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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29430 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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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.

building more places to live so they're cheaper

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.

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.

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.

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)

Boston, NYC, DC, Miami, Austin, Phoenix, LA, SD, SF, Portland, Seattle problem.

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.

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.

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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