This take is actively destructive. We need to let people CHOOSE to live WHERE they want to live - and let people who buy land CHOOSE to build housing for demand they perceive. That's it. That's the problem and the solution. It should be unconstitutional to limit housing production arbitrarily.
There's a great book called "City of Darkness" about it - a lot of what we believe about it was a campaign funded by the Hong Kong government to turn public opinion about it negative because they wanted the land back from China.
Most of the reason there were any problems there at all was that there was no legal jurisdiction over it, there are still buildings in Hong Kong that have nearly that density with none of the legal issues.
There was no zoning, no fire safety inspections, no fire safety, haphazard infrastructure, lack of water to drink and clean with, etc…it was basically an unregulated slum (which you can still find in many countries).
Hong Kong has density sure. But no one would call it cheap density.
Should people also be allowed to move into neighborhoods that are zoned as suburban (not so much in SF as in nearby areas), and have them remain that way?
I get the libertarian impulse to let people do what they want with their property, but it seems like part of that freedom should be the right to move into areas where there are zoning restrictions.
Zoning should always have been unconstitutional, and the court case enabling it proved that.
The Supreme Court upheld it a hundred years ago, in 1926, after batting down previous efforts by the same people to explicitly ban black people from neighborhoods. They realized that since black families couldn't afford houses by themselves (they needed to buy houses with two or three families together), they could get around it with single family zoning. Ever wondered why it isn't called "house" zoning? Because it was segregation.
The appellate court in the case threw out zoning, because it was so obvious that it was about race. The Supreme Court overturned it by ignoring the entire appellate court decision and defining a building itself (apartments) as a nuisance, instead of making the petitioners regulate actual behaviors. Because the behaviors weren't the problem, it was the black people they didn't want.
Sorry - this riles me up. :)
You should absolutely not be able to have a say over how much housing your neighbor builds. Sure, if they make noise, or bad smells, or bright lights, THAT you should be able to regulate. But the outcomes of having a say over how much housing your neighbor can build is the strongest root of a whole host of issues - from CO2 to obesity to high commute times and traffic to municipal budget bloat. It causes sprawl. Increasingly, parts of the left and right are starting to realize we need to overturn it.
What part of the Constitution is violated by zoning laws?
I have heard of laws that prevent the construction of structures that shade other properties (skyscrapers) or block views of the ocean. If those are apparently legal, why not a law that says you can't build a big apartment complex that would greatly increase traffic, for example?
Growth has to happen in the long run. We have the same zoning as we did before the people looking for housing were born.
We can have incremental changes, or we can have sudden change. It's going to happen predictably or with a ton of political conflict. The better solution is always to allow a self-reinforcing pressure release on housing. I've long said that everyone should be allow, by right, to expand their housing by 2x the median building unit within a half mile radius, by units, sqft, and height.
Suburban neighborhoods then slowly turn into duplexes over one generation, then row houses over another, then finally start building up after a third generation. Predictable, fair, and sustainable.
If you make it slow, you cause the same issues - and then the neighborhood just says "well if it's FOUR generations that's not too bad, is it?" And because the people who don't get to move in later don't get a say... it gets worse forever.
It's insidious, but as long as you allow people to regulate how much housing their neighbors can produce, it always gets this bad eventually.
We can’t let everyone choose to live in the same place. There has to be some mechanism, hopefully market-based but it could also be a residency system, that ensures people spread out and live in different places. Even if you could get SF to support a billion people in living space, I’m sure infrastructure and resources like water would cut things off before it got to that many people.
There absolutely does not have to be in mechanism to spread people out. It is cheaper to provide infrastructure to people who are much closer together than it is to provide the same infrastructure to people who are spread farther out.
There's been a website for the last 20 years called Strong Towns that talks about this a lot if you're interested in learning more.
Building up isn’t cheaper at some point. Around 30 stories is the economic limit right now when you consider fire safety, with anything higher reserved for splurges.
Having lived this in China, the economics get wonky in dense cities. I’ve never seen the built up area with lots of 30 stories being cheaper than 4 story blocks. And that is in the most zone-agnostic build happy country on earth.
So go buy land and build a house, just CHOOSE to spend your money and buy land. What's so hard about that? Ah yes we conveniently forget in our youthfulness that we are not original and if thousands of software leeches choose to relocate en masse they will sky rocket the costs on just about everything - simple supply and demand.
As soon as FAANG starts hiring people in Utah, Arkansas and Minnesota for the same roles at the same wages as they hire in the Bay, then people will move. As soon as VCs start funding founders in Boise, Kansas City and Chattanooga, then people will move.
Until then, maybe we work to improve the places where most of us are required to live by our jobs. (And yes, in parallel we can work to reduce the employer-mandated dependence on those areas).
>Everyone else can move literally anywhere else in the country
This sentiment makes me so angry. People -- very obviously -- need to live where the jobs are.
The fact that we want to say "oh, well if you don't want to live in the rent-seeking machine just go live in the desert" is the left-wing version of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps."
The fact is this. A housing crisis is a slow motion cascade. The landowners profit exactly because housing has been turned into a zero sum game. The more they profit, the more the political opposition will grow. Because the most desirable areas have been cordoned off, every single new resident will likely be on the losing side of the rent-seeking, and thus a pro-housing advocate. Thus, the political situation is a slow motion cascade, and the dam will break, every new building brings more pro-housing voters, every new building makes another new building more likely.
We could end this cycle by working together, but living in San Francisco, the side that has chosen to support rent-seeking cares only about themselves. You can see the political panic happening now. Scott Wiener will be our new rep. We will have hundreds of new units in the Marina. The west side has been upzoned. The only reason we're having the conversation is because the rent-seekers are starting to lose.