Best of 2019: California's Housing Crisis
We’ve learned that a surefire way to draw ten thousand visitors and dozens of comments to a Strong Towns article is to write about the housing affordability problem that plagues much of America—but nowhere more severely than coastal California. Of course, California housing issues are the subject of social media obsession and frequent conventional media coverage from local outlets all the way up to the New York Times. But one news story that crossed our paths this summer seemed to simultaneously embody the absurd extent of the problem, and point to what the Strong Towns movement has to offer to the conversation that’s unique.
I wrote in July about the denial in San Bruno, CA of a proposal to build hundreds of apartments on what is currently a disused parking lot. The developer moved heaven and earth to win approval: offered tens of millions of dollars worth of concessions to the city, complied with a local transit-oriented development plan which was recently approved by voters themselves (San Bruno is not a NIMBY bastion!)… and then was denied anyway on account of a somewhat strange technicality in the city’s laws. This is a place where the forces that would normally impose some sort of gravity on the situation, pulling things back toward normal, don’t seem to apply anymore.
In a November follow-up post, I check in on the latest developments in this saga, and offer more perspective on who benefits when we create as many hoops to jump through to build a building as San Bruno has (hint: it’s not who you’d think).
Specifically, what I hope to offer by examining stories like this is an understanding of the costs of fragility. A fragile system is one in which only one thing has to go wrong to cause a breakdown. Under the postwar suburban experiment, we have introduced an incredible amount of fragility to our governing institutions and processes, often by making them complicated in the seemingly noble pursuit of orderly, predictable planning. The extent of the symptoms is worse in California, but California’s underlying dysfunction is not unique. We all have the same financing mechanisms, similar regulatory straitjackets, the same incentives that punish small-scale change and encourage big, capital-intensive projects which, when they fail, only fail in big ways.
California can’t afford to go on with a politics in which every single housing development becomes a referendum, an existential battle over the state’s future identity. This is a politics that empowers only big actors: the local government that can demand tribute, and the large-scale, corporate developer that can pay it. Everybody else gets to watch helplessly, or at best, inveigh for a few minutes at a public meeting.
Under a Strong Towns approach, no neighborhood would be immune from change. And the next increment of neighborhood evolution would be something a small-scale builder or rehabber can participate in as of right: by picking up a quick permit from City Hall, and then picking up a hammer. -Daniel Herriges, Senior Editor
Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California
“If it's the case that, as Marx said, history's tragedies repeat themselves as farce, then California's never-ending housing crisis may be advancing to the "farce" stage.
The tragedy of it, after all, is old news at this point. It's become the numbing backdrop of life in California's wealthy but desperately unequal coastal metros. It manifests in nation-leading poverty and homelessness rates; in the statewide exodus of working-class Californians, and the fraying communities left behind; in young people lamenting, "Why is everyone I love leaving?"; in the loss of beloved small businesses, arts and activism; in the death of a 100-year old woman one month after her eviction. A sense of loss and helplessness pervades many of my conversations with friends in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I lived for seven years—both those who have found a way to stay put (often with financial help from parents), and those who have given up and moved away.
San Mateo County, just south of San Francisco, is the world headquarters of the likes of YouTube and Facebook. From 2010 to 2015, San Mateo County added 72,800 jobs but only 3,844 homes: that's 19 jobs for every home. Nineteen. Now, we can debate how much job growth the Bay Area should be experiencing, and what power cities do or don't have to slow it and encourage the tech industry to diversify its holdings elsewhere. But that 19:1 ratio is obscene. That ratio does not reflect a place in which there's a reasonably functional, responsive housing market.
So here comes the farce part…. “ Read the rest of the article.
When We Make It Hard to Build, We Give Developers More Power Over Our Communities
“This is a system designed to turn each individual development proposal into a high-stakes battle. And when that's the case, the only developers in the arena will be the ones big enough to throw their weight around.
The result of Ghielmetti's application—rejection by a single vote due to a procedural fluke—was unusual. The more common outcome of this process (and the likely eventual outcome in this case as well) is that the giant developer and the city government successfully reach an arrangement in which the developer offers the city a bunch of concessions in exchange for whatever zoning or other code changes they require to move forward. A perfunctory public hearing is held, and the project is approved—the concessions provide the necessary political cover for any conflicted elected official to vote "Yes" and still be able to answer to angry constituents later. It's not an explicit quid pro quo, but in practice it might as well be.
In all of this, it's the public that gets the short end of the stick. That culture of dealmaking and convoluted permitting processes makes housing scarcer and more expensive. It can result in land sitting idle for years waiting for a project of sufficient size and complexity to be worth the "return on brain damage" of getting permission to build. And sometimes, at the end of the day, the city ends up getting a building that actively harms the public realm, because of the leverage held by a developer dangling the promise of many millions of dollars in new tax base.” Read the rest of the article.
(Cover photo via @dataandpolitics on Twitter.)
Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is also a founding member of the organization. His work at Strong Towns focuses on housing issues, small-scale and incremental development, urban design, and lowering the barriers to entry for people to participate in creating resilient and prosperous neighborhoods. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota, with a concentration in Housing and Community Development.
Daniel’s work with Strong Towns reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children.