-Street width doesn’t meet NFPA. Widen or remove street parking.
-Buildings too close to street. Need 15-30’ from curb to face.
-Trees likely need to go as they block easy ladder access.
-Where’s the fire lane?
Seth Largo: You have the courage to hate the rich. You may even have the courage to hate “disabled” vets. But do you have the courage to hate firefighters?
Our priorities on this are deeply stupid. The value of the fire harms prevented is vastly exceeded by the value of space lost, even before factoring in the change in culture from having eyes on the street or the value of aesthetics.
Fire codes simply should not be allowed to interfere with life to this extent, and this barely scratches the surface of what those codes end up doing. It is too high a price, far higher than the cost of actual fire risk. Make everyone who buys or rents sign a very clear waiver of everything involved and let people make their own choices.
Beauty
Perhaps a lot more people would support new building if it looked better.
Alas, given all the approvals you need, and all the associated costs, and the fact that most of the value of that beauty is not captured in the price, everything new is ugly.
We could fix this, if we cared enough.
Kelsey Piper: anecdotally I hear from lots of people whose opposition to new construction is entirely that they think it’s hideous and who are happy to be YIMBY for pretty buildings
David Broockman: New paper with Christopher Elmendorf and Joshua Kalla.
An under-appreciated reason why voters oppose dense new housing, especially in less-dense neighborhoods: they think it looks ugly and want to prevent that, even in other neighborhoods.
Some of what we think is NIMBYism might not be!
… We propose a third explanation: Sociotropic Aesthetic Judgments.
Voters form automatic judgments about whether a building is visually appealing or “fits in.” Importantly, they apply these aesthetic standards broadly—not just on their own block, but wherever housing is proposed.
… Existing theories predict homeowners in dense areas should be the biggest opponents of more density in already-dense areas--it’s their backyard!
But homeowners on corridors are actually *most* supportive of AB 2011-style upzoning of corridors!
We think two things are going on here:
1. People self-select into neighborhoods that match their aesthetic tastes. If you live in density, you likely have a “taste” for it.
2. Voters prefer development that “fits in” with the existing built environment...
How much does “ugliness” actually matter compared to other concerns? A lot.
We surveyed voters on various objections to housing. As Figure 3 shows, the belief that “Cities look nicer when they have fewer tall apartment buildings” is a top predictor of opposition.
We then ran an experiment varying attributes of a proposed building: taxes, parking, and the architect’s design reputation.
Result 1: The aesthetic quality of the project was a massive driver of support--outweighing concerns about parking or tax revenue.
Result 2...
In a second vignette, we showed respondents images of buildings.
The results also confirm that both visual appeal and fit in context powerfully drive support for housing, and seemingly far more than affordability concerns.
Adrian Pietrzak: That’s right! My newly published paper (with Tali Mendelberg) asks: are concerns about ‘neighborhood context’ real? (spoiler: yes, very much)
Do people prefer traditional/brick buildings? (spoiler: no). And does changing style to “fit” boost support? (spoiler: only a tiny bit).
… What did we find? People hate tall buildings (not surprising). Style had very little impact (we found that surprising). If anything, people actually liked modern, black and white rainscreen cladded buildings *more*!
What’s driving this effect? It’s mostly height… Changing the style of a taller building to fit the style of the surrounding shorter buildings had nearly no effect!
… So, it seems the typical person does genuinely care about neighborhood character (in the innocuous, non-dog whistle sense), and getting people to support housing is probably not as simple as making it brick. Zoning for uniformity can backfire, making future densification hard!
Instead of enabling new beauty, we ‘preserve’ a bunch of existing buildings, that no one wants or values, often ugly and run down, sometimes literal parking lots, at ludicrously high costs that no one would ever choose to pay if presented with the bill.
Is there a place for some amount of historical preservation of actually unique and special buildings with histories? Sure, but 90%+ of the time it is the other way.
Yashar Ali: White House begins demolishing East Wing facade to build Trump’s ballroom.
Armand Domalewski: we’ve got stronger historic preservation rules for parking lots in this country than we do the White House.
It’s funny that Trumpers think I’m mad that he tore down the East Wing ballroom when I’m much more mad about how hard it is to replace a parking lot with housing.
