Although generally supportive of the Yimby movement in cities and the need to increase density, I am concerned that SB 827 (and similar) will steamroll the will of voters in smaller counties where staunch opposition remains.
Marin County, just across the bridge from San Francisco, is a good example: they have a strong history of opposition to housing development and density[1], and the overwhelming majority of Marin residents are opposed to top-down State measures to impose density requirements. This is quite different to San Francisco, where the YIMBY movement appears to have majority support (including me) and where a local jobs boom and office space increase has created a housing imbalance.
I would prefer that this is handled locally and am genuinely curious to know why the state government should be the interlocutor and arbiter?
Places like Marin county are nice to live in. More people would be very happy to move there. This could happen if Marin county built more housing, but the residents who currently live there can vote against it. The YIMBY movement identifies this key problem: only people who live in a county have any say in the local politics. The people who would benefit from looser zoning laws have no say in the matter. If you let every county make choose on its own: stay exclusionary or build more, then every county votes to stay exclusionary, and you end up with the situation we see today.
If want to do what's best for everyone as a whole, you need higher levels of government to step in and represent those people who don't otherwise have a voice.
Zoning is an instance of local government oppressing individuals. “Local control” means the person who owns a property cannot build an apartment. Marin County is so adverse to housing development, they illegally stopped even one new home from being added. Now it can go forward because of state law.
The Bay Area has really dysfunctional governance. We have 9 counties and lots of cities. Each one independently has incentives to attract jobs and offload housing to the other counties; though, some towns were incorporated specifically to prevent integration for racist reasons. The total result is that we have way more jobs than homes in the region, and unfunded pension liabilities, and mega-commutes, and advanced gentrification. It’s in the best interests for California as a state to override this whole mess with some reasonable baseline standards. That is what SB 827 was about.
I'm not sure Marin County ever strove to be a center of commerce, or to offload housing onto other counties as a result. This is the main point here: surrounding counties caused this mess, they should fix it.
I would prefer to see state measures that require cities to tie housing development to commercial development and jobs growth. Or even for SB-827 to be modified to exclude cities/counties that have maintained a balance. This would exclude Marin from SB-827, but would certainly still include SF and Cupertino.
(The Sausalito lawsuit is a separate matter to this discussion; its success demonstrated the effectiveness of existing state laws for that particular development.)
Local control (and the perverse incentives that operate at that level) is exactly what's causing the problem. State-level intervention is the achievable way to fix it.
Homeowners in a city have an incentive to block housing construction. That hurts everyone who commutes into that city; those people deserve a say too, and they have one at the state level.
Although generally supportive of the Yimby movement in cities and the need to increase density, I am concerned that SB 827 (and similar) will steamroll the will of voters in smaller counties where staunch opposition remains.
Marin County, just across the bridge from San Francisco, is a good example: they have a strong history of opposition to housing development and density[1], and the overwhelming majority of Marin residents are opposed to top-down State measures to impose density requirements. This is quite different to San Francisco, where the YIMBY movement appears to have majority support (including me) and where a local jobs boom and office space increase has created a housing imbalance.
I would prefer that this is handled locally and am genuinely curious to know why the state government should be the interlocutor and arbiter?
1. http://rebelsdocumentary.org/