(Sorry, this was supposed to be a reply to a complaint that people should be allowed to have “nice things” like suburban-style housing.)
> The bill only applies in urban transit counties. These are counties with 15 or more passenger rail stations. This includes the counties of Alameda, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara.
That already excludes most of the rural land in California. Some of those counties are still pretty big, however, so the next bit is also important:
> Within these counties, areas within a half-mile of most of the following stations are now designated as transit-oriented development (TOD) zones:
> Areas within a half-mile of all heavy rail (e.g., BART) and/or very high-frequency commuter rail stations—defined as stations that run 72 or more trains per day—are designated as Tier 1 TOD zones.
> Areas within a half-mile of all light rail (e.g., the San Diego Trolley), BRT, and/or high-frequency commuter rail stations—defined as stations that run 48 or more trains per day—are designated as Tier 2 TOD zones.
> In smaller cities, defined as cities with a population of less than 35,000 residents, only the quarter-mile area of the TOD zone is covered. And if a county becomes an urban transit county after January 1, 2026, only heavy rail, light rail, and eligible commuter rail will be covered—not BRT.
It is bad planning to build this kind of transportation and expect the area within 1/2 mile of the stations to stay “suburban,” (which really means single-family; there’s plenty of apartment buildings in suburbs around the world) much less “rural.”
SB79 is a great step forward for California. Hopefully other states implement similar (and more aggressive) bills in their states. My dream world would see an elimination of local zoning as we do in the US, and a move to a zoning system more like the Japanese use. I would also love to see states adopt a Land-Value Tax to help incentivize development. Similar to SB79 I have always hoped for a bill that enforced something like within 1 mile of a school, all roads need to have cross walks, lights, and side walks to help kick start walkability in the US.
> So basically you want to reap all the benefits from living in a big city without any of the downsides.
Yes? Why is that bad? And I want everyone to be able to do the same, and not get crammed into microapartments.
> Increasing density is the only realistic way to address housing affordability.
No single large Western European or American city lowered housing costs by increasing density within the last 30 years. Your _only_ option to reduce housing costs is to reduce the population.
The thing is, you are also not entitled to "affordble housing". Or to any housing, for that matter.
You can keep trying to make everyone's life worse by making dense city living inevitable, but it will just make _everyone's_ life worse (very much including yours).
Or you can try to advocate for ways to _improve_ the life of everyone.
There's a sort of "you are why the world is the way it is" irony in your comment.
Development costs spiral once you cross the 1ac threshold because them you have to do stormwater permitting (which is federal in some cases) and that adds a ton of cost and wastes developable land. And then the scrutiny this brings can cause you problems on other axis. This is why newly built houses in the middle of nowhere on a bunch of acres.
Pretty much every commercial development, pretty much every cookie cutter residential subdivision of multiple houses, is saddled with costs that the sort of "5-over-1 here, shoehorn a duplex and some townhomes in there" type development 15min cities type people love isn't.
Stormwater permitting is the driving force behind why developments get laid out the ways that they do. It's why every big box store, every residential subdivision, every warehouse building, they all have the same dozen shapes oriented in one of the same dozen ways on the lot. This is also why every residential subdivision ever has an HOA, someone needs to be responsible for maintaining whatever the stormwater infrastructure is in perpetuity.
I’m not sure how you intended your post to be to interpreted. To me, the relevant point is that infrastructure is an expensive fixed cost and we should increase density where we’ve already made that investment.
My point is that reality is the exact opposite of what person I am replying to is asserting.
Some commercial warehouse building or dozen houses on 1/8ac each are punitively taxed (by enforcing additional expensive requirements) whereas dense residential development is not.
That’s an extremely poor proxy given that income tax is not the sole source of revenue in California, you’re not netting out state spend (which would be very important to the definition of subdsidy), and you don’t even specify whether you are speaking in aggregate or per capita.
No. It's the best proxy to determine who's sponsoring whom.
Corporate taxes are not a good proxy because they are imposed at the location of corporate headquarters. Which are almost always in the Downtowns even if the workers who produce all the value live in suburbs.
This is unironically the current state of things. If you want to live in a semi dense suburban area which is within walking distance of transit, restaurants, and parks, then you're pretty much out of luck or you're paying millions for the handful of houses that meet that demand.
Well. And why not make it more accessible for _everyone_ by ensuring that jobs are not available only in Downtowns of large cities?
It's not even that hard to do. Pass tax incentives for companies opening offices in smaller cities, tax incentives for remote work, and tax the dense office space.
As used in Section 33700, “firearm barrel” means the tube, usually metal and cylindrical, through which a projectile or shot charge is fired. A firearm barrel includes any forging, casting, printing, extrusion, machined body, or similar article that has reached a stage in manufacture where it may readily be completed, assembled, or converted to be used as a firearm barrel, or that is marketed or sold to the public to become or be used as a firearm barrel once completed, assembled, or converted. A firearm barrel may have a rifled or smooth bore.
Put compressed air (or maybe some capped off black powder) in tube, it will expel a projectile. PVC pipes are readily convertible into a tube through which a projectile is fired.
Next time read the bill before accusing someone of being a loon. They 100% meet the definition in the law.
I think Prop79 will be good long term but it will take decades for the changes to be felt. I hope that something with a bit more immediate shows up this year as well. Relooking at prop 13 seems to be one option.
I agree with the sentiment, but sadly even in its watered down form, SB79 was the result of a brutal legislative battle over the course of years, and even then it barely passed.
Getting Prop 13 overturned is about as likely as California seceding from the US.