Indeed. I have zero issue with installing the ballroom or tearing down existing buildings to do it, although a much higher priority would be more office space.
The issue is that the vast majority of historical preservation requirements and landmarks are, quite frankly, stupid. The correct amount of mandated preservation is not zero, but very few buildings and details justify the costs involved.
If people disagree with a given case, there is an obvious way they can solve this, which is for governments or private groups in some combination to bid on the relevant properties and choose to preserve them. Or similarly, as in the White House windows, they can pay the cost of a particular preservation. Otherwise, it’s not worth it.
You Only Need One Staircase
I was highly confident the requirements for second staircases was dumb. I did not realize it was quite this dumb.
Samuel Hughes: The fascinating thing about the second staircase rule is that the Government knew it was a bad regulation: the Government’s own cost-benefit analysis found that its costs are 294 times greater than its benefits.”
The quoted thread goes through various reasons London has managed to construct only 5% of even its meager housing targets lately. Oh, the usual. A new regulatory approval is required for tall buildings from the Building Safety Regulator, which is heavily backlogged, and also only approves 30% of applications. This should be a Can’t Happen, it is very expensive to try and get rejected so if you have a 70% rejection rate then that means no one can figure out what it takes to get approved except by trying and finding out.
Also the second staircase requirement is a big deal, especially combined with other rules against corridors that waste huge percentages of space. And the ban on single aspect buildings, which makes efficient layouts even harder. There was expropriation of freeholders, which makes development of more buildings much less desirable. There is a new landfill tax. And so on. Almost no new housing, in a city that is already profoundly starved for housing and unaffordable.
Zoning Run Amok
Even more than usual that is, also I feel bad for this woman but this is hilarious.
Blightersort: speaking as an actuary, i simply love the “you’re on a 1-100 flood plain” and her asking “what year are we on?” just fantastic.
you understand, intellectually, that basically no one can think statistically but seeing it in action like this is <chef’s kiss>
Christoph Rehage: I once knew a guy who did tons of ecstacy pills one time he read an article that said *on average* 100 hits are fine for a person and then he looked me dead in the eye and said: “I’ve done like 90, I can do a few more”
Matrix Mysteries (has the 2 min video): This woman OWNS 37 acres of land. The government STILL told her she can’t put a tiny home on it. “I said, I own the land. It’s massive. What’s the problem?” Even when you own the land, the government still tries to tell you what you’re allowed to do with it.
There is an actual problem here which is that we are unable to avoid insuring or bailing her out for that home that she wants to build on a flood plain, but yeah having 37 acres and being told she can only have one house on it is rather absurd.
Here’s another smaller example.
Alexis Rivas: 50 million people have walked the Guggenheim spiral. Zero fell over its 36” parapet. Today’s code deems it unsafe, demands 42”.
When 50 million safe visits can’t clear plan check, the real danger isn’t the parapet - it’s bureaucracy.
Elevator Action
Yes, we are still paying for elevator operators and judges are forcing us to do it.
Daniel Trubman: “If we’re going to keep unnecessary conductors on trains as make-work jobs, should we also still have elevator operators?” is a rhetorical question often brought up in the discussion on subway automation, but the union’s answer is unironically yes.
And in 2023 a judge agreed!
Dilan Esper: at some point liberals have to be honest about public sector unions
The Hookup
The marginal cost of not hooking up a residence to power is that no one can live in it, so the obvious intervention is that if the power company has three months notice of when you’ll be ready and doesn’t give you the hookup within a month (exact timelines negotiable) then they have to pay market rent on the property until they’re finished.
Alex Weiss: 9 months and counting. Owner is still waiting on LADWP so he can get his C of O. Absolutely ridiculous.
We are ready to lease this up!
David Moghaven: Insane. This happened to one of our development deals in LA a few years ago. We stopped developing in LA after this experience. Too risky. Time KILLS deals!!! LADWP is like a mafia. Disaster. Good luck.
Max Dubler: I cannot really blame non-experts for believing that developers intentionally keep new buildings empty to do price manipulation and/or financial crimes because the actual reasons why this happens are just so dumb.
