The Lower Sioux in Minnesota need homes — so they are building them from hemp

An outsider looks at California's planning law changes

Announcement of intiative to review historic preservation regulations.

After months of rampant speculation, divisive lawsuits and contentious debate, the Silicon Valley tech titans proposing to build a new city in Solano County submitted a ballot initiative Wednesday laying out everything from where the new community will be to guarantees on jobs, transportation and open space.

This map contains of the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC)'s historical redlining grade includes 7,148 neighborhoods spanning 143 cities across the continental United States. Opens in Sacramento, CA.

Highlights loss of revenue for road maintenance as drivers switch to EVs. Discusses options, including registration fees and VMT. Suggests adjusting by vehicle cost, but not weight.

Off-site affordable housing plan will enforce segregation. Why is the mayor promoting it?
Moving affordable housing offsite will segregate residents by income and opportunity, in clear violation of state standards for affirmatively furthering fair housing

HAP 2.0 creates several new tools to address the ongoing homelessness crisis, specifically for seniors, people with disabilities, students and people at risk of falling into homelessness. Although the public conversation about the policies has focused on a few specific items, it’s worth reviewing what else is in this package.

San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu responded to a lawsuit filed against the City in state court by developers proposing a 600-foot-tall, 712-unit skyscraper on Sloat Boulevard. The building would occupy the site where the Sloat Garden Center is today, at 2700 Sloat Blvd., across the street from the SF Zoo. The area is zoned with a 40-foot maximum height limit, which could accommodate a building up to four-stories tall. The lawsuit, filed by attorneys for 2700 Sloat Holding LLC, claims San Francisco Planning Department policies violate California’s Density Bonus Law (DBL) and that the department’s interpretation of the law is wrong.

An exclusive negotiation agreement to plan the redevelopment of the Escondido Transit Center has been granted to Toll Brothers Apartment Living and the Waterford Property Co.

The proposed plan featured apartments, retail stores, offices and other commercial uses, which is different than it looks now.

Suggests true missing middle development and townhouse transitional neighborhoods and development on transit corridors instead of ADUs-as more community building!

The pilot’s aim: use big data and shared insight to inform policies that will boost economic stability — in this case, by focusing on housing access and affordability.

"The roots of the problem, however, go back further than that, with mistakes made as long as 75 years ago now being repeated by completely new generations. Failure to understand those errors—and even why they are errors and not good practice—will perpetuate and exacerbate today’s crisis into future generations."

As economist Tim Helm describes:

“Even when it is profitable to build, it can be more profitable not to build, because development-ready land rises in value through time, and over-supplying housing means selling at a discount. The absorption rate is determined by the balance of these considerations.

Paradoxically, zoning rules can bind on each and every housing development, reducing the profits of each and every developer, without binding (constraining) the market rate of new housing supply. This is because most feasible development opportunities are rationally left undeveloped as strategic investments, in what is described as speculation or landbanking.

This means that zoning rules just shape where housing goes and what it looks like – not how much is built.

For example, if total demand growth is for six dwellings per year, zoning rules determine whether a city sees development of:

a) Six buildings with single dwellings under low-density zoning;
b) Two buildings of three dwellings each under medium-density zoning; or
c) One building of six dwellings, with other sites held vacant, under high-density zoning.

How much housing is built is a market decision.”

Key takeaway is that historic preservation has positive benefits for communities and that there should be more not less.

Housing-affordability problems for the population as a whole aren’t related to housing shortages or low vacancy rates. Rather, they are driven by high overall housing prices and low household incomes. Geographic variations in housing prices and rents show no significant relationship with differences in housing supply or vacancy rates. The housing markets with the greatest affordability problems are those with the greatest job growth and the highest wage levels. Shortages of housing don’t drive affordability problems as much as strong job growth and high incomes. This is what pulls up housing prices.

This report is a comprehensive document that provides an overview of Development
Impact Fees along with an update on the implementation of Complete Communities
- Mobility Solutions, and satisfies the annual reporting requirements under the
California Mitigation Fee Act. Development Impact Fees are fees that are imposed on
new development in all communities to fund public infrastructure needed to serve
our growing City. The report details the fees collected, and how they are expended to
improve the lives of the people that live in our City, and enhance our overall well-being.

Many housing analysts argue that large-scale upzoning policies create affordable housing. This was a justification for the major upzoning in the 2016 Auckland Unitary Plan (AUP). The Auckland experience is now of intense interest in housing debates.

"The adaptive reuse ordinance brought more than 12,000 homes to downtown"

Award-winning example of turning a church into affordable housing.

Relaxing zoning rules is one of the best ways to address the nation’s ongoing housing affordability crisis, according to an independent panel of economists and housing experts polled in Zillow’s Home Price Expectations (ZHPE) Survey. Zoning reform, which would allow more housing within existing neighborhoods and growing communities, was ranked as one of the most effective means to address affordability by 73% of those surveyed.

Equity and accessibility within preservation are vital to ensure the end of place-based cultural erasure and to create means for people of non-dominant racial identities to participate and effectively lead preservation practices.

Do U.S. cities still need to require the construction of parking spots for new residential and retail projects? Aren’t developers, designers and investors better positioned to worry about these issues for customers, clients or tenants?

San Diego is falling far short of its goals for new housing construction despite a wide range of developer incentives and regulatory rollbacks in recent years, a new report says.

Note that most of the redlined areas are no longer concentrated areas of poverty on the AFFH map, whereas the yellow areas around Normal Heights are neither affluent nor poor on the AFFH map, yet Colina Park is a high concentration of poverty.

