Perhaps true, but what right do the people who don’t live in his neighborhood but want to have the right to immiserate the people who already live there by building high density blocks?
Why do you not recommend those people to look for acreage in remote areas?
This is an opinion which is not universally agreed with.
> are you seriously asking why people may want to live someplace for reasons other than it being an undistinguished suburb? School, weather, jobs, community?
No. If you look at the comment you are replying to, you’ll see that the question I asked was:
> what right do the people who don’t live in his neighborhood but want to have the right to immiserate the people who already live there by building high density blocks?
We should start by tearing this building [0] down, otherwise everyone surrounding that property will live in misery.
That's what money is for. The issue is that local landowners use regulatory capture to penalize newcomers as much as possible
Of course not. I'm not saying I have any kind of right to keep my neighborhood from changing, only that my desire to keep it from changing is not purely financial. (In fact, in my case, it is the exact opposite!)
This is not as divorced from property values as you believe. The features of suburbs you like such as low-crime (usually coded as "quiet"), amenities, good schools, access to jobs through a quick commute etc. are exactly what give them their high value. However, the single family home subdivision suburban form cannot scale provisioning these amenities to many people. That is exactly why suburbs are exclusionary whereas cities need not be.
Your suburb isn't going to have decreasing property values without disinvestment, at which point it won't be a nice place to live. The detached houses probably have little to do with what you like about your community; there are plenty of places in Central California with detaches homes, high crime, bad schools, etc.
In my case, quiet is not code for low-crime. I meant it literally. I lived for a long time (20+ years) in loud neighborhoods with lots of traffic noise and screaming kids (literally -- one place I lived was next to a house that was used as a day-care center) and mockingbirds which kept me up at night because our house had no A/C so we had to keep the windows open at night. My mantra, literally for decades, mumbled through the mental fog of chronic sleep deprivation, was "I want to live someplace quiet".
> Your suburb isn't going to have decreasing property values without disinvestment, at which point it won't be a nice place to live.
That is far from clear. I don't live in a cookie-cutter-house suburb. I live in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains in what used to be (in the late 1800s) a vacation destination for San Franciscans. If all of Silicon Valley were depopulated I think my neighborhood would still be a perfectly fine place to live.
Humboldt Country is a beautiful and high poverty part of the state with poor municipal services. I have no reason to believe the Santa Cruz wouldn't be the same without expensive urban infrastructure, not to mention the money we do and need to continue spending to minimize the risk of fire to your property.
Like I said, my neighborhood began as a vacation destination for rich San Franciscans in the late 1800s. It has been affluent for over 100 years, long before Silicon Valley was a thing, in fact, before electricity was a thing. There are rich urban areas and there are poor urban areas, and there are rich rural areas and there are poor rural areas. There is absolutely no correlation in general between housing density and quality of life. There is, however, a strong and obvious correlation between per-capita wealth and quality of life. But housing inflation does absolutely nothing to promote that.
No, the former will happen when fewer people, for whatever reason, want to buy real estate here. This was a nice place to live even (perhaps especially) back when the main industry in the surrounding area was orange farming.
You’re trying to express your preferences for lower home values with an all else equal argument which is not very meaningful in a dynamic system. The realistic alternatives where fewer people want to settle in the Bay Area all involve hypotheticals where it is simply a less attractive place to live in ways that likely impact you as well.
In between the wilderness and Hoboken NJ there is a broad range of possibilities. Somewhere in between those two extremes is a nice middle-ground where things are not too sparse and not too crowded. The San Francisco peninsula has been close to that happy medium for a long time, so I'm pretty sure it could stand to lose a few people and still stay in the desirable range.
Yes, density has all kinds of societal benefits. The problem is, not everyone wants to live that way.
I've never understood why mountain people think that those little towns would be able to fund their own infrastructure without the support of Californias actual economy.
It's not cheap maintaining roads up every canyon and electrifying all corners of the redwoods. Maybe it's because you all have leaching septic tanks that destroy the San Lorenzo that you think you're truly fronteirsman?
I wouldn't object to an oil refinery either if they can guarantee they won't suddenly explode and kill me while I sleep.
The fact remains that we all have to be good neighbors to each other, and that cuts both ways.
Short of arguing from a purely socialist or communist approach, saying the current owner's preferences matter less than the hypothetical would-be future occupants of the area is the non-sensical part, I think.
The other side is all future residents who might want to live in a quadplex where a SFH exists today. Those people usually pay a large percent of their income in rent and "commute til they qualify."
