9 ms·

California higher-density housing bill blocked in first committee hearing

86 points by thirtyseven 9y ago

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
California YIMBY organized this bill which, while destined to fail, has attracted a good deal of serious attention to the cause. Donate/volunteer: https://cayimby.org https://cayimby.org (I am not affiliated with California YIMBY.)
- arikr 9y ago
  If anyone from California YIMBY is reading this thread, I really hope you get a chance to read the following: - https://dominiccummings.com/2017/01/09/on-the-referendum-21-branching-histories-of-the-2016-referendum-and-the-frogs-before-the-storm-2/ https://dominiccummings.com/2017/01/09/on-the-referendum-21-... - "Win Bigly" by Scott Adams
  - epistasis 9y ago
    That's a super long essay, and about 500-800 words into it there's still no thesis or general topic introduced. It may help to provide a tiny teaser about why it's interesting and relevant if you'd like more people to read it, as the current introduction doesn't do it many favors.
epistasis 9y ago
The housing shortage is a completely self-inflicted wound. Like Prop 13, it benefits current owners at the expense of their children and other newcomers. And even when housing can be built, it is overly expensive due to insanely conservative zoning requirements. A great explanation of just how awful it is in LA is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_architect_in_la_specializing_in_multifamily/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_ar... And SF and the Bay Area have been even worse than LA at building housing. Crazy conservative (in the sense of "no change allowed") people dominate all the planning meetings, which control what can and can not be built. Meeting code and zoning is not enough, you have to convince the extreme ends of your opponents to get anything built.
- siculars 9y ago
  These boards should all take a field trip to places like NYC and Tokyo where the buildings are tall and the density is high. I have no sympathy for these self inflicted wounds.
  - tux1968 9y ago
    Well, they're not seen as wounds by the people who are causing the problem, they're seen as victories.
  - timr 9y ago
    "These boards should all take a field trip to places like NYC and Tokyo where the buildings are tall and the density is high." I lived in Japan, and I live in New York. Tokyo is mostly low-rise buildings. Outside of a few areas in the center of Tokyo, the city is a sprawling mass of 1-5 story buildings. The vast majority of New York (outside of Manhattan) is the same. Even in Manhattan, most of the residential neighborhoods are under ten stories. Silicon valley can clearly stand to increase density, but it doesn't help to misrepresent what density looks like.
    - pkaye 9y ago
      A lot of the new housing I've seen in SV has been 3 story condos, townhouses and apartments. Is what is being proposed higher density than this or just more of it?
      - timr 9y ago
        I can't possibly generalize across all of the bay area, let alone the entire state of California. I can speak with confidence about SF: the eastern third of the city (the part everyone always wants to "build up") is already pretty dense, by any standard. Building skyscrapers is not making housing cheaper, just taller. Meanwhile, the western two-thirds (the parts nobody ever talks about) are like McMansion suburbia. The general problem with this debate on HN is that everyone gets fixated on a select few areas where 20-something nerdbros want to live and go drinking (e.g. the Mission), and imagines turning it into some vision of Tokyo out of Blade Runner, when the real solution is that we should be building more 3 story condos in Sunnyvale. If you wanted to make the bay area resemble Tokyo as it actually exists, you'd cover every flat part of the bay in 1-5 story buildings, and connect it all by excellent transit. It has little to do with skyscrapers, as such.
blondie9x 9y ago
Disappointing. This was a way to save hours and years in aggregate for people around the state. The goal is simple. To live closer to the areas you depend on and not have to lose everything doing so. A disappointment that it was not fully understood. So many hours commuting and pollution moving from A to B when we can use transit and live near it effectively if we can simply build.
supernova87a 9y ago
As much as I hate voter propositions... It's time for a voter proposition on this one, if we can't fix the rest of the system.
- kelnos 9y ago
  I really wouldn't expect a voter proposition to do all that much better. There are a lot -- probably a majority -- of CA residents that benefit from the current policies and don't want change.
quotemstr 9y ago
If the state of California in incapable of imposing adult supervision on bay area towns and their NIMBYs, maybe it's time for the federal government to give it a shot. I'm sure the commerce clause can be construed to authorize a federal intervention. SV is too economically important to the national and world economies to allow hysterical, superstitious, and irrational local interests to overheat its housing market.
dahdum 9y ago
California has the highest poverty rate in the US [1] in no small part due to the housing crisis. It’s a sad fact that this bill dying in committee is the most progress in years to solve the root problem. 1) 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...
klochner 9y ago
Most infuriating about the SF housing debate is the the utter lack of economic knowledge that aligns groups like sierra club and low-income advocacy groups with rent-seeking or racist NIMBY homeowners.
- rajacombinator 9y ago
  You’d probably find those groups are all run by the same people.
Afforess 9y ago
Individual property ownership should be outlawed. The perverse incentives outweigh the benefits. Private real estate is an exclusive monopoly protected by the government. Housing appreciation is particularly appalling. Rarely is it due to any particular improvements an owner makes, rather its due to city or local changes which reward homeowners for no action of their own. Your schools received higher test scores, collect 35k, and pass Go. A factory ignored EPA regulations, lose 15k. There is no sense or reward for good decisions - just the whims of fate. In fast growing cities like SF, it's worse, home value grows off speculative home value, which grows off even more speculative home values. The monopoly self-reinforces. There is no reason for such an artificial monopoly to exist. The native Americans got this right. Communists got this right. The Chinese 90-year lease model looks much better.
