11 ms·

The Golden Girls Would Violate Zoning Laws

104 points by jseliger 7y ago

Finnucane 7y ago
The zoning in my neighborhood is actually fantasy. The zoning for residential has FAR limits that one would expect in the outer suburbs, whereas the actual housing is quite a bit more dense. Only a small percentage of buildings conforms to the zoning limits. Which means even the most trivial change requires a variance.
- human20190310 7y ago
  For those unfamiliar with the acronym, I believe FAR means "floor area ratio".
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  >Which means even the most trivial change requires a variance. That's a feature, not a bug. By forcing even mundane projects to go through a process where approval depends on the whims of the decision makers they have set themselves up to extract concessions from basically every project on a whim, fast track things they like (often things run by people they like) and stonewall things that they don't (don't get on their bad side if you want their approval in an expedient fashion).
quaquaqua1 7y ago
Landowners are so deeply invested in their properties that they support the local politicians who create supply-restrictive policies to further inflate asset prices. Or it's all a giant conspiracy that is closed to non-elite citizens. I actually have no idea how one would become the official who rewrites zoning laws anyway.
- shuckles 7y ago
  Loosening zoning would increase their land values though.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - erentz 7y ago
    I think that effect only happens today in most places due to the pent up demand and restrictive zoning in place. E.g.: In Seattle when they upzone a small area it immediately goes up in value because a builder can put say four houses now and sell more units. There is nowhere else that can be done so that land has a premium on it due to the restrictive zoning in the rest of the city. Now if the whole city was up zoned at the same time then the zoning would not affect the value of the land, only its amenity and location factors as per usual. In fact in this case land values would likely drop overall because now more units can be built everywhere allowing more people to live in the city in a variety of housing types, we reduced the supply demand gap and that affects the value of land overall.
    - clairity 7y ago
      it’s quite unlikely that land value will go down with upzoning. when you can build more, the value you can extract from a fixed amount of land goes up. but what may happen is that an individual unit on that land may sell for a little less for a short period of time.
  - falcolas 7y ago
    If, and only if, you want to leverage the value of your land by selling or borrowing against it. If you don't want to (or don't need to) do either of these, loosening the zoning restrictions would only make your location less valuable (industry/dense housing moving into a formerly townhome exclusive neighborhood) to you. Money is not the only value land has.
    - shuckles 7y ago
      No, it just makes those amenities more expensive to maintain at that location. This is as it should be since the opportunity cost is so high. For example, here is an example of homeowners paying a developer to not build on an adjacent lot to preserve their preferences: https://therealdeal.com/2019/07/22/chelsea-residents-paid-gary-barnett-11m-to-protect-their-views-from-a-planned-tower/ https://therealdeal.com/2019/07/22/chelsea-residents-paid-ga... Right now, the above is possible by regulatory capture, shifting the cost of preservation onto adjacent landowners who do want to build and the larger community for underutilizing a precious, shared resource (land).
- tyoma 7y ago
  Run for county/city elected office. Or even neighborhood zoning commission. A friend recently won a spot on his neighborhood’s planning commission in Columbus, OH. The vote counts were in the hundreds.
- nradov 7y ago
  There is no conspiracy. Most homeowners who oppose further housing growth are far more concerned with quality of life issues (traffic, noise, crime, pollution) than with inflating their asset values. You can run for your local city council just like any other citizen but you're unlikely to win if you don't understand actual voters.
  - quaquaqua1 7y ago
    I will rally my friends and I to all run as a bloc and try to gain a majority on the council. I'm sure some voters are concerned with the things you mentioned. I'm also sure other voters are concerned with lowering the price of rent. This can be done by increasing supply of housing, which can be done by increasing both the number of people who can live in one lot, as well as increasing the number of lots.
Glench 7y ago
In his Long Now talk and elsewhere, Saul Griffith makes the claim that because of restrictive zoning laws, solving climate change on a personal level is actually illegal (because of solar panel installation and wood-burning stove restrictions): http://longnow.org/seminars/02015/sep/21/infrastructure-and-climate-change/ http://longnow.org/seminars/02015/sep/21/infrastructure-and-... That's a strong claim, but I like that Saul is talking about changing local building laws to make green infrastructure a possibility.
- pascalxus 7y ago
  Yes. And by making it illegal for people to build living spaces near Work, they're contributing greatly to global warming because it increases commute lengths. Imagine a 4 mile commute vs 40 mile commute, the 40 miles we commute here in the bay area is 10 times more pollution!
  - Consultant32452 7y ago
    Worse than that, if you were only 4 miles away you might not use a car at all. You could more reasonably ride a bike or take public transportation.
  - dmix 7y ago
    Why do we have clearly divided zoned areas for work and residential again? What era did that start? I understand if it was a pig slaughterhouse or night club or something like that. But even the early 1900s had office buildings, law offices, various small shops, and other quiet firms. Seems like a heavy-handed approach in retrospect. If anything the laws should be related to the type of business or externalities (noise, smell, etc) it produces rather than on strict residential/work/industrial lines.
    - Symmetry 7y ago
      Probably 1916 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1916_Zoning_Resolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1916_Zoning_Resolution
    - 7y ago
geebee 7y ago
Good article. I think I'm seeing the kind of breakdown that can occur from excessive zoning regulations in my own mainly SFH neighborhood in SF. I live in a neighborhood south of 280 near a bart station. Historically, it was a middle income neighborhood, and it is zoned SFH. The houses almost all have a small front and back yard. The front setback for many of the houses is the length of a car, with a driveway in the middle and a small garden to each side. The ground floor was almost always originally an extended garage with perhaps a storage room. I think you can see it all falling apart. The proximity of this neighborhood to the peninsula, downtown SF and south of market, and the location near Bart and several muni rail lines, along with the general housing crunch in SF, has simply rendered this land too valuable for SFH residences. SF is trying, and failing, to suppress the alternate use of this land that the market is increasingly demanding. Now, I'm not arguing that land use regulations are inherently bad, and I believe that SF is bad at governing. But here's what's happened. The bottom floor, what was once a garage and storage room, has almost always been converted to a ground floor apartment or flat. Some people have gone so far as to replace the garage door with a wall and a front door. With the garage space gone, people have paved over the front setbacks next to their driveway, in order to park three cars in front of the house. Although