I'm not an expert, but I lean towards relaxing zoning laws but not getting rid of them completely. Look to Houston to see what happens when there are no zoning laws at all.
Would just like to correct a common misconception:
Houston technically has no zoning laws, but it has a combination of other laws that end up behaving similarly to exactly how zoning laws work. Giving you a link to City Beautiful which works as a great primer.
He's referring to the hundreds of houses that were knowingly built in a floodplain, because Houston does not have the kind of zoning that would have prevented that. Those houses are at high risk of flooding any time there is a storm, and many of them did flood during last year's storms.
It's easy to have cheap housing when you ignore common sense and just build wherever. (Also, part of the expense for LA and SF is that we have earthquakes, and our buildings have to be built to withstand earthquakes. For example: a 5.4 earthquake in 2011 caused over $300 million in damage on the East Coast. A series of CA earthquakes stronger than that in 2019, including 6.4 and 7.1 quakes, only caused a few thousand in damage near the epicenter. A 5.1 earthquake earlier this year in SoCal caused so little damage that most people slept through it and only know it happened because the news reported it. Note that each "magnitude" is about 30x difference in strength, so the 6.4 quake was 30x stronger than the 5.4 quake, and the 7.1 quake was nearly 900x stronger.)
I'm not sure what codes are in Texas, but I can tell you in MN the housing codes are designed nationally to cover CA earthquakes and Florida Hurricanes even though both are not factors. Of course those codes also cover insulation which the other two states don't really need as much of..
Housing codes are adopted at the municipal or state level. There is no mandatory "national" building code in the U.S., though there is a "model" building code at the national level upon which the state and local building codes are based. (https://localhousingsolutions.org/housing-policy-library/hou...)
You can't compare prices across geographic areas like that. For instance, property taxes are way higher in Houston. Assuming everything else was equal, the price of real estate in Houston would be less simply because it has higher carrying costs. That's just one of many possible differences unrelated to zoning.
There are no income taxes in Houston though, so while the property tax load is higher, the tax part of cost of living is not very different. (depending on what state you compare to)
With a moderate density like 40du/acre, that amounts to about $130,000 in land cost per unit, which is not so bad!
even at our grossly inflated land costs, simply allowing density throughout the Bay Area would enable much more housing affordability, allow more transit, and reduce our emissions and enhance our social contact. But a side benefit of broad legalization of density would be that those land costs would drop dramatically too, as there would be a much greater supply.
- Is it a desirable location, and the zoning laws cause the prices to skyrocket because not all the people that want to live there can
- Is it desirable because the zoning laws make sure it's a certain type of environment, and the desirability is what causes the price to increase
- Is it a combination of the two.
I think any reasonable person would say it's a combination of the two. And removing the zoning laws would both make it less desirable _and_ lower the price of housing. It would not leave it just as desirable, but with more people living there.
No doubt the $5.2MM anticipated the zoning changes. No one would be stupid enough to sell property based on the law today if you knew it was going to change tomorrow.
I mean, houses abutting landfills are even cheaper, but no one would consider "put landfills everywhere" a good strategy.
Houston has had a stable population (per square mile) over the past decade and has a median income of ~$50,000.
Sacramento has had the population per square mile increase by ~15% in the past decade and has a median income of ~$71,000.
San Francisco has had the population per square mile increase by ~9% in the past decade and has a median income of ~$126,000.
California has a population density of 249.1 people per sq mile compared to 103.2 people per sq mile in Texas. Seems an obviously more important factor here.
Both states have a lot of rural areas that should not be counted when considering density. CSA and MSA for a city are the easiest to look up that can be compared. Even then though things are misleading. (the MSA for my city is mostly large farms so overall our density is very low, but if you only take the parts that look like a city is much higher)
In Houston, we have what is effectively zoning. It's just that we do it at the neighborhood level. You want to go into the museum district or third ward and develop x, or y, or z? No problem. So long as the neighbors agree with you.
Hint: Once they gentrify to the point of being called "The Museum District", they will definitely not be agreeing with you.
I saw someone above throw out a figure of 3 or 4 hundred k as a price point and I had to chuckle. If all you want to do is build a low-rise for workforce housing? Yeah, this neighborhood wouldn't care if you had the money or not. Piss off peasant. The people in the Museum District no longer wish to reside in proximity with your kind. Some neighborhood get togethers you almost get the impression that people would like to put gates to the city at all the 610 exits. Keep the riff raff out. And don't even get me started about what I hear from friends behind the gates down Sunset.
In Houston, the zoning is way worse than in other cities. Because people can literally stop anyone they want. No city council permission necessary.
What I've noticed too - when I've visited a couple of times - in addition once you move out of the city center, in the suburbs surrounding Houston, residential developments with strict HOAs are pretty much the de facto standard for residential developments.
Houston has lots of zoning laws in the way of parking minimums. These parking spot requirements apply to new buildings and make it very difficult to build dense housing. It’s a big reason why Houston has so much sprawl.
You’re going to need to do more than just toss off a scaremongering phrase like “look to Houston” with no elaboration, particularly when the replies are already explaining that its approach to zoning has been rewarded with much more tractable prices. What, specifically, is wrong with Houston, and is it worse than the affordability disaster that is most of California?
Technically not most of California, since population is focused into a few urban areas and otherwise you have vast amounts of nothing if you actually see the state.
Houston is a huge urban/semi-urban sprawl, the kind that used to be popular in LA a few decades ago. Dallas is similar, Austin gets that way outside of its downtown, San Antonio does also but at least has a much more interesting urban core. It always seemed you get what you pay for in Houston, there isn’t anything wrong with that, but many people don’t want it.
What's wrong with Houston? You have pretty much whatever you want there. You can go get a single family house, live in a gated community, rent a shack on the bayou, go be a hipster in montrose, live in a high-rise downtown... Pretty good as far as I'm concerned.
There's a lot of things that are great about Houston (affordability, food, etc) but the sprawl is entirely unsustainable by any measure. From 1992-2010, Harris county lost 30% of its wetlands [1]. Not to mention the expense of owning/maintaining a car and the associated emissions.
The outer loop of 99/Grand Parkway nearly encompasses D.C. and Baltimore [2]. Commuting from 99-adjacent (e.g. Sugar Land, Cypress, and the Woodlands) to downtown is common enough. I've seen Katy to Baytown for months while working on (oil & gas) projects. Same goes for Midtown/downtown to Baytown to work in the refineries. Trying to serve an area of that size with any sort of transit is not easy, regardless of density.
As Houston continues to grow, it's going to continually max out arterial road capacity. Even Katy Freeway backs up every day despite being 20+ lanes at its widest [3]. All of those cars have to go somewhere. And you're devoting so much valuable real estate to dozens of lanes for a few hundred thousand commuters. Not even the reverse commute will save you [4].
I have another post that mentions my optimism about Houston suburbs eventually providing more transit and density [5]. It's silly that your choices of hosing are single family or stranded apartment buildings adjacent to the highway [6]. The inability to convert some number of homes into 2 or 3 apartment buildings on the same lot like this [7] seems less disruptive than 5+ unit apartments.
Fundamentally, both are much easier than providing increasingly-distant suburbs with power, water, and highways. Hopefully Houston can start embracing this before prices become as ridiculous as other regions.
Houston technically has no zoning laws, but it has a combination of other laws that end up behaving similarly to exactly how zoning laws work. Giving you a link to City Beautiful which works as a great primer.
https://youtu.be/TaU1UH_3B5k