8 ms·

The thing I don't get is why many SFH owners don't see the benefit of upzoning their lot: Overnight, their house is much more valuable because if they choose to

The thing I don't get is why many SFH owners don't see the benefit of upzoning their lot: Overnight, their house is much more valuable because if they choose to, they can sell to a developer who can make MORE money by building more homes. And if they choose to keep their house as is, nobody is going to force them. In the end, it boils down to cars, though. Many people see the free parking space in front of their house as an extension of their property, and more people on their street often means they have to compete for it. Make cars optional, and everything else falls into place.

pxeboot 5y ago
> Overnight, their house is much more valuable because if they choose to, they can sell to a developer who can make MORE money by building more homes. This only works due to scarcity. If everybody could do this, the values would stop increasing and could potentially drop.
- ihaveajob 5y ago
  And I would argue that's a good thing, save for those who overbought housing with the expectation of it continuing to rise in value. But it's not responsible to shape the housing market to favor those following the greater fool scheme.
SmellTheGlove 5y ago
I can tell you that when we were moving from SF to Seattle this past year, we were getting _crushed_ on any house that was sitting on an upzoned lot. Seattle's done a decent job of upzoning parts of neighborhoods around transit corridors, and we were looking at houses on those lots because I believe in the upside as you do. Well, so do others, and they have _cash_ to buy it - we did not! We're now in a SFH in a mostly SFH neighborhood, but a block or so from an upzoned area that has townhouses and some apartments. The only issue that I have with this so far is that newer construction denser housing is not required to have parking for some reason, but people living in them do have cars. I'm hoping that larger projects start to require parking because transit here just isn't good enough to not have a car. I don't care if people park in front of my house or anything - we're all neighbors - but at some point we're going to run out of street parking. And a lot of people think that's a fake concern, and all I can say to that is, they've never visited Philadelphia.
- xxpor 5y ago
  The way to solve the parking problem is to price street parking, not to require new buildings to build parking while the existing houses get off scott free. It's the exact same supply and demand argument: limited supply so how do you reduce demand to the supply that exists? Increase prices.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    I expect residential parking is pretty price-insensitive. Maybe more households would forgo owning a marginal second car. But if a households needs a car, they need a car. And if that means paying $100+/month that's just something they're going to have to eat.
    - ihaveajob 5y ago
      With parking requirements, families who don't have/need/want a car still have to pay the extra price for a built-in feature they don't need. When we bought our first home, it was a condo in SoMa without car parking. We loved it because we didn't want or need a car, and we couldn't have comfortably afforded a place with parking included. Especially in metropolitan environments, minimum parking requirements are the near the core among the reasons many things don't work well (public service, street safety, runaway home prices...)
      - ghaff 5y ago
        The parent was making a different point though which was that increasing the price of parking would decrease the demand. And while that is true almost by definition, mostly you'll just transfer money from all the people who want/need cars to someone or someones else. Most adults aren't going to forego a car because parking is too expensive. (Of course, they may decide just to live someplace else where parking is cheaper/free.)
        ihaveajob 5y ago
        There's definitely a core set of drivers who can't give up their cars, for whom any price increase will just be swallowed. However there's a big swath of gray cases at the boundary. For example, when we moved to San Francisco, we kept our car and parked on the street. After two parking tickets within the first month (because we forgot the weekly sweep schedule), we decided it didn't make sense to keep the car. We sold it, and started using Caltrain/Muni/biking for most of our trips, with a few Zipcar rentals peppered in. Without those parking tickets, we would definitely have kept our car because there would be no downside.
duped 5y ago
Some people aren't solely motivated by the rise in their property. Evidence already suggests doing nothing increases it plenty. On the other hand, some folks just don't like living in higher density neighborhoods. I can empathize with someone that bought a single family home decades ago, probably can't afford to buy a new one today even after selling it, and doesn't want to see their quiet neighborhood turn into a bustling urban environment. As an example, my parents live in the suburbs of a midwestern city. It's almost entirely residential single family housing, with a downtown business district that sprung up along a rail line 100 years ago. The city has major highway access, but not close to the rail station. There are plans to build a 400 unit apartment complex adjacent to the downtown area. Even with light rail to/from the major city, you still need a car to get around. Current residents are naturally livid that their quaint downtown they enjoy is going to change, and the streets around it that weren't designed to handle the daily commutes of hundreds of people are going to have far more traffic and road maintenance. It has nothing to do with home prices, and everything to do with maintaining the community experiences that they bought into, sometimes decades ago.
