You ever have a pot on the stove with a huge amount of steam built up, and you crack the lid only a little in one corner, and whoosh? That's the San Mateo County approach to housing. All the demand is shoved into a few locations. One of them is downtown Redwood City, where fully ten percent of the new homes built in the entire county (population 750,000) since 2010 have gone up in the span of just a few blocks.

The policies that target upzoning and high density redevelopment to a few locations create the perfect environment for speculation. This sends land prices through the roof. With this spot-upzoning process, cities also gain the ability to subject captive developers to extraordinary demands that raise the cost of producing housing. Just look at the laundry list of concessions San Bruno got out of Ghielmetti before killing his project anyway: affordable units, street improvements, community space, and a $10 million contribution to the city's general fund.

In a speculative environment like this, only very deep-pocketed developers are in the game. Infill building projects are huge, complex, and rare, because the procedural obstacles and the costs are astronomical. Only large-scale development can justify the uncertainty, delays, and risk of the planning process: if the neighbors are going to come out and yell about three houses on a single lot, as they did recently in Berkeley, you don't dare waste your time with something so small.

And yet we don't actually get more housing this way, because every big project is now treated as an existential battle between competing visions of the Bay Area's future. And even one that checks all the boxes established by a years-long public process, as we've seen in San Bruno, can be denied.

We Need to Relinquish Some Control

If your goal is simply to get housing units built—if you want to reduce all the complexity of our cities down to a housing-to-jobs ratio or some other statistic—there are ways to use the muscle of state and corporate power to get units built. You can throw public money at it. You can throw Google's money at it. You can ram skyscrapers through the bureaucratic process somewhere, I suppose. These top-down solutions, though, will likely produce an even more distorted and less responsive development environment, in which you have to be even better connected to play.

If your goal is to fix a dysfunctional market, so that in 30 years we're not having this debate anymore? Well, then we need to talk via negativa—the process of addressing dysfunction in complex systems by removing distortions, not adding more.

Strong Towns, inspired by Jane Jacobs's insights about cataclysmic money, has put forth the following pair of principles for neighborhood change:

No neighborhood should be exempt from change. No neighborhood should be subjected to radical change.

Here's the thing: if you want to have the second, you have to accept the first. They're a package deal.

A good starting point would be to universally allow the missing middle, up to triplexes and fourplexes, in just about all neighborhoods. Oregon just did this. California has toyed with it—it was a late and promising addition to the troubled housing bill SB50. The crucial piece here is that that next increment of development—a triplex or a backyard ADU—needs to be allowed as of right. This means no weaseling out of it with setbacks or lot width or height requirements that effectively disallow these buildings. No crazy onerous approval processes or hidden fees. No seven-hour public hearings.

The as-of-right part is essential because we've adapted to a culture in which many think it's a birthright that your neighborhood doesn't have to change. And California, as much as anywhere, is paying the price. If you don't like the vision of 425 new apartments on El Camino Real, you simply can't freak out over triplexes in your neighborhood.

I'm not suggesting triplexes alone will provide enough homes to solve the housing crisis next year or in five years or in twenty. They might do more than you think, though. When something like 90% of the land in San Mateo County is off-limits to development, the prices are guaranteed to be crazy on the remaining 10%. Make it so El Camino Real is no longer the sole outlet for every bit of pent-up demand to live on the Peninsula, and I bet you anything land prices actually fall on El Camino Real, making more projects like Ghielmetti's viable—and, crucially, much smaller ones too.

The road back to housing sanity is bumpy. But Northern California's cities will be stronger for it.

(Cover photo by Thomas Hawk via Flickr)