- ra273 9y ago
  Such behaviour does encourage frivolous spending of wealth however. Even 99-year lease models fall down in 21st century society given such projecting population growth in certain centres. This is likely to taper as the century progresses. It will likely be countered with expanding average life expectancy however — most pronounced and predominantly in already crowded urban conglomerates.
- namlem 9y ago
  Or just institute a land value tax.
DoofusOfDeath 9y ago
I'm surprised that this is characterized only as a supply problem instead of a demand problem.
- epistasis 9y ago
  How do you fix demand? Even with massive price increases, demand is still high. And that just hurts the poor. The other side of the coin is that "fixing" people's desires on where they want to live sounds pretty creepy.
- namlem 9y ago
  How dare people demand a place to live?
- astrange 9y ago
  There aren't /that/ many tech people moving to Silicon Valley, though there certainly are a lot. What are you going to do about children who grew up in California and can't live in the same city as their parents? There isn't even enough supply for them.
  - quotemstr 9y ago
    One of the worst aspects of prop 13 is that the property tax cap is hereditary. It's outrageous and creates a real risk of an honest-to-god blood-based class divide in the region.
notatoad 9y ago
As much good stuff as the bill had in it, I think I'm glad it failed. The idea of upzoning near transit is a good one, but tying it directly to transit growth is counterproductive. There was already talk of neighborhoods in LA lobbying to reduce bus service on their streets so they wouldn't qualify as a "high quality" bus line and be subject to the new zoning. There needs to be a way to build transit-friendly neighborhoods without turning people against transit.
- redditmigrant 9y ago
  "There needs to be a way". Like what? Given the dire housing situation in California, making perfect the enemy of good will end up badly in the long run.
  - notatoad 9y ago
    setting up public transit as a villian isn't a "making perfect the enemy of good" situation. the bill as written wasn't good. it was actively bad. Pitting residents against public transit is counterproductive. my first thought is that instead of tying the upzoning to transit lines or transit stations, it should be tied to transportation corridors. if a route carries a certain amount of people, whether by car or bus or train or jetpack, nearby buildings should be ineligible for certain height restrictions and parking minimums.
    - redditmigrant 9y ago
      Why wouldn't the residents then become even more anti housing because more people will lead to corridoring? This is how all these anti housing debates go, a well intentioned person with just a no and no thought on any actual solutions.
- pwinnski 9y ago
  I believe the bill, anticipating such lobbying, target bus stops as of now, already. Reducing bus service wouldn't take a location off the list, and adding new stops wouldn't add a location to the list.
djrogers 9y ago
There were some good ideas in this one, but the requirement to force high density housing near bus stops has some serious problems in small and medium sized towns. For one, bus stops are generally already near existing development, so unless property values plummet, that land won’t be turned into condos. The second problem is that bus stops can move. Yes - one of he big advantages of busses over rail is that the location of the stops is infinitely flexible. Forward thinking cities build bus pull-outs on major streets in new neighborhoods all the time, so they can be used in the future. Requiring a specific type of zoning at all of hear bus stops will effectively freeze this type of flexibility. OTOH, building a new train station? Yeah - put up some condos!
- astrange 9y ago
  The bill was based on transit stops as they are in 2018 - it doesn't follow you around if you make new ones. The idea there was to stop suburbs from just shutting down their bus lines. I think it is difficult to get a bus line moved in California though, because of CEQA - didn't it take a decade to start a new one in SF just recently? This is why everyone does UberPool.
  - djrogers 9y ago
    You’re talking about SF and I’m talking about small and mid sized towns. Big difference. If a small town wants to move a bus stop 1 block, it doesn’t take 10 years...
- oftenwrong 9y ago
  s/force/allow/
  - djrogers 9y ago
    Nope - cities are already allowed to do this, the bill would remove the option - hence force.
debt 9y ago
Damn this is being heavily down-voted yet has wide-reaching implications on tech.
redditmigrant 9y ago
Yet another failure by an American state to do anything about an absolutely huge problem. As I see it, wages haven't risen materially for decades and governments are failing to do anything substantial about the big things people spend their money on - housing, education, healthcare. At this rate , grass roots revolution will be the only remaining avenue for change.
slantaclaus 9y ago
“Not in my backyard” My best insight on what is driving the opposition is contained in a book by Zillow researchers called “Zillow Talk”. Basically, housing shortages drive up home values.
makecheck 9y ago
It may be that the only way to fight “not in my backyard” is to require, by law, “everyone’s backyard”. In other words, make every single neighborhood give something up so that no one can say they’re being singled out. One method might be to require a tax increase in every neighborhood that is nullified if that neighborhood does certain things (like allowing dense condos). The important thing would be to make it absolutely clear that a whole city/region is in the same boat, that certain actions will be taken on all areas and no one will be allowed to squirm out of them.

