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California YIMBY, "Governor Newsom Signs Historic Housing Legislation: SB 79 Culminates Eight-Year Fight to Legalize Homes Near Transit" Also covered in Politico, LA Times, CalMatters, SF Chronicle, SF Standard, Berkeleyside, Streetsblog SF... this is a big deal. (Part of a long-running series on housing, mostly in California. Now also at TheSchism.)
To quote the Governor's press office, "HUGE NEWS!! YIMBY'S REJOICE !!". Signing statement here, press release from Scott Wiener here. Bill text here.
For more details about how we got here, see this recap from Jeremy Linden, the vote lists from CalMatters, and my previous recap from when SB 79 first made it out of committee. This was the last of ten veto points this bill had to pass, and it changed markedly over the process: most counties were exempted, ferries and high-frequency bus routes without dedicated lanes no longer count, projects over 85 feet must now use union labor, there are now below-market-rate set-asides, and other such bagel toppings. It only applies to "urban transit counties", those with more than fifteen rail stations; that's only eight of California's fifty-eight counties: Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange, Santa Clara, Alameda, Sacramento, San Francisco and San Mateo, but those counties contain sixty percent of the state's population.
But of those ten veto points, it passed five of them by a single vote. (It depends exactly how you count.) Every compromise, every amendment, every watering-down was necessary to get this across the finish line. Aisha Wahab, Senate Housing chair and villain of the previous post, switched her vote to support SB 79 in the final concurrence in the Legislature, as did Elena Durazo, Senate Local Government chair, who had also opposed it originally. This has, as noted above, been eight years in the making. It will largely go into effect next July 1.
Newsom also signed a variety of other housing bills, though none were specifically as important as SB 79: AB 253 allows for third-party permit approvals if the city drags their feet, for example.
This completes a remarkably victorious legislative cycle for the YIMBYs. Along with surprise CEQA reform, Jeremy White of Politico called it: "from upzoning to streamlining to CEQA exempting, the biggest housing year I've seen in 10+ years covering Sacramento".
What, realistically, are the consequences of this actually going to be?
I wonder if "build more housing!" is the "decriminalize drugs!" of the latest generation and once we finally kick that into high gear we'll reap a bunch of unintended side effects that are horrible but nobody wanted to think about at the time.
What possible horrible side effects do you anticipate from building more places to live so they're cheaper and people have more choice and can move around more easily to places that suit their specific needs?
Some degenerate case where a cute town of 150k goes crazy building Connestoga hut villages and a million single people move in that are attracted by the $500/month rent
Traffic goes from easy to abysmal.
All public parks overrun with trash and dirtbags.
Average tax revenue per person craters so police and other services become unavailable.
People paying all of the taxes move away.
Town basically becomes a refugee camp.
The 60-ft2 Conestoga Hut is not a code-compliant permanent house. The 360-ft2 Boxabl Casita or the 660-ft2, two-story Lennar Henley can serve as a less unrealistic boogieman. (Actually, the Lennar Henley isn't even compliant with the IPMC—its bedroom and living room are too small. It must have been designed to a less stringent local code.)
Neat. And I'll be sure to remind my city council that the Connestoga villages they built for the homeless aren't code compliant.
I said code-compliant permanent house. Some cursory searching indicates that at least one municipality has added "temporary housing shelters" to its zoning code as a permitted accessory use, without calling such shelters houses. Your municipality may have done something similar.
See also how some "tiny houses" actually are recreational vehicles that cannot be installed permanently in many places.
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Phrasing things in positive terms doesn't somehow make them positive. You could frame the building of Chicago's Cabrini-Green projects the same way.
Why do you assume I'm advocating for more homes for poor people when I'm advocating for more market rate housing for everyone else besides them
You'll notice I didn't mention "affordable housing" or "community housing" or anything of the sort, and I am in fact against mandating that certain % of developments are "affordable housing" as it's a really stupid policy
I am pretty pessimistic that even the median earner is tax positive (pays more than they cost) and because of progressive taxation cities that incentive anything less than above the 90%ile to relocate become per capita tax revenue poorer.
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The examples we have of liberalised planning, both historical and current, are far superior to the examples we have of drug legalisation/decriminalisation, so it seems unlikely
While Houston's lax (lacks?) zoning laws have arguably been successful at keeping the rent reasonable, it does get lots of criticism for its urban design and walkability. Amusingly, people do cite its (non-housing price) approach to homelessness as working better than most.
