Thanks @Roy321 You should add Los Altos, and Los Altos Hills to this chart with even bigger lots and less dense than Sunnyvale.
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SF is not building nearly enough. So I am not holding SF as some paragon of success here.
But SF is denser than any other so-called cities in the Bay, and it has a wider variety of housing. A condo on 3rd St can be had for 700K, but a SFH in Marina is easily over 10M.
This is what we need. The missing middle rungs in the housing ladder need to be filled. NIMBYs have so much why not share some with folks with less means? Why hog it all for yourself?
I am honestly lost on the logic here. Let us keep aside YIMBY or NIMBY.
- SB9/SB10 will make housing more affordable => may be true, and areas like San Jose or areas with gentrification may benefit
- SB9/SB10 will make these neighborhoods desirable because they are more affordable & denser => not true
- SB9/SB10 will make provisions for smaller lot houses on areas like Los Altos at much lower prices => may not be true given the main attraction for these areas is less density. Hence, you can expect huge opposition / hurdles. Even if a small lot house is built, it will be beyond affordability for many (like the Noe Valley house you showed)
- It is highly desirable to build houses of all price ranges in a neighborhood => good goal, practically not possible in smaller neighborhoods. Big cities like San Jose / SFO already supports this, MV, SV, Santa Clara etc., to an extent support this. But many folks really want Los Altos like houses at East San Jose level prices.
A lot of the confusion comes from the different time frames we have in mind.
In the short term, if more housing is built price will have downward pressure, including SFHâs. Simple supply and demand. But in the long run, if the density of a whole biggish city like Sunnyvale gets pulled up measurably higher, price of SFHâs will go up as well because the entire town becomes more walkable and thus more vibrant and desirable. At the same time a lot of the missing middle rungs on the housing ladder get filled so the end result is win-win for everybody.
Key goal is more abundance of a greater variety of housing types. I donât get why we should restrict a piece of land to be used so inefficiently. Like people say, they are not making any more of these.
This where you are looking from your own pair of eyes. What is desirable for one is not necessarily desirable for others.
I view Bay Area as one big neighborhood with all sorts of housing to satisfy different tastes. What is really missing is good public transport to connect them, good standard of education for folks across the board, safety / crime prevention / illegal drug preventions across the board, and good way to really help people in lower economic class to help improve their quality of life (instead of gentrification). With all the good brains we should work towards achieving that instead of separating as YIMBYs and NIMBYs, I am right vs you are wrong kind of thinking. We donât have strong leadership in political parities (left or right) and local bodies to drive these.
So public school teachers in Sunnyvale who commute over from Oakland is just a drive in the neighborhood?
NIMBY vs YIMBY is a very useful tool to help focus mind IMO. It really forces people to confront the BS. Are you for, or against, more housing. And why.
Like how Stanford reserves certain parcel for faculties, one can support affordable housing for teachers or there are many affordable areas near Sunnyvale that is cheaper â biggest problem there today is public schools in those areas are not good. On a different note: our public school system is broken => students excel mainly because of external coaching and efforts put by parents, and teachers are hardly motivational / effective. Hence, lower income neighborhood where parents donât pay attention to kids have bad schools, and higher income neighborhoods where parents put in effort or send them to other coaching centers have good schools.
So instead of having more housing so it can benefit everybody, we now have to carve people up and reserve housing for special groups? If we go down that path, we are passing judgement on which group is worthy of special treatment and which group not.
Are cops worth it? Firefighters? Librarians? Nurses? Where is the cut off? Is the guy cutting your lawn worthy of housing? How about plumber? Do we need to take race into account? Gender?
Whenever there are special treatments you bet there will be corruptions.
You asked the question about âpublic school teachersâ so it is easy to make a sympathetic plea. There are enough living quarters near Sunnyvale and schools need to pay them properly (using all the tax money) to make it affordable. If communities are well connected by transport, safe, have equal opportunities / education, it will even out the housing prices.
Sounds like the usual âkicking the can to the next townâ approach masterfully practiced by local governments up and down the Bay today.
âPublic school teachersâ is an easy target, I agree. Thatâs why I opened with that group. By reserving housing for one group but not the other, what we are really doing is pitting different groups against each other in a popularity contest. Every group will need to plea to the public why they are worthy of special treatment.
In the end, maybe itâs easier, and more fair, to just build more housing. Make the pie bigger, instead of judging who is worthy enough to eat.
You assume that everyone wants to (or should) live in a shopping mall. Sorry. That is not what SFH are for. When someone chooses to live in single family neighborhood, one goal is to stay away from retail and commercial activity. Basically, what you are looking for are more Santana Row (in San Jose) style mixed used enclaves. But, to get that, you do not need to destroy neighborhood meant for single family homes.
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One simple solution is to grandfather in all the âillegalâ units. There are hundreds of thousands especially in SF, DC, Berkeley Oakland Redwood City. Letâs see the bureaucrats sweat a bit and look away from all the code violations. Many of which are total BS.
My friend has three vacant units in Tahoe because the stairs are more than 1/2â uneven and the inspector is requiring full engineered drawings and replacement instead of just resurfacing. This myopic inspector would rather see 3 families homeless than compromise on a 1/2â minor infraction. I sold my interest in my Sac Apt building because the county demanded new windows and doors plus resurfacing all the parking lotsđ costing over $1m
No, I donât assume that. I just want to allow people to build, and allow people to choose whatever housing they can afford that they think are best for them.
Nobody is taking your SFH away from you. But you want to forbid others do what they want on their own property, just so you can feel homey in your house.
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I wonder whether this new 4plex law will be more effective in densifying SFH neighborhoods, as compared to the ADU law of 2019.
I think it is more practical for homeowners to get an ADU built, given that they donât have to move out during construction, and it only costs 250-300k. Building 4plex is disruptive and probably beyond then financial means of most individual homeowners - will require developers to take the initiative
There are limits to what you can allow. For example, you cannot allow someone to pick someone elseâs pocket because the pickpocket was poor and hungry and needed money to buy food.
We cannot allow people to take away anotherâs property. Absolutely agree.
You having a veto over what someone else can and cannot do on their own property is you robbing your neighbors.
Should I be allowed to dictate what you can do with your own money?
Zoning and land use laws and conventions goes back to the time when humans started living settled and civilized life. Just because you own a property does not mean you can use the property to create nuisance and trouble in the neighborhood and use your property right to change the character of the neighborhood. That is why zoning laws CCRs etc put in the first place. Because the zoning laws are inconvenient to you worldview does not mean they are wrong.
Single family zoning was invented in Berkeley in 1916 as a way to exclude Black people.
laws are derived from conventions and traditions. The CA zoning law itself may have been written in 1916 but the idea of zoning dates to time much earlier. For example. I do not know when the laws against theft and murder were codified in California, but the idea that stealing is bad and murder is a crime is thousands of years old.
Zoning and Land-use conventions date back to the earliest human settlement when the first cities and towns were settled.
Yes, single family zoning is anachronistic and racist in its origins. Even today, in places like Bay Area, single family zoning is a means of maintaining segregation of the economic kind. Strongly agree that single family zoning must be abolished (as CA has now done), allowing people to build ADUs, duplexes, fourplexes and so on. Very progressive steps by CA 
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