Why should Modesto have a say in what gets built in San Francisco? I’m pretty sure the folks in Modesto would be pretty pissed if San Francisco was dictating building rules to them!

And Phoenix or Las Vegas aren’t even in the same states or legal jurisdictions. If you told them San Francisco was going to be able to tell them what to build or how, you’d just get laughed at.

If you think building a high density apartment complex in the middle of a single family zoned subdivision against the residents wishes wouldn’t be taken as a ‘shot to the nuts’ of someone who had bought and lived there for years, you probably don’t know too many people who have?

Fair or not, you can’t walk in and dictate to someone in that situation how they are going to take it, or what is reasonable and expect anything but well deserved anger.

1. The people in Modesto are pissed! San Francisco’s housing prices have been spilling over into their city for years! And San Francisco imports almost its entire population’s worth of people during the day to work in and contribute payroll taxes to the city. It’s not the great argument you think it is to claim that none of these people have a stake in its land use.

Additionally, Nevada and Arizona share a jurisdiction with California: the United States of America. The state is already taking land use out of city hands through SB35 et al., and this will only become more acute as each city loses credibility as a good faith actor. The federal government also dictates what can be built through mortgage policy. The subdivision itself was a policy invention to make it easy to guarantee federal mortgages.

2. Most residents do not give a crap about apartment buildings. Surveys prove this over and over. SB50, an upzoning bill, polled quite well with the general population. The ones who do will quickly get over themselves when it becomes clear that apartments aren’t a “shot to the nuts.” Honestly, this sentiment is extremely weird and endemic to America; most countries with great standards of living manage to live in varied urban topologies just fine.

That’s nice and all, but none of those things but SB35 actually matters in any real way that I can tell - and SB35 passed in ‘17 and so far hasn’t changed anything important, or we wouldn’t still all be bitching about the exact same thing we have been since well before then!

SB50 never passed, Modesto can ‘be pissed’ (why exactly?) at the higher property values and income all their residents who work in SF are benefiting from - they don’t seem to be trying to change that equation much! Sure someone is complaining about it, but when is THAT not the case about... everything?

I’m also curious what standing or stake they could claim (you assert they have one) - are they all paying property taxes in SF, or City residents who aren’t being allowed to vote because they commute to their second homes in Modesto? Or are they just driving in and out for jobs, and have as much claim to authority on how the city should run it’s business as a UPS driver dropping off a package?

I’m also curious what legal standing Phoenix or SF could claim for a suit against each other for.... people moving of their own free will between those cities for economic reasons? That would be quite an interesting lawsuit at the federal level for sure! Who would end up paying whom anyway? The city that was too expensive for otherwise qualified labor; so they moved to somewhere cheaper and are now contributing, tax paying, members of society there? Or the evil ‘good citizen’ stealing city luring productive (but maybe not 7 figure earning) folks away with bribes like affordable housing?

1. You are naive about how this process works. SB35 has already led to thousands of new units of construction, including - finally - the construction of 2k units at what was formerly Vallco mall, despite lawsuits and general objections by Cupertino city council. That is only the beginning, because it was paired with reforms to the Regional Housing Needs Allocation process which has 10x'd the planned minimum requirement of new homes. Beverly Hills and Palo Alto are both quite upset about having to let people build homes or lose local control. Some more information here: https://www.sfweekly.com/news/bay-area-takes-step-toward-maj...

These changes take years to make their real impact felt, and the crisis is half a century in the making. The future is _more_ state pre-emption of zoning, not less.

The funny thing is: the ignorance of local voters to the larger systems at play lead to lots of recent decisions that will soon backfire. For example, San Mateo recently re-affirmed city-wide height limits which more or less guarantee that their RHNA requirements will require their planning department end single family zoning in large parts of the city; there's no place for them to shove apartment towers!

2. SB50 failed due to conservative state reps from SoCal, in particular LA. It had plenty of support with reps in NorCal, and in any case its mere existence disproves your point that there is no basis for states short-circuiting local control.

3. I'm not going to explain how delegation works to you in detail, since I assume you are intelligent enough to get it. There are many powers that are delegated to city governments which can be taken away if cities prove themselves incompetent at administering it. City departments go under conservatorship of the state all the time.

