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How Californians are weaponizing environmental law to eliminate housing

192 points by jseliger 4y ago

newaccount2021 4y ago
[dead]
rkhleung 4y ago
Another cautionary tale that too many of us ignore with our virtue signaling: "I support X because it sounds good for cause Y". Unfortunately, we often don't consider system or policy resilience - how will it hold up if people intentionally abuse its rules. Sometimes it doesn't help cause Y and has other negative effects.
- theluketaylor 4y ago
  I would put heritage building laws into a similar category of well-intentioned rules that can so easily be weaponized alongside overly strict environmental review. In isolation keeping a neighbourhood character by setting rules around the paint colours and trim designs permitted seems like a benign set of laws to keep some interesting older neighbourhoods around. In practice they lock a city at a specific low density, often very close to the downtown core since the oldest development tends to be closest to the action. It can also exclude poorer residents (or even pretty well off people who can afford a $250,000 reno but not the $500,000 it'll take to satisfy the heritage committee). I love an old victorian house, but not when there are hundreds of people living in tents next door and thousands more terrified they will have to join them because the cost of living is rapidly rising. If someone wants to pay to move that charming house to an area of lower average density, great. Otherwise it needs to come down to make way for hundreds of new units so people can actually afford the city.
  - Pet_Ant 4y ago
    Sorry but in housing the value comes from "Location, location, location". If a neighbourhood can change into anything what kind of confidence do I have about the home that I'm buying? Things are already variable enough as is. Maybe if zoning changes had a 20 year window from being enacted to being effected. That might balance out needs. (In case it's suggested otherwise, I live in urban high-density housing, I'm just sympathetic to the concerns of others)
    - ElevenLathe 4y ago
      Why would we use municipal regulation as a way to give homebuyers "confidence" that their neighborhood will never change?
      - lesuorac 4y ago
        Circular logic? Municipal regulation has been keeping the neighborhood the same so why not expect it will continue to?
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Because the homebuyers just are the municipality? And as we're seeing here, if they can't get what they want one way they do it another way. I've always thought the way out (besides just waiting until a neighborhood is an absolute shithole of a slum and can be redeveloped because poor people have little political power) is just to straight up bribe people. New developments have a "fee" that is directly applied in cash to other homes in the area to reduce property tax. Everyone likes a good bribe.
        ElevenLathe 4y ago
        > homebuyers just are the municipality I think in most US states, the legal situation is actually that local governments are creations of the state. They are allowed to have their own ordinances and so on as a matter of convenience, to avoid state legislators having to bother worrying about every edge case that only comes up in one county, but they do not have a right to exist independent of the state saying that they do. There are exceptions, but municipal ordinances (and HOA rules) can be overridden by state law. We don't /have/ to let all these little NIMBY fiefdoms exist. They exist at the pleasure of the state legislature, and therefore voters statewide, not just locally (modulo gerrymandering, a big caveat).
        bombcar 4y ago
        We're seeing that play out right now in California, the state overrode local areas and the problem hasn't gone away, it's shifted to other avenues. If you don't change hearts and minds they'll keep fighting against it via any method available.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - VancouverMan 4y ago
    The existence of heritage designations and the related restrictions also encourage developers to completely tear down any existing, older, undesignated buildings on their properties as soon as they acquire them, even if the buildings are still usable, and the new developments may be years away. The developers don't want to risk the buildings being designated, or even just the designation process itself being used to introduce lengthy delays and extra costs, at some point in the future. Rather than helping to preserve older buildings, the risk of a heritage designation just speeds up the destruction of them. In the end, there are fewer older buildings, and more empty lots.
    - supertrope 4y ago
      Just like how the Endangered Species Act creates a perverse incentive not to report any Bald Eagle nests or even drive off any special animals. Also a rent control law that caps increases to CPI +2% results in landlords taking the maximum increase every year in response to the loss of optionality.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    > heritage building laws We really overuse these regulations. There are a relatively few buildings that are actually historic enough to warrant saving. But in many areas we're marking any old building as historic on the thinnest of pretenses. Having grown up in a city that was ruled by the historic review board, I'm unimpressed with the results. Maybe it's nice to see what they built 100+ years ago, but being forced to live in it forever? No. People change, neighborhoods evolve, we should carefully embrace that.
    - BurningFrog 4y ago
      I would, as emperor, have a maximum percentage of buildings that can be protected as historic.
- VectorLock 4y ago
  Especially for tax codes. Every tax break is a richer man's loophole.
  - sharemywin 4y ago
    I agree it would be way easier to have a transaction tax than tax corporate "profits" it could be tiered like income tax. billion$ corp buy X from a billion$ corp biggest rate. poor person sells some food to another poor person lowest rate.
    - rsynnott 4y ago
      That's going to make the food that the poor person is ultimately buying from the billion dollar supermarket pretty expensive... Supermarkets are, generally, ground zero for problems with corporate taxes on things other than profits. They're extremely low-margin, so proposed revenue and transaction taxes would generally just increase prices of everything in the supermarket by whatever the tax is. (That's just one problem, of course, but it's a very obvious one.)
      - marcosdumay 4y ago
        > on things other than profits Well, profits or VAT. Even more if you make some actually sane VAT that discounts all VAT paying expenses and all labor expenses. I'm not sure any VAT on the world fits that description, but it is the one way to make them work as well as profit taxes, but as easy to tax as any other VAT.
        rsynnott 4y ago
        Yes, fair, VAT done right would have a much lower (though still non-zero) impact than transaction taxes.
    - koheripbal 4y ago
      Transaction taxes have an entirely different set of loopholes. You're not solving anything by switching the form of taxation.
Overtonwindow 4y ago
Environmental justice lawsuits and regulatory action is probably the single greatest impediment to just about every major public works project, from nuclear plants to housing and mass transit. It's not just in California, but California makes it especially easy for one person to stop major developments.
davidw 4y ago
If you like the article, the author has a book out, 'Arbitrary Lines' about zoning in the US, its ugly history, and what we should replace it with: https://islandpress.org/books/arbitrary-lines https://islandpress.org/books/arbitrary-lines Also an interesting guy to talk with if you get the chance.
- nhchris 4y ago
  > its ugly history Let me guess - denying minorities access to white people?
  - davidw 4y ago
    Yes, racial and economic segregation.
asimpletune 4y ago
Anyone ever been to Bolinas, CA?
- jorts 4y ago
  Yes
  - weberer 4y ago
    Nice.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
freitzkriesler2 4y ago
[flagged]
- edgyquant 4y ago
  Yeah sure it is.
  - freitzkriesler2 4y ago
    You and the downv00ters can disagree all you want, but NIMBYism is a huge problem in California. Where there's a financial incentive to keep housing limited as an investment, you get the excessive NIMBYism California is known for.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  None of the factors you list are specific to California.
  - jen20 4y ago
    I was under the impression Proposition 13 was indeed specific to California?
    - BurningFrog 4y ago
      You're right. Sloppy work by me. But the others are universal.
      - midoridensha 4y ago
        They're universal to the US, not every place. But CA's specific problems make it even worse than the rest of the country, so SF is a bellwether.
- hedora 4y ago
  Another issue is California’s “environmental” plan to reduce daily commute miles. Most places implement it by intentionally snarling rush hour traffic. This leads to camps of motor homes, sky high real estate values near offices, etc. Of course, convincing the NIMBYs that support this plan to simultaneously invest in public transit is not an option.