Alex Weiss: We just got powered but they are delaying us for another inspection even after turning on power. I took this the other night. It was just been sitting and the owner has the bank pressing him.
Like, what? Rich developers are losing hundreds of thousands of dollars per month because the power utility simply refuses to come connect their finished apartment buildings to electricity? And this is happening amidst a crisis-level housing shortage? What are we even doing here?
Moses Kagan: Not sure normies understand how disastrous this is for the developer, so let me explain:
At this stage in the process, all of the capital budgeted to build this apartment building has been drawn down and spent.
This means that, in addition to having pay carrying costs (property tax, insurance, security, etc.) for this empty building, the developer is *also* paying interest on *all* the money to build it.
Because the developer gets paid last (after the contractor, the construction lender and the equity investors), very likely this delay means this developer will make $0 for all his work building this thing.
Let me ask you two questions:
1. If you took an enormous financial risk personally, convinced a whole bunch of your closest contacts to go in with you, worked for 3-4 years, and then made $0, would you do this ever again?
and
2. If developers like this won’t build again, how are we going to get the housing we need?
I mean, you need both.
Affordable Housing
Wonder why it’s so often not so affordable after all? In hindsight, there were signs.
Alec Stapp: I wonder why it costs $750,000 to build each unit of “affordable” housing in Chicago... 🙃
Chicago Tribune: The main issue with the statement, Vielma said, is the section that asks developers (and any city contractors) and their funders if they have records indicating if they have ever invested in or profited from slavery.
“That response takes hundreds of hours of diligence and costs and is a question that no other city or state requires,” Vielma said. “This is a great example of what a city can do that adds costs and stifles private capital from working here.”
Alec Stapp: But don’t worry, the mayor’s office will tell you explicitly that it’s a complete waste of time and money.
Chicago Tribune: No group has been denied city funding as a result of reporting this information.
Actually Affordable Housing
We know how to make it happen, we used to make it happen, instead we ban it.
One reason cities are so focused on “affordable housing” is they have regulated out of existence the naturally occurring cheap housing options which once kept people out of homelessness
Ryan Puzycki via Ben Furnas: Variously and derogatorily known by many names — rooming houses, lodging houses, flophouses — SROs provided affordable, market-rate housing to those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. SROs were the cheapest form of residential hotels, specializing in furnished single rooms for individuals, usually with shared kitchens and bathrooms. A typical SRO rent in 1924 was 230 dollars per month in today’s dollars.
As Ryan illustrates, and as I’ve covered before, the destruction of SROs (single room occupancies) was very intentional. SROs remain illegal essentially everywhere.
This is a great place to talk about preemption.
The problem with SROs is that many of the people you do not want in your city, who are borderline homeless or broke or want to send every cent back home or similar, will want to rent an SRO. You do not want them in your city, or your town. If you allow SROs and no one else does, you will be flooded.
If everyone allows SROs, then there is no problem. Those who need SROs get them, those starting out can afford to take a low paying job and still save some money, it takes very little to stay off the streets when down on one’s luck, we can take the remaining homeless off the street at much lower cost.
Thus, a Federal law (or at least a state law) forcing everyone to allow SROs would solve this coordination problem. You create a distinct class of housing, the SRO, that has to be permitted anywhere other housing is permitted, or in some portion of every city, or something similar.
The obvious objection is that living in an SRO is unacceptable, so instead we should ban them, and force people to spend much more money on housing despite this often being obviously vastly worse for them, and it often forcing them onto the street. This also drives rents up a lot on the remaining housing stock.
Affordable Housing Only Worse
It takes a lot to flabbergast me at this point, but learning about Supportive Housing Multifamily Housing did the trick:
Right Angle New Network: BREAKING - The California Senate has passed SB 549, granting LA County authority to purchase fire‑destroyed lots for minimal cost and convert them into low‑income housing, directly contradicting Gavin Newsom’s previous assurance to homeowners that such government‑driven property conversions wouldn’t happen.
Confirmed Miscer: This is potentially much worse than mere “low income housing” btw.
SB 549: To qualify as Supportive Housing Multifamily Housing, a project must provide at least 40% of its units for the homeless, or individuals who have spent at least 15 days in ‘jails, hospitals, prisons and institutes of mental disease.’
