
The Golden Girls Would Violate Zoning Laws - jseliger
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/28/opinion/affordable-housing-zoning-golden-girls.html
======
jdoliner
Here's a little thought experiment that I like to conduct about housing.
Suppose you had two politicians in a race. Politician A gets up in front of
the crowd and says:

> If you elect me I'm going to work for the people of this community, I'm
> going to make sure that your most valuable asset, your home, keeps its
> value. In fact not only is it going to stay valuable, if you elect me it's
> going to get more valuable, under me your house will appreciate 5% every
> year.

Politician B then gets up and says:

> If you elect me I'm going to make sure that you have to be rich to buy a
> home in our community. In fact I'm going to raise the bar and make sure that
> every year you need to be 5% richer to afford a home than you needed to be
> the year before.

Based just on these two snippets, most people I've asked would vote for Pol A,
but what they're saying is essentially the same thing. And that gets at the
very difficult issue we're broaching here. Our concept of housing as an
investment can't coexist with a concept of housing as a commodity that should
be affordable to the majority of the population. We need to let go of one of
them to achieve the other.

~~~
joe_the_user
Well, if the majority of a community are renters, politician A's pitch
_theoretically_ would fall short also, compared to "elect me and I will create
lots of affordable housing, rent will fall or stay stable and you will get
more of your most valuable possession - disposable income"

The problem is even in that situation, the money of the home owner and
apartment house owner speaks more loudly than the interests of the apartment
dwellers.

~~~
nradov
That doesn't accurately characterize voter motivations. Many long-term renters
also oppose loosening zoning rules due to quality of life concerns (traffic,
noise, crime, pollution). It's not always just a money issue.

Furthermore, many renters believe that if more housing is built it will only
be luxury housing that they couldn't afford anyway. Sure basic economics tells
us that increasing supply ought to drive down prices for everyone, but at the
individual level it's tough for people to make the connection.

~~~
bradknowles
Or, it would be low-income housing, and who wants /those/ kind of people
around, anyway?

~~~
lonelappde
Gentrifiers want to live near the culture of low income people (restaurants,
bars) while they push low income people out.

------
lpolovets
Zoning laws are absurdly restrictive, and sometimes just absurd. A few
examples I've seen:

\- homeowner (me) can't install a duplex addition for a home zoned duplex
without turning the front yard into a 4-car parking lot. It doesn't matter
that I have one car and could decide to only rent to people with one car, the
driveway would need to fit four cars instead of the current two.

\- most homes are limited to building one ADU (accessory dwelling unit). Only
one ~800-sq foot ADU is allowed regardless of whether you have a 3,000 sq foot
house on 4,500 sq foot lot, or a 2,000 sq foot house on a 100,000 sq foot lot.

\- if you want to have a home-based day care business, zoning sets a max
number of kids that can attend. In California, this is 14 kids. It doesn't
matter if your home is 1,500 square feet or 5,000 square feet, whether you're
in the middle of downtown SF or in a rural area, or whether you have 2 parking
spaces or 20.

I think zoning seriously infringes on people's property rights. You should be
able to do whatever you want to your property if it doesn't really hurt
anyone. Zoning feels like EULAs to me: you "buy" something, but you don't
really own it because another party has a lot of say in what you can and
cannot do.

~~~
throwawaycert
None of these things are actually true.

Zoning laws are defaults. By default, you have to provide a certain amount of
parking, or are only allowed to put up one additional unit, without additional
_planning authority_. That's an important phrase. If you start building a
bunch of houses on your land, you may overload available transportation,
utility, and public service capacity. That is why you must first go to a
planning commission.

You know what happens 90% of the time when someone with a hundred thousand
sqft lot wants to add another house? You fill out some paperwork requesting a
zoning variance and get your answer in a few weeks.

