24 ms·

Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning

255 points by g8oz 5y ago

LurkersWillLurk 5y ago
Just going to point out - ending single family zoning doesn't mean building a single family house is prohibited, it just means that you can build things other than a single family home on a particular plot of land.
- raldi 5y ago
  Right. A better term would be Apartment Prohibition, which swept the country in the 1970s after the Supreme Court said you can't just directly exclude people by race.
  - Schiendelman 5y ago
    Earlier - this started in 1911 when the Supreme Court said that.
    - raldi 5y ago
      https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/fair-housing-act https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/fair-housing-ac...
    - seoaeu 5y ago
      1917: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchanan_v._Warley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchanan_v._Warley
      - raldi 5y ago
        Housing discrimination persisted well beyond 1917. See, for instance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining It wasn't until the late 60's / early 70's that explicit racial discrimination was finally outlawed, and it's not a coincidence that exclusionary zoning took off immediately thereafter as a prima facie race-neutral way to achieve the same outcome.
        seoaeu 5y ago
        No, you have the timeline wrong. Exclusionary zoning took off almost immediately after Buchanan. Some of the original designers specifically cited that Supreme Court case as their motivation for passing such laws. Redlining and racial covenants were also used around that time for similar purposes.
        raldi 5y ago
        As the threat of litigation became a new constant, the San Francisco Planning Department slowly began to craft a new approach to development. The city’s 1971 Urban Design Plan was the first to codify the shift in values from the Modernist freeway-and-tower model toward a greater respect for San Francisco’s unique neighborhoods and their human-scale features. The plan focused on preserving and expanding existing neighborhood character ... But the largest legislative achievement of this emerging anti-growth coalition would be the Residential Rezoning of 1978, a project to implement stricter controls across all of San Francisco’s neighborhoods. In addition to creating 40-foot building-height limits for most residential areas, the legislation included new setback rules (regulating how far a building could be from the public right-of-way), low-density requirements (limiting the number of housing units in a given building), and overall design guidelines aimed at preserving entire neighborhoods in amber. https://www.fastcompany.com/90242388/the-bad-design-that-created-one-of-americas-worst-housing-crises https://www.fastcompany.com/90242388/the-bad-design-that-cre...
        seoaeu 5y ago
        That proves that exclusionary zoning was around in 1971, but not that it wasn't used earlier. Massachusetts amended its constitution in 1918, literally one year after Buchanan, to enable cities to impose zoning. And the idea of using it to create racial segregation was specifically discussed at the time [0]: Of particular concern was the fear that zoning would bring about racial and socioeconomic segregation in Massachusetts, which need not take the form of racial tests, as zoning could just as easily bring about segregation by regulating who could afford certain neighborhoods by income. Pro-zoning advocates... [went ahead anyways] [0]: https://www.cambridgema.gov/~/media/Files/officeofthemayor/2019/acitywhichisdesirableandobtainablecambridgezoninghistory102419.pdf https://www.cambridgema.gov/~/media/Files/officeofthemayor/2...
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - jankyxenon 5y ago
      Highly progressive people continue to self segregate into very non-diverse neighborhoods when buying houses.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - imtringued 5y ago
        They also complain about ghettoization as soon as certain people come to their neighborhood.
      - moosey 5y ago
        This is category error, at a minimum. 'highly progressive people' is an abstraction and cannot take action. It's imagine it's also inductive reasoning and out group bias.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - carom 5y ago
        This was my experience working at Google. Very liberal until you start talking about upzoning, then suddenly "some neighborhoods should keep their character".
        thatfrenchguy 5y ago
        Very liberal until it's time to actually solve their own backyard's problems eh.
        enraged_camel 5y ago
        NIMBY does not mean conservative. Indeed, one of the most annoying things about NIMBYs is that they come in all political shapes and sizes. :)
  - ArkanExplorer 5y ago
    Playing the devils' advocate, is the key to affordable housing to allow neighborhoods, builders etc. to exclude by race? Folks might not be able to choose where they live, but at least they will get cheap housing? Is that a fair trade?
    - rcpt 5y ago
      California voters approved such a law, 1963 Prop 14, but the supreme court struck it down. But don't lose hope for direct democracy yet! A few years later Prop 13, which is arguably worse on minorities https://harvardcrcl.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/Sarkar-Rosenthal.pdf https://harvardcrcl.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/..., passed by a wide margin and continues to see strong support from voting demographics today.
    - dillondoyle 5y ago
      I don't understand what you are (rhetorically) advocating for?
  - ta2164 5y ago
    Nothing stopping Blacks or Hispanics from moving to the suburbs except for the laws of supply and demand. It's no secret that Asians (a historically disadvantaged POC) flock to the suburbs. By definition not racist.
    - raldi 5y ago
      The laws of supply and demand are being manipulated by the powerful: They're suppressing the ability of supply to rise to meet demand, which has the effect of granting windfall profits to the haves while keeping the have-nots away from areas of opportunity.
      - ta2164 5y ago
        Not arguing that, but that is decidedly not racist. It's why educated Blacks in the US are moving back to red Southern states more so than they're moving to blue Northeast and Western ones. It's much cheaper and easier to build new housing in suburban Dallas or Atlanta versus San Francisco, New York, or LA.
        dillondoyle 5y ago
        A big thing I've noticed - especially on HN which is mostly white and male - is we perhaps fundamentally disagree on what 'racist' means. To me I view racism as a larger umbrella. Includes bias, both on the surface but also more broadly what has been cultivated as a society. Context is very important in my definition viewpoint. centuries of historic oppression, which led to unequal wealth, opportunity, and more. ongoing bias which discriminates in hiring and opportunity and more. I view this context as a kind of 'prior' (to use a ML term I don't fully understand lol) when assessing whether or not something is 'racist.' While on the other hand it seems like some view racism as solely a person knowingly and vocally treating one ethnicity differently and discriminating openly. To me I agree with parent and I hold the larger viewpoint. Because of centuries of oppression BIPOC have less money, less opportunity, own less housing, communities are segregated don't have nearly as much ownership in the 'single family neighborhoods' & that community which drives the policy we are talking about. I don't think one can ignore that context, and its implicit bias, when looking at why these laws, regulations, zoning were (and are) being passed. And plus many times it's also explicitly racist like the latter viewpoint; like the language Trump & Republicans use about 'invading' the suburbs.
  - dillondoyle 5y ago
    wow this got long, but I'm in Denver and we have like 4 ballot measures to vote on that revolve around this issue of race, class, development. Specifically Apartment Prohibition!! If anyone is interested. -- denver is going to vote on a ballot measure soon to repeal the repeal of apartment prohibition and I feel it is similarly driven by race & class bias, driven by largely white home owners who literally say they want to protect their wealth (below). Our city council only recently changed zoning to allow an increase from only 2!!! non-related adults living in the same place to 5. It's crazy to me that was ever a limit in the first place. No 3 bed apartments for non-blood relatives?! The old zoning that was fixed also made it harder and limited certain types of group homes, rehabs etc too, especially the number of and locations. One of the filers of this repeal said the following in a press article - clear intent imho. “This affects their very wealth. Their very wealth,” said George E. Mayl, one of the five voters who officially filed to create a referendum committee. “And not only that, their children’s, their heirs’ wealth. Someone’s home is their single largest investment of their life.” also the way they use 'neighborhood' to me is not so veiled language in the context of race and class - just like the many policies and laws in the past. It's used as a rhetorical excuse just like 'protecting the kids' is often used. Similarly like Trump & Reps in 2020 made 'protect the suburbs from' or 'border invasion' a key message. There are another 2 housing measures on the ballot that are competing. A big developer spent like $20 million or something to buy rights for a golf course in the city that they want to develop. They bought it with a green space park easement... But to be profitable they have to repeal the easement so they can built over the park. They gambled on their power to change the law. So they filed a measure to allow them to build more (to be fair they still plan on having a park, but less green space than currently protected in an easement). So now there is a competing measure in response to protect the park. I'm for it we don't have a ton of open green space in Denver and we can't build more. Let's change laws and remove red tape to build UP. What happens if they both pass? who in the world will be able to decipher the two when voting? And what does it say that corporations & white homeowners consistently and so plainly manipulate the law directly for their bottom line (oil and gas is a big one here)? Another one on the ballot around homelessness. HUGE problem, we have tents in residential neighborhoods and lots of theft. But it's pretending to address the problem while really making more laws and regulations to criminalize homelessness and disallow solutions. They're so brave to invest in allowing homeless to sleep in parking lots lol... While simultaneously making it harder to create group living and the rehab that a ton of homeless individuals would greatly benefit from. Thankfully we do have some push by Rep. DeGette and a few others to buy old motels. That's a good investment and would actually help.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  This is a very good step, but I wouldn't mind an outright prohibition either.
  - catern 5y ago
    That's hubris. The reason we're in this situation, where a lack of dense housing is causing housing prices to rise, is because earlier planners were confident 50 years ago that single-family homes were the best option, and they weren't content to just follow that strategy then and there. They decided that this had to be enforced on future people too - us, that is.
    - Ericson2314 5y ago
      I didn't say the ban had to be indefinite. We really need to densify a lot, and do so quickly, and I am skeptical the market will get us the quick enough. Zoning is bad, but don't forget all our good unplanned construction was also pre-auto. Looking at e.g. parts of Texas, I worry that the self-perpetuation dynamics of cars --- which are very strong --- will make a market-based transition away from low density too quite tenuous. I have 0 problem saying in Core areas single family family homes have no place, and we should ban them outright. SFH zoning is bad because it causes land too be wasted, such that future generations have to pay the costs of redevelopment rather than building right on "unimproved" land. Conversely, "too much density", if there even is such a thing, would waste very little land, meaning that a mandated switch back to SFH suburbia would be cheap, just as it was 50+ years ago. It's not hubris, it's learning from our mistakes.
    - mnouquet 5y ago
      > because earlier planners were confident 50 years ago that single-family homes were the best option SFH IS the best options, nobody WANTS to live in an apartment if given the choice.
      - Sacho 5y ago
