In Soviet Los Angeles, Housing Affordables You!
Matt Welch | May 7, 2008, 4:19pm
When I used to write editorials for the L.A. Times about the city's buttinskyite approach to property rights in the name of preserving "affordable housing," I went to extraordinary lengths to ask each and every relevant local official and activist I met the same question: How many affordable housing units -- however you care to define the term -- exist right now?
The answer was as you'd expect: They really, truly, have no idea; not even when you break it down into categories like rental units. No one keeps track of the numbers. Still! Must do something!
This week, by unanimous votes, we get the L.A. City Council's solution to the affordable housing crisis: Prevent owners of fleabag residency hotels from upgrading their properties into higher-priced condos and lofts; and prohibit home-owners from increasing the size of their houses to any more than one-half the size of their property. After all, if owners are free to buy, sell, and expand on their properties as they see fit, then how in the heck will we get more housing stock built in Los Angeles?
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joe | May 7, 2008, 6:11pm | #
Stupid.
There isn't a shortage of low-cost houses in Los Angeles because people have been making their houses larger. There's a shortage of housing in Los Angeles because there haven't been enough housing units built.
What's interesting is that the problem is not a shortage of HOUSES being built - if anything, there is an oversupply of free-standing, single family homes. This situation is masked, however, by the fact that there is an even greater shortage of the types of housing the zoning forbids - apartments, condos, townhouses, you know, affordable housing - which causes people who would have chosen those other types of housing to be compelled to buy houses they can't afford instead.
Which then reduces the supply of entry-level housing, driving those people into the next tier of housing, reducing the supply of those units for their natural buyers and forcing them in to the next tier, and on and on.
Added to this is the fact that the heavily-restricted housing is that which, because it uses land and building materials so much more efficiently, is naturally more affordable. Not only are you forcing someone to buy/rent 1800 square feet of building instead of 900, but you're also forcing them to pay for 10,000 square feet of land instead of 600, 4000, or even (in the cast of urban apartment buildings) 1000. And on top of that, you're forcing them to pay for four walls of siding instead of 1/2 of one wall (per unit), an entire boiler instead of a portion of a boiler, etc.
The problem is the zoning laws that restrict the supply of the lowest-cost housing - but there's your sprawl ideology for you. Multi-family houses promote crack addiction and socialism, or something.
Fluffy | May 8, 2008, 10:44am | #
False dichotomy. That you do not share certain values doen not make arbitrary, trivial, or even mere preferences.
That's fine, but if all decisions are self-validating then I don't want to hear your complaints about "snob zoning".
You have no basis to complain. Essentially, if your quote here is true, there is no such thing as bad zoning and no way for an observer to declare a particular form of zoning bad, because whatever evaluation you make is meaningless since it just represents a failure to "share values".
This effectively neuters your statement that you like zoning, just not bad zoning. You're creating a false dichotomy because you don't share the values of the people who make different zoning judgments than you.
Let me fill you in on something: I earned a masters degree in the field, and literally half of the courses I took revolved around exactly the issue of "Who plans?"
What you just wrote amounts the first sentence out of the mouth of the lecturer on the first day of the undergraduate Planning 101 course. The thinking on this subject within the field of urban planning is as far beyond your observation, as the research being conducted in supercolliders is beyond Momentum = Mass X Velocity.
That's very nice, but doesn't actually address the substance of my criticism.
If I state that zoning is likely to end up expressing the preferences of the politically powerful in a given area, it simply is not responsive to say, "Yeah, that teach us that on the first day of planning class." Apparently they don't teach it very well, because you went right ahead and became a planner despite the lack of an answer to that dilemma.
If brilliant advances are being made in this area, to come up with brilliant ways to overcome this "existential problem" for zoning, those advances don't seem to have any practical impact on the process. The same planning errors [if we're allowed to call them errors, since it's all just a value question anyway] that you say you don't like not only continue to happen, they happen even more than they used to, over a wider area, at an accelerating rate.
joe | May 8, 2008, 11:21am | #
That's fine, but if all decisions are self-validating then I don't want to hear your complaints about "snob zoning".
Man, whoever said that "all decision are self-validating" is, like, totally pwned!
There are concerns that fall in between mere prefences and feelings on the one hand, and immediate threats to health and safety on the other.
Guy,
"Stupid," as someone with at leat a dull-normal intelligence could have figured out from the rest of what I wrote, referred to the Los Angeles City Council's actions. See, the way I wrote several paragraphs explaining why their actions were stupid should have beern the tip-off.
So, did you and your buddies get to meet Ben Afflek, or did the Gigle production crew keep the extras away from the talent?
John in Michigan,
Elections allow the public to vote up or down, pick this one or that one. Public participation in a planning process, on the other hand, goes well beyond this, into involving members of the public and stakeholders in deciding not just yes or no, not just among alternatives presented to them, not just determining what the alternatives put up for a vote will be, not even just in deciding how different alternatives will meet a set of goals and objectives, but in determining what the design criteria will actually be, what the alternatives being produced should strive to achieve.
Modern public participation theory in the planning field is, in fact, a reaction to the "put what the planners and politicians decided to a vote" process of the urban renewal period. That process is ok for picking who will fill government offices, but the public needs to be involved at a much earlier stage, and have much more substantive impact in, the planning process.
