[HN Gopher] California's housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed...
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California's housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build
Author : danso
Score : 208 points
Date : 2020-02-14 18:03 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| davidw wrote:
| Getting involved with a local YIMBY group is pretty easy, fun,
| and one of the best things you can do on several fronts:
|
| * It's good for the economy, as "legitster" points out.
|
| * It's good for the environment if people can drive less (or even
| walk or bike!) because they live closer to things.
|
| * It's good for the people "on the margins", those struggling to
| pay rent, or those at risk of homelessness, or those who might
| like to move to a more productive place for a better job.
|
| It's much easier to make a difference locally: in many places
| it's not hard to get to know your city councilors, or state
| reps/senators. One of my prouder YIMBY moments was turning out 5
| people on a weekday morning to speak to our state rep, who ended
| up voting in favor of HB 2001, which legalizes up to 4-plexes
| throughout most Oregon cities.
| Koremat6666 wrote:
| Either ways my recommendation is to make a informed choice of
| NIMBY vs YIMBY. It appeared so far that NIMBY is winning and
| large number of people support NIMBY. This need not be because
| all these are evil people who oppose three points but might
| have legitimate reasons for their stand.
|
| Make an informed choice rather than blindly picking sides.
| jdc wrote:
| Why don't you fill us in on what those reasons might be
| instead of making strawman arguments?
| Koremat6666 wrote:
| >A straw man is a form of argument and an informal fallacy
| based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's
| argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not
| presented by that opponent.
|
| I do not think strawman argument means what you think it
| means.
|
| I am not even refuting YIMBY argument. I am suggesting that
| since there is a NIMBY group which has already been
| successfully achieving their goals and appears to be in
| minority on HN, everyone should spend some time
| understanding their arguments as well before supporting
| YIMBY. Informed choice is critical than mindless support.
|
| I am not even trying to refute YIMBY here. I am only
| pointing out that HN might be an echo chamber to make an
| informed choice.
| bbreier wrote:
| Why don't you fill us in on what those reasons might be?
| i_am_nomad wrote:
| YIMBY should more properly be called YITBY (yes in their back
| yards).
| davidw wrote:
| Cache invalidation is hard too.
|
| ... _woosh_ .... I guess.
| darksaints wrote:
| Fact: No YIMBY, no matter how powerful, can force you to put
| something in your back yard. They can _allow_ your neighbor
| to put something in _their_ back yard. You don 't own your
| neighbor's back yard.
| jellicle wrote:
| Civilization is a balancing of competing interests. Your
| rights in your property are enforced by the community, with
| limits and conditionally. The community which you are
| asking to enforce for you has interests too.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| Fact: NIMBY doesn't refer to literal backyards.
| darksaints wrote:
| Of course. Which nullifies any argument about whether it
| is Yes-in-my-back-yard or yes-in-your-back-yard. You only
| get to make that distinction if you're talking about your
| own literal back yard.
| notJim wrote:
| I think this comment is accurate just from a logical
| standpoint. Backyard has two possible meanings here:
|
| * Literal backyard: in this case, then maybe one could
| argue that if we accept the premise[1] that YIMBYs aren't
| homeowners, then they are in fact arguing about other
| people's backyards.
|
| * Figurative backyard: in this case, then whether someone
| is a homeowner is irrelevant, because the backyard refers
| to the general area, shared by all residents.
|
| Of course, as we know from this thread, backyard in
| [N|Y]IMBY refers to the figurative backyard. Therefore,
| we must reject the argument that people are arguing over
| other's backyards.
|
| [1]: As I argue elsewhere in this thread, I don't think
| we should accept this premise.
| notJim wrote:
| Ahh the classic NIMBY move, whether it's homeless folks or
| just people who want bike lanes: "These people aren't from
| here!"
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| irq11 wrote:
| I'm not a "NIMBY", but I believe the YIMBY moniker is
| counter-productive to your cause.
|
| It automatically frames the question in a sophomoric way,
| where the "other side" is an evil force to be mocked and
| dismissed. In reality, there is no such thing as a "NIMBY",
| just a collection of people with differing - often rational
| - interests concerning any given project. Until and unless
| you address these interests, calling people names and
| yelling _"just build, dammit!"_ will not get you what you
| want.
|
| I think, if you talk to most of these folks, you find that
| many/most _abstractly_ support the idea that building is
| required. It's the specifics where the problems lie, and
| calling people names doesn't resolve fundamental issues.
| This is why the "Yes in _your_ Backyard" line is such a
| devastating rhetorical criticism: everyone favors
| development of projects that don't affect them.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > just a collection of people with differing - often
| rational - interests concerning any given project.
|
| Well of course. It does not surprised me that a wealthy
| landowner would not want competition, and would not want
| housing to become more affordable.
|
| Just because someone's self interest is rational, does
| not me that I cannot criticize it.
|
| Creating more affordable housing, and lowering rents, is
| obviously something that some people out there would not
| want, because they make money from rents being high.
| XMPPwocky wrote:
| "not in my backyard" is exactly what you describe- the
| stereotypical liberal response of "yes, we should build
| affordable housing, but not HERE, where I live- put it
| somewhere else, where I'm not affected by them- can you
| imagine all the crime that the Poors would bring to such
| a nice area".
|
| in other words, virtue-signalling about vague, general
| principles of increased development...buuut when that
| development actually impacts them, well! That particular
| project is just flawed for various reasons. The general
| idea is good! But it won't work here.
|
| It's the equivalent of the boss who totally supports
| unions but, you know, a union just wouldn't be right for
| our particular company culture.
|
| So, yeah, "yes in your backyard" is just the original
| definition of a NIMBY.
| davidw wrote:
| This is an issue that actually doesn't align very well on
| the liberal/conservative spectrum. Most of the YIMBY
| folks I've met tend towards the liberal end of things,
| but there are also "market urbanism" groups out there
| that are fairly libertarian. I've had great conversations
| with local politicians of all stripes. There are both
| liberals and conservatives who are very NIMBY.
|
| In other words, it's not a very useful way to look at the
| issue in my opinion.
| krtong wrote:
| Thank you. I'm so tired of reddit's influence on this
| discussion and this tireless effort to frame this
| discussion as nimby vs yimby, nimby being a pejorative
| term for local while yimby is a self-aggrandizing term
| for transplant who wished they had more purchasing power,
| and is social-media-savvy enough to realize if they want
| something they better make it sound like an existential
| crisis.
| XMPPwocky wrote:
| Just to clarify- I very much do not mean "liberal" as
| "the opposite of conservative", here.
|
| Trying to map the high-dimensional "vector space" of
| political views onto a 1D line is very, very lossy, and
| definitely not useful outside of the very narrow context
| of general elections in a two-party system.
| Kalium wrote:
| You're absolutely right. People are rarely self-
| consciously irrationally opposed to any given proposal to
| build housing. In theory, it should be possible to
| address any given rational concern!
|
| Too tall? Make it shorter. Not enough public space? Make
| the area in front of it a parklet! Not enough subsidized
| housing? More BMR units and a donation to a neighborhood
| group will solve that one. Doesn't fit with the style or
| is otherwise ugly? Pay attention and design a building
| that fits, it's not _that_ hard.
|
| Although there might be tricky ones, like maybe the
| neighbors have been treating the lot as a park and would
| like to keep it that way or someone is afraid of losing
| the all-day sun on their backyard garden. Still, all of
| these should be solvable in principle, right?
|
| Again, as you wisely point to, all of these possible
| concerns are individually eminently reasonable and
| addressable. Certainly insulting the people who are just
| trying to keep their homes and communities they way they
| like it isn't going to win them over!
|
| With all that said, might there be problems in aggregate?
| When people are empowered to throw up essentially
| arbitrary roadblocks, no matter how reasonable their
| complaints, the result can be near-infinite stonewalling.
| This has happened enough that some people have lost trust
| in the process that enabled good, kind, compassionate
| people to get their perfectly reasonable concerns
| address.
|
| So perhaps there's some room for subtlety here. How do
| you think YIMBYs _should_ frame things, to avoid the
| issues you rightly point to?
| sidlls wrote:
| People who don't own property are entitled to the same
| representation, rights, and political activities as those who
| do. That includes activism and advocacy for housing that
| serves _all_ the community and not just homeowners.
| avocado4 wrote:
| Rent seeking is bad for economy, and is antithetical to a
| free capitalist society.
| fra wrote:
| Many of us are homeowners. Speaking for myself, I simply
| believe affordable housing for all is more important than my
| property value.
| zhoujianfu wrote:
| What I don't get is wouldn't allowing more development in a
| neighborhood _increase_ property values? Like if your
| single family home's lot gets up zoned, didn't you just hit
| the jackpot in terms of the land value?
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Yes. But you might be irrationally convinced that black
| people and drug dealers will overrun the neighborhood as
| soon as an apartment building goes in, and that will make
| property values decrease instead.
| tathougies wrote:
| Yes, I don't get this. I would love to turn my home into
| a duplex (probably going to start with an airbnb though
| due to bad tenant law in our state). Sounds like the best
| way to go from homeowner to asset owner.
| bluGill wrote:
| If it is only in your backyard it is better for your
| property value in the long run: eventually someone will
| offer you a ton of money to replace your house with a large
| apartment complex. If it is everywhere that can build, than
| the builders can take whatever property comes up - and
| because they have to compete with other developers for
| renters they are likely to build smaller so on both counts
| property values don't increase as fast.
| dv_dt wrote:
| That's what I don't understand, increasing density
| usually means price / sqft for all real estate in the
| area goes up. I often wonder if the analysis on why
| people shoot down zoning changes is incorrectly
| attributed to price or property tax, and is mostly people
| resisting any change.
| mertd wrote:
| Not every NIMBY is motivated by greed. Some just want to
| stay put, pay property taxes like it's 30 years ago and
| drive to their favorite burger shack in under five
| minutes. That particular generation also holds on to the
| doctrine that density is bad for environment.
| pc86 wrote:
| There's only a generational correlation because the 80
| year old retiree is much more likely to own nice property
| with low property taxes (if you live in a state that only
| reassesses at sale) than the 28 year old with a young
| family. Young couples with money can be just as viciously
| NIMBY-esque as old couples with money.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Its pretty easy, your standard of living declines and
| sucks.
|
| I grew up in a single family detached home in Queens, NY
| in the 80s as the shift to bigger condos and rentals
| started. The newer buildings are almost always shoddy and
| ugly, and dealing with landlords for property issues suck
| as compared to the homeowner.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| There's resistance to change but economics are far more
| important and explain the consistent opposition across
| the state. It's not as simple as sell your house and make
| a profit, then find something nicer. If your neighbors
| sell first to the developer of the N-story apartment
| building it can drop the value of houses around it. Also,
| buying a house in California resets your property taxes
| to current property value (a legacy of Prop 13).
|
| I suspect it will be hard to solving the housing problem
| without unwinding Prop 13 and some of the other issues
| that make it harder for people to sell homes.