        You really can't make a categorical statement like that. I prefered living in an apartment because the housing density meant I had a grocery store, a farmer's market, and multiple other commercial hubs within walking distance. It also meant that street planning gave priority to public transport and pedestrians. There were plenty of jobs available within reasonable commute times. My neighbours gave me an easy-to-access network of people that you could befriend and somewhat rely on. There's so many positives to living in an apartment that are pretty much direct effects of the denser housing.
slothtrop 5y ago
They needed this decades ago.
- mhb 5y ago
  The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
pmoriarty 5y ago
Some of the objections from the article: Sean Kieghran, president of San Francisco's Residential Builders Association, said he supports getting rid of single-family only zoning but doesn't think it will result in many new units. Kieghran said that building fourplexes requires either two staircases or a staircase and an elevator, which takes up too much of the site. And, unless the city streamlined the process of building a fourplex on a single-family lot, builders would run into too many bureaucratic obstacles, Kieghran said. "With how long it takes to get through planning and fire and DPW and all the other red tape it's not likely we are going to see anybody building fourplexes anytime soon," he said. ... One of the few architects to design fourplexes on single-family sized lots in the last few decades is Daniel Solomon, who has worked on three such projects... "These are nifty little projects, but they won't make a big dent in the housing need," Solomon said. "That zoning is a tool to create housing production is a widely held and completely fallacious idea. Just because something is permitted doesn't mean it happens. It's very hard to find a vacant lot or tear down at a price that would work." He said the fourplexes he designed and built were profitable, but barely. And they took as much time to design and execute as the 100-unit complexes his firm, Mithun, is known for. "You would need to find a developer willing to take a risk on a minuscule profit and an architect who enjoys brain damage," he said. "They are complicated little projects. It's the absolute opposite of economy of scale."
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  These don’t read so much as objections as pointing out that the zoning change is necessary but not sufficient.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- bilbo0s 5y ago
  building fourplexes requires either two staircases or a staircase and an elevator Wow. That means they can get away with one staircase in San Fran. Wouldn't fly where I'm from. His material point is correct though. Real estate development is about money. Where I live, you can generally only make money on fourplexes where land prices are low enough. I don't know much about San Fran real estate, but from what I've heard, land is not very cheap. I would think in San Fran larger apartment complexes would be more profitable. Of course then there are all kinds of other headaches, like getting all the lots you need in the exact same contiguous area. Which also doesn't sound cheap in San Fran. So maybe what I meant is luxury condos instead of apartments? Point is that however it happens the money math has to work.
softwaredoug 5y ago
Planning is a perverse set of incentives. First it’s usually longer term thinking, where decisions made now impact the shape of a city decades out. Second, the people that live in a place now have undue influence and veer conservative in how land is used (ie NIMBYism). This often gives rise to at least near term stagnation (on a historical scale) in established, wealthy cities and growth in up and coming metros that don’t have a reason to preserve the current city planning policies. I don’t know if there’s a solution. Cities may just go through decade long cycles of stagnation and revitalization as NIMBY generations die off, there’s less “romance” around the current character/ the place falls into disrepair, the city wants to attract new folks, and newer generations have strong demand for different modes of living.
- mkoubaa 5y ago
  Among the most beautiful cities in world are those that were not planned, but were just allowed to happen. I don't know where we get the mindset that planning is necessary to begin with
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    How do you determine if planning or not planning is a causative factor? Maybe it’s just luck and maybe most unplanned cities do not survive to be viewed as beautiful. I am sure scale of planning matters too, and that there was at least a little bit of planning, but perhaps smaller in scale. The more evident factor in “beautiful” cities is probably that they came about before the advent of personal automobiles. They are much more pleasant to be in outside of a vehicle, and hence more “beautiful” simply because there were no vehicles at the time, and so whatever developed, planned or unplanned, had parameters that only considered people not in big boxes moving at high speeds.
  - sologoub 5y ago
    Paris is usually cited as a beautiful city and it definitely has undergone some serious transformation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann's_renovation_of_Paris https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann's_renovation_of_Pa...
  - 5y ago
spodek 5y ago
There's so much to object to about the idea that Earth is overpopulated. Then you get it and it hits you like a ton of bricks. The signs are everywhere and couldn't be more clear. But we're addicted to growth and efficiency, ignoring our limits, and our addiction blinds us to seeing what's plainly all around.
- raldi 5y ago
  When you prevent housing from being constructed in cities, the families that would've lived there don't disappear; they sprawl elsewhere and — as confirmed by statistics — go on to have more children than they otherwise would've.
- pitaj 5y ago
  The primary objection is that "overpopulation" is badly defined when it comes to humanity.
  - eplanit 5y ago
    It's a taboo topic because of people's fears and anxieties that it triggers. A (cold) rational perspective sees that many (if not most) challenges facing society share a root cause of there being simply too many people.
- _-david-_ 5y ago
  Earth is not overpopulated. The problem is that certain places have too much population density. If everyone spread out across the world there wouldn't be any of these issues. For a variety of reason people can't or won't spread out.
  - shipman05 5y ago
    Spreading out would be the worst case scenario for the environment. (And I'm afraid we might see it due to easy remote work) A single apartment building uses far fewer resources per person than the equivalent number of people would if they all had 10 acre lots in the countryside. The habitat destruction alone would be an ecological disaster.
CincinnatiMan 5y ago
Something I like about this article is how it gets a bit into the financials and the complications that arise. I would love more information and detail on this though about the costs of SFH vs quadplex vs huge apartment building and so on. Like how do costs jump when you have to switch from timber frame to steel frame, and things of that nature. Would love to learn more on this if anyone knows where it can be found.
plank_time 5y ago
People are stupid if they think this will fix things. I went to the peninsula looking at houses and the new trend is to add ADUs as part of the house or in the back. You know why? To help the owners pay off their $3M houses they used to be $1M 8 years ago. This then figures into the calculus of how much you can afford to buy a house for. What is an unaffordable $8000/month mortgage now becomes $6000/month. So people keep bidding higher and higher. People in the Bay Area don’t realize that every little thing that keeps costs low gets funneled back into house prices. Interest on mortgage is tax deductible? Oh that means I can afford more house. The public schools are good? That saves me $3000/month so I can funnel that into the mortgage. Commute is shorter by 20 mins? That means $200/month extra I can spend on the house. There is no answer except for rich employers like Google and Facebook to spread out their headquarters across the world. Too many rich engineers with their stock going up 10-20x is what is fueling the housing crunch. Or create entire new cities along 280 where there is plenty of space. Invest in new cities, not try to cram more people in the same small area.
- rytor718 5y ago
  This problem really does require competent city planning and a willing cohort of politicians to step up and make some dramatic, timely changes (good luck with that tho). The market cannot and will not figure this out, unless we define solution as "whatever the wealthy want to do is fine, homelessness and rents higher than a mortgage be damned".
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > People in the Bay Area don’t realize that every little thing that keeps costs low gets funneled back into house prices. Because the root cause is the demand for housing in Bay Area is far outstripping supply. You must tweak either or both of those to move the price. Addressing supply certainly does, but it might not be sufficient supply to overcome the demand. But it does help the situation.
  - nosianu 5y ago
    My suspicion is that this might end up like more/wider streets and highways: You built it => it will be filled to capacity asap and there is no difference in the end, only more of the same (literally). Of course, this won't happen to infinity but far enough. In the end the area is just too attractive, combined with the industries there generate a lot of money.
austincheney 5y ago
Is the bigger problem availability or pricing? Where I live (in the US) increasing housing availability drives up housing prices proportionally. The way that works is that demand is fairly constant due to people moving in driving up the population (about 22.4% decade over decade) but there aren’t geographic limitations on construction. Real estate is a fixed resource though and you can only build so many houses before filling an area and pushing out the commute. In the spaces left over, after large scale housing developments, come the numerous large apartment complexes. The increased number of multi family dwellings drives up the price of single family houses. I have seen this pattern repeated various times in both median and extremely wealthy areas. Consequently, avoiding new construction either results in depreciation or merely delays the same pattern even by up 15 years.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > The increased number of multi family dwellings drives up the price of single family houses. Increased demand for single family homes drives up price of single family homes. People moving in drives up price of land and dwelling units, obviously because people need a place to live. The only thing that can move price down is demand decreasing (which will not happen if people are migrating in) or supply increasing sufficiently to accommodate demand. You obviously live in one of the most in demand places in the US right now, and so almost no amount of supply will keep up with demand to cause prices to stop going up. But at the end of the day, price is always a function of supply and demand. > Consequently, avoiding new construction either results in depreciation or merely delays the same pattern even by up 15 years. Places that are not desirable to live in simply do not have construction. Why would people want to invest in areas that they predict will depreciate or stagnate? There is no construction in Cairo, IL, but they are not avoiding construction to prevent prices from increasing.
  - austincheney 5y ago
    Increased demand drives up construction rates before it drives up prices. The only thing close to what you are describing is approximate commute distance.
0xB31B1B 5y ago
I don’t think the “land/development prices are too high to build a lot” from the developers will hold if 4plex zoning goes through. Land prices for this are high because there are extremely few opportunities to do this right now under existing zoning, under the new regime there are many more opportunities so the market tilts a bit from seller power to buyer power. As for construction costs, they suck to build because no one builds these right now so each one is basically bespoke, but if they suddenly become legal you’re going to see a cohort of developer specializing in these, learning how to do them well, and cashing in big time. You see this in other market (Portland) who have made the change already. It seems to be the SF developers are just too brain poisoned from the past entirety of their careers to see that a better world is actually possible.
sys_64738 5y ago
What about the increases in cars and foot traffic this creates, and how will increases to road congestion and transport services be mitigated? How will electric, sewer and water services handle this increases in utilization? There seems to be a multitude of factors at play in this.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Cars are bad. Walk, bike and take public transport --- aka learn from the large cities that already exist. If we presume everyone drives, then all the de-zoning and other measures will never succeed, and e.g. SF is already at max density. If we believe we can make car usage go down, our current streets will be good enough for 10x growth.
