Basically, regional government needs a big legal stick able to knock down all local objections to building more housing the regions where the jobs are.
However, to get that, regional government needs all the other stuff - a housing plan that illustrates why you need to allow people to build near the jobs and so-forth. Given the present environment, they'd probably need a good deal of money for lawyers even once you have a state or regional legal structure giving them authority to override local regulations.
Yes, local communities across the United States have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted with control over local zoning, so the power should be moved to a regional political body. Voters will of course vote in their own best interest, and everyone wants their property values to increase, resulting in every local government restricting housing construction and a general lack of construction across the board. This creates regional-level economic problems that should be addressed by regional-level government bodies.
Haha, having to do onerous amounts of environmental impact studies and various community impact studies/hearings, is exactly why we're in this situation to begin with.
We already have plenty of people that want to build, that's not the problem. Problem is local regulation and policies that don't align with regional interests.
While a single project might only materially affect its immediate neighbors, the pattern of land-use decisions in aggregate harms the region as a whole (housing shortage, astronomical rents, displacement) much more than an apartment building could harm its single-family neighbors. This is why something like regional housing needs allocation is a good idea: let local communities control the how and where, but don’t let them screw over the rest of society on the “whether or not.”
The entire planet is nontrivially affected by creating and preserving car-dependent settlements; this sort of thing needs to be handled at the level of international climate treaties.
The entire country is nontrivially affected by the inaccessibility of moving to where there are jobs. Shadows on your garden don’t come close to being stuck in a place with no opportunity.
Imagine if other law was made at such a hyper-local level. Should residents of the 1200 block get to write themselves a murder statue that says residents of the 1100 block are fair game?
Good government is an antidote to the patchwork of small-scale actors making decisions in their own interests but dumping the downside of those decisions on society.
Yeah, you'd never get it done on a local level, but when people are forced to think about the issue holistically -- that is, when they can get outside of their immediate neighborhood and think about the fact that it's illegal to build enough housing on a state or even national level -- it looks like they can actually be swayed. These changes have to be made at the state/province level.
Jurisdiction matters far more than most people realize. If we had state level environmental protection laws, Missouri might be more than happy to let St Louis save money by dumping their trash into the Mississippi River where it becomes Louisiana's problem instead. Thankfully the EPA has their jurisdiction set appropriately.
Housing and Land Use definitely need wider jurisdictions. State level would be nice, but at the very least they need metro regional jurisdiction. When a city like San Jose or San Francisco doesn't build enough housing, the affordability and traffic effects ripple far throughout the region. Right now, land use planners don't have to care about the effects they have on neighboring cities, but with wider jurisdictions they absolutely would have to take those concerns into account.
One of the solutions they’re trying now is for the state to give development quotas to municipalities, and threaten to break up single family zoning areas if not.
That it’s such a huge issue in 2 separate massive municipalities makes me agree - it’s a problem that needs solutions at a higher level (often by forcing lower levels to do what is necessary)
I agree with that, but it's difficult to say what cities should or shouldn't be able to enact. They do have different requirements to their region, and you wouldn't want e.g. a minimum wage law that might be appropriate for a city to destroy employability in the rest of the state.
It's a complex problem in need of complex solutions. Government's biggest problem is the scale of their actions. They use all the right tools, but at smaller scale/urgency than they should.
Here is the basic toolkit:
— Spend public dollars (budget+bonds) on new affordable housing, aim for 5-10% of annual city budget (now it's 1-2%).
— Create districts with pre-approved building permits (some work on it, but it takes 10+ years to master plan a district)
— Invite non-local developers and give them strong incentives (e.g. joint US-China ventures in real estate)
— Remove risks from permitting process, make it faster, reduce power of local individuals to block/delay major developments
— Raise height limits in certain areas
— Reduce parking requirements. Allow large-scale developments on former parking lots (stadiums, shopping malls)
— Create a new powerful role "Vice Mayor of Affordable Housing", centralize all functions under that person, set ambitious goals, and have the ability to fire that person if the goals are not met
You get other issues, such as NIMBYs not allowing new development in their towns as a form of defecting in a prisoners dilemma, which you often need a larger regional body to make it happen.
