When We Make It Hard to Build, We Give Developers More Power Over Our Communities -- Strong Towns

When We Make It Hard to Build, We Give Developers More Power Over Our Communities -- Strong Towns

"There's a much deeper source of dysfunction here, and that is that it's so onerous to develop in San Bruno (or virtually anywhere in coastal California), and there are so many costly regulatory hurdles and delays involved that it's virtually only viable to do so at an enormous scale like 425 or 600 apartments. Imagine jumping all those same hurdles just to build 20 or 30 apartments on a much smaller piece of land. Who would be crazy enough to try?

"This is a system designed to turn each individual development proposal into a high-stakes battle. And when that's the case, the only developers in the arena will be the ones big enough to throw their weight around....

"The biggest problem with 'Make developers give something back to the public' is that a city's efforts to do so end up ramping up the cost and complexity of development until the game is even more stacked in favor of the biggest projects and the deepest pockets. And that, in turn, even more dramatically raises the incentive to shout 'Make them give something back!'

"In an ideal world, we'd have hundreds of small infill projects going on at once. San Bruno could still get that 475 new apartments (or far more than that) but spread over dozens of sites instead of all in one gargantuan building. The culture of negotiation and dealmaking would be less dominant, because it's not practical to operate that way with small projects. For example, the logistical complexity of trying to impose inclusionary zoning on small projects is such that almost all such ordinances exempt individual homes or projects below a certain number of units (20, perhaps, or even 50).

"What should replace it is a culture of consistent rules applied consistently. With a steady stream of small projects going up all over the place, you'd have a steadier stream of revenue flowing into the city's coffers, and a stream less dependent on the approval or denial of any one specific proposal. The small-scale developer can't throw their weight around--but nor does the city need to throw its weight around."