16 ms·

To save California, sacrifice single-family zoning

151 points by wavesounds 5y ago

slater 5y ago
Every NIMBY this side of Sacramento: "From my cold, dead hands!"
- DiabloD3 5y ago
  From everyone else: "That can be arranged."
  - slater 5y ago
    Ha! :)
  - swiley 5y ago
    This is obviously a joke but the property owners should remember that California wouldn't be the first place something like that happened.
- TedShiller 5y ago
  You don't have to be a NIMBY to say that. You can also just be realistic. We don't have the water.
  - anchpop 5y ago
    Most water usage is agricultural. And increasing density decreases per-capita water usage because there are fewer lawns to water per person.
    - TedShiller 5y ago
      Building more housing won't solve that.
      - fragmede 5y ago
        We don't today have the water for that. An also today, it's not worth it to build expensive desalination plants. What increasing the density does do, is bring forwards when desalination becomes economically worthwhile, solving that better than having only low-density single-family homes. Try this series on the economics of rural development. https://actionlab.strongtowns.org/hc/en-us/articles/4402259074708-Who-Pays-for-Growth-in-Collier-County-Florida- https://actionlab.strongtowns.org/hc/en-us/articles/44022590...
litoE 5y ago
They will need to triple or quadruple the capacity of the water, electrical and sewer grids that were sized for the current density. And convince people to part with their cars because street parking will become impossible.
- jamestimmins 5y ago
  I think a lot of people would actually embrace getting rid of their cars if they weren't necessary
  - randycupertino 5y ago
    I live in a sfh in a Bay Area suburb and a lot of my neighbors have multiple cars for fun/hobbies and family. One of my neighbors has a household of three (two parents & a 10year old kid) and they have FIVE cars. I never realized how big "car culture" was in California until moving out of the city and into a suburb. In my experience living here, you can pry their cars out of their cold dead hands.
- skybrian 5y ago
  That’s an exaggeration since there wouldn’t be as many lawns to water and apartments are more energy-efficient. Also, infrastructure like water treatment plants are expensive and scale well, so you can spread the cost over more people. But yes, there are problems that come with density and they have to be thought through.
  - jjhale 5y ago
    Yes, there are many places in the US that are currently having infrastructure crises due to too little density. There might need to be infrastructure upgrades as neighborhoods become denser, but over the long run, the infrastructure will be much more sustainable because the cost per user will be significantly lower.
- wahern 5y ago
  Per capita urban water usage in California has decreased by double digits percentages since 1990. See page 10 at https://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/PI_Water_Use_Trends_June_2020.pdf https://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/PI_Water_Use_... Older cities have done even better; newer urban developments further away from the older coastal areas pulled the average state-wide decrease down. IOW, there's plenty of slack in existing cities, especially the older coastal cities, which were originally planned and built for far greater density than permitted now, and at a time when per capita usage was far greater. If anything, continuing to incentivize urban sprawl is the surest way to overburden water infrastructure, especially supply.
tomcam 5y ago
I urge the Times editorial board to experiment in their own neighborhoods first and report back to us.
mjfl 5y ago
California voters are probably totally fine with the housing supply being too low because it drives up the price of their houses.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- IIAOPSW 5y ago
  "But for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for homeowners." http://www.derekchristensen.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/shareholdervalue.jpg http://www.derekchristensen.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/s...
- nr2x 5y ago
  It's the most economically rational decision for a very large voting block, but it is openly screwing entire generations as well.
- grecy 5y ago
  Housing can't be both affordable and a good investment.
  - swiley 5y ago
    It an be if you're allowed to improve it.
  - benrbray 5y ago
    You have that backwards. Housing can only be affordable if it's not a good investment. If it's a good investment, people will buy houses expecting to get much more out of it than just a place to stay. Look at Japan, for example, where houses lose their value after 40 years. I pay cheaper rent in Tokyo than I ever did in even mid-sized American cities.
    - shuckles 5y ago
      Both of these are wrong because they confuse buildings and land. Land can be a good investment even if shelter is affordable. My understanding, for example, is land in Tokyo is quite expensive.
dclaw 5y ago
Foreign investors are the real issue. It's apparent that some are even laundering their money by purchasing US real estate. Just because the big players are doing so with commercial real estate doesn't mean smaller players aren't doing it with housing. Many houses owned by foreign investors tend to sit vacant full time. There's even lawyers who specialize in the stuff, telling people to setup businesses and have the house owned by the business to reduce their tax rate. https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/a-kleptocrats-dream-us-real-estate-a-safe-haven-for-billions-in-dirty-money-report-says/ https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/a-kleptocra... https://calmatters.org/housing/2018/03/data-dig-are-foreign-investors-driving-up-real-estate-in-your-california-neighborhood/ https://calmatters.org/housing/2018/03/data-dig-are-foreign-... https://www.avvo.com/legal-guides/ugc/a-guide-for-foreign-investors-looking-to-acquire-california-real-estate https://www.avvo.com/legal-guides/ugc/a-guide-for-foreign-in...
- woah 5y ago
  This is a baseless conspiracy theory, usually peddled by those who stand to gain from high housing prices. "Oh no, high housing prices aren't caused by the fact that we don't allow anything new to be built, it's those nefarious foreigners". It's easy to see how it doesn't add up. Why would some wealthy foreign investor want to buy a house and then lose a bunch of money by not renting it out?
  - sk2020 5y ago
    Some people have money they need to get rid of. Taking a loss on the property is not as big of a problem as having money you can’t justify having possession of. How much of the market that is would be hard to guess. Zero is not likely, though.
  - Supermancho 5y ago
