A noisy bunch of our neighbors proclaiming that the sky was about to fall made an ordinance ending single family zoning as the default for much of San Diego become a political third rail.
Here’s little something to have with your morning beverage of choice:
The San Diego metro area has one of the highest rates of inflation in the country. Energy costs (via a sweetheart deal that Sempra stockholders dearly love) are one reason. Another is rent costs.
The metropolitan area with the lowest rate of inflation is the Twin Cities in Minnesota. And, believe it or not, the “midwestern nice” trait attributed to its residents is a contributing factor.
Here’s how living in San Diego is perceived, as expressed in the conclusion of a Union-Tribune editorial.*
Last October, the Union-Tribune profiled Jeff Arns, a single parent with two children and a modest lifestyle whose credit-card debt was growing by $1,000 a month because he couldn’t make ends meet on his $100,000 salary as a construction superintendent. Rejecting SB 10 for one of a long list of reasons is understandable. But it also amounts to saying “I’ve got mine — tough luck” to the many, many San Diegans facing the same challenges as Arns. The pain they face daily? That’s their problem.
*(The UT editorial was more nuanced than its conclusion suggests.)
Here’s what happened in Minnesota, Via Bloomberg:
In May, the Twin Cities became the first major metropolitan area to see annual inflation fall below the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%. Its 1.8% pace of price increases was the lowest of any region that month.
That’s largely due to a region-wide push to address one of the most intractable issues for both the Fed and American consumers: rising housing costs. Well before pandemic-related supply-chain snarls and labor shortages roiled the economy, the city of Minneapolis eliminated zoning that allowed only single-family homes and since 2018 has invested $320 million for rental assistance and subsidies.
That helped unleash a boom in construction of apartments and condos in the region that proved to be a powerful antidote against inflation, given that the cost of shelter accounts for more than a third of the overall US consumer-price index. Minneapolis shelter prices were up at half the nation’s annual pace in May
Scaring people about a ten story building going up next to their home, as the anti-SB 10 campaign did, will cost all of us. Somehow we’re supposed to believe that having less housing will keep rents down. And that there’s something intrinsically wrong with not having the dream of home ownership.
It takes years between conception and completion in building projects, and the local government is sending a not-good message to the people with the money to make housing construction happen, otherwise known as evil developers in NIMBY parlance.
Via a 2019 New York Times story about cities reconsidering zoning laws:
Cities have typically prioritized single-family homeowners above other groups, with the old belief that dense housing hurts their property values, said Andrew Whittemore, a professor of city and regional planning at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Evidence supporting that belief is mixed, but Mr. Whittemore suggests it’s the wrong thing to focus on.
“Why is it the job of a government to see that a housing unit accumulates as much value as possible?” he said. “I think the purpose of zoning is to prevent harm. Planners shouldn’t be wealth managers. But they effectively are in every municipality in the country.”
As much as I rant against the bourgeois pigs in this world, I also know that, for now, this system is all we’ve got. I would be errant to notice the sounds of silence coming from the no-no-no SB 10 crowd when it comes to working for solutions to the housing crisis. On the other hand, some of them did organize to oppose new street lamps in Normal Heights (which were deteriorating and sources for lead paint chips) that just happened to look like the ones they were replacing.
Minneapolis started down the road to higher density residential areas in 2018, becoming effective in 2020. In 2021 the city eliminated parking minimums.
While there was opposition to upzoning, the city council approved it 12 to 1.
Surprisingly, predictions by advocates and opponents were mostly unfulfilled. Justin Fox at Bloomberg visited the city and was impressed with what he saw: a minimal amount of multifamily housing in once-upon-a-time single family neighborhoods, but a real boom in bigger properties along commercial corridors.
It was a matter of attitude as much as it was law making. (The end of parking mandates, on the other hand, has been impactful.)
There’s a lot going on in Minneapolis, in other words, beyond just the end of single-family zoning. Still, the shift away from it is significant. Only in the US is the detached single-family house “considered to be so incompatible with all other types of urbanization as to warrant a legally defined district all its own, a district where all other major land uses and building types are outlawed,” Sonia Hirt, a University of Georgia professor of landscape architecture and planning, wrote in her 2014 book “Zoned in the U.S.A.”
I understand the appeal of quiet, leafy residential neighborhoods, but it’s clear from Europe and some older US cities that these can be perfectly compatible with and even enhanced by well-designed commercial and multifamily buildings.
“Me-me-me” and “I’ve got mine” will never get us anywhere as a society. Change has to be a matter of what’s best for the community, and that includes owners of the “castles” in older San Diego neighborhoods.
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It’s Only Monday (Snips I found interesting)
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The Lost Boys of the American Right by David French at the New York Times. A conservative looks around and doesn’t like what he sees in his camp.
But what happens if you disagree? What happens if you ask: Wait, are we going too far? Well, then, you’re weak and small. You become the grifter. You don’t know what time it is. All of the social sanctions you inflicted on others come crashing down on you. And if the new right is good at anything, it’s good at bullying its critics. It’s a core aspect of the entire movement.
Worse still, even when one initially embraces bigotry “only” as a form of social transgression, marinating in that environment soon turns trolling into conviction. In contrite comments to The Washington Free Beacon in response to additional revelations from his private messages, Gonzalez said, “What starts off as joking can very quickly become unironically internalized as an actual belief.”
How true, especially when dissent is constantly characterized as weakness or cowardice. So in the name of strength, these young men capitulate until their minds and hearts are warped beyond recognition.
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Michael Smolens: San Diego city police union expands its political reach Via the Union Tribune.
The question arises about what direct benefit POA members get from opposing candidates who would have no direct control over San Diego city police policies or salaries. Perhaps there’s an indirect one. These out-of-town efforts may serve as a warning to San Diego City Council members, the mayor and potential candidates that they could receive the same treatment if they back proposals opposed by the union…
…Success for the POA in the supervisor’s race would not be without irony, however.
If Montgomery Steppe wins the seat outright on Tuesday, by gaining a majority of votes, or in a November runoff, she would be sworn in almost immediately.
If she loses, her term on the San Diego City Council runs through 2026.
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How Invasive Plants Caused the Maui Fires to Rage Via The New York Times
Fears over the risks from such grasses have been climbing since plantations began declining in the 1990s, marking the end of an agricultural model that lured immigrant laborers from around the world, shaping Hawaii for nearly 200 years. As tourism eclipsed the plantations in importance, the shift away from sugar cane and pineapple plantations allowed tropical grasslands to grow untended, bolstering what fire specialists call a “grass-fire” cycle.
Heavy rains that fall across the Hawaiian islands can cause nonnative grasses to grow in some cases as much as six inches in a day. Then the dry season arrives, and the grasses burn. Moreover, after fires ravage certain areas the nonnative grasses quickly sprout and spread, displacing native plants less adapted to wildfires, making the cycle more destructive.
Nonnative trees like mesquite, wattles and, at higher elevations, pines that were planted in the 20th century to stop erosion and provide timber, pose additional wildfire risks
I think this would be a good piece to post over at the OB Rag. I'm sure Frank and Geoff would just love it!
I was very discouraged by the apparent scuttling of the plans under SB10. Where are the ideas to fill the gap left by this refusal? Nowhere. There are so many creative ways to add housing. the MN example shows that there is less to be afraid of than we think. I lived for years in neighborhoods with 2-6 unit houses and buildings. It was every bit a neighborhood as the single family one i'm in now -- more in a lots of ways.