Because there are limited resources surrounding those homes. Like streets, schools, sewage, etc. You can’t just magically scale up the housing without also scaling up infrastructure.

I think you're thinking about the problem in the reverse order, it costs money per foot to lay down a street, sewage lines, internet, electricity, gas ect. If there are more units per square foot it makes more economical sense for everything. It's the reason rural regions still use septic tanks and DSL internet, it's expensive to lay it down. Think of it this way, if it costs 10k/year for a quarter acre lot to have access to a city municipality and to pay for the road maintenance but you double the units of housing on the lot, all of a sudden it costs 5k/year per unit on the quarter acre lot (plus a little bit for a second hookup.) This means not only do you have more units of total housing but a more economical infrastructure.

Money per foot is one thing. But the actual total infrastructure on that street has to be up to snuff before you build, while money can be taxed later.

I think the reasoning behind this is "create a problem, solve a problem". If you never create the problem there's no incentive to solve it. You have other problems instead, like homelessness and crime.

In mathematical terms, you're stuck in a local maxima, and to get to a higher global maxima you need to descend the gradient a little bit and put up with some short-term pain.

It's supposed to work with the promoter applying for a permit, and if it makes sense either it's granted or the infra is built.

Failing infrastructure can have disastrous impacts. It's not somewhere where you can afford to move fast and break stuff. There is no alternative to competent government here, no easy way out.

It's not really possible to move quick and break things, there are only so many home builders, carpenters, electricians, plumbers ect. I agree that failing infrastructure can absolutely have disastrous impacts but city councils in America are not run by the most competent people with decent foresight from what I have seen, they see that a bus route runs 95% capacity every morning at 9am, do nothing, a few months later, it's 105%, people start complaining, then they add another bus during that period and repeat the cycle. The only time I have seen infrastructure be built in advance of new housing is when a construction builds the infrastructure along with a new suburban housing development, which is great for the first 30 years, the taxes on those new houses only needs to be like 3k/year for police/fire/ect because everything is new, except after 30 years then the roads need to be repaved, sewers redone, ect, a 10k+/yr bill starts hitting and the local government is all confused about how to pay for it with the 3k/yr they are collecting, rinse, repeat. Local governments just aren't good at predicting usages until they happen.

The root of the issue is the competency of the local government. That has to be fixed.

Things can get built fairly rapidly in many places if all restrictions are removed. You can definitely move fast and break things.

This is precisely why municipalities are permitted to impose exactions on a project--so that developers can't unfairly offload infrastructure costs on the public. If the additional sewage volume of a project is going to overflow pipes 5 miles away, municipalities can and regularly do exact fees as a condition of approval to cover the costs of upgrades.

Unfortunately, these days exactions are also abusively imposed to offset the supposed costs of "gentrification" and other unquantifiable social phenomena, and sometimes the dollar value of such imaginary costs conspicuously set so high as to make a development financially unviable. This is how cities like SF force developers to include below-market-rate units or to make cash contributions to low-income housing projects, even when a project is not actually displacing any pre-existing tenants.

That cashflow problem can be addressed through bonds.

My understanding is that they put a cap on property taxes that fund the infrastructure and then turned around and said there is no money for infrastructure.

Sort of. Property taxes can only increase at ~2 percent a year due to Prop 13. However, people are still buying and selling houses. The people who have recently purchased a house pay high property taxes, because the property is expensive.

Isn’t it a chicken and egg problem? The only way to fund the new infrastructure to accommodate growth that will bring in property taxes to fund it in the future is via debt or impact fees. Either can be difficult for local governments to do.

Also voters are often given lots of say, people who don’t want density get entrenched and vote for local leaders who are like minded.

This is why the next step should be reforming prop 13.

If we charge fair property tax to homeowners, based on the actual present value, municipalities will be able to afford the infrastructure improvements.

That’s a regressive tax. Most of the fixed income people living in my neighborhood would be driven out of California if we charged them the current market rate for property taxes.

Corporations benefit hugely form prop13 for commercial property [1]. The current dominant left-wing pragmatic approach is to remove prop13 for corps, and leave it in place for residential properties.

[1] Corporate approach to keeping 1970s tax rate on large land lots: a) the property should be owned by a specific corp. b) corp has board of directors controlled by original owner c) deal made to sell the land d) new owner slowly replaces the BoDs as to not trigger a "corporate change". e) new BoD is fully controlled by new owner and corp now sold (with land assets). Due to prop13, that land is still taxed at original ownership rates.

It’s not fair for poor people to be driven out of their houses when rich people choose to enter the neighborhood.

That is the very essence of gentrification. If you want to destroy more communities of color in the Bay Area, this is how to do it.

If you want to protect poor homeowners, that's a noble goal, but it should be achieved with a narrowly tailored policy. Thousands of rich homeowners in Palo Alto are paying less than 10k per year on multi-million dollar properties because of Prop 13, and that's both unfair and unsustainable. Not to mention the corporate properties: Disney World, for example, pays an indefensibly low tax rate.

The negative side effects of Prop 13 far, far outweigh any benefit to poor people (most of whom are renters priced out due in part to Prop 13!).

Renters are just as impacted by prop 13 as buyers, since landlords pass on the costs.

That’s now how pricing happens at all. Rent is not based on “cost plus” pricing it is based on supply and demand

There’s an obvious and easy first step: End Prop 13 for anything that isn’t an owner occupied home. Business/capital interests won’t allow that though.

Are you in favor of a wealth tax in general or a property tax in particular?