86 points by thirtyseven 9y ago

California YIMBY organized this bill which, while destined to fail, has attracted a good deal of serious attention to the cause. Donate/volunteer: https://cayimby.org https://cayimby.org (I am not affiliated with California YIMBY.)

arikr 9y ago
If anyone from California YIMBY is reading this thread, I really hope you get a chance to read the following: - https://dominiccummings.com/2017/01/09/on-the-referendum-21-branching-histories-of-the-2016-referendum-and-the-frogs-before-the-storm-2/ https://dominiccummings.com/2017/01/09/on-the-referendum-21-... - "Win Bigly" by Scott Adams
- epistasis 9y ago
  That's a super long essay, and about 500-800 words into it there's still no thesis or general topic introduced. It may help to provide a tiny teaser about why it's interesting and relevant if you'd like more people to read it, as the current introduction doesn't do it many favors.

epistasis 9y ago

The housing shortage is a completely self-inflicted wound. Like Prop 13, it benefits current owners at the expense of their children and other newcomers. And even when housing can be built, it is overly expensive due to insanely conservative zoning requirements. A great explanation of just how awful it is in LA is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_architect_in_la_specializing_in_multifamily/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_ar... And SF and the Bay Area have been even worse than LA at building housing. Crazy conservative (in the sense of "no change allowed") people dominate all the planning meetings, which control what can and can not be built. Meeting code and zoning is not enough, you have to convince the extreme ends of your opponents to get anything built.

