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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

#791

Post by asda_ »

naravara wrote: post #685
spockz wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why is that? Maybe because children don’t play on the street at all in the city. So what does the fraction look when we take children playing outside and be healthy instead of just children? The chance remains the same but for the ones that survive there is a better quality of life.

> Maybe because children don’t play on the street at all in the city. They absolutely do

Lol what? Where do you see kids playing close to downtown or in the streets of a heavily urban center. Examples?

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

#792

Post by bluGill »

terr-dav wrote: post #441
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!

Souls? you mean other people? Or, f- them in favor of the existing residents... And 'affordable dystopian' housing? Only 20% of the units are required to be affordable. Who knows what private developers will come up with to maximize their profits. So, dystopian? Probably. Affordable? Just a little.

Affordable is about supply and demand. Build enough and all houses are affordable. Don't build enough and people will find ways to cheat to get what you make as 'affordable' so they get in.

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

#793

Post by adra »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #717
vineyardmike wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s in the deed so owning the property means you agree to follow the rules of the deed. The HOA can sue you for enforcement. At a high level, anyone can sue you to enforce a deed term, as long as the organization/person with an interest is around to do it and knows to do it. As an easy example, a long time ago people added racist stuff to deeds, but those family descendants no longer enforce it. HOAs don’t die like…

> you can try to get a living HOA removed from a deed I'd be curious about people's experiences and successes with this. Has anyone successfully pulled that off with a still-existing HOA?

Not entirely the same, but here in Canada (still common law), any housing covenants applied to a deed can be struck down if they are illegal. There were a bunch of houses with ancient unenforceable covenants like not selling homes to certain ethnic/religious groups and they were granted the right to no just ignore, but actually remove those causes from the deed. Transitively, I imagine any deeds for HOA rules and regulations that are illegal under the law could also be challenged under similar merits. I've got no examples of this though, so who knows.

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

#794

Post by CalRobert »

rcme wrote: post #330
CalRobert wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bummer, but people aren't cars and builder's remedy shouldn't apply to bridges on public roads? You just named a good reason to ban cars nearby though.

The point is that the state made a decision for the state’s benefit without considering the impact on the town itself. And this is natural: those in the state government have little incentive to care about the impact on the town. Also, ironically, the town has excellent train and bus coverage. Most don’t own cars. And if they do, they use them seldomly. We all moved here because we don’t like cars and wanted a place…

I think we agree, actually. In your case the state is imposing a negative externality (more cars). I am investigating moving to bloommerwede.nl/ and I will be FURIOUS if the Dutch government forces them to start letting cars through.

Just out of curiosity, may I ask roughly where you are?

I hope we can agree that the common enemy here is cars. The cities have spent most of a century fighting homes for, among other reasons, the belief that more homes means more cars (which isn't true if your city isn't horrible, but almost all American cities are car-choked hellscapes).

So far as I'm aware Builder's Remedy should not mean more roads being built. Hopefully, it eventually leads to car infrastructure like parking garages being removed in favour of housing.

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

#795

Post by OnlineGladiator »

nemo44x wrote: post #780
OnlineGladiator wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately, it does not mean you get lower cost of housing You don't believe in supply and demand? I'm not saying you have cheap housing. I'm saying you would have more expensive housing if there were fewer of them, the same way GPUs are more valuable when there are fewer of them.

What you're not factoring in is the cost of labor and materials. They are both already quite expensive and when you have a building boom the costs of both will skyrocket. What will happen is you'll end up with cheaply constructed housing made from the worst materials. And that's the good outcome. The bad outcome is the rich who are looking for alternate investments will buy up all the labor and materials and build co…

The cost of the house itself is nothing compared to the cost of the land. Houses don't appreciate in value because of the houses (which deteriorate over time) - they appreciate because of the scarcity of land.

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

#796

Post by CalRobert »

nlavezzo wrote: post #511
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…

> 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…

Low traffic streets are a reason to remove cars, not people.

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

#797

Post by xyzelement »

ladberg wrote: post #496
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".

// artificially restricting them to an "already-super Blue city".

I think the idea is that people are choosing how to live. When I was younger, I chose to live in Manhattan because that made sense for work and dating. If Manhattan was rezoned to single-family homes, I'd be pissed.

Now I chose to live in an a medium density area (.15 acre lots, way less dense than the city, much more dense than the 2 acre lots in other towns) because of the lifestyle it affords. We know all our neighbors, the streets are quiet, etc. Everyone who lives here owns here. Everyone in this town chose this town for these attributes.

To stick in a high-rise here despite the desires of every resident would be the "artificial" thing. In the city, you can always build higher and nobody can really object to the extra density because that was always part of the equation.

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

#799

Post by TulliusCicero »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #694
TulliusCicero wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that'd be great. School districts/boundaries being so unequal is at least partially the result of zoning policy that makes it harder for people of less financial means to move into affluent areas. I saw a counterexample living in Munich, just in the sense that the differences between neighborhoods in apparent wealth were much less stark than in the US. Almost everywhere looked vaguely middling, very few places…

Schools are funded by the state government in germany, not by districts. The concept of a school district doesn't exist.

I'm talking about the area boundaries that determine where people go to school. Many terrible school districts or schools in the US actually have plenty of money (the DC school district is a famous example).

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

#800

Post by nemo44x »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #571
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…

There's a certain cost to build a house. It's not like the houses themselves are more in CA (well, maybe a little), it's the land . For example, my house is appraised around $300k but the land is appraised at $1.2 million.

That may be what your used house is worth in an appraisal but if you wanted to build it new, it would cost significantly more I imagine. It depends a lot on finishes and framing complexity of course (number of windows, roof, etc).

A lot of people I know in Colorado found this out when their homes burned down. They had the structure insured for like $500,000 and found out that rebuilding their home that was built 20 years ago would cost around $1,000,000.

A friend recently had a multi story addition put on his house, and of course additions always cost more because there's some amount of demolition and working on an existing site, so the new footings have to be underpinned, etc. It's also a large kitchen and the existing kitchen space had to be demo'd and rebuilt into a new, basic room. The upstairs connected to a hallways but there was some work. Anyways, the cost, all in was over $500k. Even if he didn't use Marvin windows, Wold appliances, nice cabinetry, etc it would have been like $400k. And yes you can go lower. But don't be fooled. A lot of the cheaper construction you see is not only made with awful materials and lazy/inexperienced tradesmen, but is also track housing or similar no modifications allowed type things.

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