The tiny backyard houses for the homeless plan that failed in Oregon is popping up in Los Angeles, California!
The “not in my backyard” organized zoning NAZI’s fought long and hard, for decades, to control other people’s property and rights. Don’t think they are going to relinquish that kind of control easily.
The idea of zoning is to protect property values – most often for the class of people who buy and sell their residential property for profit. There are people who live in some municipalities, ones who are looking for a permanent home, who suffer the “domination by ordinance” of all the property in a given municipality. There are ordinances that prevent an affordable mother-in-law addition or a mobile home on any property without variances or restrictive measures making the proposed affordable housing, unaffordable.
Planners and zoning proponents are not satisfied with one part of a community being left out of their master plan, but they are often the those most likely to leave their “planned community” when financial opportunity knocks. Locals are stuck with the plan forever. If your family grows – too bad. If a relative or friend needs a small place to live on your property, even temporarily – too bad.
Here is how this all goes sour. A proponent of Los Angeles’s tiny houses wants to add homes to a municipality that has priced certain people out of the housing market:
“This is all about adding [housing] stock to a neighborhood that has gotten out of reach for everyone,” said Wolbe, 35, a freelance creative director for tech companies.”
But pricing a certain group of people, stuck on fixed or seasonal incomes, out of town is what zoning is all about! Tiny houses were not in the original “master plan,” were they? “Affordable” housing is never a real option when the zoning and planning experts first took over municipalities. It was and always will be – one size fits all.
Here is another issue the masters of master plans could see but did not include in their original vision for your property and their “investment.”
From the article:
“Backyard units expand housing options without compromising the character of the region’s single-family neighborhoods, the mayor’s design consultant said.”
Snob-zoned neighborhoods are to be “single-family neighborhoods” of a certain character and nothing else. That puts everyone on the same playing field. You can ethnically cleanse a certain neighborhood by fixing the type, style, and price of the housing – as though only one class of people exist in an area. With snob-zoning, you eventually help create the homeless problem you are now plagued by.
There go the property values selective, restrictive, ordinances were supposed to protect.
If you want homeless people roaming the woods behind your house or sleeping in cars with their kids, then the solution is simple, don’t have anywhere for them to go. Everyone has to have a four bedroom two and a half bath Victorian with a two car garage that has the doors facing away from the cul-de-sac – Oh, and granite curbs.