testhest 4y ago
The unintended consequences of laws often vastly outweigh the benefits. I am a big proponent of time limiting laws as well as requiring higher levels of support upon renewal, that way laws that have serious unintended consequences will be removed automatically.
- zip1234 4y ago
  If a software team just argued about what software to build, finally came to an agreement on what they should build and then built it saying it was done without getting any feedback from the users of the software would not be successful. Likewise government shouldn't release a law and expect to never have to tweak it. In fact they should be prepared to make changes until they get a satisfactory result.
  - starkd 4y ago
    There also needs to be a firm consensus on how those changes get tweaked. Guiding principles that don't get changed with the legislation.
  - Godel_unicode 4y ago
    This is how laws work in the US though, it’s called rule making authority. For example, the clean air act doesn’t specify any of the levels or pollutants, it empowers (or in that case creates) the Department or Agency to make rules within some often quite broad guidelines. That agency will then conduct research, hold public meetings that nobody goes to, and then make rules which are enforced under the law. Edit: those laws sometimes get amended by congress and sometimes extended or have their enforcement deprioritized by the executive.
    - Bloating 4y ago
      That how its done, said the King. Been to plenty of stakeholder meetings where the outcome was pre-determined and the meeting was simply a rouse to demonstrate public involvement. Survey asks: Rate the benefits of this plan - Its good - Its great - Its awesome 99% of respondents said this plan is good or better
pkdpic 4y ago
When I first moved to Sacramento from LA I saw multiple attempts to build high density housing projects seemingly get delayed by neighbors occupying admittedly beautiful and restrained early-20th century single family homes. Most notably somebody bought and bull-dosed Dimple, an amazing used music / movies / clothing store near the original Tower Records location, with the intention of putting a multistory housing development there. That was years ago and of course its still just a huge crumbling concrete lot fenced in with barbed wire. But since pandemic restrictions lifted we've seen a ridiculous number of 3-5 story housing developments going up all over midtown. It's honestly shocking and so far they look beautiful intermingled with the overgrown trees and houses built in the early 1900s. We've got our problems in Sac but it feels like a vision of the future of California. I hope I start to see this with the same frequency more when I visit the bay.
- verisimi 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - ignormies 4y ago
    It's actually the opposite. The issue with this argument is that denser environments are actually able to serve _more_ businesses -- mom-and-pop markets and niche stores are able to survive. Right now I live a 5 minute walk from two separate grocery stores/markets, a 15 minute walk to 5 others, and a 15 minute bike ride to a number of foreign culture (e.g. Indian, Chinese, Hispanic) stores. More than half of these are family-owned. And that's _just_ for groceries. Every time I visit home in Phoenix I'm reminded of how awful the alternative is: nothing is in walking distance and everything is a corporate big box store. Very few small specialty stores and almost zero family-owned corner stores exist.
  - jen20 4y ago
    As opposed to having to drive a car with a clearly visible license plate through a thousand ANPR cameras to buy food from a shitty chain store in a strip mall? I know which of those I prefer...
- dalyons 4y ago
kindatrue 4y ago
Californians: Let's oppose all new housing Also Californians: Let's vote in a Property Tax scheme where the amount you pay is based on when you or your ancestors bought the home. Also, also Californians: Weird why do we have 25% of the nation's homeless population???
- pksebben 4y ago
  fairly certain the weather has a bit to do with point 3. as for point 1, it's kinda not the case. My area is > 70% new construction (5 years or younger). There are whole neighborhoods here that look totally finished up until a certain house, and then are just rows on rows of half built plywood.
  - BurningFrog 4y ago
    There is non zero housing being built in CA, but it's way, way below what's needed to make housing anywhere near affordable in urban areas!
  - davidw 4y ago
    It is not the weather: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/everything-you-think-you-know-about https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/everything-you-think-you-k...
    - hifromLA 4y ago
      I buy into the idea that high housing costs are the #1 reason, but I do want to point out that mild weather increases the visibility of the homeless population. For most Americans, when they think of homeless people they don’t really care as long as they are out of sight and out of mind. So I believe that’s where the misconception comes from.
      - sopchi 4y ago
        You bring up visibility of the homeless, that is one thing, but it is besides parent's point. There are government statistics on the homeless population and California has a huge share of it. See the 2022 HUD report [1] (also note the distinction between homeless and unsheltered): • More than half of all people experiencing homelessness in the country were in four states: California (30% or 171,521 people); New York (13% or 74,178 people); Florida (5% or 25,959 people); and Washington (4% or 25,211). • California accounted for half of all unsheltered people in the country (115,491 people). This is more than nine times the number of unsheltered people in the state with the next highest number, Washington. In the 2022 point-in-time count, Washington reported 12,668 people or just six percent of the national total of people in unsheltered locations. [1] page 16 of https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2022-AHAR-Part-1.pdf https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2022-...
starkd 4y ago
What is "infill housing"? The article is never defines the term. That is kind of crucial to understanding what the objections are. This is precisely the kind of writing that infuriates me, because there is a lack of effort to understand anyone with opposing viewpoints.
- bombcar 4y ago
  > Infill housing is the insertion of additional housing units into an already-approved subdivision or neighborhood. They can be provided as additional units built on the same lot, by dividing existing homes into multiple units, or by creating new residential lots by further subdivision or lot line adjustments. (From wikipedia) So if you own a single family home and add on to it (mother in law apartment, over garage unit, duplex conversion, etc) you're creating infill housing.
  - starkd 4y ago
    Ok, thanks for that. That is sort of what I had in mind. To the extend that it inhibits urban sprawl, I think that's a great thing. So many neighborhoods have been ruined by urban sprawl. There's one neighborhood near me that was ruined by all these strip malls. Almost every inch of ground covered by asphalt. Its a real eyesore. I suspect when people think of new development they envision waves of urban sprawl like that.
    - mperham 4y ago
      That type of sprawl is created by parking mandates. If you hate giant empty parking lots, you'll love the Parking Reform Network: https://parkingreform.org https://parkingreform.org
      - starkd 4y ago
        Interesting ideas. It seems to be mostly about revitalizing cities. Problem is we are so spread out now, its difficult to believe there is any one solution. We still need cars, because no matter how well we fortify mass transit, there is always points that don't connect. I hate to be a debbie downer on this, but I'm just saying its really a tall order without impoverishing the economy. I applaud the effort, however. I just hope it is flexible; different places have different needs.
makeitrain 4y ago
What’s your long term view on California hydrology? Will droughts and desertification make it increasingly harder to live here?
BurningFrog 4y ago
California has many problems, but CEQA really is uniquely bad. If I was Californian Emperor, I'd look at the 49 other states that get by without CEQA, and just copy the legislation from some state with a good track record on these issues.
- epistasis 4y ago
  Strong agree, this needs to be reevaluated. In particular, Washington State has fantastic environmental protection laws that don't get in the way of good environments improvements. CEQA is a bad first draft of an environmental law, the definitions are bad, the logic is bad. And CEQA even protected things like level of service of traffic until recently, which greatly increased car traffic and pollution. For the era when it was passed, CEQA was probably good, and it has accomplished lots of good, but today it's causing as many problems as it seems to solve.
