In a friends/family compound that is subdivided, you need a covenant on the original deeds that controls what happens when a member wants to sell their lot, e.g. the existing members collectively have to approve the buyer, or have right of first refusal to buy back the property, etc
Otherwise what starts as a family compound will eventually just become a “normal” neighborhood of strangers.
Subdivided family compounds are one of the extremely rare cases where you actually want a deeded homeowners association.
As someone that’s dealt with families trying to sell real estate owned jointly by several different families, owning real estate that requires all your friends and/or family to approve your sale sounds like a recipe for disaster.
That's actually how many of the most famous compounds emerged (like the "gingerbread houses" on Martha's Vineyard). Lots of summer camps that became permanent over decades.
The best resolution is for the parents to sell all of their real estate (and other illiquid assets) before they die and move into an assisted living facility or something. Maybe it's sad to lose the family home but it's sure a lot easier and less emotionally fraught to divide up cash and stocks among the heirs.
In France, there's also what's called en viager. In this system, a buyer buys real estate and then pays the seller a rent for the rest of that person's life, typically while the person continues to occupy the real estate. Then, when the person dies, the buyer takes the real estate. (In at least one situation that was well publicized, the buyer actually died before the seller.)
> In this system, a buyer buys real estate and then pays the seller a rent for the rest of that person's life, typically while the person continues to occupy the real estate. Then, when the person dies, the buyer takes the real estate.
We have that in the US, it's called a reverse mortgage. Generally it's large investment companies doing the buying, but I don't think there is any real reason why normal people couldn't do it. The downside is that it's sort ripe for abuse where the large companies doing the buying can take advantage of the elders needing money.
Not quite. If I understand correctly from your links, the person selling the property then pays to continue living there. In the system I described, the person buying the property pays the seller an ongoing fee, and the seller continues to live there.
You can have arbitrary contractual arrangements (subject to local law), but the underlying property interests still matter, especially during disputes. I believe in the US a reverse mortgage typically means the mortgager (seller) retains legal title, with the mortgagee (buyer) taking a lien. But I believe an "en viager" is closer to the common law life estate, and in the context of reverse mortgage lookalikes would mean the mortgagee getting fee simple title with the mortgager retaining a life estate. A life estate arrangement was common, I believe, in the US before reverse mortgages became a popular product.
Tax policy incentivizes selling capital assets upon death, rather than while alive.
And if one can live at home rather than assisted living, that's often preferred anyway.
IMHO, the heirs and executor should endeavor to either sell the home quickly or arrange so that only one person inherits it. Group ownership typically devolves into trouble. Although sometimes there's griping about future value changes even though the split was equitable at the time of distribution.
I'd also add creating a Trust is relatively easy and the elderly can continue living their life as they normally do. The Trust will then own the house, assets, etc., with distribution instructions included.
In support of the point above, after having to arrange housing and care for elderly relatives in that stage of life, I found assisted living significantly more expensive vs. paying a care agency to have someone live at home in the United States. You get the added bonus of more accountability of a standard of care and ensuring loved ones are being taken care of. Talking to the assisted living facility, it sounded like most of their residents were using insurance.
>I found assisted living significantly more expensive vs. paying a care agency to have someone live at home in the United States.
It really depends on the level of care necessary.
>Talking to the assisted living facility, it sounded like most of their residents were using insurance.
A lot of them don't really take insurance, but they will encourage the residents to spend all their money and then get on Medicaid/Medicare to have the government pay for everything. There is private nursing home insurance but most people don't have it because it's ungodly expensive, especially when purchased when you're already fairly old.
Great points, and devil is in the details. Insurance in this case was Medicare Advantage. In hindsight, Medicare Supplement Insurance (Medigap) would've been the better way to go for that situation and what I have loved ones using now.
Sure, that's great if everyone is on speaking terms and able to have a civil, rational discussion about the subject. But that isn't the reality in many families.
There's no requirement to split the estate "fairly" if the family doesn't get along, so there's no need to talk to everybody - all that's required is leaving a will (or, probably better, a trust, because that avoids probate) that specifies how to split the estate.
You're really missing the point. Leaving a will or trust is fine from from a purely legal perspective but doesn't solve anything for family relationships if the heirs are already on bad terms. Especially if they have emotional ties to certain assets.
My mom has owned a timeshare (which is a freestanding house) for almost 40 years at the Oregon coast with 5 other families. The families have all changed over the years and there have been small conflicts around what color the couch should be reupholstered but never any large conflicts when someone left the arrangement. It has been a source of pride that these families have shared something in this way, and a bunch of the kids like me have really benefitted in a way that we could not if we always went to a different rental.
Yes. Even when all parties are directionally aligned and fundamentally agree on everything it can be a nightmare simply to get all the ducks in a row.
But if I understand this correctly, this is just a way to allow for high density housing; there's nothing specific to friends / family here? A developer can buy a large lot and subdivide it to tiny, tiny houses. Doesn't sound pleasant to me, tbh, but high-density advocates gonna high-dense, I guess.
I think it's more about making housing cheaper than being pleasant. Plenty of people live in apartments or condos, so I suspect there is a market for it.
The problem with that is that, in practice, people barely have money to buy the house they live in and basically no one:
1) Has 500k just laying around ready buy a house out of the blue ...
2) ... that also happens to be an almost identical house next to yours.
So, 99.9999% of times it goes into the market, and the other parties feel betrayed, but the seller wants (or needs!) to sell, and things get ugly, brothers stop being brothers, etc ...
I wouldn't do it.
I also don't like the idea of having friends/family right next to me. Same neighborhood is really really nice, but same lot? Nah!
> I also don't like the idea of having friends/family right next to me. Same neighborhood is really really nice, but same lot? Nah!
There was a time in my 30s when I was a part of a very close-knit group of friends. We actually talked about the idea of building a friend compound, perhaps much later in life during our retirement years, and we were enthusiastic about it.
These days (mid-40s now), I'm still friends with all those people, but I agree that I don't need them to be on the same lot with me. I would love it if we all lived in the same neighborhood, though. Fortunately we're almost all still in the same city, at least.
I think it'd be good to start with a friends compound but then as you age, purchase additional lots so once everyone had families it would essentially be a neighborhood of friends. I'm not sure how you'd actually do that in real life without doing a bunch of new builds on land you prepurchased for that purpose though.
I agree, I don't think HOA is good idea here, at least not, "the right to veto the buyer" part. This creates a whole litany of potential moral hazards "okay, I'll approve them BUT you do XYZ or pay me ABC" or simply someone with a chip on their shoulder or feeling slighted might jam it up out of spite. It's not uncommon to see low key frustration between neighbors.
It's also worth mentioning that in California urban regions, where such a law is most applicable here, the townships are fairly highly regulated to the point of being a quasi-HOA. Specifically, various housing developments may have bylaws and rules - no HOA - but bylaws and rules enforced by the local city and burned onto the property deed. A true to life HOA in Idaho or Wyoming, for example, may offer more freedom and flexibility than a HOA-free property subject to local government in California.
Not much different than private equity that requires board approval to transfer. As long as the terms are in the operating agreement (or other ownership structure agreement), caveat emptor.
That’s fine. My home will be for my children to grow up in, but the world is big. I would never constrain them to this place. Once we pass it’s okay if other families make this their home. What sin is it that’s others enjoy it after I am gone.
It's called preemption, and it's a thing where I live.
A compound's members can have preemption to acquire a property when an outside buyer puts their money in an escrow for a contract that's already been signed. The preemptees have 30d-1y to come up with the same amount to purchase the property themselves or accept the new owner.
This way, property law isn't violated, because the seller still gets to sell their property for the agreed price no matter what others decide.
This does not prevent gentrification or changing the vibe of the neighbourhood. One can see that as a positive or a negative, just wanted to call that out.
The real benefit here is the increased density of the neighbourhood. That's conducive to community even if it's strangers that move in. Combine this with mixed zoning that allows for commercial property (things like cafes and grocery stores) and suddenly you have a pathway for gradually turning faceless modern suburbs into walkable neighbourhoods with amenities.
> In a friends/family compound that is subdivided, you need a covenant on the original deeds that controls what happens when a member wants to sell their lot, e.g. the existing members collectively have to approve the buyer, or have right of first refusal to buy back the property, etc
This sounds like reinventing the the often extremely long, complicated and onerous process of getting approved to buy into a coop in NYC.
I would hope that any real estate is subject to such covenants will be appropriately valued much less than traditional freehold / fee simple land.
I do YIMBY advocacy and this sounds policy change sounds like a good thing but I am always struck that our zoning is so restrictive that when people come up with different styles of housing it requires a law change and we talk about it like the law change is giving us this new cool style of housing. What is really happening is the law has taken away this style of housing and someone has come up with nice branding for a denser housing style that seems less scary so they are able budge zoning laws the tiniest bit to allow more density, but only if it is in this cool new style that we are OK with.
> To get this going, we had to buy 1 home, not 6 of them
You had to buy land for six, though?
This side of the pond buying (vacant) land to build one family home would run well into six figures (USD $$$,$$$ where the first digit is definitely a 2 and if you're unlucky it's higher still) - then you have to finance the house(s) on top.
I think the idea is that you buy a house that has a lot that could easily support more houses. You live in the house that's there, and then you subdivide the lot and sell those smaller parcels for some amount to friends/family, who then finance the build of their own home.
So as the initial buyer, you're certainly spending some extra to get a house on a lot that's large enough (vs. a lot only large enough for your own house), but you're going to recoup some (all?) of that extra outlay from your friends/family. You're not financing the build of more homes yourself.
Also we need to be on the same page when it comes to lot size. Here in California it's common to have a house on a quarter of an acre of land or (much) less. You could easily build 6 -- maybe even 8 -- homes (1500 sqft or so each) on a 1-acre plot here, and no one would think that's unusual.
And sure, an acre of land in CA is not going to be cheap, but that certainly depends on where you buy it. But if you can get an acre for, say, $1M, and then sell sub-parcels to 5 of your friends for $200k each, that's... fine? Honestly that seems pretty standard here. But sure, in some places in CA you could get acre for $600k, or maybe less.
At the risk of sounding glib, the Detroit Land Bank has some amazing deals on adjacent vacant properties when you buy a property to rehabilitate. If a family wants to have their own virtual compound and can stomach the safety implications, buying a Land Bank house and adjacent properties would give everyone plenty of elbow room.
