(2024-07-15) ZviM Housing Roundup #8 Your Local Area
Zvi Mowshowitz: Housing Roundup #8: Your Local Area. In honor of San Francisco failing its housing target and becoming subject to SB 423, this special edition of housing deals with various state and local developments
San Francisco
Oakland rents falling most of all large US cities after building more housing. No way
Hayden Clarkin: Given an 8-3 vote tonight by San Francisco’s leaders to downzone the wealthy waterfront neighborhoods to protect the views of millionaire homeowners, I figure I’d show a visual representation of the amount of housing the city approved in January.
Sachin Agarwal: Eight Supervisors voted to save Aaron Peskin’s view. Unbelievable. Every one of these people has got to go.
San Francisco needs 82,069 units of housing under the RHNA formula (which is too low but besides the point).#sanfrancisco has only permitted >5k houses in 1 year since 1980.
The San Francisco Planning Commission is not interested in a plan to build more housing. They are interested in a plan to not build more housing.
Perhaps one place to start on building more housing would be to not give money to organizations whose central purpose is to stop housing construction? As in TODCO, a SF ‘affordable housing nonprofit’
It is not only housing. Remember that story about how so many women dreamed of opening a 24 hour coffee shop and bookstore with a cat? It is legal in the areas in green.
San Francisco: SB 423
SB 423, takes effect in San Francisco. SF is the 1st city in CA it’s in effect.
We had the longest housing approval time in CA (26 months on average). Under SB 423, that timeline is now capped at 6 months.
SF Chronicle: S.F. being subject to SB 423 means that most proposed housing projects will not require approval from the Planning Commission and therefore won’t be able to be appealed to the Board of Supervisors.
Los Angeles city planning department proposal would revise zoning codes to make room for up to 250,000 new homes
Meanwhile Los Angeles is dealing with the consequences of ED1, an emergency declaration that the city needs more affordable housing. It turned out that no, they did not actually want lots of new affordable housing.
Toby Muresianu: Unbelievable but true: If you want to build exactly the 100% low-income Affordable housing the city declared an emergency need, years into a crisis, on land you own. They can’t simply tell you how much you’re allowed to build & may change their mind months after they do.
Mishka: LA deputy mayor of housing told NIMBY crowd @ UCLA’s land use law conference a few months ago that they were going to water down ED1 because it was getting too much housing production done, too soon. Citing a story of a dryer vent ‘blowing directly out onto a single family home.’
Wall Street Journal notices Austin TX’s rents are down 7%, frames this as bad news. Then we have this, saying rents declined 12.5% in Austin in December, describing this great news as a ‘nosedive.’
the Minnesota Democrats propose requiring electrical vehicle parking and charging stations for all new homes. Why not use ‘electric’ as a reason to massively increase parking requirements?
Jared Polis signs a new bill and embraces strong YIMBY rhetoric, calls for More Housing Now. The bill he signed prohibits discriminatory residential occupancy limits, one of the lowest hanging of fruits
This was only one of six major land-use bills signed by Polis this cycle.
But then Polis goes and makes a much bigger problem elsewhere? What is this?
Merrill Stillwell: Big shift in Colorado with a light form of rent control.
United Kingdom
The lack of permission for a 24 hour bookstore is not unique to San Francisco.
France
The Chinese real estate boom was easy to see, but no one wanted to stop it, says The Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Feng. Well, one person named Xi did not want to stop it, until Xi suddenly did want to stop it. Then it stopped
But we all know the market can stay crazy longer than you can stay solvent. For the Chinese government doubly so. These were not easy short bets to make.
Argentina
Taiwan has one of most severe housing crises, the post goes into detail of how that happened, which is of course a lot of restrictions on building housing
Your Area City or State
Sacramento
Salt Lake City exploring reducing minimum lot sizes
Arizona legislature does it.
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