| bluGill wrote:
| If price goes up or down is complex. In an area that has
| a small amount of demand stopping building ensures that
| those who want to live there have to keep bidding higher.
| If those who want to live there have a lot of money only
| a few people who want to live there but don't can push
| prices up greatly. It may well be that the area only
| needs to build a small number of units to fill demand,
| and additional units will need to lower prices to get a
| buyer. Supply is limited of course, but so is demand - I
| wouldn't take a free house in the Bay Area as my job is
| several time zones away and so the free house is still a
| net cost to me (if only to replace the roof ever 30
| years)
| darawk wrote:
| That's not universally true though. Many times new
| development will block a view, or it might run the risk
| of bringing in "undesirable" groups which would lower
| property values. There is definitely a long-run argument
| that values will go up if you increase the power of
| network effects...but it's always better if the locality
| next door does it, and not you.
|
| Unfortunately the incentive problem here is real, and
| there isn't a super obvious solution to it. At least, not
| to me. Trying to shift the culture and convince people to
| vote against their own economic incentives is great and
| all, but I don't think it is destined for success at any
| significant scale.
| harikb wrote:
| It doesn't work quite like that. Builders buying livable
| property and demolishing it make economical sense _only_
| in a very very few percentage of homes. My guess is < 2%
| of entire area we talk about. For the other 98%, it is
| far far cheaper for the builder to get it rezoned from
| the goverment.
|
| Remember, we don't have a lack of land. There is plenty
| of prime, commute friendly, land available in SF-Bayarea
| and most other CA cities.
|
| Old SFH will get demo-ed and gets rebuilt as SFH - just
| because bulldozing a $200k+ building + spending $600k to
| rebuild - can only be justified by a crazy SFH owner who
| can justify it all in terms of getting his/her dream
| home.
| i_am_nomad wrote:
| There's already plenty of places to build affordable
| housing. Nearly all of it is outside the Bay Area. But
| evidently, living in Modesto, or Bakersfield, or God forbid
| Kansas is some kind of horrible punishment, and it's wrong
| to deny people the "right" to live near San Francisco.
| eropple wrote:
| I mean, I don't live in SF, but I spent a pretty good
| chunk of change to buy a house in the Boston area because
| I can't rationalize living in, say, northern New
| Hampshire, regardless of the savings. I value other
| things more that just don't exist there.
|
| People want to live where there's culture and work. Why
| should they not?
| bluGill wrote:
| People live where the jobs are. I know someone who bought
| a house in North Dakota for the value of the propane in
| the tank outside. There are no jobs in the area so the
| former owner was just glad to be rid of it. The guy I
| knew was glad to have a place to sleep near his secret
| hunting place, he had no intent of spending more than a
| few days a year there.
| notJim wrote:
| Also a homeowner, and I'm a YIMBY (or PHIMBY) for selfish
| reasons as well. My neighborhood is mostly old white
| people, because they bought their houses years ago and
| stayed put. Not that I have anything against them, but I'd
| love to have a more diverse, younger neighborhood. More
| neighbors also means more customers for local businesses,
| which means more shops and restaurants in walking distance.
| More neighbors would eventually also mean better public
| transit, because the ridership would demand it. I think the
| selfish benefits of more housing are often overlooked due
| to fear of change.
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| You want to displace retired people on fixed income
| because you like to have young and diverse neighbours?
|
| It is more than selfish. This is bigotry against the
| elderly.
| jdc wrote:
| If this is a good-faith reply I suggest you reread the
| parent.
| tathougies wrote:
| I mean, when people move in to a majority black or brown
| neighborhood they're accused of gentrification. I don't
| see why this is any different. Elderly people are also
| vulnerable populations.
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| May I request you to please cut and paste the part of the
| parent which I might have misunderstood?
|
| This is the parent, afaict:
|
| [..] notJim 2 hours ago | undown | parent | flag |
| favorite | on: California's housing crisis: how a
| bureaucrat push...
|
| Also a homeowner, and I'm a YIMBY (or PHIMBY) for selfish
| reasons as well. My neighborhood is mostly old white
| people, because they bought their houses years ago and
| stayed put. Not that I have anything against them, but
| I'd love to have a more diverse, younger neighborhood.
| More neighbors also means more customers for local
| businesses, which means more shops and restaurants in
| walking distance. More neighbors would eventually also
| mean better public transit, because the ridership would
| demand it. I think the selfish benefits of more housing
| are often overlooked due to fear of change.[..]
| davidw wrote:
| You could absolutely have more diversity by simply
| _adding people_ , rather than displacing or removing
| anyone, which is precisely what the comment suggested.
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| Sure. You can add people. IF they can afford to buy in.
| Clearly they can't...that's not the problem of existing
| homeowners who aren't 'diverse' enough for the younger
| generation.
| Swizec wrote:
| > More neighbors also means more customers for local
| businesses, which means more shops and restaurants in
| walking distance
|
| Big reason I moved from Ljubljana, Slovenia to San
| Francisco. There's just more stuff here and it's amazing.
|
| The economies of scale are insane. I have more good
| restaurants within walking distance now than I used to
| have in the whole city.
| YarickR2 wrote:
| FWIW I'm seriously considering doing the reverse. I don't
| care about restaurants, but cleanness and neatness and
| uniqueness in Slovenia is something I miss dearly in Cali
| SlowRobotAhead wrote:
| >Also a homeowner, and I'm a YIMBY (or PHIMBY) for
| selfish reasons as well. My neighborhood is mostly old
| white people, because they bought their houses years ago
| and stayed put.
|
| Hmm, here I am thinking I don't really care about the
| skin color of my neighbors. It's none of my business.
| But, I try and not judge people on immutable
| characteristics like color and age.
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| I grew up in an all-white town. All-white schools, all-
| white neighborhoods, all-white businesses. I would not
| raise my children like that. I made sure my current area
| was colorfully diverse before buying.
| kbenson wrote:
| GP could likely have replaced "mostly old white people"
| with "mostly the same demographic", but it doesn't convey
| the same information, even if you don't assume implied
| racism as you did.
|
| The important thing being conveyed is lack of diversity,
| not whiteness. In the United States, saying something is
| "mostly white people" conveys that other ethnic groups
| are not present for some reason (whether it be them self-
| selecting to not participate or because of exclusion).
| The purpose is almost always to note diversity or lack-
| thereof, and assume that the person is making a value
| judgement about the people because their skin is white is
| to completely miss the point.
|
| For example, if you bought a pack of starbust candies,
| and they were almost all orange, you might note or
| complain that they were almost all orange. I would do so,
| and orange is my favorite flavor of those. The issue is,
| I desire the diversity of colors and flavors, and _too
| much_ orange is not as good as what the added variation
| brings.
|
| So, "mostly old white people" as a negative doesn't mean
| old people are bad, or white people are bad, or old white
| people are bad, but that _mostly_ old white people are
| not as good as a group that has more variation in it.
| "Mostly" is the word you should be focusing on, not the
| other ones.
| klipt wrote:
| Although if someone visited a suburban area in Japan and
| complained that it had "mostly old Asian people", they'd
| probably be called racist.
| lopmotr wrote:
| To value diversity of ethnicity or race, you must believe
| there are intrinsic differences between people which are
| determined by their ethnicity. That's one of the
| definitions of racism. A non-racist wouldn't be bothered
| what race their neighbors were just as most people aren't
| bothered by the color of their carpets.
|
| In the candy example, you would believe the color is an
| important determinant of some quality of the candy. If it
| wasn't, you wouldn't care what color they were.
| not_literally wrote:
| You seem to be misinterpreting what they meant by "old
| white people" to show this forum (and yourself?) how
| virtuous you are.
| SlowRobotAhead wrote:
| No, I just think an educated forum of people that should
| know better should not engage in willful casual racism
| just because it's OK to hate on white people. But I know
| this is an extreme position I have! I personally have the
| hope that someday old people will be judged not on the
| color of their skin, but the content of their character.
| Perhaps if you didn't post your defense from a throwaway
| I'd think you weren't just trying to justify virtue -
| that someone of a specific color and age caused all of
| California's housing problems.
|
| Do you want to play the "is it racist if we change the
| color" game?
| sadproton wrote:
| Age is the most mutable characteristic I can possibly
| imagine.
| SlowRobotAhead wrote:
| _immuutable: unchanging over time or unable to be
| changed_
|
| Well, crap, that's a fair point... But... You can't go
| backwards and you can't go forwards any faster than
| anyone else. You can't change it yourself no matter how
| hard you try (general relativity spaceships aside of
| course).
| JackFr wrote:
| Age is very relevant for schools which are typically paid
| for with local property taxes. If you somehow find
| yourself moved to a so-called NORC, naturally occurring
| retirement community, you'll find that older people
| people with adult children on limited incomes are more
| reluctant to fund schools than say young working parents.
| SlowRobotAhead wrote:
| You're right. That's a good argument for funding schools
| with sources besides property taxes. That system
| intentionally subsidizes renters by getting home owners
| to pay for schools and tasks people who aren't concerned
| with the funding to make decisions on it.
|
| edit: YES, it's a nice plan to just raise rent to cover
| the school taxes. However, unless you are in a popular
| market, your rent prices may not bear the increase.
| Example Northeastern PA has cheap rent because there are
| so many places available, and thus the $4000/yr in school
| tax portion of the property tax is not able to be passed
| on to renters.
| djrogers wrote:
| Renters absolutely pay property taxes - just not
| directly. Every rental unit I've ever owned has had the
| exact same property tax bill as the ones I've lived in,
| and the taxes were paid from the rent collected.
|
| If property taxes increased substantially, I'd have had
| to raise rent...
| foxx-boxx wrote:
| Property taxes force homeowners to rent their properties
| in the first place: in 40 years of not renting your
| property taxes will confiscate it.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| No they don't.
| mlyle wrote:
| ??? Property taxes aren't passed on to renters? Only
| homeowners pay them, and landlords don't experience them
| as a cost they need to recover from their tenants?
| davidw wrote:
| > I don't really care about the skin color of my
| neighbors.
|
| That's a nice sentiment, but if you dig a bit, there are
| probably reasons _why_ his neighborhood is full of
| "older white people", and there's a good chance that it
| wasn't a natural process of sorting.
|
| Recommended reading: https://amzn.to/2St6rOM
| brobinson wrote:
| ^ undisclosed affiliate link
| davidw wrote:
| Also a link to a site whose owner makes utter gobs of
| money if that's of concern to people.
|
| I usually get $10 a month or so if I occasionally post a
| link that I think is highly relevant to a discussion,
| that I turn around and spend on more books.
|
| Happy to buy anyone a beer with the massive amounts of
| cash I'm raking in.
| triceratops wrote:
| NIMBY could also be more properly called "I want to control
| property I don't own"
| [deleted]
| buss wrote:
| Agreed 100%
|
| I'm very involved with YIMBY Action here in SF: I'm on the
| board of both YIMBY Action and YIMBY Law, and I'm also running
| for local office in the current election: https://buss2020.org
|
| If you have any questions about YIMBY, send them my way!
