By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

Thanks to Sen. Wiener and our own delegation, San Francisco may be in serious trouble in four years—and it won’t be the city’s fault.

I have been talking to folks at the City Planning Department to follow up on my analysis of the numbers in the Housing Element, and after a good amount of research, I think can fairly conclude the following:

The state, thanks to the likes of Sen. Scott Wiener, has totally screwed San Francisco.

Here’s what’s really going on:

Under Wiener’s state law, every city has to submit a plan, which in SF has become part of the Housing Element, that shows how the community is going to meet its Regional Housing Needs Assessment goals. The RHNA process is ridiculous and the goals are a farce.

Nevertheless, if San Francisco doesn’t show progress toward meeting those goals, the city could lose out on transportation and housing money (imagine: if we don’t have enough money to fund enough affordable housing, they will take away affordable housing money; what a brilliant, effective plan.)…

More: If the state decides to decertify the city’s Housing Element, which could happen four years from now, then San Francisco in effect loses all control over local development and developers can build anything they want, almost anywhere they want, with very little public input or oversight.

That’s what’s called the “Builder’s Option”—and it’s a very real threat to San Francisco.…(more)

By Roger Rudick : sfstreetsblog – excerpt

Advocates in Alameda fought hard and won a city council vote last fall to get approval for protected bike lanes on Grand Street between Encinal and Otis. As Streetsblog readers will recall, the issue was contentious with wealthy homeowners on the street objecting to the required removal of some private car storage to accommodate protected bike lanes.

So, of course, a local resident has now filed a lawsuit (PDF)…

And, just like with anti-safety NIMBYs in other fights, the red herring of access for the elderly and the disabled is shamelessly used. From the filing, which claims protected bike lanes will result in:

Reduced accessibility to homes, particularly as to disabled persons, persons with mobility problems and the aged who wish to remain in their home and reduce the ability of &:are-providers for such persons; (b) Reduced parking for homeowners, ADU residents and their visitors;… (more)

By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt

You can make it argue almost anything, and it’s alarmingly cogent. Here’s an example.

Artificial intelligence is getting better, fast, and at times it’s alarming. As someone who teaches undergraduates, I can see the end of the term paper looming: It’s pretty easy to find plagiarism, but really hard to figure out if an AI helped do research and writing. (A student at Princeton has an app for that; it will last until the AI gets better, and then we’ll have an ongoing tech war that the teachers will lose.)

So check this out: My son asked the new public program, OpenAI, to write an argument about the problems with the Yimby movement. Here’s what the robot had to say:

Yimbyism, or “Yes In My Backyard” is an urban planning movement that supports increased housing density as a way to address rising housing costs. It is often presented as a solution to the housing crisis, as well as a way to promote economic development through gentrification…

Finally, Yimbyism does not address the underlying causes of the housing crisis, such as inadequate public investment in housing and land-use regulations that favor development over affordability. Until these issues are addressed, Yimbyism is unlikely to lead to meaningful, long-term solutions to the housing crisis…

Got that right.

But it can make the exact opposite argument, too.

And soon, this is going to be everywhere. I don’t even know where to start…(more)

By Becky O’Malley : berkeleydailyplanet – excerpt

Almost all my life I’ve lived in walking distance of a major urban university. For most of the last 60 years or so I’ve been in Berkeley. As a Cal (that’s what we called it in the olden days) undergraduate I started out in a rooming house (aka “ a single family home”, i.e. a house with many more bedrooms than bathrooms or kitchens). It was a classic Berkeley brown shingle, vintage turn of the 20th century, on Channing near Telegraph, owned and inhabited by a classic hard-working immigrant, the proprietor of Anna’s Donut House next door, open as I recall from 6 a.m. until two a.m. Anna didn’t get much sleep…

Why am I telling you all this? Because last week I watched the oral arguments about the appeal by a couple of neighborhood groups of a lower court decision which would have allowed UCB to evade California Environmental Qualiy Act (CEQA) requirements that noise impacts and alternative sites be studied before building an 1100 bed student dorm on a historic site at People’s Park.

