7 ms·

California duplex bill, SB 1120, dies: Assembly approval comes too late

49 points by jseliger 6y ago

api 6y ago
Everyone is just going to go virtual/remote and leave. It's clear that the state is run by a property owners' cartel determined to restrict supply until they strangle the place.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- lokar 6y ago
  I feel like towns should have a right to control the feel, density and character. The real issue is that zoning for jobs and housing are out of balance. Towns/Counties should be required to balance them. eg, you can't allow that 500,000sqft office building unless you also zone enough housing for the people who will work there. If a small town wants to stay single family homes, but also is not zoning new jobs, they should not have to change to accommodate other towns zoning tons of office space with no housing.
  - thebradbain 6y ago
    That sounds great in theory, but then you remember that the Bay Area is a metropolitan area of fiefdoms. Why are Daly City, South San Francisco, Brisbane, San Bruno all separate entities? Why are Palo Alto, Atherton, Cupertino, Mountain View, Sunnyvale all separate cities? I can't even begin to list all the Peninsula fiefdoms... and all of Marin County? And yet they all rely on a few job centers (San Jose, San Francisco, Silicon Valley megacampuses...)? Should they really be separate cities, and why do they get a pass on building housing when they're essentially parasitic communities that could not exist without the larger metropolitan areas yet don't support them via city tax money (and in some cases, like Atherton, with a minimum residential lot size of 1+ acre, actively hold back the entire region in the case of CalTrain electrification because they don't want the "inconvenience of more frequent trains" disrupting their community) This isn't just a problem specific to the Bay Area, but all of California. Los Angeles –– and the fact that even within the city of Los Angeles, the legal concept of Neighorhood Councils splits the city itself into political fiefdoms even in the same city council district – and SoCal (especially Orange County) are arguably worse, coming from someone who has lived in both cities. EDIT / Anecdote: I grew up in Dallas (and I still consider it my home), and while that city has its own set of problems, one notable problem it does NOT have is a lack of supply of housing due to red tape around zoning. Dallas, unlike Houston (which has no zoning), is a zoned city, but requesting a zoning exemption takes only a few months rather than a few years, and the overall result is more homes, denser development, newer buildings, and cheaper housing stock. My childhood neighborhood has experienced a lot of nearby development, but would I say the character has notably changed? No.
    - birdyrooster 6y ago
      San Jose is truly one of the least scaled out major cities in California with capacity for multiples of its current residency. Ignore those insular cities up the peninsula and lets build up San Jose and get benefits of scale from being colocated.
      - api 6y ago
        The benefits of scale come with the cost of unaffordability and inability for the middle class to build wealth. I have also come to see it as overrated in general. Concentrations bring benefits but also groupthink and tunnel vision, which is part of why SV works on the same things all the time and Hollywood can only make one movie.
        thebradbain 6y ago
        "Scale comes with the cost of unaffordability" is an opinion, and one that's contrary to the widely shared opinions of experts in the domain, at that.
        api 6y ago
        What places have massive scale and are affordable? Please don't suggest tiny residences. This is fine when you're single, but throw in some kids or other extended family and it becomes highly stressful.
    - mrkstu 6y ago
      Being a unified county/city doesn't seem to have helped San Fran overcome NIMBYism and related ills.
      - thebradbain 6y ago
        You're right. Being a unified county/city doesn't mean that a city will still necessarily get everything (or even most things) right. However, I think it's safe to say that SF and Oakland are doing the most of any other "city" in the Bay Area to add more housing -- though that bar is low, and it's still nowhere near enough.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    That's already the law, actually. It's just poorly enforced. Cupertino just approved a huge office complex that will throw the ratio way off, but no one is stopping them and the penalties are minimal.
benmw333 6y ago
And yet they pass SB 145. Absolute whack jobs running CA.
- codemac 6y ago
  This is why quality local papers & media is so important, because the title of SB 145 is very different that the legal consequences of it's content. The number of friends I have that read nytimes, twitter, etc every day, but don't know the name of their state representatives or even the mayor of their city, is far too high. When I try to talk to them about these issues, I have to start so far back explaining the history of California politics, the statistics of the current issue, etc. Whereas I can talk to them about some minute federal tax detail and they generally teach me. However, I don't know how to make local news more profitable as it's a smaller market.
  - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
    More and more I want to find ways for us to do un profitable things that we agree are good ideas. Yes we have patreon etc which is super good, but I also want ways to better organize groups. Patreon backers are not organized in the traditional sense. They do not hold meetings or have a simple way to talk to one another.
- dntrkv 6y ago
  Why do you think anal/oral sex should be treated different from vaginal?
  - jedberg 6y ago
    I believe what OP was trying to express is that they think vaginal intercourse with a minor should also always require registration regardless of the circumstances. Instead of making it possible for LGBT+ people to be exempt, they want to make it so heterosexual people cannot be exempt.
- anaisbetts 6y ago
  To save you the Google, SB 145 makes the laws around discretion in consensual yet illegal underage sex not explicitly reference "vaginal intercourse", so that they are equivalent for both straight and queer people. This law is unequivocally good. You could certainly make an argument about the tenets before it, where people within 10 years of age do not have to register as sex offenders, but there is absolutely zero reason to special-case heterosexuals.
legitster 6y ago