  - enahs-sf 4y ago
    I wonder though, if the ballot initiative to repeal and replace it came up, would it stand a snowball’s chance in hell? Prop 13 gets put to the chopping block every few years and seems to always come out unscathed. Wouldn’t the same folks vote to maintain CEQA?
    - epistasis 4y ago
      CEQA could be done legislatively. I think that the recent UC Berkeley outrages have created plenty of support for a fix, in the legislature, where discussion is far less ideological and far more pragmatic than during ballot measures. Which isn't to say it's pragmatic and not ideological, it's just far better than what goes on for ballot measures with millions to billions spent on PR campaigns.
renewiltord 4y ago
Pretty much just gerontocracy life. It is common for many societies to take this path. Repeated technology successes by the youth have permitted California to keep the machine going but the old here continue to bleed the young dry like vampires. Decline is inevitable when technology gains stall. San Francisco is the bellwether. The city is already reeling. We will repair it or it will break. All through the way down, our parasitic elders will lament its decline, denying their role in it.
yboris 4y ago
Meanwhile: WA House passes bill banning single-family zoning https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/wa-house-passes-bill-banning-single-family-zoning/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/wa-house-... Progress can be made
- ldayley 4y ago
  Thanks for posting this, it wasn't on my radar. Couldn't this also contribute to increased home prices in older single-family home neighborhoods? Or it could go the other way, too, depending on the desirability of new neighborhoods versus legacy neighborhoods. I speculate that this type of legislation, despite the benefits, might serve to further entrench generational and class differences between neighborhoods. I'm generally for this type of legislation, but I'm seeing some potential unforeseen consequences.
denton-scratch 4y ago
> In 2018, a proposal to redevelop a San Francisco laundromat as a 75-unit apartment building 75 housing units? Wow, they must have big laundromats in San Francisco. I've never seen a laundromat that was bigger than approximately one housing unit. Were they planning to replace a two-storey building with a tower block?
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  I don't mind being downvoted, but I like to know why. For example, are laundromats in SF really huge?
- kwere 4y ago
  Its the whole building over the laundromat, and its big enough. Reason did an article and video interviewing Bob Tillman[0], the owner, who has spent nearly 5 years and $1.4 million trying to convert his laundromat into new housing. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExgxwKnH8y4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExgxwKnH8y4
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    I see, thanks.
danjoredd 4y ago
Surprised there is no archive link since its been locked behind a paywall. Here it is for anyone who is having trouble: https://web.archive.org/web/20220403135108/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/signature-environmental-law-hurts-housing/618264/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220403135108/https://www.theat...
panzagl 4y ago
Finally a use case for generative AI that might improve the world.
linuxftw 4y ago
> But in 1972, the California courts interpreted a “public project” to include any private development that required governmental approvals. And there it is. This is the real bane of our society, that a group of lifetime elected partisans can completely change the obvious meaning of a law, strike down laws, uphold blatantly unconstitutional laws, you name it. So, we have a huge power grab by the government at some point in the past, and the government is totally unwilling to relinquish that power.
PaulHoule 4y ago
The discussion seems to focus around people who don't want their neighborhood to change but California has global problems such as "where to get the water" that are sensitive to the total number of people in the state. It's even more of a struggle to provision transportation infrastructure for these people, whether or not it is public transit or more roads and parking for cars. People forget that California has about the same population density as Germany despite being mostly uninhabitable, uninhabited, military reservations, farms larger than some European countries, etc. Sure San Francisco is not up there in density with the densest cities such as Singapore (5 million), Hong Kong (7 million people) and the Gaza Strip (2 million) but answers from those places might not be scalable to a state with 40 million people and in fact all of those places struggle with inequality and governance issues.
- rqtwteye 4y ago
  As far as I understand the water problem in CA is mainly caused by agriculture.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    There is some truth in that but it is also about having a diversified economy. Water conservation could go a long way in both the rural and urban areas. In fact, if LA could find a cubic kilometer of water storage it could be self-sufficient based on rainfall.. With the concern that you might have to clean up PoPs in manufactured products in a way that makes Prop 65 look like a mashup of Phillip Morris and the 3M corporation.
- pydry 4y ago
  >California has global problems such as "where to get the water" Yet is still growing almonds in massive quantities. This discussion is starting to remind me of when Trump got really invested in the number of birds killed by wind turbines.
- epistasis 4y ago
  If you look at the numbers, California total water use is going down over time, even as population has risen. Efficiency has outpaced population growth. And that's just residential water use, which is a tiny fraction of agricultural, which is far more wasteful, and often used to grow alfalfa to export internationally, in addition to dairy in the state. So the total number of people in the state is nowhere near a cap from water. As for transit, that is easily solved with density. In the vast majority of California, even in its larger cities, it is not legal to build densely enough to support transit. Which means that everybody drives everywhere, which doesn't scale at all. Transit and density with mixed use solve the problem in two ways, by both greatly reducing the need to drive for miles for any small errand or social event, and replace it with means of transit that are orders of magnitude more efficient than cars.
m3kw9 4y ago
They’d do anything to lower supply to increase demand for their homes
andrewclunn 4y ago
I support this. High density housing destroys property values by enabling poor people to move in, and results in higher crime. NIMBYism works. Keep the immigrants, criminals, and homeless centralized I'm the dystopian cities and the rest of the state can survive. The point is to pretend you care about the poor and the environment while really just using these as covers for your own self interest. Then just demonize those who oppose said policies as bigots or uneducated. Works every time.
jwie 4y ago
No one is allowed to state the actual reason they oppose high density housing, so any will do.
- pxmpxm 4y ago
  Pretty sure the idea of a large low income housing building going up next to your house is universally undesirable. The article bullshits around that fact with "disabled veterans" or some such nonsense, but the reality is the building will be something between a homeless shelter and a section 8 housing.
dbroockman 4y ago
CA YIMBY has been making a lot of progress on this at the state level. If this stuff makes you mad it’s a good org to donate to: https://cayimby.org/ https://cayimby.org/
dbttdft 4y ago
Most people even if they actually have legitimate concerns do not possess the aptitude to make meaningful decisions. They will make whatever micro change they can as long as it's morally correct in their head simply for the fact that it errs to the green side vs the corporate/consumer side. Obviously, this just leads to shooting yourself in the foot. Here's something I'm seeing on recent LCDs, they show this popup (with a countdown) when you first turn it on: > In compliance with California Energy Commission, the brightness and contrast settings cannot be adjusted in the sRGB mode. Would you like to remain in the sRGB mode? 1. LCDs already only use maybe 15W. Changing the brightness makes almost no difference. 2. Changing the contrast makes absolutely no difference in terms of power usage 3. sRGB mode implies I'm going to see the image the way it's meant to be displayed. Switching to racing mode (whatevr the hell that means), among 10 other options like "movie mode" to bypass it sounds like a non-starter especially given that LCD menus are practically impossible to use. Disabling brightness makes the monitor likely to find the trash can as it will be uncomfortable by default if the room lighting is too dim or too high compared to the monitor. 4. A popup should not be a thing on a monitor. It already has the worst GUI on earth. The physical buttons are randomly placed. They react in literally 1-2 seconds each time you manage to even press the right one. And they switch up the GUI and button designs every 6 months with someone who has zero know-how. 5. LCDs are beta tech and there is always something a vendor can do to massively improve. Examples include: input lag from bad programming, viewing angle phenomena, VRR which doesn't really fix anything in the long run but was still easily sellable, the future when they fix strobing which is just a small engineering exercise of rearranging timings, but the difference will be big enough to merit buying a new LCD. Just the intro of IPS which didn't even fix the viewing angle but substantially improved it had almost every tech enthusiast trashing his old LCD for new ones, circa 2007. 6. Every single CCFL LCD ever made is now in the trash and each contains mercury to boot. 7. Vendors also lie to the consumer to trick them into buying new LCDs, further reducing any green benefit. A massive example of this is when they switched to LED backlights and every single piece of marketing material, from in store to manufacturer deliberately called them "LED monitors" to make it seem like this is a new technology.