curb cuts are technically allowed only to access the driveway and garage, these residents do of course keep the curb cut as a reserved parking spot in front of their house. I'm not sure what to make of it. But one thought I've had is that what we're seeing here is an attempt to convert an old SFH neighborhood in to multi unit dwellings, and it has actually been a bit of a disaster. Curb cuts are no longer used to provide access to a garage, but they do break street into small sections, all too small to legally park a car, so total parking is a wash (though it does provide residents with a reserved spot). The illegal but largely unenforced pave overs have led to higher volumes of water going into the combined storm and sewage system (an archaic but energy efficient gravity based system used in SF, possible because it's a hilly place), and the excess water, mixed with sewage, floods the lower level spots where the pipes bottleneck, severely damaging properties and subjecting residents to severe health and safety risks. Fascinatingly, San Francisco remains very strict and expensive where it comes to permits, but there's a level of permit violation that SF seems to just not bother with. In other words, you can do an un-permitted remodel of your downstairs, add drains, pave over the soil filter, create a massive sewage flooding problem, and sf will do... nothing. But if you were to try to tear down a house and replace it with a properly engineered multi unit dwelling... are you kidding me? SF will charge you upwards of 20k inspection and permit fees just to remodel the downstairs within the existing footprint of the house, if you do it legally. Anything beyond that is a massive delay with massive fees, and in most places, converting to official Muti unit dwellings is a non-starter. The result is lots of illegal in-laws, with dodgy electrical and plumbing, in an area that is likely to flood due to illegal pave overs. During one of the heavy rain episodes, someone's dog was electrocuted and died. Really, I'd give it even odds that someone is going to die from this situation before long. When I look around, I see something that just isn't working anymore. And while I bought into a SFH neighborhood, I do see something deeply immoral about restricting development in an urban neighborhood with excellent public transportation options close to job centers, in a world where low income janitors and fast food workers engage in soul and family destroying commutes for hours from exurb sprawl. It's nearly inconceivable that a city that considers itself "green"[1] and environmentalist would consider this OK. The one thing I disagree about is the notion that SFH owners are protecting an investment. Personally, I believe that while my house itself would lose value with relaxed building restrictions, the land would be worth a ton if it were legal to build a multi unit dwelling so close to the urban core and multiple public transportation lines. Nah, the SFH associations are fighting for something other than the optimization of their asset. I'm a lifelong San Franciscan in my late 40s, and I know these people. They have a powerful attachment to their neighborhood character, they never plan to leave, they are largely indifferent to the value of their house, and the want things to stay "the same". I just don't think that's possible. Things can either grow properly, or we can try to put it into a container that will eventually burst at the seams - and this is what I think I'm observing in my own neighborhood, a place that is trying to grow, in ways that are harmful but don't have to be, because we haven't allowed the kind of growth that could actually benefit the city instead. [1] when I replaced my old single pane windows with energy efficient windows, I got a tax credit from, get this, the Bush administration. Ironically, that incentive was almost exactly the same dollar value of SF's permit fees to replace my windows. Gavin Newsome's "Green" San Francisco pretty much confiscated the environmental incentive to reduce greenhouse gases created by the Bush admin. I mean, wow.
randyrand 7y ago
In Japan zoning laws only say the maximum annoyance a piece of land can have. In other words, you can build small residential buildings anywhere, even in industrial zones if you want. But you can only build industrial if the zone allows it.
- slapshot 7y ago
  In America, people would build their houses around an industrial zone and then complain about the industry -- this happens all the time. For some nuisances, like airports, it has broader impacts beyond just the industrial zone.
  - AWildC182 7y ago
    Gotta love the people who think they're real estate geniuses for buying cheap houses near an airport then realizing the airport is loud so they try to close it. Don't buy a house off the end of a runway unless you want to listen to my 230HP of bug smashing power...
    - mjcohen 7y ago
      Santa Monica, California.
    - shados 7y ago
      An issue we hit recently was our place, while near-ish an airport (well, a couple of miles away), didn't have much issues. Then several years after we bought, they changed their software I guess (thats the story anyway) which decided all planes should go over our house, and at much lower altitude than they historically would. So literally one day everything is fine, then the next its hell. Then people started saying "Well its your fault for buying near an airport". That wasn't great :(
      - AWildC182 7y ago
        You can talk to the FAA and the airport about it, though it helps to get educated about how it all works and come at it from the point of view of trying to help keep everyone happy. Start with what type of airport is it here: https://skyvector.com/ https://skyvector.com/ Is it Bravo (big blue circles around it, major commercial airport), Charlie (medium maroon circles, large secondary commercial), Delta (small single dark blue dashed circle, small controlled airport), or uncontrolled (no circle or dashed magenta, local GA airport)? If it's one of the first three, see if you can find the Standard Instrument Departures (SIDs) and Standard Terminal Arrival Routes (STARs) and see where they put aircraft in relation to you and at what altitudes (underlined altitudes are minimum, overlined are maximum). https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/digital_products/dtpp/search/ https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/digital_... (can also find them on skyvector for your airport) Also try to see if they've been changed lately as this is the most likely culprit. If it's an uncontrolled airport, try talking to them about noise abatement and see if you might be able to work something out.
jdoliner 7y ago
Here's a little thought experiment that I like to conduct about housing. Suppose you had two politicians in a race. Politician A gets up in front of the crowd and says: > If you elect me I'm going to work for the people of this community, I'm going to make sure that your most valuable asset, your home, keeps its value. In fact not only is it going to stay valuable, if you elect me it's going to get more valuable, under me your house will appreciate 5% every year. Politician B then gets up and says: > If you elect me I'm going to make sure that you have to be rich to buy a home in our community. In fact I'm going to raise the bar and make sure that every year you need to be 5% richer to afford a home than you needed to be the year before. Based just on these two snippets, most people I've asked would vote for Pol A, but what they're saying is essentially the same thing. And that gets at the very difficult issue we're broaching here. Our concept of housing as an investment can't coexist with a concept of housing as a commodity that should be affordable to the majority of the population. We need to let go of one of them to achieve the other.
