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97% of California Cities Failed to Meet State Housing Goals

177 points by apsec112 9y ago

joeblow9999 9y ago
Spoiler alert: Central planners' plans fail to materialize.
- dang 9y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - jnordwick 9y ago
    Stop picking on opinions you dont like. I noticed similar comments ("of course there is insider trading, duh") in the insider trading article with accounts of similar karma don't get flagged and reprimanded by mods. But we all know why that occurs. Maybe you shouldnt go after comments if you find yourself disagreeing with their content. The groupthink on HN had been accelerating lately.
  - viridian 9y ago
    For what it's worth, I partially agree with jnordwick's comment. I've noticed an uptick over the last couple of months in the comments that receive public callouts feeling ideological in nature. It may just be based on who flags posts, since a lot of non polemic low quality posts seem to go dead after a few hours without any flagging, but it may be worth looking into this pattern, because I imagine you don't want to give off the perception that the public callouts come from having the wrong opinions instead of nonconstructive ones.
    - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
      From what I see, the issue really isn't the ideology, it's the tone and/or substance of a post that really matters. "of course there is insider trading, duh" is significantly different from "Spoiler alert: Central planners' plans fail to materialize." The latter uses a speech pattern used in clickbait to illicit an emotional response, and the phrase "central planners" is a politically charged amplification of the actual situation.
    - jnordwick 9y ago
      Dang (and others) has a history of bias. Here is the last political story from yesterday where he reprimanded a commenter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16349565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16349565 The comment is certainly more productive than many others, but it commits the sin of calling the article "Communist apologia" and dang jumped on it. (I flagged dang's scolding for being inappropriate.)
    - dang 9y ago
      It would be helpful if you (or anyone) would send links to us at hn@ycombinator.com when you notice comments that break the site guidelines and don't seem to have been moderated. Examples would be comments that are generically ideological or unsubstantive or uncivil. Whatever our biases are, they're not strongly ideological. I know this won't persuade anyone, but the reason is that after slogging through hundreds of thousands of internet comments, one's only response to what people call their "opinions" is exhaustion. It's as if someone has sandblasted the inside of your brain. The result is tedium, except that word doesn't convey how deep it goes. Imagine an existential void of pure tedium, tedium all around, nothing but tedium—then repeat that phrase a thousand times, and that'll be how we feel about these arguments. HN moderation isn't about suppressing opinions, though commenters who get moderated sometimes feel like it must be. It's about damping repetition in the faint hope of mitigating tedium. I believe that serves the community, because most people don't come here for rehashes of flamewars. They come for something less predictable.
      - jnordwick 9y ago
        This would only explain why you don't reprimand some comments, not why you reprimand the comments you do. Such as the example I gave in another cooment is definitely holding that comment to a higher standard than those you are more ideological sympathetic too. If I were to point to a similar comment from the other side of the isle, you would rightly say it followed the site guidelines so it doesnt need to be flagged or the author scolded. However, your overly tight rein on one idiological side leads to a ratcheting down on it.
gnarbarian 9y ago
relevant: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-jackson-california-poverty-20180114-story.html http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-jackson-californi...
ChuckMcM 9y ago
My experience in driving through California's interior doesn't jibe with that headline. When I stop for lunch or a break I like to check out the local real estate scene and its often the case in these cities that there are many houses and other living accommodations available at modest prices. Hard to imagine a city like Mojave not meeting it "goal". Of course if you limit yourself to cities of 1 millions residents or more, well I could see that they were having challenges. As other people have pointed out, if California wants to lead then the state should be something to admire. And being 42nd out of 50 on K-12 education and highest poverty rate, aren't good things to lead with. Lots of opportunities to improve.
- DoreenMichele 9y ago
  So, a couple of questions: 1. What do you consider modest prices? 2. What exactly do you do to check out the local real estate scene? Because I recently left California to get off the street after moving around California a bit in search of affordable living and doing like 3 years of research, and my point of view and yours are so not on the same page, they aren't even in the same book.
  - masonic 9y ago
    He referred specifically to the California interior. Most counties not on the coast or bay have very affordable areas; I've driven the northern 2/3rds of I-5, most of US50, and all of I-80 in CA and seen hundreds of properties for a fraction of Bay Area prices. Things look different once outside of a Bay Area (or San Diego) bubble.
    - phkahler 9y ago
      >> ...seen hundreds of properties for a fraction of Bay Area prices. Anything under 300K? How about 200K? A fraction of the Bay area doesn't necessarily mean affordable.
      - ghaff 9y ago
        You look at, say, Fresno and there are properties for sale under $200K (although that's below the median of $300K+). I assume those are not the most attractive places but they certainly exist. That's the 5th most populous city in California so it's not exactly the middle of nowhere.
phkahler 9y ago
The part about increasing density near public transit was interesting. It's true that high density is a must to make public transit viable. However, I presume there is little vacant land near public transit. In that case, a mandate to increase density would be telling people to demolish and rebuild with higher density than what's there. If that's the case then the comparison to Putin might be justified - and perhaps the crony capitalism part depending who profits from this "upgrade".
