10 ms·

The idea that owners of homes should be able to make it (almost) illegal to build more homes in an area with some of the highest housing costs in the country is

• pirate787 4y ago
  The idea that a state government can seize land-use decision-making power from local communities is anti-democratic and grossly immoral.
  • gjsman-1000 4y ago
    If the local communities are completely incapable of even a modicum of good governance, what choice is there?
    • enriquec 4y ago
      "incapable of even a modicum of good governance"? really? You can't point to a single way in which these local communities govern better than the State of California? Thats laughable - at best.
      • gjsman-1000 4y ago
        Perhaps you should re-read the article, where it shows that >90% of the local communities failed to create zoning plans that comply with state law. That's their fault - they had literally years to prepare, for a >30 year old law, and failed. The latest events are the consequences of their own ineptitude. They thought they could just get away with not zoning for new construction of any significance, which is basically a protection racket.
    • deleted 4y ago
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  • bparsons 4y ago
    The idea that a few angry homeowners can block someone else from having a home is anti democratic.
    • gjsman-1000 4y ago
      Frankly, I think zoning and HOA restrictions on what you can do with land you purchased, and own, has gotten too far. Remember, the buyers own this land. And everybody agrees you shouldn't turn it into a sewage dump - but why is it any of your darned business if I want to build a deck? I'm not an idiot, I bought the land, I own the home, stop treating me like one.
      • shuckles 4y ago
        To be fair, within living memory the restrictions went as far as to say what ethnicities could buy the house. The march of progress is slow.
      • mattnewton 4y ago
        100%, we have apparently slipped so far down the slope of “well your property’s appearance affects my property value” to the point where some places are effective regulating lawn grass types like the sight of tall grass is literal seeping sewage into neighboring plots.
        • tastyfreeze 4y ago
          Grass length, allowed paint colors, and in some cases allowed models of vehicles are some of the worst HOA rules I have read about. Of course these are all backed by fines and administered by a power drunk HOA president. No thanks.
      • shadowgovt 4y ago
        > why is it any of your darned business if I want to build a deck? Hypothetically? Because I live downhill from you, you didn't do any mandated hydrology / runoff study for new construction, and when you moved earth to make room for your deck you turned my nice backyard into a swamp by changing the drainage layout. This is one of the reasons some new construction requires permitting, for example.
  • tfgg 4y ago
    Why? At what level do you define "local" - country, state, city, neighbourhood, street, literally next door, just my house?
  • ladberg 4y ago
    What gives you the right to decide what your neighbors do with their land? Would it be "democratic and moral" if I got a group of friends together who decided that your house was too big and forced you to downsize?
    • BobbyJo 4y ago
      Is this a counter argument? It seems supportive of the point if anything. "Less invested but larger group of people telling a smaller group what to do".
      • ladberg 4y ago
        Yeah sorry my argument might not have been exactly clear, I'm not trying to argue either way on how local/global governance should be. I'm trying to say that less governance over property rights is better. It happens in this case that the state is in favor of less governance over property than local governments so I'm in support of the state here, but that doesn't always hold true and I'd be pro-local if the situation was reversed.
    • voakbasda 4y ago
      Zoning is based on the principle that it's not your land. You are merely its steward for the short time that you are on this planet, and then someone else will become its steward. Know that time will come eventually, the rules prevent someone from causing damage that society does not want to be forced to clean up. But yeah, these rules are draconian and surpass their intended spirit, creating regulatory capture for the construction industry and preventing perfectly acceptable possibilities that the community would want. For example, I want to create a summer camp for kids here on my farm, but zoning and other over-regulation actively prevents me from building any of the needed dorms, classrooms, or kitchen/bathing facilities. Countless possibilities like this are being crushed every day. I personally have given up trying.
    • Ensorceled 4y ago
      This underscores is the hilariously hypocritical nature of these arguments: "my property rights give me the right to deny others their property rights" It's very much like the "first speaker" issue with free speech "advocates"; somehow the first homeowner/speaker has greater rights than the newer homeowner/speaker. The lack of self-awareness is breathtaking sometimes.
  • stalfosknight 4y ago
    States are unitary governments so they're not "seizing" anything. They already have the authority to override counties and municipalities.