I think getting Prop 13 repealed along the lines of Prop 15 (basically for investment property) may actually happen. I think the pro group is much more organized today than they were in 2020 and so it will stand a much better chance of succeeding.
That said, I fully agree with you that Prop 13 repeal for homeowners will "never" happen. The backlash would obviously be massive. But if they could keep it for homeowners and repeal it for all other types of property, including land, then that could be a major improvement because property owners would have to improve their properties to a "highest and best use" or sell it to pay the taxes.
Prop 13 is getting repealed practically speaking through time, as the main beneficiaries of the low taxes die; and the taxes they dynastically transfer to their kids get capped; and as those kids choose to sell those homes and move to New York.
There is no one simple solution to e.g. poor performance of US public schools. Repealing Prop 13 isn’t going to close the achievement gap, it’s not even going to slow the fall of performance since 1993, let alone the pandemic.
So not only is Prop 13 sort of being phased out naturally, the repeal would simply put a bunch of renters against rising costs from landlords in the places that actually matter like LA and SF, and you know, as much as I hate Prop 13 in principle, everything has settled on a delicate homeostasis where the people who want to get it repealed fully - which will never happen - will get way more than they bargained for.
I'm not sure how you're coming to this conclusion. When the property is transferred it is reassessed and the new buyer pays the full tax, but after that the taxes effectively decrease annually (increase at a rate lower than inflation). Everyone who owns a property more than a year or two in California benefits from Prop 13.
Nothing is phasing out and it has no sunset clause.
Okay… even if things worked exactly as you say. Is the repeal going to fix education? Is it going to result in home prices going down or up? Will the change in home prices that you predict cause more or fewer homes to be built? I hate Prop 13 but I hate it for reasons of justice and equity, not because I think it will have effects that it will not.
Residential real estate isn't causing the big issue. It's been under Prop 13 long enough that people have died off and the properties are now sufficiently staggered that residential real estate reassesses even if it does so slowly. Consequently, it's not really religious to remove commercial real estate from Prop 13.
The problem is that Prop 13 is worth sooooo much money to entrenched California commercial real estate owners (like The Irvine Company) that you have to be prepared for a MASSIVE money firefight if you really want to go after commercial real estate on it.
The vote was a bit closer than you might think for Prop 15, which was the last attempt, I think, to repeal Prop 13 for investment property. And in 2020 when that ballot measure was voted on the pro-repeal folks were nowhere near as organized as they are today. As I said in another comment I think there's a good chance that if they take another run at it they will succeed in repealing it for investment property because they will message aggressively that they're not after homeowners, which is what the investors convinced the electorate the last time they tried to repeal it for investment property.
And on the topic of residential, up until a few years ago if you died your heirs were allowed to inherit your tax basis, no strings attached, and so the "staggering" you're talking about has never really "staggered" en masse (if I'm understanding the way you're using that word). On top of that, even people who purchased property as late as 2020 are already massively benefiting from Prop 13. Each day home prices appreciate the new homeowner population just keeps replacing the dead in the anti-repeal camp for residential.
Edit: I was trying to put a footnote but it turned into italics so I just dropped the footnote
Houses built from advantage of SB79 are encumbered by the fact virtually every typical piece of pipe used to build a house is made a controlled material requiring a background check, under SB704.
As used in Section 33700, “firearm barrel” means the tube, usually metal and cylindrical, through which a projectile or shot charge is fired. A firearm barrel includes any forging, casting, printing, extrusion, machined body, or similar article that has reached a stage in manufacture where it may readily be completed, assembled, or converted to be used as a firearm barrel, or that is marketed or sold to the public to become or be used as a firearm barrel once completed, assembled, or converted. A firearm barrel may have a rifled or smooth bore.
Put compressed air (or maybe some capped off black powder) in tube, it will expel a projectile. PVC pipes are readily convertible into a tube through which a projectile is fired.
Have you read the bill? It literally outlaws (without background check) any piece of pipe which you can readily fire a projectile from. You can do that with pretty much any pipe, just by adjusting the charge and projectile size/type.
Even the process used to make PVC pipes is explicitly called out, which is extrusion.
Your farcical take is predicated on an interpretation of the above paragraph in which the bill claims anything from which a projectile may be expelled is a firearm barrel.
That is clearly not what the bill says, nor can it even be tortuously misconstrued as such.
It's also the way prosecutors constantly charge people with other laws.
They can drag in a potato cannon, maybe light it with some black powder if compressed air doesn't "count", and show that the PVC pipe readily expelled the projectile and thus the pipe by itself is a "firearm barrel" if it can readily be placed into such a potato gun. It would be no problem to prosecute someone for selling the PVC pipe to a plumber and 100% meet the letter of the law.
I don't see that as farcical but rather a straightforward application of the law. Maybe you find the law farcical/cranky but my interpretation isn't.
That's a bug of the judicial system's speed rather than the interpretation of law. A groundless lawsuit still needs to be heard through a glacial system before the result can be determined.
When time is money, such delays are takings from the applicant, and work like mafia protection money.
A firearm barrel includes any forging, casting, printing, extrusion, machined body, or similar article that has reached a stage in manufacture where it may readily be completed, assembled, or converted to be used as a firearm barrel
“firearm barrel” means the tube, usually metal and cylindrical, through which a projectile or shot charge is fired
It's not farcical. A PVC pipe is an extrusion that is "readily converted" into a tube that fires a projectile. It's clear as day. Have you never seen someone fire a "potato" gun and use PVC as a barrel?
