Yes, people here celebrating this don't understand at all that all this does is give developers more power over communities they have no interest in but money. And of course, the politicians that they will fund/bribe to make this happen.
We just went from democracy to oligarchy in this case.
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 previously legally allowed to satisfy.
Developer margins should actually decrease when zoning is more permissive anyway. Right now in SF there is a whole cottage industry of “facilitators” and direct graft/corruption making it hard to build housing unless you know how to work the system.
While it’s absolutely true that developers can cut corners, I personally don’t see them as any more evil than any other business.
People are looking for any scapegoat for the problems in their community so they don't have to look in the mirror.
This is the same reason why there's a persistent myth that homeless are bused in from other states or whatever (when in reality, 70-90% of them were in homes in San Francisco before going on the street). It absolves people of blame
That seems to show 65% of the homeless population of LA County were living there before they became homeless - others travelled within state or from another state to be there.
That wasn't quite what I expected to see based on the stats cited above, but it's useful info. Thank you.
The fact that housing prices are high isn't a sign of greed: it's a sign of a constrained supply. Developers build housing, the price is set by what people are willing to pay.
The price is also set by developers. There's no reason for rent to increase 30-50% in a single year other than literal greed. Will people pay it? Yes, because they have no choice in the matter, they need a place to live. But it's still greed raising the price.
To be pedantic, the price is set by the leasing office, which may or may not be run by the developer. People do have a choice in the matter: they choose to live elsewhere. If an apartment raised rents 30-50% for no reason, that's what everyone would do and they would get no tenants.
Except, they're not raising rent for no reason. They're raising rent because housing is becoming a scare commodity, and there's way more people looking for housing than there are housing units available. If they look elsewhere the prices would also be high.
The "greedy" developers are the ones that are capable of bringing us out of this situation by profiting off this shortage by building more housing. Hostility to developers is a big reason why San Francisco and similar ares have such high housing costs.
The people actually building the buildings (developers) are, generally, different than the people renting out buildings (landlords). Developers profit when more units are built, landlords are hurt with increased competition.
Also, recent California law was changed so that the maximum allowable annual rent increase is ~10% (still rough if you are hit with that, but better than 30%).
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 building the anti-NIMBY idealized massive communal living arcology in the on the east and west of your 100 year old Victorian neighborhood blocking the sun for 70% of the day, razing historic buildings and creating a construction zone for the next five years. Then once they’ve made everyone miserable for forever they pocket the profit and use it to buy a nice Victorian in a community with community zoning laws.
> Truth is people want to live in a community of the character they choose when they moved into that community.
They are not _entitled_ to forever freeze a city just because they live there. I bet they would not like their town if it still looked the same as it was in 1890.
They aren’t, but they’re entitled to advocate for it without derision. My point is the NIMBY crowd have their point, and it’s unreasonable and unfair to assume they’re entitled asshats that hate poor people. Solutions where they exist will lie in the middle, otherwise in a democracy we have ways of resolving these things.
However it really should be a city level decision - the whole point of having lots of cities is they can vary in their character and quality. Moving these decisions to a state level doesn’t allow for the advocacy of a neighborhood to matter as much. That’s not good.
The world shouldn’t revolve around some NIMBY, but a community of NIMBYs should be respected for their desires as the community. Ceding community control to the government and developers isn’t the right way to go.
> They aren’t, but they’re entitled to advocate for it without derision.
I mean, no they aren't? These people are directly screwing over people like me. I'm gonna disagree with them loudly and publicly until the problem is solved.
If you are being harmed, of course you have a right to speak up against the ones committing said harm!
Explain how this is a direct screwing over please. It seems fairly indirect. Did they enter into a contract with you for an affordable home and then broke it? Did they jack up your rent and evict you? Or did they lobby their government for a policy you don’t like and could, along with other factors, cause your rent to go up? If it’s the latter, that’s pretty indirect.
I don’t think I did. There are many factors other than NIMBYs that lead to the perceived harm. It’s also unclear what the harm is - that you can’t afford something in a market economy? That you have to move? When they raze all the single family homes and replace them with Soviet style block houses and everyone can afford it, the NIMBYs will move too. Did they face harm?
I think he is angry at the wrong thing. Maybe being angry that the cities are necessary to live in to get ahead? Maybe he should be hopeful that telecommuting will relieve housing pressures over time? Maybe there’s a saddle point that can be reached by not assuming the other side is malicious towards you personally?
No one has complained about the prices being too high in a market economy. In fact, NIMBYs are distorting the market with inefficient regulation. The harm, of course, is that this regulation unfairly favors current home owners.
The state of California has said enough is enough and has rendered the local regulation null and void.