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-08-16/taxing-the-rich-do-housing-prices-fall-when-empty-second-homes-are-taxed https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-08-16/taxing-th... - the wealthy can afford lots of houses. They buy them or even build them (midwest, lots of empty multi-million dollar homes are still appearing). I mean, there are multiple multi-billion dollar companies who haven't let go of their office spaces when there's no hope that people were going to return to work anytime soon. One of the many simple reasons, they can afford to burn the cash and it's a drop in the bucket. I don't think you are grasping what kind of wealth buys up houses. > It's easy to see how it doesn't add up. > Why would some wealthy foreign investor want to buy a house and then lose a bunch of money by not renting it out? In the late 2010s, the primary reason was as a protective measure/taxation avoidance. In China, the wealthy are always at a danger of being on the wrong side of the government and having your wealth confiscated. In Bellevue (the wealthy eastside of the Seattle area) had a burgeoning industry of exotic car dealerships, luxury jewelry and housing prices soaring as Chinese money loaded up on housing. When Xi (and the PRC at large) decided to crack down https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2020/02/chinas-new-foreign-investment-law https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2020/02/chinas-new-fore..., by 2019 most of the luxury businesses evaporated and houses were being liquidated (most still made money because of decent US housing inflation) because of the taxation of foreign assets and the penalties for not disclosing them. So that's done. There's always oil money from the middle east which has ended up in California. My family sold off 2 properties to families from Quatar and Iran, who casually paid for east house up front. These were their "California" homes. Banks have been buying up houses for awhile now. Yes, it pains me to bring up FOX News. https://foxbaltimore.com/news/nation-world/major-wall-street-investment-firms-go-on-a-home-buying-sprees-amid-housing-boom https://foxbaltimore.com/news/nation-world/major-wall-street... - they are likely to rent out the homes. American banks who are looking to maximize value for something they don't intend to even live in (or run to), don't mind renting. This is a maximized investment that makes sense to you. Those do happen. My wife and I just bought a house next door to one of the MANY display houses of Todd Griffin (Windows Plus). The yard is a wreck but the interior furnishings (kitchen, windows, shelving, etc) are very nice, barring the bare slab concrete floor. Nobody has ever lived there.
xt00 5y ago
Changing zoning in your neighborhood that you currently live in (and continue to want to live in) will likely change it, so for people to accept that risk they should be given an incentive.. for example within a given neighborhood what if the state gave those areas huge property tax breaks to allow zoning changes? Then there is a trade-off, pay less taxes and then you get something for the potentially different future. Maybe it’s better maybe it’s worse but saying to people “please just allow changes to the zoning” has not worked... edit: basic thing I was thinking about was giving people incentives for YIMBY pushes in areas.. yea prop13 complicates it, but just wondering if there is any incentive for the folks that live in someplace already or the base assumption is that a very large percentage will vote against it?
- s0rce 5y ago
  More than half my neighborhood already gets massive property tax breaks from Prop 13. Some people pay like 1/10th of what a new owner would pay.
- darksaints 5y ago
  They bought a house. It came with a deed. The deed delineates exactly what rights are conferred. Zoning is not one of them. Why do we have to bribe people to rescind rights that they never had in the first place?
  - orcasauce 5y ago
    There is an expectation that where I live won't just be rezoned industrial to make way for more Amazon warehouses.
    - darksaints 5y ago
      There's also an expectation that aliens don't invade, and chickens won't mutate into tyrannosaurus rexes with all the 5g going up. Luckily, none of that will ever happen. You'll get apartments, not warehouses.
  - RHSeeger 5y ago
TedShiller 5y ago
We don't have the water for that. Sorry.
- darksaints 5y ago
  Yes, you do. Sorry.
  - TedShiller 5y ago
    I'm with you, I wish we did. Unfortunately, the reservoirs say otherwise.
    - darksaints 5y ago
      No you don't...you're a NIMBY just like the rest of Californians. I can tell because of the rehashed completely disingenuous arguments that have been debunked a million times by now.
      - TedShiller 5y ago
        I probably would be a NIMBY if I owned property myself. Unfortunately I'm not in that position. Higher density could help me become an owner (and hence a NIMBY), but it's not even clear that it will. The reason I say that is because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand NYC built all the housing they possibly can, and yet I personally still could never afford to own property there. Same with LA. I'm also opposed to the building of more roads. Not because (as you might claim) I own existing roads and have a vested interest, but because I know that more roads simply means more traffic. The places that have the most roads also have the worst traffic. I wish it were different.
        0xB31B1B 5y ago
        it is different, consumption of road space (road use is free, or at least priced in time instead of money, many routes to get to a destination). Urban land has an enormous cost priced in dollars, and as we practice land ownership in the west, it involves the monopoly right of a fixed space. One can own multiple pieces of property simultaneously, but one cannot take up multiple spaces in traffic. Entirely different concepts and mechanisms.
refurb 5y ago
Why is single-family zoning required to "save" California when the problem is pretty much only in a small downtown core in a 2-3 major metro areas? Pretty sure Bakersfield will do just fine with single-family zoning.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Redfin says Bakersfield is "very competitive" and home prices are up 50% in only five years.
  - refurb 5y ago
    So is Billings, MT, but nobody is going to claim Montana is running out of space.
- dvaun 5y ago
  Bakersfield housing is expensive for the region. The salaries here, in my opinion, cannot keep up with this recent rise in prices.
  - refurb 5y ago
    Right, so build more single family home. Why would Bakersfield need condo towers and high density?
    - digisign 5y ago
      Bad for the environment, and why we're dependent on foreign oil.
      - nradov 5y ago
        The US imports very little foreign oil now. We're not dependent. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=727&t=6 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=727&t=6
baybal2 5y ago
Any Californians here?
gibsonf1 5y ago
Perhaps single family zoning, which is also in many other states without crises, is not the cause or it's change the solution for California's very real crisis.
- shuckles 5y ago
  Basically every metro area in the country has an affordability problem as defined by cost of housing relative to wages. One of the most affordable growing metros is Houston, which has no zoning.
  - tadfisher 5y ago
    If that is your only metric by which to judge, then Houston is a roaring success. Include just about any other factor in your judgment, such as walkability, health outcomes, education quality, or disaster resilience to name a few, you might consider Houston's zoning strategy to be batshit insane.
    - shuckles 5y ago
      I’m not arguing that all zoning is bad. I was responding to the claim that SFZ is irrelevant to affordability.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      Judging by how many people are moving from places like SF and NYC to places like Houston I think people prioritize affordable housing over all the secondary luxuries. <insert low effort quip about consumers being cheapskates and not knowing what's good for them here>
sirmike_ 5y ago
