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Andrew Burleson's avatar

One other small note: incremental doesn’t necessarily mean steps of a fixed size, it means steps that make sense in context. That’s going to mean something like a 50-100% increase in units on a lot as a baseline, but it could be bigger.

For example in NY and SF there are plenty of old small buildings or vacant lots surrounded by towers. I think the next increment there is another tower. (Although holdouts and speculation can make that hard to pencil, which is a different issue.)

Speaking to SF since I lived there and am more familiar, the “big incremental” is more than just FiDi. All through Soma, mission, and Hayes Valley I think the logical next increment is replacing 2-3 story buildings with 5-8 story buildings. And along corridors like Divisadero or Geary, same thing.

But also, consider that something like half of SF’s land area is on the west side. Sunset, and Parkside are largely single family, even the Richmond is mostly small buildings. Adding something like one 2-4 unit building per block out there every year would be many thousands of new units per year, which would be meaningful!

But even more important, consider if you could add one unit to every lot in all of Daly City and South SF and San Mateo and so on all the way down the bay and back up the other side. That would be a *profound* change in supply, nearly doubling the housing supply in just the first wave.

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Lee Nellis's avatar

Been on vacation, but wanted to say this is well done. It will be confusing to many, though, who do not understand zoning as being about use segregation. In most states, the only legal authority communities have to adopt environmental regulations or address nuisances is the zoning authority. So, if you want to protect your streams with a buffer or require landscaping between uses that are not totally compatible, what you do will be called zoning. What you do if you want to exclude exurban sprawl with open space development regulations or want to exclude strip commercial with a form-based code will also be called zoning. YIMBYs need to get over the terminology and focus on the outcomes.

I will add, for those who might be interested, that what you say here has been anticipated. Land use lawyer and urban historian, John Reps, wrote an influential essay entitled "Requiem for Zoning" in 1969 and by the mid-70s creative planners were putting performance zoning systems in place here and there throughout the US. A few of those survive, though not always in the originally intended form. Most of those systems have been repealed or replaced with more conventional zoning that carried over some of the performance standards. Part of why that has happened is that NIMBYs do not like objective systems. They have to trade in emotion. Part is that administering performance zoning takes more talent and effort. The largest part, though, is that we live in a society that deludes itself into thinking there are simple answers.

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