In my city, you can often find rows of houses for sale for $5-10k a piece from slum lords trying to exit the business. Tearing down the old homes would probably be expensive, but I think the city even has a program to help with some of that. Since you could effectively buy a whole street, the safety implications might not be as bad as initially assumed.
The general consensus in everything I read is that it is easier to build in the south (like Florida or Texas). But, where I live now, Central Florida, the zoning restrictions are tight. Even putting in an ADU is a mess. I assume this is because people want to protect themselves from a double wide showing up next door. Sprawl is fine, but not next door.
I see a lot of radical changes happening in the American West. I'm from Oregon where HB 2001 (https://www.oregon.gov/lcd/LAR/Pages/Housing-2023.aspx) passed in 2023 and it and a few other laws now disallow any city with more than 25k people from blocking high density housing.
I'm really curious to see if these things will work and if the pendulum will shift. I hope so.
The overall idea is pretty good, but I take issue the image that shows the $1M plot turning into $2.5M by building small homes.
This makes sense in a vacuum (maybe) but in reality, the areas that get subdivided like this will become less valuable with each new division.
There needs to be a feedback mechanism that prevents every lot from being turned into a bunch of micro-lots in a race to do what the image depicts before the area loses value.
Except that this is California, where real estate prices are crazy. And not just recently, prices have continually been getting less and less affordable for 40 years.
There could be macroeconomic forces that affect that estimate, but in Berkeley in the historical context of home prices it makes perfect sense.
Yes, but you want a system that can dial in a level of affordability rather than a "rapidly multiply every home in an area by four" race to the bottom.
I don't know the specifics of the bill, but if it's a 2.5x investment cheat code for the fastest actors, it's going to cause mayhem and hard backlash.
> if it's a 2.5x investment cheat code for the fastest actors
It isn't a 2.5x investment cheat code. You're spending $1M for the original home. You're spending $500k on the construction of each new home. That's $2.5M invested. They would need to sell each house for more than $1.5M each for a "2.5x investment cheat code". If the original house cost $1M, how are they going to sell 4 houses with less land at a higher asking price? Even if they somehow managed that, do you honestly think sellers in the area aren't going to catch on?
By "rapidly" I mean on the span of a few years. If your neighbor subdivides their lot, the smartest thing for you to do is subdivide yours (after all, it will turn your $1M into $2.5M, no?). It will have a domino effect because the last house in the neighborhood full of subdivisions will have the lowest sale value (and the first house to subdivide will be the most valuable).
The intent is good but the system needs a moderating factor to prevent runaway.
> If your neighbor subdivides their lot, the smartest thing for you to do is subdivide yours
What if you like your lot, and don't want a lot 1/4th the size? I think this likely applies to most homeowners.
> the last house in the neighborhood full of subdivisions will have the lowest sale value (and the first house to subdivide will be the most valuable).
I don't think this is likely. As more homes subdivide, the relative value of non-subdivided homes will go up due to scarcity.
> needs a moderating factor to prevent runaway
Why? I can think of very very few cases in the US where we've had a problem with "too many homes", and many many cases where the opposite trend prevails. I think it's unlikely that we'll see any sort of runaway.
> By "rapidly" I mean on the span of a few years. If your neighbor subdivides their lot, the smartest thing for you to do is subdivide yours
If you are an absentee landlord, sure.
If you are a homeowner, then, you probably already chose your living arrangement over living in a smaller apartment while being the landlord of several other smaller units, and the reasons you choose that probably still apply.
And because there are people who prefer larger single family homes, as the supply of those drops, the value of the existing ones goes up (not as much as the value of subdivided lots, but the increase in value is—unlike that on a lot that you subdivide and improve—mostly-untaxed because Prop 13 full-value assessment is triggered by change of ownership or nee construction, not market appreciation driven by supply.)
So, as a homeowner, the smart thing to do—absent a change in living situation that changes why you became a homeowner—the smart thing to do when some neighbors convert is to enjoy the tax-free value boost, take advantage of the increase value-to-loan ratio to refi at more favorable terms if you have a mortgage, or take money out for other projects, etc., or... whatever.
If the capacity existed to build residential properties at that scale (much less at a price that wasn't absurd), there wouldn't be a need for this bill.
Yes. Homeowners of different political stripes are united in their unabashed desire to prevent the building of housing in order to maximize their own home's value. Rather than an outright attack on their fellow citizens, which it is, this is always phrased as protecting the value of their investment as if the outsized growth if the real estate sector was something their family earned rather than the result of piss poor policy.
>It will have a domino effect because the last house in the neighborhood full of subdivisions will have the lowest sale value (and the first house to subdivide will be the most valuable).
I'm not sure there is any logic in believing that. Since even a 4x increase in housing wouldn't provide enough to meet demand, if everyone else subdivided and you didn't yours would be worth more not less. The only way your fears would happen is if they allowed apartment complexes on the new lots and density increased by 10-50x.
> after all, it will turn your $1M into $2.5M, no?
Um, no. The graphic intends to show money spent by all parties on housing. The original party pays $1M and receives $300k for the plots of land. The subplot parties then spend $500k to build houses. There is nothing magically turning a $1M home into multiple homes without additional capital.
> If your neighbor subdivides their lot, the smartest thing for you to do is subdivide yours (after all, it will turn your $1M into $2.5M, no?)
No, it doesn't. Subdividing and building more houses on it turns it into $2.5M.
Most people will not have the cash or financing available to do that. And many people who want to do this will likely spend years doing it. And many people, even seeing their neighbors do it, just won't want to. They perhaps like the size of their lot, or don't have any family or friends that they really want to live that close to.
> last house in the neighborhood full of subdivisions will have the lowest sale value (and the first house to subdivide will be the most valuable).
If true, so what? As long as its sale value is more than it cost to build, that's fine.
> By "rapidly" I mean on the span of a few years.
That just isn't going to happen. GP's estimate of several decades is much more likely.
> the system needs a moderating factor to prevent runaway.
I don't think there's really any risk of that happening. At any rate, the problem is that we don't have enough housing; increasing the number of houses, and making them more affordable, is the entire point here.
Not sure I agree. The extent of the increase is certainly up for debate, but in a place like California where we have a housing affordability crisis, packing more housing units onto the same lot absolutely increases the value of the lot as a whole.
Now, certainly each individual house will be worth less than a single house on the lot would be. But the value of the lot+improvements will likely go up quite a lot.
Also consider that the value of the lot, unimproved, doesn't just magically go up once you get approval to build your friend compound. To get that $1M -> $2.5M increase in value, you probably have to invest a cool million into building the rest of the homes.
That’s absolutely not true. Higher population density almost always increases land values and it certainly would increase the total value of the land that was subdivided.
From what I've seen with infill in my area (Reston, VA, outside DC)... infill might slow the appreciation of adjacent property, but rarely/never hurts it. Surrounding property (>1 parcel away, give or take) generally increases in value, because along with the infill housing comes more amenities (commercial/retail redevelopment).
And for the property that was "infilled", the per unit price might be slightly lower, but the value of the entire property has gone up. Say the land cost $1 million, got split into 4 parcels, and each is now worth $275,000 (fabricated numbers).
EDIT - this isn't quite apples to apples, since we don't have the same rules as CA - we just have a massive amount of infill development happening along approved "density" corridors.
The goal of housing is not to grow or even maintain the wealth of the people who live there it is to to house people. If it should come about that A given neighborhood triple's in population and everyone's house is worth half as much I should count it as a success.
If you take the Empire Builder from Chicago towards the northwest, one of the trains goes through North Dakota at night.
Every farm in the area has one of those mercury vapor lights in the yard, which are visible for tens of miles. If you sit in the scenic car then, you will see one of those farmstead perhaps every hour. It is very not populated.
I agree! I think density is good, which is why I live in an urban area. What I don't get are the other people who live in urban areas who want them to be more like North Dakota.
I agree too. Far too many people want to live in an area with the services and vibrancy of an urban area, but with the number of people you'd find out in a rural area. It's just not practical or sustainable to build a community that way.
(Also, I get the need for peace and quiet sometimes, but it makes me sad how so many people in the US just... don't like to be around other people.)
I think you missed the actual point of the graphic. It is to point out that the laws enable cheaper housing. Instead of people having to pay $1M for a single home, you're enabling 4 homes at $700k or less each.
As someone interested in "friend compounds", I'm missing what in either of these laws enables that specifically. They both just seem to provide for denser housing generally. (Particularly SB684 almost literally just seems to allow subdividing lots which couldn't be subdivided before.)
Yes, that's the whole subtext. These kinds of developments with multiple freestanding units on a single lot are generally disallowed by the previous generation of zoning and planning rules. Note how these changes are allowing "friend complexes" on lots zoned multifamily already.
This is for suburbia. There isn't massive demand for AirBnB in suburbia. There's such a massive shortage of housing that the small AirBnB demand is large relative to the supply of empty houses, but that's because a small number divided by a number very close to zero results in a large number. More supply will help a lot more than limiting AirBnB.
It allows to subdivide lots down to 600 sq ft parcels. I can find endless examples in the core of every major California city, including San Francisco, where this is applicable, and could 5x or 10x the number of houses in single family areas[1]. San Francisco currently zones for a minimum of 4000 sq feet lots in RH-1 zones, and at least 1000 sq ft lot per residence in RH-3.
Should it or would it? Probably not. But this weird image of the suburbs vs "the city" (someone else used the term "metro" which humorously includes the suburbs, but whatever) doesn't seem reality based.
Doubly so given that the suburbs are car-centric, and plans like this are car-antagonistic. It seems to specifically exclude the suburbs, if anything.
[1] This law only applies to multi-family zoning, which in SF is RH-3. Regardless, funny to see people saying this is some low density suburb thing when many of the cores of cities have zoning requiring significantly more land.
> (someone else used the term "metro" which humorously includes the suburbs, but whatever)
Not really sure where the humor is being found. There are areas where suburbs grew into their own cities that now blend back into the larger urban area they were once separated from. They are no longer suburbs, and it is now more than one city, so metroplex/metropolitan area is the term used.
I was referring to someone saying "works for suburbs I'm guessing - I don't see how it helps out in metro areas?".
A "metro area" is by definition the overarching container (often including multiple cities and the suburbs of those cities, such as the Bay Area metro area), most definitely containing said suburbs. So if something "works for the suburbs", it works for the metro.
Instead of high density housing this will do slightly higher density in low density zones. You cannot really increase density by that much with it, but you for sure can cut the yards... And parking space.