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  Well, if the majority of a community are renters, politician A's pitch theoretically would fall short also, compared to "elect me and I will create lots of affordable housing, rent will fall or stay stable and you will get more of your most valuable possession - disposable income" The problem is even in that situation, the money of the home owner and apartment house owner speaks more loudly than the interests of the apartment dwellers.
  - nradov 7y ago
    That doesn't accurately characterize voter motivations. Many long-term renters also oppose loosening zoning rules due to quality of life concerns (traffic, noise, crime, pollution). It's not always just a money issue. Furthermore, many renters believe that if more housing is built it will only be luxury housing that they couldn't afford anyway. Sure basic economics tells us that increasing supply ought to drive down prices for everyone, but at the individual level it's tough for people to make the connection.
    - 7y ago
cheesymuffin 7y ago
The solution? Kill everybody.
buss 7y ago
Overly restrictive land use policies is one of the reasons I'm running for DCCC in San Francisco. The DCCC chooses who the "official" Democrat is in a race, which almost always translates into that person winning their race. The DCCC is controlled by NIMBYs, which is why we only elect NIMBY politicians. If you want this to change, we have to get pro-growth people on the SF DCCC. https://buss2020.org https://buss2020.org for some details, and https://buss2020.org/donate https://buss2020.org/donate if you want to chip in!
- WhompingWindows 7y ago
  How do you intend to enact your vision for legalizing construction of new apartments anywhere in SF?
  - buss 7y ago
    If we get enough YIMBYs and pro-reform Democrats on the DCCC, then the type of candidate the Democratic party supports will fundamentally change. The DCCC on my side of the city (East side) has 14 seats, so we have to run and elect as many pro-growth people as possible. Enacting this vision will take years of diligent hard work, but that's what I'm signing up for.
    - buss 7y ago
      For legalizing construction of new apartments, the strategy is multi-pronged: 1) ballot props to make development by-right (must be a ballot prop rather than legislation because the problems are in the city charter which can only be changed by ballot prop) 2) adjust fees and inclusionary zoning requirements to be realistic. Right now the inclusionary zoning requirement is more than the market can bear, so development is drying up. 3) rezone all of SF to allow greater densities and heights. This is a combination of legislation and ballot props. Rezoning by ballot allows skipping a years/decade long environmental review. 4) CEQA and other environmental regulation reform. CEQA was designed in the 70s to preserve open space, it now encourages sprawl because nobody can sue you with CEQA if your new development doesn't have existing neighbors. And CEQA considers decreased traffic speeds as a negative impact, so any new development in a city can be stopped due to adding traffic. 5) eliminate parking minimums 6) reform or eliminate discretionary review, which allows any person to stop a project for years 7) change the scope of authority of the planning commission. It has dictatorial power over what gets built, does not reflect the demographics of the city, and is unelected. They should not have as much power as they do. More details in my article: https://medium.com/yimby/the-staggering-inequity-of-the-san-francisco-planning-commission-a546b82c5d56 https://medium.com/yimby/the-staggering-inequity-of-the-san-... There are more policy directions, but this is just off the top of my head.
rayiner 7y ago
I don’t see how this is a federal issue. There is a constitutional dimension, if for example zoning codes were used to discriminate against families with LGBT members. But in general? Regulation of land one of the archetypal state issues.
- syn0byte 7y ago
  “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
- yonran 7y ago
  The article itself is talking about the constitutionality of discriminating based on familial relationship under the US Constitution, so that would be a federal issue. But in general, housing affordability is a federal problem insofar as the federal government already subsidizes housing and transportation. Since the federal government already subsidizes housing (mortgage interest deduction, imputed rent exemption on income tax, and capital gains tax exemptions for the sale of houses), it has an interest in ensuring that these funds aren’t wasted on bidding up land prices in high-rent areas, and it has an interest in ensuring that these funds benefit both the rich and the poor. And since the federal government already pays for transportation, it has an interest in ensuring that these transportation infrastructure isn’t wasted on exclusionary cities.
tomohawk 7y ago
Zoning laws are absurd, but if anyone thinks getting the Feds even more involved is going to make it better, just ask yourself if it would be a good thing to give congress even more stuff to fight about and be ineffective at handling.
- mywittyname 7y ago
  Generally, laws that effect large groups of people are going to be less onerous than ones which effect only a few. Local governments are notoriously petty and rife with corruption/favoritism. I've seen local laws get passed just because someone on the board had a personal vendetta. People are assholes. Also, Congress would offload responsibility to an agency, likeHouse & Urban Development. So I doubt they'd fight too much over day-to-day matters.
  - tomohawk 7y ago
    Heh - have you ever had to deal with HUD? I cannot imagine involving them more would yield a good result. Local governments can be petty, but that is the human condition. Congress has been known to be petty and corrupt, and so have federal agencies.
40acres 7y ago
The problem with owning a home in the United States, and it's relation to restrictive zoning, is that it's such a valuable asset. I'd wager the true price of home ownership is not reflected in property taxes, assessments, or retail price. In many areas the access to a school district and the expected lifetime earnings of a child who attends that district is worth more than the median home in the district. Ownership allows access to powerful neighborhood associations to wield and maintain the status quo. I commend recent efforts by local and state legislators to eliminate single family zoning, however we have a long way to go to decouple public education and home ownership. It's not simply about funding either -- many urban school districts have great funding per student but still lack in comparison to the suburbs in terms of class size, arguably the most important metric when considering schools.
- tropo 7y ago
  We can't decouple public education and home ownership unless we get one of two things: a. mandated homeschooling b. free teleportation Without one of those, house location and choice of school are unavoidably tied together.
alexhutcheson 7y ago
It's ironic that this piece ended up running on the same day as this other article in the same paper, which quotes a bunch of residents complaining about the construction of apartment towers on Manhattan's Upper East Side: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/nyregion/yorkville-tall-buildings-nyc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/nyregion/yorkville-tall-b...
ndespres 7y ago
On the other side of the coin, I'm in an area with NO zoning restrictions at all (other than a homophobic county-wide prohibition on pornographic bookstores). The town planning board has no power to disallow any type of building or business as long as it passes a very basic environmental survey. There's been a lot of bad feeling lately about a proposed motocross track/RV park in what is a very quiet farming community. I pity the neighbors who will have to suffer it, but there's hardly anything that can be done to stop it. I guess that's the price a community pays for constantly voting against zoning ordinances.
