> “I straight up told people I was going to file something if things didn’t shape up. I went to all the meetings and said, ‘Here are the deficiencies,’ he said. “We have so grossly underbuilt housing in California for a half century that you could drop a tent on the ground anywhere in the state and someone will occupy it.”
I really like that quote. Unfortunately I'm concerned instead of drafting adequate plans the city will just use all of its resources to sue people for using builders remedy permits.
Whether or not developers take advantage will still depend on market conditions and the costs to develop housing. For example, recently in LA county voters passed a transfer tax that is espected to quiet development somewhat:
https://www.planetizen.com/news/2022/12/120395-critics-expec...
Plenty of other things beyond taxes add to costs as well. Onerous environmental review, having to add amenities like open courtyard space or balconies, how many elevators might be required, parking requirements, all adds to the cost per unit which leads to fewer units built per loan and the need for higher rents to make those costs pencil out. Even the amount of time things sit in review at city hall has costs. You could very well hit a situation where due to these constraints, not nearly as many builders take advantage of builders remedy as one might expect. This is part of the issue with allowing the onus of adding housing supply in our cities fall on an overregulated industry that depends on achieving a certain profit margin to function.
The next target should be CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act. NIMBYs can endlessly delay new construction by requesting CEQA assessments. I am hugely pro-environment, mind you, but an environmental assessment for a new development should be relatively fast and easy to complete, and it shouldn't prevent new builds wholesale except in the direst cases.
Exempting infill housing from CEQA is on the YIMBY agenda. That said, CEQA only applies to discretionary decisions, so if permitting residential development is a ministerial decision (i.e. anyone who meets certain criteria is approved), then the CEQA review for it is incorporated into the Housing Element. That is itself a huge step forward.
I don't think that is current law or jurisprudence. There is a bill introduced in this session that will make any project consequent to an adopted general, area, or specific plan be "not a project" under CEQA. But that's not where we are now, which is why cities have to EIR their general plans and then every project has another EIR.
Personally, I think they should just write down that anything inside the boundary of an incorporated city, built on a site that previously had something on it, is not a project.
The shrimp were an impediment to a small fraction of the planned build, the build was modified with minimal impact on the project, and an even more aggressive expansion of the campus was completed in the last 5 years without impact.
If anything, that appears to be a successful use of CEQA, where a large and important building project was effectively balanced with the need to protect wildlife without major disruption to the final buildings.
I think this article overstates the risks to those wanting to use the builder's remedy. It suggests wealthy towns would have the means to fight this in court. But the reality is the towns have very little legal defense. Just last year, 4000+ new units were approved via the builder's remedy in Santa Monica, a rich envlcave of LA that has notoriously fought development with oppressive zoning for decades.
Also, the point isn't to build giant high rises in the middle of Los Altos. It is to bypass restrictive zoning that doesn't let you build anything at all other than single family houses on large lots. In a lot of Bay Area towns that will be townhouses and low-rise apartments. But this can make a massive difference to the local housing markets.
The builder's remedy is just one of many measures the state has passed in recent years. Others include automatic approval for building residential above commercial and bypassing zoning for lots with wide rights of way. It all adds up.
Another aspect to this is just because you have an approved project, as a builder, it doesn't mean you have to build it. It does give you a hell of a bargaining chip with the city over something else you want to build however.
All these Bay Area NIMBY enclaves have been fucking around and I imagine a large number of them are about to find out.
This week a viral video tour of a high school in Carmel, IN has been circulating [1]. For those who don't understand, particularly non-Americans, schools are funded primarily by local property taxes. This means wealthy towns have facilities like this and poorer communities have buildings that are falling apart.
This is economic segregation.
A lot of wealthy towns in CA have been fighting state housing mandates because they want to maintain their "character". This includes some ultra-wealthy towns like Atherton.
One reason I support what CA is doing here is because by allowing a mix of accomodation it will increase access to facilities like this beyond just the ultra-wealthy.
I think it's overstating the case that 4000 units were "approved" in Santa Monica. Some guy pulled papers on the project. Get back to me if any of them break ground. So far, only 899 units worth have filed complete applications and zero of these have got anywhere in the rest of the process. I would not advise holding your breath.
Cities have various ways to stop projects. They can drag out things like demolition permits forever.
I'm not sure how the funding formula works exactly, but it seems like the problem is far from fixed. You can look at any public school in a wealthy suburb and it will have lavish amenities and everything a student could want or need. While many inner city schools look like cinderblock prisons.
> For those who don't understand, particularly non-Americans, schools are funded primarily by local property taxes.
This was true historically, and may still be true in some states, but court cases since the 1970s [1] have been forcing reforms on school funding to be more equitable at the state level.
An earlier Chronicle article anticipates some ways projects will be blocked. It sounds like this isn't the unambiguous green light that some articles suggest.
> Environmental review is one such way. Normally, cities perform one environmental review for a citywide or neighborhood-wide zoning plan. So long as project applications comply with those plans, they can piggyback on the parent environmental report. But since builder’s remedy applications often disregard local zoning, cities can ask developers to complete a full environmental impact report for a project. Once that’s done, cities can then claim that any impact — noise, shadows, pollution — in the report was insufficiently studied and demand costly redos. Community groups can also take builders to court.
> Cities can further pile on costs for builder’s remedy projects by requiring infrastructure upgrades like new sewer connections. Local governments can also potentially exact revenge by making other applications from developers more unpleasant — for instance, by subjecting them to additional scrutiny or longer processing times. This threat will likely dissuade many developers from pursuing a builder’s remedy project.
The last portion, where local governments might intentionally punish developers, may be why there's not a bunch of large experienced developers rushing to submit plans.
I'll throw out I also know a guy who is a developer, they have had enough bad issues working in Oregon alone that they have 0 intention of ever touching anything in CA with a 10ft pole, simply because it isn't worth it to deal with the hassle and the headaches.
A sinister part of the hassle and headaches are that sometimes they are designed to be so convoluted such that only certain favorite developers are even qualified to take up the project at all. Keeping your friend out of the market is sometimes the point.
> A sinister part of the hassle and headaches are that sometimes they are designed to be so convoluted such that only certain favorite developers are even qualified to take up the project at all.
Famously, the French corporation that builds high-speed railways abandoned the Californian project and moved to Morocco, claiming that Moroccan bureaucracy is much easier to work with.
My understanding is that they can still be delayed by CEQA lawsuits, which NIMBYs have become very good at, but at least CEQA usually only delays projects instead of blocking them entirely.
Sometimes the delay or threat of delay is enough to take a project from being profitable to being unprofitable for any local developer. This sometimes explains why you have vacant lots in areas like the bay area where any and all land would be in demand. Doesn't matter how much demand there would be if you can't afford to capture it at the pricepoint it exists at.
There's theoretically demand for millions of luxury penthouses but only a tiny level of actual demand at the pricepoint where it can be feasible delivered in any major city.
Projects can still effectively be denied/delayed from discretionary environmental review. State is working on pre-empting or expediting that as well for these affordable housing projects.
There is some talk that builders remedy may be exempt from CEQA because of some clauses in its law. It will surely face some CEQA suits so remains to be seen how the courts will handle.
That guy in the Mission District of SF who fought this for decades should deserve a windfall...
Ill try to find a link, but basically this guy got initial approval to build a building and got hit with a typhoon of zoning laws and knew he was in the right, but a bunch of SF NIMBYS were fighting him forever and he got F'd...
This guy deserves something like a payout for someone imprisoned for no reason.
SF managed to delay it for 8 years until the next review with lots and lots of promises, but if it doesn't actually manage to build more units, builders remedy is coming for SF in 2030.
> The builder’s remedy says that noncompliant cities must allow housing at any density and any height, anywhere in the city, as long as at least 20% of the new homes are affordable.
For most places in the Bay Area, is there an existing affordability percentage requirement? How much of an increase is this? I'm not a development/construction insider, but a quick search pulls up a claim that builders often are in the range of 10-20% gross profit. Does a 20% affordable unit requirement swing a normal project to being unprofitable, even if cities can't block it for zoning reasons?
20% IZ is usually a show-stopper when combined with height and FAR limits but the idea is that there must be some point in the solution space that works with 20% IZ.
San Francisco has IZ set at between 20 and 33% depending on the project and this is widely seen as a blanket anti-development policy.
Most cities in the Bay with IZ have close to 10% with a few close to 20%. Indeed, 20% IZ only usually works in high income areas where the market rate for housing is high enough to make the affordable unit requirements profitable. Most Builder's Remedy housing will therefore be proposed in high income areas.
"affordable" homes are just a give away to people on a magic list. I am all for more supply but spending significant quantities of cash on this is wasteful and counter-productive...
median residential home prices in Solano County (just north-east of San Francisco) went up twenty one percent over one year in 2021. The county overall lost population (again) primarily due to residents moving out of California.
Zoning laws broadly are probably still in effect, right? I doubt you could build something industrial in residential zones. It's just the bad parts of zoning that are disabled, if I understood the article correctly.
Excellent development in any case. Hope a lot of good dense housing gets built.
Basically, until these cities get a housing plan validated with the state, who is apparently sick of their crap like zoning in the middle of an active mall that will not be torn down, builder’s remedy is in place.
Once someone has a home, they're no longer homeless, so it's a good strategy in some circumstances. Even where that person has other 'issues', it's a lot easier to deal with those once they're in a stable location.
Why is it nonsense for the state to fund shelter programs by buying out non-viable businesses (empty motels at the height of the pandemic), bailing out both business owners and building shelter capacity at much lower cost than building it new?
