My wife used to work as an engineer approving (or demanding changes) to plans for Toronto. The biggest problem is that developers will cut every-single-corner and later plead ignorance when they build the 'wrong' (cheaper) way.
Here's what would happen in the scenario you're describing: Developers would build whatever the heck they like. Then, they'd be told "You built something that doesn't meet code". The developer would say "Well, my mistake, but it's built now and do you really want to tear down this new housing development that people paid for 3 years ago?". Now you have a political situation where the people who want to move in are being told that the building has to be torn down. Politicians would get involved, and the building (not meeting code) would be allowed to stay.
This would repeat over and over again.
I completely agree that we need a straightforward set of clear, consistent rules. But the idea of pre-approval without checking what the developer plans to build, how they plan to deal with waste-water, storm-water, parking, and a long list of other requirements, that's asking for trouble.
It would incentivize his sort of behavior too.
This is why a balanced regulatory approach is needed - one that is more proactive than reactive. By the time we're reacting way too much damage has been done.
Are there regulatory ways around this? Of course, but they are complex, restrict the market in other ways, and lead to different distortions.
Bonds, however, create their own host of incentive problems.
If its not built to code, the contractor didnt finish the job and will not be paid until the building is up to code.
If its a private investor building the building, thats on them, they shouldve hired better contractors or been more thorough in their management of their contractors
Flooding is a big issue right now in Toronto because we've had a few 'incidents'. You can build a building such that every drop of rain is gone from the property within minutes of it landing, straight into the storm sewers. But you can't have everyone do that, or every rainfall will mean a major flood in the lower-lying areas. And anyone in Toronto back in 2013 remembers exactly what that is like (last week too, nearly).
Instead, regulations now say that new buildings have to retain their water for as long as possible. You can release it, just not all at once, and hopefully not all of it. Green roofs are great to absorb the water. Car washes in the underground parking garage. Options like this exist, but they cost money.
This is only one example (storm water management). There are others. The goal of the city regulating certain engineering aspects of the buildings isn't just to protect those directly living in the building, it's to protect the city as a whole.
Fuck NIMBYism straight to hell, but don't tell me that the developer flooding my property isn't my problem.
In San Francisco, the situation is entirely different. We have a massive greenbelt surrounding a geographically constricted urban area, which is 99% developed. Californians have a long history of anti-growth "pull up bridges" politics. It is not so simple as putting some enlightened developers in charge.
Not really. There's plenty of room to build a ton more in San Francisco.
Just because there's already, say, a parking lot or a Burger King with a drive-through on a block in the city doesn't mean that it wouldn't be possible to build apartments there instead.
Geography and existing land use do not prevent building more housing in SF. Anti-building regulations are the only meaningful reason why the housing supply is so restricted.
A random residential street in SF: https://goo.gl/maps/GtKscWh1ko52
A random residential street in Tokyo: https://goo.gl/maps/QqtERUnBzXD2
According to my google maps eyeballing, the SF street is about 6 times wider building-to-building.
You have to prove this before you can retitle a car.
Also, I wonder if you would make the same argument for places that are also generally though of as real-estate constrained. Like Manhattan, or Tokyo. Or the part of Brooklyn where I live.
The zoning here is pretty different than in the US though. The government created a national, unified zoning standard consisting of 12 zones.
Local governments can split their land into more-or-less arbitrary regions, and choose which zone type they want each region to have. They also have some control over how large the resulting buildings can be in each region by mandating the maximum ratio of floor space to land area for each region.
The main difference between Japanese and American zoning rules is that in the US, the zones are exclusive where-as in Japan they are (mostly) inclusive.
There's a fascinating writeup about it here: https://urbankchoze.blogspot.jp/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html
I also miss the freedom Japanese architects seemed to have, where a building shaped like a treehouse would be just one of several interesting buildings.
Lots of NIMBYism is inspired by some level of home value protectionism. It's possible that if you don't expect to resell your home, you don't have to worry so much about protecting its value.
It's not like a random housing developer can come and kick you out just because they want to build condos.
IIRC a large percentage of buildings in Manhattan would be illegal to build today in terms of design/zoning.
"Anti-building regulations are the only meaningful reason why the housing supply is so restricted."
Prove your claim. The GP is right that there is essentially no undeveloped land in SF; a huge part of the housing moratorium debate centered on the fact that there are only a half-dozen or so vacant parcels in the Mission. This is true across the city.
You're arguing about underutilized land, which is a subject that cannot be addressed with simple assertions. In most cases, that "parking lot or burger king" is a contrived example that doesn't really exist: either the lot really is being developed (and you just don't know about it), or the owner of the land doesn't want to redevelop it (i.e. they're making more money with the current use than they would otherwise), or the land is in a place where a developer can't make a building work (pollution, neighborhood, etc.), or any number of other practical reasons.