~~~
lpolovets
FWIW I tried going to the zoning board for the parking issue mentioned above,
and I got different answers from different people (which is a big problem in
and of itself), but basically the answer I got from city officials was "you
have to do this if you want to build a duplex." The lot is already
zoned/approved for duplex, and whether there are 2 or 4 parking spots won't
affect things like utility capacity.

~~~
throwawaycert
This isn't the sort of thing you talk to "city officicals" about. There is
almost certainly a _political_ entity in your city/county made up of appointed
or elected _citizens_ called something like a planning commission. You do not
talk to the city employees, they _implement_ policy. You need to talk to the
_politicians_ who _make_ policy, and have the policy modified for your
project, _if_ it will serve the community's interest.

------
buss
Overly restrictive land use policies is one of the reasons I'm running for
DCCC in San Francisco. The DCCC chooses who the "official" Democrat is in a
race, which almost always translates into that person winning their race. The
DCCC is controlled by NIMBYs, which is why we only elect NIMBY politicians. If
you want this to change, we have to get pro-growth people on the SF DCCC.

[https://buss2020.org](https://buss2020.org) for some details, and
[https://buss2020.org/donate](https://buss2020.org/donate) if you want to chip
in!

~~~
WhompingWindows
How do you intend to enact your vision for legalizing construction of new
apartments anywhere in SF?

~~~
buss
If we get enough YIMBYs and pro-reform Democrats on the DCCC, then the type of
candidate the Democratic party supports will fundamentally change. The DCCC on
my side of the city (East side) has 14 seats, so we have to run and elect as
many pro-growth people as possible.

Enacting this vision will take years of diligent hard work, but that's what
I'm signing up for.

~~~
buss
For legalizing construction of new apartments, the strategy is multi-pronged:

1) ballot props to make development by-right (must be a ballot prop rather
than legislation because the problems are in the city charter which can only
be changed by ballot prop)

2) adjust fees and inclusionary zoning requirements to be realistic. Right now
the inclusionary zoning requirement is more than the market can bear, so
development is drying up.

3) rezone all of SF to allow greater densities and heights. This is a
combination of legislation and ballot props. Rezoning by ballot allows
skipping a years/decade long environmental review.

4) CEQA and other environmental regulation reform. CEQA was designed in the
70s to preserve open space, it now encourages sprawl because nobody can sue
you with CEQA if your new development doesn't have existing neighbors. And
CEQA considers decreased traffic speeds as a negative impact, so any new
development in a city can be stopped due to adding traffic.

5) eliminate parking minimums

6) reform or eliminate discretionary review, which allows any person to stop a
project for years

7) change the scope of authority of the planning commission. It has
dictatorial power over what gets built, does not reflect the demographics of
the city, and is unelected. They should not have as much power as they do.
More details in my article: [https://medium.com/yimby/the-staggering-inequity-
of-the-san-...](https://medium.com/yimby/the-staggering-inequity-of-the-san-
francisco-planning-commission-a546b82c5d56)

There are more policy directions, but this is just off the top of my head.

------
brobdingnagians
> But other cities, like Plano, Tex. — where more than 4,000 residents have
> mobilized to overturn similar plans — have taken steps backward.

I take issue with this. I grew up in Plano, Texas. I loved it and I loved the
people. This article is a negative comment about those people "taking steps
backward", when they are really mobilizing themselves to take part in local
politics and democratically help make the city how they want it to be. Is
Plano perfect? No. But the people there do believe in being active in local
government and in trying to make changes that the people in the community
_want_. It's a special kind of place, and they care. They've done this again
and again.

> As a zoning official, I’m usually the last person to advocate for federal
> intrusion into local decision-making. But the problems of housing inequality
> and segregation are too big for localities to tackle piecemeal.