vlovich123 5y ago
Go further. Get rid of all zoning that’s unrelated to pollution of some kind or strictly a safety issue. Why is the government involved in whether I can run a business from my home? Why is the government responsible for controlling where businesses might be located instead of the free market controlling that aspect more dynamically?
- Retric 5y ago
  The reasonable justification is government builds public infrastructure like schools, highways, and subways based on assumptions about use and population density. It’s much harder and more expensive to have reasonable infrastructure if you can’t make accurate predictions. The de facto justification is indirect negative externalities exist like traffic congestion. Also known as F U I got mine.
  - fiter 5y ago
    With uses segregated, the "reasonable" argument does not make sense to me: infrastructure will have to be maximized because there will be big migrations of people based on normal use times like going to work. You need twice as much parking, twice as much freeway throughput.
    - Retric 5y ago
      Don’t just think in terms of low density around current American cities. Plopping down a subdivisions in a sleepy county can quickly overwhelm local school systems, sewage treatment, etc. Even just 7% annual growth doubles the local population every decade which requires incredible and increasing investments in infrastructure. Slowing that down slightly is hardly unreasonable and it can help avoid expensive and damaging boom / bust cycles.
- jorts 5y ago
  Opening a chicken farm or leather tannery in a residential neighborhood sounds great.
notacoward 5y ago
Most of the land in my (Massachusetts) town is zoned for single-family homes. There are several identifiable square-mile or larger areas with nothing but homes plus maybe one school and one church. Maybe a gas station / Dunkin Donuts within fifteen-minute walking distance. That's no way to live. I'd love to change it, with greater zoning diversity and particularly that which allows higher density, but there valid objections to doing it all at once. Roads would need to be upgraded and then maintained, at direct town expense, plus dealing with increased traffic. Ditto for water and sewer lines, minus the traffic issue. Electrical, gas, and communications are better in that they're not at town expense but worse in that more parties have to be involved (and they tend to cheap out even more than the town does). And then there's schools - the town's crown jewels and the main reason anyone lives here. They're excellent but already overcrowded. Work is under way to fix that, but we really can't afford to add even more stress to that system. These are very real issues that I'm sensitive to, even though I also think there are other issues - especially racial and income diversity - that we must address in the longer term. These same issues recur many other places, I'm sure including the Bay Area. It has to be not only allowable but profitable for developers to do the actual building, or else they won't, and then the town needs property-tax revenue from each tranche before they begin the next. It's a very tricky dance, and I do not at all envy the people on zoning/planning boards trying to reconcile all these conflicting needs.
- pdonis 5y ago
  > I'd love to change it The simplest way to change your own situation is to move. Different towns, cities, rural areas, etc. with different land uses exist so that people with different preferences can all find some place that reasonably matches their preferences. Making them all the same just so they match your personal preferences makes the situation worse, not better.
  - notacoward 5y ago
    You're assuming infinite variety exists, or can exist. That's so absurd that it's hard to believe it was meant in good faith. No, I can't just select from a menu. What if I want good schools and other facilities that few towns have, and proximity to the people/places that matter to me, and a town that's not so much single-family-home wasteland everywhere but the center? What if I want other people who aren't millionaires to have access to some of these things? Oops, me moving doesn't solve that. Sometimes you have to build the kind of place you want (or think should exist) and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Every town that already exists has been shaped by the conscious choices of people who live there and vote there and serve in offices there. I have just as much right to push for what I want as any of them did. P.S. Almost forgot to point out the "making them all the same" strawman. Never suggested that, champ.
muststopmyths 5y ago
It's received wisdom on HN that the Bay Area housing crisis is caused by NIMBYs and restrictive zoning laws. On the other hand my sense, based on anecdata, is that a large proportion of the condos constructed in the past 15-ish years in eastern SF (Embarcadero, Rincon, etc.) and SOMA/Dogpatch are owned by absentee landlords as investment property. Since these folk are mostly rich SV types (or wealthy overseas investors), they can afford the eye-watering prices. Their renters are also well-paid techies, so they can pay the hyper-inflated rents. So I believe the housing crisis is instead a result of society deciding that no one actually has a right to a home of their own. Instead, it is in fact a good thing to engage in literally rent-seeking behavior[0] and we should all be in a race to accumulate the most wealth we can to pass down to our offspring, so that they can continue this cycle. If my analysis is correct, then more construction will just result in more of the same. Rich people buying 2 and 3rd homes that they rent out to people who are here for the short term and can afford inflated rents. It seems to me a good first step would instead be to slap a Vancouver-style 15% property tax on any home that is not occupied by the owner (not just foreigners). Of course, there is no way in hell Californians will actually do something that requires actual self-sacrifice, so that's never going to happen. ( I have more anecdata about SV residents buying 2 or 3 houses in the Austin area in order to capitalize on the real estate boom caused by other SV ex-residents moving there, further driving up costs in the area. But let's restrict the discussion to SF Bay Area for now). This theory is obviously based on feels rather than data, since I don't know of any way to actually get ownership/residence data broken down this way. That would probably violate all kinds of privacy laws. I would love to be disabused of my notions with data. Not motivated-reasoning "studies" by think-tanks who have vested interests, but actual data. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking (the rent seekers in this case being all the homeowners who resist any property tax reform which would affect their bottom line)
- burlesona 5y ago
  The number of people who want to move in to live and work in the Bay Area so vastly exceeds the supply of new housing that it is like a Sotheby’s auction where only the richest can win. This is reinforced by the fact that it takes so long to get permission to build anything that you can only make money by developing super luxury property. In a well-functioning city you can make money building anything from mid-market up. Affordable housing is the stuff that was mid market 10-20 years ago, or luxury 20-40 years ago. If you want to see this in the real world, just look at the market for cars. More here: https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-way-to-affordable-housing/ https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...
Gimpei 5y ago
Article seems to suggest that SF lots aren't large enough for 4-plexes to be economically feasible. I wonder what the minimum height is for this to work. Five stories perhaps? The SF supervisor Mandelman who was mentioned in the article has been against all of Weiner's housing bills, so he has zero credibility in my book.
- burlesona 5y ago
  I lived in a two-unit townhome in SF. The lot on one side was a large single family. The lot on the other side was an eight unit apartment. All the lots were the same size. They even all had parking. The lot sizes are not a physical problem. They may be a political problem (ie. the issue is people don’t want new tall buildings built).
xivzgrev 5y ago
Has anyone SEEN a typical SF plot? They’re basically enough for a small 1000-2000 sq ft home, a parking spot, and a little back yard. No one ain’t building a four plex on that, unless a) the height restriction is also raised b) one parking space per unit no longer required and c) some fancy footwork somehow incentivizing adjoining plots to combine. If you had two plots and lifted the restrictions, then I could see making 4 units comfortably out of that. But seeing how unlikely it is two neighbors sell at the same time, seems unlikely I think this would be more meaningful in other cities, where there are a lot of ranch style homes / bigger plots
- seibelj 5y ago
  In Boston and surrounding areas the “triple decker” is very common - three 1000 square foot condos, driveway leading to compact car parking in back, small yard or none at all. The buildings are not connected but the space between is the driveway on one side and a small path on the other to store trash cans. There are tens of thousands of these if not hundreds of thousands.
- mercutio2 5y ago
  San Fransisco has already removed (b) as an issue [0]. When SF made that change, you had people saying the same thing “this won’t change anything because you can’t build the housing that’s needed”. No one is saying that this, by itself, with zero other changes, will resolve the issue. I prefer to applaud individual incremental improvements than belabor the fact that this one change is not enough. [0] https://www.livablecity.org/time-san-francisco-say-goodbye-minimum-parking-requirements/ https://www.livablecity.org/time-san-francisco-say-goodbye-m...
travisgriggs 5y ago
When I read articles like this, where the solutions proposed are to make it more efficient (legally, operationally, fiscally) for more people to live in smaller places, I'm curious how that resolves with others' sense of the desire for privacy. I realize the privacy conversation here usually revolves around ad tech, but for me at least, it's more general than that. And I find that the denser the population, no matter how optimal it is, creates more constraints for me as a human being. There's a sweet spot in the human equation for me, when I am the most liberty to enjoy self determination and free well, but also rub shoulders socially with enough of the rest of mankind that I enjoy the magnification that happens when we work together. So I applaud efforts to get people in equitable homes--I have a married daughter who takes care of my wonderful wonderful 20mo grand twins, and I fear and angst for their future housing prospects in this country--but if they're just cages for rent in the end, did we really get the real prize?
- gnopgnip 5y ago
  A multi family home in practice is much larger than a comparably priced single family home. They can both be owned, or rented
DevKoala 5y ago
I am of the idea that we need to focus on building new cities and more efficient roads to connect them. I don’t want to live in the Bay Area particularly, but when I have to go to SF, it sucks that sometimes it can take up to 2 hours to commute 30 miles. As a software architect, it feels as if the common recipe for solving a scalability problem is decentralization for which you need an awesome messaging system. I do not get why we keep centralizing ourselves around the Bay Area. I am not an expert in the field so perhaps I am coming from a point of ignorance here, but I am genuinely curious as to why. The USA built the most new cities and roads during the time it prospered, and it seems that we stopped doing that. Not long ago, Elon Musk was highlighting how fast China continues building infrastructures to satisfy the demands of their growing population, and I had noticed that too thanks to friends who have tons of awesome things to say about their visits. Why we don’t go that route? It seems like China is kicking our ass there.
- elbasti 5y ago
  > and more efficient roads. The efficiency of roads is limited by the fact that the vehicles occupying them are large, individually piloted, and have slow reaction times. Throughout is limited because, as cars go faster, they need to be spaced out more. We have known this for seventy years. Automobile highways simply cannot work for ultra high throughput corridors.
  - DevKoala 5y ago
