[Dig1t]

I personally tried to build more housing, I tried to buy 5 acres and build 5 homes on them. 5 acres could have easily held 5 large homes with big yards.

The city zoning board denied me, saying that that 5-acre plot had been zoned for ONE house and an ADU of no larger than 300 sqft.

That was when I realized why housing is so expensive.

[boplicity]

In this case, it may not have just been that 5 acres was enough "room" for five houses. It gets into questions of building infrastructure for those houses -- sewers, water rights, etc. One development of 5 houses might not move the needle on that, but it then opens the door to neighbors doing the same thing, which could very much require major investment in infrastructure for the area.

[AnthonyMouse]

> One development of 5 houses might not move the needle on that, but it then opens the door to neighbors doing the same thing, which could very much require major investment in infrastructure for the area.

But then there is a corresponding increase in property tax revenues to pay for it, so this should require no approval and just be something that happens. The city pays for the new infrastructure from the taxes paid by the new people using it.

[8note]

> But then there is a corresponding increase in property tax revenues to pay for it, so this should require no approval and just be something that happens. The city pays for the new infrastructure from the taxes paid by the new people using it.

This is a conjecture that as far as I know does not match what actually happens, which is that the new infrastructure is paid by debt, and the 4 new taxpayers will not have paid off the debt before the infrastructure needs replacement, paid for by more debt.

If it was 600 new units rather than 4, maybe it works out that the corresponding taxes pay for the infrastructure, but property taxes just aren't high enough, and the people who live in these boondoggle houses aren't wealthy enough to pay the taxes for the infrastructure their houses need

[AnthonyMouse]

> This is a conjecture that as far as I know does not match what actually happens, which is that the new infrastructure is paid by debt, and the 4 new taxpayers will not have paid off the debt before the infrastructure needs replacement, paid for by more debt.

If four taxpayers aren't paying the amount of taxes required to fund the infrastructure needed by four taxpayers then your city is already bankrupt and zoning and planning is irrelevant.

> If it was 600 new units rather than 4

If it was literally only 4 units then you shouldn't need any new infrastructure anyway. Nothing should be operating with margins that thin to begin with.

If it's 4 units here, 4 units there then it adds up to hundreds which is the thing you admit isn't a problem.

[_DeadFred_]

So the city has to build a new $50 million dollar sewage treatment plant in the hopes of getting that paid back over 50 years of property taxes, and gets no say in the matter or the cities budget? Sewage treatment plants have finite capacity, can't be built on a 'serves 20 units' incremental scale, and oftentimes new plants have much stricter requirements than grandfathered in one. Not everywhere is the bay area where they can scale up by just piping it out a few miles into the ocean and call it good.

[toast0]

> Not everywhere is the bay area where they can scale up by just piping it out a few miles into the ocean and call it good.

At least in the San Jose area, the sewage treatment was largely built 50 years ago, when it was doing a lot of agriculture, and flows are way lower with people than they were with food processing and other industrial processing. The new plant that's in progress needs and has way less capacity, even though the standards are much much much tighter.

At the one house per acre level though, you can likely manage with septic, which is incremental sewage treatment capacity, and not a huge municipal undertaking (there is record keeping and regulation and what not, so it's not nothing)

[AnthonyMouse]

> So the city has to build a new $50 million dollar sewage treatment plant in the hopes of getting that paid back over 50 years of property taxes, and gets no say in the matter or the cities budget?

Precisely.

> Sewage treatment plants have finite capacity, can't be built on a 'serves 20 units' incremental scale

Nor would they need to be. If your sewage treatment plant has a capacity for 100,000 units and you have 99,981 existing units, you already need a new sewage treatment plant regardless of where you put the new units, unless your plan is to never approve any new construction anywhere in the city, which is manifestly unreasonable.

> and oftentimes new plants have much stricter requirements than grandfathered in one.

And whose doing is that?

[renewiltord]

How were any houses built at all originally? Surely there were no sewers once upon a time.

[boplicity]

People used to live next to cemeteries and drink well water.

Yes, they also got very sick from doing this.

How were any houses originally built?

Well, sometimes they were just built.

It's a good thing we've learned a few things since then. Not that city planning is perfect. Far from it. But it certainly does serve a purpose.

[rootusrootus]

Used to be that an acre of land generally had enough space for a proper septic tank and drain field. But I think in some places it is a little higher now. Depends a lot on local geography of course.

[maxsilver]

It depends on the area. In Michigan, for example, the area here is mostly swampland, houses with no infrastructure have to build their own. Usually that means running new power lines, and figuring out well water and septic. Septic is trickier than it seems, you need to have enough space for a leech field large enough to drain properly, it needs to flow properly (away from your home, away from your own well) and soil absorption has to be high enough (and the water line low enough) to handle it all. Having a lot of land isn't enough on it's own, it has to have enough natural drainage to be able to handle itself and anything you need to seep into it.

For example, you might have an acre of land, but if too much of the soil underneath is clay, or if the water table is too high, the wastewater might not drain fast enough, so it sits and stagnates or mixes with freshwater, despite having "lots of land". You generally need a surveyor to produce and sign off on a Topographical Survey to assess that.

So yeah, "there were no sewers once upon a time", sure. But if you try to build suburban-like densities out here without a solid plan signed off, you are likely to end up piping your own sewage right into your own water taps.

https://www.miottawa.org/Health/OCHD/pdf/AboutSewage.pdf

[renewiltord]

It seems like that's the method to build his 5 houses then, rather than denying it. It seems unlikely that the present number of houses is the precise optimal number.

[WaxProlix]

I've looked at something similar. The path is to split the plot first via your county (or whatever) and then build.

[Dig1t]

Correct, but the zoning board people outright told me they would deny the request to split the lot because it had already been zoned as “single family”.

[WaxProlix]

Strange, and frustrating sounding - 1a each is plenty to leave the resulting plots as conformant single family housing.

[toast0]

Where I'm at, our least dense zone is 1 unit per 2.5 acres. If the lot was almost, but not quite 5 acres, it couldn't be split without a variance.

In theory, the state requires the city to allow for 2x population growth, and the zoning process directs where the growth should happen. In practice, the city pushes back so hard on everything, that the growth is going to happen wherever whoever has patience and money to spend on fighting the council wants to build. Everyone else is going to be frustrated by the long process of back and forth on pulling permits over many years and many dollars that actually the city won't let you do whatever you wanted to do anyway.

[maxsilver]

Where are you? Generally you can petition for re-zoning, as long as your lot is urban enough to have proper power/water/sewer infrastructure, and meets the hypothetically split requirements. (They allow it maybe ~90% of the time here in Michigan)

[cdchn]

Yeah usually they want you to build one house on one plot. Not build a compound. If you want to build 5 houses, you subdivide.

[mikestew]

I'm not a real estate developer, and even I assumed OP was subdividing (and mentions that in another comment). Why would you assume otherwise? I also assumed that the zoning authority said, "nope, minimum 5 acre lot size", which is common. There is, after all, the possibility that someone actually knows what they're doing when they go before the zoning board.

[cdchn]

Where he says "that 5-acre plot had been zoned for ONE house"