- gsnedders 9y ago
  You don't have to mandate people demolish and rebuild: the market should adjust for this. (In short, if you have a one/two family dwelling on a piece of land, and each dwelling is worth $1.2M, then demolishing and rebuilding to provide five dwellings each worth $1.0M results in a net profit for the landowner.)
- ebikelaw 9y ago
  It isn’t a mandate to increase density. The proposed law removes limits. It doesn’t mandate anything. Existing limits are preventing market forces from working. In Berkeley there is a subway station surrounded by a five-acre parking lot. The owner of the parking list wishes to build there, but the city refuses to rezone the land, which is presently “U - Unclassified”. This law would remove Berkeley’s authority in the matter. In San Francisco 71% of the land is zoned for detached single family homes, despite virtually all of that city being within half a mile of a rail or light rail station. This bill would raise all of those limits.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    A very common limit around the entire US is the municipality-wide building height restriction. Basically, the city outlaws any building taller than 40' above grade at its highest point. Between that, and minimum setbacks from the frontage line and other property lines, 90% of the work to prevent densification is already done. Once a building plan has grown to completely fill its legal envelope, there's nowhere else to go but down, and that becomes prohibitively expensive fast. The remaining 10% can be handled by mandating a minimum square footage per residential unit that is slightly more than half the theoretical maximum from a building at maximum height and minimum height on the mean lot size for that zone. Then no amount of building up or out can allow you to squeeze another unit onto your property. You have to resort to tricks like lowering ceiling heights. If you enact a law at the state level that triggers automatic lessening of restrictions on building heights or setbacks every time a municipality fails to grow enough housing, zoning boards will be a lot more tractable when a developer wants to build.
viridian 9y ago
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.
- jdavis703 9y ago
  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.
- TulliusCicero 9y ago
  The bill says nothing of the sort. 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.
  - jdavis703 9y ago
    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.
yostrovs 9y ago
California always amazes with its goals, decade after decade of leadership among the states. Building is promoted to improve affordability. Building is discouraged to preserve the environment and maintain a local culture. Building is promoted to provide new transportation options. Building is discouraged to reduce congestion, contain sprawl. Building and not building at the same time helps California maintain its unique logical and psychological balance.
- numbsafari 9y ago
  It’s as though California is a giant state with a diverse population, both politically and geographically, with lots of competing interests that, over time, has gone through various political and leadership changes that reflect that diversity.
  - Wohlf 9y ago
    Apparently not, because 97% of the NIMBYs are winning.
    - IntronExon 9y ago
      The state is diverse, but perhaps typically the people with serious power are far less diverse. There are many voices, but only a subset get to be heard in a way that matters.
    - api 9y ago
      The instant you sign a mortgage it becomes in your economic best interest to limit the supply of housing. Housing cannot simultaneously be affordable and a good investment. Homeowners on average tend to be more politically engaged, so homeowners dominate state and local politics. As for why every prosperous state doesn't have this problem as badly as California you can add prop 13 which hugely limited property tax increases for existing homeowners. This eliminated one of the major checks on real estate hyperinflation. You can further add the fact that the San Francisco Bay Area (the region with the highest prices by far) is geographically constrained and the fact that earthquake risk imposes additional site preparation and construction costs. It's really a perfect storm for real estate price insanity, specially in the Bay Area. It's less insane in SoCal but still pretty high, especially when compared to median income in LA County and San Diego. SoCal is less geographically constrained.
puppetmaster40 9y ago
Sounds very dystopian. Did not meet state's goals.
- rsync 9y ago
  "Sounds very dystopian. Did not meet state's goals." This is worth considering. I find it despicable that otherwise liberal, progressive people are willing to immediately discard democratic results simply because they dislike them. There is nothing unconstitutional (CA) or unlawful about "NIMBY policies". However you may feel about them, they are valid, lawful policy goals in a democracy. If you don't like them, you should organize to defeat them democratically.
  - tmh79 9y ago
    > If you don't like them, you should organize to defeat them democratically. I spend my free time doing some advocacy in this space. Heres a few things you might not know. 1) Nimby's dont derive power from the ballot box, they derive power from distinctly undemocratic processes like courts and arbitrary middle of the day planning meetings. The biggest NIMBY tool is CEQA, the "california environmental quality act" which allows anyone to sue a project for "environmental" reasons. The reasons are spurious at best (project would increase traffic at an intersection). Nearly all CEQA law suits are filed by neighbors who want to kill the project, or by unions on projects that aren't using union labor. The law suits are rarely won by the plaintiff, but they are nearly always successful because they delay projects long enough to get them canceled. The second tool is the design review meeting, which often occurs around 2pm on some random mid week day, when most people are at work and unable to leave their job. A single project may go through 5 design review meetings where retired nimbys with nothing better to do with their time berate new developments for arbitrary reasons (make it smaller, its out of character etc). In this system, its not "one person one vote" but rather "your power in this process is proportional to how much time you can spend at city hall during normal working hours on a recurring basis and grind it out over months and months of meetings" 2) Nimby policies are being defeated democratically. Our elected officials are realizing the harm that these policies are causing and seeing that an anti-nimby constituency is forming. SB 827 is a democratic solution to this problem. 