Definitely feels true for kids growing up without siblings too. I know we would have had more than one probably if housing wasn't such an enormous consideration.
Early settler homes were typically a single room and not much bigger than a modern living room, and they had many kids living there. Space is a wonderful luxury, but hardly a necessity.
You may be able to get away with it with just adults. Kids talk, sooner or later some 'well meaning' individual reports them to CPS for 'inadequate shelter' and the whole thing destruct.
I feel very fortunate to live in a Midwestern small city, to have bought in 2014, and to have the skills and tools to fix up a foreclosure with lots of problems, so that I can live within 5 miles of my parents (so that my son can grow up within 5 miles of his grandparents). That 5 miles, though, is a car trip, because their house was $145k in 1995 and is now worth some $700k. There's no way as the sole breadwinner that I could buy a house within walking distance my 6-year-old's grandparents (my parents).
While you are right that perspective was taken from that of a millennial, the parents you speak of were the grandparents in the discussion. The kids are the children of the millennials. While it is true that some millennials do have adult children now, it is not common. Most millennials with children have children who are not yet adults and there is a general expectation that said children will live under the same roof as their parents.
And yes, that is most likely what the GP meant, despite the earlier discussion which already setup the context. Which is why we’re joking about it.
side-note: one of the convicted defendants in the USC pay-to-play scandal paid a couple of hundred thousand dollars for their two kids to get placement in a prestigious college. His job title? Director of a property title clearing house in San Diego county. hundreds of thousands of dollars in "envelope" money.. get the idea of how profitable it has been to do this real estate market stuff ?
That's one point, but another is that the careers of many young people force them to migrate across the country or even across continents. Academia and IT are particularly known for this, but also other industries like moviemaking have their world-wide-known centers.
Eh, I mean, for a lot of homeowners in the bay area, because they so little amount of housing compared to market price, they usually can (and do for some communities) front large down payements for their kids' houses. That's how you see so many people in their late 20s affording houses you have two have two or three of: two good incomes, frugal mindset, good RSUs / IPOs, or parental help.
Obviously it sucks for people who do not have upper middle class parents, and that's why we need to fix this stupid housing crisis.
But do the grandparents want to know the kids? If they did, they would not oppose new housing near theirs.
It often doesn't matter who the renting class votes for, and politicians who represent their interests are less likely to collect campaign donations, which affects their likelihood of holding office
> It enriches homeowners at the expense of other's misery.
This is a profoundly subjective view, because homeowners could turn around and accuse new residents of enriching themselves at the expense of homeowners; adding traffic, pollution, destroying nature, maybe bringing crime, increasing population which increases distance and reduces oversight of schools and politics, requiring more police. So a lot of people who want to keep their town small and close knit would disagree with the premise at the outset. Do communities have rights too?
No one is forcing grandpa to sell his house by rezoning the land (the property tax won't go up due to pro 13). If your argument is that the house will appreciate in value and that grandpa is "forced" to sell his house because he likes money, well I have no argument.
[0] https://thecrimereport.org/2022/09/14/the-u-s-is-under-polic...
Does anyone not think that broken down cars growing literal trees in them, broken glass, and garbage in people's yards are not blight? That's what I find just a mile from here where there are duplexes and apartment buildings.
It's not all sunshine and rainbows, but the benefits likely outweigh the drawbacks.
FWIW, the most the township would do is setup a radar trailer (zero enforcement) and new stop signs were not allowed for traffic control purposes. I never got them to add one for safety purposes either, even though a speeder clobbered a mailbox one house up from the school bus stop.
Neighborhoods change. What was once farm land and a few houses becomes suburban. What was once suburban becomes medium density. What was once medium density becomes dense city core. That's how cities have always worked. As the value of the land changes existing owners cash out and developers infill or rebuild. As density grows the justification (and budget) for city services like subways and parks grows.
Excessively restrictive zoning cuts off that natural process after the farmland-to-suburb step.
In free market terms if you cared so much about what your neighbor does with their own property you should have bought an interest in that property. Who are you to tell someone else they can't build a bigger building on property they own?
In reality there are few true free markets and externalities exist but in property rights terms zoning is a rather large government imposition to benefit other landowners often without any compensation to the owners who want to build. In an ideal world people who want to keep single family zoning should be paying land value fees to their neighbors who want to build density to compensate for the restriction. You couldn't possibly make such a scheme work in the real world though.
Because it turns out there are pesky uncontrollable externalities that keep popping up. Like, you can't buy some random lot in suburbia and turn it into a nuclear waste dump or a trash incinerator site, no matter what you pay the neighbors, because of regulations like zoning.
1. Massively increased rent, if he is renting 2. Massively increased cost of local goods and services and change in who those services cater to 3. Predatory tactics by real estate developers targeting lower income individuals in the community, if he owns the property 4. Loss of friends/community due to cohort being forced to leave by 1-3
1. Rent increase
2. Consumption price increase
3. Big real estate will use thugs and trickery to force people to sell
4. More people in the community leads to less friends
Increased housing supply almost universally decreased housing prices.
If you don't want renter Grandpa to be forced out, build more
> This is a profoundly subjective view, because homeowners could turn around and accuse new residents of enriching themselves at the expense of homeowners
Nothing is happening “at the expense of the homeowners.” The homeowners are the ones getting rich.
If it's not an investment property then homeowners don't get any benefits from higher home value other than a larger tax bill.
Nope[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13
Roughly its monthly payment => a third of 90-110% of AMI.
(Or if you retire to a country with a lower cost-of-living and no housing bubble, buying a similarly-sized house there for lower than the original purchase-price of your home in the US. Which is exactly how every retiree you see in e.g. Thailand lives like they do: they're not living off a pension; they're living off the "nest egg" they naturally accumulated by holding a house in the West for 20+ years before selling it to move there.)
You've never heard of a HELOC?
The person with a $1.8M property holds a very valuable illiquid asset. They cannot convert the value to cash trivially (they could perhaps take out a home equity credit or remortgage the house). Effectively none of the value of asset is available to them to meet any other needs, and will only be fully realized when the house (their home) is sold.
The person who can pay the mortgage on a $1.8M property has substantial income and/or cash reserves, which are liquid assets and thus distinctly different from the property owned by the previously discussed person. They may not have a net worth of $1.8M but they are much more easily able to shift financial resources aound to meet their needs.
But there are situations where the HELOC will either be hard to get. For example, you may own the house outright but have very very low income. Or the bank may not be willing to view the land in the same light as potential developers.
"House rich, cash poor" is generally convertible into "have mortgage, and cash", but it is still a distinct condition from "Income rich, have mortgage", especially for low income folks.
Im a homeowner and this is just ludicrous. Rich? Please. This kind of added drama makes me discount everything you say.
https://patch.com/california/cupertino/cupertino-councilmemb...
Many of those vilified "high-paying tech jobs" are young and have school-age kids. I am one of them (well, except I'm not that young), and almost all my friends in the SV area are the same. I go to work and half of the team have a kid or two.
It's not tech workers pushing out parents: they want to be parents and settle down. It's old grandmas in three bedroom single houses refusing to move out.
> The school board had cited declining enrollment, funding issues and voters’ rejection of a parcel tax as reasons for closing the two schools.
I'm very intrigued that the Cupertino voters rejected a parcel tax, I've seen so many of those in my town and they all pass. They typically go something like "shall the City of Cupertino collect a parcel tax at rate XYZ for the next ZZZ years to replace aging air conditioning and plumbing and other aging building facilities?".
Ratified November 5, 1996
Date effective November 6, 1996; 26 years agoPeople follow the jobs. Give companies a subsidy for starting in a new town/city/village and the people will certainly follow it. And you'll get all the benefits of starting with a clean slate: you could make it walkable, bikable, keep land costs low by not limiting it(enough supply to keep costs low)
Starting an empty town doesn’t do that. Why doesn’t everyone just stay at home with their parents and just commute into a meta verse version of the Bay Area where everyone can have a fake home?
There's already tons of cheap housing around the US. It's just that a lot of it isn't where many people most want to live.
So we give existing house owners a subsidy by creating artificial housing scarcity, and then we give companies a subsidy to fix the house owner subsidy by starting new towns?
Who pays for this? Productive young people earning income? Again?
negative density tax is the way.
unfortunately new suburbs are an unsustainable addiction in this regard. it incentivizes everyone for optimizing for cars and backyard-driven life-development.
I think it was Elon Musk who made me ponder this. Somewhere he blasted the notion that most of the Silicon Valley venture capital gets blown on housing costs. That made me ponder what other alternatives could be found and what other productive uses that money could have been spent on. It's a fascinating train of thought with big directions it could go. That's an interesting idea about encouraging the subsidization of a town, I'd like to see that experiment tried if it hasn't yet.
Who's paying for that? And why?
Kind of a different use case with needing distance and dangerous stuff being deployed but still probably a worthy bit of development history and municipal dynamics to be shared there.
We used up all the good places.
Probably very difficult to get this right.
I personally don't like living in a city, too much traffic, too many assholes and I don't trust modern police, of which cities have an abundance of.
Hopefully, if this remote working sticks and we don't go back to driving to an office everyday, it will be a net positive for a lot of problems we are facing: overcrowding of cities, skyrocketing rents, pollution, unnecessary carbon emissions, etc.
Furthermore, for people already living in, say, the Bay Area, they probably have friends and/or family there and it's not like the Bay Area is a hellhole so the default for a lot of people is to stay there, in spite of the high housing prices, rather than move to a cornfield in Iowa.
Successful towns have historically been built near some natural resource (rivers, deltas, lakes, mines, forests, etc). Jobs / corporate mini-HQs are not a natural resource.
The point is that we have to make a trade-off between free internal migration and NIMBY. If you mix those two ideas together, you get misery. In deciding which is worth prioritizing, perhaps you should consider that free internal migration is a literal bedrock principle of the American state, dating back prior to the Constitution, enshrined legally in the Constitution, on which huge quantities of American legal and economic life have been built for the last 250 years, whereas NIMBY is an ad-hoc political coalition of wealthy homeowners and crotchety neighborhood activists who'd rather no one new get to live in their city.
Assuming they are renters, how does that happen? Increase in housing will decrease rents, so even if their current apartment / house gets replaced with a bigger one they can just rent something in the same neighborhood? Unless the only reason they can still afford to live in said neighborhood is because of rent control.
Having rent control plus very strict zoning laws is the most asinine housing policy. It basically means that after a new neighborhood has been built you just freeze its state eternally - only allowing new people in when one family dies and their kids or some friends move in. The privilege to live in a neighborhood isn't then determined by wealth but by kinship - a harmful form of socialism that calcifies communities.
How would net migration in push out existing residents? This makes no sense.
>This is a profoundly subjective view, because homeowners could turn around and accuse new residents of enriching themselves at the expense of homeowners; adding traffic, pollution, destroying nature, maybe bringing crime, increasing population which increases distance and reduces oversight of schools and politics, requiring more police. So a lot of people who want to keep their town small and close knit would disagree with the premise at the outset. Do communities have rights too?
This is true. I would say 1% of the population shares your subjective view, while 99% don't. Literally the OVERALL majority wants cheaper houses while 1% are worried about their rich enclaves having crime go up and getting messier.
Yeah as a minority of the population YOU would love to have your imitation-of-the-country-side suburbia stay the same and have good nature and all that but keep in mind it exists because an UNFAIR advantage to a small minority of rich people: YOU.
The overall quality of your living standards must go down if you want to be fair. The luxuries you fight to preserve is a literal crime against humanity. This is the only way. But keep in mind if you own a home it's not like you LOSE any part of your home. It's just your neighborhood becomes more populated, that's the main difference.
What you are painting as the cause is actually the effect.
But I did nothing wrong. The people who actively prevent Boston from building more housing are the reason my presence here is at someone else's expense.
> Its (Los Altos) zoning prohibits multifamily housing, whether apartments, townhomes or condos, along with commercial stores and shops in the entirety of its city limits.
The asymmetry of how cities/neighborhoods interact with each other is what creates the need for interventions like this. Some cities are more than happy to open up commercial and office spaces without allowing additional housing, eating up all the tax revenue, all the while pushing the burden of housing and other infrastructure on others. Meanwhile cities like Los Altos make any commercial development not possible in their neighborhood but will have its residents happily go to other neighborhoods to fulfill their need of a $7 artisanal coffee. Cities like Oakland will try to push high density housing in areas that don’t really add any value, simply because these are rich neighborhoods and you get election votes for doing it, meanwhile, plenty of medium/low income neighborhoods would benefit more from new high density housing with commercial space and the infrastructure upgrades that come from it. There’s all kinds of selfish interests and there needs to be a check on them.
