How transit-oriented development can make California’s cities affordable
According to Liam Dillon in the LA Times, SB 827, the “transit-rich housing bonus,” would “dramatically increase housing density near transit stops across California.” I wrote another piece already on how it goes about doing this. But what might be even more important is why it’s so exciting.
The rent in California is too damn high. Especially in the parts of the state where all the best jobs are. And don’t even look at the price of purchasing a house or condo.
We all know this, of course.
There’s a simple logic to the problem of housing in popular cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles: the number of people that can afford to call a city home is limited by the number of homes in that city. There are ways to pick and choose which people get to live in your city without changing the number of homes, but you aren’t going to make a city affordable to more people without building more dwelling units.
We all know this, of course.
And yet…
Cities all over the Golden State continue to do the exact opposite of what you’d want them to do if you want more people to be able to afford living in them. Rather than finding ways to enable and encourage the creation of more homes, which would enable more people to afford to live in our cities, they find ways to ban and discourage it.
Most people agree that the state as a whole has a shortage of housing, and yet, those very same people are often opposed to particular buildings in particular places. You need only check the comment sections for various local newspapers to find hundreds of experts on the question of where housing is to be added. They’re usually very specific, and the location is usually some place they don’t go very often.
The obvious solution to that, it seems, is to change the rules at the state level. Instead of leaving the decisions up to local governments, or worse yet, to whatever tiny but vocal groups of local residents can find the time and motivation to show up to public hearings, we could simply make the rules in Sacramento.
This is easier said than done, though. We may not want local governments to limit our ability as a state to add enough housing to meet the needs of a growing population, but we don’t want to prevent them from exercising some control over what gets built where.
There’s a lot of plain old technical judgment involved in city planning. You wouldn’t want lots of apartment buildings constructed in a place where local services and transportation would be very expensive to provide, just to find the new residents, who will of course be voters, demanding that exactly such infrastructure be provided to them!
SB827 shortcuts all that by identifying one large class of places in California that we can be pretty sure are good candidates for building apartments.
These may not be the best places to build apartments, but they are certainly good. There might be other places you would allow apartments, too, but these would certainly qualify.
They are pretty much all near schools and jobs and stores and healthcare facilities and all of that, or at least there are existing (and if need be upgradeable) ways of getting to those places. They are bound to already have municipal sewers and water supply and power and gas lines. And they can be defined in just half a page of legislative language.
What I’m talking about is this: places within walking distance of high frequency public transit where currently some sort of housing, usually single family homes, is already allowed.
Sure, people in these neighborhoods may not like it when all of a sudden it becomes legal to build apartment buildings on their quiet streets. But we have to build somewhere. The only alternative is continued statewide gentrification, a process by which California increasingly becomes a place for wealthy professionals and those who provide direct personal services to them, and pretty much everybody else gets to move to Texas.
California has mostly run out of land to build new suburbs on. Sure, there’s lots of empty space in the state, but empty space that isn’t already some highly protected form of park or wilderness and that’s within commuting distance of a major job center… that ship has pretty much sailed.
What SB827 gives us is something California has never had before: a clear, statewide definition of at least some subset of places in existing cities with existing infrastructure and existing services where allowing the current owners, or those they’re willing to sell to, to build modest apartment buildings (we’re not talking skyscrapers here) is clearly not going to be irresponsible city planning.
It only addresses some of the mechanisms that local NIMBYs can use to make housing construction difficult. It says nothing, for instance, about the process by which cities apply their local ordinances. But there’s other reforms that have happened recently, and are continuing to happen, and together, these reforms may actually make a big difference.
At this point some people may be thinking: but what about local control? What about community character? What about those towns that have always been quiet places full of detached single family homes?
This is a long-running argument that I can’t really cover in detail right now. This article was really more intended for people who already understand that with the current level of housing shortage, we cannot afford to prioritize the tender sensibilities of single family home dwellers over the need to create adequate housing for a growing population.
But, just briefly—my answer is the following: these places got to be like that by imposing a large entry fee on anybody that wants to live in them. The entry fee is charged in the form of square feet of land that a new resident must somehow pay for, whether they like it or not. In extreme cases, the requirement may be as much as an acre of land per household, or even more.
Of course that’s not how it’s phrased, but think about it: if you say that each parcel in your town must be at least an acre, and can have only one home on it, that means you cannot have a household in that town without paying for not just a home, but also an entire acre of land for it to sit on.
I don’t think a society of closed-off communities that dig moats around themselves and exclude anyone that might bring demographic or cultural change is the kind of society we should want California to be. I didn’t come here to raise barriers to entry to those who come after me, let alone those who are born here.
California has one of the most dynamic and productive economies in the world, and some of the most amazing cultural diversity I’ve ever witnessed. I want more people to have an opportunity to be part of that, and you can’t do that if your first priority is to keep cities looking exactly the way they do today.
For more about the economics of this:
To learn more about the way that density restrictions are, historically, in many cases blatantly an attempt at not just economic but also racial discrimination, I can recommend this book:
