On Sunday, the New York Times published an article, “How Anti-Growth Sentiment, Reflected in Zoning Laws, Thwarts Equality.” The article is a reminder that, while Davis has more extreme policies, it is not alone in this regard.
The article starts with Boulder, the home of the University of Colorado, with a booming local economy, noting that “a lot of people want to move here” and those “who already live in Boulder would prefer that the newcomers settle somewhere else.”
While Davis may have a struggling local economy, the same could be written about here. Particularly, “All of Boulder’s charms are under threat” notes problems with traffic and parking.
Writes the Times, “These days, you can find a Steve Pomerance in cities across the country — people who moved somewhere before it exploded and now worry that growth is killing the place they love.”
But the bottom line: “But a growing body of economic literature suggests that anti-growth sentiment, when multiplied across countless unheralded local development battles, is a major factor in creating a stagnant and less equal American economy.”
It continues, “Unlike past decades, when people of different socioeconomic backgrounds tended to move to similar areas, today, less-skilled workers often go where jobs are scarcer but housing is cheap, instead of heading to places with the most promising job opportunities, according to research by Daniel Shoag, a professor of public policy at Harvard, and Peter Ganong, also of Harvard.”
The article continues, “One reason they’re not migrating to places with better job prospects is that rich cities like San Francisco and Seattle have gotten so expensive that working-class people cannot afford to move there. Even if they could, there would not be much point, since whatever they gained in pay would be swallowed up by rent.”
What we see in Davis is that people increasingly commute into town to work at the university and then out-commute to their homes where housing is cheaper and more plentiful.
Boulder faces the same problem as Davis, maybe worse. “In Boulder, for instance, the median home price has risen 60 percent over the last five years, to $648,200. Today, someone who makes the typical Boulder salary would have to put about 40 percent of their monthly income toward payments on a new mortgage or about half toward rent, according to Zillow.”
“We’ve switched from a world where everybody educated and uneducated was moving from poorer parts of the country to the richer parts of the country,” said Professor Shoag, “to a world where the higher-educated people move to San Francisco and lower educated people move to Vegas.”
“Zoning restrictions have been around for decades but really took off during the 1960s, when the combination of inner-city race riots and ‘white flight’ from cities led to heavily zoned suburbs,” the article continues. “They have gotten more restrictive over time, contributing to a jump in home prices that has been a bonanza for anyone who bought early in places like Boulder, San Francisco and New York City. But for latecomers, the cost of renting an apartment or buying a home has become prohibitive.”
Governor Jerry Brown in May proposed a way to “force local governments to approve any urban housing development provided the project matches the underlying zoning and a certain percentage of homes are set aside for the poor.”
As an LA Times editorial put it, “Gov. Jerry Brown’s solution to California’s affordable housing crisis is to build, build, build, and not let local politics get in the way. Earlier this month, the governor introduced a bill under which proposed urban housing developments that meet local zoning requirements and reserve some portion of their units for low-income residents would be exempted from any additional environmental or local government review. The governor’s theory is that neighborhood opponents and other parochial interests have consistently blocked or downsized badly needed development projects, leading to a housing crisis in which California’s major cities are increasingly unaffordable for most of its residents. As a result, the state, home to 12% of the nation’s population, has 21% of the nation’s homeless.”
As the NY Times put it: “To most people, zoning and land-use regulations might conjure up little more than images of late-night City Council meetings full of gadflies and minutiae. But these laws go a long way toward determining some fundamental aspects of life: what American neighborhoods look like, who gets to live where and what schools their children attend.
“And when zoning laws get out of hand, economists say, the damage to the American economy and society can be profound. Studies have shown that laws aimed at things like ‘maintaining neighborhood character’ or limiting how many unrelated people can live together in the same house contribute to racial segregation and deeper class disparities. They also exacerbate inequality by restricting the housing supply in places where demand is greatest.
“The lost opportunities for development may theoretically reduce the output of the United States economy by as much as $1.5 trillion a year, according to estimates in a recent paper by the economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti. Regardless of the actual gains in dollars that could be achieved if zoning laws were significantly cut back, the research on land-use restrictions highlights some of the consequences of giving local communities too much control over who is allowed to live there.”
“You don’t want rules made entirely for people that have something, at the expense of people who don’t,” said Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
Governor Brown has offered the biggest solution with a law that would “speed up housing development by making it harder for cities to saddle developers with open-ended design, permit and environmental reviews.”
However, “Mr. Brown’s proposal has inflamed local politicians, environmentalists and community groups, who see it as state overreach into how they regulate development. But it has drawn broad support from developers, not surprisingly, as well as a number of business leaders, including many from the technology industry.”
How would this law affect Davis and its vaunted Measure R? That is a question for another day. What is interesting, however, is that while Davis’ growth control measures are clearly more extreme than other communities, the problems faced by Davis are far from unique. Unlike Davis, Boulder has a robust economy. Davis is not only becoming more expensive, but its local economy, aside from the university, is quite limited and may get more limited.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
One approach to potentially increase the supply of housing affordable to workforce families would be for City Council to repeal the clause in the City’s affordable housing ordinance that exempts vertically integrated developments (commercial on first floor with housing on upper floors). This “out clause” allowed the Nishi developer to avoid compliance with the ordinance. Eliminating this loophole would obviously only address a small part of the problem identified by Mr. Greenwald, but would at least be a start. It reminds me of a loophole that used to exist in the City of Oakland’s historic preservation ordinance; an historic property could be demolished if it were going to be replaced by a parking lot. This led to the sad loss of a number of significant properties until the local historic preservation society and–oddly enough–the Chamber of Commerce joined together to successfully the Oakland City Council to remove the loophole. Hopefully some civic minded groups in Davis will convince our City Council to eliminate the “vertical integration” loophole in the Davis affordable housing ordinance.
Edison, in all likelihood your proposed solution solves the problem on paper, but doesn’t solve the problem in real life. The reasons for that are because your solution relies on new housing building events, and the nature of building events has changed significantly since 2000.
As it is currently constituted our Affordable Housing Program faces five major challenges.
First, it takes four years or more to actually deliver housing after it is approved by Council.
Second, Governor Brown’s elimination of the RDAs (Redevelopment Agencies) across the state essentially made the City’s historical (and still current) affordable housing approach ineffective.
Third, it is a program designed during an era when construction was focused on single family residences, not multi-family residences.
Fourth, it completely ignores the existing stock of housing in Davis.
Fifth, the challenge of building new housing affordably is one of costs. The cost of materials is higher for new construction than it is for historical construction. The cost of labor is higher for new construction than it is for historical construction. The cost of entitlements is higher for new construction than it is for historical construction. The cost of land is higher for new construction than it is for historical construction. The result is that new construction is significantly less affordable than comparable housing in the existing housing stock in Davis. Bottom-line, new construction is more expensive than existing (old) construction.
Repealing the vertically integrated clause would change the economics for the developer of a vertically integrated project, but if affordability is measured when compared to the exiting stock of housing in Davis, would there really be any increase in the affordability of housing for the residents of Davis needing more affordable housing?
So, Rent Control? 🙂
Justice4All, assuming that that is what you are proposing, how would you structure and implement a Rent Control program in Davis?
How many projects have been built using the “vertical integration” clause?
None?
There are 4 that I can think of that “might” have…
The project @ SW corner Third and C… but not sure if the dwelling units were set up as rental units, or ownership, and given the size of them, they may indeed have been qualified as “affordable”… don’t recall an “exemption” being claimed…
Roe Bldg, SW corner Fifth and G… same
“the Lofts” (E ST between First and Second?)… same, but fairly sure that those residential units were rentals.
Del Rio Live-Work (SW corner Fifth/Pena)… somewhat different animal, as the stated intent was that the dwelling units provided living space associated with the ground level use… one owner/user for each.
To my knowledge, there was no intent on either of those four, to circumvent the affordable housing ordinance…
So if there are few or none being built then how is adding another obligation going to convince people to build?
I guess a key question is going to be – how will Jerry’s move affect Davis or will it? It looks like it might not have much impact bc most peripheral moves would require land use changes?
Sounds like Jerry’s law would tend to provide lesser quality developments, possibly eye sores?
Yeah…kinda’ gets in the way of beautiful, zero-energy, economically positive and completely affordable housing for lower income folk (or, the currently homeless), doesn’t it?
You got it.
I can see it now, cookie cutter flat roof track housing eye sore developments with little in the way of ammenities that blight communities but hey, if the developers can make money on it than they’re happy.
Yeah… gotta go to one of the extremes, no?
By all means let’s find a way to keep “them” out!
If developers get to make the call who knows what we might end up with.
Sounds like you’re the one going to the extremes. Whos said anything about keeping “them” out? I’m coming at it from the I don’t know if I want the developers making the call angle. I think the communities should have the final input without developers being able to circumvent that through Jerry’s law.
OK… housing is provided by developers (evil, money-grubbing, kill the environment, scum of the earth) or by the public (differences?)… so, we should make sure that the public provides for, and funds, all new housing, and it will all need to be “perfect” (minimum threshold, for at least 80% of voters)…
Or, are you a ZPG-er? Then we don’t need new housing… and if we go to a NPG model, we can destroy existing housing (re-cycling all materials of course), and reclaim the resultant land for farming, or better yet, as wildlife mitigation for hundreds of years of past “sins”…
There you go again, extremes.
