Things that are illegal to build in most American cities now
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I read somewhere that the lack of rooming-houses significantly contributes to homelessness.
They fill a gap between an individual apartment and your car or the street.
It's too bad these aren't allowed any more. I know those populations can be hard to live with, but it's better than having them live on the street.
As others have pointed out, rooming houses weren't only for the dispossessed. They were a low rung on the ladder for young people trying to make a start, for people between jobs or starting over in a new city, for the vulnerable escaping bad marriages, for new immigrants and the elderly without support systems. It's interesting that this list closely mirrors the precarious stages and situations in life that can often lead to homelessness.
We lost SROs but we also lost casual labor. Business are criticized for not providing full time positions with benefits. The idea that someone could walk in and get day work helps folks who really don’t want to or can’t work full time.
Rooming houses had a variety of functions. My grandfather lived in one while a young adult; he was also a butcher at the co-op grocery, and made sure to get his landlady good cuts of meat since he knew he'd benefit at meals ;) There is some interesting history, too, of how rooming houses run by Respectable Matrons facilitated the entry of young women into the labor force and the migration of labor from rural areas to the cities. Sylvia Plath might be the most famous recent writer about this... but see [1], [2].
Last, I'm very happy to see near me a lot of development with first-floor commercial and living above that. The most recent development near where I live has 5-6 floors, of which most are apartments, but street level has a pie shop, a restaurant, dry cleaner, etc etc. I am delighted! It increases our quality of life.
[1] https://www.thecut.com/2015/03/why-i-live-in-an-all-women-bo... [2] https://www.citylab.com/life/2016/02/brief-history-of-co-liv...
They didn't. It came about because in WW2 labor wages were fixed by law. In order to attract workers, employers could not offer more pay. But they were able to offer benefits, like health insurance. It stuck because employer paid benefits were paid out of pre-tax income, while if the worker paid for them himself it would be from post-tax income.
I.e. it was cheaper to provide it through the employer, thanks to the tax code.
Unions probably did that more than management given that at least some of it was driven by wage and price controls during certain periods. Though that's still corporations in some sense.
Roomates in a SFH / Apartment are the new SROs, but they definitely have higher barriers.
The gig economy is not a good replacement for the full spectrum of casual labour.
That may be a factor but at the low margin "we just need you to have a pulse" end businesses mostly don't care what you think about their benefits package.
The problem is in the law. It is very hard to just hire someone off a street corner and comply with labor and tax law. Then there's civil liability. Employers mostly can't afford the risk of just hiring whoever shows up because god knows who they are. If they decide to shoot up half way through the workday and get hurt or hurt someone the employer is gonna wind up footing the bill. Unless you have an army of lawyers who have figured out how to insulate you (e.g. the gig economy) it just isn't worth it to take the risk on someone you can't vet.
When you realize that many of the items on this list also decrease tax revenue over single family housing and discriminate racially via income levels, it's not even surprising.
Essentially it's "Let's run the city like a corporation, maximize tax income and keep our neighbors safe from people who are non white, homeless, atheist, alcoholic, or otherwise scary to us. It'll be legal this way."
Density increases property taxes per sqft. 4 condos combined are worth more than a large SFH. It's all about excluding people.
The trouble is that it decreases them per capita, and now you need more teachers and firefighters to cover the additional residents.
This is the dark side of funding services through taxation. The people with little money pay little in taxes but still consume services, so they're a net loss to the government which then has a powerful incentive to push them out of the jurisdiction.
One way to solve this is with a UBI. That would allow local governments to charge actual cost for local services rather than tying them to property values, without imposing an impossible burden on low income people, because then they could pay the cost from the UBI. Which would in turn remove the perverse incentives local governments have to inflate local housing costs or push out "unprofitable" residents.
It also has direct knock-down effects.
When everyone has a large (historically speaking) private home, what need is there for public spaces?
If I have a bunk in a shared room, suddenly a well-run tavern seems more interesting.
And maybe, in that public space, I meet people who are dissimilar from myself. And maybe that broadens my view of society and knits my local community more closely together.
... Or I could sit in my home, watching my TV, being recommended media that agrees with me.
It's no surprise that worker mobility is at historic lows given how hard it is to even put a roof over your head in another place, especially if you don't have good credit or income.
Perhaps the disappearing ladder rungs of housing, occur in transportation too? Some years back, Boston-NYC intercity buses had a couple of inexpensive "light gray"-market companies go mainstream. They were attacked by incumbents, federal and local politicians and law enforcement, and press. Leaving now gray-market buses for "illegals" pushed to the city periphery, and a (now somewhat more competitive) middle-class mainstream. With a gap in between, where working poor might commute, bridging the two labor markets. It seemed that price point and use case was too socio-politically vulnerable to be viable.