Daniel Eth: Okay, this proposal has some perverse incentives
Handing out giant bribes and conditioning them on being homeless, severely sick or a criminal is a whole new level. Time to solve for the equilibrium, I suppose. How much would you have to be paid to spend 15 days in jail or temporarily be homeless?
Another form of Affordable Housing Only Worse is to ban children from it, oh I’m sorry I meant make it for seniors 55 and above. Then you are allowed to build ‘affordable housing’ with all the subsidies and extra permits that attach to that, but without pesky concerns like ‘children are loud and require schools.’ A lot of people want to live next to children, but many don’t, especially poor children, whereas poor seniors don’t cause trouble or expenses.
This is a worst-of-both-worlds situation, as you can’t say 18+ or 25+ that’s illegal, which means in order to get kids banned they have to go 55+ despite most seniors not wanting this, and the result is yet another transfer from the young to the elderly, on top of everything else.
In theory, if it wasn’t for the subsidies this was eating this mostly wouldn’t matter? If you build a bunch of housing for 55+ residents, that still means people who don’t live elsewhere, which in turn lowers housing costs, because housing is largely fungible. The problem is mostly the subsidies and ‘affordable’ requirements involved.
It would also be reasonable to say that children are loud and destroy things and require schools and so on, and thus we should be able to charge more accordingly, so long as we also took into account the benefit to society of those kids, as well.
Remember Who The Enemy Is
The video is at the link, the description is highly accurate. She really did this.
Joe Cohen: on Lovett’s face when LA City Councilmember Imelda Padilla said she forced an affordable housing project to go down from six stories to three stories and add in EV charging spaces
I still can’t believe Councilmember Padilla used *forcing a developer to reduce the size of an affordable housing project* as an example of how she is making housing more affordable for the people in her district!
Anechoic Media: How did this exact type of Ayn Rand villain manage to seize control of land use in every city in the anglosphere simultaneously? They brag about the damage they do; they truly believe stopping development is the thing they show up to do every day for their constituents.
The reason she claimed this as a victory is that there were others that wanted to kill the project entirely, so this counts as a win, despite her not even having jurisdiction.
There are at least some plans to build housing, such as one proposal to put a 25-story apartment complex in Marina District along the waterfront, since this so obviously maximizes the value of the waterfront. This ‘sparked concerns’ about tall buildings along the waterfront, as opposed to sensible concerns about a lack of such buildings. What would be the problem?
We have run the experiment and building Los Angeles falls under ‘we can’t, we don’t know how.’ As in, as of September 25, less than 10% of the destroyed houses have permits to rebuild, and even among those that applied for permits only 29% of them were approved. If you can’t even approve rebuilding houses that burn down, you can’t build anything, period.
It is amazing the objections people attempt to raise in situations like this.
Max Dubler: I really need NIMBYs to decide whether these new apartments are overpriced luxury housing that nobody can afford or informal housing for desperately poor people in the global south because they can’t be both.
Yes, changing the zoning raised the value of this *land,* but it lowers the cost of *housing* on it because each of the 20 lots that had a single family home on it will now have 30 apartments. People live in homes, not land values!
These homeowners all chose to sell at huge profits. They were not “displaced” in any meaningful sense of the term.
People will complain the new housing is too cheap, that it is too expensive, that other housing did not get cheaper, that other home values went down (when nearby homes still cost millions), that the homeowners that sold to allow this construction were displaced when they chose to sell for a million over previous value, that the homeowners that sold to allow this construction profited and that’s not fair, that the buildings look ugly (I disagree), that there is not enough parking for the new homes (adjacent to a transit stop).
Meanwhile, did you want to build things in the places LA burned down? Sorry, no.
LA Mayor Karen Bass: Just signed an Emergency Executive Order to prohibit SB 9 applications within the Palisades Fire area. SB 9 wasn’t intended to be used in the wake of the worst natural disaster L.A. has ever seen. I thank @CAgovernor for working with me to get this done.
Max Dubler: Mayor Bass’ decision to block SB 9, the state duplex and lot split law, in the Palisades will force a lot of people who would have been able to rebuild their houses and move back home to sell their lots to developers and move away, and here’s why.
