Oregon’s new governor, Tina Kotek, has made housing her top priority and has proposed a number of unrealistic and idiotic remedies to high housing costs and homelessness. For one, she wants spend $54 million to house 1,200 people for one year. That’s $4,000 a month per person. Of course, a lot of that is probably going to go into various housing bureaucracies.
Someone’s idea of affordable housing Portland, because everyone knows that people move out West so they can live in a cramped apartment.
Kotek’s long-term goal is to see 36,000 housing units built per year in Oregon, which five times more than has recently been built. The state has not built 36,000 housing units for 50 years, which by an extraordinary coincidence is when the legislature created the state’s land-use planning process that restricts rural development.
I don’t believe in conspiracy theories because the democratic societies are too complicated for anyone to take control behind the scenes. But I can’t help but feel this is all part of a plot to force low-income people — you know, the “deplorables” — into crowded housing where the rest of society won’t have to deal with them any more, except as servants.
First, use urban-growth boundaries to drive up housing prices. Second, use tax dollars to build high-density housing that few people want to live in. Third, profit from that construction and funnel some of the profits into the political campaigns of the party that claims to be on the side of the working people.
Meanwhile, earlier this week, a bunch of market urbanists went to Helena, Montana to promote their ideas of density as a solution to high housing prices. The 2010 and 2020 census both found that all the urban areas in the state covered a whopping 0.2 percent of Montana land. But the market urbanist message is that single-family zoning is the cause of the state’s high housing prices.
Housing is actually pretty affordable in Billings, Great Falls, and Helena, but it’s more expensive in Bozeman, Kalispell, and Missoula. All six cities have single-family zoning, but the last three are in counties that have put pretty severe restrictions on new development.
The main speaker at this conference was Nolan Gray, formerly with the supposedly free-market Mercatus Center and now with California YIMBY. When someone in the audience asked why the state needed density when so much of the land was rural, Gray praised the rural land-use restrictions, saying they helped to protect the environment.
Other speakers included Emily Hamilton, who is also with Mercatus, and Kendall Cotton, of the supposedly free-market Frontier Center, a state think tank. I’ve debated Hamilton in the past; she pretended that the San Francisco Bay Area was out of land because it bordered the Pacific Ocean, as if north, east, and south no longer existed. When I pointed out that nearly 70 percent of Bay Area counties was rural open space, she ignored me.
All of which convinces me even more that the market urbanists are really just new urbanists who have infiltrated the free-market movement. If free marketeers aren’t going to defend American’s right to live in the kind of homes they choose, who will?
“When someone in the audience asked why the state needed density when so much of the land was rural, Gray praised the rural land-use restrictions, saying they helped to protect the environment.”
I live in one of many houses built on former bean-corn rotation farmland. There is, of course, some pavement and structures in the neighborhood but there is also plenty of green including large trees that are coming to the end of their natural lives and are being replaced … by more trees. The city collects all the natural suburban detritus, composts it and sells it back to us.
The taxes are high, the schools are outstanding, and crime is low.
The Antiplanner is wrong again, as usual. 70% of the Bay Area is NOT suitable for housing because it is mountainous and virtually all of the area is in the wildfire danger zone. These areas are only suitable for housing at very low rural densities, parks and watershed. Local water is also an issue; recall the massive plumbing efforts in California to overcome the fact most of the state is semi-arid or desert.
The analogy is the same as if you’d try to build housing on the mountains around Camp Sherman or other similar rural burgs. Flat land supply isn’t a problem, but most flat land in areas where people want to live is already occupied.
train riders1900,
I’ve been to the Bay Area many times. I’ve never seen a single mountain. (In my world, mountains have glaciers, otherwise they are hills.) The hills surrounding San Raphael, San Mateo, Oakland, San Ramon, and San Jose have gentle slopes and would be much easier to build on that a little city in the area called San Francisco, which has very steep slopes but is nearly all developed.
Wildfire dangers are only a problem with high-density development. So long as the development is low in density and follows firewire standards, homes will be safe.
Water is hardly an issue. This isn’t southern California.
You are making up problems to justify denying the owners of more than half the land in the region the right to develop their land as they see fit. When residents of single-family neighborhoods want to keep them single family, you call them “NIMBYs,” but when owners of rural land would like to develop their land, you cry all sorts of imaginary problems.
As a person living in the San Francisco East Bay I just wanted to agree with the Antiplanner. In the area I live originally houses were limited to one per acre, then five per acre and then in the early 1990’s to one per 30 acres. All the houses are on wells and many have water tanks for rainwater catchment, so no drain on the water supply. Much of the SF bay area is like this and could easily be developed except for zoning. It is true that much of the land is already in public parkland or reservoir catchment area, but much of the parkland is little used. In the NW of Conta Costa county there are square miles of open south of Crocket and SW of Martinez that are so little used that I have hardly seen anyone else hiking in them even on three day weekends. It certainly seems that the area zoned for open space is excessive. We have had numerous contractors or delivery people come out to our property to be amazed at the open space they never realized was here. If the open space is so little used, couldn’t some of it be used for housing?