So a narrower gap than there used to be. For labor mobility, perhaps a difference that still matters for commuting on minimum wage. Exploring a possible job. Geographically broadening one's social support network.
The point "lower class of service" is perhaps key. As with flop/cage/SRO. A "yuck" service, serving people with little pull, perhaps tends to "bad thing - gone now".
People come to cities for economic opportunity, they need to be able to live here while getting on their feet.
It is a mystery to me anyway, how people can seriously have those laws (and much more) while considering themself to be in the land of the free.
Now sadly the rest of the world is not necessarily better with this (for example the cologne cathedral, everybody is very proud of it, but I read even government officials admitted that today you could not build such a monument again, due to building regulations), but at least they usually don't claim to be and lead the land of the free.
https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/greater-la/no-kitchen-shared...
SROs? (I'm not familiar with the word in english) are generally for people living full time. Many have minimums of > 30 days.
I've lived in a hostel for months at a time. At one point an employee mentioned their monthly rate (not advertised; I was paying by the night).
SROs are havens for drug addicts and prostitution, with a mix of indigent elderly. It’s incredible that they would be put forth as a cure for a social ill.
You know what would help these cost problems? Incentivize companies to place workers in Cincinnati or Harrisburg instead of only working in 5 cities.
IBM is the old days used to be able to rule the industry from places like Binghamton, NY and Minneapolis. The current scenario is ridiculous.
I remember one older woman who got evicted. Late at night she'd sneak into the building and walk up the stairs when the front desk clerk was distracted. She'd go to the 2nd floor, walk into a end floor bathroom, and lock the door for the night. Imagine being 70-something and having to play games just to have a chance at sleeping in a small bathroom with an often nasty toilet.
Other stores include a 20-something woman I knew died of a drug overdose, my short-term house guest who was a raging alcoholic with no survival skills, the meth head who offered her services on a regular basis, the strippers who wanted my ADHD meds... So many stories.
I, also, lived in what might be described as a pseudo SRO for about nine months in 1998/99. I witnessed similar things.
I'm not sure where these (SROs) should exist or how many of them we should have but it is completely reasonable and judicious to heavily regulate them and keep them out of neighborhoods where personal and familial status has reached a higher level of development.
Nobody wants an SRO near them. In theory, it’s just a small, affordable room, and that sounds fine. The reality is quite different.
These are wealth generators in that renters are paying your mortgage.
My grandparents lived in a Queens NY row house (until 1970s white flight). I have early memories of it, was a cool house. It had lots of fireplaces, varnished wooden gates, wall sconces and shared back courtyard. My parents lived in a 1950s single family house, but we gen xers rediscovered cities.
New houses around Boston are mass Lego block low rise apartments. They all are corporate owned, which means they are expensive, and the rent goes up automatically, but they sometimes have nice ammenaties.
SROs: I want to live the way Sherlock Holmes did. Mrs. Hudson cooked, cleaned, answered the door.. did people really live like this in late 19th century London? How much was the rent?
I really prefer the zoning laws and building style present in Hanoi. Our house is five stories tall, and some of our neighbors have houses with six stories. Although they are not very big per floor (they may only have 2.5 rooms per floor), they are very space efficient which allows for tons of amenities to be within walking distance.
That’s as big as my entire house, and we can fit 4 rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom in there.
2.5 rooms per floor would be the height of luxury.
Why do you say these are terrible?
It was $750 for a three bedroom near WPI in 1992. Ours had left over (disconnected) gas jet lighting, sliding wooden pocket doors for one of the living rooms and a separate entrance for one of the bedrooms (for maid I think). You could see where chimney for the original coal stove in the kitchen was. Also had a slate roof.
Because you're competing with Boston money. The fact that it's possible to live in Worcester and work in Boston (and the fact that Worcester is known for being nicer than New Bedford/Fall River and Fitchburg/Leominster) means there's tons of working professionals who are jacking up prices.
I think people liked to live like that, just like they'd like to have fresh made meals and live in walking distance to everything now. But once you get married have kids, it gets too expensive. You're housing and feeding multiple people that aren't working. Also, people forget boarding houses usually came with a shared bathroom.
Many of these triple-deckers are pretty great in the sense that they can house a lot of people - they are not so great in many other aspects.
The youngest triple decker in Worcester is ~100 years old and many of them catch on fire and burn really easily. Your mileage may vary depending on the landlord you get. One landlord I had owned 100+ properties in Worcester and barely had anyone working for him. He refused to hire more people, so many of the issues we brought up would not be addressed for a while. My current landlord is great and any issue we have gets addressed almost immediately.
That being said, the city is currently working on revitalizing triple-deckers: http://www.worcesterma.gov/announcements/city-announces-worc....