It's not like they magically respawn or something. There are people who have studied the root cause of homelessness, and: it's housing. Sure, other factors make things worse, but there's more homelessness where housing is expensive.
Which stands to reason: when a thing is expensive, fewer people can afford it.
That's why, ultimately, the biggest YIMBY win is going to be not helping out people currently homeless, but stopping the pipeline in the first place by having enough housing.
There's so much evidence from research on unhoused populations and housing-first programs in the US and around the world, but you've got "why wouldn't they" on your side, so all of that evidence should probably be ignored.
No, but people are mobile, and the houseless are also people who communicate through the internet and share where assistance is available.
If free, safe lodging is available without restrictions, demand will quickly outstrip supply with folks moving from other cities (LA, Seattle, Portland, etc) to fill the available rooms. It's a $50 bus ticket, city officials will likely fund these tickets for them to get to SF to take advantage of this. SF had programs for this exact thing to get homeless out of SF [1]
Which means every city should do this to reduce their homeless population. The "don't do it because homeless people will move from elsewhere to get this benefit" is a race to the bottom.
Housing homeless people reduces overall homelessness. If we do it enough, everyone will be housed. Part of this is lowering housing prices, another part of this is housing people who can't house themselves (for various reasons).
You are making something of an induced demand argument that basic services for people who can't care for themselves will generate more such people. Fortunately, most people of sound mind understand that living in a former Motel 6 is not a good life and in practice the number of people who are "incentivized" by it are much less than the number of people taken off the streets by shelter. That's why cities with robust shelter programs like Houston have far fewer unsheltered homeless people.
The only to solve homelessness in a city, definitionally, are getting the homeless to move out, or getting them housing. Given the insane real estate prices in the area, $550K seems accurate to buy them housing. Unless you plan to round them up and ship them to camps, or find a way to get them jobs that pay well enough to lease a $550K unit, you're sort of out of options.
Shelters are a temporary means of keeping people alive. They are not long-term housing and don't solve the problem. Also, they aren't cheap and they aren't scalable.
We need and want shelters to exist, but only as a means of temporary housing.
> CEO John Maceri said the state has set up local governments for success, but it will take a combined effort of politicians and service providers to sustain the program. He estimates conversion costs will be far less than $550,000 per unit, the going rate for building from the ground up.
I assume this is where you got your number? Why skip the "far less" part?
> until these cities get a housing plan validated with the state
I could see the cities just refusing to submit any plans at all. The state should then make its own housing plans with the developers directly. Cities should be cut out of the loop.
I don't know if Mr. Bean would be considered developmentally disabled, but I can't get the image of him being driven around while flipping off all the affluent people that support this out of my mind :)
There are many reasons it would be good for there to be a fallback zoning set by the state if a city is missing a housing element. For example, in that case builders could propose zoning compliance projects which have less legal ambiguity, are consistent with a general plan (and therefore already have environmental impacts studied for CEQA), and perhaps don’t have the same inclusionary zoning requirements of Builders’ Remedy projects.
Residential-only zoning is "the bad kind of zoning". It wasn't invented to keep factories away from homes; it was /literally/ invented in Berkeley to stop Chinese immigrants from being able to afford homes by running laundry businesses out of them.
Right - but that part of residential zoning still stays, right?
It's just that you can build a duplex on a "single-family residential lot".
But you still can't teach piano lessons out of your house without one of your neighbors constantly calling the city and complaining about how you're causing traffic problems, right?
And you definitely can't wash other people's clothes or dishes in your house, right??
"Residential-only zoning is "the bad kind of zoning"."
I wish I could mind-meld with you and transmit the memories and experiences of growing up in a residential area with no zoning.
You know that sci-fi trope where the empath gets the memory dump and breaks away screaming and crying because they can't handle the trauma that comes through ?
It would be like that.
You think you'll get cute shops and pop-ups and delightful mixed-use and stimulating workshop spaces and crafty folks doing things artisanally.
What you will actually get is half-built cars. Everywhere. You will get mobile homes and immobile RVs. You will get horses. Not rich-people horses, but "Grandma died and she had a horse and nobody knew what to do with it so we fenced part of the front yard" horses. Someone will disconnect from city sewer because they "know how to build septic". Someone will get llamas.
You think I'm making this up and I promise you I am not.
You've lived so long in a nicely regulated, rules-based order that you have no idea the kind of bullshit people engage in the minute the rules go away.
> What you will actually get is half-built cars. Everywhere. You will get mobile homes and immobile RVs. You will get horses. Not rich-people horses, but "Grandma died and she had a horse and nobody knew what to do with it so we fenced part of the front yard" horses. Someone will disconnect from city sewer because they "know how to build septic". Someone will get llamas.
a) It sounds like what you're saying is "you'll get poor people". There are several things wrong with that, the first one being the rampant classism inherent in it.
b) So you'll get horses, and mobile homes. So what? Oooh, are you afraid your property values will drop? Deal with it. That's a small price to pay to enable the kinds of walkable neighborhoods mixed zoning allows, and the kind of rejuvenated communities it creates.
c) Allowing residential and commercial zones to mix has nothing to do with people trying to build their own septic systems.