    Fine, let’s evolve our transportation units. We just need to rethink the problem as a whole. I don’t want to go into conspiracy theory territory, but it does seem as if there are powerful entities that are invested in maintaining the status quo or perhaps it’s just incompetence.
    - ericmay 5y ago
      It’s both. There’s a lot of “we’ve always done it this way” and “what would I ever do without taking my car everywhere???” And then there are construction companies, automobile companies, and oil and gas companies that employ a lot of people. Kind of hard to employ those people if we built more sidewalks and bike lanes, and built medium-density mixed use neighborhoods. Where’s the lobby against the automobile industry and all the deaths that cars cause? Aren’t car wrecks the #1 cause of death of teenagers? “But utility of cars!!” Well that utility only exists because we’ve decided to create it, not that it’s actually necessary. If in reading this comment you find yourself disagreeing, think about the alleyways and layout of Lago d’Orta for example. Oh but how do they live without 2 cars per household!?
lamontcg 5y ago
They should just largely remove these kinds of zoning laws, raise the height restriction to at least 6 stories and maybe require a commercial ground floor for buildings over a certain footprint and/or on arterials. Allow builders to combine lots. Get rid of the parking and driveway requirements as well. At least do this in strips down arterials so that entire blocks could be converted to high density mixed residential/commercial. Of course there goes your rents and home prices, but now if you actually lived in the surrounding area you'd be able to easier walk to shops and with rents being less that'd wind up eventually as lower prices and lower cost of living. Its not surprising that the half-measures they're taking almost seems designed to not have a lot of actual uptake.
- dillondoyle 5y ago
  I would add removing car parking requirements AND simultaneously pay for public transport, dedicated protected bike lanes etc to serve this new density. Like you mention importance of stores. I would maybe subsidize grocers & shops with tax breaks for a few years to get the walkability cycle going. The cart before horse problem, build it and they will come theory.
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    Exactly, make it all walkable/bikable with mass transit down the arterials, and incentives and density to attract the commerce. Particularly for mom+pop stores/restaurants. And have it all near enough school and offices that a <10 minute bus ride can get you to those campuses. And you can still have islands of SFH/Townhouses that are within ~4 blocks of high density (I'd probably prefer that since I'm quite introverted most of the time).
gumby 5y ago
Shockingly Palo Alto joined a lawsuit to try and prevent this kind of thing being mandated. The progressive city I used to live in (section 8 housing, homeless housing, source of random bands like Grateful Dead, Joan baez, grace slick) was taken over by the greed lobby when the dot com boom hit and has become an “I got mine, jack” colony.
- rcpt 5y ago
  The "greed lobby" originated in Utah and was named Howard Jarvis. All of California became a real estate investment hellscape after he left his mark. Dot com has nothing to do with it
  - gumby 5y ago
    I get your point, but I'm talking about Palo Alto specifically. Even in the 90s Palo Alto had SRO housing for the homeless, required section 8 housing in new developments, and a lower median income than neighboring Menlo Park or Los Altos (and I read actually MV too, though I find that hard to believe). There was more tolerance for goofball behavior, though perhaps less than the 70s or 80s. But 21st century Palo Alto is a different beast, and much more boring. People moved here to gain wealth (rather than nerd out) and once they had it, flaunt it. It's a real shame; there are plenty of other places to do that.
Baeocystin 5y ago
This seems like a good thread to link to https://missingmiddlehousing.com/ https://missingmiddlehousing.com/ , which is a site I've seen discussed directly here on HN several times previous. I am still in the process of consolidating my opinions on this, but I did find it an interesting, useful read.
- smichel17 5y ago
  On the about page, I found > We call them “Missing” because they have typically been illegal to build since the mid-1940s but I could not easily find and further explanation about why this is, etc
  - Baeocystin 5y ago
    They go in to further detail about that on https://missingmiddlehousing.com/about/how-to-enable https://missingmiddlehousing.com/about/how-to-enable .
    - u678u 5y ago
      Interesting. It doesn't say they're illegal, it says they're illegal in Single Family suburbs. Its like they want the benefits of low density housing but somehow not do low density housing.
  - guruz 5y ago
    By coincidence, I watched this video about missing middle houses this morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCOdQsZa15o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCOdQsZa15o
rdxm 5y ago
lol...good luck with that....tech is already bailing....i can't imagine one reason to domicile a business in the bay area at this point....it's over.....
kingsuper20 5y ago
I like the idea of building massive apartment complexes in the Bay Area. It was a PITA place to live 30 years ago and it's worse now The thing is, if we can build giant ant mounds in just a few places it'll save the central coast and California north of the Golden Gate from destruction. Step two would be to connect the giant metro areas to the rest of the state via a dirt road.
Lammy 5y ago
Relevant: https://fiftythree.studio/blogs/news/lets-talk-about-why-la-cant-build-new-housing https://fiftythree.studio/blogs/news/lets-talk-about-why-la-... "The small apartment buildings that triggered this revolt are called are called 'dingbats'. They're those boxy buildings you see all over the place with pompous names like 'La Traviata' or 'Chateau Antoinette'. These kinds of housing weren't pretty, but they were no-frills apartments you could afford if you were an actor, or a grocery clerk, or a secretary. This scared the hell out of homeowners in rich neighborhoods, because apartments were for poor people and minorities. So, we voted for politicians who reduced the zoning of LA bit by bit, effectively freezing the status quo in place. And after 1970, rich communities just stopped building new housing, period. You can see the results from the population table below."
- dheera 5y ago
  From TFA > But while the movement to allow multifamily buildings in zones previously limited to single-family homes How is this even a thing? Couldn't two families just define themselves as a big extended family? They could for example just have two people marry for a day, move into the upstairs and downstairs respectively, and then get divorced the next day to hack the system.
  - dillondoyle 5y ago
    It's 100% a thing in law. Denver up until very recently only allowed 2!!! They shouldn't have to. That's a ton of work. At one point in time black people could vote if they 'hacked the system' by paying or passing a test.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - closeparen 5y ago
    “Single family” is a property of the building, not the people living in it. A multi-family building has separately locking units with their own kitchens. Where there are too many large houses and not enough apartments, many of the houses end up with would-be apartment dwellers living communally. You do sometimes here about communities trying to enforce prohibitions on unrelated people living together in single family homes, but where the zoning itself is almost universal in America, such enforcement is very rare.
atomicfiredoll 5y ago
I think that single family housing, especially in cities dealing with lack of availability, likely needs to go. And other changes need to be made on top of that. But, assuming we were able to replace single family housing with 3 or 4 plexes, where does that leave home ownership? I'm concerned the transformation of single family homes to apartments would just present another opportunity wealth and property to move from private owners to conglomerated investment or the rich. Personally, my best experiences have always been renting with private owners, so if people have to rent in the future, hopefully they aren't stuck doing so from a comparatively small number of management companies that control the market.
- xputer 5y ago
  3 or 4 plexes are not going to solve the housing issue in the bay area, because many single family homes are already being used that way. They need to build dense urban cores with residential high rise and mixed use mid rise. Ideally close to Caltrain and BART stations, but additionally every single family zoned neighborhood should be given such an urban core. That way it would create more dense pockets all throughout the area, which would make it possible to bring alternative modes of transit into all neighborhoods by connecting these dense pockets with rail, bus routes and bike lanes.
zachware 5y ago
I've developed several multifamily projects including my current focus, a 72-unit apartment development. Proposals like these, while admirable, usually miss the mark and have little to no impact on housing availability because they fail to accept that housing development isn't just about zoning. Impact fees, planning regs (traffic, parking, etc), planning delays, NIMBY fights, labor costs...these are all inputs into the question of whether a multifamily development makes economic sense for a developer. There is a formula under which you can build market-rate and/or affordable housing (sometimes the same) and when that formula checks out, you see lots of development. All of that has to work out to a cost per door and that cost has to be recouped in rents that pay for opex and debt. The fourplex in the article would cost $562,500/door. A very basic calc of the necessary rents would be $4,950. California, particularly San Francisco, has pressures at every step of that formula. So if the Bay Area wants more housing, it has to be willing to look at the problem holistically. - What role do planning review delays play in increasing the costs and perceived risk of acquiring a parcel and going through the process? - What % of potential building sites are classified as historical properties? - What are the parking, traffic impact and roadway requirements that multifamily traffic counts will have to mitigate/build for? - What power do unions have to dictate building programs? - Who can object to proposals? I'm not suggesting that everything has to be Texas-style free markets, but to solve the problem one has to be willing to admit that it may require something a bit more comprehensive that simply changing zoning.
- andbberger 5y ago
  Sure, single-family zoning is a necessary but not sufficient development for housing reform. Can't have density with it, but doesn't mean there isn't a laundry list of other things wrong with housing in the bay
- lostsubways 5y ago
  The zoning isn't everything, but it's definitely one of the things that has to change. If everywhere in California had Sacramento's ministerial housing ordinance (60-90 day approvals, everything as of right), AND zoning reform, AND major reduction in impact fees, you'd start to make a dent in the problem. Rezoning is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
sjg007 5y ago
Maybe Oakland will do it and become an economic superstar...
killjoywashere 5y ago
Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20210301050437/https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-cities-want-to-end-single-family-home-15983648.php http://web.archive.org/web/20210301050437/https://www.sfchro...
screye 5y ago
Reading about opposition to multi-family housing reminds me of opposition to nuclear energy. Regulations for both are substantially higher than those imposed on the conventional choice, making them more expensive in through self-fulfilling prophecies. Additionally, having stopped working on them for 40 years means that the US is completely clueless about building them in an effective manner. Thus, the populace and even planners feel like the only choice is 50 year old infrastructure solutions. This also means that secondary ecosystems have developed with assumptions of the conventional choice, rendering the alternatives unable to take advantage of these secondary ecosystems. Lastly, somehow arguments around both end up appearing far more ideological than scientific. Now, I am squarely on the nuclear/multi-family side of things, but it is particularly difficult to find consensus within the community on it.
khazhoux 5y ago
> explore the benefits of getting rid of a land use policy designed to keep people of color and working class families out of certain neighborhoods. The article provides no reference to this claim of racism. I personally find it more likely that these zoning laws are simply to control density.
joelbondurant 5y ago
USA brand tax cattle objects must be at maximum social compliance or be drone bombed, unite or die USA.