That last excerpt is simply an emotional appeal "acknowledging" the author's
supposed credentials of opposing big government---- while supporting it. But
zoning laws are one of the most impactful things that a local government
actually manages, and why shouldn't you be able to help shape your community,
especially when we usually want people to participate _more_ in local
politics, and zoning laws are one of the ways you can make a real difference
in your community. But if you take away any really meaningful power that a
local government has, why would anyone care at all to participate?

~~~
ilikehurdles
I take the same issue whenever I see zoning issues about my locality (Denver)
brought up by online communities who tend "YIMBY" but have little, if any,
horse in the race of local politics. There this un-nuanced thousand-miles-
removed view of zoning issues propagated in media and places like Reddit and
HN, and then there's the opposing boots-on-the-ground version where those of
us living in the community, who would have to live with the changes, fight
against destructive zoning proposals and corrupted officials.

Starting a sentence with "as a zoning official" has no value. Having
personally met with a number of zoning officials, historic commission members,
city planners, and council-members, their allegiances and political views vary
from one to the next. Some ran on campaigns almost entirely funded by out-of-
state-developer donations; while others, sure, are a reflection of elite
country-club voters wanting to keep out the "riff-raff". There's a whole swath
of viewpoints in between the extremes, and the only thing consistent among
every national story about "NIMBY"ism is that it is far, far too disconnected
from the communities to adequately capture any of those viewpoints.

------
randyrand
In Japan zoning laws only say the _maximum_ annoyance a piece of land can
have.

In other words, you can build small residential buildings anywhere, even in
industrial zones if you want. But you can only build industrial if the zone
allows it.

~~~
slapshot
In America, people would build their houses around an industrial zone and then
complain about the industry -- this happens all the time. For some nuisances,
like airports, it has broader impacts beyond just the industrial zone.

~~~
AWildC182
Gotta love the people who think they're real estate geniuses for buying cheap
houses near an airport then realizing the airport is loud so they try to close
it.

Don't buy a house off the end of a runway unless you want to listen to my
230HP of bug smashing power...

~~~
mywittyname
This is just another type of arbitrage. Buy up property that's undervalued due
to a nuisance, make the property more appealing by resolving the nuisance,
then sell the property for a profit.

This isn't fundamentally different from fixing up some old house.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
Well except that arguably fixing your house screws nobody whereas shutting
down a small airport or racetrack screws everyone that formerly used it.

~~~
mywittyname
Shutting down a nuisance is doing the entire neighborhood a favor, and that
land can be repurposed to provide more housing in an area that sorely needs
it.

The airports and race tracks were almost certainly built in the middle of
nowhere originally. They can relocate some place that's currently a middle of
nowhere. Airports and race tracks should exist in areas where land is cheap
and abundant, not in places where lots of people want to live.

The land owners make a huge profit from selling the land to developers,
current residence see their property values go up, and more people have the
opportunity to live closer to work.

Sometimes things have to change for the better.

~~~
AWildC182
Or we could zone appropriately for higher density housing to slow the spread
of urban sprawl and not have to rebuild our airports every few years because
people are incapable of doing basic research on their investments?

~~~
mywittyname
Who's saying to rebuild these every few years? Most of these small airports
are 40+ years old. Cities change a lot over those time periods.

Why not both zone for higher density and get rid of small urban airports?
Airports are antithetical to high-density living.

------
Glench
In his Long Now talk and elsewhere, Saul Griffith makes the claim that because
of restrictive zoning laws, solving climate change on a personal level is
actually illegal (because of solar panel installation and wood-burning stove
restrictions): [http://longnow.org/seminars/02015/sep/21/infrastructure-
and-...](http://longnow.org/seminars/02015/sep/21/infrastructure-and-climate-
change/)

That's a strong claim, but I like that Saul is talking about changing local
building laws to make green infrastructure a possibility.

~~~
pascalxus
Yes. And by making it illegal for people to build living spaces near Work,
they're contributing greatly to global warming because it increases commute
lengths. Imagine a 4 mile commute vs 40 mile commute, the 40 miles we commute
here in the bay area is 10 times more pollution!

~~~
dmix
Why do we have clearly divided zoned areas for work and residential again?
What era did that start?

I understand if it was a pig slaughterhouse or night club or something like
that. But even the early 1900s had office buildings, law offices, various
small shops, and other quiet firms.

Seems like a heavy-handed approach in retrospect. If anything the laws should
be related to the type of business or externalities (noise, smell, etc) it
produces rather than on strict residential/work/industrial lines.

~~~
rhacker
We should set it up so that it is based on air, water, noise pollution zoning:
Law offices next to (or inside a single family house should be OK). However,
if the law office attracts 50 cars per day, then obviously they are going to
break noise/air pollution requirements.