All in all, it sounds to me like you experienced what happens when you live in a lower-income area, that happens not to have strong zoning laws, and your takeaway from that experience is that the lack of zoning caused the lower-income parts. Correlation is not causation, and not letting rich people stuff poor people away in a corner and forget about them is absolutely part of what we need to do.
> a) It sounds like what you're saying is "you'll get poor people".
It's more like trashy (rural coded?) middle class people I think. Collectors of broken cars and llamas aren't that poor! Similarly, you see pictures of people in, say, West Virginia with tons of stuff in their yard and kinda messy houses, but they're homeowners in a rich first world country and I suspect they're often pretty well off for the area. It's more of a personality thing.
The confusing part for me was that there are mobile homes and RVs everywhere in Silicon Valley because there aren't enough homes due to the super strict zoning.
None of the things you've listed—except possibly the ones trying to self-install a septic system when they already have municipal sewer access—sound like "bad behavior." (And, again, that has nothing to do with zoning.)
What it sounds like is the stereotypical upper-middle-class white suburban boogeyman of "Those People" that you don't want around, because they bring down property values, with a healthy helping of implied racism and explicit classism.
Furthermore, there's no reason why zoning laws couldn't be selectively adjusted and relaxed—for instance, to ensure no heavy industry goes in right in the middle of a residential area, where it's more likely to be disruptive to sleep and potentially polluting.
Acting like relaxing zoning laws to allow for corner stores and similar things will bring us to a Mad Max-style wasteland is exactly the kind of rampant NIMBYism that got us into this mess in the first place.
"What it sounds like is the stereotypical upper-middle-class white suburban boogeyman of "Those People" that you don't want around, because they bring down property values, with a healthy helping of implied racism and explicit classism."
I don't know what it "sounds like" and I cannot speak to your stereotypes.
I no longer have any interaction with residential property, zoning, development, or any of these housing politics. I am not affected by "property values".
I look at these issues as an interested, outside observer and I have tremendous enthusiasm for urban spaces, walkable cities, mixed use environs, etc.
But at the same time I appreciate well regulated[1] single family neighborhoods/developments and while I don't live anywhere like that I appreciate the reasons that someone might have for preferring that.
I hope that it is useful and interesting to you to learn that there are a variety of practical and aesthetic reasons for (not agreeing with you) that come from ideas and experience that (aren't the stereotypes you have in mind).
[1] This is the correct term. Arguing for abolishment of residential zoning is arguing for deregulation.
Everyone says that until their neighbor’s hobby includes heavy machinery at 6am. Then they say “well no that’s this other non-zoning, non-HOA type of law we really do need”.
But really, people want to do what they want, and other folks don’t get to. That’s the whole of it.
I've been to Japan (+ several other countries that aren't the US). It's pretty nice there.
As to whether or not zoning laws are what prevent people from owning horses, that's not clear to me. But a law saying you can't build a bookstore or apartment on the lot doesn't seem very related.
"As to whether or not zoning laws are what prevent people from owning horses, that's not clear to me. But a law saying you can't build a bookstore or apartment ..."
Everyone thinks they want to "get rid of zoning" but, of course, there are "obvious" rules we would all need to follow and "of course you can't do that" ... and it quickly becomes murky as to where "zoning" begins and ends and which regulations are "legitimate" or not.
Either people can communally decide what rules they want to enact or they can't.
If they can, restricting multi-family housing is as legitimate as anything else in a democracy. Like allowing or disallowing horses. Or limits to vehicles-on-blocks-in-the-front-yard. Or ad-hoc septic systems.
Out of Tokyo and San Francisco, which one requires all new buildings to go to subjective design reviews where your neighbors complain about shadows and tell you they don't like the color you plan to paint it and the style of windows facing the road?
Hint: it's not Tokyo, which actually does have a fair number of old ugly poorly-maintained buildings scattered around random nice neighborhoods. Which is fine and not hurting anyone.
Tokyo actually does have rules about shadows: new building plans have to show how the new building will affect the sunlight of neighboring buildings. I think there's some limitations along these lines, but not a lot. But yeah, you can make your building as ugly as you want.
Anyway, those older, ugly, poorly-maintained buildings eventually get torn down and replaced with something better, because the land value is very high. It's much more laissez-faire than the US and property rights are much, much stronger (the idea that you should mostly be able to do what you want with your property).
I was recently looking to buy a house, and the agent said this is the reason for the weird shapes of housing. You can't build a building in such a way that reduces the light into bedrooms. There's a certain amount of light available for a room that allows it to be classified as a bedroom or not. Hence why you'll see places listed as a 3LDK with a "storage room", rather than a 4LDK in some cases.