Triple-deckers have a certain quirky charm to them. My current apartment has closets that are the right depth, but for some reason are super-wide. Many other triple-deckers have split the living room in half so that there can be a bedroom - this means that the door to the bedroom are sliding doors that you close.
We need more stuff like this! Backyards in Brooklyn used to be treated more communally (before my time) which created a large shared space safe from cars where children could play.
Now I just stare out my window and watch people basically never go in to their yards.
What a horrible waste.
The top floor (us) had a small balcony in the front, and that was it.
The middle floor had a medium-sized ground floor patio out the front of the building adjacent to the parking area, and a small balcony in the back.
the lower floor had a gigantic fenced ground-floor yard that was easily bigger than the entire top floor we lived in. They were the only people in the building who had any green space.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakeshore/Lake_Vista,_New_Orle...
But what's the excuse for passing a law that prohibits the alternative? Can't we have both?
Setbacks are not the same as sidewalks. You can allow buildings to run right to the sidewalk without pushing pedestrians/wheelchairs into the street.
> While single family zoning was reserved for homeowners (read: White), multi-family housing was seen as being for renters, (people of color).
> State, federal, and local governments all conspired to limit homebuying and lending to whites for decades.
Nobody should be forced to have an electrical outlet in the garage for an electric car and the government has no business requiring that.
This is just my favorite example of thousands of silly regulations that are put in place to keep the poor from becoming owners.
No poor person can afford a Tesla, yet: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1095076_ca-to-require-n...
The government prevents someone from opening a lead smelting plant next to a school (hopefully). They also force homes to have two exits from every room in case of fire, etc.
But they also discovered manufacturing housing scarcities and _also_ making massive, lifelong loans available for housing are a GREAT way to keep your population working really hard to just barely keep a roof over their head. Want to work part time and pursue art? Want to stay home and watch your child grow up? Too bad, there's 10 more people who'll outbid you for your house, so you have to design your life around income maximization.
These scarcities are created with zoning, parking minimums (maybe the most horrible part), green space (aka yard size) requirements, ridiculously large streets, density restrictions, etc.
The escape is to leave the city and work remote (honestly it's amazing what having no mortgage and no rent does to your sense of agency) but that's an option open to rather few people, and probably not for long as it becomes normalized and wages adjust as a result.
That can't be true? That makes 90% of existing homes illegal to build again.
This guy gets it.
The urbanists' hearts are in the right place, but in the end they're getting used. The only way to win is not to play.
Source: bought a rural foreclosure and licensed wholesale dark fiber from the electric utility. My internet bill is ten times my property tax bill and it's worth it.
But yeah, houses are cheap. Very nice log cabin style ones (manufactured parts, assembled on site) can be sub 100k. In a scarcity house prices rise to match the debt available. Incidentally, if you like a project look for houses no bank will lend on.
Electric cars are up against a vicious cycle: no one will build houses to accommodate electric cars until a lot of people have them, but most people won't buy an electric car if they can't charge it in their garage. So if you want people to drive electric cars, which the government rightly does, it makes sense to require that new houses are built with electric cars in mind. Yes, Teslas are expensive, but the expectation is that the houses will still be around once electric vehicles are more affordable, and it's cheaper to prepare for them now than to retrofit later on.
Right now, you can buy a USED Leaf under $5K, but it probably has a worn out battery with 60-70 miles of range usable:
https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=nissan+leaf&so...
Electric vehicle sales in california are growing rapidly each year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_electric_vehicles_in_C...
Also, once people switch to an EV, they don't generally want to switch back (quiet, clean, cheap, minimal maintenance)
A level 2 charger is not much different from an electric clothes dryer as far as your house electrical infrastructure is concerned, so when putting in support for the later it is cheap and easy to put in support for the former, too.
Now add up all the other requirements.
2%? 5%? It's not the reason why I was stepping around a homeless person sprawled in the middle of the sidewalk on my Monday commute.
The reason housing is unaffordable is the cost of land, availability of credit, and the self-fulfilling expectation that houses are a good investment that will grow in price.
Also, we don't build housing for the poor, we build housing for the wealthy and middle class, which later becomes available to the poor due to depreciation. I live in a city where literal mansions have been carved up into apartment buildings over the years and where poor people live in Italianate apartments with beautiful stonework.
So often it just seems callous: this regulation is inconveniencing me, so let's remove it. If that harms other people, that's their problem.
That doesn't mean that the regulations were well designed, or even if they were, that the reasons remain the same. But that's the point: regulations are removed by the same processes that create them, and they don't get into place lightly, either. So if you want a regulation removed, you need to figure out what caused it to be created in the first place. Only then can you create a better regulation that solves the problems that need to be solved.