For me, California is a good case study for how no single political party has a monopoly on good policy. Despite being the biggest and richest state, and there being nearly no major oppositions being raised by an opposing party, the state is struggling with basic governance.
- bosswipe 6y ago
  You should have seen it when Republicans had some power in state government, it was a bunch of shutdowns and manufactured crises.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  Wasn't Prop 13 the baby of everyone's favorite dreamy Democratic California governor, Ronald Reagan? And weren't the Enron rolling blackouts specifically due to giving Enron too much "protection" from the government? That's not to say California isn't also overflowing with bad liberal ideas -- Prop 47 and corporate gender quotas spring to mind -- but the madness seems to be a result of back-and-forth escalation rather than monopoly. If back-and-forth escalation is truly to blame, it doesn't bode well for the USA as a whole, because we certainly seem to be headed down that road.
  - chimeracoder 6y ago
    > everyone's favorite dreamy Democratic California governor, Ronald Regan? Reagan switched parties before he was elected. He was elected as a Republican, not a Democrat.
    - jjoonathan 6y ago
      I know, I was being facetious. I probably could have added scare quotes.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    Prop. 13 was written by a lobbyist for the Los Angeles Apartment Owners' Association and passed during the administration of Jerry Brown, who had been elected 4 years before it passed, and was governor for 4 years after.
clairity 6y ago
that looks like some suspicious politicking given that > "SB 1120 passed the state Senate in June, 39 to 0" one interesting wrinkle in the article is that low-income neighborhoods supposedly opposed the bill in fear of gentrification and being pushed out, presumably because most of these residents don't own their homes. that seems relatively straightforward to address with some additional provisions, unlike the better-off homeowners who want to control other people and property unreasonably. up to 4+1 (fourplex plus accessory unit) should be by right on all residential parcels. homeowners can still decide to build a single-family if they want it, but not be forced into it. note that roughly 2/3 of california residential is zoned single-family only.
- aluminum96 6y ago
  The bill already had a provision preventing division of a lot that had a tenant in the last 3 years.
  - clairity 6y ago
    i guess that provision must have been small consolation to folks facing the downside of gentrification in disadvantaged neighborhoods. it doesn't seem to address the potential abuse of evictions to overcome the implied (but not explicit) restriction on ushering out the disadvantaged.
jfb 6y ago
The central dysfunction of California governance is Proposition 13, the worst law in the state, if not the world.
- mdorazio 6y ago
  Prop 13 is the strongest argument against the entire proposition system. If you give voters direct democracy power, they love to vote in their own self-interest, future problems be damned. I guess it's a system that perfectly matches the "Generation Me" voters that have driven it for decades.
  - JKCalhoun 6y ago
    It works both ways though. When it is a gun safety issue on the ballot (see Washington state ballot measures over the past years) the people are letting the government know that they want fewer guns in society. I suppose it is special interest groups pressuring politicians that prevent them from enacting certain bills popular with the public. Ballot measures seem to be a check on that.
  - notJim 6y ago
    I think the real problem with those systems is that it's relatively easy for a well-funded group or person to influence the outcome or outright abuse the system to their own ends. Pay canvassers ridiculous rates per signature to get it on the ballot, then flood the airwaves with ads supporting your preferred position. If your opponents aren't as well-funded, the deck is stacked against them.
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      The petitioners can also just wage wars of attrition. There's no cooling-off period, so they can just go to the ballot again and again until their junk finally passes, and they can even add one-way moats to their amendments such that they can pass with bare majorities but require supermajorities to amend.
  - jfb 6y ago
OliverJones 6y ago
People argue against deregulating housing density often with second-order issues. For example: "more housing density will only serve the rich" or variants on that theme. "more housing density will change the character of our neighborhood" is another argument. "more housing density will overburden our water / sewer / power / streets" is yet another. "more housing density will overburden our schools and public safety" is another. The first-order argument for higher housing density is this: "There isn't enough housing for the population. Some people are homeless. Other people are paying more than we can afford. We need more housing." The second-order questions are legitimate, but they boil down to tactical issues of carrying capacity. Using them to counter the first-order argument is rhetorical trickery as ancient as Aristotle. If people my age (I have a grandkid) wanted our neighborhoods to stay in some gauzy Ward- and June- Cleaver state, we shoulda got vasectomies at age 20. We didn't.
dmode 6y ago
Let’s face it, California is run by a bunch of faux progressive NIMBYs and their chosen politician. I live in a suburb close to Oakland and my tree lined streets are filled with BLM posters, but our state legislative rep voted against this bill. Nextdoor is full of posts opposing this bill with Trumpian scare mongering “those people will come to your neighborhood if you end single family zoning”. Good news is that things are changing slowly. Lots of young people are getting involved and pushing back. But it will take a while to take NIMBY out of suburbs
DenisM 6y ago
California reminds me of the pre-revolutionary France #. Huge country easily dwarfing its neighbors in size and population, yet hopelessly entangled in a gridlock of various special interests to the point of strangulation. Each one pursues its own best interest, collectively dooming their host to suffocation, and none willing to budge. And it's not just the real estate, and not just California. Healthcare system comes to mind as another clusterfuck - no individual actor seems malevolent or dangerous enough, yet the total is much worse than the sum of the individual participants. # I highly recommend The Revolutions podcast by Mike Duncan.