And no one has said anything about soviet style apartment buildings. That is very unlikely.
The policy they've chosen to advocate directly harms me. Not in a, "oh, no, there's now a construction project nearby" sort of way. In a, "I literally cannot afford to live in this city anymore, so I have to leave" sort of way. I will deride the hell out of the extremely privileged status quo interests who put their precious aesthetic opinions above the basic needs of their children and grandchildren. If you loudly advocate your selfish and in doing so you hurt the hell out of large groups of people, they will dislike you for it.
I see, the harm done is if the city won’t change to accommodate you you might have to move to another city. The harm done to the other side is they can’t stand to live in the city that changed to accommodate you so you didn’t have to leave, and they have to leave. Their advocacy for the city accommodating them is selfish, but your advocacy for the city accommodating you is egalitarian?
I see a lot of people say this is direct harm. I don’t think people understand what that term means. “I’m upset by the outcome of your advocacy” doesn’t mean direct harm. Advocacy isn’t directed towards you, no one has come to you and harmed you. Direct harm would be them coming and removing you from your home and keeping you under housed directly. Their advocacy indirectly leads to higher housing prices, and even then there’s a lot of other confounding factors. “I’m really upset with the situation and those guys are advocating for a partial factor that gives rise” is about as indirect as you get.
Harm is done to the person owning the single family home absolutely but I would argue that is the lesser of two evils. The best way would be to give them some element of compensation, but still, if one wants a nice, lower density area they should move away from the rapidly growing city. You can't just expect to maintain that forever.
The same could be said of the person who wants a larger apartment than they could afford given the market for housing - move further away from the city.
Neither extreme makes sense, we should probably recognize both camps have valid points and a middle path is likely the right one, and no one will be fully satisfied.
From a utilitarian perspective though it's a greater harm to all the people that would live in the high-rise that now have to live miles from the city versus the handful of single family home owners.
That is true. Hence my comments above about the extreme is razing all the SFH and replacing them with society style apartment blocks to ensure everyone has the minimum required to house the maximum number of people at the lowest cost possible. The other side is they’re incumbent, have established a life, and their entire community wants the life they have lived. Respecting that is important too, otherwise you get what you see in China with the razing of old cities replaced with efficiency unit high rises and forced relocation. There’s something to be said for respecting the lives built of a community vs destroying the community built for utilitarian gain.
> I see, the harm done is if the city won’t change to accommodate you you might have to move to another city. The harm done to the other side is they can’t stand to live in the city that changed to accommodate you so you didn’t have to leave, and they have to leave. Their advocacy for the city accommodating them is selfish, but your advocacy for the city accommodating you is egalitarian?
This is very well expressed, thanks.
Fundamentally you have people who live somewhere and like it how it is, and all the people who don't live there and want to radically change it to be something else. Clearly these desires are in conflict. Each side has the right to speak up for what they'd like to see, sure.
But where does it come the idea that the people who don't live there should have a greater say in how the place develops than those who actually make their life there?
I can only live in one place, all other towns of the world are places I don't live in. By that logic, I should be able to influence all the N-1 places on earth I don't live it, but have no say in how development occurs in the 1 place I do live in. Does that make sense?
I don't live in Boston. Should I have greater vote on how Boston needs to change than people who actually live there? (To pick a random city I don't live in.)
But isn't your position premised on an entitlement to live in a particular place? I don't recall ever creating or affirming that entitlement. And it doesn't exactly strike me as reasonable. There are expensive neighborhoods that I cannot afford to live in. I don't see anything wrong with that.
Depends on the level of information available to voters. At the local level, decisions are usually terrible, as getting info about local elections is usually contained within patronage networks.
At the state level, elections are much better, and state level elections are usually far more informed. There have been moments of pure greed by the electorate, like with Prop 13, that have severely harmed the state, but that's a common trap with all electorates.
Overall I think California voters are newer on par with places like Minnesota thag have generally very good governance.
> There have been moments of pure greed by the electorate, like with Prop 13
That is a very uncharitable description. Prop13 was driven by people sick of getting thrown out of their long-time homes by huge tax increases. There is no "greed" in the desire to keep living in the home you bought.
You know what’s really a problem? How dystopian America is.
The opportunity and jobs are in big cities. But housing makes it impossible for many people to even live near the city. People want to solve this problem, but are blocked because people like that their neighborhood has street parking.
It’s killing America and it’s really killing our ability to become a modern, progressive society.
I think the real problem is the density of opportunity and jobs in cities. I’m hopeful that remote work will break that tyranny to some extent. In five years when the emotions have cooled about return to office and the director of finance provides an analysis to the CFO about how much they could save and increase EPS while improving productivity using 2020/21 data and the CFO takes it to the board, that will be the end of the opportunity density in the cities.