- gkop 5y ago
  Is it “not solely home prices” or “has nothing to do with home prices”? The latter is not a defensible argument, on its face.
  - duped 5y ago
    For the community I was talking about, absolutely. Many of the residents in that neighborhood are in their last home, not first.
- rndmize 5y ago
  This is pretty much it imo. There was some discussion on new housing and higher density in the town where my parents live a few years back, and apparently the standard "against" argument that got it shot down was "there's not enough parking and already too much traffic, we don't want more of either". I think a lot of this comes down to generational dynamics. Boomers were until recently the largest generation and have only been passed by millennials two years ago. They have the wealth and will to be politically heard and aren't particularly concerned with the difficulties of younger generations unless they see it second-hand through their children.
AmericanChopper 5y ago
> Make cars optional, and everything else falls into place. You’re forgetting all the other infrastructure that a person living in a house/apartment/duplex needs. Looking at a zoning map makes it easy to see why housing is so expensive to purchase, but in addition to roads how much additional water, electricity, internet, emergency services, whatever else, infrastructure would be required to service intensification? Does the local council have the competency and budget to manage that? How motivated do you think they’d be to challenge a status quo that prevents them from having to address those issues?
- ihaveajob 5y ago
  In terms of funding those services, and specifically in the case of California, newcomers to a city bear an outsized share of the burden, because Prop 13 locked in low tax rates for long term owners. So if anything, new development would facilitate providing and improving those services. You can see that, in practice, cities suffering municipal bankruptcies are those who fail to grow steadily.
- notJim 5y ago
  From what I've read, infrastructure for SFH is much more expensive to build and maintain, because each mile serves so many fewer people, and because the land is basically under-utilized, so the city collects less property tax from it. (One million-dollar SFH vs 8 500k apartments in a 4-plex, for example)
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    The most expensive infrastructure, schools, actually mostly scale with the number of people, not the amount of land used for each house. So throwing in a bunch of high density apartments can quickly overwhelm the local school system, requiring a decade or two to catch up (and why property taxes generally scale with occupancy limits). Having kids take classes in trailers is a bit of a bummer.
    - clairity 5y ago
      because of a series of ballot measures over the past 2 decades, CA/LA has plenty of money to build schools, so that’s not a problem here (e.g., our billion dollar high school).
Tiktaalik 5y ago
People rich enough to own SFH don't really care about the money. They didn't buy the place to sell. The product they're buying with the SFH form is Exclusivity. With a SFH surrounded by other SFHs you have few neighbours and you're (mostly) guaranteed that they're the same class as you. SFH owners oppose apartments because apartments bring more people and (gasp) poorer people.
- rcpt 5y ago
  If the current situation was hurting their pockets rather than stuffing them they'd change their tune real quick
rcpt 5y ago
It's the variance, not the expected value. Development is work. Paying for it is risk. Easier to just bank land and watch your equity grow (tax free). https://www.jstor.org/stable/3146986 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3146986
maxsilver 5y ago
> Overnight, their house is much more valuable because if they choose to, they can sell to a developer who can make MORE money by building more homes. And if they choose to keep their house as is, nobody is going to force them. In normal states -- people oppose up-zoning, because if their lot becomes more valuable, they instantly lose a lot of money. Sure, it's on-paper higher, but if they stay, that just means higher property taxes instantly (it's not uncommon for taxes to double or more after a few years of gentrification have occurred), along with higher cost of living (every other thing around them, like child care and restaurants and such will all get more expensive, to cover the higher rent and higher cost of living for those folks). And that's before getting to all the other minor annoying issues (extra noise, less infrastructure per person, income inequality, etc) And sure, in theory they could sell out. But how, for what? Sure, in California, you can always just assume there's a boring midwest/south place to escape to -- but for everyone already in the midwest/south, no such escape option exists. If those folks leave, they'll have to buy a new place somewhere else, and they're all expensive too. If your $50k house is now worth $500k on-paper, but every other place to live is now $800k and up, you can't afford to stay (property taxes + cost of living are eating your income) and you can't afford to leave (everywhere else is getting even more expensive, there's no where to 'sell out' to). And that's before getting to the fact that the average person literally can't move anywhere meaningfully different. (They have a job that forces them to stay in market, or are going to a specific university, or have kids, or have kids with divorced ex-spouses, or are caring for elderly parents, etc, etc) --- This is of course, just for normal/boring states. California has this "never charge people actual property taxes" law weirdness that complicates things.