I'm not talking about building houses in absence of personal contact, I'm talking about keeping horses, llamas and half-built cars in a residential area.
What's the difference that isn't a posthoc fallacy?
Cause suburban Americans are famous busybodies. There's no way you can outdo them. They think anyone walking past their house is casing it for a robbery and will call the police and post on Nextdoor about it.
You don't seem to understand what I'm talking about. Imagine a HOA that has a say as what you wear, what you cook and what colour your curtains are, except it doesn't exist except in your mind through how you were brought up. A mere thought of your neighbor greeting you in a slightly abnormal manner because you are wearing bright green sneakers is enough for you not to buy them.
You can't buy a car unless you have proof you have a parking spot, so the cars part is out. Same deal with RVs. No street parking, no RV.
There's no space for people to have a horse.
There's plenty of places that I think everyone would call a "shack" made from old tin that's probably been around since the 50s or so, and is not really any different from a mobile home. So that exists here and people are generally OK with it.
People wouldn't disconnect from the sewer to do septic. That isn't a zoning issue, it's a public health one, and it's obviously illegal.
Honestly, none of the hypotheticals described have to do with zoning. Social pressure to do the right thing is a thing here, but not the only reason that things aren't super chaotic.
I think it's reasonable to invoke Chesterton's Fence here. We have to fully understand the potential consequences before enacting something potentially rife with unintended consequences before dismantling a system.
We've lived with Zoning over a century and we ought to have an understanding of what unwanted changes could come about if that were suddenly lifted. It's not that we _should not_ do it but we should make changes in a measured, purposeful and understood manner so we don't end up like unregulated favelas (not in the sense of being mostly poor, but in the sense that anything goes.)
Correct me if I'm misrepresenting you here, but are you claiming that the reason that something is invented is always the reason why it continues to be used?
Now it's probably because people don't like "traffic" outside their homes, but basically yes, that's why single-family zoning is still in place. It's extremely silly to want to ban eg corner stores in your neighborhood.
In SF where people have discovered "left-NIMBYism", people will now argue that keeping it is fighting racism, but then if you go into the suburbs they'll still happily argue the original position.
Luckily we don't have to argue about abstractions since we can just go look at land use.
I do think a lot of people want to keep single family zoning because they think it makes their properties more valuable but 1. historical segregation is part of that and 2. if your home price goes up, that only makes you richer as long as you don't want to buy any other homes that've also gone up.
People want single family zoning because they enjoy it more. People wanting single family housing is what makes it valuable not the single family housing itself.
But also people want single family housing because US made apartments are complete shit. They're poorly insulated to heat and sound which means all sorts of unnecessary interaction with your immediate neighbors, making apartment living that much worse, driving the demand of single family housing up.
People want single family homes in neighborhoods of single family homes, though; the value is highly contingent on the neighborhood those homes are in.
You might be fine with a given backyard in a suburb, but not with a highrise next door that can see right into it.
Zoning handles this in the same way that it handles preferences about people not wanting to live next to industrial shops or giant supercenters. It does this by restricting what can be developed, even if someone moving away doesn't care what happens to their old lot, and could make more money on the sale otherwise.
Whether we should respect those preferences is a fine question, but zoning is pretty much the only tool to enforce these kinds of commons-oriented preferences.
Yup. The anti sprawl people should understand that "densifying" and "building up" in neighborhoods of single family homes will just create a demand for new neighborhoods further out that don't have to deal with these issues. I currently live 25ish miles from a major city downtown. I've noticed a lot of interest from developers in building 3-4 story apartment buildings around here even though there doesn't seem to be much demand for that type of living situation. I will gladly move 15 miles further out, I work from home, in 10 years if this area becomes too dense with apartments.
That's fine, that's the whole point of relaxing zoning restrictions. Nobody is trying to ban single-family housing developments. The point is, the majority of the US now forces you into a single-family housing development even when you have a different preference.
In Japan, as discussed upthread, you often have single family homes next to 3 story apartment buildings close to the city and the further you go out, the more they become single family homes. There's space for all preferences.
Nobody wants to densify the outskirts of Kankakee. They want to densify SF and LA.
Feels a bit like the oddly pervasive "Our city is x on the top 10 list of places Russia would nuke first because of local industry y" myth that existed in places all across America.
I agree. Note how I didn't use residential only-zones, instead opting for residential zones, which can and should be mixed-use. This is not to say that there are some incompatible land uses to be considered - industrial uses can broadly be considered to be incompatible with residential uses, for example.
[5] Yelimeli, Supriya (February 24, 2021). "Berkeley denounces racist history of single-family zoning, begins 2-year process to change general plan - Council unanimously approved a resolution that will work toward banning single-family zoning". Berkeleyside.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210301140957/https://www.berke...