Oh, definitely agree, BP… the voters should be able to mandate “beautiful, zero-energy, economically positive and completely affordable housing for lower income folk (or, the currently homeless)” [my words] But I think we should raise the bar… 80% positive vote of the people, for any new residential development, even if it meets current zoning standards… and, developers would have to donate 200% of their ‘profits’ to DJUSD… I’d vote for that…
Per Jerry’s plan if the original Trackside development of 48 units has 5 of these designated as low income (it is near the train station which is a transit center so only 10% required to be low income) and it doesn’t violate any zoning law than there is nothing anybody can do to block it. The future could be a city of big nondescript brown stucco boxes with as many units crammed in as possible, and built as cheaply as possible. Democrats will probably support it because they are doing it for the poor and the Republicans will support it to help the business community. I hope this bill gets voted down or seriously amended.
Zoning is one of the simplest ways a community can control density.
I agree with Don, but here in Davis when you look at a zoning atlas map (see LINK to City website) there is an abundance of areas zoned PD (Planned Development) which is shorthand for the fact that the existing zoning designation was not followed and a zoning variance was requested by the developer and granted by the City. If exceptions are the rule, then how effective/meaningful is the zoning designation for an individual parcel?
One of the components of my campaign platform in the June election was to “Establish process standards whereby all zoning variance requests must be declared at the time the project pre-application is filed. A public hearing on the declared zoning variance must be convened to get city-wide input regarding whether the zoning variance is in the best interests of the community.”
Not quite right, Matt… PD is “custom zoning”… necessary because the basic zoning classes, defined in the 50’s/60’s were never updated… the Zoning Code is one of the few sections of the MC that has never had a major re-work… the Subdivisions section had a major re-haul in the mid-80’s… still, it needs to be updated as well…
A PD, per se, is not “evil”… it is in zoning or PD Amendments where mischief may thrive…
BTW, Village Homes and many others that most would find “good” or better, were PD’s…
Also, BTW, the Zoning Code sections are probably the longest in the entire DMC…
Thanks for that clarification hpierce. With minor differences it appears that you and I and Mark West are all on much the same page . . . specifically that the zoning code is dated, and needs to be brought up to date.
It is also one of the simplest ways to protect favored businesses from competition, artificially raise property values for existing landowners, and limit ‘those-kind’ moving into existing neighborhoods. Zoning is important, but how effective it is, depends on the details of how restrictive it is. The reason that Davis now functions on the basis of zoning exceptions is due to the unreasonable restrictions incorporated into the existing regulations.
The DMC chapter on Zoning is probably the longest in the entire code, and was designed to control/put limits on ‘others’… the Davis way, as it were/is…
I’m with you there WesC. At least some of us have the foresight to see where Jerry’s plan could possibly take us.
Fortunately, others have demonstrated an understanding of the negative impacts of our current policies…
“Studies have shown that laws aimed at things like ‘maintaining neighborhood character’ or limiting how many unrelated people can live together in the same house contribute to racial segregation and deeper class disparities. They also exacerbate inequality by restricting the housing supply in places where demand is greatest.”
“Earlier this month, the governor introduced a bill under which proposed urban housing developments that meet local zoning requirements and reserve some portion of their units for low-income residents would be exempted from any additional environmental or local government review. The governor’s theory is that neighborhood opponents and other parochial interests have consistently blocked or downsized badly needed development projects, leading to a housing crisis in which California’s major cities are increasingly unaffordable for most of its residents. As a result, the state, home to 12% of the nation’s population, has 21% of the nation’s homeless.”
The state has 21% homeless because it offers very generous services compared to other states, not necessarily because of the housing crisis. To conflate the housing issue with the issue of homelessness is ridiculous. Secondly, I’m not sure how much this bill will help, since often development requires a zoning change, which means the law would not apply in those situations. Thirdly, why doesn’t the governor/state legislature look in the mirror when it comes to the lack of affordable housing – they are the ones who did away with RDA which funded affordable housing, and it is the state that left it to local gov’t to deal with the affordable housing issue without any commensurate funding. IMO the governor’s proposal is like putting a bandaid on an artery bleed – it does nothing to rectify the underlying problem.
Partially true… what part of 21% is open to debate… mental illness, drug abuse (including alcohol) parental abandonment, job markets, etc, probably contribute more to the number (vastly) than ‘provision of services’, particularly when the folk most at risk, are the least likely to seek (or receive) those services…
Not sure “ridiculous”, but even if the we had a 5% vacancy rate, we’d have a homeless population… so, mostly true.
Third point… most RDA monies, in Davis, and throughout the State, went to capital projects that did not serve (except, perhaps tangentially) low income folk. Some lower income housing was provided, but maybe at the 30-50% level. Most of the funding for affordable housing came from exactions, where developers would rather pay fees than have ‘those people’ residing in their subdivisions…
It’s not just a question of services but also mindshare. Hollywood has the highest density of runaways in the US. A 16 year old running away from a small town in Indiana is not making a informed comparison of services offered, they are just thinking “Hollywood”. People think they can re-invent themselves there and in California in general.
The correlation of the two is as observed by others, ridiculous. It’s like saying Florida must have better healthcare as there are so many old people there
There were plenty of homeless people before redevelopment was done away with.