It’s a fundamental problem caused by the necessity to collocate to collaborate, which is largely not true any more. Jobs will diffuse away from cities as the people who live in the city out of obligation and have no desire leave. Some stay because they like it. Regardless the density will reduce. That’s a good thing. The hollowing out of the country into the coastal cities is a flaw not a feature.
Have you been to an urban downtown during lockdown where only jobs requiring in person attendance were encouraged to work in the office? They were literally empty. Now with hybrid they’re mostly empty. There wouldn’t be articles we are responding to if this were not true.
The majority of jobs in an urban core is not heavy industry or medical or teaching. Those are on the outside of the urban core, especially heavy industry is usually not in an urban environment at all in modern times.
In the city of Boston, fully half the jobs are in healthcare and education. Many urban jobs can certainly go remote but I don’t think it’s more than half.
Yes, but on the flip side thousands of people will no longer be paying $3k/mo in rent for a shitty apartment, and homelessness will drop dramatically.
The anti-NIMBY movement didn't come about because people want to override existing communities. It came about because people need a place to live, and NIMBYs were actively campaigning against it for decades with no consideration for the needs of others.
Now, I think it's reached the stage where at least among young people making their lives miserable is honestly seen as a positive.
If you expect to have retail stores, teachers, and tradespeople nearby, then you need to build housing they can afford. If everyone has a one-hour commute to get to their job at 7-11 you're going to see even more inflation.
Would love to have a law that the minimum wage for people whose services you use, whether that person lives close or far, must be enough to pay for the mortgage at, say, 40th percentile of a studio in the area. Want that receptionist at the doctor to make an appointment for you? Want somebody to restock the shelves at the grocery store? Better pay up... Want to go to a doctor's office that has a janitorial service? Better expect those janitors to get paid.
We have an entire generation of extremely over privileged, overly entitled, and narcissistic people setting housing policy that seemingly have no idea about all the labor that makes all their lives possible. We are reaching "let them eat cake" levels of self-deception from homeowners.
People want to live where the jobs are. It doesn’t make sense for California to brag about being the world’s fifth largest economy but to also plan on housing 0 new people a year.
No one is taking single family homes from people in Santa Monica. They are just saying anyone who wants to sell they can now turn that into apartments. If you frame it the way I'm describing it really it's the NIMBY people who "need" santa monica to be a certain way
And that’s happening, but still your plumber has to come from somewhere. As the need to commute drops the population density that can be accommodated will rise just because there won’t be huge flows of commuter traffic.
My quick kaging tells me a plumber in Santa Monica makes on average $80k, and the average software dev makes $90. I think you underestimate how much skilled trades actually make. The parallel thread regarding unskilled labor (janitors) is more to the point. Even then, somehow, the building are clean even in places considerably more expensive than Santa Monica. I don’t think the homeless camps are filled with janitors, but I very well could be wrong. I know a lot of recent homeless are people simply priced out of being homed. A solution in my mind lies somewhere between razing every single family home and erecting massive Soviet style block housing across the skyline and disallowing any change to any structure.
The people who do it today, but with the people who don’t have to live there for work gone, their housing will be more affordable. Unless you’re saying there’s no janitors in Santa Monica?
This is not at all true, if you wanted character to your community then the community should have approved a building plan that kept the character and allowed for more housing. As it stands these communities have said no to everything and now housing is being foisted upon them, and I say good. Too many people and families have been displaced by the absolutely absurd housing situation in California, and the failure of the people of California to address the cost of housing in their communities shows their abject dismissal of the overwhelming humanitarian toll they have inflicted on their neighbors and the environment.
Well, you know, it sure would be nice if people could build more of those tightly-clustered Victorians in, say, San Francisco, to continue the classic character of the city and replace ugly box houses... but zoning laws mean they can't.
I'm truly sorry if this comes off as a personal attack because I'm trying really hard for it not to be but my frustration bubbles over.
> demolishing beautiful, sustainably-built housing with shoddy, ugly, mass-produced 5-over-1s
YES. BECAUSE THAT'S ALL MODERN ZONING PERMITS. WHICH IS PRECISELY THE [bad word] PROBLEM.
In our haste, particularly on the West Coast, to ensure that we build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody, we've made zoning codes that produce THIS OUTCOME.
There's a reply upthread that says that density advocates want to cram everyone into Soviet-style "dystopian" high rises and, to be honest, your reply here sounds a lot like that.