3) Hyperlocal control (aka, cities deciding their own land use policies) is undemocratic, and essentially feudal. It limits the voices heard in democracy to the people who are able to afford living in the city in question, but excludes the voices of those who stakeholders in the city in some other way, say by working in the city, or commuting through the city. Local control allows cities to capture outsized benefits of development while forcing other cities to absorb the negative externalities. For instance, cupertino built the new apple campus for 12k workers, but didn't build any new housing for them. Now the rest of the bay area needs to deal with the reality of these 12k new highly paid residents looking for housing. Another example is Atherton suing to block caltrain electrifiction within its city limits. A single city is blocking an expansion of public transit that serves 60k riders per day. Why is this city allowed to delay the project and create a negative impact on all of these commuters? Why are they not beholden to a larger set of stakeholders than just the people that live within their boarders?
gwbas1c 9y ago
I think everyone's realizing that the solution to various housing crisis is to build more homes for all income levels. Artificially manipulating prices via rent control mechanisms; or only building homes for a specific income level doesn't work.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  I disagree. The housing crisis is caused by economic inequality concentrating capital to a handful of cities. Housing costs rise because that's where the money/power/jobs are. Instead of slapping a bandaid on it by increasing housing(which would just lead to further capital concentration and political polarization), we need to address capital concentration. edit: To those downvoting me, can you please explain why? Was something that I said inaccurate?
  - Wohlf 9y ago
    I guess you're a big fan of China's city planning then.
    - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
      I don't know a thing about China's city planning. How is it relevant to the conversation?
      - pessimizer 9y ago
        There's no well-known city planning being done in Venezuela, so there was a reversion to more traditional enemies.
  - closeparen 9y ago
    Capital concentration is the whole point of cities. The only economically equal and balanced settlement pattern is everyone getting a small farm. The problem we’re trying to solve here is that people are artificially denied access to the (jobs, infrastructure, culture) benefits of concentrated capital. If you think we shouldn’t have cities, that’s one thing. If you think they should be reserved exclusively for the people who already live in them, that’s quite another, and you’re simply creating a new form of structural inequality based on birthplace (even within the US).
jread 9y ago
I've been attempting to get building permits for a small personal residence in a So Cal coastal town for nearly 3 years. The experience dealing with the city has felt very adversarial. The sense I have is that the city and most neighbors don't want new construction, and in that spirit put up as many roadblocks, opposition and red tape as possible to slow you down, and in many cases stop you through attrition. I've seen many try for years and give up including one project that has been ongoing for over 10 years. The first major hurdle is obtaining approval from a Design Review Board consisting of 5 elected board members who subjectively determine if the project is "neighborhood compatible". Even while complying with all zoning requirement for setbacks, building height and envelope, lot coverage, environmental impact, etc, and not requesting any variances, most projects stall here, some for years. The board convenes monthly and invites public participation and comments, and if there is opposition either from board members, or neighbors, you're in a very long and arduous process in getting approval. Common complaints are mass and scale, incompatible architecture, view blockage, noise pollution, excessive glazing, color choices, and the list goes on. When/if you get through design review, you're then off to coastal commission and building and safety for more review and approvals, and eventually building permits if you make it through it all. The entire process will take many years, and potentially 10s or 100s of thousands in expenses before you even break ground. This is for a single residence - I can only imagine the hurdles and expense for a multi-unit project. So I understand and agree with the state attempting to legislate a reduction on the restrictions and roadblocks that local municipalities impose on residential construction.
- tmh79 9y ago
  have you heard of the housing accountability act? The law was strengthened last year to protect you from having your project denied for arbitrary reasons. I'd reach out to CaRLA (california renters legal advocacy fund, http://www.carlaef.org/ http://www.carlaef.org/), and/or victoria fierce on twitter
  - jread 9y ago
    We haven't been denied yet - we've been taking the friendly approach - meeting with board members, neighbors and attempting to address concerns before our hearing. CaRLA looks like a great resource if we were denied after all of this effort. We're attempting to build a small home and accessory apartment which will contribute in a small way to the supply of lower cost rentals which are scarce.
CodeWriter23 9y ago
California doesn’t have a housing problem. It has “companies insist on paying higher taxes and refusing to deploy in the wide open spaces between the coasts” problem. Deploying between the coasts helped Amazon greatly leverage its early entry position.
- kevinburke 9y ago
  Those same companies are responsive to where their workforce wants to live.
  - CodeWriter23 9y ago
    And they know that exactly how? I see no evidence of A/B or multivariate testing vs employment for corporate locations.
    - kevinburke 9y ago
      I mean, Uber bought a giant office in Oakland and decided about a year later not to move there...
hx87 9y ago
Aesthetic objections to new construction are 99.9% bullshit. Otherwise things like vomit- and baby-poop-green vinyl siding, uniformly white windows with fake grills and little to no trim, McMansion-style hip-roof horrorshows and gables on top of gables wouldn't exist.
staunch 9y ago
We need off-grid housing with SpaceX satellite internet, Tesla car pods, Tesla Solar, and Amazon Prime deliveries.