Brian_K_White 4y ago
Why must they want to get denser? What is wrong with liking the density they have and wanting no more? Go live somewhere else! Surely there's got to be some answer to the tech giant jobs by now. I do not want to live in a high rise or even a 5 story, but if I did, I cannot imagine going some place that doesn't have them and challenging "why don't you have a borg cube for me to live in?"
- Fernicia 4y ago
  It's nice to live in walking distance of your job, friends, and favourite restaurants. It's nice to be able to visit bars and not worry about how to get home. It's nice to not be stuck on a virtual island without your car.
  - Brian_K_White 4y ago
    Sure, but so what? To me that means you don't want to live in some parts of California. So don't.
- janosett 4y ago
  Who is “they” in this situation? The issue in this article is developers wanting to build housing being blocked by misuse of an environmental quality law. If you live in a city with a large and growing population it’s natural to build more housing to accommodate the growth. If you don’t like it you’re also free to “Go live somewhere else!” Right?
  - Brian_K_White 4y ago
    The newcomer has the superior moral right to the land? Although the entire US is the result of newcomers bulldozing the natives, I thought we at least on paper recognize that was not a good thing. I wasn't sure about expressing an argument that even hints conservative sympathy, but this completely amazing thing you just said removes all doubt. I don't live there and probably never will, but now I say good for them. I hope they tell anyone coming along with the attitude you just expressed to gfys.
zajio1am 4y ago
It is a general problem with regulations that they create bias for no-action. So in complex society with many regulations there is so much friction that vetocracy just wins.
jmyeet 4y ago
We should add 2021 to the title. A lot has changed since then. California has passed a bunch of laws to address this. Some of these passed before 2021 but the effects are only being felt now. For example: each town or city is required to file a housing element with the state showing how they will meet their quota for increased units. Failing to do so was given teeth in the late 2010s and the targets got a lot higher. Now when a town falls out of compliance the so-called "builder's remedy" comes into effect. This means a court can approve projects bypassing pretty much all local zoning, planning ordinances, review processes and environmental review (ie CEQA) as long as it meets certain requirements (eg 20% "affordable" housing). Santa Monica fell out of compliance and had courts approve 4000+ new units. it' remains to be seen how many will actually be built but it's a start. Much of the Bay Area is currently out of compliance or at risk of being out of compliance. All the while you'll see the same arguments. Something as simple as townhouses or multi-family dwellings will "ruin the character". NIMBY supported councils trying to fight state requirements, etc. But this is only one of many pieces of legislation. Others include automatic approval for higher density housing with a sufficient right-of-way (70' IIRC), easier approval for building residential over commercial (something that is illegal in most of the US), etc. My sincere hope that there will be enough support for this to ultimately repeal Prop 13. It's estimated this has cost the state hundreds of billions of dollars and represents a massive giveaway to the states richest residents.
- theluketaylor 4y ago
  My understanding was builders' remedy skips all the municipal planning rules but that CEQA still applied as a state law. That makes it a key tool left for NIMBYs to smother a project to death.
olivermarks 4y ago
California infrastructure was originally scaled for around 20m people. There are currently currently around 40m people and rising living in the state. There are huge cyclical environmental events - periods of drought, wildfires, torrential rain and flooding (the entire central valley flooded in 1892, killing 40k people, bankrupting the state and wiping out housing, cattle and crops). We have a mediocre electric grid that fails if any of the above environmental events happen. We allow 95% of rain water to flow into the ocean then promote panic about global warming when the inadequate reservoirs are depleted in dry spells. Attempts were made to verticalize housing in the 1970's bay area, with predictable results from building life cycles such as Geneva towers in San Francisco. https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Remembrance_of_Geneva_Towers https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Remembrance_of_Genev... We don't need to pack people like sardines into metropolitan areas any more. We need to create smaller, more human living spaces closer to resources. There is so much undeveloped land in the state but we are wrecking historically important locations instead of thinking new development. The YIYBY activists are obsessed with existing cities, they are rooted in the past.
- N1H1L 4y ago
  Infrastructure is not frozen in amber. It's honestly attitudes like these in the comment above that are the most corrosive to US as a nation. This is a sick disease that has taken root in the American mind, and I don't know what's the cure. https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-build-nothing-country https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-build-nothing-country
  - olivermarks 4y ago
    Add the new SF Muni line to the list of insanely expensive projects https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/muni-central-subway-17593546.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/muni-central-subway-1...
- toshredsyousay 4y ago
  You want more sprawl? Sprawl that puts people farther away from the job centers and requires the state to build brand new expensive infrastructure in all of these places rather than benefitting from existing infrastructure. Look at how much it less costs to maintain infrastructure in denser settings compared to single family home suburbs. Not to mention if you have more sprawl you are potentially putting people in the way of the wildfires as they push into the forests. And then there are all the other environmental problems that come with sprawl... We have the engineering knowhow to be able to build taller buildings, that can withstand earthquakes, and it has definitely improved since the 70s.
Analemma_ 4y ago
Meanwhile, in WA: https://twitter.com/CSElmendorf/status/1633484561685561344 https://twitter.com/CSElmendorf/status/1633484561685561344 It drives me crazy that California is seen as the model of big-D Democratic governance when there's another state nearby, also with a more-or-less permanent Democratic majority, which is not a dysfunctional mess.
toshredsyousay 4y ago
There is a big problem in the U.S. where people don't trust bureaucratic regulation so we do it through the courts instead, which is much more expensive and 'random' because decisions are made by judges and not technocrats. Those technocrats are in theory more qualified to design regulations and are more accountable to voters who elect their bosses. You can go too far with regulations as well (see regulatory capture), but a new election can in theory more directly improve a regulator than it can improve the complex random set of rules set up by the courts. With laws like CEQA and NEPA, lawsuits just keep layering condition upon condition that needs to be addressed to be compliant. Environmental impact studies have been getting bigger and bigger (and thus much more expensive). Fighting lawsuits is much more burdensome and time consuming than just having a regulator (which is not to say that regulatory oversight is never burdensome, just better than what we have). It also means rich people who can afford lawyers are more able to enforce regulations than poor people. This is a difficult hole to get out of unless we can persuade voters to push politicians to reform these laws.