I used to believe, like you, that "regulations" were the reason that SF has a housing problem. Then I started looking into it. Regulations make a difference on the margins, but the root cause of SF's housing crisis is simple economics: too much money chasing too little land. No matter what you do, it's going to be expensive.
Cost of land goes up with density, but that's the point. You build more and spread that cost among more units. Up to a point, it is economical to build higher in that situation (then for skyscrapers you start to see cost per unit going up again). Look at all the 3 or 4 stories apartment buildings sprouting in the city right now. Most of them could be double the height without increasing construction costs per unit.
If your artificially reduce the number of units that can be built on a plot of land, you're forcing to spread the price of land among fewer units and you increase their cost.
I'm not sure that's correct. I think the reason that you see a lot at that height is because building codes change quite a bit as you go past a certain height and the costs go up as well.
http://www.structuremag.org/?p=10934
The main height limit is local politics around density, not building codes.
3-4 is also where you need to start thinking about adding an elevator. That adds to the cost and reduces the area available for units.
And so? Is it affordable live in Paris? No, it is not. I just looked up rents there, and a 500sf studio will run you around $1300-$1500USD a month. Given average salaries in the area, this does not compare favorably to SF. (As a matter of fact, the city of Paris has just enacted strict rent-control laws, because rents were seen as unaffordable.)
Also, be more specific: what part of SF are you talking about? If you're talking about the 1/3rd of SF that could be characterized as "city", the density is already quite high. Increasing the density of already dense areas won't meaningfully impact rents. But meanwhile, average density numbers completely ignore that the western 2/3 of SF looks like suburbs:
https://www.google.co.jp/maps/@37.7501516,-122.4626812,3a,75...
That's in the city of San Francisco. I dropped a pin randomly in the west side of the city. You can see Sutro Tower!
When we talk about density in SF, these are the areas that matter. But even if you could build higher density in these areas, you'd still have to buy the land (which would suddenly be much more expensive), build transit, infrastructure, and so on. There is no inexpensive solution to this problem.
Yeah, lots of discussion treats SF as if it was the "downtown" urban core of the Bay Area, but in fact only a part of SF is that way, and a lot of SF, if still urban, not the kind of core that it is often compared to.
I'm actually not opposed to higher density or building up. I'm just pointing out that it isn't a panacea, and certainly won't work if you focus on the wrong places.
These kinds of stories are apocryphal.
I don't know the English terms here, but that kind of situation where individuals are earning massive profits because everybody else built city around them, is just wrong. That unearned rise in the property value should be taxed away.
So, just zone more apartments in that area and put big enough property tax on underdeveloped land area. That way the economic incentive of the property owner aligns with the interest of the whole city.
That is so wrongheaded I don't know where to start. Increasing property taxes is the exact reason you have older folks be forced out of their homes after having lived there most of their life.
No one should have a continuously growing tax burden over time.
Property taxes (specifically on the unimproved value of the land) offers a way out of this dilemma. If you can do more valuable economic activity with a piece of land, you can and should pay more for it, so it'll be worth more. So if you spend $10MM/yr in financing for building a bridge, and it increases land value in the catchment area by $100MM, and you have a 12% land-value tax, the state responsible makes more money.
The old person will make a good amount of money selling their home, and they can use that windfall to buy a nice new home somewhere warm and cheap, so it isn't like they're being trampled on.
It deconstructs communities.
This land is too valuable to allow you people to squat on it. We'll compensate you, so it's all fine and fair, now get out.
It's not hard to understand why people don't like being treated that way.
Subsidize? I think your concept of private property rights is under developed.
This is the gigantic pitfall of overly-individualistic property rights - that socially beneficial infrastructure development doesn't happen, because nobody has the power to siphon off enough of the value created to make it worth doing.
Prop 13 prevents this, and in fact makes it so that only redevelopment or change of ownership allows increases in property value to be taxed, which is one reason owners might prefer not to redevelop.
Full value assessment (even retaining the Prop 13 limit on tax rates) would encourage redevelopment because underdeveloped properties would still be paying taxes based on value increases from potential uses.
Like so what? Your property value, whether house or some artistic drawing, can go up or down based on other peoples actions. There is nothing wrong with that, that is how ownership of anything works.
When people loose business or work because those around them abandoned area or supermarket appears, they get no reimbursement. It is market force in practice. Therefore, when the same people earn on others coming in, they should not be punished either.
Doesn't sound like that's the property owner's problem. They didn't ask for the city to be built around them.
These homes aren't rented because there are too many tenant rights and it's more trouble than it's worth to the owner.
We have a bunch of parks (which add enormously to our quality of life) surrounding massive suburban sprawl. Within the city, there is space for hundreds of residential towers without demolishing anything but parking lots and decrepit buildings. Outside the city, in most places you could easily double the density of single family units, they are so spread out.