I'm pretty sure this won't make housing more affordable by much. Or will even have an opposite effect.
To build these houses a pretty serious investment or Amish-sized group is required. Who has that?
> but you for sure can cut the yards... And parking space.
As if each of the people moving into the subdivided spaces still won't need parking. Now, you've actually increased the demand for parking. Where is that parking going to happen?
> I thought the post says one person buys the lot and then sells it to friends who individually fund the houses.
One company buys the lot and then sells it to its own subsidiaries who individually fund the houses.
I'm sure there are numerous ways to juggle the finances.
Additionally, what happens after 5 years when the first friend moves out? I see this complex as a terrible HOA-in-the-making since neighbors will be sharing more resources. Reminds me of when I was doing factory work and living in a punk house.
Yeah the "friend compound" thing seems nebulous, and one of the stated benefits is specifically that it can be financed independently and resold to third parties. So basically it's just higher density housing and pretty soon it's just very close houses of random people with some sort of weird condo fees for the commons (surely there is shared walkways, etc), etc.
It may seem odd to people who grew up in the single-family detached housing world of the postwar US,
but there are cultures and societies around the world even today where multi-family housing is common.
See for example Casas de Vecindad,
a typical form of housing in the US/Mexico borderlands for hundreds of years.
SB 684 only works on multifamily-zoned lots, but starting in July, it’s getting replaced by SB 1123, which works on “vacant or uninhabitable” single-family lots
I'm pretty positive about the ability to subdivide and build smaller.
But pushing this as a "friend compound" law is super weird. Are there really that many people who want a friend compound for their primary residence? Personally, I'd be hard pressed to think of more than 1-2 other couples with whom I'd want to co-develop property and even then only for a vacation home, not my regular house.
Yeah, exactly, we’ve talked about this a lot with friends from church and, IMO, this would be the best way to do it. It avoids the coercive danger of shared property and gives anybody the ability to exit whenever they want.
In rural Colorado there is a law that makes subdividing lots under 35 acres very difficult. There are lots of areas in the mountains that have expensive housing. You are allowed to build one 15,000 sqft house but not ten 1,500 sqft houses on the 35 acres. Would love to have something like this in Colorado.
>In rural Colorado there is a law that makes subdividing lots under 35 acres very difficult.
Those sorts of laws are often to protect farms and ranches from being turned into subdivisions are generally a good thing if you want a stable food supply.
Same. I am living on about 40 acres in the 4 corners area and I'd really like to put in more infrastructure. Currently I have a bunch of non-permitted (built in the 90s) cabins together in one corner, running off of solar. I'm planning on building a septic and a cistern for this set of buildings and a larger, more permitted house on another part of the property this year.
I could have 6-10 tiny houses on this property and not have folks seeing each other, and I have the cash to just put in everything necessary. As written, the codes are not friendly towards that idea. I am still going to put in some RV hookups, at least- those are much less regulated than dwellings. My neighbors certainly aren't in a position to do the kind of complainaing that would lead to more attention from the county, and I'm at the end of a long series of oil field roads.
While I am an anarchist, I do understand the county's need to prevent folks from creating dangers to themselves and other folks. I just wish that everything didn't need to be massively profitable for some investors before variations on codes and planning could be grante.
That doesn't really scale though. Once you have ten houses, you'll start thinking about how it really should be 100 houses and they should build a better road to service everyone and then you'll want power and phone and internet, and before long all of the natural areas are just subdivisions.
That's not at all the same thing. They're subdividing the lot and building a separate house for each family, not just putting multiple families together into an existing large house.
In Europe generally all new bigger construction has most parking below ground, even 2-3 floors. Very few outside if any, normally just for quick drop off or services.
I've even seen locals blocking a successful local bank trying to build a additional building and planning way too many of those - citing concern of too much added traffic in neighborhood. Not entirely sure if thats the best approach, but thats how how respect for laws and locals looks like. At the end, bank managed just fine despite that restriction.
> Parking standards were created arbitrarily, without adequate data. Zoning laws usually require one parking space per apartment, one per 300 square feet of commercial development, and one per 100 square feet for restaurants. For context, a parking space measures 160 square feet on average, plus additional area for driveways and driving lanes, so an eatery’s parking lot may be three times the size of its dining area.
Idk, don't move there if having on-site parking is a dealbreaker for you. It isn't for a lot of people. Why should they subsidize someone else's parking preferences?
OTOH, having 4/6/8 new tinyhouses worth of neighbours and the streets filled with their cars sucks for many in the neighbourhood - so you'd expect them to resist, or at least ask the question. Where will the cars go?
> you'd expect them to resist, or at least ask the question. Where will the cars go?
Sounds like a streetside-parking regulation problem. Everyone asking questions every time someone wants to build anything is why we don’t build anymore. If we want to require parking we don’t get to complain about housing affordability.
The groups of people that "require parking" are largely different to the groups of people that "complain about housing affordability".
It's no surprise that complex issues will have various factions arguing about "their happiness".
It does seem like many countries are beyond the point of further conversation and need positive impactful action regarding housing affordability. Or even just any action at all so we can tell if it is the correct action...
Free parking is also regressive, the poor pay a much higher portion of their income for "free" parking than the rich do.
More generally, parking is a service. All market goods & services are highly regressive, because the rich and poor pay basically the same price. Addressing inequality at the individual goods level always creates more problems than it solves. Addressing it for parking is particularly unfair, because the very poorest don't have cars.
The poor would be far better off with more welfare and a less regressive tax system so they have more money to choose what they need. Paying for "free" parking via property taxes and baked into the costs of local stores is inefficient and regressive.
This is true, but only in a car-centric city like those in the US. If we extend this hypothetical to include additional changes to our infrastructure such as: reclaiming lanes for wider sidewalks, bike lanes, and bus/taxi lanes, restricting car traffic on heavily foot-trafficked streets, or building housing where parking was, cars remain cumbersome to use.
I’m not actually pitching this course of action for any specific city; I actually live in an extremely rural area and don’t have a horse in this race. Just want to make the point that mass transit investments can’t happen in a vacuum if we want to achieve the desired results.
We don't build parking smart here in the States, period. Parking lots should be multi-story to serve multiple buildings and have an array of solar panels on the roof to contribute to the city's power needs.
In theory? In practice and when I have a choice, I will always pick mass transit instead of driving because I prefer to walk and avoid the hassles of traffic lights, risk of crashing or running someone over, wear and tear on my car, gasoline, etc...
I'm going to guess you've never had some drugged-up crazy try to stab you in a bus? After the second time it happens, you never ever consider it again. Life is too short to die like that.
I'm going to guess you've never had some drugged-up crazy nearly ram into you at high speed in a car? Life is too short to die like that, and to spend it sitting in traffic to boot.
Car has airbags. My chances are better than “knifed on BART”. And your chances of a fatal collision in stop-and-go traffic are as close to zero as a number can be - the kinetic energy just isn't there at those speeds.
Maybe, maybe not. But you need to solve people's transportation problems first, not claim that if they give up car transportation options something else will materialize later.
> > problems first, not claim that if they give up
> > car transportation options something else will
> > materialize later
.
> I never said otherwise, but continuing to prioritize
> cars only makes everything, even car travel, worse.
.
You have JUST said otherwise! You want to deprioritize what works in favour of what does not exist while offering no path for it to exist and dodging the reality that no such path exists.
Okay, thank you for telling me what I want to do. You see, I thought I wanted start working on other forms of transit while still leaving cars as they are. I thought I wanted to stop saying one more lane will fix it, and actually try adding transit options. I thought I wanted to build safe sidewalks and bike infrastructure that actually goes somewhere, instead of just adding more parking lots.
I'm really glad you were here to tell me what I actually wanted. I'm glad you were here to twist my words up so bad that I finally understand that what I really wanted is to completely get rid of cars overnight, and then sit around on our thumbs and hope that someday a magic carpet will come and carry us all off to our destinations.
If you're not able to afford a regular-sized house in some area, you're likely not able to afford a car either. Also, the places with more residential density already have public transit that is heavily used by normal people. Sadly cities will always have crime, but IMO crimes on public transit are the least of your problems if you're stuck in a neighborhood like that. And nothing is stopping miscreants from stealing stuff from your car trunk, breaking a window in your car just for fun, or keying your car, or possibly much worse if your car is a Tesla these days.
This is where you have to be smart about parking. Building small houses like that, raised up so you can park a car underneath, gets dual use out of the same square footage. While you are at it, orient the building properly so that installing PV panels on the roof makes sense. Now we have three uses for the same square footage.
Since this is California law, it helps tremendously in places like LA which were built as large suburban SFH neighborhoods but have long exhausted all free space. Building denser housing within existing SFH neighborhoods will help to alleviate the housing crisis.
>I think for many the only alternative is renting.
Indeed it is, and that's kinda my point. These were the $8,000 starter homes our working class grandparents bought on a single salary from Sears in their 20s. Now they are a stretch goal for middle aged dual income families.
Of course not. There are plenty of circumstances that would change the order. But that'd be my 'all things being equal' ranking. I had hoped it was implied that I'd prefer to rent a non-haunted condo over owning a haunted mansion.
Is it just me, or does this seem like a another example of how housing in CA is broken? The demand is totally insatiable.
I grew up in the state, and am in the East Coast for now (which also has its own problems), but I can't imagine moving back if I had to live in an ADU. The whole concept of an ADU just seems like a bad sign for the market, not mention the increase in traffic bc more density = more people.
You would think the market would normalize and people would move to other states, which is happening, yet people are contemplating making these mini houses.
Yet another symptom of American standard of living decreasing -- younger people are just getting less with the same amount of money. That's the root of the problem.
> I can't imagine moving back if I had to live in an ADU.
People have different imagination from you
> I can't imagine moving back if I had to live in an ADU.
More density implies that services get built closer together. A corner store needs a high level of density to exist, but when it does it cuts down your trips to a large grocery store.
I live in a dense city. I have a grocer half a block away, 10 coffee shops in a 5-block radius, etc.
You have an extremely Americanized view of a fundamentally unsustainable housing mechanism; American car-dependent suburbs don't make any sense as the main source of housing.
> I live in a dense city. I have a grocer half a block away, 10 coffee shops in a 5-block radius, etc
"Density in CA" is not the same as "Density in Copenhagen/NY/Berlin/etc". Density in CA means it takes you an hour to drive to get to Whole Foods that's 7 miles away bc of traffic, something I experienced in Venice Beach. Density in CA makes already bad traffic way worse, and its not like the infrastructure is going to upgrade such that coffee shops spring up on every neighborhood corner.
