I don’t know if reduced zoning will even make that much difference. You need major shifts in attitude toward poor people.
If you didn’t have zoning then developers would be able to build things that there would clearly be market demand for (i.e. boarding homes, tiny home communities), but cannot be built currently.
This is nonsense, no way the whitehouse/Biden doesn’t have tons of experienced govt attorneys on staff that understand that most of these questions are ambiguous and that the government has a huge advantage when they go to court, so the path to do it is just do it and make them challenge you. The US Army Corps does that shit all the time. It’s SOP. The fact is that they didn’t really want to do it, as @■■■■■■■ and others say constantly. I mean, the fact that they evidently even think about this till the last minute tells you everything you need to know about how much of a priority it was for them.
ETA: your post isn’t nonsense, but the story they are feeding us.
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No zoning would immediately eliminate all the most affordable housing anywhere near me. There’s even a trailer park about three blocks from the beach in Hermosa Beach.
Unless you get a lot of subsidy poor people just don’t have enough money to motivate any kind of building in some areas. And there are empty units for every homeless person as it is. A rich person’s demand is worth a thousand poor people’s. Better to speculate on luxury housing than rent to people who are broke.
Sorry, why exactly would ‘no zoning’ eliminate affordable housing near you?
This is interesting. It’s the opposite in Baltimore. We’ve got sparse public transportation and only really a handful of neighborhoods that have the necessary amenities to have a thriving walkable community. Our boarding homes and the like are completely zoned out of any of the nicer neighborhoods. Group homes under a certain occupancy are allowed by right under some ADA/FHA case law, but there’s nonetheless a lot of agitation from our local electeds to start restricting them and see what happens if we get sued. Removing all zoning restrictions would certainly help the more liveable areas of the city become accessible to more people.
As a side note I spent a lot of time last winter researching the issues surrounding group homes/sober living homes and zoning, and it’s a great opportunity to see how all of those lower level federal judicial appointments can really wreak havoc. Like, there is one concrete line of case law that repeatedly says that you flat out can’t place restrictions on homes for people with addiction that you wouldn’t place on single family homes. And then there’s a dozen or more cases where individual district court judges say shit like “well, actually, this town normally wouldn’t allow 4 unrelated people to live together in this single family neighborhood at all, and now we’re allowing these addicts to live there because of the pesky fair housing act, so any additional restrictions (on things like spacing, parking requirements, additional fire code requirements, etc) are ok because the addicts are being treated BETTER than a non-addicted group of 4 friends”.
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Old small apartment buildings and the aforementioned trailer park only exist because the zoning won’t allow other uses. Without it they would be torn down and replaced by multi-million dollar houses.
Or perhaps multi-million dollar condos, but multi-million regardless. That’s not saying that much though, since the median home price in CA is about $850k.
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The market solution to housing in California is servant’s quarters.
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Or eliminate property and let me build my shanty.
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Every non billionaire will be living at work soon enough. If you’re not an in house servant you’ll still have to live at the Google campus.
Like the great George Carlin said, “The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class. Keep them going to those jobs.”
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I doubt there’s much room for productive conversation here, as the last time we did you claimed that developers were lowering density in an area of NorCal (they weren’t, I had just looked at several large, new apartment complexes in that town).
Regardless, while it is more than just a supply issue, supply is definitely a major issue. You don’t get away with 800k-1m dollar homes with ~1k sqft if it wasn’t.
I will once again point out that land use is an insanely complicated issue and “eliminate zoning” is meaningless nonsense, especially since half the time the phrase is used it’s in response to restrictions and laws that aren’t even zoning.
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We had this discussion a few months ago and your argument boiled down to “people should be able to decide what kind of housing is built in their neighborhoods, and high density housing doesn’t help anyone except developers”. It’s not a super complex issue - zoning codes flat out exclude certain types of housing from certain neighborhoods.
high density housing is pretty much the only way to develop sustainable communities that doesn’t involve killing off massive portions of the population, so I’m confused as to how this could be a conclusion.
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That was not what my argument boiled down to. The first was one relevant issue I raised that you seemed willing to ignore. The second appears to be you misinterpreting what I actually said, which is roughly the same thing as microbet posted upthread.
I get that people want simple answers and “no zoning” promises to be magic pixie dust that makes everything better, but the core argument being made is overly-simplified deregulation nonsense which isn’t going to solve anything and will almost certainly make things worse.
My actual argument is and has always been that land use is insanely complicated and there are no simple answers. In fact, it has been the core issue for most human conflict in all recorded history. It’s delusional to think we can wave a magic wand of land use deregulation and suddenly everybody has affordable housing.
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I absolutely did not ignore it, the crux of my whole position on it is that people should not have a say in what kind of housing is built down the street from them.
Of course, nobody is saying that if you get rid of zoning affordable housing will be solved. But it’s kind of silly to use Bay Area or SoCal as our measuring stick for affordable housing policy.
But that’s exactly what you’re trying to do. You don’t want other people to have a say, because it conflicts with how you want to see that land used. Sometimes your preferred use will clearly be the best option, and sometimes it won’t because you’ve been blinded by selfish motivations. Much of the time it won’t be very clear at all where the divide is between personal gain and public benefit.
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To be clear, I’m not arguing for eliminating zoning. I am just making a factual statement that affordable housing (and to an extent, infrastructure projects) will be a perpetual problem as long as planning and developing decisions are in the hands of county and city-level officials that are incentivized to keeping their voters happy.
? Now I’m confused. What do you mean I don’t want other people to have a say? My position is that whoever owns a plot of land can build whatever they want there, and that other people (myself included) don’t get to tell them no. Im not saying it solves everything but the only tangible benefit of zoning laws (at least WRT residential density limitations) that I can come up with is reinforcement of the already existing fucked up housing hierarchy.
I feel like your position is that you like zoning laws because you think they’re a good idea and support the idea that property owners should have some control over who lives in their community, but you defend the position by saying that land use is really complicated and we can’t possibly hope to make it better by doing one easy trick.