Seems like this would create a whole host of problems which restrictive zoning solves. In other words we already learned that lesson and people generally do not like unappealing entities being right next door. It allows the public an extra check on something not appropriate. Why does California not have a wider range of political ideas to solve their problems? It appears Cali is chasing its tail by their brand and experiment in democracy when they try to "solve" their glaring issues. Credit where due -- many times other states have benefited from California being so big and mandated certain safety laws. But like the famous saying many citizens of the Golden State will soon be able to answer the question for Newsom (uberkind-liberal-idiot-when-it-suits): What have you done for me lately?
- 0xB31B1B 5y ago
  "unappearling entities being nextdoor", "allows the public an extra check on something not appropriate" You're openly advocating for segregation in 2021, this is almost verbatim how segregation advocates advocated for housing segregation ~100 years ago
  - sirmike_ 5y ago
    Bluster is what you say! OK then I am sure you would be ok with zoning being changed to allow for a nuclear power plant in your neighborhood whenever someone(s) with big piles of cash comes through. Yeah, no thanks mate. Where I live the last heads of our county council, where openly corrupt with sweetheart deals handed out to local construction and developer companies. The one before last ended up in jail thanks to the feds investigating these type crimes. This is in the US no less. No way buddy. The public has a right to decide who can built what where and for what purpose. Yes there should be defining discrimination which rightly limits a free for all when it comes to zoning. How naïve are you?
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    Sub 100 with a much smaller number.
- kevinqiu1 5y ago
  And yet all of the desirable(aka expensive) places to live are mixed use dense neighborhoods built before the concept of Euclidean zoning? Eg. Old pre-zoning, pre-car neighborhoods in Toronto, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, ect.
epicureanideal 5y ago
To save California, build more. Single family, multi family, whatever. Just more.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  Wouldn't California, and the rest of the country, be better off if quite a few people from across the spectrum left for other places? The wealth/talent/business concentration is really unnecessary, and with drought, fires, and other global warming concerns, it's actually not that nice there. The solution to a lot of the "housing problems" around the country isn't further concentration but decentralization.
  - epicureanideal 5y ago
    Sure. Let’s take the 2 trillion we spent on the Afghan war and instead build up a few more tech cities with high rise apartments, great public transit, new great universities and so on. I think the problem is that outside the government spending like that, private industry has a hard time getting sufficient funding to create a meaningful new center of innovation.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    I can't speak to the rest of it, but concentration of populations is often extremely good for certain types of endeavors. Cities often have the surplus value available to support speculative and "non-productive" cultural output. The rapid mixing of ideas and cultures often helps a lot too. I'd argue that it's good for California to have all those people. It's pretty hard to argue that it isn't, based on the cultural, economic, and agricultural output of the state. Now whether or not it's good for the people in California is another matter altogether. And I say that as someone who recently left CA for another state.
  - eli_gottlieb 5y ago
    The issue is, you can have 21st-century high-tech free-market capitalism with low state intervention, or you can have decentralization of the population and economy. Pick only one.
01100011 5y ago
For the people with homes, locked into lower property taxes, a stable monthly payment, and their version of the CA dream, nothing needs to change. I can't really blame them. When I owned a home I was a NIMBY who thought my mortgage payment afforded me a right to continue my lifestyle indefinitely. After a divorce and becoming a renter, I have a lot more sympathy for folks subject to the whims of landlords and the rental market. Sure, renting means I have some flexibility and don't have to worry much about maintenance, but there is an emotional and social price you pay for the lack of (sometimes imagined) stability afforded to you by home ownership. I'm about to plan my CA escape after 27 years in the sun and it is not without regrets. I'll say though that the one thing CA should consider is requiring the supply of housing to match the supply of jobs. I suppose it's fine if, say, Cupertino doesn't want to urbanize, but as long as they allow more commercial space and more jobs, they put pressure on surrounding communities to deal with the negative effects. I can't really care too much anymore though. CA has been good to me for a long time, but she's showing me the door and telling me I'm no longer welcome and it's not something I have the will to fight for.
- cylinder714 5y ago
  > requiring the supply of housing to match the supply of jobs As a native Californian, I would change that to, "match the supply of water." I'm astounded at all the construction, particularly that being built in the hills overlooking Folsom, and wonder where they're going to get their water.
  - BelenusMordred 5y ago
    Desalination can provide for a lot more, even then, consumer usage is nothing compared to agricultural and industrial use.
    - newbamboo 5y ago
      Yes, plenty of water it’s just up north, not in the places where agriculture needs it. I’m tempted to argue it’s a self correcting problem; pipes and desalination will be built when the costs make it feasible. It’s all politics and special interests. That’s the California way.
justapassenger 5y ago
This is much more complex problem, and each time someone offers one simple solution, you should suspect it’s BS. Sure, single family zoning contributes to the problem, but Manhattan doesn’t really have single family zoning and is still not affordable. Just getting rid of it, won’t be the end of the world for the neighborhoods, but also won’t really solve problems it’s advertised to solve.
- krrrh 5y ago
  Comparing the 1.6m person commercial core of a high-income 8.5m person city is a bit unfair. Manhattan isn’t expensive because it’s high density, it’s high density because it’s expensive (desirable). Californian cities could follow suit if allowed to.
- jgwil2 5y ago
  New York has been downzoning for years now. What's important isn't just having high density, it's making sure that available housing grows with the population. When your population is increasing, increasing density helps with that.
traloid 5y ago
Interesting. So 50 years ago, with labour efficiency and productivity being a small fraction of what it is today, single-family houses were easily built and bought by people. Today its somehow an unreachable goal that people cant obtain. Why? I dont want to live in a pod or communal flat with 20 people. How are people not revolting over the direction western economies are taking?
- swiley 5y ago
  California has a long way to go before it starts to become attractive.
- jgwil2 5y ago