177 points by apsec112 9y ago

joeblow9999 9y ago

Spoiler alert: Central planners' plans fail to materialize.

dang 9y ago
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- jnordwick 9y ago
  Stop picking on opinions you dont like. I noticed similar comments ("of course there is insider trading, duh") in the insider trading article with accounts of similar karma don't get flagged and reprimanded by mods. But we all know why that occurs. Maybe you shouldnt go after comments if you find yourself disagreeing with their content. The groupthink on HN had been accelerating lately.
- viridian 9y ago
  For what it's worth, I partially agree with jnordwick's comment. I've noticed an uptick over the last couple of months in the comments that receive public callouts feeling ideological in nature. It may just be based on who flags posts, since a lot of non polemic low quality posts seem to go dead after a few hours without any flagging, but it may be worth looking into this pattern, because I imagine you don't want to give off the perception that the public callouts come from having the wrong opinions instead of nonconstructive ones.
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    From what I see, the issue really isn't the ideology, it's the tone and/or substance of a post that really matters. "of course there is insider trading, duh" is significantly different from "Spoiler alert: Central planners' plans fail to materialize." The latter uses a speech pattern used in clickbait to illicit an emotional response, and the phrase "central planners" is a politically charged amplification of the actual situation.
  - jnordwick 9y ago
    Dang (and others) has a history of bias. Here is the last political story from yesterday where he reprimanded a commenter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16349565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16349565 The comment is certainly more productive than many others, but it commits the sin of calling the article "Communist apologia" and dang jumped on it. (I flagged dang's scolding for being inappropriate.)
  - dang 9y ago
    It would be helpful if you (or anyone) would send links to us at hn@ycombinator.com when you notice comments that break the site guidelines and don't seem to have been moderated. Examples would be comments that are generically ideological or unsubstantive or uncivil. Whatever our biases are, they're not strongly ideological. I know this won't persuade anyone, but the reason is that after slogging through hundreds of thousands of internet comments, one's only response to what people call their "opinions" is exhaustion. It's as if someone has sandblasted the inside of your brain. The result is tedium, except that word doesn't convey how deep it goes. Imagine an existential void of pure tedium, tedium all around, nothing but tedium—then repeat that phrase a thousand times, and that'll be how we feel about these arguments. HN moderation isn't about suppressing opinions, though commenters who get moderated sometimes feel like it must be. It's about damping repetition in the faint hope of mitigating tedium. I believe that serves the community, because most people don't come here for rehashes of flamewars. They come for something less predictable.
    - jnordwick 9y ago
      This would only explain why you don't reprimand some comments, not why you reprimand the comments you do. Such as the example I gave in another cooment is definitely holding that comment to a higher standard than those you are more ideological sympathetic too. If I were to point to a similar comment from the other side of the isle, you would rightly say it followed the site guidelines so it doesnt need to be flagged or the author scolded. However, your overly tight rein on one idiological side leads to a ratcheting down on it.