- noonespecial 7y ago
  >there's hardly anything that can be done to stop it. Sure there is. Buy the land. If you want to be able to insist on how something is used, ownership wins hands-down every single time.
lpolovets 7y ago
Zoning laws are absurdly restrictive, and sometimes just absurd. A few examples I've seen: - homeowner (me) can't install a duplex addition for a home zoned duplex without turning the front yard into a 4-car parking lot. It doesn't matter that I have one car and could decide to only rent to people with one car, the driveway would need to fit four cars instead of the current two. - most homes are limited to building one ADU (accessory dwelling unit). Only one ~800-sq foot ADU is allowed regardless of whether you have a 3,000 sq foot house on 4,500 sq foot lot, or a 2,000 sq foot house on a 100,000 sq foot lot. - if you want to have a home-based day care business, zoning sets a max number of kids that can attend. In California, this is 14 kids. It doesn't matter if your home is 1,500 square feet or 5,000 square feet, whether you're in the middle of downtown SF or in a rural area, or whether you have 2 parking spaces or 20. I think zoning seriously infringes on people's property rights. You should be able to do whatever you want to your property if it doesn't really hurt anyone. Zoning feels like EULAs to me: you "buy" something, but you don't really own it because another party has a lot of say in what you can and cannot do.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  Zoning laws enacted after a property purchase can infringe on property rights. Zoning laws that exist prior to a purchase merely form the foundation upon which you should expect to exercise the property rights in your purchase. (Just as you are prevented from operating a junkyard on your property, your neighbor is also prevented from operating a junkyard on theirs, protecting your property rights [assuming you don't want to live next to a junkyard].) If you want unencumbered use of your property, buy out in an unincorporated area with no zoning laws. When you do, don't be surprised when your neighbor decides to start a pig farm...
  - bluGill 7y ago
    The junkyard on my neighbor's property doesn't hurt me - as long as my neighbor is careful to prevent oil leaks and other sources of pollution. It might be ugly, but ugly is a first amendment right.
    - 7y ago
zazaraka 7y ago
Another interesting take in NY Times: > Yet where progressives argue for openness and inclusion as a cudgel against President Trump, they abandon it on Nob Hill and in Beverly Hills. This explains the opposition to SB 50, which aimed to address the housing shortage in a very straightforward way: by building more housing. > What Republicans want to do with I.C.E. and border walls, wealthy progressive Democrats are doing with zoning and Nimbyism. Preserving “local character,” maintaining “local control,” keeping housing scarce and inaccessible — the goals of both sides are really the same: to keep people out. > “We’re saying we welcome immigration, we welcome refugees, we welcome outsiders — but you’ve got to have a $2 million entrance fee to live here, otherwise you can use this part of a sidewalk for a tent,” said Brian Hanlon, president of the pro-density group California Yimby. “That to me is not being very welcoming. It’s not being very neighborly.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/opinion/california-housing-nimby.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/opinion/california-housin...
brobdingnagians 7y ago
> But other cities, like Plano, Tex. — where more than 4,000 residents have mobilized to overturn similar plans — have taken steps backward. I take issue with this. I grew up in Plano, Texas. I loved it and I loved the people. This article is a negative comment about those people "taking steps backward", when they are really mobilizing themselves to take part in local politics and democratically help make the city how they want it to be. Is Plano perfect? No. But the people there do believe in being active in local government and in trying to make changes that the people in the community _want_. It's a special kind of place, and they care. They've done this again and again. > As a zoning official, I’m usually the last person to advocate for federal intrusion into local decision-making. But the problems of housing inequality and segregation are too big for localities to tackle piecemeal. That last excerpt is simply an emotional appeal "acknowledging" the author's supposed credentials of opposing big government---- while supporting it. But zoning laws are one of the most impactful things that a local government actually manages, and why shouldn't you be able to help shape your community, especially when we usually want people to participate _more_ in local politics, and zoning laws are one of the ways you can make a real difference in your community. But if you take away any really meaningful power that a local government has, why would anyone care at all to participate?
- ilikehurdles 7y ago
  I take the same issue whenever I see zoning issues about my locality (Denver) brought up by online communities who tend "YIMBY" but have little, if any, horse in the race of local politics. There this un-nuanced thousand-miles-removed view of zoning issues propagated in media and places like Reddit and HN, and then there's the opposing boots-on-the-ground version where those of us living in the community, who would have to live with the changes, fight against destructive zoning proposals and corrupted officials. Starting a sentence with "as a zoning official" has no value. Having personally met with a number of zoning officials, historic commission members, city planners, and council-members, their allegiances and political views vary from one to the next. Some ran on campaigns almost entirely funded by out-of-state-developer donations; while others, sure, are a reflection of elite country-club voters wanting to keep out the "riff-raff". There's a whole swath of viewpoints in between the extremes, and the only thing consistent among every national story about "NIMBY"ism is that it is far, far too disconnected from the communities to adequately capture any of those viewpoints.
jackfoxy 7y ago
You can look to Houston, TX as a control group of what development and urban growth looks like without zoning laws. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning_in_the_United_States#Houston,_1924–1929 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning_in_the_United_States#Ho...
- mjevans 7y ago
  Indeed, laws and structural (backbone) planning are necessary and complimentary. However as others have pointed out and (I saw them while reading further down after) I also replied about Japanese style zoning, which is based on a combination of large scale planning and allowing "Up to X nuisance" in a zone and otherwise letting market forces dictate what actually gets build.
- SamReidHughes 7y ago
  A city full of mansions, with lobster, selling for $200-300K.
- neilparikh 7y ago
  Houston does have polices that have a similar effect to zoning though (parking minimums). > Also, the city has enacted development regulations that specify how lots are subdivided, standard setbacks, and parking requirements. The regulations have contributed to the city's automobile-dependent sprawl, by requiring the existence of large minimum residential lot sizes and large commercial parking lots.
alexnewman 7y ago
In san francisco, zoning doesn't mean shit. Basically it comes down to who you know and can you hold your nose and bribe. With these capabilities, the zone and code can say whatever you want. Clearly this is all about the $$$.