SB 79 is a landmark win for California’s pro-housing movement—an ambitious, well-calibrated policy that combines zoning reform, affordability requirements, and transit-oriented development in a way that’s both bold and pragmatic. This post does an excellent job cutting through the noise to explain the what, where, and how of the bill, especially the thoughtful distinctions between Tier 1 and Tier 2 zones, the phased implementation, and the optional "Eckhouse Plans" that let cities customize density while meeting statewide goals. It’s encouraging to see legislation that balances urgency with flexibility, and even more encouraging to see it explained so clearly.
It could take up to 5 years to come into full effect, from my skim of the article. So, as revolutions in housing go, this is slow-burn.
Needed, won't fix housing next month or even next year.
Sometimes I wonder if a state went out and bought the input supply stocks (wood, particleboard, roofing materials) and sold them below cost at the longer base-line price, but exclusively to builders constructing homes, if they could prevent a grey market re-sale to the less housing oriented market. The problem with trying to drag supply prices back down is making secondary markets between your rate, and the market rate.
I am not believing there is an actual shortage worldwide of either construction grade lumber, or other inputs: Its shipping related, its logjams backing up because .. well .. the wheels fell off at the start of 2020 and we haven't got momentum back up.
Oh right. Ships. So maybe the state has to buy ships.. which demands steel.. which is hard to get right now...
onerous and overly burdensome regulations make it nye impossible to build in this state. The environmentalists have a throttle on California. That is coupled with the wealthy not wanting their home values to go down with new low cost housing built anywhere near them. These add up to skyrocketing home prices in CA.
> That is coupled with the wealthy not wanting their home values to go down
I keep hearing this criticism but I think it’s less about home values and more about how many people - wealthy and not wealthy - simply value their quality of life and don’t want that to be damaged by forced rezoning.
The 2020 CZU Lightning Complex Fires destroyed thousands of homes in the Santa Cruz mountains, a "wilderness" area that has been filled with mountain homes
Many (most) have not yet had permits issued for rebuilding, most commonly because the owners can not meet, or are unwilling to meet, the standards for septic systems.
There have been decades of higher standards for all sorts of code. Nothing nearly as stringent for multifsmlt housing, a code which makes housing six times safer than single family housing. But still strict enough that four decades of no-growth policy left most people completely unaware of how hard it is to build housing.
I bought some furniture from a guy in Ben Lomond and he told me that after the CZU fires, permitting was the bottleneck for most folks, to the point that even four years after the fires some people still were waiting. It's insane. IMO the bottleneck here is likely staffing. If someone wanted to streamline this they'd actually allocate some emergency funds statewide for this.
We really need to focus on streamlining and automating the process rather than hiring more government employees. Every county should be forced to use a single standardized API for permit applications. And if an application isn't denied within 30 days then it's automatically approved.
I mean, it was 16,000-18,000 homes that were destroyed? That's a hell of a lot when you consider that all the other new builds are still in the queue to be permitted too.
Sure! But you could treat it as an emergency and staff up. It could even be through a mutual aid system the way utilities team up to do repairs after disasters, borrowing permitting experts from other jurisdictions.
>borrowing permitting experts from other jurisdictions.
I don't think those people exist... State/City budgets have already been cut lean on this stuff and most places that aren't in the middle of a disaster are many months behind as it is.
These are not hard things to understand or solve, it's just that the majority of people don't want to understand them or face reality and the politicians will always serve up these kinds of con artist lies to placate people.
You cannot add ~60 million foreign national people to the US population in the last 25 years without severely impacting the housing situation when the USA has only built 1.1 million housing units on average over that period; most of those being locked into high prices due to the massive inflation over that time.
What makes it even worse is this obsession with both concentrating populations and jobs in urban centers, while at the same time being concerned with climate change and environmental protection. They are mutually exclusive things. This is an iron triangle issue, you can only have two of three things: affordable housing, immigration, climate/environment protection.
Being closer to where the things are so you can walk significantly drops the amount of fuel needed for transportation and opens up public transportation as a workable option.
> USA has only built 1.1 million housing units on average over that period;
That's a government issue, not a practical one. How many housing units did China build in that same amount of time?
It's because the triangle is missing the secret forth vertex: single family housing with a big private backyard and a lawn in the suburbs that's only accessible by car.
That would be a health metric, not an environmental one. While brake dust is a major contributor to this, a suburb next to a freeway is going to be pretty damn bad too.
> While brake dust is a major contributor to this, a suburb next to a freeway is going to be pretty damn bad too.
Relative to the rest of the area, for that specific pollutant, yes. Relative to a city dwelling of the same distance, no. Volume (ie Traffic) matters when comparing health impacts.
Freeway traffic next to suburbs is really the major driver here, with high speeds and tire microplastics (the biggest source of microplastics in the SF Bay Area is tires).
A suburbanite driving on their river of pollution for 50 miles every day is a much bigger impact than somebody taking the bus and train in the city. And even city streets do not see the level of pollution caused by freeways that snake through suburbs throughout the Bay Area and LA.
But honestly the gas stoves in most California kitchens are the true killer, yet nobody seems to even bother talking about that.
In any case: environmental metrics I had always thought about things that impact the environment: reduction of ecosystem, death of a particular types of animals (especially the ones we like), unhealthy water ways, etc. On all these, suburban life is absolutely horrific, urban and very rural life is pretty good. If you can drive to the Costco, you are probably living in the least environmentally friendly way possible.
As far as health metrics, whether from environmental effects or crime or the actual real killers: obesity, smoking, blood pressure, and heat disease, cities do better than rural areas:
It's ultimately a measure of the concentrations of pollutants in the air, which I would classify as an environmental measurement although perhaps a health one too.
No single thing will fix housing, and lots of things will interact to make any fix complicated and slow. The fast single things like forms of eminent domain and retrospective law changes turn out to incur massive legal cost to enact.
