Houston still has also sorts of housing covenant and other thing. Texas is still a low density mess, too.
We do need to get rid of stupid zoning, but also cannot rely on a housing market to do the right thing. We need to force a shift to anti-car rather than pro-car development (and it really is a dichotomy, with the midpoint being a highly unstable equilibrium).
The fact that they are talking about 4-plexes shows they really don't get the scale of density that is needed. Everything should be 5 stories minimum. Maybe some shorter Victorians can be grandfathered in, but the Sunset and western half more broadly needs to be almost entirely redeveloped.
The reason they are talking about 4-plexes is that's the reality of redeveloping a single family residence one at a time. If you could do it city block by city block there would be huge savings, and WAY more developer interest. The problem is it's too hard and expensive to assemble that much land to make such projects actually happen. No one wants to move, no one wants change.
The headlines will read "Poor Betty was forced from her home by the evil mayor and money grubbing developer".
They set the table when they built it, and to undo all of that is going to be crazy expensive and difficult.
Some people dream of a car free utopia. Some people like their SFR. Those things may not be compatible.
Things like the Miami tower collapse will make things worse. A lot of people don't want their life dictated by their neighbors. HOAs are well known to be horrendous. And the Miami disaster just goes to show that not only can your HOA affect your sanity, but also your life safety.
A large percentage of the people living in my R-1 neighborhood are retired now. They could sell their houses and "cash out", but what would be the point? Money is no substitute for a lifestyle. We chose this lifestyle because of the attractions it offered. A couple of my neighbors have moved away, but for every one that moved, there are ten who have stayed. Once we retire we aren't making that long commute any more, and most of us don't leave our neighborhood during the week because we have almost everything we need within a mile or two. For the people who are working in tech, a lot of them used to have WFH days, but now most of them expect to have more regular WFH days - perhaps even a majority. That's pretty much the utopia that people want to achieve through dense development, namely living locally.
I think there is one major issue that doesn't get mentioned, namely the fact that companies have chosen to site themselves in areas where there was a shortage of nearby housing. The south bay areas are the best example of this, with so many of the employers being north of 101 but almost no housing north of 101. This is not a new problem - I remember people commuting long distances to Lockheed and other defense employers north of bayshore in the 70s. As employers have continued to pack more and more jobs into tight spaces, they have exacerbated the problem.
There is a severe problem with affordability of housing, but that is caused by increased demand as much as limited supply. We worship at the altar of economic growth, and refuse to consider the consequences of that growth. Urban planning is about maintaining balances, in much the same way that we seek to strike balances in our lifestyles. Would anyone accept that employment growth is constrained to not exceed housing supply? It's hard to imagine.
I think you are accurately describing a current political reality, but this is deeply disappointing and not a response that will go behind virtue signalling ("zoning is racist") to actually solving the problem, or even right a wrong: ("there is so much cheap housing the non-white proportion of SF/Berekley/etc. goes up.")
> The reason they are talking about 4-plexes is that's the reality of redeveloping a single family residence one at a time.
I wish they could at least talk about 2 lots at a time!
> If you could do it city block by city block there would be huge savings, and WAY more developer interest.
Amen.
> The problem is it's too hard and expensive to assemble that much land to make such projects actually happen.
If only we could do just one, and then for the next one give people units and free moving in the prior one. That can become a virtuous cycle.
> No one wants to move, no one wants change.
Very true, but for all those perks and a nice cache out people can be persuaded. We would need some eminent domain for the stragglers, however.
> The headlines will read "Poor Betty was forced from her home by the evil mayor and money grubbing developer".
Just gotta talk about how Better is getting $5M, a condo, and the elevator she will need anyways as she gets older.
> Some people dream of a car free utopia. Some people like their SFR. Those things may not be compatible.
They aren't! Spineless compromises as described in https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/09/18/cars-and-train... (pork for both sides!) is spineless politics that will diffuse outrage now, but at the cost mutually-undermining investment that just makes people disrespect government more later.
> Things like the Miami tower collapse will make things worse.
:(
> A lot of people don't want their life dictated by their neighbors. HOAs are well known to be horrendous.
The irony is suburbia is full of annoying HOAs. Just like the fact that without more broad economic growth homeowners will have a hard time paying off their mortgage in their lifetimes means that it is a lot closer to paying rent than they would like to think.
Disagree with the last one, one of government’s main responsibilities is to regulate peoples’ externalities so they don’t infringe on other peoples’ rights. Noise and pollution especially negatively affect neighbors.
It’d be great if this was done parametrically (Eg setting max noise output at your property boundaries, particulate output, etc,), but I guess it’s been historically more convenient to do it via broad zoning instead. Japan’s max-use zoning seems like a good compromise.
> We just need to get rid of incentives for cars, like off street parking requirements and free parking.
The Bay Area cannot hope to cancel all the car subsidization done at the state and national level. More active measures are needed.
> The government shouldn't be telling people what they can or can't build (beyond safety)
I really fundamentally disagree. Even if we accept liberatarianism for individual and business choices by default, land is a public good in finite supply in fixed position. Isolated actors developing land as they please can cause public harm because the utility of land is based on how surrounding land is used.
We need to collectively agree cars and single family homes hold the bay area back, and then collectively work to move away from both, to replace wholesale self-perpetuating car culture with self-perpetuating public transit apartment culture.