192 points by jseliger 4y ago

newaccount2021 4y ago

[dead]

Another cautionary tale that too many of us ignore with our virtue signaling: "I support X because it sounds good for cause Y". Unfortunately, we often don't consider system or policy resilience - how will it hold up if people intentionally abuse its rules. Sometimes it doesn't help cause Y and has other negative effects.

theluketaylor 4y ago
I would put heritage building laws into a similar category of well-intentioned rules that can so easily be weaponized alongside overly strict environmental review. In isolation keeping a neighbourhood character by setting rules around the paint colours and trim designs permitted seems like a benign set of laws to keep some interesting older neighbourhoods around. In practice they lock a city at a specific low density, often very close to the downtown core since the oldest development tends to be closest to the action. It can also exclude poorer residents (or even pretty well off people who can afford a $250,000 reno but not the $500,000 it'll take to satisfy the heritage committee). I love an old victorian house, but not when there are hundreds of people living in tents next door and thousands more terrified they will have to join them because the cost of living is rapidly rising. If someone wants to pay to move that charming house to an area of lower average density, great. Otherwise it needs to come down to make way for hundreds of new units so people can actually afford the city.
- Pet_Ant 4y ago
  Sorry but in housing the value comes from "Location, location, location". If a neighbourhood can change into anything what kind of confidence do I have about the home that I'm buying? Things are already variable enough as is. Maybe if zoning changes had a 20 year window from being enacted to being effected. That might balance out needs. (In case it's suggested otherwise, I live in urban high-density housing, I'm just sympathetic to the concerns of others)
  - ElevenLathe 4y ago
    Why would we use municipal regulation as a way to give homebuyers "confidence" that their neighborhood will never change?
    - lesuorac 4y ago
      Circular logic? Municipal regulation has been keeping the neighborhood the same so why not expect it will continue to?
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Because the homebuyers just are the municipality? And as we're seeing here, if they can't get what they want one way they do it another way. I've always thought the way out (besides just waiting until a neighborhood is an absolute shithole of a slum and can be redeveloped because poor people have little political power) is just to straight up bribe people. New developments have a "fee" that is directly applied in cash to other homes in the area to reduce property tax. Everyone likes a good bribe.
      - ElevenLathe 4y ago
        > homebuyers just are the municipality I think in most US states, the legal situation is actually that local governments are creations of the state. They are allowed to have their own ordinances and so on as a matter of convenience, to avoid state legislators having to bother worrying about every edge case that only comes up in one county, but they do not have a right to exist independent of the state saying that they do. There are exceptions, but municipal ordinances (and HOA rules) can be overridden by state law. We don't /have/ to let all these little NIMBY fiefdoms exist. They exist at the pleasure of the state legislature, and therefore voters statewide, not just locally (modulo gerrymandering, a big caveat).
        bombcar 4y ago
        We're seeing that play out right now in California, the state overrode local areas and the problem hasn't gone away, it's shifted to other avenues. If you don't change hearts and minds they'll keep fighting against it via any method available.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- VancouverMan 4y ago
  The existence of heritage designations and the related restrictions also encourage developers to completely tear down any existing, older, undesignated buildings on their properties as soon as they acquire them, even if the buildings are still usable, and the new developments may be years away. The developers don't want to risk the buildings being designated, or even just the designation process itself being used to introduce lengthy delays and extra costs, at some point in the future. Rather than helping to preserve older buildings, the risk of a heritage designation just speeds up the destruction of them. In the end, there are fewer older buildings, and more empty lots.
  - supertrope 4y ago
    Just like how the Endangered Species Act creates a perverse incentive not to report any Bald Eagle nests or even drive off any special animals. Also a rent control law that caps increases to CPI +2% results in landlords taking the maximum increase every year in response to the loss of optionality.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > heritage building laws We really overuse these regulations. There are a relatively few buildings that are actually historic enough to warrant saving. But in many areas we're marking any old building as historic on the thinnest of pretenses. Having grown up in a city that was ruled by the historic review board, I'm unimpressed with the results. Maybe it's nice to see what they built 100+ years ago, but being forced to live in it forever? No. People change, neighborhoods evolve, we should carefully embrace that.
  - BurningFrog 4y ago
    I would, as emperor, have a maximum percentage of buildings that can be protected as historic.
VectorLock 4y ago
Especially for tax codes. Every tax break is a richer man's loophole.
- sharemywin 4y ago
  I agree it would be way easier to have a transaction tax than tax corporate "profits" it could be tiered like income tax. billion$ corp buy X from a billion$ corp biggest rate. poor person sells some food to another poor person lowest rate.
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    That's going to make the food that the poor person is ultimately buying from the billion dollar supermarket pretty expensive... Supermarkets are, generally, ground zero for problems with corporate taxes on things other than profits. They're extremely low-margin, so proposed revenue and transaction taxes would generally just increase prices of everything in the supermarket by whatever the tax is. (That's just one problem, of course, but it's a very obvious one.)
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      > on things other than profits Well, profits or VAT. Even more if you make some actually sane VAT that discounts all VAT paying expenses and all labor expenses. I'm not sure any VAT on the world fits that description, but it is the one way to make them work as well as profit taxes, but as easy to tax as any other VAT.
      - rsynnott 4y ago
        Yes, fair, VAT done right would have a much lower (though still non-zero) impact than transaction taxes.
  - koheripbal 4y ago
    Transaction taxes have an entirely different set of loopholes. You're not solving anything by switching the form of taxation.

Overtonwindow 4y ago

Environmental justice lawsuits and regulatory action is probably the single greatest impediment to just about every major public works project, from nuclear plants to housing and mass transit. It's not just in California, but California makes it especially easy for one person to stop major developments.

davidw 4y ago

If you like the article, the author has a book out, 'Arbitrary Lines' about zoning in the US, its ugly history, and what we should replace it with: https://islandpress.org/books/arbitrary-lines https://islandpress.org/books/arbitrary-lines Also an interesting guy to talk with if you get the chance.

nhchris 4y ago
> its ugly history Let me guess - denying minorities access to white people?
- davidw 4y ago
  Yes, racial and economic segregation.

asimpletune 4y ago

Anyone ever been to Bolinas, CA?

jorts 4y ago
Yes
- weberer 4y ago
  Nice.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

freitzkriesler2 4y ago

[flagged]

edgyquant 4y ago
Yeah sure it is.
- freitzkriesler2 4y ago
  You and the downv00ters can disagree all you want, but NIMBYism is a huge problem in California. Where there's a financial incentive to keep housing limited as an investment, you get the excessive NIMBYism California is known for.
BurningFrog 4y ago
None of the factors you list are specific to California.
- jen20 4y ago
  I was under the impression Proposition 13 was indeed specific to California?
  - BurningFrog 4y ago
    You're right. Sloppy work by me. But the others are universal.
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      They're universal to the US, not every place. But CA's specific problems make it even worse than the rest of the country, so SF is a bellwether.
hedora 4y ago
Another issue is California’s “environmental” plan to reduce daily commute miles. Most places implement it by intentionally snarling rush hour traffic. This leads to camps of motor homes, sky high real estate values near offices, etc. Of course, convincing the NIMBYs that support this plan to simultaneously invest in public transit is not an option.