My cousins and I grew up in a band from Monterey to Sacramento. Our parents all still live in the homes they had decades ago. But None of our generation live in northern California any more, except for my sister who bought in Sacramento during the recession (she had a state job which made it a lot easier to get a mortgage!)
I think that's bad. I'd like to be able to afford to live in norcal. I moved away from California for multiple reasons but one of them was affordability.
Also, I hate traffic too! It's a good thing I am not a car! Ideally we could build places like culdesac.com or bloommerwede.nl and allow people to live completely car free.
And no, in my view, "communities" do not have rights.
I find it odd how people can be pro-immigration and anti-migration. Keeping people out of your community is similar to keeping people out of your country.
No matter what you or I might think about it, people like the suburban single family home.
People want to live near their jobs, their schools, shops, doctors, all the things they need, and where that kind of density exists, they're willing to pay for it.
The demand is there.
Being able to make rules about how the area you live is used are a fundamental part of both of those.
Fully externalizing the benefits of an action never has positive social outcomes. No one would bother making their neighborhood nice if they thought that as soon as they did, a million people who had nothing to do with making it nice in the first place would move in and screw it up.
So definitely _not_ socially beneficial.
And? There are dozens of cities that don't have a housing shortage. Living in the city of your choice isn't a human right.
How many people should we try to pack into that area? Double the current housing? Triple it? Where do you stop?
I very much doubt SF is limited in expanded by water pipe capacity. Total water use, sure, but people use less water in a city then the suburbs anyways so it will be a net savings of water.
We "stop" where it is natural to, like any other place in human history: lack of resources, lack of space*, there's better places to move to, etc. And if the only thing holding back the Bay Area's development is artificial zoning laws -- we are certainly not at its "natural" equilibrium.
While CA has had its generational water supply issues, only 10% of it is used for residential purposes; 90% of it is used for agriculture. Adding more people in SF, or Palo Alto or Berkeley, does not put special strain on CA versus anywhere else. Not to mention, single family homes often consume _much_ more water per family than those in apartments or condos (yards, many bathrooms, etc).
*Lack of space, for what is a _city_, is not "it's too populated here for me to have a backyard without paying a ton of money"
After this zoning change goes through and new houses are built, I'd wager those new houses will still be still priced out of reach of people that want to live in a given area. I'm not saying it's not going to help, but it's not going to magically create 10x the housing density in a given area and bring housing prices down to the point where a low income worker can afford a home. That's a pipe dream.
[EDIT] And that's putting aside that "right" just means "thing we like a bunch", anyway.
Society creates laws that affect each other and zoning is no different.
If I live in a cute little community and my neighbors all agree that we like it how it is, we can collectively agree to keep it like that.
If that little neighborhood had a dense block of apartment buildings, many of the people who originally lived there wouldn’t want to stay.
Now, all that in mind, I generally agree that we need to fix zoning. I’m not a homeowner and want to buy property in places that are currently too expensive for me..
But I completely understand that people would be upset to build a community somewhere, then gradually be pushed away because a few of their neighbors sold to a big company, and their neighborhood doesn’t fit their needs anymore.
Even if the majority want to stay, they get forced away by a few using their land in ways that are bad for the rest of the group.
Builder's remedy or state-imposed zoning has no power if no one ever sells to a developer, right?
Plus you're comparing living in a more dense neighborhood to cooking meth. I can't take you seriously at all.
And I do prefer dense walkable neighborhoods personally, but I just also understand the frustration of a community living somewhere because of some quality of that neighborhood, then having that quality ripped away just because a small number of previous inhabitants left.
If "quality of neighborhood" is so important then said neighborhood should, as I stated above, put their money where their mouth is. Maintain a common fund, and commit to match any offer for any house going up for sale in the community. Stop using everyone else's taxpayer dollars to have cities pass and enforce laws to do it.
I asked OP why the people who don't own that property, and have no ties to it (other than potentially living near it), should be able to decide that others _can't_ live there through restrictive zoning.
If it's actually a free market, and people have interest and money to afford to live in an area, and a property owner has property and interest to build housing they can afford, why should people with no interest in the property get to decide they should live elsewhere?