Housing abundance + walkability is possible, because Tokyo exists.
I agree that it requires world-class policing to work and is therefore not an immediately applicable answer to anywhere in the US, with the possible exception of NYC.
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I mean, counterpoint, but people are moving to Houston, despite the awful climate. People are moving away from the med climates on the California coast. Revealed preferences and all that.
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I expect not. It was easy to build for the longest time and then we artificially made it difficult. The current situation is the more anomalous one.
America has famously lagged behind other cities of the world in dense urbanism. So, we have a few decades of data from tall-dense cities to read into. NYC is the only exception in the US. and it is a good exception at that. Broadly, nothing catastrophic happened. Ofc, the assumption is that densification comes with an increase in aggregate local taxes and greater investment in public infrastructure (transit, services, etc).
I would like to hear the negative side-effects that you suspect more housing will bring.
IMO, The american youth starting to adopt a nihilistic lying flat mindset, and the lack of affordable housing (esp. in urban areas) has played a role in making it worse. However, building more housing alone is not going to solve this multifaceted problem. So, if the YIMBYs win, there will be more housing and nihilism will continue (if slightly slowed down). In 50 years, some may see that the nihilism and YIMBY movement coincided with each other and wrongly draw a causal link.
Building more housing is like fixing the Ozone layer. When you do it right, nothing happens. Life goes on, and people don't appreciate it because the negative thing never happened. Classic preparedness paradox.
To be clear,
build more housing != build more ugly housing.
This is a 5+1, and this is a 5+1. This is one of the reasons I am strongly against "affordable housing". Build more market rate housing, so the buyer can impose their aesthetic preferences onto the developer.
build more housing = building more housing in urban areas with a huge shortages.
Supply-demand is alright in most of the US. Mostly limited to Boston, NYC, DC, Miami, Austin, Phoenix, LA, SD, SF, Portland, Seattle problem.
build more housing != fit a studio into what used to be 4 bed, so we can all live in kowloon walled city.
build more housing != sprawl out more
More housing means more vertical expansion and more infills.
build more housing = build better transit.
That means safer transit too. (this is a huge issue between YIMBYs and Leftists. YIMBYs are generally pro-police and hard on crime)
Austin has built so much housing that it's the only metro to have seen rents decline in recent years.
Yeah, Austin is a shining example of how to deal with the problem well.
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It certainly feels that way. The 'build more housing' crowd is in full swing where I live in Scandinavia. Usually coupled close with the 'walkable cities' phenomenon.
It's an odd feeling to be stuck in traffic for hours on end in a city of about 300k, on road going through what used to be an industrial area but is now filled with multiple 5+ story high apartment complexes in various states of construction. Where are all these extra cars going to go? It was bad enough already, one wonders.
Well, the city council, on the bleeding edge of progress, decides to deal with traffic by making one lane of an already very busy road a 'bus' lane. So now they feel emboldened to lot these new apartments with 0.4 parking spaces each. Meaning there are cars parked everywhere around the area, as they obviously can not all fit around the apartments. This increases foot traffic around and across the busy road. So every time someone presses the button on a crosswalk, the lights go red, congestion increases even more.
Dense housing - one lane + extra foot traffic = ???
Well, lets hear it, what were they thinking? A member of the city council, speaking in defense of new public transport centric city plan, said that a part of the problem was to do with values. There was a need for a radical confrontation with how people look at and organize their lives. It can not all be centered around cars. Well, are they completely wrong? Maybe not.
Similar to how one can argue that how we view addiction and drugs is wrong. That it's a disease, not a crime and so forth, one can say our relationship with cars and transport is wrong. It's a broader more novel philosophical argument that might not be incorrect, and certainly sounds fair minded and appealing. But to assume therefor that all the relevant factors have been accounted for has shown itself to be lunacy that costs lives.
Sounds like they should build higher capacity transit like LRTs to places people would like to travel, and also further encourage mixed use and commerical construction around the new housing so people can easily access their needs in a way that doesn't generate significant additional traffic?
Accounting for cost, rail is out of the question. Which is why the city has been organizing the future around buses.
The problem is less getting to a store, and more getting to and from work. Because there is not enough parking space you have increased foot-traffic during rush hour around the area, as people who park in the vicinity need to get to their cars. That's compounding an already worsening state of traffic year over year.