testhest 4y ago

The unintended consequences of laws often vastly outweigh the benefits. I am a big proponent of time limiting laws as well as requiring higher levels of support upon renewal, that way laws that have serious unintended consequences will be removed automatically.

zip1234 4y ago
If a software team just argued about what software to build, finally came to an agreement on what they should build and then built it saying it was done without getting any feedback from the users of the software would not be successful. Likewise government shouldn't release a law and expect to never have to tweak it. In fact they should be prepared to make changes until they get a satisfactory result.
- starkd 4y ago
  There also needs to be a firm consensus on how those changes get tweaked. Guiding principles that don't get changed with the legislation.
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  This is how laws work in the US though, it’s called rule making authority. For example, the clean air act doesn’t specify any of the levels or pollutants, it empowers (or in that case creates) the Department or Agency to make rules within some often quite broad guidelines. That agency will then conduct research, hold public meetings that nobody goes to, and then make rules which are enforced under the law. Edit: those laws sometimes get amended by congress and sometimes extended or have their enforcement deprioritized by the executive.
  - Bloating 4y ago
    That how its done, said the King. Been to plenty of stakeholder meetings where the outcome was pre-determined and the meeting was simply a rouse to demonstrate public involvement. Survey asks: Rate the benefits of this plan - Its good - Its great - Its awesome 99% of respondents said this plan is good or better

pkdpic 4y ago

When I first moved to Sacramento from LA I saw multiple attempts to build high density housing projects seemingly get delayed by neighbors occupying admittedly beautiful and restrained early-20th century single family homes. Most notably somebody bought and bull-dosed Dimple, an amazing used music / movies / clothing store near the original Tower Records location, with the intention of putting a multistory housing development there. That was years ago and of course its still just a huge crumbling concrete lot fenced in with barbed wire. But since pandemic restrictions lifted we've seen a ridiculous number of 3-5 story housing developments going up all over midtown. It's honestly shocking and so far they look beautiful intermingled with the overgrown trees and houses built in the early 1900s. We've got our problems in Sac but it feels like a vision of the future of California. I hope I start to see this with the same frequency more when I visit the bay.

verisimi 4y ago
[flagged]
- ignormies 4y ago
  It's actually the opposite. The issue with this argument is that denser environments are actually able to serve _more_ businesses -- mom-and-pop markets and niche stores are able to survive. Right now I live a 5 minute walk from two separate grocery stores/markets, a 15 minute walk to 5 others, and a 15 minute bike ride to a number of foreign culture (e.g. Indian, Chinese, Hispanic) stores. More than half of these are family-owned. And that's _just_ for groceries. Every time I visit home in Phoenix I'm reminded of how awful the alternative is: nothing is in walking distance and everything is a corporate big box store. Very few small specialty stores and almost zero family-owned corner stores exist.
- jen20 4y ago
  As opposed to having to drive a car with a clearly visible license plate through a thousand ANPR cameras to buy food from a shitty chain store in a strip mall? I know which of those I prefer...
dalyons 4y ago

kindatrue 4y ago

Californians: Let's oppose all new housing Also Californians: Let's vote in a Property Tax scheme where the amount you pay is based on when you or your ancestors bought the home. Also, also Californians: Weird why do we have 25% of the nation's homeless population???

pksebben 4y ago
fairly certain the weather has a bit to do with point 3. as for point 1, it's kinda not the case. My area is > 70% new construction (5 years or younger). There are whole neighborhoods here that look totally finished up until a certain house, and then are just rows on rows of half built plywood.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  There is non zero housing being built in CA, but it's way, way below what's needed to make housing anywhere near affordable in urban areas!
- davidw 4y ago
  It is not the weather: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/everything-you-think-you-know-about https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/everything-you-think-you-k...
  - hifromLA 4y ago
    I buy into the idea that high housing costs are the #1 reason, but I do want to point out that mild weather increases the visibility of the homeless population. For most Americans, when they think of homeless people they don’t really care as long as they are out of sight and out of mind. So I believe that’s where the misconception comes from.
    - sopchi 4y ago
      You bring up visibility of the homeless, that is one thing, but it is besides parent's point. There are government statistics on the homeless population and California has a huge share of it. See the 2022 HUD report [1] (also note the distinction between homeless and unsheltered): • More than half of all people experiencing homelessness in the country were in four states: California (30% or 171,521 people); New York (13% or 74,178 people); Florida (5% or 25,959 people); and Washington (4% or 25,211). • California accounted for half of all unsheltered people in the country (115,491 people). This is more than nine times the number of unsheltered people in the state with the next highest number, Washington. In the 2022 point-in-time count, Washington reported 12,668 people or just six percent of the national total of people in unsheltered locations. [1] page 16 of https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2022-AHAR-Part-1.pdf https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2022-...

starkd 4y ago

What is "infill housing"? The article is never defines the term. That is kind of crucial to understanding what the objections are. This is precisely the kind of writing that infuriates me, because there is a lack of effort to understand anyone with opposing viewpoints.

bombcar 4y ago
> Infill housing is the insertion of additional housing units into an already-approved subdivision or neighborhood. They can be provided as additional units built on the same lot, by dividing existing homes into multiple units, or by creating new residential lots by further subdivision or lot line adjustments. (From wikipedia) So if you own a single family home and add on to it (mother in law apartment, over garage unit, duplex conversion, etc) you're creating infill housing.
- starkd 4y ago
  Ok, thanks for that. That is sort of what I had in mind. To the extend that it inhibits urban sprawl, I think that's a great thing. So many neighborhoods have been ruined by urban sprawl. There's one neighborhood near me that was ruined by all these strip malls. Almost every inch of ground covered by asphalt. Its a real eyesore. I suspect when people think of new development they envision waves of urban sprawl like that.
  - mperham 4y ago
    That type of sprawl is created by parking mandates. If you hate giant empty parking lots, you'll love the Parking Reform Network: https://parkingreform.org https://parkingreform.org
    - starkd 4y ago
      Interesting ideas. It seems to be mostly about revitalizing cities. Problem is we are so spread out now, its difficult to believe there is any one solution. We still need cars, because no matter how well we fortify mass transit, there is always points that don't connect. I hate to be a debbie downer on this, but I'm just saying its really a tall order without impoverishing the economy. I applaud the effort, however. I just hope it is flexible; different places have different needs.

makeitrain 4y ago

What’s your long term view on California hydrology? Will droughts and desertification make it increasingly harder to live here?