Short of seizing property and approvals for already lodged designs which were turned down for local opposition, it's all about time now. Time to start doing things under a new legal planning system.
Great for much needed housing, but this will poison the well for public transit and cause NIMBYs to triple down on opposition to public transit expansion…
That could happen. But on the other hand, all those new housing will create more people living around stations, providing more ridership and more revenue for public transportation, and hopefully more stations along the way.
Also, these new people would vote. The old NIMBYs are already opposing everything; how harder can they go? The demographic change might be enough to change local politics in some places.
Sounds a lot like replacement theory. New people come in, replace and marginalize the existing ones, who will be left with a changed neighborhood and no voice?
I'm not intimately familiar with Californian zoning, but I have to say, all this talk of the 'seventh Regional Housing Needs Assessment cycle' reminded me of the Five Year Plans used in socialist countries.
I wish the people of California the best of luck exceeding dwelling quotas in the upcoming seventh cycle! :P
Edit: I forgot how sensitive people can be to the word 'socialism'. I am not trying imply - with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer - that California is the Soviet Union. I am just genuinely amused by the language being used, speaking as someone with family history of living under socialism.
It’s quite common in the affairs of humans to plan recurring work on a schedule. It’s not quite as common to vote on the schedule and how to do it, but at least California seems to be a democracy in this respect.
So you're not implying that CA is the Soviet Union, but you are drawing the parallel with whatever socialist country you have a "family history of living under"? Gee, I wonder what that means. Seems like a distinction without a difference.
Just to give a little insight on this legislation, it has been described, rightfully so, as a boon to for-profit real estate developers so it's one of the least socialist things California has done in recent memory. It's stripping away local control and more or less forcing municipalities, in the limited geographies where this legislation applies, to allow housing to be built with far fewer government regulations. Frankly I'm shocked it passed, but just goes to show how bad the housing crisis has gotten.
That of course doesn't rebut your comment about RHNA reminding you of socialism, but bringing up socialism when this thread is about legislation that's about as capitalist as you're going to get in California is a bit ironic.
Edit: I'm not criticizing you by pointing out the irony, but since you said you're not that familiar with California I thought I'd mention how capitalist this legislation is.
He's such a huge technocrat, it would be a big departure from most governors. A huge policy nerd with tons of good ideas and a powerful staff devoted to trying out new things is almost better than we deserve in California.
(I will say that Wiener has had some missteps, on AI and restaurant fees, but they are pretty small compared to the good policy that he's gotten through.)
Love to see it. It's great to have rural low-density for people who want it, but if you're building public mass transit in a big city, you really gotta commit to density.
Exactly this. So much money for transit has been completely wasted because the zoning around stops is hilariously low. We shouldn't be spending any money for trains on places that are not fully committed to having 4-7 story apartments all around the stops.
It's all just to help the property investors - the mom and pop landlords, the mega corporate landlords.
"If we, your landlords, own a LOT more housing, surely you can see how that will trickle down to YOU eventually owning a house. It's obvious isn't it? Our goal as investors is to build so many houses that prices will crash and everyone will be able to afford a house to live in. That's what we deeply want for all, and that's why we need to end zoning laws."
When people have a new home to live in, it's a huge help to them.
There's this weird tendency to treat people in new housing as not people, as non humans.
In reality we have a massive housing shortage, and tons of people living in crowded situations, and massive displacement of the working class out of California.
All those people exist, are real, and are helped massively by new housing. One doesn't have to own a home to be a human with needs.
It's crazy how the same property investors and mega corporate landlords who apparently stand to gain from this were fighting it tooth and nail for the last decade...
> It's all just to help the property investors - the mom and pop landlords, the mega corporate landlords.
The landlord lobby explicitly opposes this because new housing challenges their monopoly. They are pro-shortage for very obvious reasons, and this comment shows you have misunderstood the situation entirely.
(Sorry, this was supposed to be a reply to a complaint that people should be allowed to have “nice things” like suburban-style housing.)
> The bill only applies in urban transit counties. These are counties with 15 or more passenger rail stations. This includes the counties of Alameda, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara.
That already excludes most of the rural land in California. Some of those counties are still pretty big, however, so the next bit is also important:
> Within these counties, areas within a half-mile of most of the following stations are now designated as transit-oriented development (TOD) zones:
> Areas within a half-mile of all heavy rail (e.g., BART) and/or very high-frequency commuter rail stations—defined as stations that run 72 or more trains per day—are designated as Tier 1 TOD zones.
> Areas within a half-mile of all light rail (e.g., the San Diego Trolley), BRT, and/or high-frequency commuter rail stations—defined as stations that run 48 or more trains per day—are designated as Tier 2 TOD zones.
> In smaller cities, defined as cities with a population of less than 35,000 residents, only the quarter-mile area of the TOD zone is covered. And if a county becomes an urban transit county after January 1, 2026, only heavy rail, light rail, and eligible commuter rail will be covered—not BRT.
It is bad planning to build this kind of transportation and expect the area within 1/2 mile of the stations to stay “suburban,” (which really means single-family; there’s plenty of apartment buildings in suburbs around the world) much less “rural.”
SB79 is a great step forward for California. Hopefully other states implement similar (and more aggressive) bills in their states. My dream world would see an elimination of local zoning as we do in the US, and a move to a zoning system more like the Japanese use. I would also love to see states adopt a Land-Value Tax to help incentivize development. Similar to SB79 I have always hoped for a bill that enforced something like within 1 mile of a school, all roads need to have cross walks, lights, and side walks to help kick start walkability in the US.