Given that the rules are nominally in place to benefit occupants, I don't see where you're getting a conflict of interest. It's offering to suffer the alleged harm yourself in exchange for not having to pay significantly higher housing costs.
> But that's the point: regulations are removed by the same processes that create them
The problem is that they're not. As you say they're often imposed following some fatality. But even if the new rule is ineffective garbage, it's unlikely to be traceable to any specific deaths. The way regulations kill people is much more indirect, e.g. by making housing more expensive so that people who can no longer afford it freeze to death on the streets, or die in car crashes because they have to live somewhere with a longer commute and the additional vehicle miles turned them into a statistic.
What that means is that there is a process for getting individual rules added in practice but no equivalent process for getting individual rules removed, so they accumulate over time.
> Only then can you create a better regulation that solves the problems that need to be solved.
A huge part of the issue is that some problems don't have cost-effective solutions. If you can prevent one death every ten years by raising housing costs by $1/month, notice that in a city with a million homes you've just spent $120M to save one life. If the value of a statistical life is something like $10M, well, we just overpaid by >1000%. And we may not know of any way to prevent that death for the less than $0.10/month cost increase it would take to make it cost effective. (You also need to verify that the rule is actually effective and not just speculate that it might work when it might not.)
But local zoning boards are hardly doing that kind of cost benefit analysis every time they add a new rule to their thick book of rules, so consequently huge swathes of the existing rules come out on the wrong side of it.
And since nothing ever really gets people excited about any given individual minor regulatory inefficiency until they stack up to be killing thousands of people on net, fixing that problem characteristically comes in the form of a mass culling of existing rules.
What will actually happen is that the children of the original owners rent out the place for extortionate amounts, and people will pay it, because they have nowhere else to go.
I’m sure there’s something driving all of this that has some basis in a real concern (similar to sprinkler systems and networked smoke detectors) but it seems like the complex and higher cost code-driven housing requirements is basically unbounded.
In fact, at least in France, where I live, it is a common annoyance in old houses: not enough outlet. Some people add them later on, and it is not always pretty... or safe. There is now rules mandating a minimum of outlets and light fixtures for new constructions, and it is a good thing.
Electric car or not, a high enough amperage outlet is good to have. And you have to think long term too. Electric cars are mostly luxury vehicles now, but things are evolving. And consider that the next owner may have an electric car if you ever want to sell your house.
Of course, you can install the outlet later, but generally, doing things later in a house is a huge pain in the ass. For example, you want to drill holes and make a mess before painting and furnishing.
These regulations actually make things cheaper, because you don't have to rebuild things later.
If my neighbor and I decide to sell our land to a developer so they can build a small apartment complex we should be allowed to. If the neighbors don't like the idea of having an apartment nearby they can see if they can get in on the deal too (probably turning a tidy profit on their lot) or they can suck it. It's my land I should be able to sell it to whomever I want or build whatever I want provided the structure doesn't pose a physical risk to my neighbor or their property.
(I'm for relaxing zoning laws but if you ever wanted to convince anyone this kind of argument is like the last approach you should use.)
They didn't quite price in the current zoning restrictions in that they were as changeable then as they are now. If I was particularly motivated and persuasive (or let's be honest good at grift) I could still convince my local city council to rezone my neighborhood to allow said sale. My formulation just doesn't force me to go through a middleman who, most likely, really doesn't care about my neighbor's concerns are just what their cut will be.
See, I thought not.
For instance, I want a 220 outlet in my garage so I can have a proper welder out there. I don't have an electric car (and even if someday I do own one, it won't fit in my current garage, due to various reasons - chief one being it's a conversion from a carport).
That all said - I am not sure I can get such an outlet. Money isn't the issue - but it could become the issue.
Because I would need an additional 220 circuit added to my existing circuits in my breaker box. But the panel is full. So I would probably need to either get a larger panel, or add on an auxiliary panel (likely the latter). But that also depends on my service from the main transformer.
I might not be able to get an extra circuit if my service isn't large enough to support such an extra circuit. The only way to change that would be to have a larger capacity transformer installed. That transformer is shared between my house and the neighbor's house. I don't even want to contemplate what it would cost to change that out (thinking somewhere in the 5 figure range - but where?).
So money isn't an issue - until you have an electrician come out and tell you that to run an additional line is going to require major changes to your current electrical service.
If the supply from the transformer isn't enough, then I don't see a regulation requiring a 220v in your garage affecting that. Whether it's new or an an upgrade later, you are going to have the same problem.
I have that problem. It will probably cost me $3000-$4000 to install the wall charger and then in 10 years they will probably rip it out and replace it with a whole set of wall chargers with central load balancing for a much lower cost because the cost of running a wire doesn't increase with the number of chargers. (Underground garage of an apartment complex if it wasn't obvious)
> This is just my favorite example of thousands of silly regulations that are put in place to keep the poor from becoming owners.