104 points by jseliger 7y ago

The zoning in my neighborhood is actually fantasy. The zoning for residential has FAR limits that one would expect in the outer suburbs, whereas the actual housing is quite a bit more dense. Only a small percentage of buildings conforms to the zoning limits. Which means even the most trivial change requires a variance.

human20190310 7y ago
For those unfamiliar with the acronym, I believe FAR means "floor area ratio".
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
>Which means even the most trivial change requires a variance. That's a feature, not a bug. By forcing even mundane projects to go through a process where approval depends on the whims of the decision makers they have set themselves up to extract concessions from basically every project on a whim, fast track things they like (often things run by people they like) and stonewall things that they don't (don't get on their bad side if you want their approval in an expedient fashion).

quaquaqua1 7y ago

Landowners are so deeply invested in their properties that they support the local politicians who create supply-restrictive policies to further inflate asset prices. Or it's all a giant conspiracy that is closed to non-elite citizens. I actually have no idea how one would become the official who rewrites zoning laws anyway.

shuckles 7y ago
Loosening zoning would increase their land values though.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- erentz 7y ago
  I think that effect only happens today in most places due to the pent up demand and restrictive zoning in place. E.g.: In Seattle when they upzone a small area it immediately goes up in value because a builder can put say four houses now and sell more units. There is nowhere else that can be done so that land has a premium on it due to the restrictive zoning in the rest of the city. Now if the whole city was up zoned at the same time then the zoning would not affect the value of the land, only its amenity and location factors as per usual. In fact in this case land values would likely drop overall because now more units can be built everywhere allowing more people to live in the city in a variety of housing types, we reduced the supply demand gap and that affects the value of land overall.
  - clairity 7y ago
    it’s quite unlikely that land value will go down with upzoning. when you can build more, the value you can extract from a fixed amount of land goes up. but what may happen is that an individual unit on that land may sell for a little less for a short period of time.
- falcolas 7y ago
  If, and only if, you want to leverage the value of your land by selling or borrowing against it. If you don't want to (or don't need to) do either of these, loosening the zoning restrictions would only make your location less valuable (industry/dense housing moving into a formerly townhome exclusive neighborhood) to you. Money is not the only value land has.
  - shuckles 7y ago
    No, it just makes those amenities more expensive to maintain at that location. This is as it should be since the opportunity cost is so high. For example, here is an example of homeowners paying a developer to not build on an adjacent lot to preserve their preferences: https://therealdeal.com/2019/07/22/chelsea-residents-paid-gary-barnett-11m-to-protect-their-views-from-a-planned-tower/ https://therealdeal.com/2019/07/22/chelsea-residents-paid-ga... Right now, the above is possible by regulatory capture, shifting the cost of preservation onto adjacent landowners who do want to build and the larger community for underutilizing a precious, shared resource (land).
tyoma 7y ago
Run for county/city elected office. Or even neighborhood zoning commission. A friend recently won a spot on his neighborhood’s planning commission in Columbus, OH. The vote counts were in the hundreds.
nradov 7y ago
There is no conspiracy. Most homeowners who oppose further housing growth are far more concerned with quality of life issues (traffic, noise, crime, pollution) than with inflating their asset values. You can run for your local city council just like any other citizen but you're unlikely to win if you don't understand actual voters.
- quaquaqua1 7y ago
  I will rally my friends and I to all run as a bloc and try to gain a majority on the council. I'm sure some voters are concerned with the things you mentioned. I'm also sure other voters are concerned with lowering the price of rent. This can be done by increasing supply of housing, which can be done by increasing both the number of people who can live in one lot, as well as increasing the number of lots.

Glench 7y ago

In his Long Now talk and elsewhere, Saul Griffith makes the claim that because of restrictive zoning laws, solving climate change on a personal level is actually illegal (because of solar panel installation and wood-burning stove restrictions): http://longnow.org/seminars/02015/sep/21/infrastructure-and-climate-change/ http://longnow.org/seminars/02015/sep/21/infrastructure-and-... That's a strong claim, but I like that Saul is talking about changing local building laws to make green infrastructure a possibility.

pascalxus 7y ago
Yes. And by making it illegal for people to build living spaces near Work, they're contributing greatly to global warming because it increases commute lengths. Imagine a 4 mile commute vs 40 mile commute, the 40 miles we commute here in the bay area is 10 times more pollution!
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  Worse than that, if you were only 4 miles away you might not use a car at all. You could more reasonably ride a bike or take public transportation.
- dmix 7y ago
  Why do we have clearly divided zoned areas for work and residential again? What era did that start? I understand if it was a pig slaughterhouse or night club or something like that. But even the early 1900s had office buildings, law offices, various small shops, and other quiet firms. Seems like a heavy-handed approach in retrospect. If anything the laws should be related to the type of business or externalities (noise, smell, etc) it produces rather than on strict residential/work/industrial lines.
  - Symmetry 7y ago
    Probably 1916 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1916_Zoning_Resolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1916_Zoning_Resolution
  - 7y ago