We don't need a housing market where buying a small fixer upper costs millions. That's unjust.
But you have an inherent right to deny someone to live somewhere?
It seems like you're defining "where you grew up" with long/lag proximity, while attaching lots of unrelated personal concepts to it. How much can an area change before you've, for all practical purposes, moved somewhere else.
I'm fine with communities deciding for themselves how they grow and change. I really only take issue when they decide to grow office space and not housing, or when employers take office space meant for 100 workers and cram 300 into it.
That being said - I do wish my children were able to see their extended family more than once a year (travel costs/calendar coordination/ etc... being the impediments)
Building more doesn't stop the makeup of a community from changing. If anything it accelerates it.
The local native population without an influx would not be in such dire housing situation.
Yes, the area is very attractive and is a magnet but without that influx the population would have plateaued.
Look at the figures: https://www.newgeography.com/content/007550-total-fertility-....
SF: 1.49
SJ: 1.59
That's not growth, it's decline.
In any case, the California Department of Finance gives counts of births and deaths by county, and you are wrong: https://dof.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/Forecasting/Demographi...
> A rate of 2.1 children per woman is necessary to maintain a population at its current level (immigration and migration aside). California and the nation had fertility rates near population replacement levels in 2008, but every state falls below those levels today. California has fallen faster than most, dropping from 2.15 to 1.52
Well below replacement rates on births. I imagine a very large portion of the births are immigrant births as well, which would push the rate even lower.
1: https://www.ppic.org/blog/californias-plunging-birth-rates/
People can live longer, and natural population increase can persist long after fertility drops below replacement.
I grew up in a town with an economic implosion. Very few people born here during the '70s stayed, and there was not, is not, and should not be a mechanism to bend the economics of the entire country to enable them to do so (if for no other reason than their industry collapsed for a compelling counter-concern: it was killing us. Pollution controls went in and the best companies in town could no longer compete while maintaining air quality standards and shuttered operations. So now people were out of work but the work was also not shortening their lives by a decade).
2) Reducing obstacles to building is free (in the long term, it's revenue-positive). Propping up a dying town is expensive.
SF: 1.49
SJ: 1.59
Thank about what the Fertility rate means.
>the TFR is based on the age-specific fertility rates of women in their "child-bearing years", which in conventional international statistical usage is ages 15–44.
>The TFR is, therefore, a measure of the fertility of an imaginary woman who passes through her reproductive life subject to all the age-specific fertility rates for ages 15–49 that were recorded for a given population in a given year. The TFR represents the average number of children a woman would potentially have, were she to fast-forward through all her childbearing years in a single year, under all the age-specific fertility rates for that year. In other words, this rate is the number of children a woman would have if she was subject to prevailing fertility rates at all ages from a single given year and survives throughout all her childbearing years.
Typically people’s lifetimes overlap their kids’ significantly. I mean most people meet their grandparents, so if you have a fertility rate of 1, and an area becomes attractive to early-career people who are just settling down and starting families, and the existing housing become taken up by that group, then I guess the area will have to house the original population, plus their kids, plus their grandkids, so we’ll need housing for 175% of the original population, total.
Of course the area is, by not accepting new immigrants to get back to replacement rate, setting itself up for long-term unpleasantness as the tax base ages into retirement. But hey I guess that’s their right…
You're confusing your ideas of property rights with actual US democratic ideals, which are not equal at all. In fact the idea of property rights is explicitly left out of the Declaration of Independence; where Locke would declare "Life, Liberty, and Property" as inalienable human rights, Jefferson changes "Property" to "Pursuit of Happiness". (Quite a strange distinction for a man who owned slaves!) This is because there was great debate about property and lordship in the New World. Property holders were seen as the tyrants who oppressed the colonists, and prevented the Americans from doing what they needed to do to live, in pursuit of their own profits and investments. So, the idea of a democratic government's eminent domain is absolutely the point: to keep the land available for public good and not for the sole-benefit of the few.
We need to allow the mob to steal everything - it's the most democratic social process possible!
I mean, what do you think majority vote is if not essentially the largest mob of people?
It's very much like the "first speaker" issue with free speech "advocates"; somehow the first homeowner/speaker has greater rights than the newer homeowner/speaker.