pxeboot 5y ago

> Overnight, their house is much more valuable because if they choose to, they can sell to a developer who can make MORE money by building more homes. This only works due to scarcity. If everybody could do this, the values would stop increasing and could potentially drop.

ihaveajob 5y ago
And I would argue that's a good thing, save for those who overbought housing with the expectation of it continuing to rise in value. But it's not responsible to shape the housing market to favor those following the greater fool scheme.

SmellTheGlove 5y ago

I can tell you that when we were moving from SF to Seattle this past year, we were getting _crushed_ on any house that was sitting on an upzoned lot. Seattle's done a decent job of upzoning parts of neighborhoods around transit corridors, and we were looking at houses on those lots because I believe in the upside as you do. Well, so do others, and they have _cash_ to buy it - we did not! We're now in a SFH in a mostly SFH neighborhood, but a block or so from an upzoned area that has townhouses and some apartments. The only issue that I have with this so far is that newer construction denser housing is not required to have parking for some reason, but people living in them do have cars. I'm hoping that larger projects start to require parking because transit here just isn't good enough to not have a car. I don't care if people park in front of my house or anything - we're all neighbors - but at some point we're going to run out of street parking. And a lot of people think that's a fake concern, and all I can say to that is, they've never visited Philadelphia.

xxpor 5y ago
The way to solve the parking problem is to price street parking, not to require new buildings to build parking while the existing houses get off scott free. It's the exact same supply and demand argument: limited supply so how do you reduce demand to the supply that exists? Increase prices.
- ghaff 5y ago
  I expect residential parking is pretty price-insensitive. Maybe more households would forgo owning a marginal second car. But if a households needs a car, they need a car. And if that means paying $100+/month that's just something they're going to have to eat.
  - ihaveajob 5y ago
    With parking requirements, families who don't have/need/want a car still have to pay the extra price for a built-in feature they don't need. When we bought our first home, it was a condo in SoMa without car parking. We loved it because we didn't want or need a car, and we couldn't have comfortably afforded a place with parking included. Especially in metropolitan environments, minimum parking requirements are the near the core among the reasons many things don't work well (public service, street safety, runaway home prices...)
    - ghaff 5y ago
      The parent was making a different point though which was that increasing the price of parking would decrease the demand. And while that is true almost by definition, mostly you'll just transfer money from all the people who want/need cars to someone or someones else. Most adults aren't going to forego a car because parking is too expensive. (Of course, they may decide just to live someplace else where parking is cheaper/free.)
      - ihaveajob 5y ago
        There's definitely a core set of drivers who can't give up their cars, for whom any price increase will just be swallowed. However there's a big swath of gray cases at the boundary. For example, when we moved to San Francisco, we kept our car and parked on the street. After two parking tickets within the first month (because we forgot the weekly sweep schedule), we decided it didn't make sense to keep the car. We sold it, and started using Caltrain/Muni/biking for most of our trips, with a few Zipcar rentals peppered in. Without those parking tickets, we would definitely have kept our car because there would be no downside.

duped 5y ago

Some people aren't solely motivated by the rise in their property. Evidence already suggests doing nothing increases it plenty. On the other hand, some folks just don't like living in higher density neighborhoods. I can empathize with someone that bought a single family home decades ago, probably can't afford to buy a new one today even after selling it, and doesn't want to see their quiet neighborhood turn into a bustling urban environment. As an example, my parents live in the suburbs of a midwestern city. It's almost entirely residential single family housing, with a downtown business district that sprung up along a rail line 100 years ago. The city has major highway access, but not close to the rail station. There are plans to build a 400 unit apartment complex adjacent to the downtown area. Even with light rail to/from the major city, you still need a car to get around. Current residents are naturally livid that their quaint downtown they enjoy is going to change, and the streets around it that weren't designed to handle the daily commutes of hundreds of people are going to have far more traffic and road maintenance. It has nothing to do with home prices, and everything to do with maintaining the community experiences that they bought into, sometimes decades ago.

gkop 5y ago
Is it “not solely home prices” or “has nothing to do with home prices”? The latter is not a defensible argument, on its face.
- duped 5y ago
  For the community I was talking about, absolutely. Many of the residents in that neighborhood are in their last home, not first.
rndmize 5y ago
This is pretty much it imo. There was some discussion on new housing and higher density in the town where my parents live a few years back, and apparently the standard "against" argument that got it shot down was "there's not enough parking and already too much traffic, we don't want more of either". I think a lot of this comes down to generational dynamics. Boomers were until recently the largest generation and have only been passed by millennials two years ago. They have the wealth and will to be politically heard and aren't particularly concerned with the difficulties of younger generations unless they see it second-hand through their children.