geebee 7y ago

Good article. I think I'm seeing the kind of breakdown that can occur from excessive zoning regulations in my own mainly SFH neighborhood in SF. I live in a neighborhood south of 280 near a bart station. Historically, it was a middle income neighborhood, and it is zoned SFH. The houses almost all have a small front and back yard. The front setback for many of the houses is the length of a car, with a driveway in the middle and a small garden to each side. The ground floor was almost always originally an extended garage with perhaps a storage room. I think you can see it all falling apart. The proximity of this neighborhood to the peninsula, downtown SF and south of market, and the location near Bart and several muni rail lines, along with the general housing crunch in SF, has simply rendered this land too valuable for SFH residences. SF is trying, and failing, to suppress the alternate use of this land that the market is increasingly demanding. Now, I'm not arguing that land use regulations are inherently bad, and I believe that SF is bad at governing. But here's what's happened. The bottom floor, what was once a garage and storage room, has almost always been converted to a ground floor apartment or flat. Some people have gone so far as to replace the garage door with a wall and a front door. With the garage space gone, people have paved over the front setbacks next to their driveway, in order to park three cars in front of the house. Although curb cuts are technically allowed only to access the driveway and garage, these residents do of course keep the curb cut as a reserved parking spot in front of their house. I'm not sure what to make of it. But one thought I've had is that what we're seeing here is an attempt to convert an old SFH neighborhood in to multi unit dwellings, and it has actually been a bit of a disaster. Curb cuts are no longer used to provide access to a garage, but they do break street into small sections, all too small to legally park a car, so total parking is a wash (though it does provide residents with a reserved spot). The illegal but largely unenforced pave overs have led to higher volumes of water going into the combined storm and sewage system (an archaic but energy efficient gravity based system used in SF, possible because it's a hilly place), and the excess water, mixed with sewage, floods the lower level spots where the pipes bottleneck, severely damaging properties and subjecting residents to severe health and safety risks. Fascinatingly, San Francisco remains very strict and expensive where it comes to permits, but there's a level of permit violation that SF seems to just not bother with. In other words, you can do an un-permitted remodel of your downstairs, add drains, pave over the soil filter, create a massive sewage flooding problem, and sf will do... nothing. But if you were to try to tear down a house and replace it with a properly engineered multi unit dwelling... are you kidding me? SF will charge you upwards of 20k inspection and permit fees just to remodel the downstairs within the existing footprint of the house, if you do it legally. Anything beyond that is a massive delay with massive fees, and in most places, converting to official Muti unit dwellings is a non-starter. The result is lots of illegal in-laws, with dodgy electrical and plumbing, in an area that is likely to flood due to illegal pave overs. During one of the heavy rain episodes, someone's dog was electrocuted and died. Really, I'd give it even odds that someone is going to die from this situation before long. When I look around, I see something that just isn't working anymore. And while I bought into a SFH neighborhood, I do see something deeply immoral about restricting development in an urban neighborhood with excellent public transportation options close to job centers, in a world where low income janitors and fast food workers engage in soul and family destroying commutes for hours from exurb sprawl. It's nearly inconceivable that a city that considers itself "green"[1] and environmentalist would consider this OK. The one thing I disagree about is the notion that SFH owners are protecting an investment. Personally, I believe that while my house itself would lose value with relaxed building restrictions, the land would be worth a ton if it were legal to build a multi unit dwelling so close to the urban core and multiple public transportation lines. Nah, the SFH associations are fighting for something other than the optimization of their asset. I'm a lifelong San Franciscan in my late 40s, and I know these people. They have a powerful attachment to their neighborhood character, they never plan to leave, they are largely indifferent to the value of their house, and the want things to stay "the same". I just don't think that's possible. Things can either grow properly, or we can try to put it into a container that will eventually burst at the seams - and this is what I think I'm observing in my own neighborhood, a place that is trying to grow, in ways that are harmful but don't have to be, because we haven't allowed the kind of growth that could actually benefit the city instead. [1] when I replaced my old single pane windows with energy efficient windows, I got a tax credit from, get this, the Bush administration. Ironically, that incentive was almost exactly the same dollar value of SF's permit fees to replace my windows. Gavin Newsome's "Green" San Francisco pretty much confiscated the environmental incentive to reduce greenhouse gases created by the Bush admin. I mean, wow.

randyrand 7y ago

In Japan zoning laws only say the maximum annoyance a piece of land can have. In other words, you can build small residential buildings anywhere, even in industrial zones if you want. But you can only build industrial if the zone allows it.

slapshot 7y ago
In America, people would build their houses around an industrial zone and then complain about the industry -- this happens all the time. For some nuisances, like airports, it has broader impacts beyond just the industrial zone.
- AWildC182 7y ago
  Gotta love the people who think they're real estate geniuses for buying cheap houses near an airport then realizing the airport is loud so they try to close it. Don't buy a house off the end of a runway unless you want to listen to my 230HP of bug smashing power...
  - mjcohen 7y ago
    Santa Monica, California.
  - shados 7y ago
    An issue we hit recently was our place, while near-ish an airport (well, a couple of miles away), didn't have much issues. Then several years after we bought, they changed their software I guess (thats the story anyway) which decided all planes should go over our house, and at much lower altitude than they historically would. So literally one day everything is fine, then the next its hell. Then people started saying "Well its your fault for buying near an airport". That wasn't great :(
    - AWildC182 7y ago
      You can talk to the FAA and the airport about it, though it helps to get educated about how it all works and come at it from the point of view of trying to help keep everyone happy. Start with what type of airport is it here: https://skyvector.com/ https://skyvector.com/ Is it Bravo (big blue circles around it, major commercial airport), Charlie (medium maroon circles, large secondary commercial), Delta (small single dark blue dashed circle, small controlled airport), or uncontrolled (no circle or dashed magenta, local GA airport)? If it's one of the first three, see if you can find the Standard Instrument Departures (SIDs) and Standard Terminal Arrival Routes (STARs) and see where they put aircraft in relation to you and at what altitudes (underlined altitudes are minimum, overlined are maximum). https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/digital_products/dtpp/search/ https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/digital_... (can also find them on skyvector for your airport) Also try to see if they've been changed lately as this is the most likely culprit. If it's an uncontrolled airport, try talking to them about noise abatement and see if you might be able to work something out.

jdoliner 7y ago

Here's a little thought experiment that I like to conduct about housing. Suppose you had two politicians in a race. Politician A gets up in front of the crowd and says: > If you elect me I'm going to work for the people of this community, I'm going to make sure that your most valuable asset, your home, keeps its value. In fact not only is it going to stay valuable, if you elect me it's going to get more valuable, under me your house will appreciate 5% every year. Politician B then gets up and says: > If you elect me I'm going to make sure that you have to be rich to buy a home in our community. In fact I'm going to raise the bar and make sure that every year you need to be 5% richer to afford a home than you needed to be the year before. Based just on these two snippets, most people I've asked would vote for Pol A, but what they're saying is essentially the same thing. And that gets at the very difficult issue we're broaching here. Our concept of housing as an investment can't coexist with a concept of housing as a commodity that should be affordable to the majority of the population. We need to let go of one of them to achieve the other.

