CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 25, 2022, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“DEMISE OF
R-1 ZONING WILL LEAD TO NEW BLOCKBUSTING”
Blockbusting. A technique used to encourage people to sell
their property by giving the impression that a neighborhood is changing for the
worse, causing property values to decline. The property is later resold at
inflated prices.
Definition
2, American Heritage Dictionary
Blockbusting has not
been a major force in California life since the early 1980s, when civil rights
laws took hold strongly. Those laws prevented brokers from trying to scare
white homeowners into selling quickly and at a loss just because a family of
another race moves into a residential neighborhood, the prime definition of
blockbusting.
Now a new era of blockbusting may be upon us, thanks to the landmark
housing density laws passed last year, known as SB 9 and SB 10. SB 9 does away
with almost all single family, or R-1, zoning by allowing all but a few
residential lots to be split down the middle, with two new apartments or
condominiums and an "additional dwelling unit" (grandma-style
one-room structure) on each half.
So
SB 9 essentially allows six housing units on virtually all lots where there now
is only one, everywhere in California. Cities and counties cannot stop this. SB
10, aiming to radically densify housing near light rail transit stops or major
bus routes, allows high-rise development on any lot within half a mile of those
transportation features.
Neither
bill requires developers to provide new parking, new water supplies, new school
buildings, new parks, traffic mitigation or any other community amenity in
exchange for the right to build.
Developers
merely need to get control of properties they want to remake.
This
is an open invitation to blockbusting, as described in Definition 2. If it happens,
it will eventually lower property values in current R-1 areas at least
temporarily and raise them in places where the current occupants move.
Much
of this could have been prevented if a proposed initiative to take land-use
decisions away from state government and give them permanently and completely
to local city and county elected officials had reached this fall’s ballot and
passed.
But
in late February, sponsors of that putative measure, known as “Our Neighborhood
Voices,” announced they’ve given up on qualifying the measure for a vote this
fall and will aim instead for 2024.
“We
are not stopping, we are not slowing down, we are not ever going to give up
until we have restored a neighborhood voice in community planning,” went the
plaintive declaration of Redondo Beach Mayor Bill Brand, a sponsor of the
proposed measure.
Translation:
The group saw it had neither the money nor personnel to gather enough
signatures in time to qualify the measure this year. This may be because
sponsors failed to raise enough cash to pay the army of petition carriers
needed to get the 1 million-plus signatures now required. The number will be
different, likely lower, for 2024.
It
all opens the door to three years of unmitigated, virtually unregulated
development, and very likely a form of blockbusting much like that described in
Definition 2 above.
Here’s
how that blockbusting might work:
Let’s
say you own a suburban three-bedroom. two-bath house. A developer offers you
$1.5 million for your home, as is (such offers have lately been common). You
refuse. But your next-door neighbor to the east accepts the offer and quickly
moves somewhere cheaper.
Next,
developers buy the homes to your west and across the street. Now you’re
surrounded, knowing you face a year or more of demolition and construction dust
and noise from all sides, newly crowded streets and no possible return to the
lifestyle in which you invested much of your life savings.
So
you accept an offer lower than what was originally proffered. Now there will be
24 housing units where previously there were four, and original property values
have dropped.
But
when you try to buy in a new location, you find prices there have risen because
of an influx of folks just like you.
It’s
classic blockbusting, even if it’s not racially based, as blockbusting
traditionally was. And it may soon become ubiquitous.
-30-
Email
Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough:
The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch
It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias
columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
Another spot-on column from my favorite commentator.
ReplyDelete