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I can't really see how it'd directly cause issues, but also trying to 'build more closely-integrated housing' whilst doing nothing to actually create community integration or solve for ghettoification could easily just snowball into a bunch more ghettos.
I know Yardcels hate it, but big fan of the Singapore HDB system (which the Chinese are broadly aping with their apartment builds) but that's built on deliberate integration of different ethnicities and very strongly punishing antisocial behavior.
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I have a family member that lives in SoCal and they've recently built higher density housing along the freeway and metrolink stop there. The result has been a massive spike in local traffic, the shopping centers nearby are so crowded that they no longer even bother going to them and generally avoid businesses near the freeway, opting to drive to grocery stores and shopping further away. Lights back up to the point that they routinely get stuck stopped at green lights waiting for the intersection in front of them to empty near these areas.
Doesn't really seem like it'd take a genius to figure this out, but it turns out that just because you live next to a metrolink or freeway or other "quality public transit" doesn't mean you will hop on one or hop on the freeway and drive 30 minutes every time you want to leave your house for basic things. Maybe some people use it to commute, but the local area is still negatively effected. Whatever small shopping centers they might build into these higher density housing can't compete with all the amenities offered by the preexisting suburban sprawl. So you basically just end up plopping a bunch more people in an area with roads and parking lots not equipped for it. Also, the rent on these places wasn't any lower and rent has continued to rise precipitously in the area.
Just build more shopping centers??? Seems like an easy solution
What bothers me about angry "I hate that things changed" posts like this is that it's based on a belief/argument that the status quo was fine, which it was not.
The status quo in this case is 1) ever worsening traffic as population scales via horizontal expansion, but road network capacity does not 2) a perpetual increase in housing prices causing the following (but not limited to): lower birth rates, higher homelessness + higher crime as a result, a general erosion of the Western social contract, lower economic growth from the friction of moving, higher property taxes due to less economies of scale, and more!
If you're going to oppose building, you need to propose a different solution to the status quo, which again, ISN'T WORKING
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Ah the classic "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded". For the particular family member, perhaps their individual utility has decreased but for the surrounding area the overall utility created has likely increased by a significant amount.
The quality might lower for the people who there before, whose main claim to the general area around them was 1. They got there first 2. They used the force of government to take away the property rights of all their neighbors so they don't maximize the value of the land they own, but it opens up a lot for people who want to be there and were previously locked out because of artificial big government restrictions.
If you build a dam to block flooding, the size of the dam (supply or something) and the amount of rainfall (demand of something) both matter, and a small dam with high rainfall can still flood. But even a small dam will still stem the tide a little bit.
Rent is also a signal of how much people are willing to trade to live somewhere, so if it's a place people are desiring to live at more either by quality increases or less supply of alternatives then rent going up still is expected to begin with. "X is seen as lesser value than before" and "People are willing to spend more on X than before" aren't impossible to coexist, but they are a negative correlation that requires an even worse fall from alternative selections.
Mumbai is crowded. Would you like to live there? Libs worried about rogue ai paperciip maximizers destroying humanity but it turns out they were the paperclip maximizers all along.
I always joked (in person) about them creating God in their own image.
The only real difference between a paperclip maximiser and a corp is speed, anyway. (Granted it's a huge difference)
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Mumbai no, but that's because it's India. A dense city in a rich and freer country however, yeah why not? 14 million choose to live in Tokyo over the vast rural areas the country has (and 37 million in the surrounding area). 8.5 million choose to live in NYC. 2 million choose to live in Paris. 9.6 million choose Seoul.
It's not going to be a life fit for everyone, I personally prefer my smaller ~100k city. But clearly there's a shit ton of people who like to live in dense areas with lots of opportunities and things to do around over having a little extra space. Rents are so high in dense areas in part because people really want to be there. If people are willing to pay 2.5k for a 1 bedroom in NYC, and only 1k for a two bedroom in super ruralsville, that means something. Assuming equal capability for supply, people want the former more. It's not perfectly equal of course, but it still says something how much more people are willing to pay for the dense areas.
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Tokyo is crowded and living there seems pretty cool
NYC is extremely crowded and I am strongly considering moving there
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Death Valley is sparsely populated: by your logic, we can assume it's a good place to live.