  Because the population has increased over the course of fifty years. There's a limit to how many single-family houses you can build that are reasonably close to jobs.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  You can easily get an affordable single-family house - it's just going to be a long, long way from your job because you'll have to drive through all the land taken up by less affordable single-family houses who want to pay extra to live closer to where everybody else is.
digisign 5y ago
One state alone can't fix a nationwide problem. Otherwise it becomes more attractive and loses any ground made. There need to be homes everywhere people would like to live, within reason.
crubier 5y ago
Disclaimer, I’m European and have only been in SFBA for 5months in my life. Maybe the solution is not to build more residential to keep growing, but instead to limit implantation of new jobs/companies to limit the growth to a sustainable decent value? The result would be to limit real estate price, but without making the Bay Area a hellscape of concrete towers. I understand it is controversial, but do we really want to transform the Bay Area (which still has some really fine natural beauty and neighborhoods) into the hellscape that are some Chinese (or European) concrete tower based suburbs? Do we still want to keep centralizing more? Sadly free market + democracy means either the homeowners side are in charge and keep the status quo so their property prices go up. Or the renters side might one day win, and start sacrificing this nice place to make concrete prisons for everyone. The current system ensures that the optimal thing to do will never happen.
- etrautmann 5y ago
  This seems likely to create a host of unintended consequences and exacerbates the issues caused by a lack of socioeconomic diversity and people working in service jobs. The incentives will push municipalities to only take the “best” jobs, putting further pressure on restaurants etc to find workers. Ultimately the “character” of a neighborhood is a function of the vibrant culture and people more than yhe architecture and density.
  - crubier 5y ago
    In a different system where limiting implantation of new companies would be a thing, I don’t see why you couldn’t place incentives to keep the job balance and avoid these consequence. It’s not that complicated in comparison. But of course this « different system » is science fiction at this point, especially in the US.
- jabl 5y ago
  Surely there are other ways of increasing density than some concrete tower dystopia? I mean, there's this entire movement, 'new urbanism' or whatever you want to call it, which is specifically about creating nice AND decently high density towns and cities. IMHO, the Bay Area is its own kind of dystopia, with low-density 'burbia spreading like a mat over the (previously beautiful, I presume) landscape. Even things like central Santa Clara are quite low density, with wide (very wide!) streets, low houses (typically 1-2 stories) set back far from the streets with ginormous parking lots.
theragra 5y ago
I know nothing about housing, but I am always perplexed about size of US houses. My sister has 9 room house, and it is considered small! My parents here in northern Europe has house twice as small, and it is more than enough for them. Maybe it is part of the problem. Smaller house obviously is cheaper to build and maintain.
tonfreed 5y ago
You WILL live in the concrete pod You WILL eat the bugs You WILL NOT own anything You WILL be happy Amazing how many of these articles I'm seeing lately.
- swiley 5y ago
  Allowing for denser housing frees up homes. The pod thing is scary because of a lack of choice which is what this article argues against.
- andrewmcwatters 5y ago
  Serfdom is SO hot right now. Like global warming? Omg, no like so much hotter.
jgowdy 5y ago
Yeah, the traffic isn't bad enough so let's just shoehorn in multifamily units into single family zoned neighborhoods that aren't remotely close enough to the jobs people work for bicycling to be a realistic option. Virtue signaling the housing crisis isn't useful. If you're going to talk about housing you can't just rail against "NIMBYs" and clamor for more housing. You have to actually explain how the infrastructure and transportation to/from jobs will work with your assertions. Otherwise you're just arguing for cramming everyone up each other's asses and let the chips fall where they may. Most people are not going to ride a bicycle to work. Some of us have kids to drop off at school on the way to work. We have to buy enough groceries to feed a family, which don't fit on a bicycle. Let go of your hipster fantasies. We can't all be single people living in a flat, riding a bicycle to the farmer's market and the book store.
- andrewmcwatters 5y ago
  No, no, no, can't you see? We need to save California! Won't someone PLEASE think about the landlords? I need people to owe me money forever! How else will I survive? Please, oh please, California, don't build more single-family homes and create stable families. Won't someone PLEASE think about Blackrock! REITs need cash flow to be viable investments! How else will we pay out dividends to investors?
  - anchpop 5y ago
    Density is better for the environment and reduces housing costs which benefits poor people and minorities. The primary beneficiaries of the current arrangement are rich white landowners who in many cases pay virtually no property tax. Stable families are more than capable of thriving in multi-family homes, go anywhere in London or Paris to see for yourself.
    - andrewmcwatters 5y ago
      Renting is for the poor. No one else thinks otherwise.
joelbondurant 5y ago
Communists gonna commune.
kadomony 5y ago
If places like the Bay Area had a modicum of intelligent governance, they’d take the approach that Tokyo did. Urbanize and ban street parking. Make the place walkable with affordable rent. The current real estate developments out there are a joke.
samstave 5y ago
So I actually have a story about this, which I have posted on HN in the past... Alameda, Ca - I was talking to the planning department about this problem as I was interested in creating a Tiny Home Community - and had one of the Pre-Eminent Tiny Home Companies on board: Wind River Tiny Homes to assist in planning, speaking to the city council etc... The city council shut it down and refused to re-zone the lots. They stated that one was not allowed to put multiple tiny homes on a single lot - as the zoning required one entrance per dwelling only on the lot, which meant one pluming infrastructure, one sewer and one power... So I asked if I could build shared utilities underground for multiple units on a lot - and they said no, because they defined single dwelling as only having one primary entrance (front door) And they were dead set against changing any zoning laws. Further, when asked about municipal broadband, they said "no we sold that whole contract to comcast, and we wont be looking at that again" (That is an actual quote)
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/7lrVl https://archive.is/7lrVl
hamburgerwah 5y ago
Zoning changes are worthless when there is still prop 13 and the most onerous permitting and building restrictions in the country. The only long term solutions are completely infeasible while there are elections in the state. Existing property owners need to pay actual representative property taxes and need to see their homes decrease about 75% in value through a combination of massive building campaign and increase an inventory from the unaffordability of paying real property taxes.