Or other issues of too many small governments, such as road networks, or regional transit.
If this is ever to be solved, it has to be on the state level. Individual cities or counties are not going to nobly go against their interests and start building more than they have to.
But a lot of people have gotten very rich off of this, so I don't know if there is any political strength behind this. What happens to the Jerry Brown proposal will be a good indicator.
I don't understand though how the state government will be expected to implement this different than the local government; they both draw from essentially the same voterbase that is hostile toward the upzoning as the majority of the state population resides in those large cities anyway. The only real difference is that you'll also have a population of rural voters observing from the sidelines as they have no investment in the issue of high-density zoning
What they need to do is change regulation, change land use policy and change transportation planning, and city planning. Just building individual houses isn't a solution.
I suggest abandoning centralized government planning through zoning and strengthen nuisance torts - if you want to build a big tower in the neighborhood, pay off the neighbors to like it or else they sue.
It's also not always quite that simple. My city is trying to pass a moratorium on residential building permits because the infrastructure is simply not built out enough to handle all the people moving to town. Yeah, yeah, public transportation, etc... but all of that takes time and money to build.
The 2 lane road leading to my house is already overloaded and a builder is wanting to build another 2000 houses at the end of the road. Instead of waiting and relying on the state to improve the road, maybe we should do a better job at shifting the infrastructure costs to the builder when they put up a new apartment building or neighborhood.
I don't need a solution on hand to recognize a problem. IMO, the issue is not urban development, it's country-wide development. We definitely can't approach that problem by worrying about zoning laws.
Here is an interesting article[1] on the issue that talks about regional inequality, its causes, and possible solutions. Basically, a reintroduction of anti-trust laws would do a lot to turn things around.
I mean we can fix it. Allow high density, tall buildings in urban centers, discourage centralized working environments and encourage satellite offices throughout the state, remove fees/expedite permit applications for new construction contingent on low/middle income rents, and get people out of fire areas.
Swinging back on this, because I find this stuff interesting.
I don't necessarily disagree with anything you say here. But I'm still not sure it gets at the crux of my question.
If local control of land use systematically creates problems for people that don't have the privilege of living in the jurisdiction in question, maybe it's time to put control of land use or certain aspects of land use in the hands of regional counsels of government (much like Metropolitan Planning Organizations plan for transportation needs at a metro-area level, rather than a city level). I think that lets you start solving not only the problem in question in the article, but all sorts of other problems that you address. (Maybe this could work at the State level too, but I think that's too broad. People in San Jose certainly have some interest in San Francisco land use... but do people in Sacramento? Not much.)
But that's very different from leaving land use in the hands of city governments, then overriding them on individual issues when you don't like what they're doing. Right?
I think part of my thinking on this is shaped from living in NC, and watching the insanity that was HB2 (which you likely heard of, if you're up on the news). Basically, Charlotte raises minimum wage and adds some protections for LGBT folks, state legislatures doesn't like it, and so passes a law preventing local governments from being able to set the minimum wage in their area, or grant rights/protections beyond what's granted by the state. The fallout was absolute insanity for, like, a year.
All of that to say - if you want State government overriding local government rights, you have to be prepared for the day when the State legislature is doing something you don't like, and the local government is doing something you do. Right?
In the end, like I said before, I think this policy is good, but I think there's better ways to go about it. Regional counsels of government having more authority over land use seems like a great start to me. Actually, I'd be interested to know if somebody's proposed that.
The only way to solve the problem is to build more housing, and the only way to do that is to change the zoning laws. A startup cannot do much about that.
The only way to change the zoning laws is to convince the majority of voters that they need to be changed. A nonprofit would have just as much luck doing this as a VC-backed startup.
We really need a regional planning authority for the Bay Area, with the power to override local zoning boards, exercise eminent domain, and with an enormous budget for building mass transit.
Politically, I think the only way to get there is to wait for the Big One. Plate tectonics has become the best hope for urbanism in northern California.
However, to get that, regional government needs all the other stuff - a housing plan that illustrates why you need to allow people to build near the jobs and so-forth. Given the present environment, they'd probably need a good deal of money for lawyers even once you have a state or regional legal structure giving them authority to override local regulations.
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