| davidw wrote:
| Nice work! It'd be fun to have a mini-meetup at the YimbyTown
| conference this spring; there seems to be an overlap of tech
| people and YIMBYs.
| mrfusion wrote:
| Is the movement growing? Do you see a way forward?
| avocado4 wrote:
| Are there any unfair obstacles you face as a newcomer trying
| to unseat an incumbent?
| exterrestrial wrote:
| >It's good for the people "on the margins", those struggling to
| pay rent, or those at risk of homelessness, or those who might
| like to move to a more productive place for a better job.
|
| Please cite at lease one example in which this has ever been
| the case. I do understand the theory behind your argument here,
| and I assume you are familiar with (leftist) counter-arguments,
| so this is not an attempt to open a debate. Rather, I want you
| to be right but until I see some solid evidence I am
| unconvinced.
|
| >One of my prouder YIMBY moments was turning out 5 people on a
| weekday morning to speak to our state rep, who ended up voting
| in favor of HB 2001, which legalizes up to 4-plexes throughout
| most Oregon cities.
|
| This is a great example of how it seems to me that YIMBYs are
| anti-NIMBY in the way Democrats are anti-Republican. Time and
| time again, it appears neither groups are actually doing any
| thing 'good for the people "on the margins. Clearly, this
| policy benefits landlords more than anybody and the implication
| is that this is besides the fact of lowering rent prices. Fine.
| But it is not insignificant that all of these efforts primarily
| promote the perpetuation of rent-seeking.
|
| I watched from the front row as investors bought up Portland.
| It has been about 6 years since it entered full-swing and rent
| prices are higher than ever before. This is not good for people
| "on the margins". In fact, most of those people were not even
| on the margins before the investors came in. I am one of them.
| I should know.
|
| Of course, history is littered with cases of YIMBY theory
| failing urban housing markets, so please show me an example of
| where your theories have actually succeeded.
| davidw wrote:
| I think that if you're going to argue that supply and demand
| are not real for housing, you'd need to supply some good
| evidence of your own.
|
| There are a lot of ways to build more supply:
|
| https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-
| your-...
|
| I find the 'Montreal' example the most compelling in that
| it's fairly "human scale", but tastes vary.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Rental housing has price floor that distorts the market.
| Once a property diverges from the requirements of housing
| subsidy programs, it usually gets abandoned.
|
| In most places new supply is high end and is making more
| housing available for people who don't lack access.
| mlyle wrote:
| > In most places new supply is high end and is making
| more housing available for people who don't lack access.
|
| People are outraged when you put apartments and condos in
| their multi-single-family cities because "lower class"
| people will move in. Don't those "lower class" people
| currently lack access to live these places?
| mlyle wrote:
| > In most places new supply is high end and is making
| more housing available for people who don't lack access.
|
| vs. the article:
|
| > ... how expensive new housing today would become
| affordable old housing tomorrow ...
| davidw wrote:
| > In most places new supply is high end and is making
| more housing available for people who don't lack access.
|
| In most places, new cars are more expensive than used
| ones, but if you stopped providing new cars, the price of
| the used ones would shoot up as everyone started
| competing for a dwindling supply of cars.
|
| Same goes for housing.
|
| Also, it's a longer term process with housing, but
| 'filtering' is a real thing:
| https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2016/05/25/housing-
| does-f...
| allovernow wrote:
| >In most places, new cars are more expensive than used
| ones, but if you stopped providing new cars, the price of
| the used ones would shoot up as everyone started
| competing for a dwindling supply of cars
|
| An unspoken consequence of cash for clunkers. Practically
| overnight 100k miles was considered "low mileage", which
| was ridiculous before people started needlessly trashing
| perfectly good used cars.
| smogcutter wrote:
| Eh, I've heard that before as well but I don't know if
| it's true. By the time the program ended in 2009, cash
| for clunkers had taken ~700k cars off the market. The
| same year, about 35 million used cars were sold in the
| US[1]. Cash for clunkers was a rounding error.
|
| [1] Had a hard time finding statistics for 2009, but it's
| in here: https://www.niada.com/PDFs/Publications/2010Indu
| stryReport.p...
| tathougies wrote:
| > Clearly, this policy benefits landlords more than anybody
|
| Well... no. If your SFH zoned lot is now duplex-friendly, it
| means your house goes up in value because it can be
| immediately rented out to two people or you can rent it out
| to another family immediately, without asking anyone, as long
| as you do the required physical modifications. Now your home
| value is increased by the amount of revenue (at an
| appropriate discount rate) it would draw in from two
| simultaneous occupants in perpetuity, which is always higher
| than the rate possible from one occupant.
|
| It literally benefits everyone
|
| > Of course, history is littered with cases of YIMBY theory
| failing urban housing markets
|
| No, it's not. History is a constant example of the success of
| the free market, which YIMBY's are in favor of, and NIMBY's
| are against. This is ridiculous.
| api wrote:
| How much do you think rents would have gone up without more
| housing supply.
| darksaints wrote:
| Speaking as the SO of a major property management company
| exec operating in Portland, no it wasn't a policy that
| benefits landlords. Not in the slightest. More competition
| and lower prices are a landlord's and developer's worst
| nightmare.
|
| And yes, due to the scale of development, rents are _lower_
| than they expected when they built. Your prices were gonna go
| up regardless, and the scale of development that happened
| actually kept prices down.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| You are absolutely correct that the root cause of the housing
| crisis is capitalism and the commodification of housing.
| However, a socialist restructuring of the entire housing
| market is not likely to happen any time soon.
|
| While we wait for the revolution, we might as well encourage
| the for-profit developers to build in the least destructive
| ways, so that less people suffer in the short term from the
| choked supply and anti-human urban planning that capitalists
| will exercise if left unchecked.
| marknutter wrote:
| Hey look, a socialist calling capitalism the root cause of
| a problem in question. And oh wow, a call for revolution as
| well. Nice.
| moultano wrote:
| > _You are absolutely correct that the root cause of the
| housing crisis is capitalism and the commodification of
| housing._
|
| Every other commodity in my life, food for instance, is
| dirt cheap and getting cheaper all the time. Housing is
| expensive because it is _not_ a commodity. You have to beg
| the government to allow it to exist.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| If housing was not a commodity, then it could not be
| bought and traded with fluctuations of value and
| expectations of profit on the part of the owners. The
| cost of housing would not be a problem if it was priced
| for the benefit it provides, instead of its profit
| potential.
| moultano wrote:
| It isn't the price of housing that's the root problem,
| it's the arithmetic. There aren't enough homes in places
| people want to live for the people who want to live
| there. The price decides who gets them, but arithmetic
| causes the underlying suffering.
|
| If there isn't enough food, someone goes hungry. The
| price just decides who. If there isn't enough housing,
| someone has to move out. The price just decides who.
|
| Choosing "who" via a more equitable method than price
| doesn't reduce the amount of suffering, it just spreads
| it around better.
| tmh79 wrote:
| You're speaking past each other. In marxist economics
| literature "commodification" means something is able to
| be bought and sold, not that it is a commodity in the
| broader ecconomic sense (an undifferentiated good with
| broadly elastic demand). "Honor" isn't commodified,
| "dignity" isn't commodified, "food" is commodified, and
| "rare collectible art" is commodified.
| moultano wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification. If it's a definition that
| applies to literally every physical good in a market
| economy, then it doesn't have much explanatory power to
| explain why some things are cheap and abundant, and why
| some things are expensive and scarce.
| matchbok wrote:
| Demonizing landlords is not the answer. They did not get us
| into this mess. It's a distraction. Prices are set by the
| market.
| ben_w wrote:
| What happens when the market is prevented from increasing
| supply by property owners collectively setting rules that
| prevent sufficient further growth?
|
| I'm not saying this happened in California, but it's what I
| think happened in the UK, where I am a landlord.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| In the California case it did happen but the "landlords"
| are owners of single family homes. Here's a typical
| example: https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-
| california-sb50-f...
| matchbok wrote:
| I agree, that's a problem. I would hope that most
| landlords are good actors, though. (heh)
| tmh79 wrote:
| In california, landlords largely did get us into this mess
| though. Like not on an individual scale, but as an
| organized political constituency they lobbied for the
| policies that have caused the problems we're experiencing
| and they're generally lobbying against the solutions.
| mlyle wrote:
| > Clearly, this policy benefits landlords more than anybody
|
| Plenty of people buy duplexes and fourplexes and live in
| them. They are also housing that is cheaper and can be rented
| at a lower price.
| foxx-boxx wrote:
| It's only if your don't have a job. People who need to work and
| pay income taxes simply don't have time for all this. Because
| they know, that market always does its job.
| badfrog wrote:
| Any tips on how to find such a group? Google is turning up
| nothing for my city.
| davidw wrote:
| Sometimes people pick other names... maybe search for people
| talking about housing issues. Not 100% correlated with YIMBY,
| but people thinking about similar problems:
| https://www.strongtowns.org/local
|
| Or start something yourself! Where do you live?
| mayneack wrote:
| If you know of initiatives you care about (like SB 50 for
| example), look for groups pushing that.
|
| If you're on twitter, the twitter networks usually bridge
| cities. I follow a lot of LA area YIMBY groups, but get some
| cross pollination from other cities too.
| eruditegamer420 wrote:
| Maybe if there were fewer residents of California who were
| actually citizens of other countries that don't belong here,
| there wouldn't be a 'housing crisis'?
| pascalxus wrote:
| I completely agree with the sentiment to build more, much more
| housing. But, in order to make that happen, we also need to:
|
| - get rid of or modify zoning laws (at least in places where
| growth will happen)
|
| - reduce regulations on builders
|
| - ensure that there are plenty of builders for health competition
| (so that consumers don't get ripped off)
|
| - provide protections for builders from Sue happy NIMBYs (some
| kind of legal protection that prevents builders from being sued
| and penalizes NIMBYs that try to stand in their way).
|
| The benefits of building more are so numerous:
|
| - every house that gets built reduces costs for everyone else as
| well, as the stress of under supply lessens
|
| - it's easier for people to get to work and find work
|
| - easier for companies to higher people
|
| - more jobs getting created, not just from people able to get to
| work but new jobs getting created from all that construction
|
| - It'll help the environment immensly! Everyday, I see the 580 -
| 5 lane highway clogged up with cars crawling by at 10mpg,
| probably getting very low MPG over a very long distance (this is
| where most of the CO2 pollution is coming from, at least in the
| US!)
|
| - over the long term even people with houses already will pay
| lower property taxes (decreasing values reduce prop taxes)
|
| - as the number of average miles driven per commute comes down,
| there will be less and less traffic.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Another beneficial change would be repealing proposition 13.
| Because proposition 13 essentially bans property tax increases
| for property owners, it creates a perverse incentive to drive
| property values as high as possible with restrictive zoning.