151 points by wavesounds 5y ago

slater 5y ago

Every NIMBY this side of Sacramento: "From my cold, dead hands!"

DiabloD3 5y ago
From everyone else: "That can be arranged."
- slater 5y ago
  Ha! :)
- swiley 5y ago
  This is obviously a joke but the property owners should remember that California wouldn't be the first place something like that happened.
TedShiller 5y ago
You don't have to be a NIMBY to say that. You can also just be realistic. We don't have the water.
- anchpop 5y ago
  Most water usage is agricultural. And increasing density decreases per-capita water usage because there are fewer lawns to water per person.
  - TedShiller 5y ago
    Building more housing won't solve that.
    - fragmede 5y ago
      We don't today have the water for that. An also today, it's not worth it to build expensive desalination plants. What increasing the density does do, is bring forwards when desalination becomes economically worthwhile, solving that better than having only low-density single-family homes. Try this series on the economics of rural development. https://actionlab.strongtowns.org/hc/en-us/articles/4402259074708-Who-Pays-for-Growth-in-Collier-County-Florida- https://actionlab.strongtowns.org/hc/en-us/articles/44022590...

litoE 5y ago

They will need to triple or quadruple the capacity of the water, electrical and sewer grids that were sized for the current density. And convince people to part with their cars because street parking will become impossible.

jamestimmins 5y ago
I think a lot of people would actually embrace getting rid of their cars if they weren't necessary
- randycupertino 5y ago
  I live in a sfh in a Bay Area suburb and a lot of my neighbors have multiple cars for fun/hobbies and family. One of my neighbors has a household of three (two parents & a 10year old kid) and they have FIVE cars. I never realized how big "car culture" was in California until moving out of the city and into a suburb. In my experience living here, you can pry their cars out of their cold dead hands.
skybrian 5y ago
That’s an exaggeration since there wouldn’t be as many lawns to water and apartments are more energy-efficient. Also, infrastructure like water treatment plants are expensive and scale well, so you can spread the cost over more people. But yes, there are problems that come with density and they have to be thought through.
- jjhale 5y ago
  Yes, there are many places in the US that are currently having infrastructure crises due to too little density. There might need to be infrastructure upgrades as neighborhoods become denser, but over the long run, the infrastructure will be much more sustainable because the cost per user will be significantly lower.
wahern 5y ago
Per capita urban water usage in California has decreased by double digits percentages since 1990. See page 10 at https://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/PI_Water_Use_Trends_June_2020.pdf https://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/PI_Water_Use_... Older cities have done even better; newer urban developments further away from the older coastal areas pulled the average state-wide decrease down. IOW, there's plenty of slack in existing cities, especially the older coastal cities, which were originally planned and built for far greater density than permitted now, and at a time when per capita usage was far greater. If anything, continuing to incentivize urban sprawl is the surest way to overburden water infrastructure, especially supply.

tomcam 5y ago

I urge the Times editorial board to experiment in their own neighborhoods first and report back to us.

mjfl 5y ago

California voters are probably totally fine with the housing supply being too low because it drives up the price of their houses.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
IIAOPSW 5y ago
"But for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for homeowners." http://www.derekchristensen.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/shareholdervalue.jpg http://www.derekchristensen.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/s...
nr2x 5y ago
It's the most economically rational decision for a very large voting block, but it is openly screwing entire generations as well.
grecy 5y ago
Housing can't be both affordable and a good investment.
- swiley 5y ago
  It an be if you're allowed to improve it.
- benrbray 5y ago
  You have that backwards. Housing can only be affordable if it's not a good investment. If it's a good investment, people will buy houses expecting to get much more out of it than just a place to stay. Look at Japan, for example, where houses lose their value after 40 years. I pay cheaper rent in Tokyo than I ever did in even mid-sized American cities.
  - shuckles 5y ago
    Both of these are wrong because they confuse buildings and land. Land can be a good investment even if shelter is affordable. My understanding, for example, is land in Tokyo is quite expensive.

dclaw 5y ago

Foreign investors are the real issue. It's apparent that some are even laundering their money by purchasing US real estate. Just because the big players are doing so with commercial real estate doesn't mean smaller players aren't doing it with housing. Many houses owned by foreign investors tend to sit vacant full time. There's even lawyers who specialize in the stuff, telling people to setup businesses and have the house owned by the business to reduce their tax rate. https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/a-kleptocrats-dream-us-real-estate-a-safe-haven-for-billions-in-dirty-money-report-says/ https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/a-kleptocra... https://calmatters.org/housing/2018/03/data-dig-are-foreign-investors-driving-up-real-estate-in-your-california-neighborhood/ https://calmatters.org/housing/2018/03/data-dig-are-foreign-... https://www.avvo.com/legal-guides/ugc/a-guide-for-foreign-investors-looking-to-acquire-california-real-estate https://www.avvo.com/legal-guides/ugc/a-guide-for-foreign-in...