49 points by jseliger 6y ago

api 6y ago

Everyone is just going to go virtual/remote and leave. It's clear that the state is run by a property owners' cartel determined to restrict supply until they strangle the place.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
lokar 6y ago
I feel like towns should have a right to control the feel, density and character. The real issue is that zoning for jobs and housing are out of balance. Towns/Counties should be required to balance them. eg, you can't allow that 500,000sqft office building unless you also zone enough housing for the people who will work there. If a small town wants to stay single family homes, but also is not zoning new jobs, they should not have to change to accommodate other towns zoning tons of office space with no housing.
- thebradbain 6y ago
  That sounds great in theory, but then you remember that the Bay Area is a metropolitan area of fiefdoms. Why are Daly City, South San Francisco, Brisbane, San Bruno all separate entities? Why are Palo Alto, Atherton, Cupertino, Mountain View, Sunnyvale all separate cities? I can't even begin to list all the Peninsula fiefdoms... and all of Marin County? And yet they all rely on a few job centers (San Jose, San Francisco, Silicon Valley megacampuses...)? Should they really be separate cities, and why do they get a pass on building housing when they're essentially parasitic communities that could not exist without the larger metropolitan areas yet don't support them via city tax money (and in some cases, like Atherton, with a minimum residential lot size of 1+ acre, actively hold back the entire region in the case of CalTrain electrification because they don't want the "inconvenience of more frequent trains" disrupting their community) This isn't just a problem specific to the Bay Area, but all of California. Los Angeles –– and the fact that even within the city of Los Angeles, the legal concept of Neighorhood Councils splits the city itself into political fiefdoms even in the same city council district – and SoCal (especially Orange County) are arguably worse, coming from someone who has lived in both cities. EDIT / Anecdote: I grew up in Dallas (and I still consider it my home), and while that city has its own set of problems, one notable problem it does NOT have is a lack of supply of housing due to red tape around zoning. Dallas, unlike Houston (which has no zoning), is a zoned city, but requesting a zoning exemption takes only a few months rather than a few years, and the overall result is more homes, denser development, newer buildings, and cheaper housing stock. My childhood neighborhood has experienced a lot of nearby development, but would I say the character has notably changed? No.
  - birdyrooster 6y ago
    San Jose is truly one of the least scaled out major cities in California with capacity for multiples of its current residency. Ignore those insular cities up the peninsula and lets build up San Jose and get benefits of scale from being colocated.
    - api 6y ago
      The benefits of scale come with the cost of unaffordability and inability for the middle class to build wealth. I have also come to see it as overrated in general. Concentrations bring benefits but also groupthink and tunnel vision, which is part of why SV works on the same things all the time and Hollywood can only make one movie.
      - thebradbain 6y ago
        "Scale comes with the cost of unaffordability" is an opinion, and one that's contrary to the widely shared opinions of experts in the domain, at that.
        api 6y ago
        What places have massive scale and are affordable? Please don't suggest tiny residences. This is fine when you're single, but throw in some kids or other extended family and it becomes highly stressful.
  - mrkstu 6y ago
    Being a unified county/city doesn't seem to have helped San Fran overcome NIMBYism and related ills.
    - thebradbain 6y ago
      You're right. Being a unified county/city doesn't mean that a city will still necessarily get everything (or even most things) right. However, I think it's safe to say that SF and Oakland are doing the most of any other "city" in the Bay Area to add more housing -- though that bar is low, and it's still nowhere near enough.
- jedberg 6y ago
  That's already the law, actually. It's just poorly enforced. Cupertino just approved a huge office complex that will throw the ratio way off, but no one is stopping them and the penalties are minimal.