Accurate or not, I hate that all of these references are from one 6-month regional news cycle. They may as well be 1 citation, rather than 5. The excess just makes the inclusion of claim look more motivated by political investment than a desire to be informative.
I hate that people's instinct is to play 4D chess with the intent of some random Wiki editor instead of even glancing at the data contained in the references. Here are some aged references for your discerning palate:
This disputes the claim it originated in SF and the reasons listed. Odd that Wikipedia is centered on SF and its claim is backed up by (several experts believe.) Looks to me like another example of Wikipedia pushing a narrative and pretending it’s fact.
Looks to me like another example of HN guy pushing a narrative and pretending it’s fact. Or maybe someone just made a mistake and a more charitable reading would show that there is perhaps not a conspiracy going on but instead just a misunderstanding.
If you have an interest, the most comprehensive book I'm aware of is "Zoned in the USA: The Origins and Implications of American Land-Use Regulation" by Sonia Hirt. Cornell University Press. 2014. ISBN 978-0-8014-5305-2.
TLDR: the real estate developer that founded Claremont (Mason-McDuffie Co spearheaded by Duncan McDuffie) imposed conditions in its titles that explicitly bared non-whites and prohibited commercial enterprises. However, those title conditions couldn't control neighboring areas, so McDuffie pushed to get zoning laws passed that were explicitly inspired by anti-chinese laundry regulations in LA. The Berkley regulation was "expedited" to prevent a "negro dance hall" from opening.
To me, the existence of the anti-commercial provisions in the McDuffie title restrictions in addition to explicit racial exclusions indicates that racial exclusion was not the only motivating factor in adopting single family zoning laws. However, the context and immediate usage does make it pretty clear that racial exclusion was a significant part of the motivation.
No it’s just completely untrue. This is a common tactic today to say something was created for <racist|sexist|homophobic> purposes so the entire concept is bad naturally.
See how activists say policing was invented to catch slaves or some ridiculous claim. There’s a bunch of others.
Yes, it is absolutely ridiculous that slave patrols existed and formed the basis for later police departments in the south. It is also ridiculous that labor-busting squads existed in the north, which formed the basis for later police departments in the north.
The history is there, it is what it is, as ridiculous as that is. You might argue that modern police have far outgrown their origins, and then it would be up to readers to decide which whether your claim is also ridiculous, given how many police departments generally exhibit qualities consonant with their origins.
Ancient Rome had police. Get real. Boston has the oldest police department. And although some slave states used police for it, it’s ridiculous to compare todays policing as anything like it.
Yes, the slave society of Rome had a police force within the city, which was mostly made up of slaves under supervision. The two main functions of this police force? Fighting fires and catching runaway slaves. So the gap between "police" and "slave patrols" has been nonexistent for a very long time.
I already mentioned that northern states had union-busting squads who formed the basis of modern police forces, so yes, I'm aware of Boston, too.
Once again, you use that word. I agree that it's ridiculous to compare today's policing to anything like historic policing or ancient slave patrols. Today's police are far less accountable, more violent, and heavily armed.
I guess there's been a long weekend, keeping us both away, but since you brought up ancient Rome, I keep remembering fun things from reading about this a couple of years back, inspired by Mike Duncan's excellent podcast on the history of Rome.
Within the great city, there were, as you pointed out, police. As I pointed out, they were mostly there for fire-fighting and as a slave patrol, and were themselves made up of mostly-slaves. But you might be thinking, what about investing crimes? That's what police do when there aren't traffic stops to make, right?
In that great city, if you wanted a crime investigated, you did it yourself. Evidence gathered? Find it yourself. If you wanted to accuse someone of something, you grabbed them and at least one witness and dragged them before a judge. So justice, what there was of it, was largely available to the wealthy, who could afford to hire people to drag other people before judges, and if you were a poor person wanting to accuse a rich person of a crime, well, good luck with that.
So modern cops might have a really poor clearance rate for most crimes, barely exceeding half even for murder[0], but at least they try, which is more than can be said for Roman vigiles urbani. And at least they pretend to be impartial, even if one can clearly see that crimes are prosecuted unevenly, and that US prisons are filled with more than their fair share of the poor.
Okay, they didn't invent racist policies that persist to this day, they just furthered their racist goals by using existing policies that persist to this day. Better?
No, it's completey true. The first businesses affected by Berkeley residential zoning were Chinese and Japanese laundries (c.f. Ordninance 575-NS). Another zoning ordinance was passed to block a "negro dance hall." See Pollard's "Outline of the Law of Zoning in the United States," and Paul Ong "An Ethnic Trade: The Chinese Laundries in Early California." (Journal of Ethnic Studies, Winter 1981)
I think all the people who have washers and dryers in their own homes would disagree that having a laundromat on their street would be a value add. It would just bring traffic from outside of their neighborhood into it.
