CA Housing Permits an Expensive Ticket
Along with being “Blue” and the good quality of life that comes with it is a disturbing trend, that urban California doesn’t really want you to build (NIMBYism) and charges exorbitant fees when you do (to offset Prop 13). Add union and nanny-state driven codes/poorly-staffed Cities, and you have runaway housing costs and people leaving the State.
This is an issue of which many are blissfully unaware. They accept their urban California high wages and dutifully spend most of it for the high housing costs, but increasingly are realizing that this is not sustainable. Unless you are a builder or a developer, you usually don’t get a front-row seat to all the forces that conspire to increase the cost of your home (all of which reflects perhaps the dark side of liberalism). If you are one of the unlucky ones who simply wants to put up a shed, solar panel, own a backyard chicken, or build a treehouse (don’t laugh, once I had to help a poor soul get a treehouse permit), you may even experience the byzantine mess that seems to say “ha! And you thought you were the lord and lady of your castle! Welcome to urban California!” Before I write this, I should preface by saying that myself and my cohorts are fully onboard Nationally with things like Climate Change solutions, reigning in Donald Trump’s deceitful agenda, better schools, police, and social justice (you’d know that if you’d read my previous articles). Many don’t understand that at the local level, the permitting situation is almost textbook liberal “dark-side” (over-regulation, over-taxation, nanny-state, over-unionization) which if unchecked will give California a further black-eye (we are already national poster people for liberalism run-amok)
The reasons for this phenomenon are many, but here are the main ones:
1) Prop 13, which limits property taxes to 1% of assessed property value. This meant that most California cities didn’t get enough tax money from existing property owners (or businesses), so they had to “soak” the new builders with exorbitant fees. CA cities have been helped in recent years by increases in assessed values and housing turnover, but this is still a problem. Along with this plague goes poorly maintained city streets and the like. (Levin, 2018)
2) NIMBYism: Many cities act like giant homeowner’s associations, which want to regulate every aspect of your home. A sort of lurid “pecking party” ensues, in which the poor applicant is dragged through the mud by neighbors who don’t want anything new. This could be streamlined to exempt minor things like tasteful additions and in-law units, but cities seem to enjoy the mob mentality of “Not in my Back Yard” politics. (Buhayer, Cannon, 2019)
3) Fake environmentalism. This is related to #2 above. The joke about the Sierra Club is “I built mine last year and I don’t want you to build yours this year”. People that have theirs just don’t want you to build yours, period, but they put up all sorts of phony reasons why you shouldn’t, called smoke-screens. These smoke-screens might be “lack of water and sewer services”, “traffic issues”, or “bad soils”, but the king of them all is “environmental reasons” which may be a) some kind of questionable amphibian study b) the need for the planners/environmental experts to make money or c) they think you’re a rich developer and they just don’t like you. I should say here that I’m sympathetic to the plight of cities and that often there really are substantive water/sewer/soils/traffic/habitat/ character issues, but just as often they are leveraged to keep people from building even reasonable projects. Note also that there are good and bad developers (Trump is a textbook bad one). Ironically, the rules make it so you almost have to be a crook to succeed.(Rosenberg, 2012)
4) Planners. I spent much of my career trying to work with planners and I finally gave up. They obsess over things like General Plans and Zoning Codes, but are more or less voyeurs while the architects/engineers/builders are creating the action. Few nice things in cities are created by planners…they are created by those with money and a vision who succeed in spite of planners, who try to smear these people as evil developers and pit citizens against them. As for the “vision” of civic perfection that planners think they have, this is limited by technology available, which planners know nothing about. It all makes one realize that a new sort of building technology is needed, inexpensive with built-in transit and park/farm amenities, so as to foil the uppity planners and their phony notions of what is “right” and “wrong’ in cities (which all raises costs and makes cookie-cutter cities…after all, cities were pretty good before planning was invented). A post-Covid trend may be the conversion of emptying malls and office space to residential villages with some commercial and built-in transit access. This is something tied to increased “work from home” and a sort of fait accompli, and yet planners will try to prevent it, then take credit after the fact (as is their nature). (Malanga, 2020)
5) Evolving codes: Codes used to have “owner-builder” clauses, which were for the old “Mom and Pop” cultures who liked to build things themselves. They exempted people for standard construction. Later, they evolved to require “engineering” for areas where people got themselves in trouble, like taller retaining walls and undersized beams. The understaffed/petty City staffs started to hide increasingly behind the engineers, trying to bring them into everything (at great cost to the owners). Most engineers have better things to do, and don’t like all the nonsense. Next, unions started to politic code authorities to favor themselves. For example, in SF (a strong union town), the unions require copper vents which require skilled plumbers (everyone else uses plastic). There are even competing codes, and of course “code boy scouts” who make a living beating you over the head with code books (the way others do with the Bible?) It is all inflationary and not completely conducive to better quality buildings (of which cost-control is part of the equation). (Broughel, Hamilton, 2019)