A WORLD of difference exists between "detached dwelling on a 7,500 square foot lot" and "clone stamp 5-over-1 with empty retail on the bottom." BUT ZONING DOESN'T PERMIT IT. We absolutely should be building rowhouses and stacked flats and plaza housing and all of the other beautiful, people-scale-yet-still-dense, workable housing types that have been tried all over the planet yet America thinks we're too god damn special to have because "American Dream".
If you have rules that say you can only build 5-over-1s, it should come as no shock at all when those are the only things being built, especially in the very tiny slice of areas where it's permitted to build anything dense at all.
If the truth is that zoning is the only obstacle holding us back from idyllic, beautiful mixed-density cities, then I'm showing my ignorance, but I'm not convinced that it is. From what I've seen, developers love building places like Mission Bay in SF and Seaport in Boston, made of cheap and ugly ticky-tacky that caters to insular WFH yuppies. If that's the vision of our utopian future, count me out.
> If the truth is that zoning is the only obstacle holding us back from idyllic, beautiful mixed-density cities, then I'm showing my ignorance, but I'm not convinced that it is.
It definitely is. I work in IT but one of my kids is in land use planning and they have regaled me with many stories of how builders come to the city (not in California) with plans. All of them involve a zoning variance and, more often than not, a trip through what is called Design Review. If the zoning change doesn't kill it--usually because they want a departure from what is called "floor area ratio" rules or from the "wedding cake" style zoning that is supposed to keep zones of detached housing "safe" from "impacts"--then design review absolutely does. Which dovetails into...
> made of cheap and ugly ticky-tacky that caters to insular WFH yuppies
...your other point. It's fine to not like the design of a particular building, but to enforce design aesthetic onto someone else is also a failing of zoning. Design review is often used as a cudgel to "catch" what zoning doesn't (so the rules say this kind of building is allowed but neighbors don't want it) and then administrivia it into, if not oblivion, then a very expensive project through things like "more building modulation" and "tamp down building massing" and "mitigate shadow impacts".
In your world, everyone counts except the people who actually live in the community today and will be affected by changes. You're shocked that outsiders come into a town with plans to build things that require special consideration and the people of the town demand it be put through a rigorous process?
I get it, there are real issues. But minimizing real concerns of people that are the stakeholders isn't fair. Construction means years of noise and dust, and traffic issues in many cases and people don't want that. People are wary of the character of their town being ruined - what makes the town a great place to be. I agree that there's usualy a middle ground that could be found. But importantly, to your last point...
> It's fine to not like the design of a particular building, but to enforce design aesthetic onto someone else is also a failing of zoning.
I disagree. Go to somewhere like the UK and you'll see in many places they not only restrict what you can do to existing structures, but they dictate which materials can be used to build new developments. They do this because it allows the area to develop while also hopefully maintaining the character of the place. The thing that makes the place nice today. If someone wanted to put up a house covered in vinyl siding, they wouldn't be allowed to.
I fully support enforcing new developments having to use certain materials and be restricted to certain sizes, styles, and layouts.
> In your world, everyone counts except the people who actually live in the community today and will be affected by changes.
In my world, everyone counts including the people who actually live in the community today and will be affected by changes...alongside the people who do not yet live there and thus have no voice.
I am vehemently opposed to ladder-pulling in all its forms.
> But minimizing real concerns of people that are the stakeholders isn't fair.
I do not believe I am minimizing their real concerns, I believe I am putting them on the same footing as other real concerns, concerns which people who want to act insular have no motivation to consider. Concerns like the state bill in question here attempts to balance.
Cities change or they die. The world is full of inconveniences and problems related to change but it is not fair to use the regulatory power of the state to insist that a hamlet remain as-is in perpetuity. There are strategies to mitigate those inconveniences instead of "nope, not here."
> I fully support enforcing new developments having to use certain materials and be restricted to certain sizes, styles, and layouts.
In a perfect world, I would be fine with this, but we do not live in a perfect world and these restrictions are more often used as a fig leaf to keep people out than they are to maintain a character. Hell, the phrase "neighborhood character" is very often used as a code phrase for keeping out "those people", whomever is the villain of the day (often renters or people who want to buy but who can't or don't want to buy a massive structure).
These sorts of rules can be useful--look at Leavenworth in Washington State, for example--but, in a lot of places in the United States and especially on the West Coast, they are impossible-to-meet predicates for exclusion.
> In my world, everyone counts including the people who actually live in the community today and will be affected by changes...alongside the people who do not yet live there and thus have no voice.
It's difficult to understand how this makes sense. There are ~900K people who live in San Francisco. There are (roughly) 333 million people in the US who don't live in San Francisco. So you're saying those 333 million people should all have equal voice in deciding what happens in SF? Why?
