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The legislation followed popular opinion. The housing was built to satisfy market demand. If no one bought single family homes, fewer would be built. Every pers

The legislation followed popular opinion. The housing was built to satisfy market demand. If no one bought single family homes, fewer would be built. Every person was a kid, and raising kids is by far more comfortable in single family homes.

apsec112 6y ago
Most people don't vote in local elections. ~99.9% of the US (by land area) bans multi-family housing, and those laws mostly come from city councils and neighborhood committees dominated by wealthy, retired homeowners.
- choeger 6y ago
  Interesting. In Germany you see kind of the opposite: The (often wealthy and well-connected) people in local politics vote for whatever drives the prices for real estate upwards. Guess who owns the real estate that is not (yet) allowed for building?
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    That's how it is in the USA too. San Fran is the most salient and popular example of this. It's not limited to just wealthy here either. Almost every considers how something will "affect their property values." Oh, and it's not even like people use studies to determine how property values are effected. They literally just make shit up in their head, and if they think it will drive down property values, it's a veto. It's why things in the USA are the way they are. Anything not SFHs with big yards and 3 car garages are "bad for property values."
  - khuey 6y ago
    They vote for higher real-estate prices but that doesn't in general require multifamily housing, scarcity works just as well.
    - choeger 6y ago
      Well, say you have 1000m^2 to sell. In Germany, in a relatively dense area, you can build two one-family homes on that real estate. Considering the financing requirements and the relatively small size of the plots you can sell the real estate for maybe 600k in total, assuming that a family can pay 600k for a house and real estate and 50% goes into the latter. (This is a rough estimate for generic metropolitan areas, might be much lower in areas where there is place to build, might also be much higher in some areas.) If you do a multi-family home, you can easily build up to 8 town houses or largish apartments on that same area. Say you sell each of these for 500k, leaving the family a good argument to move into this more dense configuration. Even if the construction costs stay the same (they won't), that would leave you with 1.6M for the whole real estate.
- impendia 6y ago
  Bingo. Decisions are made by those that show up. I'd encourage anyone who cares about these issues to vote, to contact local politicians, to attend local debates or city council meetings.
notJim 6y ago
This take is completely ignorant of the history around this. It is illegal to build anything other than single-family homes in many places in US cities. This is due to an (often-racist) history of homeowners creating laws to keep lower-income people out of their neighborhoods. This continues to this day, where many NIMBY homeowners will fight tooth and nail to prevent any kind of dense development being built in their neighborhood.
- 0x00000000 6y ago
  Yes, and the rhetoric about “preserving the character of the neighborhood” is indistinguishable from that used when this redlining was instituted. Bizarre and sad to see misguided progressives (including renters) with no understanding of economics parrot the same lines and thinking that stopping new construction will keep prices down.
kiba 6y ago
Why is it more 'comfortable'? From my perspective as a free range kid in the 2000s, by far the most dangerous was crossing the 40 mph streets into other neighbourhood and getting a threat to call the police just because I briefly cycled in the neighbor's backyard. In that era, I would want less dangerous streets to cross and actual interconnected bike trails.
enragedcacti 6y ago
welcome to my town where you are legally only allowed to buy black beans. People keep buying them so there must be market demand. the legislation must have followed popular opinion. If people don't like black beans then why are they buying them? Like food, you need housing to survive. housing will be built and purchased because it's necessary, even if legislation mandates a type of housing that isn't well suited to the population. > The legislation followed popular opinion. Agreed. The legislation followed the popular opinion that black people were inferior and dangerous and needed to be priced out of white neighborhoods through draconian zoning laws.
woah 6y ago
I grew up in the suburbs because my parents got priced out of the Bay Area. It was good as a little kid because I could play in the woods. It sucked as a teenager because there was absolutely nothing to do outside of stupid high school drama. I knew a lot of kids who got into opiates, mostly out of boredom.
renewiltord 6y ago
Hmm, interesting. I have this view that two things are prime determiners of a good life as a kid: * Things to explore and do by yourself * Lots of other kids to do these things with But I don't know. I'm not a parent. I wonder if there are studies that show what happens. For what it's worth, this could just be personal bias. I grew up separately in the country when I was very young and then in a Barcelona-style superblock when I was a teenager, and enjoyed both experiences.
CydeWeys 6y ago
Your first two sentences directly contradict each other. There is in fact a lot of market demand for non-fully-detached-single-family-housing that the market is not allowed to satisfy solely because of the zoning legislation. If you actually let the market decide then you will see more density (and cheaper housing options on the lower end).
dublinben 6y ago
If you're interested in learning why this is wrong, the book The Color of Law is an excellent history of the segregationist laws that made things as they are. https://wwnorton.com/books/The-Color-of-Law/ https://wwnorton.com/books/The-Color-of-Law/
- refurb 6y ago
  What's the connection between redlining (discriminatory housing policies) and demand for single family homes?
  - wonder_er 6y ago
    I'm not the OP, but... This connection (between redlining and modern Single-family-house-only zoning districts) is the topic of the recommended book. It's difficult to give a high-quality summary of the book. An NPR story with the author of the book might be a better introduction than anything I could write: https://www.npr.org/2017/05/17/528822128/the-color-of-law-details-how-u-s-housing-policies-created-segregation https://www.npr.org/2017/05/17/528822128/the-color-of-law-de...
  - ProfessorLayton 6y ago
    A lot of what makes single family homes desirable, and thus increase demand for them, have discriminatory roots. For example, absurdly high minimum lot sizes and low coverage ordinances were designed to keep cheaper and denser units from being built as a roundabout way to keep POC from desirable neighborhoods. These ordinances remain on the books today, and much of the Bay Area and its insane housing policies is connected to this.
watwut 6y ago
> Every person was a kid, and raising kids is by far more comfortable in single family homes. It is complicated, because distance to school, childcare and to work makes massive difference in child raising too. The distance to friends makes difference between "parent needs to drive the kid for each playdate" vs "the kid walks to play with the friend". This all may mean that kids in flat are easier practically while kids in single family home mean the parent spends all the time driving them around.
gnopgnip 6y ago
San Jose is the third most populous city in CA. 94% of the land in San Jose is restricted to single family homes. Is this because of popular opinion, or because people have no other choice?