> You have an extremely Americanized view of a fundamentally unsustainable housing mechanism
Bc I live in America.
> American car-dependent suburbs don't make any sense as the main source of housing.
Agreed, but I do not think ADUs make much sense in a suburban area that does not support the infrastructure for more dense housing.
Density in CA is bad because we don't build up. If we built up, there would be enough customers for you to not need to go to Whole Foods and instead be able to hit up a smaller grocer on your block without getting in a car. Traffic is bad because we don't have density we have sprawl
The demand has nothing to do with it. SF should look like Tokyo, but California gave away its right to be the king of the world economy so it could hand over feudal fiefdoms to retirees and old people who bought houses when they were worth $10 each.
Is insatiable demand equivalent to 'broken' housing? Seems like the latter is a pejorative and the former is the better of two possible problems.
Considering people live in apartments and condos, what's the problem with an ADU (or tinyhouse as they called them years ago)?
The density/traffic thing is not straightforward. Increased capacity will add traffic, sure. To the extent that capacity remains static and people can live closer to their commute destinations, you have fewer people taking longer trips and more people taking shorter trips (or other transport). Obviously both of these will be the case. As will people moving from high density housing to ADUs in the suburbs.
This makes it easier to both move into & out of California. It'll make existing suburban lots more valuable because they now can be subdivided so existing homeowners can cash in and move on. But the new subdivided lots will be cheaper than existing non-subdivided lots, so it's also cheaper to move in. Win-win!
It can't make lots simultaneously more valuable and cheaper to acquire
Existing homeowners won't subdivide and leave. They will split their sfh lot and rent it out. Look at people investing into ADUs
It will be cheaper in the sense that renting a room is cheaper than renting the house when looking at total outlay, but not when looking at sqft ownership
We complain about housing being an asset and instead turn every lot into an investment opportunity
So a fancy trailer park basically?
but one where relocation and moving can
be more difficult?
People get divorced, relocate for work,
relocate for mental health,end up in jail,
People end up hating each other, have kids
and need space, get a raise a want space,
and people die.
How long does the friend structure survive?
There will be people moving in and out just
like any part of real estate.
Do the original owners turn into landlords
and rent out the homes?
There would be an interesting dynamic if
the homes were mobile, when you could move
to a different friend compound if you wanted
to leave.
But again, all of this is solved in trailer parks.
I am -not- being derisive of trailer parks.
I am saying that this is a rich person's
reinvention of it with some added attributes.
Spending time studying the dynamics of a
trailer park over time would provide lessons
on mistakes not to make, and nifty solutions
to problems not yet pondereed.
(Yeah if you can afford a mini house on its own
real estate in California these days you are rich)
The "group of friends or families living together" is probably the least likely application of this legislation. It main goal seems to be increasing the housing density of residential areas, so investors can buy a single plot of land, develop the property, and sell up to ten houses. Which I guess is the intended purpose, giving investors a more socially productive way to get profits than speculating with limited pre-existing real state.
This is a response to decades of poor planning in an appropriately compromised way. Ideally, big chunks of low density California should be bulldozed and be rezoned to be more like Paris or Amsterdam, but this will have to do.
No. Apartment buildings are little bricks stacked together into a larger structure. In the original example, individual houses are spaced close together, they have the feel of a trailer park.
These two living environments have in common that they are one—to two-person places to sleep, cook, and watch videos. Everything else that makes life interesting has to be done somewhere else. There are no gardens, no workshops for CNC machines and 3d printers, and no space for outdoor recreational equipment like kayaks, paddleboards, bikes, etc.
I can concede I am biased, and I'm blessed by being able to afford a property with a garden of about 2,000 square feet. I'm looking to expand it by another 500 square feet this year. My basement is just half full with my workshop and home lab; the other half is my partner's art studio.
There was a recent discussion on HNN about developers who quit their jobs to start a farm or otherwise leave the tech world behind, but I do a version of that in the small. I am content to hang around the house and garden, relax outside, watch birds, and occasionally hike in neighboring State Parks.
> Everything else that makes life interesting has to be done somewhere else.
So you've never lived in a city? All the things you have are typical suburbia pastimes. I don't see in your listing for "things that make life interesting" going to the theater, pub, hanging out with your neighborhood friends at the local restaurant 10 minutes away.
And all these things are enabled by dense housing and essentially inaccessible for suburbanites.
I have lived in cities. Going to the theater held little charm for me, although I did go when a friend of mine was acting in a community theater. I went to support him, not because the play was a draw. I never had any neighborhood friends. In most of my apartment blocks, very few people spoke to each other. I quickly found out I had nothing in common with those who did talk to me. When they went to the local restaurants, it was to talk about American sports and drink beer. I don't do American sports or drink beer.
You probably intended your comment as a gotcha on the property tax issue. Still, I only bought my house a couple of years ago, which reset the valuation of the property to a much higher level at the current tax rate. I don't use much in the way of city services (road, water), but I know the property tax I pay goes to help pay for school for other people's children, police, fire, and EMS for folks who need them. I know my income taxes contribute to many services in urban areas that I will never use. I am okay with this. I recognize that there are many cross-subsidies in our society, and unless we go completely pay-as-you-go, it'll be impossible to untangle them all.
> There are no gardens, no workshops for CNC machines and 3d printers, and no space for outdoor recreational equipment like kayaks, paddleboards, bikes, etc.
Funny, since I live in a dense city and I do all of that daily.
In a friends/family compound that is subdivided, you need a covenant on the original deeds that controls what happens when a member wants to sell their lot, e.g. the existing members collectively have to approve the buyer, or have right of first refusal to buy back the property, etc
Otherwise what starts as a family compound will eventually just become a “normal” neighborhood of strangers.
Subdivided family compounds are one of the extremely rare cases where you actually want a deeded homeowners association.
As someone that’s dealt with families trying to sell real estate owned jointly by several different families, owning real estate that requires all your friends and/or family to approve your sale sounds like a recipe for disaster.
All the stories I've heard about families not getting along pale in comparison to stories of when the parents die. Game of Thrones come to life.
I would love to know how people have successfully resolved this for their families.
I wonder if this compound stuff might work better for 6 secondary homes, like in the woods for summer. Everyone pitches in to build them.
That's actually how many of the most famous compounds emerged (like the "gingerbread houses" on Martha's Vineyard). Lots of summer camps that became permanent over decades.
>I would love to know how people have successfully resolved this for their families.
Have kids so rich what you leave doesn't really matter, or so poor they can't afford to bicker over it.
> so rich what you leave doesn't really matter
Please see recent Murdoch family succession news. The world is not enough.
> so poor they can't afford to bicker over it
We will never stop bickering, it is only our implements that become more cost efficient.
I imagine most of the time its not really about the money but grief and bottled up disagreements coming out in weird ways.
The best resolution is for the parents to sell all of their real estate (and other illiquid assets) before they die and move into an assisted living facility or something. Maybe it's sad to lose the family home but it's sure a lot easier and less emotionally fraught to divide up cash and stocks among the heirs.
In France, there's also what's called en viager. In this system, a buyer buys real estate and then pays the seller a rent for the rest of that person's life, typically while the person continues to occupy the real estate. Then, when the person dies, the buyer takes the real estate. (In at least one situation that was well publicized, the buyer actually died before the seller.)
https://www.connexionfrance.com/practical/buying-and-selling...
> In this system, a buyer buys real estate and then pays the seller a rent for the rest of that person's life, typically while the person continues to occupy the real estate. Then, when the person dies, the buyer takes the real estate.
We have that in the US, it's called a reverse mortgage. Generally it's large investment companies doing the buying, but I don't think there is any real reason why normal people couldn't do it. The downside is that it's sort ripe for abuse where the large companies doing the buying can take advantage of the elders needing money.
I think what the parent is talking about is called "residential sale leaseback agreement".
Hugh Hefner did this arrangement with the Playboy mansion - https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesrealestatecouncil/2017/10...
Conrad Black also did a similar deal for his place - https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/conrad-black-sells-2300...
Not quite. If I understand correctly from your links, the person selling the property then pays to continue living there. In the system I described, the person buying the property pays the seller an ongoing fee, and the seller continues to live there.
Really it can be whatever deal you work out. We don't really have laws preventing any sort of arrangement you might want to make.
>In the system I described, the person buying the property pays the seller an ongoing fee, and the seller continues to live there.
That's called a reverse mortgage in the US.
You can have arbitrary contractual arrangements (subject to local law), but the underlying property interests still matter, especially during disputes. I believe in the US a reverse mortgage typically means the mortgager (seller) retains legal title, with the mortgagee (buyer) taking a lien. But I believe an "en viager" is closer to the common law life estate, and in the context of reverse mortgage lookalikes would mean the mortgagee getting fee simple title with the mortgager retaining a life estate. A life estate arrangement was common, I believe, in the US before reverse mortgages became a popular product.
Tax policy incentivizes selling capital assets upon death, rather than while alive.
And if one can live at home rather than assisted living, that's often preferred anyway.
IMHO, the heirs and executor should endeavor to either sell the home quickly or arrange so that only one person inherits it. Group ownership typically devolves into trouble. Although sometimes there's griping about future value changes even though the split was equitable at the time of distribution.
I'd also add creating a Trust is relatively easy and the elderly can continue living their life as they normally do. The Trust will then own the house, assets, etc., with distribution instructions included.
In support of the point above, after having to arrange housing and care for elderly relatives in that stage of life, I found assisted living significantly more expensive vs. paying a care agency to have someone live at home in the United States. You get the added bonus of more accountability of a standard of care and ensuring loved ones are being taken care of. Talking to the assisted living facility, it sounded like most of their residents were using insurance.
>I found assisted living significantly more expensive vs. paying a care agency to have someone live at home in the United States.
It really depends on the level of care necessary.
>Talking to the assisted living facility, it sounded like most of their residents were using insurance.
A lot of them don't really take insurance, but they will encourage the residents to spend all their money and then get on Medicaid/Medicare to have the government pay for everything. There is private nursing home insurance but most people don't have it because it's ungodly expensive, especially when purchased when you're already fairly old.
Great points, and devil is in the details. Insurance in this case was Medicare Advantage. In hindsight, Medicare Supplement Insurance (Medigap) would've been the better way to go for that situation and what I have loved ones using now.
