California has a bunch of new housing laws, several taking effect in each of the last few years.
They eliminate most single-family “R-1” zoning to allow more housing and permit more floors in any new apartment building or condominium structure if it contains an acceptable percentage of “affordable” or low-income units. One measure also allows more living units by mandating fewer or no parking spaces in buildings near mass transit stops on the flawed presumption that most people living there won’t ever want to own a vehicle.
At times, the lawmakers seem to have forgotten these new buildings will be in California and not New York or some other Eastern state where many people neither like nor want to drive.
The most important reality ignored, though, by the housing density enthusiasts who now populate the Legislature and governor’s office may be this: Some of what they’re enabling can conflict directly with other state mandates, notably one that insists California run almost exclusively on carbon-free renewable energy by 2045, just 22 years from now. The main reason for this conflict? Shade.
Measures like the density bonus given by one California law to developers allow them to add floors to their new buildings if they put more affordable units than absolutely required into those structures. That same factor affects the “builders remedy” that allows developers almost a completely free hand on new projects within cities that are late getting state approval for their housing plans.
The nub of the problem is simple: The higher and wider a new multistory building gets, the more shade it casts over nearby building rooftops the less solar energy can be produced from them. The reality is that California won’t reach its mandated carbon-free energy future without huge numbers of photovoltaic (solar) panels installed atop houses and commercial buildings.
Yet the 2021 law known as SB 10, sponsored by state Sen. Scott Wiener, D- San Francisco, allows limitless new apartment or condo buildings along all streets classed as “major transit corridors” or within half a mile of a light rail stop. All it takes to create a major transit corridor is for a city or regional bus system to add new routes on any street it wants.
If and when that happens on a large scale, not only will residents of nearby R-1 neighborhoods lose privacy, as their once-secluded backyards become visible to new neighbors living a few floors up, but shadows from large new buildings will block sunlight to those existing homes for hours every day. So much for the ability to generate much solar energy, still the key to renewable power even in an era that includes wind energy, geothermal, hydroelectric power and more.
A lot of this has been spelled out graphically by a group of architects in Santa Monica, an independent enclave surrounded on three sides by Los Angeles. In parts of that city, almost every lot is eligible for new construction dwarfing what was standard in the beachside town for generations.
The group, called Santa Monica Architects for a Responsible Tomorrow, notes that an 88-foot-high building on a typical 50-by-150-foot lot would cast shadows over some of its neighbors between 9 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. on most days. This essentially negates the common idea of placing solar panels atop existing nearby two-story commercial structures.
But some new laws propounded in Sacramento over the last three years were neither subjected to such analysis nor vetted for conflicts with other state laws. Taking the word of the state Housing and Community Development (HCD) Department that millions of new homes are needed, even in a time of falling population, legislators and Gov. Gavin Newsom gladly passed and signed these laws.
It’s an example of lawmakers becoming so preoccupied with one perceived need (even though a 2022 report from the state auditor cast doubt on documents forming the basis of HCD estimates) that they don’t notice effects on other state mandates.
Of course, there is a solution: Convert existing vacant office buildings and closed big box stores and mini-malls into housing, and you’d create more units faster while avoiding interference with any other mandates.
Thomas Elias can be reached at tdelias@aol.com. To read more of his columns, visit californiafocus.net online.
