Zone defense

An older piece from City Lab but most of you probably saw (or heard about) the Gawker piece that commanded: San Francisco: Build More Housing, Assholes.  I mean you really can’t get any more clickbait-y than that.   City Lab, naturally goes beyond the commandment to build more housing and instead goes to the root of the problem, zoning.

It’s not that there’s not anyone to build the housing, it’s just that zoning laws, and the residents that hug them oh so tightly,  make it difficult to get through the process to create any supply to meet the demand.

Highlights:

The housing crisis is both a regional and local problem. Looking at it two ways leads to two different conclusions about gentrification and displacement. From a regional perspective, any and every city in a metro area could be building more. Any and every new housing unit adds to the supply and lets out some pressure.

But from a neighborhood perspective, the view is different. Neighborhoods that build less than others are sometimes given a pass, because they are beautiful or historic or wealthy or powerful (and often all of these things). The lack of new construction in wealthier neighborhoods puts pressure on less wealthy neighborhoods. (“You can build new things in other places.”) This pressure builds up until it explodes in distressed neighborhoods. (See: the Mission.)

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Since the residents of high-cost, high-demand neighborhoods tend to have mobility, money, and access to information and power, they are hugely successful in leveraging land-use policies to exclude newcomers. They protect what is theirs and shut the gate behind them. (Nolan gets that.) So the high-margin development that really should go into the high-end neighborhood winds up replacing cheaper, older, and abandoned housing in low-end neighborhoods.

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The new wealthy are ruining everything because the old wealthy decided not to let them live anywhere near them.
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The answer is to build. Build more fucking housing, just like Nolan says. But the answer is also to zone: To take away land-use decisions from neighborhoods and hand them over to cities. And for cities to act in concert with other cities toward regional goals for new market-rate and affordable units everywhere. Not just where developers can get away with it, but where incumbent residents have already soldered shut the gate behind them.

Solving this housing crisis means breaking up the cartelized wealthy districts that are able to decide that new housing is everybody else’s problem.

It’s the whole belief that housing families and individuals is someone else’s problem that got us — and by “us” I mean the entire Bay Area — in the position we are in today.  We can either hope and pray for an economic downturn to somehow soften the housing market.  Of course this logic is probably one of the most crazy desires that I’ve actually heard expressed.  I’m not sure who benefits from a region being economically weak.  Or we can address the housing shortage by actually creating housing that is necessary and continue to let our regional economy grow as opposed to stifling it because people think the should be able to commute to work in the shortest amount of time possible.