woah 5y ago
This is a baseless conspiracy theory, usually peddled by those who stand to gain from high housing prices. "Oh no, high housing prices aren't caused by the fact that we don't allow anything new to be built, it's those nefarious foreigners". It's easy to see how it doesn't add up. Why would some wealthy foreign investor want to buy a house and then lose a bunch of money by not renting it out?
- sk2020 5y ago
  Some people have money they need to get rid of. Taking a loss on the property is not as big of a problem as having money you can’t justify having possession of. How much of the market that is would be hard to guess. Zero is not likely, though.
- Supermancho 5y ago
  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-08-16/taxing-the-rich-do-housing-prices-fall-when-empty-second-homes-are-taxed https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-08-16/taxing-th... - the wealthy can afford lots of houses. They buy them or even build them (midwest, lots of empty multi-million dollar homes are still appearing). I mean, there are multiple multi-billion dollar companies who haven't let go of their office spaces when there's no hope that people were going to return to work anytime soon. One of the many simple reasons, they can afford to burn the cash and it's a drop in the bucket. I don't think you are grasping what kind of wealth buys up houses. > It's easy to see how it doesn't add up. > Why would some wealthy foreign investor want to buy a house and then lose a bunch of money by not renting it out? In the late 2010s, the primary reason was as a protective measure/taxation avoidance. In China, the wealthy are always at a danger of being on the wrong side of the government and having your wealth confiscated. In Bellevue (the wealthy eastside of the Seattle area) had a burgeoning industry of exotic car dealerships, luxury jewelry and housing prices soaring as Chinese money loaded up on housing. When Xi (and the PRC at large) decided to crack down https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2020/02/chinas-new-foreign-investment-law https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2020/02/chinas-new-fore..., by 2019 most of the luxury businesses evaporated and houses were being liquidated (most still made money because of decent US housing inflation) because of the taxation of foreign assets and the penalties for not disclosing them. So that's done. There's always oil money from the middle east which has ended up in California. My family sold off 2 properties to families from Quatar and Iran, who casually paid for east house up front. These were their "California" homes. Banks have been buying up houses for awhile now. Yes, it pains me to bring up FOX News. https://foxbaltimore.com/news/nation-world/major-wall-street-investment-firms-go-on-a-home-buying-sprees-amid-housing-boom https://foxbaltimore.com/news/nation-world/major-wall-street... - they are likely to rent out the homes. American banks who are looking to maximize value for something they don't intend to even live in (or run to), don't mind renting. This is a maximized investment that makes sense to you. Those do happen. My wife and I just bought a house next door to one of the MANY display houses of Todd Griffin (Windows Plus). The yard is a wreck but the interior furnishings (kitchen, windows, shelving, etc) are very nice, barring the bare slab concrete floor. Nobody has ever lived there.

xt00 5y ago

Changing zoning in your neighborhood that you currently live in (and continue to want to live in) will likely change it, so for people to accept that risk they should be given an incentive.. for example within a given neighborhood what if the state gave those areas huge property tax breaks to allow zoning changes? Then there is a trade-off, pay less taxes and then you get something for the potentially different future. Maybe it’s better maybe it’s worse but saying to people “please just allow changes to the zoning” has not worked... edit: basic thing I was thinking about was giving people incentives for YIMBY pushes in areas.. yea prop13 complicates it, but just wondering if there is any incentive for the folks that live in someplace already or the base assumption is that a very large percentage will vote against it?

s0rce 5y ago
More than half my neighborhood already gets massive property tax breaks from Prop 13. Some people pay like 1/10th of what a new owner would pay.
darksaints 5y ago
They bought a house. It came with a deed. The deed delineates exactly what rights are conferred. Zoning is not one of them. Why do we have to bribe people to rescind rights that they never had in the first place?
- orcasauce 5y ago
  There is an expectation that where I live won't just be rezoned industrial to make way for more Amazon warehouses.
  - darksaints 5y ago
    There's also an expectation that aliens don't invade, and chickens won't mutate into tyrannosaurus rexes with all the 5g going up. Luckily, none of that will ever happen. You'll get apartments, not warehouses.
- RHSeeger 5y ago

TedShiller 5y ago

We don't have the water for that. Sorry.

darksaints 5y ago
Yes, you do. Sorry.
- TedShiller 5y ago
  I'm with you, I wish we did. Unfortunately, the reservoirs say otherwise.
  - darksaints 5y ago
    No you don't...you're a NIMBY just like the rest of Californians. I can tell because of the rehashed completely disingenuous arguments that have been debunked a million times by now.
    - TedShiller 5y ago
      I probably would be a NIMBY if I owned property myself. Unfortunately I'm not in that position. Higher density could help me become an owner (and hence a NIMBY), but it's not even clear that it will. The reason I say that is because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand NYC built all the housing they possibly can, and yet I personally still could never afford to own property there. Same with LA. I'm also opposed to the building of more roads. Not because (as you might claim) I own existing roads and have a vested interest, but because I know that more roads simply means more traffic. The places that have the most roads also have the worst traffic. I wish it were different.
      - 0xB31B1B 5y ago
        it is different, consumption of road space (road use is free, or at least priced in time instead of money, many routes to get to a destination). Urban land has an enormous cost priced in dollars, and as we practice land ownership in the west, it involves the monopoly right of a fixed space. One can own multiple pieces of property simultaneously, but one cannot take up multiple spaces in traffic. Entirely different concepts and mechanisms.

refurb 5y ago

Why is single-family zoning required to "save" California when the problem is pretty much only in a small downtown core in a 2-3 major metro areas? Pretty sure Bakersfield will do just fine with single-family zoning.

jeffbee 5y ago
Redfin says Bakersfield is "very competitive" and home prices are up 50% in only five years.
- refurb 5y ago
  So is Billings, MT, but nobody is going to claim Montana is running out of space.
dvaun 5y ago
Bakersfield housing is expensive for the region. The salaries here, in my opinion, cannot keep up with this recent rise in prices.
- refurb 5y ago
  Right, so build more single family home. Why would Bakersfield need condo towers and high density?
  - digisign 5y ago
    Bad for the environment, and why we're dependent on foreign oil.
    - nradov 5y ago
      The US imports very little foreign oil now. We're not dependent. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=727&t=6 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=727&t=6

baybal2 5y ago

Any Californians here?

gibsonf1 5y ago

Perhaps single family zoning, which is also in many other states without crises, is not the cause or it's change the solution for California's very real crisis.

shuckles 5y ago
Basically every metro area in the country has an affordability problem as defined by cost of housing relative to wages. One of the most affordable growing metros is Houston, which has no zoning.
- tadfisher 5y ago
  If that is your only metric by which to judge, then Houston is a roaring success. Include just about any other factor in your judgment, such as walkability, health outcomes, education quality, or disaster resilience to name a few, you might consider Houston's zoning strategy to be batshit insane.
  - shuckles 5y ago
    I’m not arguing that all zoning is bad. I was responding to the claim that SFZ is irrelevant to affordability.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    Judging by how many people are moving from places like SF and NYC to places like Houston I think people prioritize affordable housing over all the secondary luxuries. <insert low effort quip about consumers being cheapskates and not knowing what's good for them here>

sirmike_ 5y ago

Seems like this would create a whole host of problems which restrictive zoning solves. In other words we already learned that lesson and people generally do not like unappealing entities being right next door. It allows the public an extra check on something not appropriate. Why does California not have a wider range of political ideas to solve their problems? It appears Cali is chasing its tail by their brand and experiment in democracy when they try to "solve" their glaring issues. Credit where due -- many times other states have benefited from California being so big and mandated certain safety laws. But like the famous saying many citizens of the Golden State will soon be able to answer the question for Newsom (uberkind-liberal-idiot-when-it-suits): What have you done for me lately?