I didn't claim that approach was tax efficient, just less likely to cause disagreements between surviving family members.
Or, they could talk to the kids before death, figure it out, and spell out the details in a will (or place the assets in a trust). Crazy, I know.
> (or place the assets in a trust)
This is key. I wish the elders in my family had done that. You don't even need to have a ton of assets for it to be worth it to protect them that way.
Sure, that's great if everyone is on speaking terms and able to have a civil, rational discussion about the subject. But that isn't the reality in many families.
There's no requirement to split the estate "fairly" if the family doesn't get along, so there's no need to talk to everybody - all that's required is leaving a will (or, probably better, a trust, because that avoids probate) that specifies how to split the estate.
You're really missing the point. Leaving a will or trust is fine from from a purely legal perspective but doesn't solve anything for family relationships if the heirs are already on bad terms. Especially if they have emotional ties to certain assets.
My mom has owned a timeshare (which is a freestanding house) for almost 40 years at the Oregon coast with 5 other families. The families have all changed over the years and there have been small conflicts around what color the couch should be reupholstered but never any large conflicts when someone left the arrangement. It has been a source of pride that these families have shared something in this way, and a bunch of the kids like me have really benefitted in a way that we could not if we always went to a different rental.
Yes. Even when all parties are directionally aligned and fundamentally agree on everything it can be a nightmare simply to get all the ducks in a row.
But if I understand this correctly, this is just a way to allow for high density housing; there's nothing specific to friends / family here? A developer can buy a large lot and subdivide it to tiny, tiny houses. Doesn't sound pleasant to me, tbh, but high-density advocates gonna high-dense, I guess.
I think it's more about making housing cheaper than being pleasant. Plenty of people live in apartments or condos, so I suspect there is a market for it.
On the other hand, right of first purchase seems fine: "I'm going to sell this to <X>, and if you want it you have to pay the same amount".
The problem with that is that, in practice, people barely have money to buy the house they live in and basically no one:
1) Has 500k just laying around ready buy a house out of the blue ...
2) ... that also happens to be an almost identical house next to yours.
So, 99.9999% of times it goes into the market, and the other parties feel betrayed, but the seller wants (or needs!) to sell, and things get ugly, brothers stop being brothers, etc ...
I wouldn't do it.
I also don't like the idea of having friends/family right next to me. Same neighborhood is really really nice, but same lot? Nah!
> I also don't like the idea of having friends/family right next to me. Same neighborhood is really really nice, but same lot? Nah!
There was a time in my 30s when I was a part of a very close-knit group of friends. We actually talked about the idea of building a friend compound, perhaps much later in life during our retirement years, and we were enthusiastic about it.
These days (mid-40s now), I'm still friends with all those people, but I agree that I don't need them to be on the same lot with me. I would love it if we all lived in the same neighborhood, though. Fortunately we're almost all still in the same city, at least.
I think it'd be good to start with a friends compound but then as you age, purchase additional lots so once everyone had families it would essentially be a neighborhood of friends. I'm not sure how you'd actually do that in real life without doing a bunch of new builds on land you prepurchased for that purpose though.
Sure, just give me 3 weeks to raise the cash…. Actually i don't have the money.
in the meantime the actual buyer leaves
Nah, right of first purchase also has a time limit.
but what happens if i run out the limit? will the original buyer be there still?
I think it mostly goes “I’m going to sell, it goes up to market on day <X>, unless you meet my ask.”
I agree, I don't think HOA is good idea here, at least not, "the right to veto the buyer" part. This creates a whole litany of potential moral hazards "okay, I'll approve them BUT you do XYZ or pay me ABC" or simply someone with a chip on their shoulder or feeling slighted might jam it up out of spite. It's not uncommon to see low key frustration between neighbors.
It's also worth mentioning that in California urban regions, where such a law is most applicable here, the townships are fairly highly regulated to the point of being a quasi-HOA. Specifically, various housing developments may have bylaws and rules - no HOA - but bylaws and rules enforced by the local city and burned onto the property deed. A true to life HOA in Idaho or Wyoming, for example, may offer more freedom and flexibility than a HOA-free property subject to local government in California.
Not much different than private equity that requires board approval to transfer. As long as the terms are in the operating agreement (or other ownership structure agreement), caveat emptor.
(am member/owner in family friend's family farm)
> Otherwise what starts as a family compound will eventually just become a “normal” neighborhood of strangers.
That's explicitly noted as an advantage of the arrangement in the article.
That’s fine. My home will be for my children to grow up in, but the world is big. I would never constrain them to this place. Once we pass it’s okay if other families make this their home. What sin is it that’s others enjoy it after I am gone.
It's called preemption, and it's a thing where I live.
A compound's members can have preemption to acquire a property when an outside buyer puts their money in an escrow for a contract that's already been signed. The preemptees have 30d-1y to come up with the same amount to purchase the property themselves or accept the new owner.
This way, property law isn't violated, because the seller still gets to sell their property for the agreed price no matter what others decide.
This does not prevent gentrification or changing the vibe of the neighbourhood. One can see that as a positive or a negative, just wanted to call that out.
The real benefit here is the increased density of the neighbourhood. That's conducive to community even if it's strangers that move in. Combine this with mixed zoning that allows for commercial property (things like cafes and grocery stores) and suddenly you have a pathway for gradually turning faceless modern suburbs into walkable neighbourhoods with amenities.
> In a friends/family compound that is subdivided, you need a covenant on the original deeds that controls what happens when a member wants to sell their lot, e.g. the existing members collectively have to approve the buyer, or have right of first refusal to buy back the property, etc
This sounds like reinventing the the often extremely long, complicated and onerous process of getting approved to buy into a coop in NYC.
I would hope that any real estate is subject to such covenants will be appropriately valued much less than traditional freehold / fee simple land.
Sounds like more fun than selling a co-op, even!
I do YIMBY advocacy and this sounds policy change sounds like a good thing but I am always struck that our zoning is so restrictive that when people come up with different styles of housing it requires a law change and we talk about it like the law change is giving us this new cool style of housing. What is really happening is the law has taken away this style of housing and someone has come up with nice branding for a denser housing style that seems less scary so they are able budge zoning laws the tiniest bit to allow more density, but only if it is in this cool new style that we are OK with.
> To get this going, we had to buy 1 home, not 6 of them
You had to buy land for six, though?
This side of the pond buying (vacant) land to build one family home would run well into six figures (USD $$$,$$$ where the first digit is definitely a 2 and if you're unlucky it's higher still) - then you have to finance the house(s) on top.
They're talking about buying one lot and splitting it into 6 micro lots. That sounds ridiculously small to me.
The context you're missing is that zoning and building codes make a lot of lots ridiculously big in the first place.
I lived in the suburbs for decades so I know how big lots are.
Ah, good, mind telling me how big the lots are around my area?
Open Zillow and move around various metro’s suburbs to see how much lot sizes can vary.
Depends on what your measure for normal is.
In Seattle, luckily a lot of SFHs with big lots are being turned into multiple townhomes.
I think the idea is that you buy a house that has a lot that could easily support more houses. You live in the house that's there, and then you subdivide the lot and sell those smaller parcels for some amount to friends/family, who then finance the build of their own home.
So as the initial buyer, you're certainly spending some extra to get a house on a lot that's large enough (vs. a lot only large enough for your own house), but you're going to recoup some (all?) of that extra outlay from your friends/family. You're not financing the build of more homes yourself.
Also we need to be on the same page when it comes to lot size. Here in California it's common to have a house on a quarter of an acre of land or (much) less. You could easily build 6 -- maybe even 8 -- homes (1500 sqft or so each) on a 1-acre plot here, and no one would think that's unusual.
And sure, an acre of land in CA is not going to be cheap, but that certainly depends on where you buy it. But if you can get an acre for, say, $1M, and then sell sub-parcels to 5 of your friends for $200k each, that's... fine? Honestly that seems pretty standard here. But sure, in some places in CA you could get acre for $600k, or maybe less.
Yeah, I think the article captures that pretty well. The infographic shows 4 lots for 100k each.
In most cities it is close to impossible to find several lots for sale side by side.
At the risk of sounding glib, the Detroit Land Bank has some amazing deals on adjacent vacant properties when you buy a property to rehabilitate. If a family wants to have their own virtual compound and can stomach the safety implications, buying a Land Bank house and adjacent properties would give everyone plenty of elbow room.
Im sure there are lots of places if location is not a concern. The author of the article is in the California bay area.
In my city, you can often find rows of houses for sale for $5-10k a piece from slum lords trying to exit the business. Tearing down the old homes would probably be expensive, but I think the city even has a program to help with some of that. Since you could effectively buy a whole street, the safety implications might not be as bad as initially assumed.
The general consensus in everything I read is that it is easier to build in the south (like Florida or Texas). But, where I live now, Central Florida, the zoning restrictions are tight. Even putting in an ADU is a mess. I assume this is because people want to protect themselves from a double wide showing up next door. Sprawl is fine, but not next door.
I see a lot of radical changes happening in the American West. I'm from Oregon where HB 2001 (https://www.oregon.gov/lcd/LAR/Pages/Housing-2023.aspx) passed in 2023 and it and a few other laws now disallow any city with more than 25k people from blocking high density housing.
I'm really curious to see if these things will work and if the pendulum will shift. I hope so.
The overall idea is pretty good, but I take issue the image that shows the $1M plot turning into $2.5M by building small homes.
This makes sense in a vacuum (maybe) but in reality, the areas that get subdivided like this will become less valuable with each new division.
There needs to be a feedback mechanism that prevents every lot from being turned into a bunch of micro-lots in a race to do what the image depicts before the area loses value.
Except that this is California, where real estate prices are crazy. And not just recently, prices have continually been getting less and less affordable for 40 years.
There could be macroeconomic forces that affect that estimate, but in Berkeley in the historical context of home prices it makes perfect sense.
Isn't homes becoming more affordable an intended side effect of this legislation?
Yes, but you want a system that can dial in a level of affordability rather than a "rapidly multiply every home in an area by four" race to the bottom.
I don't know the specifics of the bill, but if it's a 2.5x investment cheat code for the fastest actors, it's going to cause mayhem and hard backlash.