6) Petty inspectors: About 1/3 of the city plan checkers/inspectors are officious martinets who are undereducated and on a power-trip. As such, they just like to play with you to build themselves up. Since California construction is up and down, I can only imagine that Cities have a hard time staffing up when the need arises, and being Cities they have a hard time getting rid of bad-actors. Sometimes they farm out these tasks to consultants, and perhaps half the time it’s even worse since the consultant gets paid more money to mess with you. (Kendall, 2018)
7) Arbitrary Nanny-State rules: Many California cities think they are on the cutting edge of “green” technology, and a whole fake economy has been created over forcing you to use this window, that toilet, or those solar panels. The latest “trend” is banning natural-gas appliances. The overall look is that many Californians pay a premium for required “green” tech, when the rest of the country could care less. Yet California thinks it sets the trends and that this is progress. The reality is that things are ultimately tech and price point driven, not rammed down people’s throats. The popularity of LED bulbs, low-flush toilets, double-glazed windows, etc. came when they reached a price point where people bought them thinking they could save money (on power and water bills) in the long run. California is on the verge of requiring people to install photovoltaics (which are maybe a few years from vast tech improvements). This is like forcing people to buy a computer in 1983, before they became good/cheap enough for most. What happens when you’re forced to buy a $15k system that saves you $1500/yr today, when in 5 years you could buy one for $10k that saves you $2500/yr (a very realistic scenario). I’m not going full Republican here, I understand the need for “goals” and “leadership” in Cities, I just don’t think you should force the early users to bear the cost burdens for fear of running up housing costs (exactly what’s happening). Also, banning natural gas appliances requires electricity, most of which currently comes from…natural gas! Who thought out that one? If this trend continues, there will be tremendous demand for electricity (about a three-fold increase which our society is not ready to produce cleanly). Wouldn’t it be wiser to have a national policy to utilize natural gas (which is MUCH cleaner than coal) with carbon-capture controls/hydrogen conversion, instead of inefficient/expensive city nanny-state controls? (Obernolte, 2019),(Nevada Business, 2003)
8) Lack of consistency: The State is aware that CA cities collectively are creating a housing “Tower of Babel”, in which no two cities are alike (also running up costs). This is pretty much why we have so much State and Federal government in the first place (because cities and counties can be crony-driven and not cooperate amongst themselves, like when States had to force neighboring counties to get adjacent roads to align). The State may have some of its own problems, but it generally tries to get cities to standardize and keep rules reasonable (good luck) in the name of affordable housing. Meantime, cities are often run by mobs of far-left (restrictive housing) or far-right (ticky-tack housing) ideologues. Furthermore, most cities have contract bidding restrictions for anything over $5,000 (never adjusted for inflation after their incorporations around 100 years ago), a fact that makes getting things done difficult and which the State is trying to resolve. (lao.ca.gov, 2015)
In fairness, we should also note that California officials are reluctant to grant development permits in forested regions (fire danger), coastal areas (on deteriorating bluffs), low-lying Delta floodplains (flooding), hillsides (mudslides), and fault lines (earthquakes), all of which describes most of California (and its beauty). Development in these areas puts great strain on public services and tax dollars, much of it borne by State and Federal agencies. These are unique problems that the rest of the country doesn’t face nor understand. The above, along with traffic, require a fair share contribution from the developer for resolution (ie prorated cost of an engineered wall, firebreak, road, seawall, or levee) and no more, due to nexus laws. Unfortunately, most local jurisdictions don’t have the resources to build these ultimate protections ahead of the developers. It may all be evolving toward more group housing, in which pooled resources make it easier to share appropriate costs. Of course, this is in conflict with the Sunset Magazine California dream home, and the naughty developers that build them while sticking our State with the bill down the road.
Overall, California may be leading the world in utopian visions (actually sometimes-arrogant visions), but they are headed to a point where the only ones who can afford homes are children lucky enough to inherit them from their parents. Much money is spent, not all of it to great effect. Increasingly, engineers are asked to intervene at great cost to the home owner, with a miserable moving-target presented to the engineer or architect. California would be wise to streamline and standardize their rules, and let market forces dictate the amenities people buy for their homes (within reason). A big joke here is when someone builds a basic “homeless shelter” and the code authorities subsequently condemn it as “substandard housing” (oh well, back to the cardboard box?). Lest we want to continue being the laughingstock of the nation for over-regulating playhouses and chicken coops, we need to set more reasonable standards. At some point, the high cost of living may also produce some sort of revolutionary housing concepts that bring down prices while solving transit and energy problems (see also mall and office conversion above).