255 points by g8oz 5y ago

Just going to point out - ending single family zoning doesn't mean building a single family house is prohibited, it just means that you can build things other than a single family home on a particular plot of land.

raldi 5y ago
Right. A better term would be Apartment Prohibition, which swept the country in the 1970s after the Supreme Court said you can't just directly exclude people by race.
- Schiendelman 5y ago
  Earlier - this started in 1911 when the Supreme Court said that.
  - raldi 5y ago
    https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/fair-housing-act https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/fair-housing-ac...
  - seoaeu 5y ago
    1917: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchanan_v._Warley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchanan_v._Warley
    - raldi 5y ago
      Housing discrimination persisted well beyond 1917. See, for instance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining It wasn't until the late 60's / early 70's that explicit racial discrimination was finally outlawed, and it's not a coincidence that exclusionary zoning took off immediately thereafter as a prima facie race-neutral way to achieve the same outcome.
      - seoaeu 5y ago
        No, you have the timeline wrong. Exclusionary zoning took off almost immediately after Buchanan. Some of the original designers specifically cited that Supreme Court case as their motivation for passing such laws. Redlining and racial covenants were also used around that time for similar purposes.
        raldi 5y ago
        As the threat of litigation became a new constant, the San Francisco Planning Department slowly began to craft a new approach to development. The city’s 1971 Urban Design Plan was the first to codify the shift in values from the Modernist freeway-and-tower model toward a greater respect for San Francisco’s unique neighborhoods and their human-scale features. The plan focused on preserving and expanding existing neighborhood character ... But the largest legislative achievement of this emerging anti-growth coalition would be the Residential Rezoning of 1978, a project to implement stricter controls across all of San Francisco’s neighborhoods. In addition to creating 40-foot building-height limits for most residential areas, the legislation included new setback rules (regulating how far a building could be from the public right-of-way), low-density requirements (limiting the number of housing units in a given building), and overall design guidelines aimed at preserving entire neighborhoods in amber. https://www.fastcompany.com/90242388/the-bad-design-that-created-one-of-americas-worst-housing-crises https://www.fastcompany.com/90242388/the-bad-design-that-cre...
        seoaeu 5y ago
        That proves that exclusionary zoning was around in 1971, but not that it wasn't used earlier. Massachusetts amended its constitution in 1918, literally one year after Buchanan, to enable cities to impose zoning. And the idea of using it to create racial segregation was specifically discussed at the time [0]: Of particular concern was the fear that zoning would bring about racial and socioeconomic segregation in Massachusetts, which need not take the form of racial tests, as zoning could just as easily bring about segregation by regulating who could afford certain neighborhoods by income. Pro-zoning advocates... [went ahead anyways] [0]: https://www.cambridgema.gov/~/media/Files/officeofthemayor/2019/acitywhichisdesirableandobtainablecambridgezoninghistory102419.pdf https://www.cambridgema.gov/~/media/Files/officeofthemayor/2...
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - jankyxenon 5y ago
    Highly progressive people continue to self segregate into very non-diverse neighborhoods when buying houses.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - imtringued 5y ago
      They also complain about ghettoization as soon as certain people come to their neighborhood.
    - moosey 5y ago
      This is category error, at a minimum. 'highly progressive people' is an abstraction and cannot take action. It's imagine it's also inductive reasoning and out group bias.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - carom 5y ago
      This was my experience working at Google. Very liberal until you start talking about upzoning, then suddenly "some neighborhoods should keep their character".
      - thatfrenchguy 5y ago
        Very liberal until it's time to actually solve their own backyard's problems eh.
      - enraged_camel 5y ago
        NIMBY does not mean conservative. Indeed, one of the most annoying things about NIMBYs is that they come in all political shapes and sizes. :)
- ArkanExplorer 5y ago
  Playing the devils' advocate, is the key to affordable housing to allow neighborhoods, builders etc. to exclude by race? Folks might not be able to choose where they live, but at least they will get cheap housing? Is that a fair trade?
  - rcpt 5y ago
    California voters approved such a law, 1963 Prop 14, but the supreme court struck it down. But don't lose hope for direct democracy yet! A few years later Prop 13, which is arguably worse on minorities https://harvardcrcl.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/Sarkar-Rosenthal.pdf https://harvardcrcl.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/..., passed by a wide margin and continues to see strong support from voting demographics today.
  - dillondoyle 5y ago
    I don't understand what you are (rhetorically) advocating for?
- ta2164 5y ago
  Nothing stopping Blacks or Hispanics from moving to the suburbs except for the laws of supply and demand. It's no secret that Asians (a historically disadvantaged POC) flock to the suburbs. By definition not racist.
  - raldi 5y ago
    The laws of supply and demand are being manipulated by the powerful: They're suppressing the ability of supply to rise to meet demand, which has the effect of granting windfall profits to the haves while keeping the have-nots away from areas of opportunity.
    - ta2164 5y ago
      Not arguing that, but that is decidedly not racist. It's why educated Blacks in the US are moving back to red Southern states more so than they're moving to blue Northeast and Western ones. It's much cheaper and easier to build new housing in suburban Dallas or Atlanta versus San Francisco, New York, or LA.
      - dillondoyle 5y ago
        A big thing I've noticed - especially on HN which is mostly white and male - is we perhaps fundamentally disagree on what 'racist' means. To me I view racism as a larger umbrella. Includes bias, both on the surface but also more broadly what has been cultivated as a society. Context is very important in my definition viewpoint. centuries of historic oppression, which led to unequal wealth, opportunity, and more. ongoing bias which discriminates in hiring and opportunity and more. I view this context as a kind of 'prior' (to use a ML term I don't fully understand lol) when assessing whether or not something is 'racist.' While on the other hand it seems like some view racism as solely a person knowingly and vocally treating one ethnicity differently and discriminating openly. To me I agree with parent and I hold the larger viewpoint. Because of centuries of oppression BIPOC have less money, less opportunity, own less housing, communities are segregated don't have nearly as much ownership in the 'single family neighborhoods' & that community which drives the policy we are talking about. I don't think one can ignore that context, and its implicit bias, when looking at why these laws, regulations, zoning were (and are) being passed. And plus many times it's also explicitly racist like the latter viewpoint; like the language Trump & Republicans use about 'invading' the suburbs.
- dillondoyle 5y ago
  wow this got long, but I'm in Denver and we have like 4 ballot measures to vote on that revolve around this issue of race, class, development. Specifically Apartment Prohibition!! If anyone is interested. -- denver is going to vote on a ballot measure soon to repeal the repeal of apartment prohibition and I feel it is similarly driven by race & class bias, driven by largely white home owners who literally say they want to protect their wealth (below). Our city council only recently changed zoning to allow an increase from only 2!!! non-related adults living in the same place to 5. It's crazy to me that was ever a limit in the first place. No 3 bed apartments for non-blood relatives?! The old zoning that was fixed also made it harder and limited certain types of group homes, rehabs etc too, especially the number of and locations. One of the filers of this repeal said the following in a press article - clear intent imho. “This affects their very wealth. Their very wealth,” said George E. Mayl, one of the five voters who officially filed to create a referendum committee. “And not only that, their children’s, their heirs’ wealth. Someone’s home is their single largest investment of their life.” also the way they use 'neighborhood' to me is not so veiled language in the context of race and class - just like the many policies and laws in the past. It's used as a rhetorical excuse just like 'protecting the kids' is often used. Similarly like Trump & Reps in 2020 made 'protect the suburbs from' or 'border invasion' a key message. There are another 2 housing measures on the ballot that are competing. A big developer spent like $20 million or something to buy rights for a golf course in the city that they want to develop. They bought it with a green space park easement... But to be profitable they have to repeal the easement so they can built over the park. They gambled on their power to change the law. So they filed a measure to allow them to build more (to be fair they still plan on having a park, but less green space than currently protected in an easement). So now there is a competing measure in response to protect the park. I'm for it we don't have a ton of open green space in Denver and we can't build more. Let's change laws and remove red tape to build UP. What happens if they both pass? who in the world will be able to decipher the two when voting? And what does it say that corporations & white homeowners consistently and so plainly manipulate the law directly for their bottom line (oil and gas is a big one here)? Another one on the ballot around homelessness. HUGE problem, we have tents in residential neighborhoods and lots of theft. But it's pretending to address the problem while really making more laws and regulations to criminalize homelessness and disallow solutions. They're so brave to invest in allowing homeless to sleep in parking lots lol... While simultaneously making it harder to create group living and the rehab that a ton of homeless individuals would greatly benefit from. Thankfully we do have some push by Rep. DeGette and a few others to buy old motels. That's a good investment and would actually help.
Ericson2314 5y ago
This is a very good step, but I wouldn't mind an outright prohibition either.
- catern 5y ago
  That's hubris. The reason we're in this situation, where a lack of dense housing is causing housing prices to rise, is because earlier planners were confident 50 years ago that single-family homes were the best option, and they weren't content to just follow that strategy then and there. They decided that this had to be enforced on future people too - us, that is.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    I didn't say the ban had to be indefinite. We really need to densify a lot, and do so quickly, and I am skeptical the market will get us the quick enough. Zoning is bad, but don't forget all our good unplanned construction was also pre-auto. Looking at e.g. parts of Texas, I worry that the self-perpetuation dynamics of cars --- which are very strong --- will make a market-based transition away from low density too quite tenuous. I have 0 problem saying in Core areas single family family homes have no place, and we should ban them outright. SFH zoning is bad because it causes land too be wasted, such that future generations have to pay the costs of redevelopment rather than building right on "unimproved" land. Conversely, "too much density", if there even is such a thing, would waste very little land, meaning that a mandated switch back to SFH suburbia would be cheap, just as it was 50+ years ago. It's not hubris, it's learning from our mistakes.
  - mnouquet 5y ago
    > because earlier planners were confident 50 years ago that single-family homes were the best option SFH IS the best options, nobody WANTS to live in an apartment if given the choice.
    - Sacho 5y ago
      You really can't make a categorical statement like that. I prefered living in an apartment because the housing density meant I had a grocery store, a farmer's market, and multiple other commercial hubs within walking distance. It also meant that street planning gave priority to public transport and pedestrians. There were plenty of jobs available within reasonable commute times. My neighbours gave me an easy-to-access network of people that you could befriend and somewhat rely on. There's so many positives to living in an apartment that are pretty much direct effects of the denser housing.