> if it's a 2.5x investment cheat code for the fastest actors
It isn't a 2.5x investment cheat code. You're spending $1M for the original home. You're spending $500k on the construction of each new home. That's $2.5M invested. They would need to sell each house for more than $1.5M each for a "2.5x investment cheat code". If the original house cost $1M, how are they going to sell 4 houses with less land at a higher asking price? Even if they somehow managed that, do you honestly think sellers in the area aren't going to catch on?
If by "rapidly" you mean "over several decades". That's the scale at which neighborhoods turn over.
By "rapidly" I mean on the span of a few years. If your neighbor subdivides their lot, the smartest thing for you to do is subdivide yours (after all, it will turn your $1M into $2.5M, no?). It will have a domino effect because the last house in the neighborhood full of subdivisions will have the lowest sale value (and the first house to subdivide will be the most valuable).
The intent is good but the system needs a moderating factor to prevent runaway.
> If your neighbor subdivides their lot, the smartest thing for you to do is subdivide yours
What if you like your lot, and don't want a lot 1/4th the size? I think this likely applies to most homeowners.
> the last house in the neighborhood full of subdivisions will have the lowest sale value (and the first house to subdivide will be the most valuable).
I don't think this is likely. As more homes subdivide, the relative value of non-subdivided homes will go up due to scarcity.
> needs a moderating factor to prevent runaway
Why? I can think of very very few cases in the US where we've had a problem with "too many homes", and many many cases where the opposite trend prevails. I think it's unlikely that we'll see any sort of runaway.
> By "rapidly" I mean on the span of a few years. If your neighbor subdivides their lot, the smartest thing for you to do is subdivide yours
If you are an absentee landlord, sure.
If you are a homeowner, then, you probably already chose your living arrangement over living in a smaller apartment while being the landlord of several other smaller units, and the reasons you choose that probably still apply.
And because there are people who prefer larger single family homes, as the supply of those drops, the value of the existing ones goes up (not as much as the value of subdivided lots, but the increase in value is—unlike that on a lot that you subdivide and improve—mostly-untaxed because Prop 13 full-value assessment is triggered by change of ownership or nee construction, not market appreciation driven by supply.)
So, as a homeowner, the smart thing to do—absent a change in living situation that changes why you became a homeowner—the smart thing to do when some neighbors convert is to enjoy the tax-free value boost, take advantage of the increase value-to-loan ratio to refi at more favorable terms if you have a mortgage, or take money out for other projects, etc., or... whatever.
If the capacity existed to build residential properties at that scale (much less at a price that wasn't absurd), there wouldn't be a need for this bill.
Why do we want to prevent runaway? You're worried that houses will be too affordable?
Yes. Homeowners of different political stripes are united in their unabashed desire to prevent the building of housing in order to maximize their own home's value. Rather than an outright attack on their fellow citizens, which it is, this is always phrased as protecting the value of their investment as if the outsized growth if the real estate sector was something their family earned rather than the result of piss poor policy.
>It will have a domino effect because the last house in the neighborhood full of subdivisions will have the lowest sale value (and the first house to subdivide will be the most valuable).
I'm not sure there is any logic in believing that. Since even a 4x increase in housing wouldn't provide enough to meet demand, if everyone else subdivided and you didn't yours would be worth more not less. The only way your fears would happen is if they allowed apartment complexes on the new lots and density increased by 10-50x.
> after all, it will turn your $1M into $2.5M, no?
Um, no. The graphic intends to show money spent by all parties on housing. The original party pays $1M and receives $300k for the plots of land. The subplot parties then spend $500k to build houses. There is nothing magically turning a $1M home into multiple homes without additional capital.
Exactly. This probably makes the land somewhat more valuable, but nothing close to 2.5x.
Just to be clear, your concern here is the destruction of wealth for middle and lower class homeowners?
> If your neighbor subdivides their lot, the smartest thing for you to do is subdivide yours (after all, it will turn your $1M into $2.5M, no?)
No, it doesn't. Subdividing and building more houses on it turns it into $2.5M.
Most people will not have the cash or financing available to do that. And many people who want to do this will likely spend years doing it. And many people, even seeing their neighbors do it, just won't want to. They perhaps like the size of their lot, or don't have any family or friends that they really want to live that close to.
> last house in the neighborhood full of subdivisions will have the lowest sale value (and the first house to subdivide will be the most valuable).
If true, so what? As long as its sale value is more than it cost to build, that's fine.
> By "rapidly" I mean on the span of a few years.
That just isn't going to happen. GP's estimate of several decades is much more likely.
> the system needs a moderating factor to prevent runaway.
I don't think there's really any risk of that happening. At any rate, the problem is that we don't have enough housing; increasing the number of houses, and making them more affordable, is the entire point here.
Most US cities are literally decades behind on the home supply. x4 isn't a race to the bottom, it's barely getting started.
The constraint you're looking for is construction labour availability. You can't get millions of houses overnight.
Not sure I agree. The extent of the increase is certainly up for debate, but in a place like California where we have a housing affordability crisis, packing more housing units onto the same lot absolutely increases the value of the lot as a whole.
Now, certainly each individual house will be worth less than a single house on the lot would be. But the value of the lot+improvements will likely go up quite a lot.
Also consider that the value of the lot, unimproved, doesn't just magically go up once you get approval to build your friend compound. To get that $1M -> $2.5M increase in value, you probably have to invest a cool million into building the rest of the homes.
That’s absolutely not true. Higher population density almost always increases land values and it certainly would increase the total value of the land that was subdivided.
Do you have a source for this?
From what I've seen with infill in my area (Reston, VA, outside DC)... infill might slow the appreciation of adjacent property, but rarely/never hurts it. Surrounding property (>1 parcel away, give or take) generally increases in value, because along with the infill housing comes more amenities (commercial/retail redevelopment).
And for the property that was "infilled", the per unit price might be slightly lower, but the value of the entire property has gone up. Say the land cost $1 million, got split into 4 parcels, and each is now worth $275,000 (fabricated numbers).
EDIT - this isn't quite apples to apples, since we don't have the same rules as CA - we just have a massive amount of infill development happening along approved "density" corridors.
The goal of housing is not to grow or even maintain the wealth of the people who live there it is to to house people. If it should come about that A given neighborhood triple's in population and everyone's house is worth half as much I should count it as a success.
How many of these would it take to drive down property values in a neighborhood?
How much more would you pay for a house with 1 or 2 neighbors instead of 4 or 8 neighbors?
There is your answer.
That's what North Dakota is for.
The number might be smaller.
If you take the Empire Builder from Chicago towards the northwest, one of the trains goes through North Dakota at night.
Every farm in the area has one of those mercury vapor lights in the yard, which are visible for tens of miles. If you sit in the scenic car then, you will see one of those farmstead perhaps every hour. It is very not populated.
If you're worried about how many neighbors you have, it sounds idyllic.
Well, if you fall ill, then you might decide that you have too few neighbors.
I agree! I think density is good, which is why I live in an urban area. What I don't get are the other people who live in urban areas who want them to be more like North Dakota.
I agree too. Far too many people want to live in an area with the services and vibrancy of an urban area, but with the number of people you'd find out in a rural area. It's just not practical or sustainable to build a community that way.
(Also, I get the need for peace and quiet sometimes, but it makes me sad how so many people in the US just... don't like to be around other people.)
Who wants to live in the cold though.
Why? More, cheaper homes is a good thing
I think you missed the actual point of the graphic. It is to point out that the laws enable cheaper housing. Instead of people having to pay $1M for a single home, you're enabling 4 homes at $700k or less each.
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As someone interested in "friend compounds", I'm missing what in either of these laws enables that specifically. They both just seem to provide for denser housing generally. (Particularly SB684 almost literally just seems to allow subdividing lots which couldn't be subdivided before.)
Yes, that's the whole subtext. These kinds of developments with multiple freestanding units on a single lot are generally disallowed by the previous generation of zoning and planning rules. Note how these changes are allowing "friend complexes" on lots zoned multifamily already.
Why do I feel like this is going to supercharge short-term rentals like AirBnB and do little to ease the housing crunch?
This is for suburbia. There isn't massive demand for AirBnB in suburbia. There's such a massive shortage of housing that the small AirBnB demand is large relative to the supply of empty houses, but that's because a small number divided by a number very close to zero results in a large number. More supply will help a lot more than limiting AirBnB.
It allows to subdivide lots down to 600 sq ft parcels. I can find endless examples in the core of every major California city, including San Francisco, where this is applicable, and could 5x or 10x the number of houses in single family areas[1]. San Francisco currently zones for a minimum of 4000 sq feet lots in RH-1 zones, and at least 1000 sq ft lot per residence in RH-3.
Should it or would it? Probably not. But this weird image of the suburbs vs "the city" (someone else used the term "metro" which humorously includes the suburbs, but whatever) doesn't seem reality based.
Doubly so given that the suburbs are car-centric, and plans like this are car-antagonistic. It seems to specifically exclude the suburbs, if anything.
[1] This law only applies to multi-family zoning, which in SF is RH-3. Regardless, funny to see people saying this is some low density suburb thing when many of the cores of cities have zoning requiring significantly more land.
> (someone else used the term "metro" which humorously includes the suburbs, but whatever)
Not really sure where the humor is being found. There are areas where suburbs grew into their own cities that now blend back into the larger urban area they were once separated from. They are no longer suburbs, and it is now more than one city, so metroplex/metropolitan area is the term used.
I was referring to someone saying "works for suburbs I'm guessing - I don't see how it helps out in metro areas?".
A "metro area" is by definition the overarching container (often including multiple cities and the suburbs of those cities, such as the Bay Area metro area), most definitely containing said suburbs. So if something "works for the suburbs", it works for the metro.
Instead of high density housing this will do slightly higher density in low density zones. You cannot really increase density by that much with it, but you for sure can cut the yards... And parking space.
I'm pretty sure this won't make housing more affordable by much. Or will even have an opposite effect. To build these houses a pretty serious investment or Amish-sized group is required. Who has that?
> but you for sure can cut the yards... And parking space.
As if each of the people moving into the subdivided spaces still won't need parking. Now, you've actually increased the demand for parking. Where is that parking going to happen?
This stuff is only feasible in places that are served by transit which are pretty rare.
I thought the post says one person buys the lot and then sells it to friends who individually fund the houses.
> I thought the post says one person buys the lot and then sells it to friends who individually fund the houses.
One company buys the lot and then sells it to its own subsidiaries who individually fund the houses. I'm sure there are numerous ways to juggle the finances.
Yup. Or it is bought by Friends LLC.