Because his son is a developer who wants to disrupt existing communities without the community having a say in it. He disguises it in a mask of egalitarianism. But his argument is the same as a pro-lifer who claims they’re the voice of the unheard baby to be aborted without considering the existing person who’s voice we can actually verify.
You can’t possibly know what future people in the community may want and can only justify your own opinions about what ought to be by projecting them on these hypothetical people. If anything the evidence says differently as the people living in a community today were the hypothetical people in previous years.
Developers "love" building that stuff because... it's what zoning allows them to build.
You would need to actually look at a place with better zoning to see a functional example, like suburban metropolitan Japan or France or Spain, where neighborhoods are often made of tightly-clustered detached homes (e.g. the old-fashioned Victorian row home equivalent) mixed with corner store retail.
As an aside... I find it fun that people in the US use the term 'Victorian' to describe an era. I like the idea of naming an era in a Republic after a foreign monarch.
Incidentally, if it were 100 years old it would be Georgian. Vitoria died in 1901
No, the term describes an architectural style that was popular ~100 years ago. I might be off by some number of years. It is related to the era, but it is independent of it.
Ok, I consider 100 years ago from the top of my head pretty reasonable, especially as someone who couldn’t care less about a foreign monarch or precision in dating architectural styles. But, regardless, it’s not referring to an era but to an architectural style. While it was most popular 120 years ago, there have been Victorians built since then. I know not every Victorian in SF is 120+ years old because the city was burned to the ground in 1906.
In the USA, many “revival” style homes were built in the 19th and early 20th century. It wouldn’t be uncommon to find a Victorian next to a Georgian next to a Tutor. But they are just styles.
So much of the problems with housing in the state stem from the fact that lots of community members are valuing their investment in their own house over everything else. Housing can either be affordable or it can be a good investment, it really can't be both.
At this point the market has been so perverted by entrenched interests blocking new development that I would be okay with a dictatorship of developers for a solid decade. It might be enough to dig us out of the hole we're in.
This is a point I don't often see discussed. I have friends and family in CA whose primary asset is their home, with little to nothing invested elsewhere (perhaps because of the high cost of living)...resulting in a mortgage they have no intention of ever paying off, little retirement savings, and fingers crossed for a cash-out down the line.
That's not all of it, either. Older buyers have gotten the lionshare of their wealth from housing appreciation by preventing new housing and pay a lower tax burden than new buyers due to Prop 13. There's a reason that when it made it to the supreme court Justice Stevens called it medeival and referred to entrenched owners as Squires.
"During the two past decades, California property owners have enjoyed extraordinary prosperity. As the State's population has mushroomed, so has the value of its real estate. Between 1976 and 1986 alone, the total assessed value of California property subject to property taxation increased tenfold. Simply put, those who invested in California real estate in the 1970s are among the most fortunate capitalists in the world.Proposition 13 has provided these successful investors with a tremendous windfall and, in doing so, has created severe inequities in California's property tax scheme. These property owners (hereinafter "the Squires) are
guaranteed that, so long as they retain their property and do not improve it, their taxes will not increase more than 2% in any given year. As a direct result of this windfall for the Squires, later purchasers must pay far more than their fair share of property taxes." https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/90-1912.ZD.html
This might be one of the craziest parts of it, and it makes me understand how a lot of neighborhoods in California just look sort of...dumpy. The system actively discourages you from improving a property!
My dream is to see the state property tax code flipped to land value tax. No penalties for improving the property, just purely tax the value of the land and penalize people who park their vacant lots for year after year.
No, what this does is give developers the power to bring affordable housing to california. Them making money is just the incentive to do it. Silicon valley was already an oligarchy since housing affordability ensures only the wealthy can afford to vote in local elections.
It's interesting to hear people describe government-organized supply restriction cartels as some sort of utopia, whereas, in their world, eliminating the cartel is in fact creating an "oligarchy."
Who cares if the developers get rich? Do you(and the rest of society) get what you want?
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages”
― Adam Smith
> Do you(and the rest of society) get what you want?
That is an interesting question. In many cases people here are advocating that the locals don't get what they want, so that "the rest of society" does.
The NIMBY locals always think they represent the community when poll after poll shows that they do not.
The process has been setup to allow a few squeaky wheels to have veto power over change. It's just pure narcissism of the NIMBY that all the other community members have the same belief as them.
Collectively, perhaps, but the developer who built my house has by far the biggest house in the area, on the nicest property, with the nicest cars, and Facebook albums filled to the brim with pictures of him meeting famous people I'll not ever get to schmooze with.
We just went from democracy to oligarchy in this case.