slothtrop 5y ago

They needed this decades ago.

mhb 5y ago
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

pmoriarty 5y ago

Some of the objections from the article: Sean Kieghran, president of San Francisco's Residential Builders Association, said he supports getting rid of single-family only zoning but doesn't think it will result in many new units. Kieghran said that building fourplexes requires either two staircases or a staircase and an elevator, which takes up too much of the site. And, unless the city streamlined the process of building a fourplex on a single-family lot, builders would run into too many bureaucratic obstacles, Kieghran said. "With how long it takes to get through planning and fire and DPW and all the other red tape it's not likely we are going to see anybody building fourplexes anytime soon," he said. ... One of the few architects to design fourplexes on single-family sized lots in the last few decades is Daniel Solomon, who has worked on three such projects... "These are nifty little projects, but they won't make a big dent in the housing need," Solomon said. "That zoning is a tool to create housing production is a widely held and completely fallacious idea. Just because something is permitted doesn't mean it happens. It's very hard to find a vacant lot or tear down at a price that would work." He said the fourplexes he designed and built were profitable, but barely. And they took as much time to design and execute as the 100-unit complexes his firm, Mithun, is known for. "You would need to find a developer willing to take a risk on a minuscule profit and an architect who enjoys brain damage," he said. "They are complicated little projects. It's the absolute opposite of economy of scale."

bradleyjg 5y ago
These don’t read so much as objections as pointing out that the zoning change is necessary but not sufficient.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
bilbo0s 5y ago
building fourplexes requires either two staircases or a staircase and an elevator Wow. That means they can get away with one staircase in San Fran. Wouldn't fly where I'm from. His material point is correct though. Real estate development is about money. Where I live, you can generally only make money on fourplexes where land prices are low enough. I don't know much about San Fran real estate, but from what I've heard, land is not very cheap. I would think in San Fran larger apartment complexes would be more profitable. Of course then there are all kinds of other headaches, like getting all the lots you need in the exact same contiguous area. Which also doesn't sound cheap in San Fran. So maybe what I meant is luxury condos instead of apartments? Point is that however it happens the money math has to work.

softwaredoug 5y ago

Planning is a perverse set of incentives. First it’s usually longer term thinking, where decisions made now impact the shape of a city decades out. Second, the people that live in a place now have undue influence and veer conservative in how land is used (ie NIMBYism). This often gives rise to at least near term stagnation (on a historical scale) in established, wealthy cities and growth in up and coming metros that don’t have a reason to preserve the current city planning policies. I don’t know if there’s a solution. Cities may just go through decade long cycles of stagnation and revitalization as NIMBY generations die off, there’s less “romance” around the current character/ the place falls into disrepair, the city wants to attract new folks, and newer generations have strong demand for different modes of living.

mkoubaa 5y ago
Among the most beautiful cities in world are those that were not planned, but were just allowed to happen. I don't know where we get the mindset that planning is necessary to begin with
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  How do you determine if planning or not planning is a causative factor? Maybe it’s just luck and maybe most unplanned cities do not survive to be viewed as beautiful. I am sure scale of planning matters too, and that there was at least a little bit of planning, but perhaps smaller in scale. The more evident factor in “beautiful” cities is probably that they came about before the advent of personal automobiles. They are much more pleasant to be in outside of a vehicle, and hence more “beautiful” simply because there were no vehicles at the time, and so whatever developed, planned or unplanned, had parameters that only considered people not in big boxes moving at high speeds.
- sologoub 5y ago
  Paris is usually cited as a beautiful city and it definitely has undergone some serious transformation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann's_renovation_of_Paris https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann's_renovation_of_Pa...
- 5y ago

spodek 5y ago

There's so much to object to about the idea that Earth is overpopulated. Then you get it and it hits you like a ton of bricks. The signs are everywhere and couldn't be more clear. But we're addicted to growth and efficiency, ignoring our limits, and our addiction blinds us to seeing what's plainly all around.

raldi 5y ago
When you prevent housing from being constructed in cities, the families that would've lived there don't disappear; they sprawl elsewhere and — as confirmed by statistics — go on to have more children than they otherwise would've.
pitaj 5y ago
The primary objection is that "overpopulation" is badly defined when it comes to humanity.
- eplanit 5y ago
  It's a taboo topic because of people's fears and anxieties that it triggers. A (cold) rational perspective sees that many (if not most) challenges facing society share a root cause of there being simply too many people.
_-david-_ 5y ago
Earth is not overpopulated. The problem is that certain places have too much population density. If everyone spread out across the world there wouldn't be any of these issues. For a variety of reason people can't or won't spread out.
- shipman05 5y ago
  Spreading out would be the worst case scenario for the environment. (And I'm afraid we might see it due to easy remote work) A single apartment building uses far fewer resources per person than the equivalent number of people would if they all had 10 acre lots in the countryside. The habitat destruction alone would be an ecological disaster.

CincinnatiMan 5y ago

Something I like about this article is how it gets a bit into the financials and the complications that arise. I would love more information and detail on this though about the costs of SFH vs quadplex vs huge apartment building and so on. Like how do costs jump when you have to switch from timber frame to steel frame, and things of that nature. Would love to learn more on this if anyone knows where it can be found.

plank_time 5y ago

People are stupid if they think this will fix things. I went to the peninsula looking at houses and the new trend is to add ADUs as part of the house or in the back. You know why? To help the owners pay off their $3M houses they used to be $1M 8 years ago. This then figures into the calculus of how much you can afford to buy a house for. What is an unaffordable $8000/month mortgage now becomes $6000/month. So people keep bidding higher and higher. People in the Bay Area don’t realize that every little thing that keeps costs low gets funneled back into house prices. Interest on mortgage is tax deductible? Oh that means I can afford more house. The public schools are good? That saves me $3000/month so I can funnel that into the mortgage. Commute is shorter by 20 mins? That means $200/month extra I can spend on the house. There is no answer except for rich employers like Google and Facebook to spread out their headquarters across the world. Too many rich engineers with their stock going up 10-20x is what is fueling the housing crunch. Or create entire new cities along 280 where there is plenty of space. Invest in new cities, not try to cram more people in the same small area.

rytor718 5y ago
This problem really does require competent city planning and a willing cohort of politicians to step up and make some dramatic, timely changes (good luck with that tho). The market cannot and will not figure this out, unless we define solution as "whatever the wealthy want to do is fine, homelessness and rents higher than a mortgage be damned".
lotsofpulp 5y ago
> People in the Bay Area don’t realize that every little thing that keeps costs low gets funneled back into house prices. Because the root cause is the demand for housing in Bay Area is far outstripping supply. You must tweak either or both of those to move the price. Addressing supply certainly does, but it might not be sufficient supply to overcome the demand. But it does help the situation.
- nosianu 5y ago
  My suspicion is that this might end up like more/wider streets and highways: You built it => it will be filled to capacity asap and there is no difference in the end, only more of the same (literally). Of course, this won't happen to infinity but far enough. In the end the area is just too attractive, combined with the industries there generate a lot of money.

austincheney 5y ago

Is the bigger problem availability or pricing? Where I live (in the US) increasing housing availability drives up housing prices proportionally. The way that works is that demand is fairly constant due to people moving in driving up the population (about 22.4% decade over decade) but there aren’t geographic limitations on construction. Real estate is a fixed resource though and you can only build so many houses before filling an area and pushing out the commute. In the spaces left over, after large scale housing developments, come the numerous large apartment complexes. The increased number of multi family dwellings drives up the price of single family houses. I have seen this pattern repeated various times in both median and extremely wealthy areas. Consequently, avoiding new construction either results in depreciation or merely delays the same pattern even by up 15 years.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
> The increased number of multi family dwellings drives up the price of single family houses. Increased demand for single family homes drives up price of single family homes. People moving in drives up price of land and dwelling units, obviously because people need a place to live. The only thing that can move price down is demand decreasing (which will not happen if people are migrating in) or supply increasing sufficiently to accommodate demand. You obviously live in one of the most in demand places in the US right now, and so almost no amount of supply will keep up with demand to cause prices to stop going up. But at the end of the day, price is always a function of supply and demand. > Consequently, avoiding new construction either results in depreciation or merely delays the same pattern even by up 15 years. Places that are not desirable to live in simply do not have construction. Why would people want to invest in areas that they predict will depreciate or stagnate? There is no construction in Cairo, IL, but they are not avoiding construction to prevent prices from increasing.
- austincheney 5y ago
  Increased demand drives up construction rates before it drives up prices. The only thing close to what you are describing is approximate commute distance.

0xB31B1B 5y ago

I don’t think the “land/development prices are too high to build a lot” from the developers will hold if 4plex zoning goes through. Land prices for this are high because there are extremely few opportunities to do this right now under existing zoning, under the new regime there are many more opportunities so the market tilts a bit from seller power to buyer power. As for construction costs, they suck to build because no one builds these right now so each one is basically bespoke, but if they suddenly become legal you’re going to see a cohort of developer specializing in these, learning how to do them well, and cashing in big time. You see this in other market (Portland) who have made the change already. It seems to be the SF developers are just too brain poisoned from the past entirety of their careers to see that a better world is actually possible.

sys_64738 5y ago

What about the increases in cars and foot traffic this creates, and how will increases to road congestion and transport services be mitigated? How will electric, sewer and water services handle this increases in utilization? There seems to be a multitude of factors at play in this.