Plus, I daresay that many Indians would in fact like to live in Mumbai, more than are currently there
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If they execute on the plans, LA will be in the midst of America's biggest transit boom. I would wait a few years to find out if the up-zoning led to a loss in quality of life. Often, new infrastructure feels like a net negative until the whole plan gets executed. Many of China's once-ghost cities and trains-to-nowhere are a good example.
Isn't that good for local business ?
That's just LA.
Wouldn't it have risen even faster if the apartments had not been built ?
This is, at best, a mixed example.
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That is decidedly not all LA was. As I mentioned in my reply to remzem's comment, the LA I grew up in was not overcrowded as a whole. It was population dense, but not overcrowded except for the most touristy/central spots (Hollywood, downtown).
The question of whether the up-zoning improved quality of life can be answered right now, because it's been going on for over a decade: It decidedly has not. The LA I visit occasionally is unrecognizable in the most in-your-face, uncomfortable way. The streets cannot support it, and barring a radical shift in the entire city council's (and let's be frank, populace's) attitudes toward law enforcement, no amount of transit overhaul will fix the problem.
I will probably get drunk and annoyed enough to write a top-level post about this because watching LA go from a quiet post-90s crime wave city with a ton of culture and places worth visiting to a homelessness, crime, and overpopulation-ridden nightmare has been a huge lesson inspiring my disenchantment with the idea that people on the whole will work to better things.
So it isnt YIMBYism that's the problem, it's pervasive soft on crime attitude that's the problem. How does that indict the YIMBY cause?
YIMBYs don't push for being tougher on crime.
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Sounds like Los Angeles to me. I grew up in the Los Angeles area during the best time to grow up there (I might make a top level post about this some time) and it is essentially unrecognizable. I'm no stranger to city living, but whenever I go back, it's almost an anxiety attack as every street, every home, every parking spot is filled beyond its natural capacity in every sense of the word. Small streets are covered in towering luxury apartments that replaced the more meager (and more charming) buildings that preceded them. Single family homes are filled with people, leaving 3-5 cars to somehow fill out the driveways and street parking to the point that visiting is almost impossible unless you coordinate in advance with the people that you are visiting. Shopping centers, as you mention, are plopped down in areas that cannot support them, and the traffic (and light pollution, which is never something I thought I'd care about) make the entire area unpleasant. I know Los Angeles hate has been low hanging fruit for decades, but the city is in such an unlivable state these days I can hardly believe it.
Literally every problem you mentioned could be fixed by building more. More houses so people don't pile into single family homes, more transit, more shopping centers. It seems the problem with LA is shitty development, not development per se.
The problem of "towering luxury apartments" can't be fixed by building more. Nor can the problem of filling places with people. Nor can parking; transit is so bad that the only way to get people to take it is to make driving worse, and the only way to do that is to allow driving infrastructure to become highly oversubscribed.
....so build more transit?
This all sounds like a problem of will and not an actual material problem.
Building more transit is doable. Making transit good is not.
Because you lack the political will. Again, not a material problem.
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You can reduce the number/duration of total car trips if you manage to densify the other infrastructure too: if your towering apartments are walking distance (within a block or two?) of the grocery store, bar, gym, or employer. Probably not to zero, but it'd help.
Yes, if you get everyone to do everything they want and need to do within their little neighborhood, you can do that. Places like that in the US either tend to be planned retirement villages, or places which are extremely not-nice to live.
I've heard some anecdotes at times describing Manhattan positively this way. Sometimes Boston or SF, too. If you can afford rent downtown, some blue places can be like this. But for some reason in the nicer places the rent is really high...
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Please do, I would love to read that!
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Great question! There's still uncertainty here, and it varies by city. Despite all the state laws, there's a lot of local control, and cities will, to various degrees, fight the state. Consider the history of ADUs; despite being essentially legalized in 2017, the legislature continues to adjust rules and close loopholes. (This year: SB 9 (different from the other SB 9; authorizes the state housing department to void bad ADU ordinances) and AB 1154 (clarify rules around Junior ADUs).)
Tariffs and the resultant high commodity prices are a problem, as is a tight labor market. Local governments still absolutely love inclusionary zoning, which is essentially taxing new housing to provide subsidized housing to poor people; see the graph on page 9 here. And the construction industry is remarkably cyclical, so real changes won't happen until the next boom cycle.