    • jeffbee 4y ago
      Right, another mistake that casual commenters make. The relationship between the city and the state is not analogous to the relationship between the state and the nation. Cities have no powers other than those granted by the state, they exist to serve the purposes of the state and to further state policies, and the state has the unilateral ability to end a city for any or no reason. If a city fails to advance state policy it has no reason to continue existing.
      • sremani 4y ago
        It is about Local-ism. You make stupid rules at city level, you feel the consequences and people who want to advocate their position can travel few blocks for them to be at least heard. Try that at State level esp. in a massive state like CA, TX, FL and NY. State bureaucracy is far removed from the people.. you are just a row in an excel sheet, if you are lucky.
        • shadowgovt 4y ago
          You're not conceptually wrong, but structurally, jeffbee is quite correct: the details vary from state to state (for the exact same reason: every state has its own constitution describing how it is organized separate from the federal government) but unless that constitution says otherwise, the governmental structure of the United States is (right there in the name) a union of states, and each state has (federally-constrained) sovereignty in its borders. If the California constitution says cities have more power, then they do. But I'm pretty sure it says (like every state constitution I'm familiar with) that city power is wholly defined by state authority and if the state wants to explicitly revoke the right to zone, they can do that. (Whether or not it's a bad idea is independent of the question "Do they have the authority").
        • 4y ago
  • micromacrofoot 4y ago
    it cuts both ways... it's also anti-democratic to leave zoning decisions up to a small pool of the top earners (i.e., land owners) who consistently make decisions that prevent other people from living there and participating there's a balance to be struck, and at the moment it seems the scale has been heavily tilted towards wealthy home-owners deciding what their neighbors can do on their own property
    • ejb999 4y ago
      but it is not left up to a 'small pool of top earners', it is left to voters - if people don't vote, thats the problem that needs to be fixed.
      • HDThoreaun 4y ago
        But these communities have defined themselves so that all the voters are massively wealthy landowners. The average income in los altos hills is $400,000. That's why the state, made up of normal people needs to step in and fix the zoning situation.
      • micromacrofoot 4y ago
        a lot of times it's not even a vote — abutters and nearby busybodies will complain until they get a project shot down... people who want to live there but can't afford to have no voice zoning should be flexible and applied equally within a region (rules as determined by the voting population) but in expensive cities this is not the situation
      • sangnoir 4y ago
        Most political candidates in local politics are from the same small pool of top earners. Look up the biographies of your councilors.
  • johngladtj 4y ago
    The idea that a local government can seize land-use decision-making power from the landowner is anti-democratic and grossly immoral.
    • BobbyJo 4y ago
      "We live in a society." Realistically, your neighbors have a lot more invested in your land/home/whatever than the state government.
      • kelnos 4y ago
        Realistically, the state government is less influenced by local corruption and broken local incentives than your neighbors are.
        • BobbyJo 4y ago
          And have completely different incentives and corruption. I don't see how that's better...
      • goodpoint 4y ago
        The people denied housing due to NIMBY have way more skin in the game.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • cptskippy 4y ago
    Isn't that how the US government is designed to work? When a lower authority fails to meet it's mandate, it's escalated up the chain. That's certainly how the courts work. The local government has been deemed a failure. They have repeatedly been told they need to fix zoning, and each time the local government fails differently. Now their authority has been revoked. This is very reminiscent of the political distracting and gerrymandering cases currently in flight.
  • sowbug 4y ago
    Most of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights are dedicated to curtailing the abuses inherent in a pure democracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
    • notch898a 4y ago
      Most of the abuses against the bill of rights I'd argue are also democratically unpopular. So how'd we get here with such prevailing winds of acts that are both unconstitutional and democratically unpopular?
  • vonwoodson 4y ago
    Having a majority-elected government step in to restrict the property rights of individuals is literally the most democratic thing possible. That is the purpose of the US democracy: to "promote the general Welfare". You're confusing your ideas of property rights with actual US democratic ideals, which are not equal at all. In fact the idea of property rights is explicitly left out of the Declaration of Independence; where Locke would declare "Life, Liberty, and Property" as inalienable human rights, Jefferson changes "Property" to "Pursuit of Happiness". (Quite a strange distinction for a man who owned slaves!) This is because there was great debate about property and lordship in the New World. Property holders were seen as the tyrants who oppressed the colonists, and prevented the Americans from doing what they needed to do to live, in pursuit of their own profits and investments. So, the idea of a democratic government's eminent domain is absolutely the point: to keep the land available for public good and not for the sole-benefit of the few.