| Without proposition 13, property taxes would rise along with
| the land's economic value, creating an additional incentive for
| property owners to let the market naturally shift land use to
| higher-density housing.
| RangerScience wrote:
| There's good reasons to keep part of it. I figure: You get to
| have the Prop 13 effect on one property - notionally, your
| home, but since it's difficult / gameable to determine which
| place is "your home", fuggedaboutit, and just say "pick one".
|
| Because yeah, it'd suck to lose your home that you're
| supposed to own because your neighborhood got pricey.
| Obi_Juan_Kenobi wrote:
| There are reasonable ways to protect people from property-
| tax shocks. Prop 13 is about as dumb a mechanism you could
| design.
| mlyle wrote:
| Lots of states have regimes where you can defer (often
| interest-free) the amount of property tax increase above a
| certain limit to time of sale. This may be a better way to
| handle it than what California does.
|
| That is, if your property tax was $10,000 last year when
| you bought, and would increase to $12,000 this year, the
| state would give you an indefinite, interest free loan for
| $1500 or whatever secured by the property.
| myvoiceismypass wrote:
| How does one "lose their home" if the value (to resell to
| others) goes down, but they aren't moving & still living
| there?
| panopticon wrote:
| > it'd suck to lose your home that you're supposed to own
| because your neighborhood got pricey
|
| This would imply that the value goes _up_ (location,
| location, location). That would cause property taxes to
| increase and may drive people out that can 't afford to
| stay.
| mlyle wrote:
| They're saying that if the value goes _up_ you can have
| to pay increased property taxes that you now can 't
| afford.
| davidw wrote:
| I think your point is an important one to consider and
| mitigate if property tax reform ever comes to the west
| coast (Oregon has a similar system). However: giving people
| an incentive to make sure their neighborhood doesn't get
| too pricey (build more!) is probably not bad, either.
| danans wrote:
| There is an upcoming ballot initiative to repeal the
| _commercial_ side of prop 13:
|
| https://edsource.org/2019/school-groups-
| explore-15-billion-t...
| [deleted]
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Yeah, but I feel like any removal or reduction of prop 13
| should be used to help reduce California income taxes,
| which is abnormally high due to prop 13, not spend more
| money on stuff.
| bluGill wrote:
| Prop 13 also has the perverse incentive that once you are in
| you should vote for tax increases and high spend policies -
| you won't have to pay for them.
|
| I'm surprised Republicans have not latch onto this as a
| reason to repeal it - they already like to point out it is
| easy to spend other people's money as an argument against
| socialism.
| prewett wrote:
| Republicans are also against more taxes, so increasing
| property taxes isn't very appealing. Plus, the Republican
| area of northern California (the "State of Jefferson" area)
| isn't very wealthy, so I think people fear they won't be
| able to afford paying any more money.
| tathougies wrote:
| There are no republicans in california. Like, the CA
| republican party is completely defunct at this point, and I
| am a (former) California republican; now a republican in
| another liberal state.
| christiansakai wrote:
| Home ownership generally slows growth for everything else
| around that area. Every home owner has this "not in my
| backyard" mentality and will veto any possible developments in
| their area.
| intopieces wrote:
| If that's the case - which I don't doubt - why are we
| encouraging home ownership at all? One of the key metrics the
| article presents is the drop in home ownership. Wouldn't
| encouraging renters be a potential solution?
| riantogo wrote:
| You know why, right?
| stale2002 wrote:
| Of course I know why. People don't like competition.
|
| Lower rents, and having more affordable housing is
| obviously something that a person who profits from higher
| rents, would want to prevent.
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| Yeah, we know why. Maybe a basic necessity like housing
| shouldn't be treated like the damn stock market.
| riantogo wrote:
| That is correct. So people who got into the "stock
| market" are being protective about their investment.
| Unless there is a path to offer them relief they will
| always vote against diluting their hard earned money.
| Most of the people who didn't get in often approach the
| problem as, "yeah, screw them, make it good for me", and
| then act surprised as to why they don't get the votes.
| But it seems like you understand the issue.
| istjohn wrote:
| And the people who did get in often approach the problem
| as, "yeah, screw them, I got mine." So we have two groups
| who have countervailing interests. But of course the
| property owners have more money--and also time,
| education, social capital, and so on--so they are the
| ones who usually win this fight.
| christiansakai wrote:
| Yeah. I will do the same thing.
| samatman wrote:
| Not that this detracts from your points, but transportation is
| responsible for 29% of CO2 emissions[0]. It's the single
| largest sector, but not a majority contributor.
|
| [0]: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-
| emis...
| thedance wrote:
| In California, transportation by itself is 41% of GHG
| emissions and oil production and refining are another 11% so
| it is a supportable statement that transportation is the
| majority of this state's CO2 production.
|
| https://ww3.arb.ca.gov/cc/inventory/pubs/reports/2000_2017/g.
| ..
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| The highest figure I could find for oil usage by sector
| gives ~60% for transport, so even that gives only ~47% of
| GHG emissions for transport in total. Then start to
| discount for all non-local transport, and you won't get
| anywhere close to a majority.
| rndmize wrote:
| Ahead of most of this, you probably need to remove or heavily
| adjust Prop 13.
|
| The primary problem, as detailed in the article, is that
| homeowners have every incentive to be against new construction
| and no incentives to be for it. If property taxes rose
| appropriately with property values, homeowners would have an
| interest in maintaining housing prices rather than doing
| everything they can to keep them rising.
|
| There's also a range of beneficial secondary effects. For
| example, I've talked to retired folks that have considered
| leaving the bay due to the increased cost of living. But
| because they have owned their house for decades + P13, if they
| bought a _cheaper_ house elsewhere in CA to downsize, they'd be
| paying _more_ in property taxes, to the point of the move not
| being worth the cost. (I believe there's been talk of
| transferable tax rates to fix this specific problem, or maybe
| something was even passed, but it just goes to show the
| distortions P13 has beyond the obvious).
|
| Aligning incentives (where possible) is, imo, almost always a
| better way to do things than creating a new batch of
| regulations/laws to deal with a problem.
| jdhn wrote:
| >But because they have owned their house for decades + P13,
| if they bought a _cheaper_ house elsewhere in CA to downsize,
| they'd be paying _more_ in property taxes,
|
| California homeowners who are 55 or older get a one time
| chance to sell their existing primary residence, and transfer
| its property tax assessment to another house[0]. Only catch
| is that the valuation of the new property has to be equal or
| less than the property that you sold, but if you live in the
| Bay Area you probably meet that qualification.
|
| [0] https://www.sfgate.com/business/networth/article/How-to-
| tran...
| hcknwscommenter wrote:
| "if you live in the Bay Area you probably meet that
| qualification"
|
| Only if you are leaving the Bay Area. Often, these older
| houses have a lot of deferred maintenance and the retired
| seller wants to downsize into something in the Bay Area
| that is newer build/renovated.
| njarboe wrote:
| And you can't leave the Bay Area as the transfer has to
| be in the same county in most cases.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I don't know a single long time home owner that is NIMBY
| because they want their house's value to rise. They're NIMBY
| because they want their neighborhood to stay the same.
|
| > For example, I've talked to retired folks that have
| considered leaving the bay due to the increased cost of
| living. But because they have owned their house for decades +
| P13, if they bought a _cheaper_ house elsewhere in CA to
| downsize, they'd be paying _more_ in property taxes, to the
| point of the move not being worth the cost. (I believe
| there's been talk of transferable tax rates to fix this
| specific problem, or maybe something was even passed, but it
| just goes to show the distortions P13 has beyond the
| obvious).
|
| Tax rates are transferable in the same county, under certain
| restrictions (less expensive I think). Some counties have
| deals with eachother to transfer tax rates. I think a big
| benefit would be to have all counties to be able to transfer
| rates with eachother.
|
| Another problem with transferable tax rates is most smaller
| housing units tend to be condos - and all they build new are
| 'luxury' condos. Even if you could pay for it outright, and
| get a transferred tax rate, you probably have an insane HOA
| attached to it. This alone can make it not worthwhile.
|
| But still, I think the best, most realistic way out of the
| prop 13 mess is to get rid of it for newly bought homes, but
| allow the transfer rate for downsizing state-wide. And for
| the love of god, get rid of it from inheritance. Most of
| these people massively benefiting from it are in their 60s
| and 70s, so the circle of life will eventually take care of
| things. If we don't pass something soon the next generation
| of inheritors will force us to wait another lifetime to fix
| the problem.
| mlyle wrote:
| > I don't know a single long time home owner that is NIMBY
| because they want their house's value to rise. They're
| NIMBY because they want their neighborhood to stay the
| same.
|
| There's lots of people who move into a neighborhood near a
| airport, landfill, etc, and who over some time living there
| decide the airport is a big problem because it's holding
| property values down.
| deepakhj wrote:
| Prop 13 would be easy to fix: 1) Limit to primary
| residence. 2) Charge market rate tax for everyone but for
| homeowners that want to defer assess it as a lien on the
| house that is collected once sold. New homeowner tax will
| drop once tax revenue is more equitable. Make this
| deferment income based. 3) Remove from commercial property.
| tomohawk wrote:
| > He had now argued, and paid for, both sides of the same case.
|
| And this is why we need the English Rule. We're the only
| industrialized nation that does not have some form of it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_%28attorney%27s_f...
| pneill wrote:
| It's very complicated. People have conflicting ideas - one the
| one hand, they want affordable housing (ie their rent to go down)
| or the other, not in my backyard.
|
| Worth a view The Insane Battle To Sabotage a New Apartment
| Building Explains San Francisco's Housing Crisis
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExgxwKnH8y4
| staplers wrote:
| Articles like this and the subsequent comments always reinforce
| to me that the human domain will never, or perhaps _can never_
| support wildlife and fauna.
|
| As much as we like to grandstand against mass extinction of
| wildlife and deforestation, we will always cave to economical and
| social pressures of modern life which almost exclusively require
| resource extraction and destruction of the biosphere.
| readarticle wrote:
| There isn't a single pro wildlife/forest view expressed in this
| article, what's being _explicitly_ fought against here by
| YIMBY, and later Falk, are:
|
| _... letters to elected officials, and at the open microphone
| that Mr. Falk observed at the City Council meetings, residents
| said things like "too aggressive," "not respectful,"
| "embarrassment," "outraged," "audacity," "very urban," "deeply
| upset," "unsightly," "monstrosity," "inconceivable," "simply
| outrageous," "vehemently opposed," "sheer scope," "very wrong,"
| "blocking views," "does not conform," "property values will be
| destroyed," and "will allow more crime to be committed."_
|
| If preserving wildlife and forests can be equated with
| preserving suburban lifestyles and property values, then yes,
| it's perhaps already lost and we should all be quite sad.
| reading-at-work wrote:
| > If preserving wildlife and forests can be equated with
| preserving suburban lifestyles and property values
|
| It can't, and shouldn't, be equated to that. Denser urban
| living, i.e. building more housing in cities, reduces
| suburban sprawl. That's a good thing if you care about the
| environment.