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If you want rural, then don’t move to a metro area with millions of people.
Those aren’t the only choices. It’s okay to have urban areas that are low density but not quite as low as rural. This prop overrides that choice.
No its doesnt. If you want a suburban sfh lifestyle you just need to buy in an area more than half a mile from public transit.
Ah. But that is the trick!
You have to move into dense helks, because it is the only place with decent jobs.
So basically you want to reap all the benefits from living in a big city without any of the downsides.
California has been trying this for decades and it really isn’t working out, except maybe for people with very high salaries.
Increasing density is the only realistic way to address housing affordability.
> So basically you want to reap all the benefits from living in a big city without any of the downsides.
Yes? Why is that bad? And I want everyone to be able to do the same, and not get crammed into microapartments.
> Increasing density is the only realistic way to address housing affordability.
No single large Western European or American city lowered housing costs by increasing density within the last 30 years. Your _only_ option to reduce housing costs is to reduce the population.
It's as simple as that.
Can you list some examples where a city has tried this and it failed?
The only example I can think of is Minneapolis, and they have seen lower rent increases than similar cities, so it seems successful.
But outside of that, I just don’t think it’s been tried enough to really make any conclusions right now.
You are not entitled to have a town with no bus service within a humanly drivable distance from you decent job, to which you aren't entitled either.
Those who blame others of collectivism have the weirdest sense of entitlements...
The thing is, you are also not entitled to "affordble housing". Or to any housing, for that matter.
You can keep trying to make everyone's life worse by making dense city living inevitable, but it will just make _everyone's_ life worse (very much including yours).
Or you can try to advocate for ways to _improve_ the life of everyone.
I am entitled to build housing on land I own. You are not entitled to say I cant.
So move to your magical suburb or rural area with decent jobs.
If you want nice things, be prepared to pay the true cost for them instead of being subsidized by everyone else.
There's a sort of "you are why the world is the way it is" irony in your comment.
Development costs spiral once you cross the 1ac threshold because them you have to do stormwater permitting (which is federal in some cases) and that adds a ton of cost and wastes developable land. And then the scrutiny this brings can cause you problems on other axis. This is why newly built houses in the middle of nowhere on a bunch of acres.
Pretty much every commercial development, pretty much every cookie cutter residential subdivision of multiple houses, is saddled with costs that the sort of "5-over-1 here, shoehorn a duplex and some townhomes in there" type development 15min cities type people love isn't.
Stormwater permitting is the driving force behind why developments get laid out the ways that they do. It's why every big box store, every residential subdivision, every warehouse building, they all have the same dozen shapes oriented in one of the same dozen ways on the lot. This is also why every residential subdivision ever has an HOA, someone needs to be responsible for maintaining whatever the stormwater infrastructure is in perpetuity.
I’m not sure how you intended your post to be to interpreted. To me, the relevant point is that infrastructure is an expensive fixed cost and we should increase density where we’ve already made that investment.
My point is that reality is the exact opposite of what person I am replying to is asserting.
Some commercial warehouse building or dozen houses on 1/8ac each are punitively taxed (by enforcing additional expensive requirements) whereas dense residential development is not.
Suburbs subsidize cities. If we use personal income taxes as a proxy.
That’s an extremely poor proxy given that income tax is not the sole source of revenue in California, you’re not netting out state spend (which would be very important to the definition of subdsidy), and you don’t even specify whether you are speaking in aggregate or per capita.
No. It's the best proxy to determine who's sponsoring whom.
Corporate taxes are not a good proxy because they are imposed at the location of corporate headquarters. Which are almost always in the Downtowns even if the workers who produce all the value live in suburbs.
Ditto for sales taxes.
This is a drop in the bucket, the Bay Area isn’t going to become Hong Kong anytime soon.
:-(
> Can't have nice things
This is unironically the current state of things. If you want to live in a semi dense suburban area which is within walking distance of transit, restaurants, and parks, then you're pretty much out of luck or you're paying millions for the handful of houses that meet that demand.
Well. And why not make it more accessible for _everyone_ by ensuring that jobs are not available only in Downtowns of large cities?
It's not even that hard to do. Pass tax incentives for companies opening offices in smaller cities, tax incentives for remote work, and tax the dense office space.
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Read it:
Put compressed air (or maybe some capped off black powder) in tube, it will expel a projectile. PVC pipes are readily convertible into a tube through which a projectile is fired.Next time read the bill before accusing someone of being a loon. They 100% meet the definition in the law.
I think Prop79 will be good long term but it will take decades for the changes to be felt. I hope that something with a bit more immediate shows up this year as well. Relooking at prop 13 seems to be one option.
I agree with the sentiment, but sadly even in its watered down form, SB79 was the result of a brutal legislative battle over the course of years, and even then it barely passed.
Getting Prop 13 overturned is about as likely as California seceding from the US.
Actually, it might even be less likely than that.
I think getting Prop 13 repealed along the lines of Prop 15 (basically for investment property) may actually happen. I think the pro group is much more organized today than they were in 2020 and so it will stand a much better chance of succeeding.
That said, I fully agree with you that Prop 13 repeal for homeowners will "never" happen. The backlash would obviously be massive. But if they could keep it for homeowners and repeal it for all other types of property, including land, then that could be a major improvement because property owners would have to improve their properties to a "highest and best use" or sell it to pay the taxes.
Prop 13 is getting repealed practically speaking through time, as the main beneficiaries of the low taxes die; and the taxes they dynastically transfer to their kids get capped; and as those kids choose to sell those homes and move to New York.