[1] http://www.startribune.com/brooklyn-park-brooklyn-center-acc...
That would likely lead to a solution that's actually worse than the problem. Court cases to resolve these violations will take years to adjudicate and will in most situations lead to a settlement that still fucks over those who were victimized.
A better approach would be to reform our legal system so that it isn't and/or hire more court employees, judges, etc. If our court systems are perpetually overburdened, it makes sense to clear the bottlenecks to give them the resources and reforms so that they can meet their obligations.
It's a travesty that in all the places I have lived in the US, going to court for some minor infraction or permitting issue will take me at least 3 hours or more, necessitating me taking a vacation or sick day if I didn't work remotely. When my number is called, the actual process takes usually no more than 5 minutes. Perhaps a relatively small investment in our legal system could lead to a large return
Basically, the wait is serving an important role in making court expensive in an egalitarian way.
But the wealthy don't wait anyway. They just hire lawyers.
You'd better be prepared to demolish a lot of buildings if you're going to play it that way. A developer can have the buildings up, sold, the money moved offshore and the shell company responsible for the building wound up before the court case about lying on the affidavit completes.
Also, you'd better have a plan to deal with the angry voters.
Regulation isn't so much the problem as regulation which is slow to the point where it effectively kills development. There is a balance.
For example there's a new development in Fremont of a few hundred houses: the school district had to zone it as "we'll provide school for you, but it'll be wherever we have space across the entire city." That's not good.
To me the idiocy is this: the state government mandates that all cities build new housing. But they don't mandate that housing and jobs balance. A city like Fremont was master-planned with enough space for both, but is being forced by the state to build houses instead for people who will work in Sunnyvale which has too many jobs and not enough houses.
The hostility is built up of years of expecting each new increase to be the last, and yet continuing to receive urgent demands for more, all with the plaintive "for our schools and our children" exhortations that try to suggest only an absolute monster would dare to say "enough".
If this system were used in USA, our shameless politicians would regularly just completely fail to fund schools. The fact that some money goes directly to schools means that most of them can at least keep the lights on.
One of many ways in which local government here is fucked up.
I am sure some fake-libertarian HNer who wants the shrink government to the size of a bathtub drain will tell me I am wrong.
Taxpayers have a real blind spot to the whole 'money is fungible' concept.
The political promise is usually "Hey, we'll implement a lottery and earmark 100% of the taxes towards education -- that'll be $20 million a year!" to which everybody thinks that $20 million will be added to the $30 million already being spent. But what happens is the $20 million lottery gets added, then the $20 million non-earmarked funds get pulled to pay for <insert other thing here>, such that the schools don't end up with any more or less than they had.
Past that, "earmarked for schools" is also a way to reframe over political opponents against the lottery as "voting against education".
> A fund is hereby established in the State Treasury, to be known as the 2016 State School Facilities Fund
> no disbursement shall be made from any funds required by law to be transferred to the General Fund.
> Bonds in the total amount of nine billion dollars ($9,000,000,000) […] may be issued and sold for the purposes set forth…
(This proposition was approved by the voters.)
Thus the schools are receiving the $y, just as promised. Only they aren't any better off, and the general fund has an extra $y in it now.
Property values (and therefore property tax receipts) vary relatively modestly with the economic cycle, but income tax receipts are fully exposed to the booms and busts of the stock market. What this leads to is school funding that is somewhat directly tied to the financial markets :( So if you're in school during a recession, it sucks
I'm sure there's a ton of good-sounding legal reasons for it, but seriously?!
The legislation discussed in the article is largely about making Sunnyvale (and the rest of the job-heavy housing-light peninsula cities) build more housing.
A decent article detailing the mismatch between people coming vs. housing starts: http://www.paragon-re.com/Supply_Demand_Money_and_Demographi...
Other metro areas have balanced these competing needs much better.
A lot of the laws proposed still require any proposals to follow the existing zoning (a law championed by the governor last year is one example), etc. but just prevent a few motivated individuals from blocking growth.
I'm not aware of any country or city (besides London) that does this to young people. It's insane to be making over $100,000 anywhere in the world and be expected to pay $5000/month for a studio just because building some high-density housing would diminish some entrenched gentry's view of the ocean.
The NIMBY's can all go and shoot themselves in the face, as far as I'm concerned.
I don't think anyone really has suggestions that enable anyone to by a family home in Palo Alto. But, the question is do local residents deserve the right to keep out newcomers.
Who has what rights (who deserves what) is not an abstract truth we discover. It’s decisions we make.
Also, when does someone become 'local'? All the time on Nextdoor I see, "we need to stop the building", "traffic is bad", "there are too many people". Yet, the loudest complainers are people who literally just moved to my town in the last year. The building, etc... is what allowed them to move here in the first place so don't complain about it now.