BurningFrog 4y ago

California has many problems, but CEQA really is uniquely bad. If I was Californian Emperor, I'd look at the 49 other states that get by without CEQA, and just copy the legislation from some state with a good track record on these issues.

epistasis 4y ago
Strong agree, this needs to be reevaluated. In particular, Washington State has fantastic environmental protection laws that don't get in the way of good environments improvements. CEQA is a bad first draft of an environmental law, the definitions are bad, the logic is bad. And CEQA even protected things like level of service of traffic until recently, which greatly increased car traffic and pollution. For the era when it was passed, CEQA was probably good, and it has accomplished lots of good, but today it's causing as many problems as it seems to solve.
- enahs-sf 4y ago
  I wonder though, if the ballot initiative to repeal and replace it came up, would it stand a snowball’s chance in hell? Prop 13 gets put to the chopping block every few years and seems to always come out unscathed. Wouldn’t the same folks vote to maintain CEQA?
  - epistasis 4y ago
    CEQA could be done legislatively. I think that the recent UC Berkeley outrages have created plenty of support for a fix, in the legislature, where discussion is far less ideological and far more pragmatic than during ballot measures. Which isn't to say it's pragmatic and not ideological, it's just far better than what goes on for ballot measures with millions to billions spent on PR campaigns.

renewiltord 4y ago

Pretty much just gerontocracy life. It is common for many societies to take this path. Repeated technology successes by the youth have permitted California to keep the machine going but the old here continue to bleed the young dry like vampires. Decline is inevitable when technology gains stall. San Francisco is the bellwether. The city is already reeling. We will repair it or it will break. All through the way down, our parasitic elders will lament its decline, denying their role in it.

yboris 4y ago

Meanwhile: WA House passes bill banning single-family zoning https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/wa-house-passes-bill-banning-single-family-zoning/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/wa-house-... Progress can be made

ldayley 4y ago
Thanks for posting this, it wasn't on my radar. Couldn't this also contribute to increased home prices in older single-family home neighborhoods? Or it could go the other way, too, depending on the desirability of new neighborhoods versus legacy neighborhoods. I speculate that this type of legislation, despite the benefits, might serve to further entrench generational and class differences between neighborhoods. I'm generally for this type of legislation, but I'm seeing some potential unforeseen consequences.

denton-scratch 4y ago

> In 2018, a proposal to redevelop a San Francisco laundromat as a 75-unit apartment building 75 housing units? Wow, they must have big laundromats in San Francisco. I've never seen a laundromat that was bigger than approximately one housing unit. Were they planning to replace a two-storey building with a tower block?

denton-scratch 4y ago
I don't mind being downvoted, but I like to know why. For example, are laundromats in SF really huge?
kwere 4y ago
Its the whole building over the laundromat, and its big enough. Reason did an article and video interviewing Bob Tillman[0], the owner, who has spent nearly 5 years and $1.4 million trying to convert his laundromat into new housing. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExgxwKnH8y4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExgxwKnH8y4
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  I see, thanks.

danjoredd 4y ago

Surprised there is no archive link since its been locked behind a paywall. Here it is for anyone who is having trouble: https://web.archive.org/web/20220403135108/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/signature-environmental-law-hurts-housing/618264/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220403135108/https://www.theat...

panzagl 4y ago

Finally a use case for generative AI that might improve the world.

linuxftw 4y ago

> But in 1972, the California courts interpreted a “public project” to include any private development that required governmental approvals. And there it is. This is the real bane of our society, that a group of lifetime elected partisans can completely change the obvious meaning of a law, strike down laws, uphold blatantly unconstitutional laws, you name it. So, we have a huge power grab by the government at some point in the past, and the government is totally unwilling to relinquish that power.

PaulHoule 4y ago

The discussion seems to focus around people who don't want their neighborhood to change but California has global problems such as "where to get the water" that are sensitive to the total number of people in the state. It's even more of a struggle to provision transportation infrastructure for these people, whether or not it is public transit or more roads and parking for cars. People forget that California has about the same population density as Germany despite being mostly uninhabitable, uninhabited, military reservations, farms larger than some European countries, etc. Sure San Francisco is not up there in density with the densest cities such as Singapore (5 million), Hong Kong (7 million people) and the Gaza Strip (2 million) but answers from those places might not be scalable to a state with 40 million people and in fact all of those places struggle with inequality and governance issues.

rqtwteye 4y ago
As far as I understand the water problem in CA is mainly caused by agriculture.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  There is some truth in that but it is also about having a diversified economy. Water conservation could go a long way in both the rural and urban areas. In fact, if LA could find a cubic kilometer of water storage it could be self-sufficient based on rainfall.. With the concern that you might have to clean up PoPs in manufactured products in a way that makes Prop 65 look like a mashup of Phillip Morris and the 3M corporation.
pydry 4y ago
>California has global problems such as "where to get the water" Yet is still growing almonds in massive quantities. This discussion is starting to remind me of when Trump got really invested in the number of birds killed by wind turbines.
epistasis 4y ago
If you look at the numbers, California total water use is going down over time, even as population has risen. Efficiency has outpaced population growth. And that's just residential water use, which is a tiny fraction of agricultural, which is far more wasteful, and often used to grow alfalfa to export internationally, in addition to dairy in the state. So the total number of people in the state is nowhere near a cap from water. As for transit, that is easily solved with density. In the vast majority of California, even in its larger cities, it is not legal to build densely enough to support transit. Which means that everybody drives everywhere, which doesn't scale at all. Transit and density with mixed use solve the problem in two ways, by both greatly reducing the need to drive for miles for any small errand or social event, and replace it with means of transit that are orders of magnitude more efficient than cars.

m3kw9 4y ago

They’d do anything to lower supply to increase demand for their homes

andrewclunn 4y ago

I support this. High density housing destroys property values by enabling poor people to move in, and results in higher crime. NIMBYism works. Keep the immigrants, criminals, and homeless centralized I'm the dystopian cities and the rest of the state can survive. The point is to pretend you care about the poor and the environment while really just using these as covers for your own self interest. Then just demonize those who oppose said policies as bigots or uneducated. Works every time.

jwie 4y ago

No one is allowed to state the actual reason they oppose high density housing, so any will do.

pxmpxm 4y ago
Pretty sure the idea of a large low income housing building going up next to your house is universally undesirable. The article bullshits around that fact with "disabled veterans" or some such nonsense, but the reality is the building will be something between a homeless shelter and a section 8 housing.

dbroockman 4y ago

CA YIMBY has been making a lot of progress on this at the state level. If this stuff makes you mad it’s a good org to donate to: https://cayimby.org/ https://cayimby.org/

dbttdft 4y ago

Most people even if they actually have legitimate concerns do not possess the aptitude to make meaningful decisions. They will make whatever micro change they can as long as it's morally correct in their head simply for the fact that it errs to the green side vs the corporate/consumer side. Obviously, this just leads to shooting yourself in the foot. Here's something I'm seeing on recent LCDs, they show this popup (with a countdown) when you first turn it on: > In compliance with California Energy Commission, the brightness and contrast settings cannot be adjusted in the sRGB mode. Would you like to remain in the sRGB mode? 1. LCDs already only use maybe 15W. Changing the brightness makes almost no difference. 2. Changing the contrast makes absolutely no difference in terms of power usage 3. sRGB mode implies I'm going to see the image the way it's meant to be displayed. Switching to racing mode (whatevr the hell that means), among 10 other options like "movie mode" to bypass it sounds like a non-starter especially given that LCD menus are practically impossible to use. Disabling brightness makes the monitor likely to find the trash can as it will be uncomfortable by default if the room lighting is too dim or too high compared to the monitor. 4. A popup should not be a thing on a monitor. It already has the worst GUI on earth. The physical buttons are randomly placed. They react in literally 1-2 seconds each time you manage to even press the right one. And they switch up the GUI and button designs every 6 months with someone who has zero know-how. 5. LCDs are beta tech and there is always something a vendor can do to massively improve. Examples include: input lag from bad programming, viewing angle phenomena, VRR which doesn't really fix anything in the long run but was still easily sellable, the future when they fix strobing which is just a small engineering exercise of rearranging timings, but the difference will be big enough to merit buying a new LCD. Just the intro of IPS which didn't even fix the viewing angle but substantially improved it had almost every tech enthusiast trashing his old LCD for new ones, circa 2007. 6. Every single CCFL LCD ever made is now in the trash and each contains mercury to boot. 7. Vendors also lie to the consumer to trick them into buying new LCDs, further reducing any green benefit. A massive example of this is when they switched to LED backlights and every single piece of marketing material, from in store to manufacturer deliberately called them "LED monitors" to make it seem like this is a new technology.