There is no one simple solution to e.g. poor performance of US public schools. Repealing Prop 13 isn’t going to close the achievement gap, it’s not even going to slow the fall of performance since 1993, let alone the pandemic.
So not only is Prop 13 sort of being phased out naturally, the repeal would simply put a bunch of renters against rising costs from landlords in the places that actually matter like LA and SF, and you know, as much as I hate Prop 13 in principle, everything has settled on a delicate homeostasis where the people who want to get it repealed fully - which will never happen - will get way more than they bargained for.
> Prop 13 sort of being phased out naturally
I'm not sure how you're coming to this conclusion. When the property is transferred it is reassessed and the new buyer pays the full tax, but after that the taxes effectively decrease annually (increase at a rate lower than inflation). Everyone who owns a property more than a year or two in California benefits from Prop 13.
Nothing is phasing out and it has no sunset clause.
Okay… even if things worked exactly as you say. Is the repeal going to fix education? Is it going to result in home prices going down or up? Will the change in home prices that you predict cause more or fewer homes to be built? I hate Prop 13 but I hate it for reasons of justice and equity, not because I think it will have effects that it will not.
Prop 13 is a religious document in California.
You'd have more luck persuading the Catholic Church to repeal the Bible.
> Prop 13 is a religious document in California.
Residential real estate isn't causing the big issue. It's been under Prop 13 long enough that people have died off and the properties are now sufficiently staggered that residential real estate reassesses even if it does so slowly. Consequently, it's not really religious to remove commercial real estate from Prop 13.
The problem is that Prop 13 is worth sooooo much money to entrenched California commercial real estate owners (like The Irvine Company) that you have to be prepared for a MASSIVE money firefight if you really want to go after commercial real estate on it.
The vote was a bit closer than you might think for Prop 15, which was the last attempt, I think, to repeal Prop 13 for investment property. And in 2020 when that ballot measure was voted on the pro-repeal folks were nowhere near as organized as they are today. As I said in another comment I think there's a good chance that if they take another run at it they will succeed in repealing it for investment property because they will message aggressively that they're not after homeowners, which is what the investors convinced the electorate the last time they tried to repeal it for investment property.
And on the topic of residential, up until a few years ago if you died your heirs were allowed to inherit your tax basis, no strings attached, and so the "staggering" you're talking about has never really "staggered" en masse (if I'm understanding the way you're using that word). On top of that, even people who purchased property as late as 2020 are already massively benefiting from Prop 13. Each day home prices appreciate the new homeowner population just keeps replacing the dead in the anti-repeal camp for residential.
Edit: I was trying to put a footnote but it turned into italics so I just dropped the footnote
Houses built from advantage of SB79 are encumbered by the fact virtually every typical piece of pipe used to build a house is made a controlled material requiring a background check, under SB704.
Please stop repeating this intentionally ridiculous misinterpretation all over this thread.
Please read it. I'm 100% right.
Put compressed air (or maybe some capped off black powder) in tube, it will expel a projectile. PVC pipes are readily convertible into a tube through which a projectile is fired.Have you read the bill? It literally outlaws (without background check) any piece of pipe which you can readily fire a projectile from. You can do that with pretty much any pipe, just by adjusting the charge and projectile size/type.
Even the process used to make PVC pipes is explicitly called out, which is extrusion.
Your farcical take is predicated on an interpretation of the above paragraph in which the bill claims anything from which a projectile may be expelled is a firearm barrel.
That is clearly not what the bill says, nor can it even be tortuously misconstrued as such.
I am sympathetic to the guy’s crank interpretation, because that’s exactly how lawsuits against development that drag on for ages work.
It's also the way prosecutors constantly charge people with other laws.
They can drag in a potato cannon, maybe light it with some black powder if compressed air doesn't "count", and show that the PVC pipe readily expelled the projectile and thus the pipe by itself is a "firearm barrel" if it can readily be placed into such a potato gun. It would be no problem to prosecute someone for selling the PVC pipe to a plumber and 100% meet the letter of the law.
I don't see that as farcical but rather a straightforward application of the law. Maybe you find the law farcical/cranky but my interpretation isn't.
That's a bug of the judicial system's speed rather than the interpretation of law. A groundless lawsuit still needs to be heard through a glacial system before the result can be determined.
When time is money, such delays are takings from the applicant, and work like mafia protection money.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tS2jKYbzsnA
SB 79 is a landmark win for California’s pro-housing movement—an ambitious, well-calibrated policy that combines zoning reform, affordability requirements, and transit-oriented development in a way that’s both bold and pragmatic. This post does an excellent job cutting through the noise to explain the what, where, and how of the bill, especially the thoughtful distinctions between Tier 1 and Tier 2 zones, the phased implementation, and the optional "Eckhouse Plans" that let cities customize density while meeting statewide goals. It’s encouraging to see legislation that balances urgency with flexibility, and even more encouraging to see it explained so clearly.
It could take up to 5 years to come into full effect, from my skim of the article. So, as revolutions in housing go, this is slow-burn.
Needed, won't fix housing next month or even next year.
Sometimes I wonder if a state went out and bought the input supply stocks (wood, particleboard, roofing materials) and sold them below cost at the longer base-line price, but exclusively to builders constructing homes, if they could prevent a grey market re-sale to the less housing oriented market. The problem with trying to drag supply prices back down is making secondary markets between your rate, and the market rate.
I am not believing there is an actual shortage worldwide of either construction grade lumber, or other inputs: Its shipping related, its logjams backing up because .. well .. the wheels fell off at the start of 2020 and we haven't got momentum back up.
Oh right. Ships. So maybe the state has to buy ships.. which demands steel.. which is hard to get right now...