0xB31B1B 5y ago
"unappearling entities being nextdoor", "allows the public an extra check on something not appropriate" You're openly advocating for segregation in 2021, this is almost verbatim how segregation advocates advocated for housing segregation ~100 years ago
- sirmike_ 5y ago
  Bluster is what you say! OK then I am sure you would be ok with zoning being changed to allow for a nuclear power plant in your neighborhood whenever someone(s) with big piles of cash comes through. Yeah, no thanks mate. Where I live the last heads of our county council, where openly corrupt with sweetheart deals handed out to local construction and developer companies. The one before last ended up in jail thanks to the feds investigating these type crimes. This is in the US no less. No way buddy. The public has a right to decide who can built what where and for what purpose. Yes there should be defining discrimination which rightly limits a free for all when it comes to zoning. How naïve are you?
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  Sub 100 with a much smaller number.
kevinqiu1 5y ago
And yet all of the desirable(aka expensive) places to live are mixed use dense neighborhoods built before the concept of Euclidean zoning? Eg. Old pre-zoning, pre-car neighborhoods in Toronto, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, ect.

epicureanideal 5y ago

To save California, build more. Single family, multi family, whatever. Just more.

colechristensen 5y ago
Wouldn't California, and the rest of the country, be better off if quite a few people from across the spectrum left for other places? The wealth/talent/business concentration is really unnecessary, and with drought, fires, and other global warming concerns, it's actually not that nice there. The solution to a lot of the "housing problems" around the country isn't further concentration but decentralization.
- epicureanideal 5y ago
  Sure. Let’s take the 2 trillion we spent on the Afghan war and instead build up a few more tech cities with high rise apartments, great public transit, new great universities and so on. I think the problem is that outside the government spending like that, private industry has a hard time getting sufficient funding to create a meaningful new center of innovation.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  I can't speak to the rest of it, but concentration of populations is often extremely good for certain types of endeavors. Cities often have the surplus value available to support speculative and "non-productive" cultural output. The rapid mixing of ideas and cultures often helps a lot too. I'd argue that it's good for California to have all those people. It's pretty hard to argue that it isn't, based on the cultural, economic, and agricultural output of the state. Now whether or not it's good for the people in California is another matter altogether. And I say that as someone who recently left CA for another state.
- eli_gottlieb 5y ago
  The issue is, you can have 21st-century high-tech free-market capitalism with low state intervention, or you can have decentralization of the population and economy. Pick only one.

01100011 5y ago

For the people with homes, locked into lower property taxes, a stable monthly payment, and their version of the CA dream, nothing needs to change. I can't really blame them. When I owned a home I was a NIMBY who thought my mortgage payment afforded me a right to continue my lifestyle indefinitely. After a divorce and becoming a renter, I have a lot more sympathy for folks subject to the whims of landlords and the rental market. Sure, renting means I have some flexibility and don't have to worry much about maintenance, but there is an emotional and social price you pay for the lack of (sometimes imagined) stability afforded to you by home ownership. I'm about to plan my CA escape after 27 years in the sun and it is not without regrets. I'll say though that the one thing CA should consider is requiring the supply of housing to match the supply of jobs. I suppose it's fine if, say, Cupertino doesn't want to urbanize, but as long as they allow more commercial space and more jobs, they put pressure on surrounding communities to deal with the negative effects. I can't really care too much anymore though. CA has been good to me for a long time, but she's showing me the door and telling me I'm no longer welcome and it's not something I have the will to fight for.

cylinder714 5y ago
> requiring the supply of housing to match the supply of jobs As a native Californian, I would change that to, "match the supply of water." I'm astounded at all the construction, particularly that being built in the hills overlooking Folsom, and wonder where they're going to get their water.
- BelenusMordred 5y ago
  Desalination can provide for a lot more, even then, consumer usage is nothing compared to agricultural and industrial use.
  - newbamboo 5y ago
    Yes, plenty of water it’s just up north, not in the places where agriculture needs it. I’m tempted to argue it’s a self correcting problem; pipes and desalination will be built when the costs make it feasible. It’s all politics and special interests. That’s the California way.

justapassenger 5y ago

This is much more complex problem, and each time someone offers one simple solution, you should suspect it’s BS. Sure, single family zoning contributes to the problem, but Manhattan doesn’t really have single family zoning and is still not affordable. Just getting rid of it, won’t be the end of the world for the neighborhoods, but also won’t really solve problems it’s advertised to solve.

krrrh 5y ago
Comparing the 1.6m person commercial core of a high-income 8.5m person city is a bit unfair. Manhattan isn’t expensive because it’s high density, it’s high density because it’s expensive (desirable). Californian cities could follow suit if allowed to.
jgwil2 5y ago
New York has been downzoning for years now. What's important isn't just having high density, it's making sure that available housing grows with the population. When your population is increasing, increasing density helps with that.

traloid 5y ago

Interesting. So 50 years ago, with labour efficiency and productivity being a small fraction of what it is today, single-family houses were easily built and bought by people. Today its somehow an unreachable goal that people cant obtain. Why? I dont want to live in a pod or communal flat with 20 people. How are people not revolting over the direction western economies are taking?