That one regulation is marginal compared to the effects of very restrictive zoning for density and transit, which is usually a tool most effectively implemented by highly exclusive locales.
Local governments (the ones in charge of zoning) adopt this because it's easier to adopt an existing standard than to try and write one's own. Any homeowner who's discovered wonky wiring done by a previous handyman will appreciate the existence of standards like this.
It's like how we have anti-vaxxers now that the memories of what the vaccines cure are so distant.
I disagree vehemently, and believe there are very few that are necessary, aside from enforcing the harm principle and a few basic functions (i.e. diplomacy & military). Rather, most people use laws to attempt to enforce upon society their visions of how it ought to look and operate (i.e. drug bans, zoning). My motivation for getting rid of _most_ regulations is ideological (I can think of no ethical justification for the state to compel, by force, a home-owner to install an outlet in his wall), and I was attempting to illustrate a practical aspect of why; I don't believe there's much "bathwater" to be thrown out that wouldn't have been provided through other means.
It’s not just government; private contracts often prohibit homeowners from serving more residents. In Zoning Rules! (https://www.amazon.com/Zoning-Rules-Economics-Land-Regulatio...), William Fischel describes how zoning can substitute for private CC&Rs, which are worse than zoning in that amendments often require supermajority of all property owners in the neighborhood instead of simple majority. Property rights that are too strong can be just as big of a problem as government regulations that are too restrictive.
Nobody is being forced to have a car charging outlet in the garage. From your link: “The rule specifies that one- and two-family dwellings have a service panel with capacity for a 40-amp circuit--enough for a 32-amp charging station--and conduit that can support wiring for an 80-amp circuit.
“The estimated cost of compliance is reportedly around $50, a fraction of the cost of adding the appropriate electrical service and wiring later on.”
And you know Teslas aren’t the only electric cars, and that more brands are on the way, right?
The price is in the land not the building.
Prewiring new homes for solar or electric cars probably costs $100 when building a house. Romex is that cheap and pulling the wires before the walls have drywall is trivial.
Doing it after the house is built is several orders of magnitude more expensive, and a great barrier to homeowners.
“We do have a lot of land-use regulations,” Festa said. “We still have a lot of stuff that looks and smells like zoning.”
To be more precise, Houston doesn’t exactly have official zoning. But it has what Festa calls “de facto zoning,” which closely resembles the real thing. “We’ve got a lot of regulations that in other cities would be in the zoning code,” Festa said. “When we use it here, we just don’t use the ‘z’ word.”
Where I'm from if someone said a property for sale had no power in the garage I'd be genuinely surprised and wonder what went wrong during the build. The same level of surprise as if there was no roof. Power in the garage is so useful. 240 volt power at a minimum as well. That level of expectation goes back several decades.
I don't own a Tesla or EV.
As long as existing homeowners are incentivized to drive up the price of their home, none of our housing supply woes are likely to change. And who can blame them? For most people their house is worth more than all their other possessions and investments combined.
Besides the incentive issue, the fact is that most increases in home value are not created by the homeowner. They're created by the city who provide streets, infrastructure, security, etc. They're created by small business owners who make a neighborhood attractive to live in. They're created by nearby employers who bring in wage earners who create demand. The new bathroom the homeowner puts in is a minor matter. Yet all of the value (minus property taxes where applicable) is captured by the private home owner.
I'm not sure it's that logical. If you own land and tomorrow it's upzoned to allow more density, the value increases immediately. Once the density creates enough foot traffic to support cafes and restaurants in a walkable space the value goes up again.
People are stuck on the idea that urban means blight so they need to zoning rules to keep out "the riff raff".
But, good luck campaigning for tax increases.
Another would be to encourage them to really commit to the value of their homes (instead of the price). If property taxes in California rose with the value of homes, many more people in San Francisco would have found it expedient to (a) sell to developers or (b) let out their homes or (c) remodel their homes as denser housing. Well...(c) could have happened, if it were not so difficult to build in San Francisco, but that goes back to helping people find better ways to invest, by not discouraging commerce.
Most investments work the way you describe: "...most increases in home value are not created by the homeowner." It's the same when you put money in a 401k or an index fund. Investing is putting capital out there and hoping it comes back. Doesn't make sense to advance this argument against home ownership as an investment.
Like, you have to plant a tree on your property if you improve it more than 25k (so if you rewire an old house, or decide to split your home into a separate unit to rent and create housing, like we're doing right now). This applies even if you have no yard. Trees are expensive, but yards are more expensive, especially in a city where space is at a premium. This is an insane requirement when there are people sleeping on your streets because there are not enough beds for them. That is only one example. The heavy hand of Uncle Ted is felt everywhere here, so HB 2001 is not enough.