joe_the_user 7y ago
Well, if the majority of a community are renters, politician A's pitch theoretically would fall short also, compared to "elect me and I will create lots of affordable housing, rent will fall or stay stable and you will get more of your most valuable possession - disposable income" The problem is even in that situation, the money of the home owner and apartment house owner speaks more loudly than the interests of the apartment dwellers.
- nradov 7y ago
  That doesn't accurately characterize voter motivations. Many long-term renters also oppose loosening zoning rules due to quality of life concerns (traffic, noise, crime, pollution). It's not always just a money issue. Furthermore, many renters believe that if more housing is built it will only be luxury housing that they couldn't afford anyway. Sure basic economics tells us that increasing supply ought to drive down prices for everyone, but at the individual level it's tough for people to make the connection.
  - 7y ago

cheesymuffin 7y ago

The solution? Kill everybody.

buss 7y ago

Overly restrictive land use policies is one of the reasons I'm running for DCCC in San Francisco. The DCCC chooses who the "official" Democrat is in a race, which almost always translates into that person winning their race. The DCCC is controlled by NIMBYs, which is why we only elect NIMBY politicians. If you want this to change, we have to get pro-growth people on the SF DCCC. https://buss2020.org https://buss2020.org for some details, and https://buss2020.org/donate https://buss2020.org/donate if you want to chip in!

WhompingWindows 7y ago
How do you intend to enact your vision for legalizing construction of new apartments anywhere in SF?
- buss 7y ago
  If we get enough YIMBYs and pro-reform Democrats on the DCCC, then the type of candidate the Democratic party supports will fundamentally change. The DCCC on my side of the city (East side) has 14 seats, so we have to run and elect as many pro-growth people as possible. Enacting this vision will take years of diligent hard work, but that's what I'm signing up for.
  - buss 7y ago
    For legalizing construction of new apartments, the strategy is multi-pronged: 1) ballot props to make development by-right (must be a ballot prop rather than legislation because the problems are in the city charter which can only be changed by ballot prop) 2) adjust fees and inclusionary zoning requirements to be realistic. Right now the inclusionary zoning requirement is more than the market can bear, so development is drying up. 3) rezone all of SF to allow greater densities and heights. This is a combination of legislation and ballot props. Rezoning by ballot allows skipping a years/decade long environmental review. 4) CEQA and other environmental regulation reform. CEQA was designed in the 70s to preserve open space, it now encourages sprawl because nobody can sue you with CEQA if your new development doesn't have existing neighbors. And CEQA considers decreased traffic speeds as a negative impact, so any new development in a city can be stopped due to adding traffic. 5) eliminate parking minimums 6) reform or eliminate discretionary review, which allows any person to stop a project for years 7) change the scope of authority of the planning commission. It has dictatorial power over what gets built, does not reflect the demographics of the city, and is unelected. They should not have as much power as they do. More details in my article: https://medium.com/yimby/the-staggering-inequity-of-the-san-francisco-planning-commission-a546b82c5d56 https://medium.com/yimby/the-staggering-inequity-of-the-san-... There are more policy directions, but this is just off the top of my head.

rayiner 7y ago

I don’t see how this is a federal issue. There is a constitutional dimension, if for example zoning codes were used to discriminate against families with LGBT members. But in general? Regulation of land one of the archetypal state issues.

syn0byte 7y ago
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
yonran 7y ago
The article itself is talking about the constitutionality of discriminating based on familial relationship under the US Constitution, so that would be a federal issue. But in general, housing affordability is a federal problem insofar as the federal government already subsidizes housing and transportation. Since the federal government already subsidizes housing (mortgage interest deduction, imputed rent exemption on income tax, and capital gains tax exemptions for the sale of houses), it has an interest in ensuring that these funds aren’t wasted on bidding up land prices in high-rent areas, and it has an interest in ensuring that these funds benefit both the rich and the poor. And since the federal government already pays for transportation, it has an interest in ensuring that these transportation infrastructure isn’t wasted on exclusionary cities.

tomohawk 7y ago

Zoning laws are absurd, but if anyone thinks getting the Feds even more involved is going to make it better, just ask yourself if it would be a good thing to give congress even more stuff to fight about and be ineffective at handling.

mywittyname 7y ago
Generally, laws that effect large groups of people are going to be less onerous than ones which effect only a few. Local governments are notoriously petty and rife with corruption/favoritism. I've seen local laws get passed just because someone on the board had a personal vendetta. People are assholes. Also, Congress would offload responsibility to an agency, likeHouse & Urban Development. So I doubt they'd fight too much over day-to-day matters.
- tomohawk 7y ago
  Heh - have you ever had to deal with HUD? I cannot imagine involving them more would yield a good result. Local governments can be petty, but that is the human condition. Congress has been known to be petty and corrupt, and so have federal agencies.

40acres 7y ago

The problem with owning a home in the United States, and it's relation to restrictive zoning, is that it's such a valuable asset. I'd wager the true price of home ownership is not reflected in property taxes, assessments, or retail price. In many areas the access to a school district and the expected lifetime earnings of a child who attends that district is worth more than the median home in the district. Ownership allows access to powerful neighborhood associations to wield and maintain the status quo. I commend recent efforts by local and state legislators to eliminate single family zoning, however we have a long way to go to decouple public education and home ownership. It's not simply about funding either -- many urban school districts have great funding per student but still lack in comparison to the suburbs in terms of class size, arguably the most important metric when considering schools.

tropo 7y ago
We can't decouple public education and home ownership unless we get one of two things: a. mandated homeschooling b. free teleportation Without one of those, house location and choice of school are unavoidably tied together.

alexhutcheson 7y ago

It's ironic that this piece ended up running on the same day as this other article in the same paper, which quotes a bunch of residents complaining about the construction of apartment towers on Manhattan's Upper East Side: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/nyregion/yorkville-tall-buildings-nyc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/nyregion/yorkville-tall-b...

ndespres 7y ago

On the other side of the coin, I'm in an area with NO zoning restrictions at all (other than a homophobic county-wide prohibition on pornographic bookstores). The town planning board has no power to disallow any type of building or business as long as it passes a very basic environmental survey. There's been a lot of bad feeling lately about a proposed motocross track/RV park in what is a very quiet farming community. I pity the neighbors who will have to suffer it, but there's hardly anything that can be done to stop it. I guess that's the price a community pays for constantly voting against zoning ordinances.