| papreclip wrote:
| The haber-bosch process is the worst scientific advance human
| beings have ever made, much worse than tetra-ethyl lead, CFCs,
| or the atom bomb. It's not even possible to grow enough food to
| support the current world population without industrial
| nitrogen fixation for fertilizer. We've thrown things horribly
| out of equilibrium by proceeding in this manner and no amount
| of high density housing, paper straws, or solar panels is going
| to make things gravy
|
| it's like the bacteria in a biological weapons lab learned how
| to place orders for and distribute more agar
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.md/39Yh4
| danbmil99 wrote:
| Go ahead and build, but make damn sure you are being rational
| about people's behavior when it comes to driving and transit.
|
| My ex moved into a condominium complex that has exactly zero
| parking spots or loading docks for visitors, and no parking for
| half a mile in either direction. It's an absolute total fail.
| Neighbors rat on each other to get each other's cars towed
| because they get so upset. It's literally impossible to have a
| party there or even invite friends over because they simply
| cannot park and there is no transit available anywhere near
| there. There aren't any bike lanes either because it's a
| financially strapped city and the complex is near the border of a
| rich city that explicitly does things to make it harder to get
| between the two townships.
|
| I'm just saying, both hands have to know what each other are
| doing and people have to make rational decisions at the municipal
| level.
| jsharf wrote:
| I think YIMBY is about city restrictions and ordinance. This
| sounds like the private building developers just wanted to save
| money and cheaped out on building additional parking space.
| Unless the city itself imposed a restriction on parking
|
| That being said, I'm not aware of any YIMBYish laws that
| outright restrict parking in residential areas. The only thing
| equivalent I can think of is the Market street law in SF, but
| that's not a residential area, so it actually makes sense.
| foota wrote:
| ...Bellevue?
| jseliger wrote:
| What's the name of this mythical city?
|
| If the condo complex is sufficiently unattractive, few people
| will want to live there, and prices will fall to the point
| where buyers or renters accept the low price and the associated
| hassle. That's a market decision. If the condo complex is,
| let's imagine, 50% lower than market, then maybe people will
| accept the parking situation.
|
| _and there is no transit available anywhere near there_
|
| Then residents might try demanding it from the city government.
|
| You may like this: https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-
| Parking-Updated/dp/193... book.
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| Wow, seems like there was a leaps-and-bounds approach instead
| of an incremental style with that building. Their rationale may
| have been to think of a car-less society?
| tathougies wrote:
| So the wonderful thing is that your ex can sell their condo,
| take the money and move elsewhere. That is the beauty of a free
| market. And the absolute magnificence of section 1031 of the
| IRC.
| driverdan wrote:
| Sounds like your ex didn't do proper research to understand
| what they were getting into. If they needed a place with
| parking and/or easy public transit access they shouldn't have
| bought that condo.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| This is what I chant when I'm waiting for my code to compile. I
| was hoping this was an article about how to make it compile
| faster.
|
| (Edit: the original title was "Build Build Build Build Build
| Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build"! ;)
| pixxel wrote:
| In Steve Ballmer's voice I hope.
|
| (https://youtu.be/Vhh_GeBPOhs)
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I'm all for more housing but we need to make sure we have the
| appropriate infrastructure to support it, water, sewage
| treatment, roads, etc.
|
| The city I live in has been growing a lot, but so has traffic and
| crime.
| tibiahurried wrote:
| Do yourself a favor, _don 't_ buy real estate in California
| unless you are rich. It's not financially worth it for the
| majority of people out there. If you must live in California I'd
| suggest to rent and invest your money instead.
|
| Then come up with a plan and move to a more
| affordable/sustainable state or country.
| stewaleex wrote:
| Tech doesn't need a location, it should branch out, away from
| stupid policies that drive housing prices up
| foxx-boxx wrote:
| You should always respect people who was there first. When money
| talks, bs takes the bus: new tenants are needed to support
| bankrupt pension system anyway.
|
| Even international law admits that.
|
| High cost of real estate should force many people to sell their
| homes and leave to cheaper places.
| legitster wrote:
| There is a study that came out this year that I have been
| obsessed with: If zoning laws in San Francisco and New York City
| (just two places!) were frozen in place in 1964, the average
| American income today would be on average $3700 higher.
|
| https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/mac.20170388?fbc...
| istjohn wrote:
| It goes to show that housing is a national issue that needs
| national solutions. We need federal legislation.
| tmh79 wrote:
| To clarify, the issue is that in the 60's, both cities had much
| looser zoning and allowed dense housing development. Policy
| changes in the late 60s and early 70s tightened the
| zoning/reduced a cities ability to create dense housing.
| aresant wrote:
| Super interesting study and to further clarify:
|
| "Our point is that a first-order effect of more housing in
| Silicon Valley is to raise income and welfare of all US
| workers."
| thenightcrawler wrote:
| build build build
| foxx-boxx wrote:
| Instead of trying to buy Greenland from wealthy socialist
| Europeans, Trump should buy some tropical islands, like
| Madagascar for instance.
|
| California can move it's operations to these cheaper places.
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| Let me the ask the YIMBY crowd this...what is stopping 2 dozen do
| you to pool funds together to build a community where land is
| affordable and have tailored amenities. And you can literally
| have your own transport to anywhere. Co-Own your shared vacation
| paradises. Private schools. Incorporated communities. Invest in
| farms and automation. You can grow your own food and use
| economics instead of govt bureaucracy to make it all work.
|
| A satellite community of multiple such youthful communities is a
| win-win for all. That's what real estate companies do, but they
| profit enormously from it with little value. They are building on
| top of existing infrastructure and not passing the monetary
| benefits of it and pocketing it for their purposes.
|
| I am not being flippant because I have spent a few years on such
| a model. A community of 6000 can be supported in 600 acres that
| will actually not only be self sustaining but can also be income
| producing if you add farms and value added businesses for those
| who don't wish full time jobs. There are monetary and communal
| benefits. There will be less reliance on govt and less wastage of
| resources.
|
| 120 is a good number because it would satisfy the Dunbar number
| limits. It shouldn't be difficult to have a nice proportion of
| ageing, young and middle aged populations for diversity.
|
| It's just a modern tech supported version of eco villages and
| ..dare I say..cults. But they fail because they never take the
| necessary survival factor of monetary stability and most eschew
| technology. These don't have to and will be better supported.
| zacksinclair wrote:
| The "BY" in YIMBY is referring to our existing back yards.
| There's a significant gap between YIMBYs and what you
| described.
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| What has a 30 year old contributed that they claim to make
| decisions for those who are 70. Five years into employment
| and they expect to own a home? And want to displace retired
| seniors on fixed incomes who have worked for decades and paid
| 30 year mortgages.
|
| The value of the house is not in $ but the number of man
| hours that go into it. Maybe tax the kids and grandkids who
| get tax free and tax saving inheritances. Property tax is as
| valorem. There is no value added to a home until it's sold at
| the new higher price.
|
| Property taxes are a way for the government to make sure that
| you never truly own your home 100%. They are not a means for
| young professionals to avail free public education for their
| own kids. It's double dipping since they already availed free
| education paid for by the very same seniors who paid by taxes
| to support public schools and build city infrastructure.
|
| I am sorry to know that those who want their kids to be in
| nice neighbourhoods cant afford to pay rent or pay for
| private schools, but that's no reason to promote elder abuse
| by way of punitive property tax increases to displace them
| from their homes to build more.
| istjohn wrote:
| Because the great value of cities lies in the network effects
| that arise when hundreds of thousands of people live and work
| in the same neighborhoods. Ideas cross-polinate, spawn, and
| mutate creating wealth. And the value produced by a city
| increases super-linearly, perhaps exponentially, as population
| density increases. Policies that place artificial limits on
| city densities choke off that engine of wealth.
|
| It may be possible to create an extremely dense, high
| population, productive charter city with an enormous investment
| of capital, but it would be far easier to simply remove the
| restraints that hold back our existing cities.
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| It's not easy clearly if it means that someone else has to
| pay the price of it without any benefit.
|
| If you want older people/property owning seniors on fixed
| incomes to move out, pay them. It's as simple as that.
|
| The truth is that most cannot pay. The value of the dollar
| they earn is imaginary. The whole system from Wall Street to
| wages to taxes is a Ponzi scheme.
|
| Land has value. Water or access to water has value. Inherent
| value. Everything else is value-added. So you have to pay
| more for a resource that is fixed or shrinking while
| population increases.
|
| It's very simple. Buy it off people. OR. It's far cheaper to
| add value upon affordable land and water. To not build on
| something available and abundant and to not ADD value to it
| is a poverty of creativity and intelligence. To want to evict
| older citizens or punitively tax them to displace them to
| take their land and water is not only lazy but also immoral.
| jayd16 wrote:
| This might be an unpopular question but why is everyone certain
| that more housing will cut homelessness when these California
| cities are already quite dense (not the most in the world but
| more than most of the US)?
|
| Why don't we assume more housing will not simply bring more non-
| homeless from elsewhere? The homeless are certainly not the most
| competitive home buyers.
| zacksinclair wrote:
| More housing is not a panacea for homelessness - but supply and
| demand are real. Increasing supply will decrease equilibrium
| price; this increase in affordability is one measure (of the
| many necessary) to help homelessness.
| jayd16 wrote:
| >Increasing supply will decrease equilibrium price
|
| Hmm but this is not a given is it? I think many would move to
| SF if housing was only slightly cheaper.
| zacksinclair wrote:
| It is a given and is basic economics. Supply and demand
| curves certainly apply to housing.
|
| Increasing housing shifts the supply line to the right -
| which satisfies greater demand at a lower price, all else
| equal. That is what "many would move to SF if housing was
| only slightly cheaper" means in economic terms.
|
| Shifting the demand curve to the right is not driven by
| quantity of housing, but instead by things like quality of
| life, supply of jobs, etc. Its the difference between the
| slope of the line and its position.
| tathougies wrote:
| Yes, you are totally right. The homeless issue in SF is one of
| drug addiction. The issue that housing would solve is
| exorbitant rents in the area. People aren't homeless because of
| prices. But people are leaving the area leaving Silicon Valley
| less competitive.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| If California were its own country, would it try to build more
| housing or would it put up a border wall and halt immigration?
| It's clear to me that Californians would choose the latter, and I
| don't really blame them. Deep down, everyone hates change,
| especially the type of transformative change that is taking place
| in these California suburbs.
|
| What does Lafayette owe the people of San Francisco?--or more
| accurately, the people that are not from California that chose to
| move to San Francisco? The revolving door that defines California
| immigration today, where wealthy young software developers go in
| and middle/lower class native Californians go out, is what is
| hollowing out the population, shifting the culture, and causing
| the homelessness problem, and building more housing isn't going
| to fix that.