gnarbarian 9y ago

relevant: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-jackson-california-poverty-20180114-story.html http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-jackson-californi...

ChuckMcM 9y ago

My experience in driving through California's interior doesn't jibe with that headline. When I stop for lunch or a break I like to check out the local real estate scene and its often the case in these cities that there are many houses and other living accommodations available at modest prices. Hard to imagine a city like Mojave not meeting it "goal". Of course if you limit yourself to cities of 1 millions residents or more, well I could see that they were having challenges. As other people have pointed out, if California wants to lead then the state should be something to admire. And being 42nd out of 50 on K-12 education and highest poverty rate, aren't good things to lead with. Lots of opportunities to improve.

DoreenMichele 9y ago
So, a couple of questions: 1. What do you consider modest prices? 2. What exactly do you do to check out the local real estate scene? Because I recently left California to get off the street after moving around California a bit in search of affordable living and doing like 3 years of research, and my point of view and yours are so not on the same page, they aren't even in the same book.
- masonic 9y ago
  He referred specifically to the California interior. Most counties not on the coast or bay have very affordable areas; I've driven the northern 2/3rds of I-5, most of US50, and all of I-80 in CA and seen hundreds of properties for a fraction of Bay Area prices. Things look different once outside of a Bay Area (or San Diego) bubble.
  - phkahler 9y ago
    >> ...seen hundreds of properties for a fraction of Bay Area prices. Anything under 300K? How about 200K? A fraction of the Bay area doesn't necessarily mean affordable.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      You look at, say, Fresno and there are properties for sale under $200K (although that's below the median of $300K+). I assume those are not the most attractive places but they certainly exist. That's the 5th most populous city in California so it's not exactly the middle of nowhere.

phkahler 9y ago

The part about increasing density near public transit was interesting. It's true that high density is a must to make public transit viable. However, I presume there is little vacant land near public transit. In that case, a mandate to increase density would be telling people to demolish and rebuild with higher density than what's there. If that's the case then the comparison to Putin might be justified - and perhaps the crony capitalism part depending who profits from this "upgrade".

gsnedders 9y ago
You don't have to mandate people demolish and rebuild: the market should adjust for this. (In short, if you have a one/two family dwelling on a piece of land, and each dwelling is worth $1.2M, then demolishing and rebuilding to provide five dwellings each worth $1.0M results in a net profit for the landowner.)
ebikelaw 9y ago
It isn’t a mandate to increase density. The proposed law removes limits. It doesn’t mandate anything. Existing limits are preventing market forces from working. In Berkeley there is a subway station surrounded by a five-acre parking lot. The owner of the parking list wishes to build there, but the city refuses to rezone the land, which is presently “U - Unclassified”. This law would remove Berkeley’s authority in the matter. In San Francisco 71% of the land is zoned for detached single family homes, despite virtually all of that city being within half a mile of a rail or light rail station. This bill would raise all of those limits.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  A very common limit around the entire US is the municipality-wide building height restriction. Basically, the city outlaws any building taller than 40' above grade at its highest point. Between that, and minimum setbacks from the frontage line and other property lines, 90% of the work to prevent densification is already done. Once a building plan has grown to completely fill its legal envelope, there's nowhere else to go but down, and that becomes prohibitively expensive fast. The remaining 10% can be handled by mandating a minimum square footage per residential unit that is slightly more than half the theoretical maximum from a building at maximum height and minimum height on the mean lot size for that zone. Then no amount of building up or out can allow you to squeeze another unit onto your property. You have to resort to tricks like lowering ceiling heights. If you enact a law at the state level that triggers automatic lessening of restrictions on building heights or setbacks every time a municipality fails to grow enough housing, zoning boards will be a lot more tractable when a developer wants to build.