Many homeowners in the Palisades and Altadena were significantly under-insured, which means that the insurance payouts they get will not be enough to cover the actual cost of rebuilding their homes.
Enter SB 9. Senate Bill 9 (2021) gives homeowners the right to split their lots in two and sell off half their land. Homeowners can then build a duplex on each lot, up to four total homes.
SB 9 is an important lifeline for under-insured homeowners because they can use the money they get from selling half their lot to fund rebuilding their homes, allowing them to return to a new house on a smaller lot in their old neighborhood.
…
To recap: blocking SB 9 won’t prevent increased density in the Palisades. It won’t do anything to improve evacuation efficiency. It will screw over families who are struggling to rebuild and force them to sell to McMansion developers.
I don’t see how that is relevant, and very obviously building more housing to replace what burned down is superior to building less. But yes, if you are trying to ‘preserve’ what was there before, blocking SB 459 and SB 9 and otherwise getting in the way is not going to do that.
Los Angeles raises the fee to file an objection to new housing from $178 to $229, now a full 1% of the cost of investigating each objection. One guess how that plays out. The obvious solution is to give people a free objection or two, then if those fail and they want to keep objecting they can post a bond that they get back if the objection proves reasonable.
This provides an excellent test for me in particular, since I own an apartment very close to the upzone area, and I can confirm yes I am still very happy about this.
This is despiteNew York City’s completely insane construction rules requiring a host of additional useless labor hours, expensive construction tools and liability that adds 15%-50% to total construction cost. You’d happily pay the extra if you were allowed to build at all.
What does it actually cost to rent a place in New York City? If you need to live in the most central and best areas, and don’t have a special deal, it will cost a pretty penny. If you are willing to compromise and live away from the center, and you shop around, it’s not cheap, but it’s a lot more reasonable. Only about a third of two-bedroom renters in Manhattan actually pay over $3k per month, and outside of Manhattan it is cheaper than that, as Musa al-Gharbi notes.
Thus, yes, you can survive in New York City on not that much money, and anyone who lives on $250k ‘paycheck to paycheck’ is making a choice.
I am indeed making the choice to live in the center of the world, which is the main thing I spend discretionary money on. I pay for that accordingly. Again, it’s a choice.
Open New York: City of Yes opened the path to legalizing basement apartments, but the proposed @NYC_Buildings rules are... pretty ridiculous.
Our friends at @chpcny printed out a banner of the exact dimensions, colors, and font sizes that would be required outside of every basement apartment:
Samantha Maldnado: Buildings Department spokesperson Andrew Rudansky said in a statement that the pilot program’s rules were “carefully considered, with a focus on providing a safe space for existing tenants to live while the landlord works to bring the apartment up to Code,” and that the DOB would take feedback into account if it revises the rules.
Paulina Cachero (Bloomberg): There’s an unmistakable trend across New York City: Real-estate developers are seeking to construct buildings with exactly 99 units. No more, no less.
In the past four quarters, 28 such permits were filed, more than double the total from the previous 16 years combined, according to city data analyzed by the Real Estate Board of New York, a lobbying group.
To those in the industry, there’s no question what’s behind the pileup at that precise number: A new tax program for real estate developments that requires higher worker wages for buildings with 100 or more apartments.
Developer MaryAnne Gilmartin is a case in point for the results of the program. She once envisioned a pair of 400-unit rental towers on a NYC lot, but she’s now considering as many as six smaller buildings — a patchwork of projects that ultimately would deliver fewer apartments. The revised plan would take longer to execute and cost more per unit, but Gilmartin said this is the more financially viable option for her.
…
The wage requirements “are a huge burden,” said Gilmartin, chief executive officer of MAG Partners. “We’ll build less housing, less quickly, and it’s less financially viable. Frankly, we just have less ability to address this housing crisis.”
What exactly happened? Along with the 485-x Tax Abatement Program, they passed minimum wage requirements that scaled with building size, that are prohibitive.
These are crazy requirements, like totally insane, as in double or more than triple the prevailing wage, more than enough to wipe out all the tax benefits.