I'm not making a case for or against, but instead saying this is a matter of perspective based on who's making the judgement call.
You could say the same about restaurants, stores, or streets themselves.
Those people can choose to live in the woods away from society if that’s a problem. The vast majority of people like having things they need within a few minutes of their home—particularly people who aren’t in HOA-governed cookie cutter suburbs.
This is factually incorrect and easily verifiable so. The vast majority - 80% of the US population prefers single family homes. There are 138 Million households in the US and fully half - 68 million - reside in owner occupied single family homes, another ~15% (about 44 million people) live in rented single family homes. This is just the people who have achieved the desired outcome. There are another 15% of people who would prefer to be in one, but just haven't gotten there yet.
Very few people actually want to be stacked on top of each other and packed in like sardines around a bunch of loud shops and offices. Very few people want to walk through dirty city streets stepping over feces and around homeless people or forced to be smushed in with strangers on public transportation to grab their groceries. They want to be 5-10 minutes away from that stuff in a car which they can afford to own. The reason a lot of people are putting up with this anyway is an affordability issue only. They are forced to work in a handful of cities to be paid well and the cost of parking and the congestion in these cities make it impractical to own a car or commute.
I obviously know there is a slice of people who actually do just love the hell out of city life and wouldn't trade NYC or SF for the world, but to claim that this is the vast majority is demonstrably false.
Edit: Adding a source. There are many, but this one is nice in that it breaks it out by age in addition to overall and breaks out actual vs preferred.
That's all very nice but the calculations would change quite quickly if people had to pay for the upkeep of the roads they use for their cars. Cities for the most part use their productive core to subsidise the unproductive suburbs until they inevitably go bankrupt when the roads build 40 years ago need to be replaced.
This. The preferences are obviously driven by the widespread subsidies provided to suburban living. Take that away and those preferences will shift rapidly.
Looking at your average suburb, there are about 110 houses on quarter acre lots per mile of paved 2 lane road within said suburb, plus an additional bit to connect to an arterial street (which also connects other suburbs) and back out to main drags that have businesses and such.
Starting with the street the houses are actually on, it costs approx $300-$500K to repave 1 mile of residential 2 lane undivided road. Using the upper end we've got $500,000 / 110 houses / 20 year lifespan = $18/mo per household. A rounding error against property taxes.
Now lets assume that per mile of suburb, you also have 3 miles of connecting minor arterial roads those houses also need to account for. These run $400-$800K per mile, and again we'll take the upper limit here. So $800K * 3 / 110 / 20 = $90/mo
So our grand total is $108/mo or $1,306/year. The average American pays $2500/year in property taxes already. I don't think the extra $108/mo is going to change peoples preferences for not being packed in on top of each other. I also don't think that these folks are contributing zero to this now. The gas at the pump is taxed and earmarked for road improvement, some of their property tax goes to it as well.
We can do the same thing for power, water, et cetera. Yes over the lifetime of suburban living a single person probably needs to account for something like $250K of extra infrastructure their sprawl requires, but that's not a lot to pay over a lifetime and a lot of it is already baked into the initial cost of their house (Builders had to pave those suburbs, wire & plumb the neighborhood and that cost is baked into those initial home sales).
I very probably can't make a similar argument for truly rural homes - but a lot of those are farms and I'm sure that complicates things quite a bit - as subsidizing rural farms benefits anyone who eats food from those farms.
It's not just the direct subsidies, it's also the massive amounts of free parking in both suburbs and cities that have distorted the built environment, and things like the mortgage interest deduction + the capital gains tax exemption that have made single-family homeownership cheaper than it would otherwise be.
You’ve made a few massive leaps by assuming a single family home can’t possibly have a shop nearby, and that if it did it’d mean people are dodging feces.
Because you can literally go just about anywhere outside of America and see that people live in homes right next to businesses and… it’s fine. We’re not dodging feces and homeless people. Frankly, most places I’ve been to and lived have been much cleaner than my old US homes despite the fact I’m literally a 2 minute walk from a two separate stores and several restaurants in an area where everyone lives in detached homes.
That rant reads like fearmongering from a person with little outside exposure.
The feces and homeless comments were specifically geared towards the sort of people packing taking place in SF. I think there is some sort of rule about making assumptions about commentors, but as far as exposure, I have it in spades. First I was actually homeless in my teens, second through a combination of some time in the military, and a general wanderlust I've moved about 35 times in the 41 years I've been kicking around for including:
Seattle area (Seattle itself and most of the Puget sound - Olympia, Tacoma, Burien, Keyport, Bremerton, Poulsbo, bla bla too many to count here)
Several stents in California from San Diego to long beach and everything in between
Oregon,
Michigan,
Texas,
Georgia,
New Hampshire,
Mexico (specifically 6 months in playa del carmen),
North Carolina,
Indiana
And of course the military bits like Kuwait, Iraq and a few other gnarlies
I'm sure I'm missing some here, but the point is I've lived in many more and varied places than the average joe. The only real assumption I made here is that we were talking about the US. I will grant you if you are talking about places outside of the US it changes the math quite a bit.