SF is not the only city experiencing these issues, although they are amplified. Nearly every nice weather coastal city in the US is growing out of control right now as people flee much of the center of the country.
It's true that anyone is legally allowed to live here.
It's also true I've excluded, by legal fiat, almost all Americans. I've declared my lifestyle superior to all others and no one else can live here except those who enjoy the same.
Palo Alto is not as extreme.
But it still limits the number of houses, tells everyone what lifestyles are legally permissible (don't forget to include parking or yards!), and excludes vast swaths of Americans.
This isn't good governance. It's not healthy for the region, and it's not healthy on a national basis.
This is why many nations take away zoning power from localities and move it to regional or even national levels.
It's also why we don't have the power to vote for who lives next to us, at least explicitly. That would be local governance, but quite cruel and prone to abuse.
Why do we give localities this right to implicitly vote out people?
I would argue it is just as cruel and misguided as voting to ban your neighbor
This simply cannot work. The most desirable areas in the world are going to have high prices that exclude "normal people" period.
> Houses are for sale, of course, but suppose I passed a law requiring all new houses to be mansions. I'm talking palace of Versailles level amenities, out of reach for all but the most wealthy.
This actually happens all the time. Every time a new subdivision is built in the suburbs this is exactly what happens. Hell, even new condos being built in my small city in the downtown area do this. So unless you're going to mandate that every single development that will house human beings stratifies the cost such that each income level can afford the exact same setup and you don't allow people over that income level to purchase housing, then you will never solve this "problem".
Does it suck and is it not fair that you're not mega rich and can afford to live in Manhattan or in the hippest part of SF? No. That's just a market economy. I also can't buy a Ferrari and have to drive a Honda around. Can I afford a 1.5mm shack in SF? Sure. Why would I do that when I can afford a 1.5mm giganto-mansion on the Great Lakes?
City ordinances, national ordinances, any of those are fundamentally the same thing. You're just arguing about what's most prolific because that's in your field of vision. Why can't I buy an affordable house in Switzerland? Why are they keeping average Americans out?
Why can't I afford a 2br/3b flat in Paris next to the Louvre? Why don't they just fill that place up with skyscrapers?
etc. etc.
Maybe people want to keep their neighborhoods how they are? Maybe the charm that makes a place what it is has value, and should be protected? Why should they lose tens-hundreds of thousands of dollars in value because other people want to move next to them?
I've lived all over the world. Moving sucks. But life is what it is. If I wasn't making the money I am now where I live and it was too expensive then I would just leave. You don't have to work for Google or Facebook or whatever. You can go have a huge impact at a smaller company that really needs the talent somewhere else in the country. If Google can't find good people because rent is too high and they aren't raising wages, don't be an idiot and move there and just get paid shit and then complain about it. Move to Michigan and work in automotive, or move to Nashville and work doing something there. Don't act like you don't have choices. You do.
Environmental concerns under CEQA aren't "black-boxed" or generic, they have to be categorized, detailed, and public. Mitigation measures are sometimes expensive, yes.
Rubber-stamping construction permits in my island is how we ended up with rows of hotels destroying the coast illegally. Once the buildings are there, the harm is done, and no one has the money to demolish them. "Going after them after the fact" can work for arbitrary zoning requirements, but it doesn't work for environmental ones.
The reason why CEQA can't be amended or repealed is because it effectively gives the environmental lobby a veto over projects, and that lobby is a pillar of the governing coalition in California. Setting aside the wisdom of granting such leverage to non-state institutions, any amendments that cut down on NIMBY abuse would almost necessarily reduce the environmental lobby's de facto veto powers.
California can keep putting the screws to city councils, but unless they amend CEQA you'll see very little change in number of units built, except for large projects or well-heeled (i.e. well-lawyered) developers. Alternatively, the Supreme Court could step in. A possible silver lining of adding another conservative vote to SCOTUS would be that it might strike down CEQA as commonly applied. Likewise, they would hopefully crack down on the "community input" process that makes it difficult for developers to clear zoning hurdles. In particular, in cities like San Francisco zoning laws are so loosely defined and applied that it's impossible to submit a plan with any degree of confidence that it meets zoning and other regulatory requirements. In reality you're basically bargaining with the city like you would bargain with a corrupt city political machine in the 19th century, except it has the imprimatur of the courts.
It's a failure of Due Process, the most basic guarantee of Western constitutional law. Government is supposed to apply clearly defined laws. In particular, zoning boards and other instruments of government (courts in CEQA lawsuits) aren't supposed to be venues for democratic feedback. NIMBYs are free to lobby to change zoning and regulatory law to shape the character of their neighborhood; they shouldn't have a backdoor to change those rules on-the-fly as part of development plan approvals.
If I were a developer, I'd be hesitant to build anything with that hanging over my head. It probably also means I'll have more difficulty getting financing. Less up-front bureaucracy, more risk and cost.