Similarly there's no way for a quiet old couple that wants a quiet
neighborhood to stay quiet unless the zoning allows for it. A lot of people
would consider a Q1 zone anti-familyist but the REASON such a zone would be
desireable is that's what rich people pay for - they only want to hear their
own noise - so they end up buying 7 lots around their mansion.

We shouldn't make the need to want absolute peace and quiet a price but
instead just let that group of people that want the same thing live next door
to each other. Instead we encourage people to buy rural properties in a
forest.

Sorry for that aside but zones for quiet level, air and water pollution levels
- but traffic induced by business should be considered as part of the zoning,
and then get rid of the residential / commercial separation - just focus on
the pollutions.

~~~
saltminer
I think the big problems are parking minimums and a lack of mixed-use zoning
in many areas. Walkable areas encourage density, which helps reduce noise and
air pollution.

------
quaquaqua1
Landowners are so deeply invested in their properties that they support the
local politicians who create supply-restrictive policies to further inflate
asset prices.

Or it's all a giant conspiracy that is closed to non-elite citizens. I
actually have no idea how one would become the official who rewrites zoning
laws anyway.

~~~
shuckles
Loosening zoning would increase their land values though.

~~~
erentz
I think that effect only happens today in most places due to the pent up
demand and restrictive zoning in place.

E.g.:

In Seattle when they upzone a small area it immediately goes up in value
because a builder can put say four houses now and sell more units. There is
nowhere else that can be done so that land has a premium on it due to the
restrictive zoning in the rest of the city.

Now if the _whole_ city was up zoned at the same time then the zoning would
not affect the value of the land, only its amenity and location factors as per
usual. In fact in this case land values would likely drop overall because now
more units can be built everywhere allowing more people to live in the city in
a variety of housing types, we reduced the supply demand gap and that affects
the value of land overall.

~~~
clairity
it’s quite unlikely that land value will go down with upzoning. when you can
build more, the value you can extract from a fixed amount of land goes up. but
what _may_ happen is that an individual unit on that land may sell for a
little less for a short period of time.

------
alexhutcheson
It's ironic that this piece ended up running on the same day as this other
article in the same paper, which quotes a bunch of residents complaining about
the construction of apartment towers on Manhattan's Upper East Side:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/nyregion/yorkville-
tall-b...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/nyregion/yorkville-tall-
buildings-nyc.html)

------
jackfoxy
You can look to Houston, TX as a control group of what development and urban
growth looks like without zoning laws.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning_in_the_United_States#Ho...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning_in_the_United_States#Houston,_1924–1929)

~~~
mjevans
Indeed, laws and structural (backbone) planning are necessary and
complimentary.

However as others have pointed out and (I saw them while reading further down
after) I also replied about Japanese style zoning, which is based on a
combination of large scale planning and allowing "Up to X nuisance" in a zone
and otherwise letting market forces dictate what actually gets build.

------
ndespres
On the other side of the coin, I'm in an area with NO zoning restrictions at
all (other than a homophobic county-wide prohibition on pornographic
bookstores). The town planning board has no power to disallow any type of
building or business as long as it passes a very basic environmental survey.
There's been a lot of bad feeling lately about a proposed motocross track/RV
park in what is a very quiet farming community. I pity the neighbors who will
have to suffer it, but there's hardly anything that can be done to stop it. I
guess that's the price a community pays for constantly voting against zoning
ordinances.

~~~
noonespecial
>there's hardly anything that can be done to stop it.

Sure there is. Buy the land. If you want to be able to insist on how something
is used, ownership wins hands-down every single time.

------
rayiner
I don’t see how this is a federal issue. There is a constitutional dimension,
if for example zoning codes were used to discriminate against families with
LGBT members. But in general? Regulation of land one of the archetypal state
issues.

~~~
syn0byte
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under
bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

------
tomohawk
Zoning laws are absurd, but if anyone thinks getting the Feds even more
involved is going to make it better, just ask yourself if it would be a good
thing to give congress even more stuff to fight about and be ineffective at
handling.

~~~
mywittyname
Generally, laws that effect large groups of people are going to be less
onerous than ones which effect only a few. Local governments are notoriously
petty and rife with corruption/favoritism. I've seen local laws get passed
just because someone on the board had a personal vendetta. People are
assholes.