Is this a US-specific term? What does it mean? (Only really found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_light)
"Light commercial" means things like small corner stores, barber shops, local restaurants, stuff like that. There are legit reasons to not want, say, a tannery right next to housing.
Restaurants and bakeries possibly as well, for smoke, oder, and (for restaurants and bars), late-evening / night noise and disruption.
>An as-of-right development complies with all applicable zoning regulations and does not require any discretionary action by the City Planning Commission or Board of Standards and Appeals. Most developments and enlargements in the city are as-of-right.
In my small-ish Michigan city alone, we have multiple examples of #1, #3, #4, #5, #7, and #8, all of which have been built this decade. The same is true in Minneapolis, and Portland, and Seattle, and Chicago, and others.
I've seen it in virtually every urban and suburban area of Northern California, it's practically the on-trend mode of infill development and has been for a couple decades. Either Northern California has the reverse relationship to the rest of the nation that it is reputed to have for development (which I doubt), or the assertion that this is prohibited in most US cities is false.
[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELaN6w_UUAAQbOC?format=jpg&name=...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
More seriously, my guess is that you enjoy those streets because there's so much more character to them. They are generally part of an older, more storied urban core, so the streets are more imbued with a "there"ness of the community.
Contrast this with the experience of walking down a recently-gentrified street.
That said: I'd really like to see a list of places which afford such environments.
This results in a large number of blind turns where you can't tell if anyone's coming around the corner unless there are mirrors available, which aren't always a guarantee.
I’ve always wondered why US seems to lack those and that neatly explains it.
An insane amount of US urban design is caused by the desire to give people free storage of private cars on public land everywhere all the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvUByM-fZk&t=346s
They've been building some of what they call row homes in the PNW, but these are still detached houses (no adjoining walls). It's better than it used to be, you can fit three houses on the space formerly reserved for one or two, but go the extra mile and connect 'em together.
I'm not entirely sure what the proper definition of a rowhouse is, but at least where I live (US Midwest) there are a lot of newer townhouses (multi-floor houses that share a wall on at least one side). There are also quite a few zero lot line houses (also called a duplex?), which are houses that share a single wall only.
Rowhouses/townhomes would be homes with two opposed zero-lot-line walls, exactly the width of the property, all in a row. If a whole-block-width building had partitioning walls at roughly the same interval, that could instead be a rowhouse-like condominium.
Sharing a wall does bring in some legal issues and definitions, which do not come into play when each structure is completely independent (but abutting other structures).
The ability to build without setbacks is a major factor in urban density. The costs of maintaining a city roughly scale with the linear amount of street frontage, so not wasting that length on empty setbacks is a great way to keep city services cheaper.
When the author says (of #1-7) "Said bans were put in place largely for racial reasons", sure, there was tons of redlining (racially biased zoning and bank loans) throughout Baltimore, but that doesn't have to do with why rowhomes aren't built more today. Rowhomes aren't built today because they don't scale up very well, and a fire can easily gut an entire block in one night. They also don't make developers as much money to build, and they're less attractive for a city that wants to keep units from becoming abandoned and unmaintained.
In both Philadelphia and Baltimore, new multi-unit condos and apartments have been going up for at least the past 5 years, in increasingly gentrifying neighborhoods. Whenever possible they are >3 floors and mixed-use, and when not possible, they are revamped and carved into condos. They all look ugly as hell, and they're all wildly more expensive. In the Fishtown and Northern Liberties neighborhoods of Philadelphia I have counted at least four gigantic excavated lots for new multi-story condo and apartment complexes, where before there had been rowhomes.
So in truth, density is going up, but home ownership is going down, while the cost of living is going up.
I don't know what he means by "banned". It seems that given the locality of such regulations and the vastness of the US, there are many exceptions to his claims.
Prior to that the situation was much like it was in most places in the US: current homeowners interested in raising home prices ran the politics, and everything listed was effectively banned.
No. It's an invention by the author, who provided zero support to their repeated claims of everything being commonly banned. Check out how they phrased each tweet, it's because they can't support what they said at all. When called out about the lying, for example re Texas (the second most populated state), the author promptly evades.
They are de facto banned though. ~99% of all land in urban and suburban areas has FAR requirements and setback requirements that make it impossible to build a new rowhouse.
> The US often doesn't allow inclusionary zoning like this unless development is denser.
4+1s are fairly common now. Most new development in chicago has this.
https://forgottenchicago.com/features/defining-the-four-plus...
Somewhat specific to Chicago as terminology, though the construction is more widespread.
Aren't there a few startups doing this and marketing them as communal living for young techies?