Contains maps and other resources about the redlining process.

Charts showing evolution of different zones of the HOLC maps

Massive planning deregulation has been repeatedly touted as a key
policy solution. The story goes that prices remain high because the
supply of new dwellings in accessible, desirable locations has not
kept pace with demand.

Prosper Australia has consistently critiqued this reasoning, leading
to some bewilderment among fellow economists. How can we ignore
evidence turned up in modelling from cities around the world?
The simple answer is we suspect the model is incomplete, and at
times dangerously so.

The model conflates the impacts of rezoning with the impacts of
dwelling completion, and may obscure the behaviour and incentives
of the market when it comes to actual building.

In the interest of giving YIMBYism a fair hearing, however, Current Affairs recently invited Darrell Owens, policy analyst at CA YIMBY and activist at East Bay for Everyone, to come and discuss what he feels the misconceptions about YIMBYs are.

Summary of National Housing Act.

Various challenges facing millenials, from 2008 housing crisis, COVID, high interest rates, and bulge of boomers not ready to move out.

[subscription requred]

The 2022 Annual Report on Homes shows that the City's housing
programs have resulted in the provision of more new homes for people
in all communities in San Diego. This progress is incremental and lays
the foundation for the additional work needed to ensure that everyone
has the opportunity for a conveniently located home that meets their
needs. What this Annual Report on Homes shows us is how many
homes were built and where they were built, but it does not show
us what these homes will look like or who specifically will call them
home now.

This time the contradictory stories about rent control and housing supply are in Minnesota

America has six times more retail per capita than is average in Europe, and, to make matters worse, online shopping is accelerating. This leads to decay, declining strip commercial values, and diminishing local taxes. The days of spreading ever outward in the suburbs too far away from jobs and too expensive for many struggling working-class households are long over. The only rational direction is inward; infilling, repairing and enhancing our existing communities — and accelerating the transition from cars to walking, biking, and transit. But how and where?

The weak evidence behind the economic case against planning regulation

Land use regulation and zoning have long been core functions of local governments.
Critics of local land use practices, however, assert that local regulations are too
restrictive and that “exclusionary zoning” ordinances increase housing costs, reduce
mobility, entrench racial segregation, prevent the poor from accessing jobs and services,
and reduce economic productivity.

This Article challenges that conventional wisdom.

U.S. cities spent much of the middle and late 20th century reducing capacity for new housing through extensive downzoning, leading to a shortage of homes and rising prices in high-demand locations. To combat this, many cities and states are now reversing course and upzoning to allow higher-density housing, usually in targeted locations such as individual neighborhoods or corridors. While these targeted upzones have increased housing production in some cases, they have also led to higher land prices that erode
the affordability of new homes. In this paper I introduce the concept of the “zoning buffer” — the gap between the existing housing stock and the maximum number of homes allowed by current zoning — and describe how it affects land values and ultimately the production and affordability of housing.

Webpage contains links to the Housing Element report and appendices. The Adequate Sites inventory is Appendix D.

Positioning Parks and Green Spaces in an Equitable COVID-19 Recovery

“Grand boulevards” are commercial corridors anchored by diverse housing options that serve multiple income demographics, largely associated with Parisan boulevards. This type of district doesn’t rely solely on greenfield new housing construction. Instead, according to Calthorpe, grand boulevards take advantage of “grayfields,” underutilized or economically obsolete spaces left over from previous retail occupiers, and ideally leverage Tax Increment Financing (TIF) districts so that increases in value pay for additional development.

Explains reasons to change census tracts

Trickle-down housing policy, pushed by the real estate industry and politicians, has been a colossal failure. It hasn’t built the affordable housing that’s needed for California’s housing affordability crisis, and it fuels gentrification in working-class communities, especially those of color. Activists have long used the term trickle-down housing, but not everyone knows what it is. Here’s an explanation.

Excellent introduction to the role that land plays in housing unaffordability

"Pro-development activists try to trick you into thinking it helps the poor to destroy neighborhoods to make way for luxury condos. We need a radically democratic preservationism."

Concerns are favors white affluent neighborhoods and creates barriers by increasing home maintenance costs.

Economic analysis of housing supply is usually based on a one-shot static density model. In this model, landowners choose a housing density that maximises the value of their site. The density that achieves this is where the marginal development cost of extra density equals the marginal dwelling price. Every landowner does this instantly. There is no time in the model. It just happens.

But optimal density (dwellings per unit of land) is not optimal supply (new dwellings per period of time).

Despite this conceptual confusion, radical town planning policy changes have been proposed around the world. By allowing higher-density housing, proponents of these policies expect that the rate of new housing supply will increase enormously, reducing housing prices.

Calthorpe developed the concept of Transit Oriented Development, a strategy that is now the foundation of many regional policies and city plans around the world. His work internationally has demonstrated that community design with a focus on environmental sustainability and human scale can be adapted throughout the globe. Most recently Calthorpe launched the urban-planning software UrbanFootprint which models the diverse impacts of urban planning scenarios for designers and planners working for cities, businesses, public agencies and nonprofits.

Historical preservation is an important tool when utilized properly, preserving our nation’s landmarks and maintaining our history. However, like any other policy tool, it is important to monitor the effects of its implementation and watch for abuse. Especially with Los Angeles’ current rates of overcrowding and homelessness, we must understand the consequences of restrictive zoning regulations, historic preservation included.

A new study evaluates some common street design interventions that should be in every city’s toolbox. [Includes photos of where this has been done.]