AmericanChopper 5y ago

> Make cars optional, and everything else falls into place. You’re forgetting all the other infrastructure that a person living in a house/apartment/duplex needs. Looking at a zoning map makes it easy to see why housing is so expensive to purchase, but in addition to roads how much additional water, electricity, internet, emergency services, whatever else, infrastructure would be required to service intensification? Does the local council have the competency and budget to manage that? How motivated do you think they’d be to challenge a status quo that prevents them from having to address those issues?

ihaveajob 5y ago
In terms of funding those services, and specifically in the case of California, newcomers to a city bear an outsized share of the burden, because Prop 13 locked in low tax rates for long term owners. So if anything, new development would facilitate providing and improving those services. You can see that, in practice, cities suffering municipal bankruptcies are those who fail to grow steadily.
notJim 5y ago
From what I've read, infrastructure for SFH is much more expensive to build and maintain, because each mile serves so many fewer people, and because the land is basically under-utilized, so the city collects less property tax from it. (One million-dollar SFH vs 8 500k apartments in a 4-plex, for example)
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  The most expensive infrastructure, schools, actually mostly scale with the number of people, not the amount of land used for each house. So throwing in a bunch of high density apartments can quickly overwhelm the local school system, requiring a decade or two to catch up (and why property taxes generally scale with occupancy limits). Having kids take classes in trailers is a bit of a bummer.
  - clairity 5y ago
    because of a series of ballot measures over the past 2 decades, CA/LA has plenty of money to build schools, so that’s not a problem here (e.g., our billion dollar high school).

Tiktaalik 5y ago

People rich enough to own SFH don't really care about the money. They didn't buy the place to sell. The product they're buying with the SFH form is Exclusivity. With a SFH surrounded by other SFHs you have few neighbours and you're (mostly) guaranteed that they're the same class as you. SFH owners oppose apartments because apartments bring more people and (gasp) poorer people.

rcpt 5y ago
If the current situation was hurting their pockets rather than stuffing them they'd change their tune real quick

rcpt 5y ago

It's the variance, not the expected value. Development is work. Paying for it is risk. Easier to just bank land and watch your equity grow (tax free). https://www.jstor.org/stable/3146986 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3146986

maxsilver 5y ago

> Overnight, their house is much more valuable because if they choose to, they can sell to a developer who can make MORE money by building more homes. And if they choose to keep their house as is, nobody is going to force them. In normal states -- people oppose up-zoning, because if their lot becomes more valuable, they instantly lose a lot of money. Sure, it's on-paper higher, but if they stay, that just means higher property taxes instantly (it's not uncommon for taxes to double or more after a few years of gentrification have occurred), along with higher cost of living (every other thing around them, like child care and restaurants and such will all get more expensive, to cover the higher rent and higher cost of living for those folks). And that's before getting to all the other minor annoying issues (extra noise, less infrastructure per person, income inequality, etc) And sure, in theory they could sell out. But how, for what? Sure, in California, you can always just assume there's a boring midwest/south place to escape to -- but for everyone already in the midwest/south, no such escape option exists. If those folks leave, they'll have to buy a new place somewhere else, and they're all expensive too. If your $50k house is now worth $500k on-paper, but every other place to live is now $800k and up, you can't afford to stay (property taxes + cost of living are eating your income) and you can't afford to leave (everywhere else is getting even more expensive, there's no where to 'sell out' to). And that's before getting to the fact that the average person literally can't move anywhere meaningfully different. (They have a job that forces them to stay in market, or are going to a specific university, or have kids, or have kids with divorced ex-spouses, or are caring for elderly parents, etc, etc) --- This is of course, just for normal/boring states. California has this "never charge people actual property taxes" law weirdness that complicates things.