| timerol wrote:
| Building more housing would result in that revolving door just
| being an entrance. CA would still get the influx of "wealthy
| young software developers", but would also be able to keep all
| of the "middle/lower class native Californians," since there
| would be room for all of the newcomers to live. CA could stop
| playing this horrendous game of musical chairs, where every
| techie that moves in displaces a local, and instead have enough
| room for everyone to live.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| It's not just building housing, it's building more of
| everything including transit and infrastructure, as other
| commenters have noted. Not to mention, housing cannot be
| built fast enough. See this earlier discussion [0]. And for
| what? Why should people happily established in a place have
| to cater to the whims of people that are not in that place?
| It's like allowing people in India to vote in American
| elections so that they can lobby for their own immigration
| rights. It's patently ridiculous on the scale of a nation and
| it's still ridiculous on the scale of a state.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120479
| komali2 wrote:
| If they wanted to halt immigration, why would they build a
| border wall? That would be a highly expensive and ineffective
| way to halt immigration, for fairly obvious reasons.
| logfromblammo wrote:
| One could halt immigration--or at least the kind of
| immigration that most anti-immigration people complain about
| --in a naive and oversimplified fashion by raising the
| minimum hourly wage of noncitizen permanent residents to the
| median annual household income divided by 2000 (~$32/h),
| raising the minimum hourly wage for temporary residents with
| a work-permitting visa to 125% of that (~$40/h), and raising
| the minimum wage of persons without any official immigration
| status to 150% (~$48/h) of that. In order to get a job that
| pays less, a person would have to show their visa, residency
| card, or proof of citizenship. For jobs that pay more, who
| cares, as long as they support local business and pay taxes?
|
| Don't deport anybody. Don't build a wall. Just make any
| businesses that hire at lower wages, without first verifying
| citizenship or immigration status, pay the workers all their
| back wages.
|
| The economics shape and are shaped by human behavior.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Merely a figure of speech.
| jaequery wrote:
| click bait gone wild
|
| Edit: looks like the title changed now
| mc32 wrote:
| It's like they wanted to riff on the failed '08 candidate for
| the vice presidency but couldn't allow themselves to do it.
| Ididntdothis wrote:
| To me it sounds like "developers, developers, developers"
|
| But I am glad that the media is reporting this. California is
| slowly killing itself with its housing policy. I live in an
| area where there are only people who are either rich retirees
| or whose parents have bought real estate before the market
| went crazy. And these people kill any effort to build more.
| It's basically impossible for regular people to live here.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I thought it was ripping off that Chinese stela inscription
| that supposedly ends with seven 'kills'
| kempbellt wrote:
| Maybe they're taking the Steve Ballmer approach to promotion
| trevyn wrote:
| This is what the apocalypse looks like!
| jngreenlee wrote:
| Text please?
| glaberficken wrote:
| https://pad.riseup.net/p/BS4bd3KJQR7-DeHuBI-Q-keep
| foxx-boxx wrote:
| At some point high prices should force companies to move their
| operations, hence price should drop.
| Lendal wrote:
| This story reminds me of when I was a kid and the school bus
| would come. Often there were no seats because every seat was
| taken--one kid each. There was plenty of room there, but the kids
| who got on the bus first would ban together to prevent new kids
| from sitting.
|
| Today these kids have grown up and own homes in the suburbs. New
| kids need to move in, but the kids who got there first refuse to
| let them build. That's what this story is about.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| I'm a renter but please, this is about families protecting the
| value of the primary asset that they hope to live on in
| retirement. Home assets don't skyrocket in value when there is
| lots of supply. If we frame this thing as reasonable-needs-of-
| renters vs unreasonable-wants-of-homeowners, then everyone is
| going to remain at loggerheads.
| starpilot wrote:
| Since when is homeownership a requirement for retirement
| savings? What about IRA's, 401ks? That they chose to stake so
| much on a more volatile asset is not the fault of the people
| around them. Should cities sacrifice their urban well-being,
| pushing people out on the streets and guaranteeing lower-
| income people can never live there, for the sake of some
| elderly residents who put their eggs in one basket?
| bbarn wrote:
| Investment in the market is incredibly volatile compared to
| real estate. That's why it's called "real" estate.
| tathougies wrote:
| No, it's not. In 2008 we saw that that is really not the
| case. Housing is awful because it's relatively difficult
| to find an owner and transaction fees are extremely high.
| logfromblammo wrote:
| The house that the owner lives in is not an asset. It's a
| durable consumer good.
|
| Wanting your home to appreciate in value forever is like
| expecting your 20-year-old car to sell for more than its
| sticker price. It really only works for art installations,
| created by a collaboration of architect, engineer, and
| builder, with some living space inside.
|
| Framed in these terms, most families do not have any
| significant assets, and a hefty chunk of their resources
| dedicated to maintaining their gigantic shelter-providing
| consumer appliance.
| jsharf wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken, most of the value of the home in
| places like the Bay area is not the house itself, but the
| land it sits on. In that case, it's super reasonable to
| expect it to appreciate in value, just like any other
| commodity. Arguably more so.
| _arvin wrote:
| Location, location, location.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| So you're saying that a house is not a good investment?
| That despite a trend in increasing property values over the
| long term, as we have seen in the data since .. the
| beginning of cities, that a price correction is coming
| where homes will return to ... prehistoric levels? I don't
| see it. Instead look at a sample of home prices in the last
| twenty years in the Bay Area for example, and graph it
| against the value of a sample of cars bought in 2000.
|
| I suppose it's no surprise that tax laws everywhere do not
| classify homes as durable goods that depreciate in value.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| Housing returns are so location dependent it's hard to
| generalize if housing is a "good investment".
| Historically, buying in the SFBA clearly netted a good
| return, but what about Flint, Michigan? On the whole, re-
| invested dividends in an S&P index fund would have better
| returns than nearly all housing markets -- about 11%
| annually. The math is more nuanced, since homes mortgages
| require interest payments, but also offer leverage (only
| ~20% down payment).
| trianglesphere wrote:
| It's the distinction between the building and the land.
| Buildings usually depreciate over time, but the land
| appreciates. In the bay area, the value of the land is
| significantly more than the building which is why so many
| people tear down houses and rebuild. Where land is
| cheaper people don't tear down and rebuild houses that
| have more life in them when they buy a house.
|
| Residences are mainly exempted from depreciation, but
| commercial real estate is allowed to be depreciated
| because buildings do have a useful life.
| njarboe wrote:
| Although recently in the Bay Area construction costs have
| skyrocketed so much that in the last 5 years my home
| replacement cost (for insurance) has about doubled
| causing the land value to actually drop.
| sjg007 wrote:
| The house sits on land and that is in a good school
| district or otherwise desirable location. That is worth
| something to someone and why properties become more
| valuable. When land and development is constrained you have
| to go up to support the density or out. All new communities
| are basically townhome communities across the US except in
| some places where land is not constrained... even then the
| homes are very similar and sit next to each other. It
| increases the affordability.. This makes existing homes on
| larger lots worth more b/c you get space despite needing to
| remodel the 1960s decor. But you get a nice view.
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| Wait, what? My regular family house in the Bay Area has
| almost tripled in 20 years. I'm not banking on that for
| retirement, but homes can definitely appreciate in value.
| nomel wrote:
| I think it's silly to try to separate the home from the
| land it sits on, unless you're suggesting that people buy
| homes with nothing beneath them.
| lthornberry wrote:
| See my comment above, but the economics of increasing supply
| are actually much more nuanced, and the majority of current
| owners would probably not see the value of their assets
| eroded.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| I think this is the best point to shout out, in the Bay
| Area. Show how building projects can alleviate supply
| concerns for demographics who can't afford your suburban
| home, and how the increase in population will still help
| your home price because it will make your fat suburban land
| parcel look even more exclusive. Everybody wins something.
| avocado4 wrote:
| Rent seeking is bad for society, by economic definition.
| People relying on appreciating prices of their homes instead
| of investing into their productivity growth indicate a bug in
| the system that needs to be fixed (via increasing supply and
| possibly LVT).
| xamuel wrote:
| That analogy isn't exactly accurate. To make it accurate, the
| kids sitting in the current seats would have to have paid a
| significant amount to purchase those seats. Also, throw in some
| kids who, for neurological reasons, become extremely distressed
| if they're forced to sit next to very loud kids. Because of
| this, they (or their parents) made a big sacrifice to secure
| single seats for them at great expense.
| collias wrote:
| You're right, and I feel like this is something that is
| frequently either downplayed or willfully ignored.
|
| If I live in California where home prices are sky-high, and
| I've saved up for nearly a decade for a house, why would I be
| willing to allow legislation that would likely devalue my
| biggest asset (by far) that I saved and sacrificed so
| diligently for?
|
| This is a legitimate question, not trying to be a jerk. I'm
| genuinely curious what the argument against this is.
| lthornberry wrote:
| Increased development wouldn't necessarily devalue you
| asset, particularly if it's a single family house or a
| condo in a relatively low-density development.
|
| Right now, the high cost of housing in the Bay Area is
| largely due to a couple of factors: 1 - high cost of labor.
| Rezoning won't change that. 2 - restrictions on right to
| build. Rezoning will reduce this. 3 - high cost of land.
| Rezoning will _increase_ this, by making it possible to
| build more units of housing on a given area of land.
|
| For most current homeowners, it's likely that 3 will
| outweigh 2. Developers will buy up some portion of single
| family housing stock (and low-density multifamily stock) to
| rebuild the lots with denser housing. That process will
| both increase demand and reduce supply of those types of
| housing, resulting in price increases.
|
| At the same time, the average unit of housing will cost
| less, because there will be many more condos/apartments
| available. Owners of high-density condos would be the most
| vulnerable to seeing their asset values decrease. However,
| building big condo buildings is still going to be a
| complicated endeavor, so price adjustments will happen
| slowly over time. No one's going to get hosed, although
| their asset prices might go up more slowly over time than
| otherwise, or even be eroded by inflation in the long term.
|
| At the same time, many of those condo owners will still
| come out ahead. They may be able to upgrade to a nicer
| condo than they otherwise could have afforded. They may
| also benefit from the second-order effects of lower average
| housing prices, in the form of reduced costs for non-
| housing items. If they run a business, it will be easier
| for them to attract and retain workers. Schools and other
| public services will also be better able to attract and
| retain quality staff, at a lower wage bill. Etc.
| collias wrote:
| This is the type of detailed reply that I come here for,
| and definitely has reframed how I think about this
| situation.
|
| Thank you!
| joefkelley wrote:
| The tough thing is of course you are right. It's obviously
| in your best interest to vote against new housing if you
| own a house. But it's not in society's best interest.
| tathougies wrote:
| But it's really not. Homelessness and destitution also
| reduce property value. Lots of people leaving California
| because it's so awful.
| tathougies wrote:
| > If I live in California where home prices are sky-high,
| and I've saved up for nearly a decade for a house, why
| would I be willing to allow legislation that would likely
| devalue my biggest asset (by far) that I saved and
| sacrificed so diligently for?