The average hourly wage for an entry-level construction worker is typically $18.30 an hour, while the most experienced workers can get up to $50.38, according to the New York Department of Labor.
…
But even with those benefits, the 150-unit wage minimum would tack on 20% to a project’s hard expenses, said Gilmartin, who’s considering buildings with 99 or 149 apartments on the site where she would have built two larger towers under the prior program.
You definitely don’t want to be paing $63 or more an hour, so going into the $40 bucket only gets you to 149 units, so you’re stuck at 99. Finito.
Adam Ozimek: People will sometimes claim on the basis of very unpersuasive empirical work that prevailing wage rules don’t raise costs because they are offset by productivity.
If that was true, you wouldn’t observe this. It matters.
Melissa Kearney: This is why people always think of the economist in the room as the skunk at the garden party, but any single one of us could have told you this would happen! 🤦♀️
New York City hotels have gotten expensive. I wonder if it has something to do with a law passed in 2023 limiting construction of new supply? In his Odd Lots interview Mayor Adams said we need to construct more hotels, and generally came off very strong on housing, yet this was signed under his watch.
Previously there were reports that rents in NYC jumped 15% after the ditching of broker fees. Gothamist’s David Brand however has now fired back saying that according to StreetEasy that this did not happen, that rents have risen an average of 5.3% for apartments previously listed with a fee, versus 4.5% for those with previous listings without a fee, with only 1.7% of apartments having 10%+ rises in trents. If that is true, then banning broker fees caused renters to win big.
He does report that many landlords of rent-stabilized apartments in particular have stopped using brokers, which makes sense given their inability to raise the rent and that they are already being heavily squeezed.
I mean, look, I live close to the high line and it’s cool but if that’s the upper bound on what we can do, my lord.
The New York City rent control situation, even before Mamdani potentially makes it vastly worse, was already rather terrible. We had 1 million rent-controlled apartments, many deeply misallocated or even partly or entirely vacant, with 50k of them as full ‘ghost apartments’ that have been abandoned as uneconomical.
Michelle Tandler claims this is part of an intentional attempt to let the government buy buildings in fire sales. I’m skeptical that is intentional but the result is the same. She claims that the rent control directly raises market rents 33%, although I am guessing (and Claude guesses) that this is too high if you don’t count long term effects. Long term an effect this large seems plausible.
Baltimore
Baltimore legalizes 6-story single stair apartment buildings and eliminates parking requirements on new developments. Excellent.
Among many others, Open Philanthropy strikes again.
Alexander Berger: First, some context on SB 79. TL;DR, it’s a very big deal! By legalizing more homes around bus and rail lines, by some internal estimates, SB 79 could eventually help add 1m+ units. That’s huge in a state that only added 500k housing units from 2020-5!
Housing up to 9 stories will be legalized next to BART and most Caltrain stations, while housing up to 6 stories will be allowed next to Muni and most LA metro lines.
Building more homes near public transit both makes housing more affordable and reduces carbon emissions.
SB 79 will also benefit from other recent CA housing wins, like the recently-passed CEQA reform: fewer lawsuits & faster reviews = less delay & more housing
We’ve [OpenPhil] been funding @CAYIMBY, which championed this work, since its early days, and it’s been fun to look back at how far they’ve come. After a prior incarnation of SB 79 failed in 2018, we renewed our funding and I wrote in our renewal template:
Another lesson is that there can be incredibly outsized and surprising wins from early field building. @hanlonbtwas able to start CA YIMBY because we’d funded him to go full time on YIMBY work at CaRLA; that brought him to advocate in Sacramento and meet @natfriedman and @zack.
I think @jeremys sometimes doesn’t get enough credit in these stories either - his funding originally let @sonjatrauss go full time, and was early on CA YIMBY too. We never anticipated just how much impact could potentially come from that early support for a nascent movement.
As I wrote in a thread last year, it’s amazing to watch the decade of work from advocates and volunteers in the YIMBY movement starting to pay off.
Nolan Gray: Lots of excitement over SB 79—understandably. I would add, every single bill California YIMBY sent to the governor was signed today
AB 253 will empower applicants to hire third-party permit reviewers when cities drag their feet on small-scale residential projects, which will help to clear out the log jam in permitting offices.