Rishi Kumar brings up these points in a local article [1]. It's a good question:

"These bills will not require developers to invest in infrastructure improvement, rather only provide bare-minimum parking, avoiding costly entitlements. How will the current infrastructure — water, sewer, gas, roads — support the increased population? Who will make the necessary infrastructure investment?"

[1] https://padailypost.com/2021/03/19/guest-opinion-sb9-sb10-th...

Good thing the government tracks the capacity of those things. There's no need to ask random people with no expertise what they think.

All those things can routinely be built, without magic, as needed.

> I never understood why we allow people who don't own the land dictating the terms of the housing that gets built when we need more of every kind of housing in California.

So we could keep out black people: https://www.kqed.org/news/11840548/the-racist-history-of-sin...

Folks have come up with reasons more palatable to folks in the 21st reason. Some of those reasons may be valid, and some of those folks honestly believe those reasons are why we have zoning. I'm not going to call them racist, but that article makes a compelling case single-family zoning was originally due to racism.

While I 100% think that SFH has often been used for this reason I think larger reason that "my house will go up in value if I restrict all other building" is more accurate. Keeping out black people was one of the early use cases with it but certainly not the only or the first.

SFH has existed heavily in New England, Canada, Iowa, pretty much every where in North America in spots where there are very few black people. Even heavily black neighborhoods like Baldwin Hills (aka Black Beverly Hills) historically had quite a bit of single family zoning. I think if that thesis was true you'd see large historical discrepancies with SFH in different states but you really don't.

I grew up in a suburban white town next to a city that was 95% white and our town had a lot of NIMBYs who prevented condos from going up. I do no think it was because they were cool with 95 white people moving in but scared of 5 non-white people. I think they just knew that it was bad for property values (for supply/demand reasons) + property taxes (for budgetary reasons) and were selfish.

The only reason I push back on this is because I don't think its helpful. I live in LA and the most common cited arguments against SB9/SB10 was that it would hurt "middle class minorities in south LA" and the representatives of these areas all voted against the bill (presumably because their biggest donors are black+hispanic+white landowners in these areas)

> "my house will go up in value if I restrict all other building" is more accurate.

This was also a reason used to keep blacks and minorities out of predominately white neighborhoods. Many people believed that bringing blacks into a neighborhood would devalue their homes. Once a black person moved into your neighborhood - "there goes the neighborhood".

It was a self-fulfilling prophesy because once blacks moved into a neighborhood, all the white families would move out ( white flight ) which caused housing values to collapse since there were so many more sellers than buyers.

On the flip side, it's why gentrification increases home values. As blacks/minorities are kicked out of the neighborhood and it becomes more white, it attracts more whites to move in. More buyers than sellers. Gentrification is the exact opposite of the white flight phenomenon in america.

> Keeping out black people was one of the early use cases with it but certainly not the only or the first.

No, it was the first in the US, as described in the article I linked. I agree it's not the only reason, but I think it's important to mention the racist origins every time someone gives another reason for single family zoning.

[Edit: I originally said first in North America. I misremembered what the article said. Changed to US to match it. Wouldn't surprise me if first in North America were also true though.]

It could also just be that people don't like change or don't want additional density around them, regardless of effects on their home value.

> So we could keep out black people: https://www.kqed.org/news/11840548/the-racist-history-of-sin...

That article hardly proves that SFH was primarily a tool for racism. It only says the first Bay Area SFH law, in Berkeley, was championed by a guy who didn't allow property to be sold to blacks. This is not compelling evidence for SFH being a channel for racism in any subsequent cases across different cities.

Due to redlining, black people generally couldn't buy houses. They rented. Having multi-family units means letting renters into your neighborhood, which means letting black people in. In many part of the US, politicians in county elections often run on "eliminating multi-tenant housing to reduce crime", which is a dog-whistle to racists.

I don't think it's necessary to provide references here. The history of housing discrimination is well researched and just a quick google search away for you. I know this is HN and the culture is to require proof, but seriously, some people just need to educate themselves, because otherwise they aren't receptive to listening.

> It only says the first Bay Area SFH law, in Berkeley, was championed by a guy who didn't allow property to be sold to blacks. This is not compelling evidence for SFH being a channel for racism in any subsequent cases across different cities.

You're underselling it. The first US single-family zoning law, not just first in the Bay Area.

Yes, maybe all of the subsequent single-family zoning laws that spread across the US were for totally different reasons than the first one. Personally I find that unlikely.

>I'm not going to call them racist

...because that would be absurd.

If there are possibly valid reasons, shouldn't we instead discuss those?

> If there are possibly valid reasons, shouldn't we instead discuss those?

That's a matter of opinion, but since you asked me: no. Every discussion of single family zoning should start with its racist origins and go on to consider the negative racial and socioeconomic effects it's still having, and to hell with parking and the other selfish, greedy, petty, short-sighted, and/or misguided reasons for denying folks affordable housing.

We don't need to speculate. There is strong support in the historical record that many cities adopted single family zones for explicitly racist reasons.

The prevalance of these state sanctioned laws and their rebranded remnants reminds what I liked about the first few episodes of Lovecraft Country.

Its basically like the show Supernatural except with the twist that Dean and Sam Winchester had to hunt demons but also had to escape white only neighborhoods and sundown towns every episode, because they were black.

That kind of perpetual threat alongside a different non-race related plot isn't portrayed often.

Oh, I do understand that was/is a motivation, I was being more rhetorical.

Goes hand in hand with red-lining.