Brian_K_White 4y ago

Why must they want to get denser? What is wrong with liking the density they have and wanting no more? Go live somewhere else! Surely there's got to be some answer to the tech giant jobs by now. I do not want to live in a high rise or even a 5 story, but if I did, I cannot imagine going some place that doesn't have them and challenging "why don't you have a borg cube for me to live in?"

Fernicia 4y ago
It's nice to live in walking distance of your job, friends, and favourite restaurants. It's nice to be able to visit bars and not worry about how to get home. It's nice to not be stuck on a virtual island without your car.
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
  Sure, but so what? To me that means you don't want to live in some parts of California. So don't.
janosett 4y ago
Who is “they” in this situation? The issue in this article is developers wanting to build housing being blocked by misuse of an environmental quality law. If you live in a city with a large and growing population it’s natural to build more housing to accommodate the growth. If you don’t like it you’re also free to “Go live somewhere else!” Right?
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
  The newcomer has the superior moral right to the land? Although the entire US is the result of newcomers bulldozing the natives, I thought we at least on paper recognize that was not a good thing. I wasn't sure about expressing an argument that even hints conservative sympathy, but this completely amazing thing you just said removes all doubt. I don't live there and probably never will, but now I say good for them. I hope they tell anyone coming along with the attitude you just expressed to gfys.

zajio1am 4y ago

It is a general problem with regulations that they create bias for no-action. So in complex society with many regulations there is so much friction that vetocracy just wins.

jmyeet 4y ago

We should add 2021 to the title. A lot has changed since then. California has passed a bunch of laws to address this. Some of these passed before 2021 but the effects are only being felt now. For example: each town or city is required to file a housing element with the state showing how they will meet their quota for increased units. Failing to do so was given teeth in the late 2010s and the targets got a lot higher. Now when a town falls out of compliance the so-called "builder's remedy" comes into effect. This means a court can approve projects bypassing pretty much all local zoning, planning ordinances, review processes and environmental review (ie CEQA) as long as it meets certain requirements (eg 20% "affordable" housing). Santa Monica fell out of compliance and had courts approve 4000+ new units. it' remains to be seen how many will actually be built but it's a start. Much of the Bay Area is currently out of compliance or at risk of being out of compliance. All the while you'll see the same arguments. Something as simple as townhouses or multi-family dwellings will "ruin the character". NIMBY supported councils trying to fight state requirements, etc. But this is only one of many pieces of legislation. Others include automatic approval for higher density housing with a sufficient right-of-way (70' IIRC), easier approval for building residential over commercial (something that is illegal in most of the US), etc. My sincere hope that there will be enough support for this to ultimately repeal Prop 13. It's estimated this has cost the state hundreds of billions of dollars and represents a massive giveaway to the states richest residents.

theluketaylor 4y ago
My understanding was builders' remedy skips all the municipal planning rules but that CEQA still applied as a state law. That makes it a key tool left for NIMBYs to smother a project to death.

olivermarks 4y ago

California infrastructure was originally scaled for around 20m people. There are currently currently around 40m people and rising living in the state. There are huge cyclical environmental events - periods of drought, wildfires, torrential rain and flooding (the entire central valley flooded in 1892, killing 40k people, bankrupting the state and wiping out housing, cattle and crops). We have a mediocre electric grid that fails if any of the above environmental events happen. We allow 95% of rain water to flow into the ocean then promote panic about global warming when the inadequate reservoirs are depleted in dry spells. Attempts were made to verticalize housing in the 1970's bay area, with predictable results from building life cycles such as Geneva towers in San Francisco. https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Remembrance_of_Geneva_Towers https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Remembrance_of_Genev... We don't need to pack people like sardines into metropolitan areas any more. We need to create smaller, more human living spaces closer to resources. There is so much undeveloped land in the state but we are wrecking historically important locations instead of thinking new development. The YIYBY activists are obsessed with existing cities, they are rooted in the past.

N1H1L 4y ago
Infrastructure is not frozen in amber. It's honestly attitudes like these in the comment above that are the most corrosive to US as a nation. This is a sick disease that has taken root in the American mind, and I don't know what's the cure. https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-build-nothing-country https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-build-nothing-country
- olivermarks 4y ago
  Add the new SF Muni line to the list of insanely expensive projects https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/muni-central-subway-17593546.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/muni-central-subway-1...
toshredsyousay 4y ago
You want more sprawl? Sprawl that puts people farther away from the job centers and requires the state to build brand new expensive infrastructure in all of these places rather than benefitting from existing infrastructure. Look at how much it less costs to maintain infrastructure in denser settings compared to single family home suburbs. Not to mention if you have more sprawl you are potentially putting people in the way of the wildfires as they push into the forests. And then there are all the other environmental problems that come with sprawl... We have the engineering knowhow to be able to build taller buildings, that can withstand earthquakes, and it has definitely improved since the 70s.

Analemma_ 4y ago

Meanwhile, in WA: https://twitter.com/CSElmendorf/status/1633484561685561344 https://twitter.com/CSElmendorf/status/1633484561685561344 It drives me crazy that California is seen as the model of big-D Democratic governance when there's another state nearby, also with a more-or-less permanent Democratic majority, which is not a dysfunctional mess.

toshredsyousay 4y ago

There is a big problem in the U.S. where people don't trust bureaucratic regulation so we do it through the courts instead, which is much more expensive and 'random' because decisions are made by judges and not technocrats. Those technocrats are in theory more qualified to design regulations and are more accountable to voters who elect their bosses. You can go too far with regulations as well (see regulatory capture), but a new election can in theory more directly improve a regulator than it can improve the complex random set of rules set up by the courts. With laws like CEQA and NEPA, lawsuits just keep layering condition upon condition that needs to be addressed to be compliant. Environmental impact studies have been getting bigger and bigger (and thus much more expensive). Fighting lawsuits is much more burdensome and time consuming than just having a regulator (which is not to say that regulatory oversight is never burdensome, just better than what we have). It also means rich people who can afford lawyers are more able to enforce regulations than poor people. This is a difficult hole to get out of unless we can persuade voters to push politicians to reform these laws.