The lack of self-awareness is breathtaking sometimes.
Got an example there? Not sure I'm following.
For example, say I give a speech and people criticize me for it. If I then say “I’m practicing free speech. My critics are against free speech” then it’s like I’m saying that only the first person to speak is allowed free speech; everyone else needs to shut up.
It sounds silly in this example but this is an extremely common rhetorical technique.
The rhetorical technique is frustrating, but there is a clear dividing line between exercising free speech, and coordinating with enough people to facilitate a societal ostracization. In one, a party is availing themselves of making a point; adding something to the intellectual crock pot, if you will. The other is essentially working the room to prevent a party in particular from doing so at all.
I do not think anyone can reasonably argue that someone 'gathering up the boys to defenestrate someone with an odious opinion' is merely a good faith "exercising of free speech".
But again, at that point we're starting to argue about something other than free speech, and more representing enforcement of the Overton window, and what everyone is comfortable with counting as reasonable to be an outcome of being found to be outside it.
Example: Dave Chappelle makes a joke about trans people, other people criticize Chappelle and vow to boycott Netflix. Those are BOTH free speech but a lot of people think Chappelle's free speech rights should take priority over his critics.
To be clear, I believe Chappelle has the right to make trans jokes and I also believe he has brain worms about the issue and has become distinctly unfunny because of it.
> but if you use your free speech to criticize my speech, you're censoring me ("cancel culture") and depriving me of my free speech, so the "second speaker" does not have a right to free speech.
entirely follows; in particular since the hallmark of "cancel culture tends to be communicating with other people to orchestrate action or dissociation of the one of the speakers from society.
It seems much closer to something akin to the practice of industrial blacklisting/secondary striking in employment/labor reltions law. In that you're using speech to command/coordinate a group to force an action or change in circumstance on someone else.
I'm not saying mind, that even those and similar activities don't have a place, but they are examples of "patterns of speech elevated to action", and thereby removed from the arena of "free speech", and firmly plopped in the "freedom of association"/situationally labelled and verboten bucket.
The spirit of free speech is you are free to voice things without the threat of government force gagging you, or compelling you to say otherwise.
Now... Where is the dividing line between the "Government" and "a sufficiently large group of people that there is warranted a stepping in and reminder that "if a government employee eould be specifically restricted from keeping you from saying this then mayhaps as a very large group of citizens it warrants the same consideration of restraint; as we've all got a vested interest in not windi g up on the wrong side of a snowball network effect"... That's an entirely different kettle of fish.
But yeah, these rules are draconian and surpass their intended spirit, creating regulatory capture for the construction industry and preventing perfectly acceptable possibilities that the community would want.
For example, I want to create a summer camp for kids here on my farm, but zoning and other over-regulation actively prevents me from building any of the needed dorms, classrooms, or kitchen/bathing facilities. Countless possibilities like this are being crushed every day. I personally have given up trying.
It happens in this case that the state is in favor of less governance over property than local governments so I'm in support of the state here, but that doesn't always hold true and I'd be pro-local if the situation was reversed.
In this scenario you and folks who want more building are the justice system: you want defection, you want building. You say, "how is it moral for prisoners to constrain each other's actions?" but they voted for it freely because mutual cooperation is better than mutual defection, even if they personally would defect given the choice.
Seems like there's a spectrum (even if the dividing line is in the wrong place on that spectrum right now).
Many suburbs prohibit owning roosters (they wake your neighbors at dawn) though female chickens are OK. I think it's OK if you can't open a slaughterhouse next door in an urban or other dense area. It's also reasonable to require that new construction be up to code, as your close-by building not to fire code could threaten my home.
At the other extreme are restrictions on how you paint your house or operating a slaughterhouse in a low density agricultural area is none of your (distant) neighbors' business, assuming the roads are up to the new traffic.
Increasing infill density doesn't seem bad to me, but even then, you need adequate utility and road capacity, and it's easy for NIMBYs in town to prevent that from being upgraded.
The local government has been deemed a failure. They have repeatedly been told they need to fix zoning, and each time the local government fails differently. Now their authority has been revoked.