The California housing crisis is a result of restrictive local policy preventing housing starts, not a shortage of materials.
onerous and overly burdensome regulations make it nye impossible to build in this state. The environmentalists have a throttle on California. That is coupled with the wealthy not wanting their home values to go down with new low cost housing built anywhere near them. These add up to skyrocketing home prices in CA.
> That is coupled with the wealthy not wanting their home values to go down
I keep hearing this criticism but I think it’s less about home values and more about how many people - wealthy and not wealthy - simply value their quality of life and don’t want that to be damaged by forced rezoning.
A large majority of SF residents support upzoning: https://growsf.org/pulse/growsf-pulse-october-2024/#allowing...
Aren't there a lot of people in the Palisades still waiting for permits to rebuild from the fires almost a year ago?
It's utterly absurd looking from the outside that officials are claiming the permits are being "fast tracked" even now.
The 2020 CZU Lightning Complex Fires destroyed thousands of homes in the Santa Cruz mountains, a "wilderness" area that has been filled with mountain homes
Many (most) have not yet had permits issued for rebuilding, most commonly because the owners can not meet, or are unwilling to meet, the standards for septic systems.
There have been decades of higher standards for all sorts of code. Nothing nearly as stringent for multifsmlt housing, a code which makes housing six times safer than single family housing. But still strict enough that four decades of no-growth policy left most people completely unaware of how hard it is to build housing.
"almost a year" isn't a very long time for West Coast permits
The duplex I'm in took... 4-5 years of permitting? Something like that.
Totally insane waits, I agree.
I bought some furniture from a guy in Ben Lomond and he told me that after the CZU fires, permitting was the bottleneck for most folks, to the point that even four years after the fires some people still were waiting. It's insane. IMO the bottleneck here is likely staffing. If someone wanted to streamline this they'd actually allocate some emergency funds statewide for this.
We really need to focus on streamlining and automating the process rather than hiring more government employees. Every county should be forced to use a single standardized API for permit applications. And if an application isn't denied within 30 days then it's automatically approved.
literally any attention on this problem would be a tremendous improvement.
Yes.
https://recovery.lacounty.gov/rebuilding/permitting-progress...
2162 permit applications received; 1916 applications have full plans submitted. 534 permits issued so far.
I mean, it was 16,000-18,000 homes that were destroyed? That's a hell of a lot when you consider that all the other new builds are still in the queue to be permitted too.
Sure! But you could treat it as an emergency and staff up. It could even be through a mutual aid system the way utilities team up to do repairs after disasters, borrowing permitting experts from other jurisdictions.
>borrowing permitting experts from other jurisdictions.
I don't think those people exist... State/City budgets have already been cut lean on this stuff and most places that aren't in the middle of a disaster are many months behind as it is.
The cost of permits alone would easily pay for the extra staff and overtime. Most places in California charge what, $1-3k per house?
These are not hard things to understand or solve, it's just that the majority of people don't want to understand them or face reality and the politicians will always serve up these kinds of con artist lies to placate people.
You cannot add ~60 million foreign national people to the US population in the last 25 years without severely impacting the housing situation when the USA has only built 1.1 million housing units on average over that period; most of those being locked into high prices due to the massive inflation over that time.
What makes it even worse is this obsession with both concentrating populations and jobs in urban centers, while at the same time being concerned with climate change and environmental protection. They are mutually exclusive things. This is an iron triangle issue, you can only have two of three things: affordable housing, immigration, climate/environment protection.
> They are mutually exclusive things.
Source: You made it up.
Being closer to where the things are so you can walk significantly drops the amount of fuel needed for transportation and opens up public transportation as a workable option.
> USA has only built 1.1 million housing units on average over that period;
That's a government issue, not a practical one. How many housing units did China build in that same amount of time?
I don’t understand, why is urban concentration anathema to environmental protection? It seems instead to be in service of it?
I don't understand why this is a iron triangle situation.
Higher density housing -- and a lot of it -- solves for all three, right? If not, why not?
It's because the triangle is missing the secret forth vertex: single family housing with a big private backyard and a lawn in the suburbs that's only accessible by car.
What an incredibly weird take. Higher density cities are better in virtually any environmental metric per capita. This is widely supported
Even as measured by pollutants per breath inhaled?
That would be a health metric, not an environmental one. While brake dust is a major contributor to this, a suburb next to a freeway is going to be pretty damn bad too.
> While brake dust is a major contributor to this, a suburb next to a freeway is going to be pretty damn bad too.
Relative to the rest of the area, for that specific pollutant, yes. Relative to a city dwelling of the same distance, no. Volume (ie Traffic) matters when comparing health impacts.
Freeway traffic next to suburbs is really the major driver here, with high speeds and tire microplastics (the biggest source of microplastics in the SF Bay Area is tires).
A suburbanite driving on their river of pollution for 50 miles every day is a much bigger impact than somebody taking the bus and train in the city. And even city streets do not see the level of pollution caused by freeways that snake through suburbs throughout the Bay Area and LA.
But honestly the gas stoves in most California kitchens are the true killer, yet nobody seems to even bother talking about that.
In any case: environmental metrics I had always thought about things that impact the environment: reduction of ecosystem, death of a particular types of animals (especially the ones we like), unhealthy water ways, etc. On all these, suburban life is absolutely horrific, urban and very rural life is pretty good. If you can drive to the Costco, you are probably living in the least environmentally friendly way possible.
As far as health metrics, whether from environmental effects or crime or the actual real killers: obesity, smoking, blood pressure, and heat disease, cities do better than rural areas:
https://schaeffer.usc.edu/research/rural-americans-dont-live...
