Someone on HN posted a link to this article that compared Japanese zoning laws to American zoning laws.[0] There was also some interesting discussion.[1] The reason I thought of this is because in Japan the broad outlines of zoning laws are made at the national level, and cities can only make exceptions to them, unlike in America where cities make their zoning laws out of whole cloth. A bill like this is a small movement closer to the Japanese system.
What’s needed is large amounts of new housing in Palo Alto, Mountain View, Santa Clara, Cupertino, Menlo Park, Sunnyvale, etc. etc. The most reasonable places to put it are near public transit and near office parks. These cities don’t really have a whole lot of “out” left to build on.
NIMBY is a huge problem. I live in Cupertino, and we just defeated a couple of bills that would have allowed a nine story high rise of apartments right next to the freeway.
In this particular case most people opposed it because they didn't want a nine story building. I didn't actually mind, even though I would literally live in it's shadow.
But I voted against it too because the they were apartments, not condos, which means that they will send their kids to the schools but not pay for them. Actually worse, their rent would have been higher because of the schools, but the schools would never see any of that money since apartments don't pay parcel taxes, which is where a good chunk of the school funding comes from.
But my main point is that almost all of my neighbors opposed it because "they don't want high density housing to ruin the neighborhood".
I hate to break it to these people, but they said the same thing in the 1960s when their houses were being built.
>I hate to break it to these people, but they said the same thing in the 1960s when their houses were being built.
This was an issue in my city recently too. People didn't want a medium-density condo project to go in, and the mayor came out and said "I lived here when your houses were built and people said the same thing... you wouldn't be here if we didn't build them".
>"they don't want high density housing to ruin the neighborhood".
In all likelihood they probably just don't want more supply driving down prices.
If you've got a $1 million mortgage on a $1.4 million bungalow you're not exactly going to be pleased if the housing crisis comes to an abrupt end and you're plunged deep into negative equity.
There seems to be some tiptoeing around this elephant when it comes to the politics of land development though.
You are part of the problem. In fact, you are the problem. You know, tenants have rights too, they pay taxes, and as a rule they tend to pay more taxes and get less break for it than homeowners, especially in California, where incumbent homeowners are protected from tax increases.
The property is taxed; the landlord pays the tax directly, the tenants absorb this cost in their rent.
The people living there will all be working in the office space in Cupertino and nearby towns. It’s ridiculous that all of these towns can add unlimited amounts of new office space, without likewise building any new places for the workers to live.
I'd thought the same. In theory, this would contribute to sprawl. In practice, you have to know a bit of what's been going on in California to recognize that the proposed law is squarely aimed at these suburban towns, and they are all already sprawls as it is anyway.
Agreed, many of my neighbors spoke out against a proposed condo development (less than half a mile from a Caltrain station, and 1/4 mile from 2 ramps to 101) because they were worried about traffic in the neighborhood.
Fortunately, the developments went on as planned and 3 years and 400 housing units later, traffic isn't noticeably worse than it was before the developments, and I see a lot more people walking to Caltrain.
Cities love to welcome office space, but they are loathe to welcome residential space, yet at the same time, people complain that people are being forced out of the community due to the price of housing.
The cure to high housing prices is more housing, not rent control.
The problem in the Peninsula is the traffic. It will just get worse with higher density. Nobody is going to walk or bike to work. Complete wonderland. Public transit is a joke and has been for the last 30 years. Higher density may lower housing costs some, but it will just make traffic worse and that's why existing residents are not in favor of it. The most practical thing would be to extend BART and have it run next to the freeway to minimize the NIMBY factor. That will never ever happen though because it costs a billion dollars a mile to build anything that carries multiple people on a track in the U.S. See the recent muni train expansion in San Francisco.
One of (many) reasons why BART can't expand is NIMBYism as well. Trains are loud, they bring undesirable people to the area, the stations themselves can have crime problems.
Basically people see it as a magical portal that brings downtown Oakland and San Francisco to them, with all of the attendant problems of those areas. Not entirely untrue, but it also contributes to the inability to ever improve things in the bay area.
Why do rational urbanists suddenly crave development in suburbs like Mountain View, Palo Alto, and Cupertino when we have three major urban centers in San Jose, Oakland, and San Francisco that all could use a lot more density. Building more out in the suburbs between will just mean more traffic, more pollution, more global warming. It makes no sense.
I think a good chunk of San Francisco should also be up-zoned for mixed uses and more housing units in buildings up to 5 stories with less parking requirement. All the pale yellow here is very low density residential: http://default.sfplanning.org/zoning/zoning_map.pdf
But anyway, I don’t think it would be inherently terrible to have relatively low density suburbs.