That’s studied, not eliminated.

The plaintiffs’ attorney, Tom Lippe, in his oral presentation pointed to language in California law that clearly included noise as one of the categories that an environment impact report needs to review. UCB had simply chosen to skip that step when it did the CEQA-mandated Environmental Impact Report. The university’s hired counsel suggested that human social noise, which students could be expected to make, shouldn’t count. The underlying premise of UC’s argument seemed to be that they could do as they please, Berkeley citizenry be damned…

All this adds up to my long-winded response to an op-ed in yesterday’s Chronicle by Professor Elmendorf. It appears to be part of an on-going campaign to get rid of the Environmental Quality Act, orchestrated by what is called, sometimes without sarcasm, the development “community”. These are the folks who believe that there’s big money in big buildings, and that if your profit margin doesn’t perform up to expectations it must be the government’s fault. You can read his Sunday issue treatise here:

California legislators refuse to fix CEQA. Here’s how Newsom and the courts can take charge.  

What was cut from the Chron piece, he says on Twitter, is a lengthy discussion of whether the real effect of CEQA can be reliably measured. The author admits honestly that “ CEQA critics have no way of quantifying the true severity of the CEQA problem. That’s why, in my first draft of the Chronicle piece, I wrote that I am only ‘weakly of the view that CEQA is a big problem.’ “ …(more)

Please read the entire article, as it gives a good explanation on the whys and wherefores of prop and con CEQA attitudes that are hitting the courts now with pleas for protection and destruction of the California Environmental Quality Act that has been in place since Regan was Governor. That leads us to wonder what would Regan say now about this discrepancy over one of his landmark bills.

by Annie Gaus : sfstandard – excerpt

California Rep. Katie Porter, who represents Orange County in the House of Representatives, is launching a bid for the U.S. Senate seat currently occupied by veteran lawmaker Dianne Feinstein.

Porter is the first major candidate to openly seek the position.

“California needs a warrior in the Senate—to stand up to special interests, fight the dangerous imbalance in our economy, and hold so-called leaders like Mitch McConnell accountable for rigging our democracy,” said Porter in a video announcement…(more)

By Judge Glock : thebreakthrough – excerpt

The Environmental Case for Suburbia

In the years leading up to the coronavirus pandemic, the intelligentsia came to a consensus that sprawling, car-dominated cities were doomed. The future, they said, was in dense, transit-dependent metropolises. The seeming success of compact cities such as San Francisco, Boston, and New York gave this theory credence. And the supposed dangers of sprawl to the climate gave it urgency.

Yet the facts show that sprawling and car-dependent cities have grown more rapidly than dense ones for decades and are far more affordable. The pandemic, meanwhile, showed they will expand even more rapidly in the future. By contrast, the climate-driven demands for density and transit are just the most recent version of a solution that has long been searching for a problem. Advocates will continue to search. In reality, sprawling cities are more environmentally sound than their dense counterparts and will become even more so as technology evolves.

Instead of warring against sprawl and cars, planners and environmentalists should recognize how the green spaces of suburbia, allied to autonomous electric vehicles and green single-family homes, can provide both the affordability and sustainability most Americans crave.

The Long Triumph of Sprawl

There has been much discussion of the benefits of density, of which there are many. If there weren’t, nobody would live in Manhattan or San Francisco. These cities allow many people, especially young, high-productivity singles and those who work in business services like finance or law, to congregate and learn from each other. Economists call these benefits “agglomeration effects.”…

The Future Is Spread Out

Just like density, sprawl has costs as well as benefits. For instance, sprawl can result in the loss of species’ habitats and natural landscapes. But these problems can be accommodated. The fact that only 2 percent of the American landmass is urbanized, and that not even the most sprawling projections of the future would imagine that figure going over 5 percent, means Americans can protect species and environmentally sensitive areas as we expand. We can, as McHarg noted, design with nature.

Judge Glock is the senior director of policy and research at the Cicero Institute and the author of The Dead Pledge: The Origins of the Mortgage Market and Federal Bailouts, 1913–1939…(more)