apsec112 6y ago

Most people don't vote in local elections. ~99.9% of the US (by land area) bans multi-family housing, and those laws mostly come from city councils and neighborhood committees dominated by wealthy, retired homeowners.

choeger 6y ago
Interesting. In Germany you see kind of the opposite: The (often wealthy and well-connected) people in local politics vote for whatever drives the prices for real estate upwards. Guess who owns the real estate that is not (yet) allowed for building?
- mywittyname 6y ago
  That's how it is in the USA too. San Fran is the most salient and popular example of this. It's not limited to just wealthy here either. Almost every considers how something will "affect their property values." Oh, and it's not even like people use studies to determine how property values are effected. They literally just make shit up in their head, and if they think it will drive down property values, it's a veto. It's why things in the USA are the way they are. Anything not SFHs with big yards and 3 car garages are "bad for property values."
- khuey 6y ago
  They vote for higher real-estate prices but that doesn't in general require multifamily housing, scarcity works just as well.
  - choeger 6y ago
    Well, say you have 1000m^2 to sell. In Germany, in a relatively dense area, you can build two one-family homes on that real estate. Considering the financing requirements and the relatively small size of the plots you can sell the real estate for maybe 600k in total, assuming that a family can pay 600k for a house and real estate and 50% goes into the latter. (This is a rough estimate for generic metropolitan areas, might be much lower in areas where there is place to build, might also be much higher in some areas.) If you do a multi-family home, you can easily build up to 8 town houses or largish apartments on that same area. Say you sell each of these for 500k, leaving the family a good argument to move into this more dense configuration. Even if the construction costs stay the same (they won't), that would leave you with 1.6M for the whole real estate.
impendia 6y ago
Bingo. Decisions are made by those that show up. I'd encourage anyone who cares about these issues to vote, to contact local politicians, to attend local debates or city council meetings.

notJim 6y ago

This take is completely ignorant of the history around this. It is illegal to build anything other than single-family homes in many places in US cities. This is due to an (often-racist) history of homeowners creating laws to keep lower-income people out of their neighborhoods. This continues to this day, where many NIMBY homeowners will fight tooth and nail to prevent any kind of dense development being built in their neighborhood.