Our cars are killing us in every way yet we refuse to acknowledge the massive health effects.
It's ultimately a measure of the concentrations of pollutants in the air, which I would classify as an environmental measurement although perhaps a health one too.
Working backwards from not wanting immigrants to be here paints them into some nonsensical corners.
Multifamily housing developments take years to plan and build anyway, especially in California and especially in these urban areas.
No single thing will fix housing, and lots of things will interact to make any fix complicated and slow. The fast single things like forms of eminent domain and retrospective law changes turn out to incur massive legal cost to enact.
Short of seizing property and approvals for already lodged designs which were turned down for local opposition, it's all about time now. Time to start doing things under a new legal planning system.
Great for much needed housing, but this will poison the well for public transit and cause NIMBYs to triple down on opposition to public transit expansion…
That could happen. But on the other hand, all those new housing will create more people living around stations, providing more ridership and more revenue for public transportation, and hopefully more stations along the way.
Also, these new people would vote. The old NIMBYs are already opposing everything; how harder can they go? The demographic change might be enough to change local politics in some places.
Right but SB79 will never go into effect in counties if existing homeowners vote to prevent public transit ststions to stop the upzoning..
Sounds a lot like replacement theory. New people come in, replace and marginalize the existing ones, who will be left with a changed neighborhood and no voice?
How much more tripped down can they get? I think they’ve been tripped down on it for decades.
Yeah, I fear this. This will also make pedestrian bridges that connect housing to transit some that NIMBYs dislike even more. For example.
I was literally thinking that. I wouldn't be surprised if Orange County's rail now comes to a halt.
How about if we just greatly reduce government's power to regulate building of all sorts? You would see vastly more construction then.
I'm not intimately familiar with Californian zoning, but I have to say, all this talk of the 'seventh Regional Housing Needs Assessment cycle' reminded me of the Five Year Plans used in socialist countries.
I wish the people of California the best of luck exceeding dwelling quotas in the upcoming seventh cycle! :P
Edit: I forgot how sensitive people can be to the word 'socialism'. I am not trying imply - with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer - that California is the Soviet Union. I am just genuinely amused by the language being used, speaking as someone with family history of living under socialism.
It’s quite common in the affairs of humans to plan recurring work on a schedule. It’s not quite as common to vote on the schedule and how to do it, but at least California seems to be a democracy in this respect.
So you're not implying that CA is the Soviet Union, but you are drawing the parallel with whatever socialist country you have a "family history of living under"? Gee, I wonder what that means. Seems like a distinction without a difference.
Just to give a little insight on this legislation, it has been described, rightfully so, as a boon to for-profit real estate developers so it's one of the least socialist things California has done in recent memory. It's stripping away local control and more or less forcing municipalities, in the limited geographies where this legislation applies, to allow housing to be built with far fewer government regulations. Frankly I'm shocked it passed, but just goes to show how bad the housing crisis has gotten.
That of course doesn't rebut your comment about RHNA reminding you of socialism, but bringing up socialism when this thread is about legislation that's about as capitalist as you're going to get in California is a bit ironic.
Edit: I'm not criticizing you by pointing out the irony, but since you said you're not that familiar with California I thought I'd mention how capitalist this legislation is.
This doesn't cover Atherton's train stop, based on their estimated map, which is interesting.
Atherton closed their station in 2020 and, through a great twist of irony, it will become a museum for the line that's still alive next to it: https://inmenlo.com/2025/06/16/community-interest-meeting-on...
The residents of atherton saw this coming and closed their train station to get around it
Atherton’s train station has zero trains per week that stop there.
Honestly hope Senator Scott Wiener runs for governor
He's such a huge technocrat, it would be a big departure from most governors. A huge policy nerd with tons of good ideas and a powerful staff devoted to trying out new things is almost better than we deserve in California.
(I will say that Wiener has had some missteps, on AI and restaurant fees, but they are pretty small compared to the good policy that he's gotten through.)
Ah yes, the technocrat who missteps on the most obvious political and policy wins…
Love to see it. It's great to have rural low-density for people who want it, but if you're building public mass transit in a big city, you really gotta commit to density.
Exactly this. So much money for transit has been completely wasted because the zoning around stops is hilariously low. We shouldn't be spending any money for trains on places that are not fully committed to having 4-7 story apartments all around the stops.
It's all just to help the property investors - the mom and pop landlords, the mega corporate landlords.
"If we, your landlords, own a LOT more housing, surely you can see how that will trickle down to YOU eventually owning a house. It's obvious isn't it? Our goal as investors is to build so many houses that prices will crash and everyone will be able to afford a house to live in. That's what we deeply want for all, and that's why we need to end zoning laws."
When people have a new home to live in, it's a huge help to them.
There's this weird tendency to treat people in new housing as not people, as non humans.
In reality we have a massive housing shortage, and tons of people living in crowded situations, and massive displacement of the working class out of California.
All those people exist, are real, and are helped massively by new housing. One doesn't have to own a home to be a human with needs.
You'll own nothing and be happy, eh?
What are you talking about?
It's crazy how the same property investors and mega corporate landlords who apparently stand to gain from this were fighting it tooth and nail for the last decade...
Why is more housing a good thing if it is just going to be owned by the people who already own all the housing?
Why do we have to be thankful and grateful for that?
> It's all just to help the property investors - the mom and pop landlords, the mega corporate landlords.
The landlord lobby explicitly opposes this because new housing challenges their monopoly. They are pro-shortage for very obvious reasons, and this comment shows you have misunderstood the situation entirely.
You can invest in a REIT fund if you believe this is a good asset class. Real estate investing is not a conspiracy