This is very reminiscent of the political distracting and gerrymandering cases currently in flight.
there's a balance to be struck, and at the moment it seems the scale has been heavily tilted towards wealthy home-owners deciding what their neighbors can do on their own property
zoning should be flexible and applied equally within a region (rules as determined by the voting population) but in expensive cities this is not the situation
State bureaucracy is far removed from the people.. you are just a row in an excel sheet, if you are lucky.
If the California constitution says cities have more power, then they do. But I'm pretty sure it says (like every state constitution I'm familiar with) that city power is wholly defined by state authority and if the state wants to explicitly revoke the right to zone, they can do that.
(Whether or not it's a bad idea is independent of the question "Do they have the authority").
The constitution of the U.S., and likely of every State, clearly does not endow any independent sovereignty to local municipalities.
Hypothetically? Because I live downhill from you, you didn't do any mandated hydrology / runoff study for new construction, and when you moved earth to make room for your deck you turned my nice backyard into a swamp by changing the drainage layout.
This is one of the reasons some new construction requires permitting, for example.
This was the precise thesis of Milton and Rose Friedmans' "Tyranny of the Status Quo"
It's interesting to me how people argue from a left-leaning angle(think of the children, it's immoral, etc.) about this topic while essentially having a pro-colonialism mindset that the current residents need to just suck it up or leave.
I do think that some parts of the YIMBY side at its worst sometimes downplays the rights of the present land owners though, and I think your “enriches homeowners” comment plays into that. We need to respect and honor both sets of stakeholders. I think most homeowners are not money-grubbers as you suggest, they chose a particular neighborhood vibe because that is where they want to live, and they don’t want to lose that. That is valid! Moving house is incredibly disruptive, particularly considering school districts. (To be clear though, I do agree that YIMBY is directionally appropriate for most neighborhoods).
One angle I don’t see discussed often is “rate of change”. I think some people would like to preserve their neighborhoods character indefinitely, and that is unrealistic clinging. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that if you buy a house in a quiet suburban neighborhood, that it’ll have that character for, say, a decade or maybe two while your kids grow up or whatever.
I think a lot of infill can happen without changing the character too much, and this middle ground is probably hurt by polarization.
> It enriches homeowners
Homeowners own the land, not just the building. If your property is worth X dollars when anyone buying is only allowed to (re)build a single family home on it, it must be worth more if they can also build a tall condo complex on it instead. Dense neighborhoods almost always more valuable on a per-unit-land basis than less dense ones, so upzoning is going to increase land value, lining the pockets of incumbent homeowners. This all makes perfect sense but everyone seems to go around pretending the opposite.
Now what does happen is that poorer people will live in these condos and apartment buildings, and send their kids to the same schools as incumbent families, use the same services, etc. I strongly suspect that's why people are so against upzoning, and I think that is an important moral issue in itself.
The implication here is that if housing were abundant and more affordable in the bay area, then both grandparents and grandkids can live in the same city and visit each other often, rather than one side living far away in some suburbs. (In some cases, it's the grandparents living in suburbs and parents/kids living in the city for jobs; in other cases, it's grandparents living in the city because they've lived there forever and don't want to move, while parents/kids move to a suburb further away for better life/more space).
The thing is, growth of a city/a region brings along many other issues (in addition to lack of housing driving prices up), including safety, traffic, crowds, decrease in quality of life. Just because housing is affordable doesn't mean that both grandparents and grandkids would still want to live in the city.
Instead of building out even more housing in an already dense area (because jobs are concentrated in that area), I would've liked it if we have a far more diverse set of growing cities across the country where the job markets thrive in all of them, rather than deeply concentrated in a couple of places (SF Bay, NY, etc.).
[Edit] To clarify, I am in the group where the grandparents want to live in SFBA because they've been there forever and don't want to move away. I'm saying, the job market made SFBA grow too much, and building more housing in SFBA to make them cheaper won't necessarily make me want to keep living there because there are other problems that come with more people. Hence, if job markets weren't so deeply concentrated in one area, the country could see more evenly distributed growth across many cities/metropolitan areas, and SFBA/NY wouldn't be so lopsided and ridiculously unaffordable.
When a building is proposed, the benefactors are diffuse - any of the people looking for a home will benefit from its existence. But the people who oppose it are concentrated - anyone who lives near the new building. For too long our planning system has only considered the latter, and nobody has spoken for the person who will be seeking a home in the future (though groups like SFBARF come to mind).