While I want this to happen, what realistic incentive(s) are there to relinquish local control, and even if the power is indeed given to the state-level government, won't NIMBY's just move their fight there?
As we just saw with the fight for SB 50, they will indeed.
However, the idea is that as more people join the YIMBY cause, they will elect enough YIMBY representatives that the state will be able to pass solid state level laws about zoning and development that preempt local NIMBY groups.
The main argument is that NIMBYs are outnumbered at the state level. They "win" at the local level because older, richer homeowners are overrepresented at community meetings.
NIMBYs also win in local votes. Most voters turn out for presidential elections. Far fewer turn out for state elections. And the voter turnout for local elections is frankly pathetic. The votes where San Francisco set a cap on new office space per year and made apartment buildings near the coast inordinately slow and expensive to build? Off-year elections where the NIMBYs have an electoral advantage.
Your analysis is exactly right, and taking local control away from state and county governments is a partial solution. There should also be financial implications to local governments if they take too long to turn around permit applications. (1.5x actual damages incurred after a cutoff date, paid directly to the home owner, no lawyer required, seems reasonable to me).
In particular, some local planning offices are notoriously obstructionist. In the best case (no zoning exceptions, no objections from neighbors, sympathetic bureaucrats in the office itself), they still needlessly delay the project, and compliance with questionable local regulations with bloat the budget. A San Jose builders association estimates that 25% of the cost of new construction goes to this — I don’t think that includes finance costs due to delay, and it still seems low. Individual homeowners probably pay more as a percentage than well-connected development firms. Alternatively, maybe SJ is more developer-friendly than most places around here.
Over the decades, NIMBYs have passed a set of onerous laws, and created numerous new county offices to enforce them. Of course, the offices are woefully understaffed. There can be a dozen, and they are all backlogged. To resubmit, you have to wait for the slowest office to respond, and with 12 offices, you’ll definitely be resubmitting.
There has been some action at the state level for ADUs (nanny units). Basically, local governments had to remove a bunch of restrictions that were designed to make ADU development impossible, and impose an SLA (of many months, which is lightning fast by CA standards) on permit application processing. If the governments didn’t comply, the law temporarily voided the entirety of their local zoning laws.
Sadly, it only applied to ADU’s, which are limited to being the second house on a lot, with a max square footage of 1200 sq ft.
That’s intentionally too small for families with kids, especially in areas with weird lot shape constraints. I guess this protects affluent schools from poor kids.
Also, they can’t be sold separately from the main house, only rented. Presumably this is to prevent lower class people from owning houses. (If this seems implausible to you, search for “palo alto redlining“ to get an idea of the historical behavior of the city governments around here.)
On the bright side for owners of ADUs, the state-wide rent control laws that were recently passed don’t apply to them (though the anti-eviction clauses might) so home owners can use them to extract extra money from students (and therefore UC), as rent control restricts construction of higher density housing.
Happily, some legislators understand the crisis. While SB-827 and SB-50 were drawing fire from the NIMBYs, other pro-housing bills passed into law, including SB-167 (sue more suburbs for denying housing permits), SB-828 (double the expected housing growth that cities are required to zone) and SB-330 (limit the number of hearings and the timeline for permits and prohibit downzoning for the next few years).
We need to elect and re-elect more pro-housing candidates, e.g., Scott Wiener from San Francisco, Shelly Masur from Redwood City, Dave Cortese from San Jose, Nancy Skinner from Berkeley, Marisol Rubio from San Ramon, Maria Cadenas from Santa Cruz.
I'm a diehard YIMBY myself and thus inclined to agree, but you've larded up your post here with some grade-A class-politics bullshit.
> That’s intentionally too small for families with kids, especially in areas with weird lot shape constraints.
No, that's just what an ADU is. It stands for accessory dwelling unit, not additional dwelling unit. If you want to argue that people should be able to build additional full-size dwelling units on their property, that's fine, and I might even agree with you. But then we're no longer talking about ADUs, and we have to address a whole different set of practical problems. ADU's have an important role, which would not necessarily be served by unrestricted infill.
> I guess this protects affluent schools from poor kids.
Really? You guess? You can't imagine any other reasons folks might be reluctant to allow unrestricted construction of multiple new residences on existing lots?
> Also, they can’t be sold separately from the main house, only rented. Presumably this is to prevent lower class people from owning houses.
No, it's because selling an ADU separately from the primary dwelling makes no fucking sense whatsoever. An ADU doesn't have it's own separate water, sewer, or electrical service. It shares the lot with the primary dwelling, and you can't subdivide without figuring out right-of-ways, for which there is often not enough room.
> On the bright side for owners of ADUs, the state-wide rent control laws that were recently passed don’t apply to them (though the anti-eviction clauses might) so home owners can use them to extract extra money from students (and therefore UC), as rent control restricts construction of higher density housing.
Great, another variation on the old theme of the landed class extracting money from the working class. Fine, NIMBY homeowners are evil. I agree enthusiastically, without irony. But renting an ADU is much like renting out a room in your house. Imposing restrictions on how much money someone can make from renting a portion of their own residence, or worse yet, preventing a homeowner from evicting tenants from the homeowner's own residence, sure sounds like a recipe for not having any rented ADUs in a city, and accordingly for doing jack shit to improve the housing situation.
"Really? You guess? You can't imagine any other reasons folks might be reluctant to allow unrestricted construction of multiple new residences on existing lots?"
Sure, usually they bitch and moan that someone else will take their taxpayer-funded free storage for private property (so long as it has an engine) on a public street.
I hate the sense of entitlement that leads some people to lay claim to the street in front of their home. That said, parking is a legit issue. Bad parking can severely impact the livability of a neighborhood. It does you no good to have a chip on your shoulder over a few entitled assholes.
When someone says "I need a free place for my car on the street so therefore you can't build homes here" they're basically saying they care more about homeless cars than homeless people.
Yes I agree. But like I said, don't let that chip on your shoulder make you incapable of rational thought. Entitled assholes notwithstanding, parking (and car traffic in general) is a serious problem that deserves careful consideration if aggressive infill is to be allowed.
We agree, but my approach is generally to tell drivers to suck it up and start paying for what they use (i.e. if you want parking, go rent or buy some land. Or build your own. But don't force others to build parking just so you can keep privatizing the public street for free).
Of course, this is not a popular view so I remain an eccentric cycling weirdo, except that I got tired of dealing with drivers trying to kill me while cycling in the city, so now I live in the country, and drive everywhere.
> If you want to argue that people should be able to build additional full-size dwelling units on their property, that's fine, and I might even agree with you.
I was taking a more conservative stance than that: Why not allow one ADU, and put a limit on the sum of the square footage on the property? Currently zoned for 8000 sq ft + 1200 sq ft ADU? Build two 4600 sq ft McMansions, for all I care.
Going to unlimited infill dwellings regardless of zoning and local infrastructure is pretty radical, and I’m actually not for that.
Hah, I live with two kids in 517 square feet (gigantic yard though). We're going to extend the house, and everything you say is true otherwise, but you can totally raise a couple kids in 1200 square feet.
In this case it's a 200+ year old cottage on a few acres, which would be very illegal to build now but was pretty standard back when families had 10+ kids. All I'm saying is that 1200 square feet really is plenty for a family with a couple kids.
There is an easy solution: move most land-use regulation to the state level, not the local level. CA's legislature is making some noises in that direction. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-01-06/sb-50-ch...