Other than the size of the units, it's a typical apartment building--office workers, teachers, retail workers, and even a dentist with a house in Marin who keeps a unit so he doesn't have to commute during weekdays. It was probably built in the 1940s or 1950s, before zoning laws stopped construction of such buildings.
Houses, or rather apartments with a shared kitchen and maybe shared bathrooms are still a thing in Japan.
There are "share houses" of which maybe the most famous/notorious is Sakura House that has many locations and caters to visitors.
There's also https://www.social-apartment.com which is targeted more at locals. I've thought about joining one for the social aspect. I think there would be a market in other countries, especially if there was an activity director making sure events happened. I didn't know it would be illegal in the USA.
There are also high end apartments that have an activity "roof top". A friend lives in one. The rooftop has a restaurant, live entertainment, indoor and outdoor areas, a pool, and rooms you can reserve for private parties.
Tangentially, lots of old USA movies show characters living in boarding houses, having a room to themselves but sharing meals. Seems nice in the movies. No idea how it was in real life.
Most of the zoning laws were not written recently, and they do carry a heavy burden of being both anti-poor and racist.
It's not accidental either, they were written that was as a neutral way of implementing racist policies.
Just like the war on drugs was a smokescreen for Nixon to attack the hippies and peace protestors.
> Said bans were put in place largely for racial reasons.
Housing, desperately needs permission-less innovation (completely regulation/zoning free). Maybe not everywhere. But, come on, CA has 163,707 square miles, can we just carve out a couple of those, even if it's just 100 or 200 or so (with enough economies of scale to attract serious VC money), in an area that has no NIMBYs, for build whatever you want and let builders and innovators innovate. We can take what's working and slowly apply it other areas.
At the current rate, the way things are, we're never going to see any progress in housing.
For the parts of the internet where users can affect each other, like the networking layer, RF protocols like LTE/bluetooth/wifi, there do tend to be heavy rules (RFCs) and sometimes regulation (FCC).
As a resident of Ann Arbor, MI, I am an opponent of all the high-rise developments. I've seen general prices rise, I've seen traffic start jamming, and I've seen days with much lower air quality.
I prefer to see cities managed like an interconnected ecosystem rather than a simply supply/demand chart for housing.
There are lots of sparsely populated areas in CA where developers can effectively build whatever they want.
But they're sparsely populated areas because they're undesirable for one or more reasons: too hot, or too dry, or too plain, or too far from the rest of civilization.
And no developer wants to be left holding the bag if the investment doesn't pan out... In fact, what happened in San Bernardino County and in Clark County (around Las Vegas) are exactly the types of failures that real estate developers have nightmares over.
Objectively wrong: every county in California requires building permits and has zoning.
Back in the early days, the US gov would provide enormous incentives for people to populate the western part of the US, going so far as to even give away free land.
I think your recommendation can help with this issue, but I wonder if CA is a good place for this. As I understand it, access to water is a limiting factor in CA.
I don't think it's clear that Uber is a better way than taxis. Cheaper for an individual ride? Yes. Better for the drivers? Maybe, but maybe not. Better for society as a whole? I lean toward no, even if the only factors we consider are congestion and pollution.
Zoning laws need to be addressed, and we need to do something about housing prices in major metropolitan areas. But at the same time, we don't need to allow the construction of meat packing plants in the middle of residential neighborhoods, and we don't want to promote construction of what will end up being slums in the name of affordable housing.
There is, like always, a balance to strike.
It is: for farmers, who use something like 80% (I forget the exact number).
It isn't for cities, and denser cities use less water because there are no big lawns and other waste.
Any attempts at actually regulating things in the U.S are watered down by "but free markets!" and "oh no big government!", and the shitty compromise results in giant loopholes for regulatory capture, and toothless govt agencies that can't regulate what they were created for.
You should use experts when coming up with regulations. But you need to use unbiased experts. Anything that Facebook suggests will of course amount to nothing more than a moat for their existing business.
Even though a large fraction of the city is abandoned, getting the city government to approve things like experimental urban farm plots and green spaces made up of combined vacant lots is extremely difficult... because deep down the city doesn't want to give up the theoretical tax revenue they might be able to get if new houses were built there and the owners started paying.
People don't like change much.
IMHO you can't just say "regulation is good" or "regulation is bad." Intent and consequences both matter.
If you want stasis, California has never been that place. LA has had double digit growth per decade for most of its history, sometimes triple digit.
Good. If you want these things, you live rurally. Everything has trade-offs.
None of them are popular to build now, however, where they are allowed.
I believe the template for setbacks and height limits came from New York City, wherein a new 40-story building cast a good deal of the surrounding neighborhood into permanent shadow.