AB 1308 established 14-day inspection shot clock for those same sorts of small-scale residential projects—a major source of needless delays. Blowing passed it will be an HAA violation.
AB 1154 will expand protections for JADUs—namely, by removing the owner-occupancy mandate. This is going to scale up California’s ADU renaissance even further.
AB 1061 ends the total prohibition on SB 9 projects in historic districts, which will cut back on a lot of historic preservation abuse, while still protecting genuine landmarks.
SB 9 (2025, not 2021!) will beef up state oversight over ADU law, ensuring that cities can’t impose arbitrary and illegal standards.
And AB 413 will require HCD to translate key materials into common major languages in California—helpful for developers in large immigrant communities. This idea originated with @alfredtwu_act.
In addition to these bills, it looks like the governor signed all of the Fast Track Housing Package bills that made it to his desk. This is a package of individually small bills that fix a lot of problems with building housing in California.
Our focus now turns to (a) implementation and (b) reform in 2026, specifically reducing costs and expanding financing to ensure that projects pencil. California YIMBY not in the business of passing bills—we’re in the business of ending the housing crisis. [thread goes on to thank various people]
Armand Domalewski: For the national left wing folks: the leader of San Francisco’s “left” faction showed up today dressed as a condo with the phrase “rent is too damn low” to oppose an upzoning to build more housing 🙃
I strongly agree with Peskin that you should oppose new construction if and only if you think the rent is too damn low.
Welcome to Solano, potential future home of a new shipyard, a new foundry, a new manufacturing park, and a walkable neighborhood for 400,000 people, one hour from Silicon Valley. The design is a combination of New York City, Barcelona and Tokyo with a focus on homeownership and family-sized units and having lots of trees everywhere. It could be a lot denser, but the point of a new city is that you don’t have to be in order to win big. They’re even talking about making the buildings not ugly.
As Matthew Yglesiasand Jen Fox point out, this looks like urban planning done right, you lay out the grid and set the terms but don’t dictate individual choices.
Jen Fox: If you want to live in a world with an #abundance of
- affordable homes in walkable neighborhoods
- compact, mixed-use urban form (where walking, biking + transit for most trips is easy)
- slow, narrow streets designed for humans
then watch this space
Which sounds great. But are we actually doing this?
Well, maybe. Suisun seems on board. They need to get LAFCO signoff, and they still need to get through CEQA and other environmental reviews.
Joe Weisenthal: In the opening chapters of Moby Dick, Ishmael arrives in the town of New Bedford. He is a stranger and there is no room for him at the inn. What story could be more iconic and timeless? Here is a crucial commercial hub with a scarcity of lodging in need of supply side reform.
IMO the bigger problem with SROs is the difficulty of evicting bad actors. This is a huge problem everywhere for every type of rental development, but it is completely fatal when you are already somewhat selecting for bad actors. Add in communal spaces like kitchens and bathrooms and you need downright draconian ability to respond and probably a strong selection filter as well.
“Only about a third of two-bedroom renters in Manhattan actually pay over $3k per month”
I’ve been seeing this claim a lot recently, that it’s not actually that expensive to live in Manhattan. But aren’t these mostly people who have won various lotteries or have lived in the same rent-stabilized place for several years? I can’t find a single place below 112th st on streeteasy that satisfies these conditions. I think this data doesn’t really represent the price that you’d pay if you moved to Manhattan today and found an apartment.
IMO the bigger problem with SROs is the difficulty of evicting bad actors. This is a huge problem everywhere for every type of rental development, but it is completely fatal when you are already somewhat selecting for bad actors. Add in communal spaces like kitchens and bathrooms and you need downright draconian ability to respond and probably a strong selection filter as well.
“Only about a third of two-bedroom renters in Manhattan actually pay over $3k per month”
I’ve been seeing this claim a lot recently, that it’s not actually that expensive to live in Manhattan. But aren’t these mostly people who have won various lotteries or have lived in the same rent-stabilized place for several years? I can’t find a single place below 112th st on streeteasy that satisfies these conditions. I think this data doesn’t really represent the price that you’d pay if you moved to Manhattan today and found an apartment.