4. I'm not sure why you assume the legal remedy is a lawsuit. Changes to how federal mortgages are backed; removal of subsidy on home insurance which makes sprawl math workout (albeit in the short term); a shift away from federally mandated highway spending; changes to how housing assistance programs are managed and qualified for at the federal level could all manifest as land use changes in cities without explicitly being about zoning. There are probably individual bureaucrats at the DOT or FHWA who are deciding which expansions of 101 or 880 are worthwhile to fund and which aren't. Federal law could easily let them prioritize funding for BART instead.

I missed that you specifically asked for legal standing. The basis of SFH zoning was created in Euclid, which required it be necessary to uphold safety and be reasonable. There are strong arguments against it on both grounds: https://ij.org/sc_podcast/148/

In that case, standing was any landowner holding land zoned single family. A Phoenix landowner of a SFH subdivision could screw it for the whole country.

Not narrowly zoning, but the viability of single family zoning also depends on property tax stabilization regimes, which themselves can be challenged under the equal protection clause.

No offense, but you're a bit all over the place?

Near as I can tell, your counter-argument seems to be 'but there is stuff that could change it!' which.... could be?

Your arguments don't really seem cohesive or coherent enough to me to indicate how realistic or likely any of those would materially impact our current situation more than say the generation currently benefitting the most from this situation (boomers) slowly dying out. For instance the Phoenix vs SF argument seemed to go from a 'Phoenix has the right to demand SF change what it's doing' (not trying to strawman, that's what I read) to 'sfh rezoning is entirely possible!' and 'we can change conforming mortgage rules!' - which hey maybe - but why should they, and why should anyone with the power to do it care right now?

Let's play this back, because I think it's you whose position keeps changing with no engagement with my responses. You started by claiming that if enough people want something (e.g. SFZ), they should be able to vote it into law:

> if enough others agree that is what they want, why shouldn’t they be able to? That’s literally what democracy is!

(For starters, that is not how American democracy works. There are plenty of policies that are not allowable and should not be allowable merely because they have popular support. I'm sure you can name a few.)

I pointed out that "enough" people only want SFZ if you control who the relevant population is. In aggregate, Californians are perfectly happy with ending SFZ, and policies to do so like SB50 poll quite well. You are simultaneously claiming: if a cul de sac by popular vote prefers SFZ, it should be able to impose it on any objecting landowner in the cal de sac, but if the residents of California by popular vote prefer that San Francisco zone for more housing, they shouldn't. These are inconsistent at face unless you specify and defend a distinction between immediate and regional neighbors, which you haven't.

Next, I pointed out that the residents of California are already dictating what gets built in the SFBA. I gave you an example of a law supported by the state legislative representatives from Modesto that forced Cupertino to increase its housing stock by nearly 10% with a single project, over the long-standing objections of Cupertino city council members and voters (the Vallco project went to the city ballot in 2018 and was voted down). Your response to this was that a 10% increase in Cupertino's housing stock does not solve a 50 year shortage so it's not a meaningful example of state policy dictating what is built locally. Not only is this irrelevant (your argument is invalidated by an existence proof, which I provided), but wrong: I gave you a reference for how state policy on land use will be increasingly more important than local policy in coming years.

You also asked why it's fair for "all the citizens of California (or the USA)" to have a stake in local land use. I pointed out that: (i) they interact with the local economy (ii) they have a stake in the consequences of those policies (iii) they may even _want to_ live locally but cannot because they are priced out (iv) SFZ is justified legally in Euclid by its ability to mitigate a small set of very specific issues, none of which include "neighborhood preference." These are all separately great arguments for why they should. You have not engaged with any.

I went ahead and made a stronger claim that land use is a national matter. You asked how that's the case. I pointed out that suburban subdivisions are Federal policy, and anyone who can influence how Fannie and Freddie guarantee loans implicitly dictates what type of home is built locally. You responded by saying that is a future hypothetical even though this policy is the status quo.

Given all that, I think it's reasonable to conclude that you're the one who has strayed from defending the your original point (which was, roughly, "the immediate neighbors of a property should have the exclusive right to decide what can be built on it - that's democracy!").