|
| Rezoning would not devalue your house. You'd get more money
| for it in the long run. Better yet, you'd be able to
| instantly become a landlord (convert your house into a
| plex) and move somewhere else that satisfied your desire
| for a single-family home. Or you'd be able to market to a
| developer.
|
| Plus, if you just kept living in your house, the value
| would go up anyway, as it always does.
| i_am_nomad wrote:
| Except the school bus is a public good. Are you saying that we
| should reframe housing as a public good as well and provide it
| as such?
| nostrademons wrote:
| There's no need to assume this. Even if you treat land &
| housing as a private good, you're entitled to decide what you
| do _with your own land_. You 're not entitled to decide what
| _other people_ do with their land. Zoning laws, development
| restrictions, and HOAs violate this principle - they give
| existing homeowners a collective power to decide what other
| homeowners can do with their private property. This makes
| housing a weird sort of public /private hybrid where you have
| the private right to protect yourself from change but also
| the public right to prevent change within your neighborhood,
| which biases everything towards the status quo.
|
| (Importantly, no such restriction exists on population:
| within the U.S. at least, nobody has the right to prevent
| their neighbors or fellow citizens from having kids, while
| they do have the right to prevent their neighbors from
| building more housing units. There's an inevitable mismatch
| between reality here...)
| jbattle wrote:
| You are oversimplifying. Are you OK with someone opening
| hog farms all around your house? Setting up fracking rigs?
| Building a factory and running heavy industry?
| tathougies wrote:
| Yes. I would move. If my neighbors all decided to sell to
| these companies, I cannot help that. It is not my land. I
| don't believe in socialism.
|
| I would hope I would have the common sense to sell my
| land at that point as well, so I could cash in on the
| sweet moolah the developers were paying.
| jschwartzi wrote:
| And you're misrepresenting what the OP is saying. Someone
| opposed to HOA and zoning isn't saying that it should be
| okay to locate a chemical plant next door to a preschool.
| It's more that we as a society shouldn't let people with
| entrenched interests in the status quo dictate that we
| stay with the status quo even when it's clear how awful
| the status quo is.
|
| To wit if I want to raise chickens or garden in my
| suburban backyard that should be my right as long as the
| chickens don't get out or cause a ruckus. And if the
| chickens do cause a problem my neighbors' should be
| limited to seeking legal remedies and not preventing
| everyone from raising chickens in the future, as most
| chicken owners are generally responsible. That's very
| different from running a fracking rig and is much more
| like the things an HOA prevents you from doing.
| jbattle wrote:
| I really don't think I'm misrepresenting. I tried to take
| a literal but good-faith reading of what the OP wrote:
|
| > You're not entitled to decide what other people do with
| their land. Zoning laws, development restrictions, and
| HOAs violate this principle - they give existing
| homeowners a collective power to decide what other
| homeowners can do with their private property.
|
| Zoning laws and HOAs are (some of the more common
| mechanisms) we currently arbitrate the boundaries of what
| are acceptable uses for a property.
|
| You say raising chickens should be your right. You say
| running a fracking rig should _not_ be my right.
|
| What mechanism do you propose to negotiate that when
| people disagree? You mention legal remedies "if the
| chickens do cause a problem". Do you mean to say the
| process should be for a homeowner wait til the fracking
| rig is built and running AND causing actual harm BEFORE
| they have any right to object?
| marcell wrote:
| It's pretty simple. If I own property, I should be allowed to
| build a home for myself on it, subject to relevant zoning.
| You, and adjacent property owner, should not be able to deny
| my private property use.
|
| Yet this is not the case in California.
| nradov wrote:
| That _is_ the case in California. If you own property zoned
| residential and apply for a fully compliant building permit
| then it will almost always be approved (although fees may
| be high). Developers and property owners generally only run
| into long delays and battles with neighbors when they
| request variances or zoning changes.
| moultano wrote:
| Oh, my sweet summer child...
|
| https://twitter.com/eean/status/1228182747149025280
|
| https://twitter.com/neversassylaura/status/96939949395841
| 843...
|
| https://reason.com/2019/01/16/san-francisco-property-
| owner-f...
|
| I could go on for days.
| Lendal wrote:
| This particular story is about a development which did
| comply with existing zoning but the neighbors try to stop
| it anyway, forcing local govt into a negotiation.
|
| If you look at the photo of the lot you can see why:
| Beautiful rolling green hills. They didn't own the lot so
| they didn't have any right to stop the development.
| Nevertheless that's human nature.
|
| That's why I chose the school bus example. You're
| supposed to get the part of the seat that your butt sits
| on, not the whole seat. But from childhood to adulthood,
| people just never change.
| sjg007 wrote:
| It'll be approved although sometimes you get neighbors
| who would get upset that your house shades their lawn.
| Typically you want to design your house to be compatible
| with the neighbors and the neighborhood. Los Angeles is
| an exception generally which is amazing b/c you get these
| great wonders of architecture that appear out of nowhere.
| These tend to be on bigger lots though.
| dmode wrote:
| The fact is that American laws and policies are being set-up to
| serve only constituent - older baby boomers. This is especially
| true at the local level. I went to a city council meeting for my
| city, and it was 90% older white folks. Although the city is
| young and 60% Asian. There was constant stream of anti-
| development voices, with hardly anyone to counter them. This is
| almost non representative of the majority view, but younger
| people with work, commutes, and kids simply cannot attend these
| meetings. I have heard recently that SF is moving towards a
| representative focus group model to get community input instead
| of this random council meetings. That is the path forward.
| Abandon these open forums that only serves retirees. Increase
| outreach, create focus groups, and be more representative of the
| city's makeup
| dominotw wrote:
| depends on who owns the houses. I live in a suburb in bay area
| where population is almost all house owners are indian and
| chinese. They have the same preferences as "older baby
| boomers".
|
| Are you implying that if in your case if they were reversed we
| would see some sort of different outcomes? Asians are more open
| to getting their house values going down by new development?
| truebosko wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20200214180644/https://www.nytim...
| corentin88 wrote:
| Not sure what you want to express with this link?
| rhinoceraptor wrote:
| It gets around the NYT paywall.
| rb808 wrote:
| Not luxury apartments. Projects. In the 50s and 60s NYC built
| loads of massive housing projects for the poorest people on
| welfare. This is something that is needed in California. Most of
| the homeless can't afford fancy new builds, the state should be
| building big cheap buildings to house the people who can't afford
| anything. Say there are 20k units required in the Bay Area, each
| building can have 20 floors, 25 aprts per floor, that's just 40
| buildings, say one in each suburb.
|
| Here are NYC ones, the biggest prjects are 1000-2000 units each
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_Housing_...
| tmh79 wrote:
| Yea... there are way more than 20k units needed in the bay area
| (all 9 countie), its closer to 1m. You need to account for the
| huge amount of office space growth in the past 15 years and the
| next 10 years, as well as our historical trend of underbuilding
| due to regulations for the past 40 years.
| x0054 wrote:
| Have you seen what happens in those projects? I lived in
| Chicago and those were not a good place to live because of
| incredible levels of crime.
|
| What we need is to stop clustering so much around SF and LA.
| There are lots of places in CA that are basically empty. What
| we need is more ways for people to make money remotely so they
| can live in lower density areas and still make good living.
| High density is not the answer, people need space and we have
| space.
| tmh79 wrote:
| The reason we have a housing crises is because people want
| high density living. Our market crises is a literal
| refutation of your proposed solution.
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| I have been asking someone..anyone..to give me an example of how
| building more housing leads to affordable housing. Like in real
| life..
|
| Every high density over crowded over built city ..and this is
| global..is unaffordable. It has expensive utilities, higher taxes
| and bad declining infrastructure that the government can't seem
| to replace or upgrade.
|
| We have pestilence, rodent infestations, higher crime, big
| government and more taxes.
|
| I also don't understand the fairness of a non house owning young
| majority with little or no financial intelligence or experience
| due to being educated by free public education and state
| nannyship getting to vote on imposing punitive high taxes aimed
| to displace the very people whose taxes and employment history
| and financial savvy that actually funded said free public
| education.
|
| Clearly this means that we have done a bad job of public
| education using property taxes. In fact, most of the wealth is
| accrued due to immigrant net worth and who didn't even avail the
| free public school education.
|
| Wasting more public money on public education and using property
| taxes to fund said education is the real problem that needs
| fixing. There is no end to taxation. Especially because those who
| are not home owners can force more property taxes on the minority
| who own it.
|
| Put another way..why should someone who can't handle their
| personal finances be allowed to make decisions at govt level.
| This would never happen with employment. How can the unsavvy
| have-nots have a say about punitive taxation upon the haves who
| get to gain nothing from the punitive taxes. This is especially
| crucial to ask considering that the government in Sacramento has
| a piss poor track record on managing money and shown a lack of
| transparency.
| tathougies wrote:
| > Every high density over crowded over built city ..and this is
| global..is unaffordable. It has expensive utilities, higher
| taxes and bad declining infrastructure that the government
| can't seem to replace or upgrade.
|
| That's not true. Houston and Dallas are big cities without
| affordability problems. Sunnyvale, CA (quite dense, and
| becoming more so, but suffering from these NIMBY problems) is
| one of the safest cities in the country. Well below the average
| crime rate of many rural towns.
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| 1. [..]In Sunnyvale, CA you have a 1 in 611 chance of
| becoming a victim of violent crime. Violent crimes include
| murder, rape, robbery and assault. With regards to property
| crime, you have a 1 in 62 chance of becoming a victim.
| Property crimes include burglary, theft and vehicle
| theft.[..]
|
| 2. Dallas and Houston are not in the same category as Bay
| Area. Texas is not California.
|
| 3. Crime in California stats are unreliable due to passing of
| Prop 47. Crimes are not reported or recorded or booked due to
| not wanting to incarcerate people. This has actually
| increased petty crimes all over Bay Area(I don't know about
| other cities in CA..I do know about my backyard however)..you
| only have to subscribe to NIXLE to see that even those
| reported is increasing.
|
| The cops won't even come to an ongoing crime scene unless
| someone's life is in immediate danger.
|
| Wrt San Francisco..just type 'Chesa Boudin' in google news to
| see what's happening in San Francisco. This is our lives and
| our backyards and built upon our tax dollars and work. It's
| being auctioned away by those who have no stake and have
| never contributed to it.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_.
| ..
| behringer wrote:
| What?? San Francisco has the worst rent in the world, excepting
| Hong Kong. It's 600 dollars more a month than the average in
| New York. 2000 dollars more than Chicago... That's entirely due
| to the lack of high rise housing.
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| Or maybe it's due to lack of income.
|
| How about what do in Singapore? 97% of the population lives
| in state owned apartments on 99 year leases. Affordable to
| luxury homes for all income levels.
| bbreier wrote:
| How about some of the much denser megacities? For example,
| Tokyo, or Seoul? Both are far more affordable than the much
| less dense first tier cities of the US.