Groundwater? It all goes in the same sewer, and the water you drink comes from the same tap. What does it matter if it's 5 miles away or next door, when we don't locally source water or dispose of waste locally?
Large centralized industries are probably going to be more efficient than small ones, but maybe not accounting for customer travel related pollution.
There's air pollution, of course, but few people want to ban wood stoves, and I doubt many medium industries you'd find without zoning pollute as much as 6 if those on one block.
Installation of new wood stoves is generally banned in California. Only certain types of pellet fuel stoves are allowed in new construction. And at times all wood burning is banned in certain regions for air quality reasons (except in homes that have no other source of heat).
Yes, also residential "zoning laws" broadly still exist - it's just that they are state-level residential zoning regs rather than city/county ones.
The implication that this is anarchy is incorrect. Construction and zoning are still highly regulated, just by someone else this time (FWIW, I fully support this and hope many projects built and cities stop crying and get in compliance with the HCD).
Most of the existing lots aren't big enough for large developments. It's probably going to be more of what we have -- relatively low-rise apartment complexes and townhouses, with carport parking or garages underneath.
I'd also expect more people who have space for ADUs to build them, although many of the lots aren't the right size or shape to fit one.
The really big, dense housing projects are being built on commercial land -- stuff like what is being built in downtown Sunnyvale, Santa Clara Square, Lawrence Station, and the proposed replacement of Cambrian Plaza.
Notably, all that big stuff is either already finished, or in the process of building, and didn't need the builder's remedy to get done.
The builder's remedy applies to housing and only housing. Nothing else. It doesn't, however, stop developers from proposing housing projects in non-residential zones.
The same "Builder's Remedy" kicked in last year in many Southern California cities when they missed similar deadlines, and as far as I know it has led to approximately (if not exactly) zero new construction.
Here, for instance: "Santa Monica officials later indicated they would wait to respond until WSC filed its full project application, which is due six months from the preliminary filing."
Interesting that the developer that started the commotion is listing some of the sites they started the application process on for sale, but not necessarily indicative of it not going to happen - "Even as it prepares the listing WSC is still moving ahead with the full application, Walter confirmed this week." from this Jan 2023 article. Could just be looking to offload some risk to someone else who now thinks there's enough of a chance of these things getting built to pay more for the lots than they would've last year.
Under the builder's remedy, a developer can propose any housing project, regardless of existing zoning and land use codes, and it is automatically considered “approved,” as long as it doesn't present a clear danger to public health or safety.
A mildly funny thing about vacant housing/everything is corporations conspiracists is they can't tell the difference between BlackRock and Blackstone. Though neither one is a hedge fund.
They are completely unrelated companies with similar names. There is nothing to compare.
Blackstone is buying houses (though it's more an effect of the housing crisis than the cause of it); BlackRock runs ETFs you can buy in your retirement fund and is known for asking corporations to care about climate change.
blackstone - private equity / alternative investments company (originally mediated M&A deals)
blackrock - primarily sells shares in index funds; one of the big 3 index managers (started as a partnership between blackstone and others... that's why the similar name)
Why do you care if they do? Now you should have the right to demand that the chicken farm controls the smell, and otherwise isn't polluting, but stopping chicken farms completely is the wrong solution. The above includes assurance that fire and accidents will not spread.
Of course land in the bay is valuable enough that nobody will do what you suggest. However that is economics, it shouldn't be law.
I’ll assume there’s law controlling animal welfare, pollution, building codes for fire, water etc. hazards, but without zoning laws are there grounds to control noise, smell, traffic etc. ?
I can imagine there's at least a couple of landlords who would place a premium on shortening their supply chains in such a way.
Where I live, a lot of zoning laws are really ordinances, and the enforcement of different aspects of sanitation is split between the zoning ordinance and other ordinances. I wonder how the new anti-zoning law law handles that.
Sometimes there are things are obviously bad and harmful and it can be known ahead of time that it will harm people. These things should be stopped before they happen in a properly functioning society.
If someone invents a way to do it safely, they should have the burden of safely proving that first.
If someone wants to stockpile 100 tons of explosive material in my neighborhood, I don't want my estate to use the courts to find remedy after my section of the neighborhood gets leveled/cratered. I want the obviously harmful activity to be stopped before the hazard is created.
Thankfully it's not quite that level of anarchy,
it's just that new housing can be built without local governments saying "no". It isn't the case that heavy industry can now be placed next to an elementary school.
Also, given prevailing rents that would likely lose them money over renting it out, though you can certainly regulate your way into that being the best option if you "protect" renters enough.