A lot of things have to go right for a project to happen, and only a few need to go wrong. It took us decades to get into this mess, and there's still reluctance to let go of all of the bagel toppings (union set-asides, inclusionary zoning, various extra review nonsense) that have accumulated over the years. And yet the two biggest impediments, CEQA and base zoning, have been swept away. Note also that these reforms are cumulative; density bonus law means that cities have lost pretty much all discretion over the aesthetics of projects, and the Housing Accountability Act provides impressive fines if they manage to block a valid-zoned project, and there's a department enforcing that.
I think it'll have a significant effect, especially in San Francisco and the Bay Area; in Los Angeles, it'll depend on how dysfunctional their city government remains, though AB 253 should help there. But that effect will be delayed until commodities become cheaper and labor becomes more available, and at that point, there will be the usual temptation to make it so projects just barely pencil out, and to "capture" the "developer profits". I think the state of the law makes that very difficult at this point.
I wish I had numbers, and I know this isn't very specific. Hopefully there will be some clear analysis out soon from groups like the Terner Center.
Chuck Marohn (of Strong Towns)'s recent big thing (and more or less the topic of his most recent book Escaping The Housing Trap) is that a major problem with YIMBYs is that simply legalizing housing isn't enough, since the financing for housing is also broken. He's cagey about offering solutions but generally thinks federal level support for 30-year mortgages is a problem and that funding should be at the local level instead.
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I don't understand why these people don't want to let developers just make money? It's not like developers are even particularly bourgeoisie, hedge fund types and associated financial wizards are able to make bank much more freely in California.
Soft skills aren't my strong suit, but I spent far too much time gargling rage-slop from Facebook until I turned off the spigot, and the upshot of all of that is that I'm confident that there's a very straightforward model on the vague-left, as follows.
Everything is some kind of class conflict, in that there are rich people exploiting working people in some way. In order to solve a problem, you need to figure out who the rich exploiters are, and, depending on how brave and/or edgy you want to be, regulate/tax or eat/behead them.
In this case, possibly due to the influence of the evil developer trope, developers are evil business owners who want to bulldoze virtuous, affordable working-class homes and replace them with empty glass high-rises. Because developers are evil, it's never considered that the existing homes were once newly built by some other developer. Because developers cannot do good, it's never considered that people will live in these new buildings, so there's a persistent idea that developers intentionally construct buildings, intending that they stay empty, and profit from this by "writing it off" or something like that.
Example here: "No matter how many houses you build, if they are not affordable, then you will not solve the housing crisis."; "we need to take on the profiteers and the corporate giants to win homes for people." (This is an organization which is, as far as I can tell, not keen on letting developers build homes because they're "profiteers" and "corporate giants" and, presumably, the homes they build are somehow not "for people".)
Left-NIMBYism is, from what I can tell, frequently the result of getting negatively polarized against YIMBYs, who are, unfortunately, kinda smug nerds sometimes. For example, YIMBY poster Sam Deutsch made fun of comedian Kate Willett for being a gentrifier complaining about gentrification, and she is still, four years later, writing red-string-on-a-board articles like this and constantly tweeting about how YIMBYs are funded by "billionaires".
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This is a tic that makes me think LLM these days. Not necessarily accusing you of using one here, more commenting on the sad closing of the linguistic frontier as various phrasings become associated with "artificial" text.
Some writers have begun intentionally introducing mistakes into their writing in order to not be thought of as using LLMs. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sarah-waller-1b967671_i-recently-read-an-article-where-the-writer-activity-7381594464328359936-6dNO?rcm=ACoAAAIRfjcBLt5fKoXIZEwnmoXzpmaEixqxsJ8
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First they took my em-dashes, and now this‽
This is indeed me attempting to be more consciously agreeable. I have a history of being aggressively negative and downright disagreeable in my comments, and I'm trying to go in the opposite direction. It's also influenced by seeing people who supposedly agree with me being incredibly unpleasant on the internet, and wanting to do the opposite of that.
Which is, I think, similar to what's happening with LLMs, in that they are designed to be extremely agreeable so people continue to engage with them.
Which is to say, that's a really great point, and you are a special and insightful person for making it! It's not just an insight—it's a whole new perspective that you've uncovered!
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It's just corporate management speech in text form. It existed well before LLMs and is where their speech patterns come from and are aimed at.
It isn't artificial as much as it is a bit soulless, which I suppose might be fitting for the output of a literal machine.
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