How are both sides understandable? My claim is simply that a private individual should be able to buy a lot of land in almost any American city and build a quadplex on it. This was legal until very recently in our history. How will this be the end of the community as we know it?
Both sides are understandable to me because those hypothetical future residents have the entire rest of the country to choose from. I don't know why the current residents shouldn't be able to expect to make the rules they want. Yes, it's what they want versus what other people want... that's unavoidable! It's the other side of the "if you want to continue living in a less dense area, go move somewhere more rural (until we pick it for densification too)" coin.
Some folks think the tiebreaker here is that cities are more sustainable, but that doesn't avoid the problem that if you want to move more people into denser housing, some people aren't going to be able to get what they want.
I find both sides understandable because I don't expect anyone to be happy when people more powerful than them tell them they can't have what they want.
Can you really not understand why someone would be unhappy with someone else coming in and saying "I have the right to change your life?" Why "well you better be rich enough to own the land for the entire neighborhood" is a hollow response?
> those hypothetical future residents have the entire rest of the country to choose from
This is kind of a silly claim because it suggests that the country is an undifferentiated landmass and there are no relative benefits of a particular geographic location. There are clearly relative advantages to living in a place, so telling people they can choose anyplace else is not really a choice!
> I don't know why the current residents shouldn't be able to expect to make the rules they want.
This is only barely a coherent argument at the international levels ("Middle Eastern refugees shouldn't be able to decide where to settle in Europe!"). When you live within a country with freedom of movement, this is a very difficult argument to make. Should I only be allowed to vote in places where I am a property owner?
For what it's worth, there are plenty of developing legal arguments _against_ local zoning, and California is on track to solve its housing issues by having the state take control of zoning away from cities.
I'm not aware of this. I thought it was a huge expense to people who wanted to move to an area at any price, and the absence of a huge windfall to people who want to build massive apartment buildings in neighborhoods where the vast majority of the residents don't want them.
It’s not their responsibility - not anyone’s! - to take a shot in the nuts so someone else can be happy, despite any guilt tripping.
In addition, it is not a fair characterization to describe apartment buildings as "a shot in the nuts."
And Phoenix or Las Vegas aren’t even in the same states or legal jurisdictions. If you told them San Francisco was going to be able to tell them what to build or how, you’d just get laughed at.
If you think building a high density apartment complex in the middle of a single family zoned subdivision against the residents wishes wouldn’t be taken as a ‘shot to the nuts’ of someone who had bought and lived there for years, you probably don’t know too many people who have?
Fair or not, you can’t walk in and dictate to someone in that situation how they are going to take it, or what is reasonable and expect anything but well deserved anger.
Additionally, Nevada and Arizona share a jurisdiction with California: the United States of America. The state is already taking land use out of city hands through SB35 et al., and this will only become more acute as each city loses credibility as a good faith actor. The federal government also dictates what can be built through mortgage policy. The subdivision itself was a policy invention to make it easy to guarantee federal mortgages.
2. Most residents do not give a crap about apartment buildings. Surveys prove this over and over. SB50, an upzoning bill, polled quite well with the general population. The ones who do will quickly get over themselves when it becomes clear that apartments aren’t a “shot to the nuts.” Honestly, this sentiment is extremely weird and endemic to America; most countries with great standards of living manage to live in varied urban topologies just fine.
SB50 never passed, Modesto can ‘be pissed’ (why exactly?) at the higher property values and income all their residents who work in SF are benefiting from - they don’t seem to be trying to change that equation much! Sure someone is complaining about it, but when is THAT not the case about... everything?
I’m also curious what standing or stake they could claim (you assert they have one) - are they all paying property taxes in SF, or City residents who aren’t being allowed to vote because they commute to their second homes in Modesto? Or are they just driving in and out for jobs, and have as much claim to authority on how the city should run it’s business as a UPS driver dropping off a package?
I’m also curious what legal standing Phoenix or SF could claim for a suit against each other for.... people moving of their own free will between those cities for economic reasons? That would be quite an interesting lawsuit at the federal level for sure! Who would end up paying whom anyway? The city that was too expensive for otherwise qualified labor; so they moved to somewhere cheaper and are now contributing, tax paying, members of society there? Or the evil ‘good citizen’ stealing city luring productive (but maybe not 7 figure earning) folks away with bribes like affordable housing?
These changes take years to make their real impact felt, and the crisis is half a century in the making. The future is _more_ state pre-emption of zoning, not less.
