fix is the broken financial model. Exclusive suburbs pay disproportional less taxes for low density, low efficient, infrastructure. They are being subsidised by high density areas. That's not fair.

How does that work? Property tax is by city and suburbs are their own cities. For example, my city has implemented has implemented a Mello-Roos for new developments to fund new schools.

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

#783

Post by twblalock »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #644
twblalock wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Texans don't want to live in suburbs in drive cars, they have no choice because it's illegal to build dense housing via deed covenants and city ordinances that work in place of zoning. The most expensive and desirable housing (not counting the hyper-wealthy enclaves) in Houston is also the most walkable and dense.

Like most discussions about zoning, this mixes up cause and effect.

Certain types of housing are illegal because people don’t like them, and voted to ban them! Zoning laws don’t just magically appear out of nowhere.

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

#784

Post by [deleted] »

rnk wrote: post #529
hibikir wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#785

Post by runarberg »

rootusrootus wrote: post #719
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…

> Much better than suburbia in my opinion. I think a lot of people just assume that the only kind of suburbia that exists is endless tract housing as far as the eye can see. I'm absolutely positive that does happen, but I've never lived in a suburban neighborhood that fit such a description. We have stores. We have business parks here and there. Heck, we even have public transit. This is probably why there is such a…

I don’t think parent was denying that, or at least I don’t get a sense of this dichotomy in the text. As someone that lives on Vashon island (what some consider a suburb of Seattle; but I actually consider rural King County), I got the sense that suburbia here was specifically directed at the endless tract of housing one (so like East Bellevue, Kent, or large parts of Kirkland), but not actual small towns around the main city (like Bothel, Lynnwood, Kirkland proper, or—well—Vashon) or even other dense urban areas like Burien or Redmond.

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

#786

Post by xyzelement »

outworlder wrote: post #424
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…

> regardless of what the local people think and want. NIMBY has caused so many issues that I'm not sure the people who already live in a place should have this much power. They bought the land their property sits on and nothing else. > if the assumption is that the residents of higher-density dwellings are more likely to vote Democrat on average vs the current home owners Citation needed. > There are obvious concerns…

// You should book a trip with your family and visit an european country, with their walkable cities. And then come back and let us know if a suburb – which you can only reach via car and people are mostly inside their houses because there's nothing to do outside – is really preferable to a city where you can actually walk around (and, for kids, actually socialize)

(I am the person you're responding to.) I grew up in Europe and then lived in NYC. So I am extremely familiar with this model. I am also someone who chose to live in the burbs once we had kids.

In Manhattan, my neighbors had ~0 kids on average. In my current town, my neighbors are by and large former NYC residents who have ~3-4 kids on average. Very clearly people with kids are choosing the burbs, despite plenty of experience with the other model, and I expect that most of my neighbors have been to Europe plenty. We know the options.

Also, have you ever been to Europe outside the big cities? You need a car.

And also also, do you have kids? I was much more enthused about city life before I had a family, now I get it.

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

#787

Post by notch898a »

cheeseomlit wrote: post #704
lfuller wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly all studies regarding suburban vs. urban streets have shown that suburban streets have significantly higher rates of child deaths and injuries than urban streets.

Probably because kids dont play outside on urban streets at all, it'd be an instant death sentence

Nah some people do. I saw a lady who was letting her infant crawl across an urban road. She gave me the death glare because her child decided to crawl out from underneath a parked vehicle right in front of me and I was only able to avoid it at the last minute because I wasn't expecting crawling babies to pop out from underneath a parked car.

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

#788

Post by bluGill »

satvikpendem wrote: post #760
nostromo123 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, f*k other people, let's cram as many souls as we can in affordable dystopian high rises... that's the spirit!

High rises are one of the most efficient ways to house people at scale. There's a reason the majority of the human population lived in cities, historically. It's also more efficient greenhouse-gas wise, as suburban sprawl means more driving to transport goods.

Actually it is mid rises that are most efficient. High rises are very expensive to build. The cheapest construction is good to use for up to about 5 floors (check with a structural engineer for details). As such building 5 floors everywhere should be the goal: it is the cheapest mix of low costs and high density. There is no real advantage to making your city any denser than this.

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

#789

Post by crooked-v »

godtoldmetodoit wrote: post #767
maxsilver wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With no constraints on construction will there be a small boom in new development, tearing down virgin forest in order to make empty developments? Probably? I live in Michigan, which (with the exception of two spots) has no meaningful limits on construction. Even the cities that technically have-and-enforce zoning, waive all the rules constantly anytime a developer asks. And yes -- it means developers can build alm…

> (Truly anything, I live next to a 15-story concrete castle apartment building that a developer built on what was once a trailer park). Ah, the good ol' Grandville castle. It boggles my mind every time I drive past that someone decided to spend tens of millions to build... whatever the hell this is. https://cdngeneral.rentcafe.com/dmslivecafe/3/610177/DJI_018...

My very first thought there was 'here's an example of what could have been ambitious, interesting architecture, except all the public space is devoted to cars instead of people'.

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

#790

Post by dahfizz »

dvdkon wrote: post #722
api wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that are safe for kids It’s all about kids. Without kids in the picture sure, go ahead, make cities look like Coruscant from Star Wars. The instant you have kids you see how important open spaces safe enough for unstructured minimally supervised play are. Without spaces like this all you have are kids drooling on Roblox and YouTube all day. There’s nothing for kids in an urban core. Those spaces don’t have to be un…

With suburban sprawl, it's likely the only places within walking distance (i.e. "kid-reachable") are other houses, maybe a park. If managed well, a dense(r) city can have a forest or other semi-natural area nearby to everyone.

Name a single city in walking distance to a forest. And no, Central Park is not a forest.

I have acres of woods _in my backyard_. There are also no homeless people sleeping on the benches.

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