siculars 9y ago
These boards should all take a field trip to places like NYC and Tokyo where the buildings are tall and the density is high. I have no sympathy for these self inflicted wounds.
- tux1968 9y ago
  Well, they're not seen as wounds by the people who are causing the problem, they're seen as victories.
- timr 9y ago
  "These boards should all take a field trip to places like NYC and Tokyo where the buildings are tall and the density is high." I lived in Japan, and I live in New York. Tokyo is mostly low-rise buildings. Outside of a few areas in the center of Tokyo, the city is a sprawling mass of 1-5 story buildings. The vast majority of New York (outside of Manhattan) is the same. Even in Manhattan, most of the residential neighborhoods are under ten stories. Silicon valley can clearly stand to increase density, but it doesn't help to misrepresent what density looks like.
  - pkaye 9y ago
    A lot of the new housing I've seen in SV has been 3 story condos, townhouses and apartments. Is what is being proposed higher density than this or just more of it?
    - timr 9y ago
      I can't possibly generalize across all of the bay area, let alone the entire state of California. I can speak with confidence about SF: the eastern third of the city (the part everyone always wants to "build up") is already pretty dense, by any standard. Building skyscrapers is not making housing cheaper, just taller. Meanwhile, the western two-thirds (the parts nobody ever talks about) are like McMansion suburbia. The general problem with this debate on HN is that everyone gets fixated on a select few areas where 20-something nerdbros want to live and go drinking (e.g. the Mission), and imagines turning it into some vision of Tokyo out of Blade Runner, when the real solution is that we should be building more 3 story condos in Sunnyvale. If you wanted to make the bay area resemble Tokyo as it actually exists, you'd cover every flat part of the bay in 1-5 story buildings, and connect it all by excellent transit. It has little to do with skyscrapers, as such.

blondie9x 9y ago

Disappointing. This was a way to save hours and years in aggregate for people around the state. The goal is simple. To live closer to the areas you depend on and not have to lose everything doing so. A disappointment that it was not fully understood. So many hours commuting and pollution moving from A to B when we can use transit and live near it effectively if we can simply build.

supernova87a 9y ago

As much as I hate voter propositions... It's time for a voter proposition on this one, if we can't fix the rest of the system.

kelnos 9y ago
I really wouldn't expect a voter proposition to do all that much better. There are a lot -- probably a majority -- of CA residents that benefit from the current policies and don't want change.

quotemstr 9y ago

If the state of California in incapable of imposing adult supervision on bay area towns and their NIMBYs, maybe it's time for the federal government to give it a shot. I'm sure the commerce clause can be construed to authorize a federal intervention. SV is too economically important to the national and world economies to allow hysterical, superstitious, and irrational local interests to overheat its housing market.

dahdum 9y ago

California has the highest poverty rate in the US [1] in no small part due to the housing crisis. It’s a sad fact that this bill dying in committee is the most progress in years to solve the root problem. 1) 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...

klochner 9y ago

Most infuriating about the SF housing debate is the the utter lack of economic knowledge that aligns groups like sierra club and low-income advocacy groups with rent-seeking or racist NIMBY homeowners.

rajacombinator 9y ago
You’d probably find those groups are all run by the same people.

Afforess 9y ago

Individual property ownership should be outlawed. The perverse incentives outweigh the benefits. Private real estate is an exclusive monopoly protected by the government. Housing appreciation is particularly appalling. Rarely is it due to any particular improvements an owner makes, rather its due to city or local changes which reward homeowners for no action of their own. Your schools received higher test scores, collect 35k, and pass Go. A factory ignored EPA regulations, lose 15k. There is no sense or reward for good decisions - just the whims of fate. In fast growing cities like SF, it's worse, home value grows off speculative home value, which grows off even more speculative home values. The monopoly self-reinforces. There is no reason for such an artificial monopoly to exist. The native Americans got this right. Communists got this right. The Chinese 90-year lease model looks much better.

ra273 9y ago
Such behaviour does encourage frivolous spending of wealth however. Even 99-year lease models fall down in 21st century society given such projecting population growth in certain centres. This is likely to taper as the century progresses. It will likely be countered with expanding average life expectancy however — most pronounced and predominantly in already crowded urban conglomerates.
namlem 9y ago
Or just institute a land value tax.