As the "Ancient Lights" doctrine of English property law had been repudiated in America, and the Prescription Act 1832 obviously came after independence, the neighborhood incumbents had no real legal grounds for complaint. This disturbed enough people that New York passed its first architectural restriction laws.
Land-use restrictions basically came out of racists trying to legislate segregation. Those nuisance laws combined with architecture laws to birth modern zoning. Once that camel's nose entered the tent, the rest of the camel came right in. Every problem that has a nexus with private land use had an attempted zoning solution attempted somewhere. So things like parking-space allotments and environmental impact assessments were added. The NIMBYs could halt developments they didn't like by dealing the death of a thousand permits and public hearings through the zoning laws.
Now I live in new construction which is timber framed, cheap drywall, and cheaper california insulation, and I can tell what specific video game my neighbor is playing along with his bowel schedule. Once this lease is up I'm running for the oldest heaviest looking building I can find.
Prices are well over $1million. These developments are quite common around the south bay. There are two more similar developments within a couple of blocks of this one, and I used to live in yet another over in Milpitas.
Enormous chunks of land surrounding the three airports have actual zoning.
The rest has de facto zoning. It just isn't called zoning. This is why Houston looks pretty much like any other city with zoning.
A lot of what can and can't be built is covered by deed restrictions, which are enforced by the city. (i.e., a developer may put a restriction in the deed stating that only residences can be built, and no commercial activities.)
In addition, there are gazillions of 'land-use' ordinances that control the height of buildings, lot size, parking, etc.
While it would be kinda neat -- as an experiment -- to see how a city would develop without zoning, Houston sure as heck isn't that example.
https://kinder.rice.edu/2015/09/08/forget-what-youve-heard-h...
[edited to supply link]
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/real-estate/articl...
There was a more recent dispute in the Heights where a the local residents secured an ordinance to force single family homes in an area under proposed development:
https://theleadernews.com/owner-nearby-residents-remain-at-o...
The point being to re-enforce the point, the lack of zoning in Houston is a myth. Deed restrictions, ordinances, and nuisance laws create a patchwork of regulations that essentially create an ineffective, confusing, and legally complicated zoning system.
Kowloon Walled City would probably be one possible outcome...
This paper has a really good summary of the history here: https://www.dartmouth.edu/~wfischel/Papers/02-03.pdf
> While it would be kinda neat -- as an experiment -- to see how a city would develop without zoning, Houston sure as heck isn't that example.
If you're counting covenants as "zoning", I'm not really sure that such a thing is possible without a major change in property right law (except for the parking and height restrictions, which obviously have a big influence on structures everywhere and should go away IMO).
Take a look at the core neighborhoods of pretty much any major city on the east coast. They were built out pretty extensively before zoning existed.
I still struggle to see what was so bad about it. The few things that might have been bad would probably be better addressed with nuisance law instead of the endlessly prescriptive micromanagement that zoning brings.
It seems to me that Houston is a great example of that experiment: in the absence of a formal centralized zoning system, the vacuum of limiting who can build structure x in location y is filled by informal and labyrinthine arrangements.
Also it's illegal to build chicken coops in many cities. Not sure how common that one is, though
Some are really just there to ensure that developers don't cheap out on the stuff in the walls in order to cut costs. But I don't think people are really complaining about requirements for the species of wood required for framing or the number of electrical outlets per square foot.
Is this really true for all of them? I see in the thread that
> Said bans were put in place largely for racial reasons.
Some of the ones who are not NIMBYism or the above I can absolutely see how they could be motivated in an effort to slow down/hinder certain socioeconomic dynamics.
> #2 Bunkhouses/Roominghouses/SROs, which have multiple people sharing a room, or individuals getting small rooms, with shared kitchen and bathroom spaces, for short to medium term living.
In a poor environment and/or when housing is scarce, these easily become hosts for abusive or exploitative relationships between landlord and tenants or shitty housing.
> #1 Bungalow Courts. Single family homes with shared walls and a communal courtyard. And no car parking requirement.
Aka gated societies
EDIT: Downvoters, why? Care to reply? Is this question ignorant or irrelevant to the conversation? I'm not defending any of these or claiming that they actually have the desired effect.
#1 -- gated communities are way bigger than a bungalow court and are much easier to isolate from the community around them. I think this correlation is a misapprehension. Here's a highly renovated example: https://seattle.curbed.com/2018/4/4/17200290/pine-street-cot...
See how it faces the street like any other house, but there's a little private shared area in back? It's not self-contained like a gated community can be.
#2 -- yep, there's the potential for abusive relationships. There is no rental model that works without strong protections for tenants and, yes, landlords. So that problem isn't inherent to rooming houses. However, the power relationship is usually tilted towards the party with more money and that's likely to be accentuated in this type of housing. You gotta be careful.