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This is a great article about great news (except for the first sentence calling it "A little known law" -- it's been quite contentious). Palo Alto has fought t

• kevinburke 4y ago
  It won't make economic sense to try a builder's remedy project in lower land value jurisdictions, especially when you consider the legal headache. This is why we saw so many in Santa Monica and few in, say, the Inland Empire.
  • TulliusCicero 4y ago
    Right, and I mean the Inland Empire doesn't have anywhere near the housing shortage of the coast anyway, right?
    • yellowapple 4y ago
      That, and what housing shortage it does have is largely a downstream effect of the housing shortage of the coast.
• raldi 4y ago
  If you were to stop 100 people on the street and ask if they'd heard of the law, how many do you think it would be?
  • spacedcowboy 4y ago
    If I were to stop 100 people on the street and ask them if they'd heard of hedgehogs, the positive answer percentage would be depressingly low, I feel...
    • spookthesunset 4y ago
      Sonic was a hedgehog in a video game. Older people might get that reference.
      • olddustytrail 4y ago
        Indeed. From TFA: "The “builder’s remedy” is a very old law from the 1990s" Ah, the ancient times!
  • cinericius 4y ago
    You could refer to Java as a "little known programming language" and use this as a defence.
    • raldi 4y ago
      I would wager money that members of the general public are at least five times as likely to have heard of the Java programming language as the Housing Accountability Act.
  • eddsh1994 4y ago
    I hear it brought up by someone almost every time I go to a bar in Palo Alto/Mountain View.
  • jimnotgym 4y ago
    Which street?
• pj_mukh 4y ago
  Santa Monica building 4000 homes seems like such a dream. However, I wonder how many of these will get CEQA blocked [1] :( [1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/signature-environmental-law-hurts-housing/618264/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/signature-...
  • mistrial9 4y ago
    but just two comments above, there is a no-zoning State person decrying rampant destruction of pristine areas.. so CEQA serves that purpose..
  • dragonwriter 4y ago
    My guess is that a lot will in the short term, which will result in streamlining changes to CEQA rules specifically applying to them. It probably won't be a straight exemption like SB288 and SB922 provided for certain projects. And if the pressure for a statewide emergenct declaration on the housing crisis bears out, well, a lot could happen without legislative change.
• RangerScience 4y ago
  The article doesn’t mention it, but it’s my understanding that this auto-approval only happens within a certain distance of public transit as well. I know that’s been a part of prior laws by Wiener, but I could totes be wrong that it’s a part of this one as well. The developers still have to abide by construction laws - safety, and I think environmental impact. All that’s released (AFAIK?) is the zoning-based “no” from cities (and when within a certain distance from public transit hubs, maybe).
  • CydeWeys 4y ago
    > The article doesn’t mention it, but it’s my understanding that this auto-approval only happens within a certain distance of public transit as well. That article doesn't mention it because that's not correct. It's not tied to transit.
    • RangerScience 4y ago
      Right - that's the prior bill that didn't pas SB50?
  • epistasis 4y ago
    I think you are referring to AB 2097, which allows more housing near transit hubs. It was passed in the latest legislative session, but is distinct from the Builder's Remedy and has height restrictions unlike the topic of this article. The same author wrote about it here: https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/yimby-triumph-in-california https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/yimby-triumph-in-califor...
    • RangerScience 4y ago
      Thank you! This was a super cool article. There's some neat and very spicy things happening in the CA legislature :D
• cody_coconuts 4y ago
  Maybe "little know outside of California" is more accurate. I certainly haven't heard anything about this, and it seems like the article is aiming for the broader audience
• omegaworks 4y ago
  >With no constraints on construction will there be a small boom in new development, tearing down virgin forest in order to make empty developments? Prior to these changes, so much new housing was forced into the urban-wildland interface that entire neighborhoods regularly burned in our seasonal wildfires. The hope is these rule changes will force cities that use land inefficiently to densify rather than encourage more sprawl.
• maxsilver 4y ago
  > With no constraints on construction will there be a small boom in new development, tearing down virgin forest in order to make empty developments? Probably? I live in Michigan, which (with the exception of two spots) has no meaningful limits on construction. Even the cities that technically have-and-enforce zoning, waive all the rules constantly anytime a developer asks. And yes -- it means developers can build almost anything they want, almost anywhere they want. (Truly anything, I live next to a 15-story concrete castle apartment building that a developer built on what was once a trailer park). Unfortunately, it does not mean you get lower cost of housing (prices here are still astronomical, and while they look cheaper in comparison to California, is only because of the severely reduced income locals make -- prices are still at record-all-time highs) But it does mean, developers routinely cut down entire forests or farmland for new suburbs anytime they'd like. If you want a house made of sticks and cardboard, we have loads and loads of them for 'just' $450k. Years worth of 'inventory' here.
  • OnlineGladiator 4y ago
    > Unfortunately, it does not mean you get lower cost of housing You don't believe in supply and demand? I'm not saying you have cheap housing. I'm saying you would have more expensive housing if there were fewer of them, the same way GPUs are more valuable when there are fewer of them.