viridian 9y ago

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.

jdavis703 9y ago
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.
TulliusCicero 9y ago
The bill says nothing of the sort. 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.
- jdavis703 9y ago
  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.

yostrovs 9y ago

California always amazes with its goals, decade after decade of leadership among the states. Building is promoted to improve affordability. Building is discouraged to preserve the environment and maintain a local culture. Building is promoted to provide new transportation options. Building is discouraged to reduce congestion, contain sprawl. Building and not building at the same time helps California maintain its unique logical and psychological balance.

numbsafari 9y ago
It’s as though California is a giant state with a diverse population, both politically and geographically, with lots of competing interests that, over time, has gone through various political and leadership changes that reflect that diversity.
- Wohlf 9y ago
  Apparently not, because 97% of the NIMBYs are winning.
  - IntronExon 9y ago
    The state is diverse, but perhaps typically the people with serious power are far less diverse. There are many voices, but only a subset get to be heard in a way that matters.
  - api 9y ago
    The instant you sign a mortgage it becomes in your economic best interest to limit the supply of housing. Housing cannot simultaneously be affordable and a good investment. Homeowners on average tend to be more politically engaged, so homeowners dominate state and local politics. As for why every prosperous state doesn't have this problem as badly as California you can add prop 13 which hugely limited property tax increases for existing homeowners. This eliminated one of the major checks on real estate hyperinflation. You can further add the fact that the San Francisco Bay Area (the region with the highest prices by far) is geographically constrained and the fact that earthquake risk imposes additional site preparation and construction costs. It's really a perfect storm for real estate price insanity, specially in the Bay Area. It's less insane in SoCal but still pretty high, especially when compared to median income in LA County and San Diego. SoCal is less geographically constrained.

puppetmaster40 9y ago

Sounds very dystopian. Did not meet state's goals.

rsync 9y ago
"Sounds very dystopian. Did not meet state's goals." This is worth considering. I find it despicable that otherwise liberal, progressive people are willing to immediately discard democratic results simply because they dislike them. There is nothing unconstitutional (CA) or unlawful about "NIMBY policies". However you may feel about them, they are valid, lawful policy goals in a democracy. If you don't like them, you should organize to defeat them democratically.
- tmh79 9y ago
  > If you don't like them, you should organize to defeat them democratically. I spend my free time doing some advocacy in this space. Heres a few things you might not know. 1) Nimby's dont derive power from the ballot box, they derive power from distinctly undemocratic processes like courts and arbitrary middle of the day planning meetings. The biggest NIMBY tool is CEQA, the "california environmental quality act" which allows anyone to sue a project for "environmental" reasons. The reasons are spurious at best (project would increase traffic at an intersection). Nearly all CEQA law suits are filed by neighbors who want to kill the project, or by unions on projects that aren't using union labor. The law suits are rarely won by the plaintiff, but they are nearly always successful because they delay projects long enough to get them canceled. The second tool is the design review meeting, which often occurs around 2pm on some random mid week day, when most people are at work and unable to leave their job. A single project may go through 5 design review meetings where retired nimbys with nothing better to do with their time berate new developments for arbitrary reasons (make it smaller, its out of character etc). In this system, its not "one person one vote" but rather "your power in this process is proportional to how much time you can spend at city hall during normal working hours on a recurring basis and grind it out over months and months of meetings" 2) Nimby policies are being defeated democratically. Our elected officials are realizing the harm that these policies are causing and seeing that an anti-nimby constituency is forming. SB 827 is a democratic solution to this problem. 3) Hyperlocal control (aka, cities deciding their own land use policies) is undemocratic, and essentially feudal. It limits the voices heard in democracy to the people who are able to afford living in the city in question, but excludes the voices of those who stakeholders in the city in some other way, say by working in the city, or commuting through the city. Local control allows cities to capture outsized benefits of development while forcing other cities to absorb the negative externalities. For instance, cupertino built the new apple campus for 12k workers, but didn't build any new housing for them. Now the rest of the bay area needs to deal with the reality of these 12k new highly paid residents looking for housing. Another example is Atherton suing to block caltrain electrifiction within its city limits. A single city is blocking an expansion of public transit that serves 60k riders per day. Why is this city allowed to delay the project and create a negative impact on all of these commuters? Why are they not beholden to a larger set of stakeholders than just the people that live within their boarders?

gwbas1c 9y ago

I think everyone's realizing that the solution to various housing crisis is to build more homes for all income levels. Artificially manipulating prices via rent control mechanisms; or only building homes for a specific income level doesn't work.