0x00000000 6y ago
Yes, and the rhetoric about “preserving the character of the neighborhood” is indistinguishable from that used when this redlining was instituted. Bizarre and sad to see misguided progressives (including renters) with no understanding of economics parrot the same lines and thinking that stopping new construction will keep prices down.

kiba 6y ago

Why is it more 'comfortable'? From my perspective as a free range kid in the 2000s, by far the most dangerous was crossing the 40 mph streets into other neighbourhood and getting a threat to call the police just because I briefly cycled in the neighbor's backyard. In that era, I would want less dangerous streets to cross and actual interconnected bike trails.

enragedcacti 6y ago

welcome to my town where you are legally only allowed to buy black beans. People keep buying them so there must be market demand. the legislation must have followed popular opinion. If people don't like black beans then why are they buying them? Like food, you need housing to survive. housing will be built and purchased because it's necessary, even if legislation mandates a type of housing that isn't well suited to the population. > The legislation followed popular opinion. Agreed. The legislation followed the popular opinion that black people were inferior and dangerous and needed to be priced out of white neighborhoods through draconian zoning laws.

woah 6y ago

I grew up in the suburbs because my parents got priced out of the Bay Area. It was good as a little kid because I could play in the woods. It sucked as a teenager because there was absolutely nothing to do outside of stupid high school drama. I knew a lot of kids who got into opiates, mostly out of boredom.

renewiltord 6y ago

Hmm, interesting. I have this view that two things are prime determiners of a good life as a kid: * Things to explore and do by yourself * Lots of other kids to do these things with But I don't know. I'm not a parent. I wonder if there are studies that show what happens. For what it's worth, this could just be personal bias. I grew up separately in the country when I was very young and then in a Barcelona-style superblock when I was a teenager, and enjoyed both experiences.

CydeWeys 6y ago

Your first two sentences directly contradict each other. There is in fact a lot of market demand for non-fully-detached-single-family-housing that the market is not allowed to satisfy solely because of the zoning legislation. If you actually let the market decide then you will see more density (and cheaper housing options on the lower end).

dublinben 6y ago

If you're interested in learning why this is wrong, the book The Color of Law is an excellent history of the segregationist laws that made things as they are. https://wwnorton.com/books/The-Color-of-Law/ https://wwnorton.com/books/The-Color-of-Law/

refurb 6y ago
What's the connection between redlining (discriminatory housing policies) and demand for single family homes?
- wonder_er 6y ago
  I'm not the OP, but... This connection (between redlining and modern Single-family-house-only zoning districts) is the topic of the recommended book. It's difficult to give a high-quality summary of the book. An NPR story with the author of the book might be a better introduction than anything I could write: https://www.npr.org/2017/05/17/528822128/the-color-of-law-details-how-u-s-housing-policies-created-segregation https://www.npr.org/2017/05/17/528822128/the-color-of-law-de...
- ProfessorLayton 6y ago
  A lot of what makes single family homes desirable, and thus increase demand for them, have discriminatory roots. For example, absurdly high minimum lot sizes and low coverage ordinances were designed to keep cheaper and denser units from being built as a roundabout way to keep POC from desirable neighborhoods. These ordinances remain on the books today, and much of the Bay Area and its insane housing policies is connected to this.

watwut 6y ago

> Every person was a kid, and raising kids is by far more comfortable in single family homes. It is complicated, because distance to school, childcare and to work makes massive difference in child raising too. The distance to friends makes difference between "parent needs to drive the kid for each playdate" vs "the kid walks to play with the friend". This all may mean that kids in flat are easier practically while kids in single family home mean the parent spends all the time driving them around.

gnopgnip 6y ago

San Jose is the third most populous city in CA. 94% of the land in San Jose is restricted to single family homes. Is this because of popular opinion, or because people have no other choice?