By Andrea Fox, Gov1 Senior Editor
Earlier this month City Lab’s Kriston Capps advocated for stronger local government control over land-use decisions--based on some recent zoning research1 and pointed comments coming out of media coverage of San Francisco’s affordable housing crisis. “Take away land-use decisions from neighborhoods and hand them over to cities,” and then cities will work with other cities toward regional goals, he said.
Capps commented on Gawker’s recent San Francisco: Build More Housing, Assholes where author Hamilton Nolan talked about preserving San Francisco’s Victorian homes--aka the Painted Ladies. “You can build new things in other places,” Nolan said.
While Nolan’s comment sounds fairly reasonable, according to Capps, the only ones making it are San Francisco homeowners that object to new development plans. “You can build new things in other places” is a refrain for this set,"--and that’s precisely the problem, he argued. The answer is not just to build more housing, it’s to build more housing everywhere, Capps said.
The City Lab writer referenced the practice of exclusionary zoning, which Dartmouth College economics professor William Fischel proposed in the seminal Homevoter Hypothesis in 2001. The idea is that people advocate and vote based on which local government decisions may enhance or detract from their homes’ values2. In this way, wealthy neighborhoods are able to keep new housing out. Then when luxury housing appears in formerly low-income neighborhoods, as research concludes that it does, the neighborhoods gentrify. Demand causes rents to rise, and that displaces people who used to live there1. The affordable housing need continues.
The new wealthy are ruining everything because the old wealthy decided not to let them live anywhere near them,” he surmised.
To solve the housing crisis in city’s like San Francisco, local governments need to break up the power of the wealthy cartels “that are able to decide that new housing is everybody else’s problem,” concluded Capps.
Read Capps original story on The Atlantic’s City Lab website.