noonespecial 7y ago
>there's hardly anything that can be done to stop it. Sure there is. Buy the land. If you want to be able to insist on how something is used, ownership wins hands-down every single time.

lpolovets 7y ago

Zoning laws are absurdly restrictive, and sometimes just absurd. A few examples I've seen: - homeowner (me) can't install a duplex addition for a home zoned duplex without turning the front yard into a 4-car parking lot. It doesn't matter that I have one car and could decide to only rent to people with one car, the driveway would need to fit four cars instead of the current two. - most homes are limited to building one ADU (accessory dwelling unit). Only one ~800-sq foot ADU is allowed regardless of whether you have a 3,000 sq foot house on 4,500 sq foot lot, or a 2,000 sq foot house on a 100,000 sq foot lot. - if you want to have a home-based day care business, zoning sets a max number of kids that can attend. In California, this is 14 kids. It doesn't matter if your home is 1,500 square feet or 5,000 square feet, whether you're in the middle of downtown SF or in a rural area, or whether you have 2 parking spaces or 20. I think zoning seriously infringes on people's property rights. You should be able to do whatever you want to your property if it doesn't really hurt anyone. Zoning feels like EULAs to me: you "buy" something, but you don't really own it because another party has a lot of say in what you can and cannot do.

sokoloff 7y ago
Zoning laws enacted after a property purchase can infringe on property rights. Zoning laws that exist prior to a purchase merely form the foundation upon which you should expect to exercise the property rights in your purchase. (Just as you are prevented from operating a junkyard on your property, your neighbor is also prevented from operating a junkyard on theirs, protecting your property rights [assuming you don't want to live next to a junkyard].) If you want unencumbered use of your property, buy out in an unincorporated area with no zoning laws. When you do, don't be surprised when your neighbor decides to start a pig farm...
- bluGill 7y ago
  The junkyard on my neighbor's property doesn't hurt me - as long as my neighbor is careful to prevent oil leaks and other sources of pollution. It might be ugly, but ugly is a first amendment right.
  - 7y ago

zazaraka 7y ago

Another interesting take in NY Times: > Yet where progressives argue for openness and inclusion as a cudgel against President Trump, they abandon it on Nob Hill and in Beverly Hills. This explains the opposition to SB 50, which aimed to address the housing shortage in a very straightforward way: by building more housing. > What Republicans want to do with I.C.E. and border walls, wealthy progressive Democrats are doing with zoning and Nimbyism. Preserving “local character,” maintaining “local control,” keeping housing scarce and inaccessible — the goals of both sides are really the same: to keep people out. > “We’re saying we welcome immigration, we welcome refugees, we welcome outsiders — but you’ve got to have a $2 million entrance fee to live here, otherwise you can use this part of a sidewalk for a tent,” said Brian Hanlon, president of the pro-density group California Yimby. “That to me is not being very welcoming. It’s not being very neighborly.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/opinion/california-housing-nimby.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/opinion/california-housin...

brobdingnagians 7y ago

> But other cities, like Plano, Tex. — where more than 4,000 residents have mobilized to overturn similar plans — have taken steps backward. I take issue with this. I grew up in Plano, Texas. I loved it and I loved the people. This article is a negative comment about those people "taking steps backward", when they are really mobilizing themselves to take part in local politics and democratically help make the city how they want it to be. Is Plano perfect? No. But the people there do believe in being active in local government and in trying to make changes that the people in the community _want_. It's a special kind of place, and they care. They've done this again and again. > As a zoning official, I’m usually the last person to advocate for federal intrusion into local decision-making. But the problems of housing inequality and segregation are too big for localities to tackle piecemeal. That last excerpt is simply an emotional appeal "acknowledging" the author's supposed credentials of opposing big government---- while supporting it. But zoning laws are one of the most impactful things that a local government actually manages, and why shouldn't you be able to help shape your community, especially when we usually want people to participate _more_ in local politics, and zoning laws are one of the ways you can make a real difference in your community. But if you take away any really meaningful power that a local government has, why would anyone care at all to participate?

ilikehurdles 7y ago
I take the same issue whenever I see zoning issues about my locality (Denver) brought up by online communities who tend "YIMBY" but have little, if any, horse in the race of local politics. There this un-nuanced thousand-miles-removed view of zoning issues propagated in media and places like Reddit and HN, and then there's the opposing boots-on-the-ground version where those of us living in the community, who would have to live with the changes, fight against destructive zoning proposals and corrupted officials. Starting a sentence with "as a zoning official" has no value. Having personally met with a number of zoning officials, historic commission members, city planners, and council-members, their allegiances and political views vary from one to the next. Some ran on campaigns almost entirely funded by out-of-state-developer donations; while others, sure, are a reflection of elite country-club voters wanting to keep out the "riff-raff". There's a whole swath of viewpoints in between the extremes, and the only thing consistent among every national story about "NIMBY"ism is that it is far, far too disconnected from the communities to adequately capture any of those viewpoints.

jackfoxy 7y ago

You can look to Houston, TX as a control group of what development and urban growth looks like without zoning laws. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning_in_the_United_States#Houston,_1924–1929 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning_in_the_United_States#Ho...

mjevans 7y ago
Indeed, laws and structural (backbone) planning are necessary and complimentary. However as others have pointed out and (I saw them while reading further down after) I also replied about Japanese style zoning, which is based on a combination of large scale planning and allowing "Up to X nuisance" in a zone and otherwise letting market forces dictate what actually gets build.
SamReidHughes 7y ago
A city full of mansions, with lobster, selling for $200-300K.
neilparikh 7y ago
Houston does have polices that have a similar effect to zoning though (parking minimums). > Also, the city has enacted development regulations that specify how lots are subdivided, standard setbacks, and parking requirements. The regulations have contributed to the city's automobile-dependent sprawl, by requiring the existence of large minimum residential lot sizes and large commercial parking lots.

alexnewman 7y ago

In san francisco, zoning doesn't mean shit. Basically it comes down to who you know and can you hold your nose and bribe. With these capabilities, the zone and code can say whatever you want. Clearly this is all about the $$$.