The problem is that all the towns in the peninsula love building massive amounts of new office space, but don’t build enough housing for the workers to live there. As a result, the workers all live in SF and commute daily to the peninsula by car or corporate shuttle. This is a horrible planning pattern for everyone. (Except for the peninsula towns who get big tax revenue from the office space and don’t have to pay for any of the costs of housing the workers’ families.)
It’s plausible that increasing the housing supply in Silicon Valley suburbs would even decrease commute-hours traffic. (I’m not enough of an expert to predict precisely.)
Mountain View has about 6,000 people per square mile. Cupertino has about 5,000 people per square mile. Palo Alto has about 2,500 people per square mile. Etc.
By contrast, a suburb full of real housing can be far denser. For example, Somerville, MA, a suburb of Boston, has about 19,000 people per square mile. It’s entirely unnecessary to fill the whole of the Bay Area with 30+ floor high rises in order to increase density by a factor of 2 or more; all we need is to re-zone a fraction of the land to allow 3–6 story low rise apartment buildings in mixed-use neighborhoods instead of only allowing single family detached houses on large lots and scattered strip malls and outrageous numbers of parking spaces everywhere.
Kowloon has a density of more than 100,000 people per square mile. The Bay Area does not need anything near the density of Hong Kong to meet its housing needs.
Of course, Somerville has little parkland, and few commercial buildings, not even much retail, and little office space.
I'd much rather see balanced communities with parks, retail/entertainment and office space so many residents don't have to travel outside of their community for every day needs.
What I like about the cali coast is that while there is a lot of space, most of it is not developed. Besides a road, and the occasional vantage points. I don't think "mandatory developement" plans like this which just sprawl and sprawl is that good of an idea, it really takes out from the landscape.
Much of that coastal land is protected from development. What this proposed law will likely do is increase density in areas that are already developed.
Having said that, I think you have a point: there are benefits to more housing, but there are also costs. Those houses or apartment complexes have to go somewhere, the infrastructure to support more people living in an area has to go somewhere. The bay area can't keep on growing forever.
I was thinking about how SF is not NY as I was visiting NY's East 80s, walking from a subway stop to a friend's apartment, a month after having visited SF and driving the miserable 19th Street route.
Does it, though? Rents are leveling off in SF. Also, it's about time for this boom to collapse. When the first dot-com boom collapsed, about 40% of the twentysomethings in SF left.
The big moment will be when Twitter goes under. They're the most visible troubled "tech" company in SF. If Uber tanks as well, SF's housing problem will be over for a while.
(Twitter will live on, but it will probably be acquired by somebody like IAC, which buys troubled services at a discount and runs them cheaply. They own "about.com", "match.com", "dictionary.com", Vimeo, Ask, etc. If they ran Twitter, it would have far fewer employees.)
Rents in SF (and the rest of the Bay Area) are absolutely outrageous for anyone who isn’t a highly paid professional or already independently wealthy. Ideally SF rents would drop to half their current levels, or below.
CA has too much housing already. Consider water availability and traffic jams. In LA and sometimes in San Jose, consider smog.
Why does everybody have to live there anyway? The country would be way better off if 25 million people left there for Tennessee, West Virginia, Mississippi, Kentucky, Michigan, Maine, Indiana, Arkansas, and Louisiana.
yeah no kidding, blue hipsters need to spread their progressivism to the rest of the country(as I noticed most of those states lean Republican), if we're ever to have a more progressive country.
The intent of the bill isn't to force development where there shouldn't be any. It's to encourage it where it's needed most, but hasn't happened yet due to NIMBYism etc.
Profit maximizing capitalists prefer the regulation. Especially if they have an existing property portfolio, a regulatory market against building provides an insulation from risk and a better return on their existing investments.
New buildings require a much longer minimum investment timeline because the building doesn't exist yet. It's also far easier.
So if you let the free-market write the rules here, you'd get essentially exactly what we already have, because that's essentially exactly what we've already done.
Instead, if you really want a free-enterprise approach that encourages better land utilization, you'd need to look before you leap. For instance, a conservative rent and property resell value control would guarantee a maximum ROI for the buy/hold and do nothing/dump strategy. Otherwise, you'd have to indirectly subsidize new developments through tax breaks and other financial incentives (which is exactly what is happening)
Alternatively, if you're willing to forgo the engineering and manufacturing of markets you could use community land trusts, which is likely a far simpler and less issue-prone model of execution. I've personally invested in a few and have seen a long-term, stable, dependable 3% ROI (which is better than other equally conservative vehicles) so this doesn't mean that capitalists and investors are gone - just all the messy parts.
Which, effectively, incentivizes home-building companies to dig their heels on building so that they can get permission for schemes that are more profitable but wouldn't meet local approval.
0: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540845