2) Are there undesirable, unintended side-effects to land economics? We describe one (perhaps desirable, perhaps not) example of an unintended incentive created. We suspect there are more, some of which may require policy tweaks

Breaking down the housing legalized by neighborhood, we learned:
- This policy has a huge effect in central business districts - think of Salesforce's lucky neighbors
- In SF it yields solid AFFH outcomes (Pac Heights being among the neighborhoods with the most housing legalized)

@alexshadley.bsky.social & I learned a few things from this web app:
- Bc of the right-skewed distribution of building heights & bulk, you want to anchor a contextual upzoning to the biggest building nearby, rather than the typical building nearby. Production-wise, it's not a close call

#2: The central complaint animating NIMBYs is a fear of “out-of-scale” development: a single building (eg 2700 Sloat) that will forever alter the neighborhood. Contextual upzoning addresses the kernel of truth in this critique—bc contextual upzoning is not one-size-fits-all

We built a web app where you can play with a number of parameters to such a policy and see how many homes you can legalize in San Francisco by legalizing taller buildings nearby other tall buildings contextual-upzoning.vercel.app

A contextual upzoning is a policy that allows bigger buildings near other bigger buildings.

Take 300 16th Ave (pictured below). The city's 40-X district makes it illegal to build anything similarly tall nearby. Contextual upzoning would change that

❗️If you like new ways to upzone, this thread is for you ⤵️

Motivated by an old @cselmendorf.bsky.social tweet, I worked with a fellow sfyimby lead @alexshadley.bsky.social, to explore contextual upzoning, pictured below in a nutshell. Full write-up here: alexshadley.substack.com/p/ef779f2a-c...