Bus Rapid Transit expansion is a near-term fix that can happen in a year or two. Rezones and construction to densify a city take longer. I don't think these two solutions are incompatible - they address the problem at different time scales.
Zoning is inherently racist, designed to keep the poor and working class out of areas of the city. It stunts economic growth to boot, and should be done away with entirely.
That being said, the roadways are public property, and should be redesigned to be on a road diet, but building structures in the middle is perhaps not the best idea. Parkifying some sections, expanding others into plazas (while infilling parking to densify) and selling the edges of the roadway to new development so it may be denser would be better approaches.
Not sure where you're going with the "zoning is racist" comment - I'm not talking about redlining here. In places like Seattle, much of the city is still zoned single-family, which is exclusionary to the poor and working class.
The rezones happening in our city boost the building density permitted in most of the city while requiring that some of that extra capacity be dedicated to low-income units. It's net positive for those in need of affordable housing and lets developers build bigger, which hardly hurts the economy.
Dedicating units to low income housing means you've failed to build enough units despite demand, and zoning is likely at fault. Whether it be height caps or parking minimums jacking up the price, they need to go.
Agreed that lack of units is at fault. This kind of mandatory affordable housing is an attempt to mitigate displacement within neighborhoods dealing with gentrification. In my case, this is Seattle, which has no parking minimums, but has suffered from too many single-family zones and not enough dense zoning. The rezones are an attempt to correct these issues.
Seattle needs to dezone MLK, Interbay and other major transit corridors and allow these areas to densify. The transit is there, and the property is either empty parking lots or 1 story slum commercial as the zoning restricts the area to a certain use. These areas should be replaced with dense, mixed use development.
We can have $800 apartments inside the city if we so choose, but with zoning forcing developers to build skinny dual towers and similar, we are forcing the minimum apartment price skywards.
No, the areas will still have restrictive height caps that will stave off tall buildings per that HALA overview doc, we need these areas de-zoned, not rezoned.
I feel like you're letting great be the enemy of good, but we can agree to disagree. With few exceptions, all cities have zoning to keep some consistency and continuity within neighborhoods. Within that frame, I'm happy the city is pursuing "larger than normal" upzones and converting some SF zoning to mixed-use.
Its a temporary bandaid though, that is the issue. With a lack of zoning, like we had not even 100 years ago, we'd have much more core development, and it'd prevent much of the extremely destructive single family home infill that is occurring.
Zoning adds risk to projects and creates an overheated housing market, where the cost of housing is land cost, construction costs, & zoning cost plus whatever the seller can get thanks to the artificially constrained supply.
"They aren't making more land" is entirely due to zoning ensuring most of the city is underdeveloped.