    • wyager 4y ago
      > Having a majority-elected government step in to restrict the property rights of individuals is literally the most democratic thing possible. We need to allow the mob to steal everything - it's the most democratic social process possible!
      • squeaky-clean 4y ago
        > the mob I mean, what do you think majority vote is if not essentially the largest mob of people?
• pkdpic 4y ago
  The grandparents point is excellent. I never thought of it that way but it was / is certainly true for me. Definitely feels true for kids growing up without siblings too. I know we would have had more than one probably if housing wasn't such an enormous consideration.
  • montagg 4y ago
    Yeah, the family planning changes that result from housing costs literally have generational effects. Even if you think of it just from a housing and economy perspective, the tax base and workforce of the future is smaller because of high housing costs. Value that could be better for everyone (more jobs can be done, more tax can be spent on everyone, more economic activity can occur for businesses) taken out of the future and brought into present home values.
  • loeg 4y ago
    Not just grandparents -- often kids cannot afford to live near their parents. My parents bought their house for $490,000 (2023 dollars) and Redfin estimates it would cost $1,300,000 today.
    • mschuster91 4y ago
      > often kids cannot afford to live near their parents. That's one point, but another is that the careers of many young people force them to migrate across the country or even across continents. Academia and IT are particularly known for this, but also other industries like moviemaking have their world-wide-known centers.
    • ido 4y ago
      That was the point though, right? Your kids won't know your parents (their grandparents) if you're forced to live really far away.
    • randomdata 4y ago
      Surely housing your kids elsewhere would be more expensive than keeping them under your roof? Early settler homes were typically a single room and not much bigger than a modern living room, and they had many kids living there. Space is a wonderful luxury, but hardly a necessity.
• linuxftw 4y ago
  Maybe people should live literally anywhere else?
  • reidjs 4y ago
    I’d like to live where I grew up though.
    • mc32 4y ago
      I sympathize but it's not people born in the Bay Area who are driving up demand. If there had not been an influx of people from other areas (including other areas of Calif) there would not be such housing crunch --and likely there would have been a pop. reduction without an influx. What's the fertility rate per woman in the Bay Area, I'm pretty sure it's below the 2.1 figure to sustain a pop. The local native population without an influx would not be in such dire housing situation. Yes, the area is very attractive and is a magnet but without that influx the population would have plateaued.
      • jeffbee 4y ago
        This is not really true. Many Bay Area cities have severely underbuilt even their own demographic processes. Berkeley, for example, needed to add 40% more homes just to accommodate its own longevity increases and birth rate since 1970. Casual observers severely underestimate the housing implications of longer old age, and birth rates were well above replacement until quite recently.
      • selectodude 4y ago
        Fortunately, we don't have internal passports in the United States
        • mc32 4y ago
          Sure, but it does not mean it's the local pop driving the growth, it's the newcomers who are driving growth and causing pain for the locals.
• deleted 4y ago
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• michaelbuckbee 4y ago
  Housing is an infrastructure resource. It delivers a wide range of collective economic and social benefits which are often stunted by the current zoning laws.
• titzer 4y ago
  Well, before we get into the moral/immoral dimension, the fact is that these areas are growing from net migration in, rather than internal population increase. So in some sense the huge influx of these new residents (typically with high-paying tech jobs) are pushing out the parents and grandparents (and not bringing their own extended families anyhow). So the atomization of intra-family bonds that seems so immoral to you is actually caused by the migration, driven by underlying economic opportunities and not some NIMBY anti-growth mindset. > It enriches homeowners at the expense of other's misery. This is a profoundly subjective view, because homeowners could turn around and accuse new residents of enriching themselves at the expense of homeowners; adding traffic, pollution, destroying nature, maybe bringing crime, increasing population which increases distance and reduces oversight of schools and politics, requiring more police. So a lot of people who want to keep their town small and close knit would disagree with the premise at the outset. Do communities have rights too?