DoofusOfDeath 9y ago

I'm surprised that this is characterized only as a supply problem instead of a demand problem.

epistasis 9y ago
How do you fix demand? Even with massive price increases, demand is still high. And that just hurts the poor. The other side of the coin is that "fixing" people's desires on where they want to live sounds pretty creepy.
namlem 9y ago
How dare people demand a place to live?
astrange 9y ago
There aren't /that/ many tech people moving to Silicon Valley, though there certainly are a lot. What are you going to do about children who grew up in California and can't live in the same city as their parents? There isn't even enough supply for them.
- quotemstr 9y ago
  One of the worst aspects of prop 13 is that the property tax cap is hereditary. It's outrageous and creates a real risk of an honest-to-god blood-based class divide in the region.

notatoad 9y ago

As much good stuff as the bill had in it, I think I'm glad it failed. The idea of upzoning near transit is a good one, but tying it directly to transit growth is counterproductive. There was already talk of neighborhoods in LA lobbying to reduce bus service on their streets so they wouldn't qualify as a "high quality" bus line and be subject to the new zoning. There needs to be a way to build transit-friendly neighborhoods without turning people against transit.

redditmigrant 9y ago
"There needs to be a way". Like what? Given the dire housing situation in California, making perfect the enemy of good will end up badly in the long run.
- notatoad 9y ago
  setting up public transit as a villian isn't a "making perfect the enemy of good" situation. the bill as written wasn't good. it was actively bad. Pitting residents against public transit is counterproductive. my first thought is that instead of tying the upzoning to transit lines or transit stations, it should be tied to transportation corridors. if a route carries a certain amount of people, whether by car or bus or train or jetpack, nearby buildings should be ineligible for certain height restrictions and parking minimums.
  - redditmigrant 9y ago
    Why wouldn't the residents then become even more anti housing because more people will lead to corridoring? This is how all these anti housing debates go, a well intentioned person with just a no and no thought on any actual solutions.
pwinnski 9y ago
I believe the bill, anticipating such lobbying, target bus stops as of now, already. Reducing bus service wouldn't take a location off the list, and adding new stops wouldn't add a location to the list.

djrogers 9y ago

There were some good ideas in this one, but the requirement to force high density housing near bus stops has some serious problems in small and medium sized towns. For one, bus stops are generally already near existing development, so unless property values plummet, that land won’t be turned into condos. The second problem is that bus stops can move. Yes - one of he big advantages of busses over rail is that the location of the stops is infinitely flexible. Forward thinking cities build bus pull-outs on major streets in new neighborhoods all the time, so they can be used in the future. Requiring a specific type of zoning at all of hear bus stops will effectively freeze this type of flexibility. OTOH, building a new train station? Yeah - put up some condos!

astrange 9y ago
The bill was based on transit stops as they are in 2018 - it doesn't follow you around if you make new ones. The idea there was to stop suburbs from just shutting down their bus lines. I think it is difficult to get a bus line moved in California though, because of CEQA - didn't it take a decade to start a new one in SF just recently? This is why everyone does UberPool.
- djrogers 9y ago
  You’re talking about SF and I’m talking about small and mid sized towns. Big difference. If a small town wants to move a bus stop 1 block, it doesn’t take 10 years...
oftenwrong 9y ago
s/force/allow/
- djrogers 9y ago
  Nope - cities are already allowed to do this, the bill would remove the option - hence force.

debt 9y ago

Damn this is being heavily down-voted yet has wide-reaching implications on tech.

redditmigrant 9y ago

Yet another failure by an American state to do anything about an absolutely huge problem. As I see it, wages haven't risen materially for decades and governments are failing to do anything substantial about the big things people spend their money on - housing, education, healthcare. At this rate , grass roots revolution will be the only remaining avenue for change.

slantaclaus 9y ago

“Not in my backyard” My best insight on what is driving the opposition is contained in a book by Zillow researchers called “Zillow Talk”. Basically, housing shortages drive up home values.

makecheck 9y ago

It may be that the only way to fight “not in my backyard” is to require, by law, “everyone’s backyard”. In other words, make every single neighborhood give something up so that no one can say they’re being singled out. One method might be to require a tax increase in every neighborhood that is nullified if that neighborhood does certain things (like allowing dense condos). The important thing would be to make it absolutely clear that a whole city/region is in the same boat, that certain actions will be taken on all areas and no one will be allowed to squirm out of them.