Ericson2314 5y ago
Cars are bad. Walk, bike and take public transport --- aka learn from the large cities that already exist. If we presume everyone drives, then all the de-zoning and other measures will never succeed, and e.g. SF is already at max density. If we believe we can make car usage go down, our current streets will be good enough for 10x growth.

vlovich123 5y ago

Go further. Get rid of all zoning that’s unrelated to pollution of some kind or strictly a safety issue. Why is the government involved in whether I can run a business from my home? Why is the government responsible for controlling where businesses might be located instead of the free market controlling that aspect more dynamically?

Retric 5y ago
The reasonable justification is government builds public infrastructure like schools, highways, and subways based on assumptions about use and population density. It’s much harder and more expensive to have reasonable infrastructure if you can’t make accurate predictions. The de facto justification is indirect negative externalities exist like traffic congestion. Also known as F U I got mine.
- fiter 5y ago
  With uses segregated, the "reasonable" argument does not make sense to me: infrastructure will have to be maximized because there will be big migrations of people based on normal use times like going to work. You need twice as much parking, twice as much freeway throughput.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Don’t just think in terms of low density around current American cities. Plopping down a subdivisions in a sleepy county can quickly overwhelm local school systems, sewage treatment, etc. Even just 7% annual growth doubles the local population every decade which requires incredible and increasing investments in infrastructure. Slowing that down slightly is hardly unreasonable and it can help avoid expensive and damaging boom / bust cycles.
jorts 5y ago
Opening a chicken farm or leather tannery in a residential neighborhood sounds great.

notacoward 5y ago

Most of the land in my (Massachusetts) town is zoned for single-family homes. There are several identifiable square-mile or larger areas with nothing but homes plus maybe one school and one church. Maybe a gas station / Dunkin Donuts within fifteen-minute walking distance. That's no way to live. I'd love to change it, with greater zoning diversity and particularly that which allows higher density, but there valid objections to doing it all at once. Roads would need to be upgraded and then maintained, at direct town expense, plus dealing with increased traffic. Ditto for water and sewer lines, minus the traffic issue. Electrical, gas, and communications are better in that they're not at town expense but worse in that more parties have to be involved (and they tend to cheap out even more than the town does). And then there's schools - the town's crown jewels and the main reason anyone lives here. They're excellent but already overcrowded. Work is under way to fix that, but we really can't afford to add even more stress to that system. These are very real issues that I'm sensitive to, even though I also think there are other issues - especially racial and income diversity - that we must address in the longer term. These same issues recur many other places, I'm sure including the Bay Area. It has to be not only allowable but profitable for developers to do the actual building, or else they won't, and then the town needs property-tax revenue from each tranche before they begin the next. It's a very tricky dance, and I do not at all envy the people on zoning/planning boards trying to reconcile all these conflicting needs.

pdonis 5y ago
> I'd love to change it The simplest way to change your own situation is to move. Different towns, cities, rural areas, etc. with different land uses exist so that people with different preferences can all find some place that reasonably matches their preferences. Making them all the same just so they match your personal preferences makes the situation worse, not better.
- notacoward 5y ago
  You're assuming infinite variety exists, or can exist. That's so absurd that it's hard to believe it was meant in good faith. No, I can't just select from a menu. What if I want good schools and other facilities that few towns have, and proximity to the people/places that matter to me, and a town that's not so much single-family-home wasteland everywhere but the center? What if I want other people who aren't millionaires to have access to some of these things? Oops, me moving doesn't solve that. Sometimes you have to build the kind of place you want (or think should exist) and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Every town that already exists has been shaped by the conscious choices of people who live there and vote there and serve in offices there. I have just as much right to push for what I want as any of them did. P.S. Almost forgot to point out the "making them all the same" strawman. Never suggested that, champ.

muststopmyths 5y ago

It's received wisdom on HN that the Bay Area housing crisis is caused by NIMBYs and restrictive zoning laws. On the other hand my sense, based on anecdata, is that a large proportion of the condos constructed in the past 15-ish years in eastern SF (Embarcadero, Rincon, etc.) and SOMA/Dogpatch are owned by absentee landlords as investment property. Since these folk are mostly rich SV types (or wealthy overseas investors), they can afford the eye-watering prices. Their renters are also well-paid techies, so they can pay the hyper-inflated rents. So I believe the housing crisis is instead a result of society deciding that no one actually has a right to a home of their own. Instead, it is in fact a good thing to engage in literally rent-seeking behavior[0] and we should all be in a race to accumulate the most wealth we can to pass down to our offspring, so that they can continue this cycle. If my analysis is correct, then more construction will just result in more of the same. Rich people buying 2 and 3rd homes that they rent out to people who are here for the short term and can afford inflated rents. It seems to me a good first step would instead be to slap a Vancouver-style 15% property tax on any home that is not occupied by the owner (not just foreigners). Of course, there is no way in hell Californians will actually do something that requires actual self-sacrifice, so that's never going to happen. ( I have more anecdata about SV residents buying 2 or 3 houses in the Austin area in order to capitalize on the real estate boom caused by other SV ex-residents moving there, further driving up costs in the area. But let's restrict the discussion to SF Bay Area for now). This theory is obviously based on feels rather than data, since I don't know of any way to actually get ownership/residence data broken down this way. That would probably violate all kinds of privacy laws. I would love to be disabused of my notions with data. Not motivated-reasoning "studies" by think-tanks who have vested interests, but actual data. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking (the rent seekers in this case being all the homeowners who resist any property tax reform which would affect their bottom line)

burlesona 5y ago
The number of people who want to move in to live and work in the Bay Area so vastly exceeds the supply of new housing that it is like a Sotheby’s auction where only the richest can win. This is reinforced by the fact that it takes so long to get permission to build anything that you can only make money by developing super luxury property. In a well-functioning city you can make money building anything from mid-market up. Affordable housing is the stuff that was mid market 10-20 years ago, or luxury 20-40 years ago. If you want to see this in the real world, just look at the market for cars. More here: https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-way-to-affordable-housing/ https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...

Gimpei 5y ago

Article seems to suggest that SF lots aren't large enough for 4-plexes to be economically feasible. I wonder what the minimum height is for this to work. Five stories perhaps? The SF supervisor Mandelman who was mentioned in the article has been against all of Weiner's housing bills, so he has zero credibility in my book.

burlesona 5y ago
I lived in a two-unit townhome in SF. The lot on one side was a large single family. The lot on the other side was an eight unit apartment. All the lots were the same size. They even all had parking. The lot sizes are not a physical problem. They may be a political problem (ie. the issue is people don’t want new tall buildings built).

xivzgrev 5y ago

Has anyone SEEN a typical SF plot? They’re basically enough for a small 1000-2000 sq ft home, a parking spot, and a little back yard. No one ain’t building a four plex on that, unless a) the height restriction is also raised b) one parking space per unit no longer required and c) some fancy footwork somehow incentivizing adjoining plots to combine. If you had two plots and lifted the restrictions, then I could see making 4 units comfortably out of that. But seeing how unlikely it is two neighbors sell at the same time, seems unlikely I think this would be more meaningful in other cities, where there are a lot of ranch style homes / bigger plots

seibelj 5y ago
In Boston and surrounding areas the “triple decker” is very common - three 1000 square foot condos, driveway leading to compact car parking in back, small yard or none at all. The buildings are not connected but the space between is the driveway on one side and a small path on the other to store trash cans. There are tens of thousands of these if not hundreds of thousands.
mercutio2 5y ago
San Fransisco has already removed (b) as an issue [0]. When SF made that change, you had people saying the same thing “this won’t change anything because you can’t build the housing that’s needed”. No one is saying that this, by itself, with zero other changes, will resolve the issue. I prefer to applaud individual incremental improvements than belabor the fact that this one change is not enough. [0] https://www.livablecity.org/time-san-francisco-say-goodbye-minimum-parking-requirements/ https://www.livablecity.org/time-san-francisco-say-goodbye-m...

travisgriggs 5y ago

When I read articles like this, where the solutions proposed are to make it more efficient (legally, operationally, fiscally) for more people to live in smaller places, I'm curious how that resolves with others' sense of the desire for privacy. I realize the privacy conversation here usually revolves around ad tech, but for me at least, it's more general than that. And I find that the denser the population, no matter how optimal it is, creates more constraints for me as a human being. There's a sweet spot in the human equation for me, when I am the most liberty to enjoy self determination and free well, but also rub shoulders socially with enough of the rest of mankind that I enjoy the magnification that happens when we work together. So I applaud efforts to get people in equitable homes--I have a married daughter who takes care of my wonderful wonderful 20mo grand twins, and I fear and angst for their future housing prospects in this country--but if they're just cages for rent in the end, did we really get the real prize?

gnopgnip 5y ago
A multi family home in practice is much larger than a comparably priced single family home. They can both be owned, or rented

DevKoala 5y ago

I am of the idea that we need to focus on building new cities and more efficient roads to connect them. I don’t want to live in the Bay Area particularly, but when I have to go to SF, it sucks that sometimes it can take up to 2 hours to commute 30 miles. As a software architect, it feels as if the common recipe for solving a scalability problem is decentralization for which you need an awesome messaging system. I do not get why we keep centralizing ourselves around the Bay Area. I am not an expert in the field so perhaps I am coming from a point of ignorance here, but I am genuinely curious as to why. The USA built the most new cities and roads during the time it prospered, and it seems that we stopped doing that. Not long ago, Elon Musk was highlighting how fast China continues building infrastructures to satisfy the demands of their growing population, and I had noticed that too thanks to friends who have tons of awesome things to say about their visits. Why we don’t go that route? It seems like China is kicking our ass there.