  • throw8383833jj 4y ago
    and we could solve this problem by creating new cities/towns. Why on earth, can't we do that anymore? for most of human history we were able to do that, now all the sudden everyone needs to be in the same exact geographical area. People follow the jobs. Give companies a subsidy for starting in a new town/city/village and the people will certainly follow it. And you'll get all the benefits of starting with a clean slate: you could make it walkable, bikable, keep land costs low by not limiting it(enough supply to keep costs low)
    • triceratops 4y ago
      > Give companies a subsidy Who's paying for that? And why?
      • adamw2k 4y ago
        It's actually common practice in many parts of the country. The practice is called Economic Development. Rarely used for residential purposes, but does finance commercial development and promote hiring. The funding typically comes from the calculated/expected incremental tax revenue to the area (State, Local, etc). Newark, CA in the Bay Area did this for a while (may still?).
• wyager 4y ago
  It's socially beneficial for people to A) make the place they live reflect their preferences and B) ensure that the ones who capture the positive social externalities of an action are the ones who paid for it. Being able to make rules about how the area you live is used are a fundamental part of both of those. Fully externalizing the benefits of an action never has positive social outcomes. No one would bother making their neighborhood nice if they thought that as soon as they did, a million people who had nothing to do with making it nice in the first place would move in and screw it up.
  • iamwpj 4y ago
    > a million people who had nothing to do with making it nice in the first place would move in and screw it up So definitely _not_ socially beneficial.
  • dyno12345 4y ago
    Obvoiusly one solution could be an internal passport system, where you would need to apply for a visa or residency permit in order to live somewhere.
    • wyager 4y ago
      Certainly, that would work very well, but such a system would almost certainly not be permitted by federal regulators (e.g. HUD) or the courts.
• ip26 4y ago
  Could this ability be a contributing factor for why this area is so desirable? No matter what you or I might think about it, people like the suburban single family home.
  • ahoy 4y ago
    If that were broadly true, then highly urbanized, dense cities would be cheaper. But we see the opposite. Manhattan has some of the highest rents and most expensive real estate in the nation. People want to live near their jobs, their schools, shops, doctors, all the things they need, and where that kind of density exists, they're willing to pay for it. The demand is there.
  • deleted 4y ago
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• googlryas 4y ago
  It's not owners of homes, it is whoever occupies it. If I live in Washington and rent out a home I own in SF, the renter gets to vote in SF, not me.
  • asveikau 4y ago
    A lot of housing policy happens at the state level, so the fact that a large part of the SF voting population are renters can get cancelled out by the fact that home ownership rates are higher outside the city, at least in state issues.
  • pcthrowaway 4y ago
    Yes, but the political system is often more likely to represent the interests of the donors rather than the voters, and the homeowners are the wealthy class who can afford to buy votes and hold political sway. It often doesn't matter who the renting class votes for, and politicians who represent their interests are less likely to collect campaign donations, which affects their likelihood of holding office
    • googlryas 4y ago
      If votes can be bought, it's because people selling their vote don't really care about the issue.
• throwaway1777 4y ago
  Keep in mind increasing density usually increases land values and also home values… so it’s not exactly gonna hurt homeowners. The issue is the “character of the neighborhood” or the “quality of life”
  • rcpt 4y ago
    In expected value yes. But the variance is high and people with all their wealth in one asset don't want the extra risk. Sitting around doing nothing has provided them more than enough wealth already.
  • TimPC 4y ago
    If this were actually true it would never be possible to build more to make housing more affordable. Rents in a market are typically a percentage of the capital investment so what you are saying is roughly equivalent to “building more makes rents go up”. It’s actually the opposite. The demand for density raises the value of land, but the supply of density lowers it.
    • throwaway1777 4y ago
      It’s not a simple equation. Demand can change based on desirability and other factors. You can make more in rent from a 100 unit skyscraper than a single family home… but the value is mostly in sfh is weighted heavily toward the land whereas with the skyscraper it’s not. Sfh can appreciate while rents go down and population goes up.
• lr4444lr 4y ago
  > When a building is proposed, the benefactors are diffuse - any of the people looking for a home will benefit from its existence. But the people who oppose it are concentrated - anyone who lives near the new building This was the precise thesis of Milton and Rose Friedmans' "Tyranny of the Status Quo"
• ren_engineer 4y ago
  did the homeowners ask for SF to become a tech hub? Many of these people bought homes decades ago due to liking the existing area at that time. It's interesting to me how people argue from a left-leaning angle(think of the children, it's immoral, etc.) about this topic while essentially having a pro-colonialism mindset that the current residents need to just suck it up or leave.