The funny thing is: the ignorance of local voters to the larger systems at play lead to lots of recent decisions that will soon backfire. For example, San Mateo recently re-affirmed city-wide height limits which more or less guarantee that their RHNA requirements will require their planning department end single family zoning in large parts of the city; there's no place for them to shove apartment towers!
2. SB50 failed due to conservative state reps from SoCal, in particular LA. It had plenty of support with reps in NorCal, and in any case its mere existence disproves your point that there is no basis for states short-circuiting local control.
3. I'm not going to explain how delegation works to you in detail, since I assume you are intelligent enough to get it. There are many powers that are delegated to city governments which can be taken away if cities prove themselves incompetent at administering it. City departments go under conservatorship of the state all the time.
4. I'm not sure why you assume the legal remedy is a lawsuit. Changes to how federal mortgages are backed; removal of subsidy on home insurance which makes sprawl math workout (albeit in the short term); a shift away from federally mandated highway spending; changes to how housing assistance programs are managed and qualified for at the federal level could all manifest as land use changes in cities without explicitly being about zoning. There are probably individual bureaucrats at the DOT or FHWA who are deciding which expansions of 101 or 880 are worthwhile to fund and which aren't. Federal law could easily let them prioritize funding for BART instead.
In that case, standing was any landowner holding land zoned single family. A Phoenix landowner of a SFH subdivision could screw it for the whole country.
Not narrowly zoning, but the viability of single family zoning also depends on property tax stabilization regimes, which themselves can be challenged under the equal protection clause.
Near as I can tell, your counter-argument seems to be 'but there is stuff that could change it!' which.... could be?
Your arguments don't really seem cohesive or coherent enough to me to indicate how realistic or likely any of those would materially impact our current situation more than say the generation currently benefitting the most from this situation (boomers) slowly dying out. For instance the Phoenix vs SF argument seemed to go from a 'Phoenix has the right to demand SF change what it's doing' (not trying to strawman, that's what I read) to 'sfh rezoning is entirely possible!' and 'we can change conforming mortgage rules!' - which hey maybe - but why should they, and why should anyone with the power to do it care right now?
> if enough others agree that is what they want, why shouldn’t they be able to? That’s literally what democracy is!
(For starters, that is not how American democracy works. There are plenty of policies that are not allowable and should not be allowable merely because they have popular support. I'm sure you can name a few.)
I pointed out that "enough" people only want SFZ if you control who the relevant population is. In aggregate, Californians are perfectly happy with ending SFZ, and policies to do so like SB50 poll quite well. You are simultaneously claiming: if a cul de sac by popular vote prefers SFZ, it should be able to impose it on any objecting landowner in the cal de sac, but if the residents of California by popular vote prefer that San Francisco zone for more housing, they shouldn't. These are inconsistent at face unless you specify and defend a distinction between immediate and regional neighbors, which you haven't.
Next, I pointed out that the residents of California are already dictating what gets built in the SFBA. I gave you an example of a law supported by the state legislative representatives from Modesto that forced Cupertino to increase its housing stock by nearly 10% with a single project, over the long-standing objections of Cupertino city council members and voters (the Vallco project went to the city ballot in 2018 and was voted down). Your response to this was that a 10% increase in Cupertino's housing stock does not solve a 50 year shortage so it's not a meaningful example of state policy dictating what is built locally. Not only is this irrelevant (your argument is invalidated by an existence proof, which I provided), but wrong: I gave you a reference for how state policy on land use will be increasingly more important than local policy in coming years.
You also asked why it's fair for "all the citizens of California (or the USA)" to have a stake in local land use. I pointed out that: (i) they interact with the local economy (ii) they have a stake in the consequences of those policies (iii) they may even _want to_ live locally but cannot because they are priced out (iv) SFZ is justified legally in Euclid by its ability to mitigate a small set of very specific issues, none of which include "neighborhood preference." These are all separately great arguments for why they should. You have not engaged with any.
I went ahead and made a stronger claim that land use is a national matter. You asked how that's the case. I pointed out that suburban subdivisions are Federal policy, and anyone who can influence how Fannie and Freddie guarantee loans implicitly dictates what type of home is built locally. You responded by saying that is a future hypothetical even though this policy is the status quo.
Given all that, I think it's reasonable to conclude that you're the one who has strayed from defending the your original point (which was, roughly, "the immediate neighbors of a property should have the exclusive right to decide what can be built on it - that's democracy!").
Wanting to live in a place that is already occupied does not give the right to force people there to rebuild their houses into high density places. There is a lot of free land in that country where people can build skyscrapers with millions of cheap, small living pods inside.