elbasti 5y ago
> and more efficient roads. The efficiency of roads is limited by the fact that the vehicles occupying them are large, individually piloted, and have slow reaction times. Throughout is limited because, as cars go faster, they need to be spaced out more. We have known this for seventy years. Automobile highways simply cannot work for ultra high throughput corridors.
- DevKoala 5y ago
  Fine, let’s evolve our transportation units. We just need to rethink the problem as a whole. I don’t want to go into conspiracy theory territory, but it does seem as if there are powerful entities that are invested in maintaining the status quo or perhaps it’s just incompetence.
  - ericmay 5y ago
    It’s both. There’s a lot of “we’ve always done it this way” and “what would I ever do without taking my car everywhere???” And then there are construction companies, automobile companies, and oil and gas companies that employ a lot of people. Kind of hard to employ those people if we built more sidewalks and bike lanes, and built medium-density mixed use neighborhoods. Where’s the lobby against the automobile industry and all the deaths that cars cause? Aren’t car wrecks the #1 cause of death of teenagers? “But utility of cars!!” Well that utility only exists because we’ve decided to create it, not that it’s actually necessary. If in reading this comment you find yourself disagreeing, think about the alleyways and layout of Lago d’Orta for example. Oh but how do they live without 2 cars per household!?

lamontcg 5y ago

They should just largely remove these kinds of zoning laws, raise the height restriction to at least 6 stories and maybe require a commercial ground floor for buildings over a certain footprint and/or on arterials. Allow builders to combine lots. Get rid of the parking and driveway requirements as well. At least do this in strips down arterials so that entire blocks could be converted to high density mixed residential/commercial. Of course there goes your rents and home prices, but now if you actually lived in the surrounding area you'd be able to easier walk to shops and with rents being less that'd wind up eventually as lower prices and lower cost of living. Its not surprising that the half-measures they're taking almost seems designed to not have a lot of actual uptake.

dillondoyle 5y ago
I would add removing car parking requirements AND simultaneously pay for public transport, dedicated protected bike lanes etc to serve this new density. Like you mention importance of stores. I would maybe subsidize grocers & shops with tax breaks for a few years to get the walkability cycle going. The cart before horse problem, build it and they will come theory.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  Exactly, make it all walkable/bikable with mass transit down the arterials, and incentives and density to attract the commerce. Particularly for mom+pop stores/restaurants. And have it all near enough school and offices that a <10 minute bus ride can get you to those campuses. And you can still have islands of SFH/Townhouses that are within ~4 blocks of high density (I'd probably prefer that since I'm quite introverted most of the time).

gumby 5y ago

Shockingly Palo Alto joined a lawsuit to try and prevent this kind of thing being mandated. The progressive city I used to live in (section 8 housing, homeless housing, source of random bands like Grateful Dead, Joan baez, grace slick) was taken over by the greed lobby when the dot com boom hit and has become an “I got mine, jack” colony.

rcpt 5y ago
The "greed lobby" originated in Utah and was named Howard Jarvis. All of California became a real estate investment hellscape after he left his mark. Dot com has nothing to do with it
- gumby 5y ago
  I get your point, but I'm talking about Palo Alto specifically. Even in the 90s Palo Alto had SRO housing for the homeless, required section 8 housing in new developments, and a lower median income than neighboring Menlo Park or Los Altos (and I read actually MV too, though I find that hard to believe). There was more tolerance for goofball behavior, though perhaps less than the 70s or 80s. But 21st century Palo Alto is a different beast, and much more boring. People moved here to gain wealth (rather than nerd out) and once they had it, flaunt it. It's a real shame; there are plenty of other places to do that.

Baeocystin 5y ago

This seems like a good thread to link to https://missingmiddlehousing.com/ https://missingmiddlehousing.com/ , which is a site I've seen discussed directly here on HN several times previous. I am still in the process of consolidating my opinions on this, but I did find it an interesting, useful read.

smichel17 5y ago
On the about page, I found > We call them “Missing” because they have typically been illegal to build since the mid-1940s but I could not easily find and further explanation about why this is, etc
- Baeocystin 5y ago
  They go in to further detail about that on https://missingmiddlehousing.com/about/how-to-enable https://missingmiddlehousing.com/about/how-to-enable .
  - u678u 5y ago
    Interesting. It doesn't say they're illegal, it says they're illegal in Single Family suburbs. Its like they want the benefits of low density housing but somehow not do low density housing.
- guruz 5y ago
  By coincidence, I watched this video about missing middle houses this morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCOdQsZa15o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCOdQsZa15o

rdxm 5y ago

lol...good luck with that....tech is already bailing....i can't imagine one reason to domicile a business in the bay area at this point....it's over.....

kingsuper20 5y ago

I like the idea of building massive apartment complexes in the Bay Area. It was a PITA place to live 30 years ago and it's worse now The thing is, if we can build giant ant mounds in just a few places it'll save the central coast and California north of the Golden Gate from destruction. Step two would be to connect the giant metro areas to the rest of the state via a dirt road.

Lammy 5y ago

Relevant: https://fiftythree.studio/blogs/news/lets-talk-about-why-la-cant-build-new-housing https://fiftythree.studio/blogs/news/lets-talk-about-why-la-... "The small apartment buildings that triggered this revolt are called are called 'dingbats'. They're those boxy buildings you see all over the place with pompous names like 'La Traviata' or 'Chateau Antoinette'. These kinds of housing weren't pretty, but they were no-frills apartments you could afford if you were an actor, or a grocery clerk, or a secretary. This scared the hell out of homeowners in rich neighborhoods, because apartments were for poor people and minorities. So, we voted for politicians who reduced the zoning of LA bit by bit, effectively freezing the status quo in place. And after 1970, rich communities just stopped building new housing, period. You can see the results from the population table below."

dheera 5y ago
From TFA > But while the movement to allow multifamily buildings in zones previously limited to single-family homes How is this even a thing? Couldn't two families just define themselves as a big extended family? They could for example just have two people marry for a day, move into the upstairs and downstairs respectively, and then get divorced the next day to hack the system.
- dillondoyle 5y ago
  It's 100% a thing in law. Denver up until very recently only allowed 2!!! They shouldn't have to. That's a ton of work. At one point in time black people could vote if they 'hacked the system' by paying or passing a test.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- closeparen 5y ago
  “Single family” is a property of the building, not the people living in it. A multi-family building has separately locking units with their own kitchens. Where there are too many large houses and not enough apartments, many of the houses end up with would-be apartment dwellers living communally. You do sometimes here about communities trying to enforce prohibitions on unrelated people living together in single family homes, but where the zoning itself is almost universal in America, such enforcement is very rare.

atomicfiredoll 5y ago

I think that single family housing, especially in cities dealing with lack of availability, likely needs to go. And other changes need to be made on top of that. But, assuming we were able to replace single family housing with 3 or 4 plexes, where does that leave home ownership? I'm concerned the transformation of single family homes to apartments would just present another opportunity wealth and property to move from private owners to conglomerated investment or the rich. Personally, my best experiences have always been renting with private owners, so if people have to rent in the future, hopefully they aren't stuck doing so from a comparatively small number of management companies that control the market.

xputer 5y ago
3 or 4 plexes are not going to solve the housing issue in the bay area, because many single family homes are already being used that way. They need to build dense urban cores with residential high rise and mixed use mid rise. Ideally close to Caltrain and BART stations, but additionally every single family zoned neighborhood should be given such an urban core. That way it would create more dense pockets all throughout the area, which would make it possible to bring alternative modes of transit into all neighborhoods by connecting these dense pockets with rail, bus routes and bike lanes.

zachware 5y ago

I've developed several multifamily projects including my current focus, a 72-unit apartment development. Proposals like these, while admirable, usually miss the mark and have little to no impact on housing availability because they fail to accept that housing development isn't just about zoning. Impact fees, planning regs (traffic, parking, etc), planning delays, NIMBY fights, labor costs...these are all inputs into the question of whether a multifamily development makes economic sense for a developer. There is a formula under which you can build market-rate and/or affordable housing (sometimes the same) and when that formula checks out, you see lots of development. All of that has to work out to a cost per door and that cost has to be recouped in rents that pay for opex and debt. The fourplex in the article would cost $562,500/door. A very basic calc of the necessary rents would be $4,950. California, particularly San Francisco, has pressures at every step of that formula. So if the Bay Area wants more housing, it has to be willing to look at the problem holistically. - What role do planning review delays play in increasing the costs and perceived risk of acquiring a parcel and going through the process? - What % of potential building sites are classified as historical properties? - What are the parking, traffic impact and roadway requirements that multifamily traffic counts will have to mitigate/build for? - What power do unions have to dictate building programs? - Who can object to proposals? I'm not suggesting that everything has to be Texas-style free markets, but to solve the problem one has to be willing to admit that it may require something a bit more comprehensive that simply changing zoning.

andbberger 5y ago
Sure, single-family zoning is a necessary but not sufficient development for housing reform. Can't have density with it, but doesn't mean there isn't a laundry list of other things wrong with housing in the bay
lostsubways 5y ago
The zoning isn't everything, but it's definitely one of the things that has to change. If everywhere in California had Sacramento's ministerial housing ordinance (60-90 day approvals, everything as of right), AND zoning reform, AND major reduction in impact fees, you'd start to make a dent in the problem. Rezoning is a necessary but not sufficient condition.

sjg007 5y ago

Maybe Oakland will do it and become an economic superstar...

killjoywashere 5y ago

Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20210301050437/https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-cities-want-to-end-single-family-home-15983648.php http://web.archive.org/web/20210301050437/https://www.sfchro...

screye 5y ago

Reading about opposition to multi-family housing reminds me of opposition to nuclear energy. Regulations for both are substantially higher than those imposed on the conventional choice, making them more expensive in through self-fulfilling prophecies. Additionally, having stopped working on them for 40 years means that the US is completely clueless about building them in an effective manner. Thus, the populace and even planners feel like the only choice is 50 year old infrastructure solutions. This also means that secondary ecosystems have developed with assumptions of the conventional choice, rendering the alternatives unable to take advantage of these secondary ecosystems. Lastly, somehow arguments around both end up appearing far more ideological than scientific. Now, I am squarely on the nuclear/multi-family side of things, but it is particularly difficult to find consensus within the community on it.

khazhoux 5y ago

> explore the benefits of getting rid of a land use policy designed to keep people of color and working class families out of certain neighborhoods. The article provides no reference to this claim of racism. I personally find it more likely that these zoning laws are simply to control density.

joelbondurant 5y ago

USA brand tax cattle objects must be at maximum social compliance or be drone bombed, unite or die USA.