Re:CA Cities to Lose All Zoning Powers in 2 Days
by vineyardmike on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @02:21PM
(#34600383)
> For one if zoning laws change tomorrow no one is going to bulldoze those neighborhoods on Thursday.
I’m so in favor of up zoning, but some parts of California will be quickly thrust into a new reality.
Santa Monica was the first town to fail the housing element. They previously had 1600 houses built in the last 8 years. Since failing recently, developers have submitted permits for 4000 units. That’s 20x above the yearly average. If I was a “desirable” town, I’d be very nervous to not comply.
If I owned property in one of those towns I’d have been advertising it to developers hard too.
For one if zoning laws change tomorrow no one is going to bulldoze those neighborhoods on Thursday. So everyone already in their "safe" neighborhood will remain "safe". Except in rare circumstances no one is going to build a 10-lane expressway behind that tract of "safe" houses.
Second you've got to be realistic about the socioeconomic factors behind those "safe" suburbs.
The small, often winding suburban streets are largely impenetrable to buses and completely immune to light rail. This means public transit often used by "those people" (for whatever local definition of "those") is inaccessible from inside the "safe" suburban housing tracts. This is exacerbated by many suburbs lacking sidewalks. Inaccessibility of public transit was a design criteria for early suburbs preventing anyone that could afford a house but not a car from moving to them.