Also, Congress would offload responsibility to an agency, likeHouse & Urban
Development. So I doubt they'd fight too much over day-to-day matters.

~~~
tomohawk
Heh - have you ever had to deal with HUD? I cannot imagine involving them more
would yield a good result.

Local governments can be petty, but that is the human condition. Congress has
been known to be petty and corrupt, and so have federal agencies.

------
Finnucane
The zoning in my neighborhood is actually fantasy. The zoning for residential
has FAR limits that one would expect in the outer suburbs, whereas the actual
housing is quite a bit more dense. Only a small percentage of buildings
conforms to the zoning limits. Which means even the most trivial change
requires a variance.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
>Which means even the most trivial change requires a variance.

That's a feature, not a bug.

By forcing even mundane projects to go through a process where approval
depends on the whims of the decision makers they have set themselves up to
extract concessions from basically every project on a whim, fast track things
they like (often things run by people they like) and stonewall things that
they don't (don't get on their bad side if you want their approval in an
expedient fashion).

------
40acres
The problem with owning a home in the United States, and it's relation to
restrictive zoning, is that it's such a valuable asset. I'd wager the true
price of home ownership is not reflected in property taxes, assessments, or
retail price.

In many areas the access to a school district and the expected lifetime
earnings of a child who attends that district is worth more than the median
home in the district.

Ownership allows access to powerful neighborhood associations to wield and
maintain the status quo.

I commend recent efforts by local and state legislators to eliminate single
family zoning, however we have a long way to go to decouple public education
and home ownership. It's not simply about funding either -- many urban school
districts have great funding per student but still lack in comparison to the
suburbs in terms of class size, arguably the most important metric when
considering schools.

~~~
tropo
We can't decouple public education and home ownership unless we get one of two
things:

a. mandated homeschooling

b. free teleportation

Without one of those, house location and choice of school are unavoidably tied
together.

------
geebee
Good article. I think I'm seeing the kind of breakdown that can occur from
excessive zoning regulations in my own mainly SFH neighborhood in SF.

I live in a neighborhood south of 280 near a bart station. Historically, it
was a middle income neighborhood, and it is zoned SFH. The houses almost all
have a small front and back yard. The front setback for many of the houses is
the length of a car, with a driveway in the middle and a small garden to each
side. The ground floor was almost always originally an extended garage with
perhaps a storage room.

I think you can see it all falling apart. The proximity of this neighborhood
to the peninsula, downtown SF and south of market, and the location near Bart
and several muni rail lines, along with the general housing crunch in SF, has
simply rendered this land too valuable for SFH residences. SF is trying, and
failing, to suppress the alternate use of this land that the market is
increasingly demanding.

Now, I'm not arguing that land use regulations are inherently bad, and I
believe that SF is bad at governing. But here's what's happened.

The bottom floor, what was once a garage and storage room, has almost always
been converted to a ground floor apartment or flat. Some people have gone so
far as to replace the garage door with a wall and a front door. With the
garage space gone, people have paved over the front setbacks next to their
driveway, in order to park three cars in front of the house. Although curb
cuts are technically allowed only to access the driveway and garage, these
residents do of course keep the curb cut as a reserved parking spot in front
of their house.

I'm not sure what to make of it. But one thought I've had is that what we're
seeing here is an attempt to convert an old SFH neighborhood in to multi unit
dwellings, and it has actually been a bit of a disaster. Curb cuts are no
longer used to provide access to a garage, but they do break street into small
sections, all too small to legally park a car, so total parking is a wash
(though it does provide residents with a reserved spot). The illegal but
largely unenforced pave overs have led to higher volumes of water going into
the combined storm and sewage system (an archaic but energy efficient gravity
based system used in SF, possible because it's a hilly place), and the excess
water, mixed with sewage, floods the lower level spots where the pipes
bottleneck, severely damaging properties and subjecting residents to severe
health and safety risks.