swiley 5y ago
California has a long way to go before it starts to become attractive.
jgwil2 5y ago
Because the population has increased over the course of fifty years. There's a limit to how many single-family houses you can build that are reasonably close to jobs.
PeterisP 5y ago
You can easily get an affordable single-family house - it's just going to be a long, long way from your job because you'll have to drive through all the land taken up by less affordable single-family houses who want to pay extra to live closer to where everybody else is.

digisign 5y ago

One state alone can't fix a nationwide problem. Otherwise it becomes more attractive and loses any ground made. There need to be homes everywhere people would like to live, within reason.

crubier 5y ago

Disclaimer, I’m European and have only been in SFBA for 5months in my life. Maybe the solution is not to build more residential to keep growing, but instead to limit implantation of new jobs/companies to limit the growth to a sustainable decent value? The result would be to limit real estate price, but without making the Bay Area a hellscape of concrete towers. I understand it is controversial, but do we really want to transform the Bay Area (which still has some really fine natural beauty and neighborhoods) into the hellscape that are some Chinese (or European) concrete tower based suburbs? Do we still want to keep centralizing more? Sadly free market + democracy means either the homeowners side are in charge and keep the status quo so their property prices go up. Or the renters side might one day win, and start sacrificing this nice place to make concrete prisons for everyone. The current system ensures that the optimal thing to do will never happen.

etrautmann 5y ago
This seems likely to create a host of unintended consequences and exacerbates the issues caused by a lack of socioeconomic diversity and people working in service jobs. The incentives will push municipalities to only take the “best” jobs, putting further pressure on restaurants etc to find workers. Ultimately the “character” of a neighborhood is a function of the vibrant culture and people more than yhe architecture and density.
- crubier 5y ago
  In a different system where limiting implantation of new companies would be a thing, I don’t see why you couldn’t place incentives to keep the job balance and avoid these consequence. It’s not that complicated in comparison. But of course this « different system » is science fiction at this point, especially in the US.
jabl 5y ago
Surely there are other ways of increasing density than some concrete tower dystopia? I mean, there's this entire movement, 'new urbanism' or whatever you want to call it, which is specifically about creating nice AND decently high density towns and cities. IMHO, the Bay Area is its own kind of dystopia, with low-density 'burbia spreading like a mat over the (previously beautiful, I presume) landscape. Even things like central Santa Clara are quite low density, with wide (very wide!) streets, low houses (typically 1-2 stories) set back far from the streets with ginormous parking lots.

theragra 5y ago

I know nothing about housing, but I am always perplexed about size of US houses. My sister has 9 room house, and it is considered small! My parents here in northern Europe has house twice as small, and it is more than enough for them. Maybe it is part of the problem. Smaller house obviously is cheaper to build and maintain.

tonfreed 5y ago

You WILL live in the concrete pod You WILL eat the bugs You WILL NOT own anything You WILL be happy Amazing how many of these articles I'm seeing lately.

swiley 5y ago
Allowing for denser housing frees up homes. The pod thing is scary because of a lack of choice which is what this article argues against.
andrewmcwatters 5y ago
Serfdom is SO hot right now. Like global warming? Omg, no like so much hotter.

jgowdy 5y ago

Yeah, the traffic isn't bad enough so let's just shoehorn in multifamily units into single family zoned neighborhoods that aren't remotely close enough to the jobs people work for bicycling to be a realistic option. Virtue signaling the housing crisis isn't useful. If you're going to talk about housing you can't just rail against "NIMBYs" and clamor for more housing. You have to actually explain how the infrastructure and transportation to/from jobs will work with your assertions. Otherwise you're just arguing for cramming everyone up each other's asses and let the chips fall where they may. Most people are not going to ride a bicycle to work. Some of us have kids to drop off at school on the way to work. We have to buy enough groceries to feed a family, which don't fit on a bicycle. Let go of your hipster fantasies. We can't all be single people living in a flat, riding a bicycle to the farmer's market and the book store.

andrewmcwatters 5y ago
No, no, no, can't you see? We need to save California! Won't someone PLEASE think about the landlords? I need people to owe me money forever! How else will I survive? Please, oh please, California, don't build more single-family homes and create stable families. Won't someone PLEASE think about Blackrock! REITs need cash flow to be viable investments! How else will we pay out dividends to investors?
- anchpop 5y ago
  Density is better for the environment and reduces housing costs which benefits poor people and minorities. The primary beneficiaries of the current arrangement are rich white landowners who in many cases pay virtually no property tax. Stable families are more than capable of thriving in multi-family homes, go anywhere in London or Paris to see for yourself.
  - andrewmcwatters 5y ago
    Renting is for the poor. No one else thinks otherwise.

joelbondurant 5y ago

Communists gonna commune.

kadomony 5y ago

If places like the Bay Area had a modicum of intelligent governance, they’d take the approach that Tokyo did. Urbanize and ban street parking. Make the place walkable with affordable rent. The current real estate developments out there are a joke.

samstave 5y ago

So I actually have a story about this, which I have posted on HN in the past... Alameda, Ca - I was talking to the planning department about this problem as I was interested in creating a Tiny Home Community - and had one of the Pre-Eminent Tiny Home Companies on board: Wind River Tiny Homes to assist in planning, speaking to the city council etc... The city council shut it down and refused to re-zone the lots. They stated that one was not allowed to put multiple tiny homes on a single lot - as the zoning required one entrance per dwelling only on the lot, which meant one pluming infrastructure, one sewer and one power... So I asked if I could build shared utilities underground for multiple units on a lot - and they said no, because they defined single dwelling as only having one primary entrance (front door) And they were dead set against changing any zoning laws. Further, when asked about municipal broadband, they said "no we sold that whole contract to comcast, and we wont be looking at that again" (That is an actual quote)

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.is/7lrVl https://archive.is/7lrVl

hamburgerwah 5y ago

Zoning changes are worthless when there is still prop 13 and the most onerous permitting and building restrictions in the country. The only long term solutions are completely infeasible while there are elections in the state. Existing property owners need to pay actual representative property taxes and need to see their homes decrease about 75% in value through a combination of massive building campaign and increase an inventory from the unaffordability of paying real property taxes.