benmw333 6y ago

And yet they pass SB 145. Absolute whack jobs running CA.

codemac 6y ago
This is why quality local papers & media is so important, because the title of SB 145 is very different that the legal consequences of it's content. The number of friends I have that read nytimes, twitter, etc every day, but don't know the name of their state representatives or even the mayor of their city, is far too high. When I try to talk to them about these issues, I have to start so far back explaining the history of California politics, the statistics of the current issue, etc. Whereas I can talk to them about some minute federal tax detail and they generally teach me. However, I don't know how to make local news more profitable as it's a smaller market.
- TaylorAlexander 6y ago
  More and more I want to find ways for us to do un profitable things that we agree are good ideas. Yes we have patreon etc which is super good, but I also want ways to better organize groups. Patreon backers are not organized in the traditional sense. They do not hold meetings or have a simple way to talk to one another.
dntrkv 6y ago
Why do you think anal/oral sex should be treated different from vaginal?
- jedberg 6y ago
  I believe what OP was trying to express is that they think vaginal intercourse with a minor should also always require registration regardless of the circumstances. Instead of making it possible for LGBT+ people to be exempt, they want to make it so heterosexual people cannot be exempt.
anaisbetts 6y ago
To save you the Google, SB 145 makes the laws around discretion in consensual yet illegal underage sex not explicitly reference "vaginal intercourse", so that they are equivalent for both straight and queer people. This law is unequivocally good. You could certainly make an argument about the tenets before it, where people within 10 years of age do not have to register as sex offenders, but there is absolutely zero reason to special-case heterosexuals.

legitster 6y ago

For me, California is a good case study for how no single political party has a monopoly on good policy. Despite being the biggest and richest state, and there being nearly no major oppositions being raised by an opposing party, the state is struggling with basic governance.

bosswipe 6y ago
You should have seen it when Republicans had some power in state government, it was a bunch of shutdowns and manufactured crises.
jjoonathan 6y ago
Wasn't Prop 13 the baby of everyone's favorite dreamy Democratic California governor, Ronald Reagan? And weren't the Enron rolling blackouts specifically due to giving Enron too much "protection" from the government? That's not to say California isn't also overflowing with bad liberal ideas -- Prop 47 and corporate gender quotas spring to mind -- but the madness seems to be a result of back-and-forth escalation rather than monopoly. If back-and-forth escalation is truly to blame, it doesn't bode well for the USA as a whole, because we certainly seem to be headed down that road.
- chimeracoder 6y ago
  > everyone's favorite dreamy Democratic California governor, Ronald Regan? Reagan switched parties before he was elected. He was elected as a Republican, not a Democrat.
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    I know, I was being facetious. I probably could have added scare quotes.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Prop. 13 was written by a lobbyist for the Los Angeles Apartment Owners' Association and passed during the administration of Jerry Brown, who had been elected 4 years before it passed, and was governor for 4 years after.