• ROTMetro 4y ago
  I was pushed out of the Bay Area by people moving in, which jacked up the prices. Those people who CHOOSE to move to the Bay Area and FORCE people out of the communities that they grew up in are the IMMORAL people (see how nebulous the moral impact your choices have on others can be?). Those people that purchase houses at more that 5% of the homes previous sale price are immoral, driving up the prices of homes with their wealth. So many immoral people in the Bay Area, but the grandmother that moved into a community once filled with cherry and apple orchards that are now clone homes and is just trying to maintain something of the community she put her life savings into living in is not, actually, a monster.
  • km3r 4y ago
    People have a right to move wherever they want. You don't have a right for things to not change. Grandma had a choice, make room for newcomers or price out kids and neighbors. Simple as that.
  • nottaRealname 4y ago
    Housing prices were jacked up because more people moved in than there were houses to live in. The rich tech yuppies are gonna move where they want regardless, so either build enough housing to accommodate them or they will take over the existing housing. If you build, they won't have to kick anyone out
• ideamotor 4y ago
  I hate how well this sums things up.
• theptip 4y ago
  I agree with the point of diffuse benefits being under-appreciated. I do think that some parts of the YIMBY side at its worst sometimes downplays the rights of the present land owners though, and I think your “enriches homeowners” comment plays into that. We need to respect and honor both sets of stakeholders. I think most homeowners are not money-grubbers as you suggest, they chose a particular neighborhood vibe because that is where they want to live, and they don’t want to lose that. That is valid! Moving house is incredibly disruptive, particularly considering school districts. (To be clear though, I do agree that YIMBY is directionally appropriate for most neighborhoods). One angle I don’t see discussed often is “rate of change”. I think some people would like to preserve their neighborhoods character indefinitely, and that is unrealistic clinging. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that if you buy a house in a quiet suburban neighborhood, that it’ll have that character for, say, a decade or maybe two while your kids grow up or whatever. I think a lot of infill can happen without changing the character too much, and this middle ground is probably hurt by polarization.
• icambron 4y ago
  I agree on the morality points. But the interesting thing is that this isn't true: > It enriches homeowners Homeowners own the land, not just the building. If your property is worth X dollars when anyone buying is only allowed to (re)build a single family home on it, it must be worth more if they can also build a tall condo complex on it instead. Dense neighborhoods almost always more valuable on a per-unit-land basis than less dense ones, so upzoning is going to increase land value, lining the pockets of incumbent homeowners. This all makes perfect sense but everyone seems to go around pretending the opposite. Now what does happen is that poorer people will live in these condos and apartment buildings, and send their kids to the same schools as incumbent families, use the same services, etc. I strongly suspect that's why people are so against upzoning, and I think that is an important moral issue in itself.
• godot 4y ago
  I agree with everything you said in theory. In practice, I don't really know that I agree with the grandkids/grandparents point. The implication here is that if housing were abundant and more affordable in the bay area, then both grandparents and grandkids can live in the same city and visit each other often, rather than one side living far away in some suburbs. (In some cases, it's the grandparents living in suburbs and parents/kids living in the city for jobs; in other cases, it's grandparents living in the city because they've lived there forever and don't want to move, while parents/kids move to a suburb further away for better life/more space). The thing is, growth of a city/a region brings along many other issues (in addition to lack of housing driving prices up), including safety, traffic, crowds, decrease in quality of life. Just because housing is affordable doesn't mean that both grandparents and grandkids would still want to live in the city. Instead of building out even more housing in an already dense area (because jobs are concentrated in that area), I would've liked it if we have a far more diverse set of growing cities across the country where the job markets thrive in all of them, rather than deeply concentrated in a couple of places (SF Bay, NY, etc.). [Edit] To clarify, I am in the group where the grandparents want to live in SFBA because they've been there forever and don't want to move away. I'm saying, the job market made SFBA grow too much, and building more housing in SFBA to make them cheaper won't necessarily make me want to keep living there because there are other problems that come with more people. Hence, if job markets weren't so deeply concentrated in one area, the country could see more evenly distributed growth across many cities/metropolitan areas, and SFBA/NY wouldn't be so lopsided and ridiculously unaffordable.