Fascinatingly, San Francisco remains very strict and expensive where it comes
to permits, but there's a level of permit violation that SF seems to just not
bother with. In other words, you can do an un-permitted remodel of your
downstairs, add drains, pave over the soil filter, create a massive sewage
flooding problem, and sf will do... nothing. But if you were to try to tear
down a house and replace it with a properly engineered multi unit dwelling...
are you kidding me? SF will charge you upwards of 20k inspection and permit
fees just to remodel the downstairs within the existing footprint of the
house, if you do it legally. Anything beyond that is a massive delay with
massive fees, and in most places, converting to official Muti unit dwellings
is a non-starter.

The result is lots of illegal in-laws, with dodgy electrical and plumbing, in
an area that is likely to flood due to illegal pave overs. During one of the
heavy rain episodes, someone's dog was electrocuted and died. Really, I'd give
it even odds that someone is going to die from this situation before long.

When I look around, I see something that just isn't working anymore. And while
I bought into a SFH neighborhood, I do see something deeply immoral about
restricting development in an urban neighborhood with excellent public
transportation options close to job centers, in a world where low income
janitors and fast food workers engage in soul and family destroying commutes
for hours from exurb sprawl. It's nearly inconceivable that a city that
considers itself "green"[1] and environmentalist would consider this OK.

The one thing I disagree about is the notion that SFH owners are protecting an
investment. Personally, I believe that while my house itself would lose value
with relaxed building restrictions, the land would be worth a ton if it were
legal to build a multi unit dwelling so close to the urban core and multiple
public transportation lines. Nah, the SFH associations are fighting for
something other than the optimization of their asset. I'm a lifelong San
Franciscan in my late 40s, and I know these people. They have a powerful
attachment to their neighborhood character, they never plan to leave, they are
largely indifferent to the value of their house, and the want things to stay
"the same". I just don't think that's possible. Things can either grow
properly, or we can try to put it into a container that will eventually burst
at the seams - and this is what I think I'm observing in my own neighborhood,
a place that is trying to grow, in ways that are harmful but don't have to be,
because we haven't allowed the kind of growth that could actually benefit the
city instead.

[1] when I replaced my old single pane windows with energy efficient windows,
I got a tax credit from, get this, the _Bush_ administration. Ironically, that
incentive was almost exactly the same dollar value of SF's permit fees to
replace my windows. Gavin Newsome's "Green" San Francisco pretty much
confiscated the environmental incentive to reduce greenhouse gases created by
the Bush admin. I mean, wow.

~~~
malandrew
> I believe that SF is bad at governing

You're certainly not alone in that belief. SF is probably one of the most
poorly governed cities in the world, especially when you consider its budget
relative to what it accomplishes.

~~~
nradov
Incompetent and corrupt government is an inevitable consequence of having a
single-party political machine. Historically that has always been a problem at
any scale of government from whole nation states down to cities.

To be clear, I'm not making a Republican versus Democrat argument here. The
problem is the lack of a viable alternative rather than the particular party
in power.

------
alexnewman
In san francisco, zoning doesn't mean shit. Basically it comes down to who you
know and can you hold your nose and bribe. With these capabilities, the zone
and code can say whatever you want. Clearly this is all about the $$$.

------
zazaraka
Another interesting take in NY Times:

> _Yet where progressives argue for openness and inclusion as a cudgel against
> President Trump, they abandon it on Nob Hill and in Beverly Hills. This
> explains the opposition to SB 50, which aimed to address the housing
> shortage in a very straightforward way: by building more housing._

> _What Republicans want to do with I.C.E. and border walls, wealthy
> progressive Democrats are doing with zoning and Nimbyism. Preserving “local
> character,” maintaining “local control,” keeping housing scarce and
> inaccessible — the goals of both sides are really the same: to keep people
> out._

> _“We’re saying we welcome immigration, we welcome refugees, we welcome
> outsiders — but you’ve got to have a $2 million entrance fee to live here,
> otherwise you can use this part of a sidewalk for a tent,” said Brian
> Hanlon, president of the pro-density group California Yimby. “That to me is
> not being very welcoming. It’s not being very neighborly.”_

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/opinion/california-
housin...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/opinion/california-housing-
nimby.html)

