This little bit of political sparring was my favorite part of the article:
>SB 827, Wiener’s bill to mandate increased density near public transit, was recently the subject of a spat on Twitter between the Senator and former Beverly Hills mayor John Mirisch. Mirisch began his tirade by calling the bill “a bizarre combination of Soviet-style master planning with raging crony capitalism…the urban planning lovechild of Vladimir Putin and the Koch Bros.”
>“Not quite sure how he got to this conclusion but definitely scores high in the melodramatic response competition,” Wiener responded. “Interesting to say that my authoring a bill to allow more housing near transit makes me Putin, since I sort of got the idea from a guy named [President Barack] Obama,” he remarked wryly.
The name dropping and mudslinging here is pretty laughable. The reason reason for conflict seems to me to be misaligned incentives though. The idea that a place like Beverly Hills is going to have to throw up a bunch of new housing to please CA congress is ridiculous, since essentially the city now has to find a way to destroy existing housing or places of business in order to throw up new, cheaper housing, assuming the bill passes.
SB-827 does not require the destruction of any housing. In fact it gives property holder's more freedom to build what they want on their own land. The reason is because it removes onerous regulations that have restricted the ability of a growing state to match it's housing needs. SB-827 isn't a long piece of law, I highly encourage everyone with an opinion on it to read the text of the law.
I've noticed a common talking point among anti-development types is to assert that changing zoning to allow denser housing translates to mandating denser housing, which is obviously ridiculous.
Unfortunately at first glance the law is easy to misread. If you’re not careful it reads like it’s mandating a minimum height for new construction. Instead what it’s doing is mandating a floor on the maximum allowable height a city can set. So in other words a city can’t force a developer to shorten their building beyond the minimum heights in SB-827. Conversely a developer or home owner can construct a short building if they really want to.
>SB 827, Wiener’s bill to mandate increased density near public transit, was recently the subject of a spat on Twitter between the Senator and former Beverly Hills mayor John Mirisch. Mirisch began his tirade by calling the bill “a bizarre combination of Soviet-style master planning with raging crony capitalism…the urban planning lovechild of Vladimir Putin and the Koch Bros.”
>“Not quite sure how he got to this conclusion but definitely scores high in the melodramatic response competition,” Wiener responded. “Interesting to say that my authoring a bill to allow more housing near transit makes me Putin, since I sort of got the idea from a guy named [President Barack] Obama,” he remarked wryly.
The name dropping and mudslinging here is pretty laughable. The reason reason for conflict seems to me to be misaligned incentives though. The idea that a place like Beverly Hills is going to have to throw up a bunch of new housing to please CA congress is ridiculous, since essentially the city now has to find a way to destroy existing housing or places of business in order to throw up new, cheaper housing, assuming the bill passes.