Additionally, what happens after 5 years when the first friend moves out? I see this complex as a terrible HOA-in-the-making since neighbors will be sharing more resources. Reminds me of when I was doing factory work and living in a punk house.
Yeah the "friend compound" thing seems nebulous, and one of the stated benefits is specifically that it can be financed independently and resold to third parties. So basically it's just higher density housing and pretty soon it's just very close houses of random people with some sort of weird condo fees for the commons (surely there is shared walkways, etc), etc.
It may seem odd to people who grew up in the single-family detached housing world of the postwar US, but there are cultures and societies around the world even today where multi-family housing is common. See for example Casas de Vecindad, a typical form of housing in the US/Mexico borderlands for hundreds of years.
Do they have HOAs?
So like condos in the city.
You put an ad for more friends on Find a Friend Facebook groups or Craigslist. Maybe match makers appears to solve a gap in the market.
You are correct - in fact the OG “bestie row” compound in Texas is already a glorified Airbnb.
What all of this will do is fuel vacation villages for rich people to use a little and rent out a lot.
One thing that’s incorrect in the article:
SB 684 only works on multifamily-zoned lots, but starting in July, it’s getting replaced by SB 1123, which works on “vacant or uninhabitable” single-family lots
I'm pretty positive about the ability to subdivide and build smaller.
But pushing this as a "friend compound" law is super weird. Are there really that many people who want a friend compound for their primary residence? Personally, I'd be hard pressed to think of more than 1-2 other couples with whom I'd want to co-develop property and even then only for a vacation home, not my regular house.
Are you a churchgoer? Because they usually have a lot of families they know that want these situations.
Yeah, exactly, we’ve talked about this a lot with friends from church and, IMO, this would be the best way to do it. It avoids the coercive danger of shared property and gives anybody the ability to exit whenever they want.
This type of law, and its consequences, are really interesting to me.
I used to live in San Francisco, but in 2020 moved back to Italy.
Now we like to spend 2-3 months a year in the SF Bay Area, but we would hardly consider buying a house (and renting it out when we're away).
Instead, a situation where we would be neighbors with a few "friends", it would make it much easier to consider the option.
In rural Colorado there is a law that makes subdividing lots under 35 acres very difficult. There are lots of areas in the mountains that have expensive housing. You are allowed to build one 15,000 sqft house but not ten 1,500 sqft houses on the 35 acres. Would love to have something like this in Colorado.
>In rural Colorado there is a law that makes subdividing lots under 35 acres very difficult.
Those sorts of laws are often to protect farms and ranches from being turned into subdivisions are generally a good thing if you want a stable food supply.
Same. I am living on about 40 acres in the 4 corners area and I'd really like to put in more infrastructure. Currently I have a bunch of non-permitted (built in the 90s) cabins together in one corner, running off of solar. I'm planning on building a septic and a cistern for this set of buildings and a larger, more permitted house on another part of the property this year.
I could have 6-10 tiny houses on this property and not have folks seeing each other, and I have the cash to just put in everything necessary. As written, the codes are not friendly towards that idea. I am still going to put in some RV hookups, at least- those are much less regulated than dwellings. My neighbors certainly aren't in a position to do the kind of complainaing that would lead to more attention from the county, and I'm at the end of a long series of oil field roads.
While I am an anarchist, I do understand the county's need to prevent folks from creating dangers to themselves and other folks. I just wish that everything didn't need to be massively profitable for some investors before variations on codes and planning could be grante.
Can condo or co-op (legal) structures solve this problem?
Where are those ten houses going to get water?
Spring, well, rain-water, or water transported there on pick-ups
That doesn't really scale though. Once you have ten houses, you'll start thinking about how it really should be 100 houses and they should build a better road to service everyone and then you'll want power and phone and internet, and before long all of the natural areas are just subdivisions.
I just haul it on a trailer from the water dock.
It would be nice if the yards could face each other. So people could basically have a large open space that is private to the residents.
That's what a Bungalow Court is all about. They're kind of a dying breed, but have previously been very popular here in LA County.
Similar has been already tried in the USSR, it was called a Communal Apartment: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_apartment
That's not at all the same thing. They're subdividing the lot and building a separate house for each family, not just putting multiple families together into an existing large house.
why not NY style row houses? you might achieve more density than a compound
“Replacing parking” is going to cause all sorts of fun. Where will the cars go?
And please spare me the tired “transit that is safe and not full of stabby hoboes will magically sprout out of nothing overnight” nonsense.
> Where will the cars go?
Half of some cities' downtown space is parking.
https://thehill.com/changing-america/resilience/smart-cities...
Every apartment complex in my area clearly has way, way more parking that needed - at no time of day are they more than 50% occupied.
In Europe generally all new bigger construction has most parking below ground, even 2-3 floors. Very few outside if any, normally just for quick drop off or services.
I've even seen locals blocking a successful local bank trying to build a additional building and planning way too many of those - citing concern of too much added traffic in neighborhood. Not entirely sure if thats the best approach, but thats how how respect for laws and locals looks like. At the end, bank managed just fine despite that restriction.
> at no time of day are they more than 50% occupied
Why is that? Is there more than one parking space per bedroom or do people not have cars?
America has eight parking spots per car.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90645900/america-has-eight-parki...
> Parking standards were created arbitrarily, without adequate data. Zoning laws usually require one parking space per apartment, one per 300 square feet of commercial development, and one per 100 square feet for restaurants. For context, a parking space measures 160 square feet on average, plus additional area for driveways and driving lanes, so an eatery’s parking lot may be three times the size of its dining area.
> Where will the cars go?
Idk, don't move there if having on-site parking is a dealbreaker for you. It isn't for a lot of people. Why should they subsidize someone else's parking preferences?
OTOH, nimbyism sucks.
OTOH, having 4/6/8 new tinyhouses worth of neighbours and the streets filled with their cars sucks for many in the neighbourhood - so you'd expect them to resist, or at least ask the question. Where will the cars go?
The "pursuit of happiness" applies to all.
> you'd expect them to resist, or at least ask the question. Where will the cars go?
Sounds like a streetside-parking regulation problem. Everyone asking questions every time someone wants to build anything is why we don’t build anymore. If we want to require parking we don’t get to complain about housing affordability.
The groups of people that "require parking" are largely different to the groups of people that "complain about housing affordability".
It's no surprise that complex issues will have various factions arguing about "their happiness".
It does seem like many countries are beyond the point of further conversation and need positive impactful action regarding housing affordability. Or even just any action at all so we can tell if it is the correct action...
Uh, no, there are plenty of people who complain about both affordability and availability of parking, sometimes in the same sentence.
The problem is that parking is too cheap. It's not hard to find parking in downtown NYC but you have to pay an arm and a leg for it.
Get rid of free parking and you'll never be short of it again. Putting a proper price will reduce demand and increase supply.
This is literally just a regressive tax.
Especially (but not solely) in areas with lack of quality public transportation (ie, doesn't double the time it takes to get somewhere)
Free parking is also regressive, the poor pay a much higher portion of their income for "free" parking than the rich do.
More generally, parking is a service. All market goods & services are highly regressive, because the rich and poor pay basically the same price. Addressing inequality at the individual goods level always creates more problems than it solves. Addressing it for parking is particularly unfair, because the very poorest don't have cars.
The poor would be far better off with more welfare and a less regressive tax system so they have more money to choose what they need. Paying for "free" parking via property taxes and baked into the costs of local stores is inefficient and regressive.
Transit that is safe will never sprout if you keep building parking lots.
The more popular mass transit becomes, the better the proposition of driving a car becomes.
You cannot escape that as transit drives down traffic and frees up parking, cars become much more enjoyable to use.
This is true, but only in a car-centric city like those in the US. If we extend this hypothetical to include additional changes to our infrastructure such as: reclaiming lanes for wider sidewalks, bike lanes, and bus/taxi lanes, restricting car traffic on heavily foot-trafficked streets, or building housing where parking was, cars remain cumbersome to use.
I’m not actually pitching this course of action for any specific city; I actually live in an extremely rural area and don’t have a horse in this race. Just want to make the point that mass transit investments can’t happen in a vacuum if we want to achieve the desired results.
It is taken as flatly impossible that parking would be reclaimed for other uses?
We don't build parking smart here in the States, period. Parking lots should be multi-story to serve multiple buildings and have an array of solar panels on the roof to contribute to the city's power needs.
In theory? In practice and when I have a choice, I will always pick mass transit instead of driving because I prefer to walk and avoid the hassles of traffic lights, risk of crashing or running someone over, wear and tear on my car, gasoline, etc...
> I will always pick mass transit
I'm going to guess you've never had some drugged-up crazy try to stab you in a bus? After the second time it happens, you never ever consider it again. Life is too short to die like that.
I'm going to guess you've never had some drugged-up crazy nearly ram into you at high speed in a car? Life is too short to die like that, and to spend it sitting in traffic to boot.
Car has airbags. My chances are better than “knifed on BART”. And your chances of a fatal collision in stop-and-go traffic are as close to zero as a number can be - the kinetic energy just isn't there at those speeds.
As best as I can tell your gut feeling and anecdotal experience here is not supported by evidence / data.
One particular example that had a good breakdown: https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
How many people per year are knifed on the BART?
I’ve been using public transport my whole life, and that has never happened. Not even when I’ve visited the US. You may be a statistical anomaly.
(If nothing else, the piles of corpses would, presumably, be noticeable and cause scheduling issues.)
With working public transport, you’ll generally see more development without parking. Very, very few of the places I go regularly have parking at all.
Who doesn't enjoy a good equilibrium?
Maybe, maybe not. But you need to solve people's transportation problems first, not claim that if they give up car transportation options something else will materialize later.
I never said otherwise, but continuing to prioritize cars only makes everything, even car travel, worse.
> > But you need to solve people's transportation
> > problems first, not claim that if they give up
> > car transportation options something else will
> > materialize later
.
> I never said otherwise, but continuing to prioritize
> cars only makes everything, even car travel, worse.
.
You have JUST said otherwise! You want to deprioritize what works in favour of what does not exist while offering no path for it to exist and dodging the reality that no such path exists.
Okay, thank you for telling me what I want to do. You see, I thought I wanted start working on other forms of transit while still leaving cars as they are. I thought I wanted to stop saying one more lane will fix it, and actually try adding transit options. I thought I wanted to build safe sidewalks and bike infrastructure that actually goes somewhere, instead of just adding more parking lots.