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
I disagree. The housing crisis is caused by economic inequality concentrating capital to a handful of cities. Housing costs rise because that's where the money/power/jobs are. Instead of slapping a bandaid on it by increasing housing(which would just lead to further capital concentration and political polarization), we need to address capital concentration. edit: To those downvoting me, can you please explain why? Was something that I said inaccurate?
- Wohlf 9y ago
  I guess you're a big fan of China's city planning then.
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    I don't know a thing about China's city planning. How is it relevant to the conversation?
    - pessimizer 9y ago
      There's no well-known city planning being done in Venezuela, so there was a reversion to more traditional enemies.
- closeparen 9y ago
  Capital concentration is the whole point of cities. The only economically equal and balanced settlement pattern is everyone getting a small farm. The problem we’re trying to solve here is that people are artificially denied access to the (jobs, infrastructure, culture) benefits of concentrated capital. If you think we shouldn’t have cities, that’s one thing. If you think they should be reserved exclusively for the people who already live in them, that’s quite another, and you’re simply creating a new form of structural inequality based on birthplace (even within the US).

jread 9y ago

I've been attempting to get building permits for a small personal residence in a So Cal coastal town for nearly 3 years. The experience dealing with the city has felt very adversarial. The sense I have is that the city and most neighbors don't want new construction, and in that spirit put up as many roadblocks, opposition and red tape as possible to slow you down, and in many cases stop you through attrition. I've seen many try for years and give up including one project that has been ongoing for over 10 years. The first major hurdle is obtaining approval from a Design Review Board consisting of 5 elected board members who subjectively determine if the project is "neighborhood compatible". Even while complying with all zoning requirement for setbacks, building height and envelope, lot coverage, environmental impact, etc, and not requesting any variances, most projects stall here, some for years. The board convenes monthly and invites public participation and comments, and if there is opposition either from board members, or neighbors, you're in a very long and arduous process in getting approval. Common complaints are mass and scale, incompatible architecture, view blockage, noise pollution, excessive glazing, color choices, and the list goes on. When/if you get through design review, you're then off to coastal commission and building and safety for more review and approvals, and eventually building permits if you make it through it all. The entire process will take many years, and potentially 10s or 100s of thousands in expenses before you even break ground. This is for a single residence - I can only imagine the hurdles and expense for a multi-unit project. So I understand and agree with the state attempting to legislate a reduction on the restrictions and roadblocks that local municipalities impose on residential construction.

tmh79 9y ago
have you heard of the housing accountability act? The law was strengthened last year to protect you from having your project denied for arbitrary reasons. I'd reach out to CaRLA (california renters legal advocacy fund, http://www.carlaef.org/ http://www.carlaef.org/), and/or victoria fierce on twitter
- jread 9y ago
  We haven't been denied yet - we've been taking the friendly approach - meeting with board members, neighbors and attempting to address concerns before our hearing. CaRLA looks like a great resource if we were denied after all of this effort. We're attempting to build a small home and accessory apartment which will contribute in a small way to the supply of lower cost rentals which are scarce.

CodeWriter23 9y ago

California doesn’t have a housing problem. It has “companies insist on paying higher taxes and refusing to deploy in the wide open spaces between the coasts” problem. Deploying between the coasts helped Amazon greatly leverage its early entry position.

kevinburke 9y ago
Those same companies are responsive to where their workforce wants to live.
- CodeWriter23 9y ago
  And they know that exactly how? I see no evidence of A/B or multivariate testing vs employment for corporate locations.
  - kevinburke 9y ago
    I mean, Uber bought a giant office in Oakland and decided about a year later not to move there...

hx87 9y ago

Aesthetic objections to new construction are 99.9% bullshit. Otherwise things like vomit- and baby-poop-green vinyl siding, uniformly white windows with fake grills and little to no trim, McMansion-style hip-roof horrorshows and gables on top of gables wouldn't exist.

staunch 9y ago

We need off-grid housing with SpaceX satellite internet, Tesla car pods, Tesla Solar, and Amazon Prime deliveries.