clairity 6y ago

that looks like some suspicious politicking given that > "SB 1120 passed the state Senate in June, 39 to 0" one interesting wrinkle in the article is that low-income neighborhoods supposedly opposed the bill in fear of gentrification and being pushed out, presumably because most of these residents don't own their homes. that seems relatively straightforward to address with some additional provisions, unlike the better-off homeowners who want to control other people and property unreasonably. up to 4+1 (fourplex plus accessory unit) should be by right on all residential parcels. homeowners can still decide to build a single-family if they want it, but not be forced into it. note that roughly 2/3 of california residential is zoned single-family only.

aluminum96 6y ago
The bill already had a provision preventing division of a lot that had a tenant in the last 3 years.
- clairity 6y ago
  i guess that provision must have been small consolation to folks facing the downside of gentrification in disadvantaged neighborhoods. it doesn't seem to address the potential abuse of evictions to overcome the implied (but not explicit) restriction on ushering out the disadvantaged.

jfb 6y ago

The central dysfunction of California governance is Proposition 13, the worst law in the state, if not the world.

mdorazio 6y ago
Prop 13 is the strongest argument against the entire proposition system. If you give voters direct democracy power, they love to vote in their own self-interest, future problems be damned. I guess it's a system that perfectly matches the "Generation Me" voters that have driven it for decades.
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  It works both ways though. When it is a gun safety issue on the ballot (see Washington state ballot measures over the past years) the people are letting the government know that they want fewer guns in society. I suppose it is special interest groups pressuring politicians that prevent them from enacting certain bills popular with the public. Ballot measures seem to be a check on that.
- notJim 6y ago
  I think the real problem with those systems is that it's relatively easy for a well-funded group or person to influence the outcome or outright abuse the system to their own ends. Pay canvassers ridiculous rates per signature to get it on the ballot, then flood the airwaves with ads supporting your preferred position. If your opponents aren't as well-funded, the deck is stacked against them.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    The petitioners can also just wage wars of attrition. There's no cooling-off period, so they can just go to the ballot again and again until their junk finally passes, and they can even add one-way moats to their amendments such that they can pass with bare majorities but require supermajorities to amend.
- jfb 6y ago

OliverJones 6y ago

People argue against deregulating housing density often with second-order issues. For example: "more housing density will only serve the rich" or variants on that theme. "more housing density will change the character of our neighborhood" is another argument. "more housing density will overburden our water / sewer / power / streets" is yet another. "more housing density will overburden our schools and public safety" is another. The first-order argument for higher housing density is this: "There isn't enough housing for the population. Some people are homeless. Other people are paying more than we can afford. We need more housing." The second-order questions are legitimate, but they boil down to tactical issues of carrying capacity. Using them to counter the first-order argument is rhetorical trickery as ancient as Aristotle. If people my age (I have a grandkid) wanted our neighborhoods to stay in some gauzy Ward- and June- Cleaver state, we shoulda got vasectomies at age 20. We didn't.

dmode 6y ago

Let’s face it, California is run by a bunch of faux progressive NIMBYs and their chosen politician. I live in a suburb close to Oakland and my tree lined streets are filled with BLM posters, but our state legislative rep voted against this bill. Nextdoor is full of posts opposing this bill with Trumpian scare mongering “those people will come to your neighborhood if you end single family zoning”. Good news is that things are changing slowly. Lots of young people are getting involved and pushing back. But it will take a while to take NIMBY out of suburbs

DenisM 6y ago

California reminds me of the pre-revolutionary France #. Huge country easily dwarfing its neighbors in size and population, yet hopelessly entangled in a gridlock of various special interests to the point of strangulation. Each one pursues its own best interest, collectively dooming their host to suffocation, and none willing to budge. And it's not just the real estate, and not just California. Healthcare system comes to mind as another clusterfuck - no individual actor seems malevolent or dangerous enough, yet the total is much worse than the sum of the individual participants. # I highly recommend The Revolutions podcast by Mike Duncan.