891–900 of 1001 posts
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Says who? There are no zoning powers right.
Says the state. It's the cities that are losing power.
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Fari enough: let me clarify. Because California gets so little tax from property, it must get more from income taxes. That has a couple of negative consequences. The nice thing about property taxes is that housing prices change slowly, even in boom/bust cycles -- essentially they are coupled to a dashpot. While income, especially in California with a progressive system coupled with most of the high earners paying cap…
Your point about moving is really important: there are a ton of boomers sitting in houses which are much larger than they need without children living at home but in many cases they're doing exactly what the system incentivizes. Accessory dwelling units (ADUs) can help somewhat if they have enough space and want to get in the landlord business (or have family who need it) but really we need to make it easy for people…
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Where does this narrative about evil greedy developers come from? If the new housing represents a net increase in people, then the developers are filling unmet demand. It’s not that different from restricting the supply of milk and getting angry that milk producers will make more money when those restrictions are lifted. Yeah, they will, but only because there is more demand for their product than they were previousl…
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…
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…
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…
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> Cities should be able to plan their own growth. They are able to plan their own growth, but they aren't able to refuse to grow. Or at least, not through zoning; being located where potable water or sewer/septic are at capacity is probably still valid to restrict new building.
Why not? if a low density community wants to plan to remain low density, who are the rest of us to stop them?
Otherwise it's a tyranny of the majority over the minority (of property owners) that want something not low-density.
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I see a lot of validity in this line of thought and agree with it in principle, but in practice it has led to a lot of problems in California. For one, California is split up into many smaller towns/cities in large metro areas, so each having their own policies leads to locally-optimal but regionally-suboptimal policies of trying to get as much commercial development as possible with as little residential development…
I agree with your premise. I just disagree that the use of authority is the solution here. I don't see any reason why the state needs to intervene. Just let the locally-optimal solutions (peacefully) compete and sort themselves out. Let there be winners and losers, and don't get in the way. Using authority to force cooperation is tyranny. We're not all on the same team. We're self-interested, in-group focused, animal…
Agreed. So why even allow the city to use its authority? Leave it to the property owner to decide.
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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.
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> and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around Actually, suburban streets are significantly more dangerous than urban streets, in terms of number of children killed, as a fraction of both population and miles driven. > Motor vehicle traffic was the leading mechanism of unintentional injury death among children aged 5–13, with the rural rate (3.1) twice as high as the urban rate (1.5) > Motor vehicle…
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.
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The article doesn’t mention it, but it’s my understanding that this auto-approval only happens within a certain distance of public transit as well. I know that’s been a part of prior laws by Wiener, but I could totes be wrong that it’s a part of this one as well. The developers still have to abide by construction laws - safety, and I think environmental impact. All that’s released (AFAIK?) is the zoning-based “no” fr…
I think you are referring to AB 2097, which allows more housing near transit hubs. It was passed in the latest legislative session, but is distinct from the Builder's Remedy and has height restrictions unlike the topic of this article. The same author wrote about it here: https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/yimby-triumph-in-califor...
With efficiency being in homes being stacked, more stress and disruption and crime come from low quality and control in walls/floors especially in regard to soundproofing.