I'm really glad you were here to tell me what I actually wanted. I'm glad you were here to twist my words up so bad that I finally understand that what I really wanted is to completely get rid of cars overnight, and then sit around on our thumbs and hope that someday a magic carpet will come and carry us all off to our destinations.
If you're not able to afford a regular-sized house in some area, you're likely not able to afford a car either. Also, the places with more residential density already have public transit that is heavily used by normal people. Sadly cities will always have crime, but IMO crimes on public transit are the least of your problems if you're stuck in a neighborhood like that. And nothing is stopping miscreants from stealing stuff from your car trunk, breaking a window in your car just for fun, or keying your car, or possibly much worse if your car is a Tesla these days.
Forgot the elephant in the room here. Public transit fatality rates per mile are much lower than driving your own car.
This is where you have to be smart about parking. Building small houses like that, raised up so you can park a car underneath, gets dual use out of the same square footage. While you are at it, orient the building properly so that installing PV panels on the roof makes sense. Now we have three uses for the same square footage.
This works for suburbs I'm guessing - I don't see how it helps out in metro areas? Where does this work best for? Buy and re-develop for friends?
Since this is California law, it helps tremendously in places like LA which were built as large suburban SFH neighborhoods but have long exhausted all free space. Building denser housing within existing SFH neighborhoods will help to alleviate the housing crisis.
Exactly, rather than sending people farther and farther out of county, it lets LA's existing, sprawling suburbs look a tiny bit more like a real city.
Anything but building significantly upwards, amirite?
The second law adds ability to replace parking spaces with ADU's, which could be useful even in more denser metro areas.
Increasing density in suburbs is a giant win.
I like it. Honestly we need even more freedom. I thought this was AMERICA! Absurd that you couldn’t already do this.
Now you get the privilege of paying a mortgage to live in a Hooverville.
I think for many the only alternative is renting. Having your rent go towards ownership is preferable in many cases.
>I think for many the only alternative is renting.
Indeed it is, and that's kinda my point. These were the $8,000 starter homes our working class grandparents bought on a single salary from Sears in their 20s. Now they are a stretch goal for middle aged dual income families.
And all of them would be illegal to build today. Safety first!
That's just one of many preferred outcomes - not the top one
1. Buy cheap sfh
2. Buy cheap condo
3. Rent cheap sfh
4. Rent cheap condo
...
20. Buy expensive micro-house
Edit:formatting
Speak for yourself. For me, buying is better than any rental options and a freestanding building is better than anything attached or in an HOA.
Really ? You would buy vs rent under any circumstance ?
Of course not. There are plenty of circumstances that would change the order. But that'd be my 'all things being equal' ranking. I had hoped it was implied that I'd prefer to rent a non-haunted condo over owning a haunted mansion.
Owning a home sucks, but it's still better than renting one.
Is it just me, or does this seem like a another example of how housing in CA is broken? The demand is totally insatiable.
I grew up in the state, and am in the East Coast for now (which also has its own problems), but I can't imagine moving back if I had to live in an ADU. The whole concept of an ADU just seems like a bad sign for the market, not mention the increase in traffic bc more density = more people.
You would think the market would normalize and people would move to other states, which is happening, yet people are contemplating making these mini houses.
Yet another symptom of American standard of living decreasing -- younger people are just getting less with the same amount of money. That's the root of the problem.
> I can't imagine moving back if I had to live in an ADU.
People have different imagination from you
> I can't imagine moving back if I had to live in an ADU.
More density implies that services get built closer together. A corner store needs a high level of density to exist, but when it does it cuts down your trips to a large grocery store.
I live in a dense city. I have a grocer half a block away, 10 coffee shops in a 5-block radius, etc.
You have an extremely Americanized view of a fundamentally unsustainable housing mechanism; American car-dependent suburbs don't make any sense as the main source of housing.
> I live in a dense city. I have a grocer half a block away, 10 coffee shops in a 5-block radius, etc
"Density in CA" is not the same as "Density in Copenhagen/NY/Berlin/etc". Density in CA means it takes you an hour to drive to get to Whole Foods that's 7 miles away bc of traffic, something I experienced in Venice Beach. Density in CA makes already bad traffic way worse, and its not like the infrastructure is going to upgrade such that coffee shops spring up on every neighborhood corner.
> You have an extremely Americanized view of a fundamentally unsustainable housing mechanism
Bc I live in America.
> American car-dependent suburbs don't make any sense as the main source of housing.
Agreed, but I do not think ADUs make much sense in a suburban area that does not support the infrastructure for more dense housing.
Density in CA is bad because we don't build up. If we built up, there would be enough customers for you to not need to go to Whole Foods and instead be able to hit up a smaller grocer on your block without getting in a car. Traffic is bad because we don't have density we have sprawl
The demand has nothing to do with it. SF should look like Tokyo, but California gave away its right to be the king of the world economy so it could hand over feudal fiefdoms to retirees and old people who bought houses when they were worth $10 each.
Is insatiable demand equivalent to 'broken' housing? Seems like the latter is a pejorative and the former is the better of two possible problems.
Considering people live in apartments and condos, what's the problem with an ADU (or tinyhouse as they called them years ago)?
The density/traffic thing is not straightforward. Increased capacity will add traffic, sure. To the extent that capacity remains static and people can live closer to their commute destinations, you have fewer people taking longer trips and more people taking shorter trips (or other transport). Obviously both of these will be the case. As will people moving from high density housing to ADUs in the suburbs.
Agreed on the standard of living issue.
A starter home in the 1950s is so much closer to an ADU than the median SFH from 1990+
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Please don't do regional flamewar, or any flamewar, on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This makes it easier to both move into & out of California. It'll make existing suburban lots more valuable because they now can be subdivided so existing homeowners can cash in and move on. But the new subdivided lots will be cheaper than existing non-subdivided lots, so it's also cheaper to move in. Win-win!
It can't make lots simultaneously more valuable and cheaper to acquire
Existing homeowners won't subdivide and leave. They will split their sfh lot and rent it out. Look at people investing into ADUs
It will be cheaper in the sense that renting a room is cheaper than renting the house when looking at total outlay, but not when looking at sqft ownership
We complain about housing being an asset and instead turn every lot into an investment opportunity
> not when looking at sqft ownership
Which is a relatively minor consideration. Yes it's nice to have some garden space. But not when the garden adds $1M to the price of your house.
Are you thinking of leaving the state now, or did you already do it, or are you just trying to talk other people into leaving?
Long ago, and have had friends do the same.
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Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The Californians yearn for a cult.
So a fancy trailer park basically? but one where relocation and moving can be more difficult?
People get divorced, relocate for work, relocate for mental health,end up in jail, People end up hating each other, have kids and need space, get a raise a want space, and people die.
How long does the friend structure survive? There will be people moving in and out just like any part of real estate.
Do the original owners turn into landlords and rent out the homes?
There would be an interesting dynamic if the homes were mobile, when you could move to a different friend compound if you wanted to leave.
But again, all of this is solved in trailer parks.
I am -not- being derisive of trailer parks. I am saying that this is a rich person's reinvention of it with some added attributes. Spending time studying the dynamics of a trailer park over time would provide lessons on mistakes not to make, and nifty solutions to problems not yet pondereed.
(Yeah if you can afford a mini house on its own real estate in California these days you are rich)
The "group of friends or families living together" is probably the least likely application of this legislation. It main goal seems to be increasing the housing density of residential areas, so investors can buy a single plot of land, develop the property, and sell up to ten houses. Which I guess is the intended purpose, giving investors a more socially productive way to get profits than speculating with limited pre-existing real state.
>So a fancy trailer park basically?
Don't trailer parks rent the land? Here it sounds like they sell the land:
>Step 3: Sell the new lots to friends
This is a response to decades of poor planning in an appropriately compromised way. Ideally, big chunks of low density California should be bulldozed and be rezoned to be more like Paris or Amsterdam, but this will have to do.
Work with what’s there.
> So a fancy trailer park basically?
Would you describe an apartment building this way?
No. Apartment buildings are little bricks stacked together into a larger structure. In the original example, individual houses are spaced close together, they have the feel of a trailer park.
These two living environments have in common that they are one—to two-person places to sleep, cook, and watch videos. Everything else that makes life interesting has to be done somewhere else. There are no gardens, no workshops for CNC machines and 3d printers, and no space for outdoor recreational equipment like kayaks, paddleboards, bikes, etc.
I can concede I am biased, and I'm blessed by being able to afford a property with a garden of about 2,000 square feet. I'm looking to expand it by another 500 square feet this year. My basement is just half full with my workshop and home lab; the other half is my partner's art studio.
There was a recent discussion on HNN about developers who quit their jobs to start a farm or otherwise leave the tech world behind, but I do a version of that in the small. I am content to hang around the house and garden, relax outside, watch birds, and occasionally hike in neighboring State Parks.
> Everything else that makes life interesting has to be done somewhere else.
So you've never lived in a city? All the things you have are typical suburbia pastimes. I don't see in your listing for "things that make life interesting" going to the theater, pub, hanging out with your neighborhood friends at the local restaurant 10 minutes away.
And all these things are enabled by dense housing and essentially inaccessible for suburbanites.
I have lived in cities. Going to the theater held little charm for me, although I did go when a friend of mine was acting in a community theater. I went to support him, not because the play was a draw. I never had any neighborhood friends. In most of my apartment blocks, very few people spoke to each other. I quickly found out I had nothing in common with those who did talk to me. When they went to the local restaurants, it was to talk about American sports and drink beer. I don't do American sports or drink beer.
L’enfer, c’est les autres.
Sure, just pay the appropriate property tax and don't externalize the cost of your own highly inefficient housing on others.
You probably intended your comment as a gotcha on the property tax issue. Still, I only bought my house a couple of years ago, which reset the valuation of the property to a much higher level at the current tax rate. I don't use much in the way of city services (road, water), but I know the property tax I pay goes to help pay for school for other people's children, police, fire, and EMS for folks who need them. I know my income taxes contribute to many services in urban areas that I will never use. I am okay with this. I recognize that there are many cross-subsidies in our society, and unless we go completely pay-as-you-go, it'll be impossible to untangle them all.
Yes, they most certainly are.
> There are no gardens, no workshops for CNC machines and 3d printers, and no space for outdoor recreational equipment like kayaks, paddleboards, bikes, etc.
Funny, since I live in a dense city and I do all of that daily.
> So a fancy trailer park basically?
No, not at all.