No one want to live in overcrowded apartment buildings. That’s why it’s so important that we enforce single-family housing by law.
janehavisham,
You’ve finally said something I agree with — though I suspect you’re being sarcastic. Few people want to live in overcrowded apartment buildings, but urban planners want to force such buildings into neighborhoods of single-family homes, thus reducing the supply of single-family homes. If instead they would abolish urban-growth boundaries, then developers could build whatever the market demands — apartments, row houses, duplexes, or single-family homes.
Most of the hills in the Bay Area are not developable, so the Antiplanner is just wrong. There are many flat areas in the North Bay valleys, but these are remote from the central Bay Area, lack significant local water supplies without billions in infrastructure costs assuming you could even get political approval for diverting large amounts of water from the North Coast or huge new dams on the Russian River. In theory you could build large new developments in eastern Solano County, with a bridge over the Sacramento/San Joaquin River circa West Pittsburg, but where would the tens of billions for highways and water come from?
So in my view, anyone who thinks what I conjecture here is any way politically or financially feasible is smoking some bad weed.
trainriders2100,
SF and Bay Area cities joined an environmental group decades ago to essentially draw out urban-growth boundaries to “protect the environment.” It has nothing to do with financial feasibility. 235 miles south of the Bay is the LA metro area, which has houses in the Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains and is far harder to develop on than the Bay Area.
“If instead they would abolish urban-growth boundaries, then developers could build whatever the market demands — apartments, row houses, duplexes, or single-family homes.”
I don’t get the connection between urban-growth boundaries. You can build whatever the market demands if you legalize apartments and leave urban-growth boundaries as they are. They have nothing to do with each other.
I have a better idea: why don’t the homeowners who don’t want apartments in their neighborhood simply buy up the other properties in their neighborhood? Then they can keep them if they like, since they own them.
If they can’t afford the other properties at present, maybe they can get a second mortage or a second job. Probably most of them are lazy retirees with too much time on their hands. They don’t even have a first job right now, so finding gainful employment to fund their property-buying projects would be a chance for them to get out of the house and maybe meet some new people and maybe even some other hobbies, as well!
janehavisham,
“why don’t the homeowners who don’t want apartments in their neighborhood simply buy up the other properties in their neighborhood? ”
Actually, most newer areas in California were deed-restricted to single-family-homes in the early to mid-20th century before being annexed by cities, who kept it to SFH zoning, rendering deed-restriction superfluous. Now that the deed-restrictions are gone, you also want the protection of SFH zoning removed.
Would you be happy to allow homeowners to vote back in deed-restrictions?
janehavisham,
“I don’t get the connection between urban-growth boundaries.” You don’t? If because of an urban-growth boundary there is no room for new development, then housing prices will go up. Get rid of the boundaries and developers will build what the market wants.
With the boundary, if you abolish single-family zoning, developers might replace some single-family homes with apartments. However, the demand for apartments is low so usually those apartments must be subsidized. So now we are getting further and further away from what people want.
Just abolish the boundaries. Don’t zone any land outside of city limits. Builders will build what people want and people will live the way they want to live.
“If because of an urban-growth boundary there is no room for new development,”
That’s the thing – there’s plenty of room for new development without touching the urban-growth boundary. It’s called building up – a relatively recent technology (only a few thousand years old) where the floors of buildings are oriented vertically to one another.
“Would you be happy to allow homeowners to vote back in deed-restrictions?”
No need for any voting in any heavy-handed government regulations. All the homeowners have to do is buy the land next to their houses, and voilà, no apartments next to them.
janehavisham,
Building up has two problems. First, it’s a lot more expensive than single-family homes. Second, people don’t want to live in multifamily housing. Surveys show that 80% of Americans want single-family homes, and in some states that don’t have urban-growth boundaries 80% do live in single-family homes (showing that their actual behavior matches their stated preferences). Why should other people be forced to pay higher costs for housing they don’t want simply because you think density is good?
janehavisham,
You have a simplistic view of property rights. Here’s a property right: I will build no more than a single-family home on my property provided all of my neighbors build no more than single-family homes on their properties. Everyone who has bought a house in a deed-restricted area or an area zoned for single-family housing has that right and most were happy to get it. Almost no one today owns a single-family home in an area that was zoned for single-family after they bought it, thereby taking away a right to develop their property to higher densities.
So long as there are no urban-growth boundaries, single-family zoning doesn’t make housing expensive. So when you propose to abolish single-family zoning, you are taking away people’s property rights and you won’t even make housing more affordable when you.