    • nemo44x 4y ago
      What you're not factoring in is the cost of labor and materials. They are both already quite expensive and when you have a building boom the costs of both will skyrocket. What will happen is you'll end up with cheaply constructed housing made from the worst materials. And that's the good outcome. The bad outcome is the rich who are looking for alternate investments will buy up all the labor and materials and build construction for themselves and will build rentals. That's the bad outcome. The awful outcome, and likely outcome is that the labor and materials will be bought by newly formed real estate companies that will build rental property that is ugly and expensive - because they control the market more and more as they merge into 2 super landlord companys.
• mateo411 4y ago
  >Basically, shows that the State's tax difficulties are themselves the consequence of exclusion. I'm not sure what you mean by tax difficulties, if you mean the state has trouble raising revenue, that's certainly not the case. CA is running a large budget surplus right now. If they only relied on property tax it could be an issue, but they also have an income tax, so the revenue outlook in CA is pretty good right now.
  • gumby 4y ago
    Fari enough: let me clarify. Because California gets so little tax from property, it must get more from income taxes. That has a couple of negative consequences. The nice thing about property taxes is that housing prices change slowly, even in boom/bust cycles -- essentially they are coupled to a dashpot. While income, especially in California with a progressive system coupled with most of the high earners paying cap gains, leading to large swings (further influenced by the Fed). Also property taxes are the main source of municipal and school funding; with property taxes artificially pulled low, the state needs to step in instead. In addition, the structure of Prop 13 discourages people from moving which reduces the availability of housing stock. Prop 13 wouldn't be so bad if it excluded commercial buildings (including rental properties) and didn't have the huge inheritance loophole. But neither of those is likely to change. The reason I mentioned the coupling between prop 13 and exclusion: Californians voided all restrictive covenants in the 60s, which lead to more selective zoning restrictions; Prop 13 came from conservative southern californians and (due to the stickiness mentioned above, including a retroactive valuation reduction and the inheritance loophole) locked a lot of "those" buyers out of the existing neghborhoods.
    • acdha 4y ago
      Your point about moving is really important: there are a ton of boomers sitting in houses which are much larger than they need without children living at home but in many cases they're doing exactly what the system incentivizes. Accessory dwelling units (ADUs) can help somewhat if they have enough space and want to get in the landlord business (or have family who need it) but really we need to make it easy for people to downsize without financial precarity.
• tinglymintyfrsh 4y ago
  PA has random pockets of new development, like on Alma St & Page Mill across from where AOL was. Mountain View has much more around the San Antonio Shopping Center where it's starting to look like SF. I'm wondering if there will be random developments that will sink property values because big city blight comes with : homeless camping, property crime, and so forth. Palo Alto is unique in California in that it is/was legal to dwell in a vehicle because it wasn't criminalized since the law had to be rolled back due to a Ninth Circuit ruling about another law in LA.
  • telotortium 4y ago
    The south side of El Camino Real belongs to Stanford, not Palo Alto, so RV camping has always been allowed on that side of the street.
• seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  SROs went out of style throughout the USA because they provided poor returns for the property used and were a huge hassle for whoever was running them, not to mention being magnates for crime. It’s sad, since an SRO is better than a tent. The socialization of lower tier housing (via HUD) also played a role as SROs didn’t really fit what was expected once the government got involved. China has a lot of options for cheap housing, none at all legal, but rule of law isn’t really a thing there so just keep things quiet. In Beijing, you can rent a windowless sub-basement room for a few hundred kuai a month, mold is an issue, but it’s better than other options. Waitresses also often crash on the floors of the restaurants they are working in, so the windows are all blinded over in cardboard after closing time. This is all working poor, it is really hard to be a vagabond in China because the social safety net just isn’t there for it (and you can’t just crash under an overpass because the police are already in to that).
• dragonwriter 4y ago
  > It sets an interesting context for Prop 13 (basing the tax base on the purchase price, not generally on assessed value) Prop 13 uses assessed value, but only allows unlimited assessment increases at sales, some other non-exempt transfers, and a few other qualifying events, otherwise, the year-over-year increase in tax basis value is limited to 2% or the rate of inflation, whichever is lower. But, also missed in most discussions of Prop 13, is that it capped property tax rates at 1%, which (even before considering the value missed by the assessment cap) is not only way below the common rates prior to Prop 13, its way below the national average effective property tax rate. Prop 13 isn't a result of exclusive zoning, it is—like exclusive zoning—a measure that protects status quo elites at the expense of everyone else. > For example, Calaveras county has a shrinking population, but the main sources of jobs and taxes is construction. With no constraints on construction will there be a small boom in new development, tearing down virgin forest in order to make empty developments? Neither Calaveras County nor any city therein has a noncompliant housing element, so “no constraints” due to builder's remedy is not an issue. OTOH, other places in the state getting more housing is more likely to accelerate Calaveras County population loss.