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| Have you been to either cities?
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| I don't know if this holds water. Boomers who "bought in"
| during the 70s-80s (when prices were a much lower multiple of
| the median income) didn't have to make a public discussion of
| housing, because it was readily available to them. Had in not
| been affordable to those boomers, would have the silent
| generation said the boomers didn't deserve housing? As a public
| policy, it seems prudent to have home prices target some median
| of the income. If people can afford to buy homes, they are
| incentivized to stay in the area longer and establish strong
| community ties. That's why the U.S. Government heavily promoted
| home ownership post WW2.
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| They own because they existed. They were born before most of
| us did..To say that someone doesn't deserve their wealth they
| earned in the past because they didn't have to deal with
| today's problems doesn't hold water.
|
| Wealth is a construct built upon the notion of scarcity. One
| has wealth BECAUSE another doesn't have it. If everyone had
| one million dollars, then a million has no value.
|
| Imagine I inherited a diamond necklace from my grandmother
| who inherited it from her mother and so on. The original
| price of it was $200 and today it is worth a million dollars.
|
| Yes, I inherited it. It's mine. It's valuable. Because
| someone else covets such a diamond necklace doesn't mean that
| it is unfair that I inherited it.
|
| Most of the YIMBY arguments seems to be based on
| 'unfairness'. How is it unfair to hold something of value
| that others covet? To be punitively taxed on an asset that
| one owns free and clear just because someone younger doesn't
| own it is a gross violation of property rights. It's also
| ignorant and misleading. Most of all, it's immoral and petty.
| fortran77 wrote:
| The answer _is_ building more. (I'll say this before the people
| on Hacker News who are opposed to all private property suggest
| that "prop 13" is the problem. It's not.) The problem is they
| don't build enough. Build build build!
|
| They need the California State Government to overrule local
| zoning limits. We need to allow dense housing near rail lines and
| major roads. And I think that anywhere a single-family detached
| home currently exists, a 2-family home should be allowed.
|
| Build more housing! It's that simple. Prices will fall fast.
| snarf21 wrote:
| I'm not saying building isn't the problem but how do you solve
| for someone who is in a loan at $1.2M and in one year it is
| worth $500K on the open market due to all the building. This is
| something that has to happen incrementally and why people dig
| in so hard. That property is the main store of wealth for a lot
| of people. The wrong scheme could bankrupt them and destroy
| their retirement. Additionally, super dense housing will need
| major updates to public infrastructure to support these new
| numbers; from roads to trains to schools to hospitals and more.
| There is a reason that no one has the political will to do such
| a thing.
| spankalee wrote:
| Show me where any house would be worth 40% of its current
| nominal value because of nearby building. That's completely
| unrealistic conjecture.
| jophde wrote:
| Econ 101, more supply same demand lower prices.
| [deleted]
| neurocline wrote:
| My current house is apparently worth $2 million. Even with
| California construction costs, replacing it with a new
| house would cost less than $350,000. If someone could build
| a lot of houses nearby, it would drive the price of my
| house down to something realistic.
|
| I'm in favor of lots of construction, because it's the
| right thing overall. But it would hit me hard. I'm willing
| to accept that, so I lobby for new construction when I can.
| I'm just realistic about the outcome.
| sct202 wrote:
| If it makes you feel any better, I live in an area that
| was built with a mix of SFHs and low rise apartment/condo
| buildings. The SFH are all $1m+ while condo prices range
| from $160k for a studio to $500k+ for a new 3-4 bedroom.
| If you figure that to build a new house they have to tear
| down an existing house, the minimum price for a new
| construction SFH or multi-unit is greatly increased.
| bradlys wrote:
| I doubt your place will drop even 20% even if
| construction goes up drastically. Until it happens - you
| can't really say your home price would drop drastically.
|
| Realistically, it won't. The new supply will be
| apartments - not single family homes. It's not like
| people will all want to sell and move into apartments or
| that the desire for homes will go down. It just means
| competition for apartments will improve.
| bluGill wrote:
| Sure it will. Housing is about compromises. If you can
| rent a 3 bedroom apartment for $900/month would you pay
| $9000/month (plus taxes and insurance) to buy a house?
|
| The above numbers are realistic. You have a choice to
| nice 3 bedroom apartments for $900/month in the Des
| Moines Iowa area. The payments on a 30 year loan for a 2
| million dollar house are a bit over 9000/month.
| bradlys wrote:
| Your comparison doesn't make sense. You're conflating
| multiple variables.
| prewett wrote:
| I bet your hypothetical developer would price the new
| houses at $1.9 million (or maybe $2.1 million, because
| where else are you going to buy a new house?), and they'd
| sell out as fast as they could build them, netting them a
| huge profit and hardly affecting your property values.
| Now if they could build 10,000 houses nearby it might
| have more of an effect.
| lthornberry wrote:
| Much of your value is in the underlying cost of land.
| More permissive development rules would increase the
| value of your land, because it would be possible for a
| developer to buy it and build more units of housing on
| it.
| bhawks wrote:
| Those numbers seem very unlikely. Ignoring that California is
| a nonrecourse state. If someone ended up owing 1.2 mil on a
| 500k house, they could walk away and only be out the house
| and whatever payments they had already made on the loan. The
| risk of massive correction simply isn't borne by the
| individual (especially if they've bought the property in the
| past 5-10 years).
| i_am_nomad wrote:
| "Only be out the house and whatever payments" isn't
| negligible in most cases, why are you hand-waving that
| away?
| bluGill wrote:
| Because if you can walk away from a $9000/month payment
| into a $900/month rent, investing the difference will
| make you better off in the long run.
| d1zzy wrote:
| I can see why someone might not want to loose their 40%
| appreciation of their real estate property but that doesn't
| make them right.
|
| That is, of course if you change a policy that was primarily
| designed to inflate housing prices to the stratosphere then
| it might negatively impact that, but maybe you were wrong to
| do that to begin with.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I own a house in 940xx and am all for more building.
|
| It won't bankrupt anyone. If you bought a house you could
| afford for "x", and you budgeted as if it cost "x", you still
| have a place to live if you keep paying the mortgage. All
| your plans remain exactly the same. If the "value" of the
| house goes down, you'll save on property taxes.
| sokoloff wrote:
| If you scrimped and saved to pull together a 5% down-
| payment on a "starter house" and new construction nearby
| takes your home value own by 20%, you're going to be stuck
| in that starter home for a very, very long time.
| bradlys wrote:
| Can you really even get a house here on 5% down? I
| presumed anything over $750k would require 20% down
| immediately (and there's basically nothing that you'd
| want to own under $1m here). At least - that's what I got
| told when I talked to a guy at a bank about it.
| pruneridge wrote:
| Prices will fall fast and congestion will rise exponentially
| ilamont wrote:
| _Build more housing! It 's that simple. Prices will fall fast._
|
| How fast, and how much?
| svachalek wrote:
| How much are you building?
| notJim wrote:
| > They need the California State Government to overrule local
| zoning limits
|
| Yes, California and other places with housing problems need as-
| of-right policies as the article suggests. It's not simply
| zoning, it's removing all ability of local governments to hold
| things up, because people will use absolutely anything they can
| grab onto.
|
| From a philosophical standpoint, people are sometimes
| uncomfortable with the idea of pre-empting local control--after
| all, don't they know better? But as the article points out,
| it's a coordination problem. There is a certain cost [1] to be
| paid in building housing, unfortunately, and you need a higher-
| level (in this case, state-wide) view to distribute that cost
| fairly.
|
| > And I think that anywhere a single-family detached home
| currently exists, a 2-family home should be allowed.
|
| Make it more like 4-8 (but maybe limited to 3-4 stories), and
| I'm in.
|
| [1]: As the article points out, however, we think far too often
| only about the costs. I for one would welcome more neighbors.
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| I don't understand though how the state government will be
| expected to implement this different than the local
| government; they both draw from essentially the same
| voterbase that is hostile toward the upzoning as the majority
| of the state population resides in those large cities anyway.
| The only real difference is that you'll also have a
| population of rural voters observing from the sidelines as
| they have no investment in the issue of high-density zoning
| notJim wrote:
| The difference is turnout. It's way easier to turn out for
| one single election (electing someone who will pre-empt
| this NIMBY nonsense) than it is to turn out to dozens of
| local meetings most people don't even hear about where
| these projects are discussed. Historically, the only people
| who show up to those meetings are the NIMBYs. There was a
| meeting in my city about housing and transit. On Thursday.
| At 2pm. How many people are gonna show up for that?
| bluGill wrote:
| The edges. There are people who want to live in the city
| who are forced to live outside (a suburb) who cannot vote
| in the local election but can vote in the state election.
| Also rural farmers do not like seeing their neighbor's land
| turned into a subdivision (this is a form of NIMBY of
| course - more than a few of them lost bids to buy the
| subdivision and keep farming it), so those on the edges are
| also likely to vote this way
| aty268 wrote:
| I'm from Texas, and I don't understand the stigma against
| developers building more housing. It drives down prices, and
| increases competition. Why would California citizens ever be
| against this?
|
| Edit: The reason is because homeowners are competing with
| developers, so their own asset depreciates when supply
| increases. I was just thinking from the perspective of renters.
| twiceaday wrote:
| Because it drives down prices and increases competition.
| California gets exactly what it functionally wants, not what
| some people say they want.
| kelnos wrote:
| Yup, and this is what saddens me the most.
|
| I'm closing next week in SF on my first ever home purchase
| (after renting for 10 years here, and 6 years prior
| elsewhere in the Bay Area). Sure, I would like for it to be
| worth more (outpacing inflation) in 10, 20, or 30 years.
| But I am not buying a lifestyle, or a guarantee of value
| increase, or a neighborhood frozen in time at this point
| forever. I'm buying some floors, walls, and ceilings. I'm
| buying into a community that I know needs to grow and
| change if it's to survive and flourish.
| wedn3sday wrote:
| It drives down prices. When you bought a house back in 2008
| for $300k and now its worth $2M you really dont want anything
| to touch your nest egg. Its NIMBYism at its finest. Everyone
| says, "just build affordable housing!" Just as long as its
| not in _my_ neighborhood.
| majormajor wrote:
| It really wouldn't. Not any time soon. A developer being
| able to build a 4-unit place on top of a single family home
| would increase the value of that land cause now they can
| sell it to four times as many people.
|
| So it's gonna be that much harder for a "regular" person to
| buy anything in the short term.
| pound wrote:
| not sure what exactly is 'short term' here, but simple
| example re. supply and demand and prices:
|
| 1) there is a 100 single family homes somewhere.
|
| 2) there are 300 people looking who need to live in that
| somewhere
|
| 3) on top of 100 single family homes now we have 400
| units built
|
| ..
|
| Can it be that price of the units for sale may get
| reduced for competitiveness?
| kelnos wrote:
| Flip it on its head a bit.
|
| Let's say you live in a neighborhood of mostly single
| family homes. A new law is passed changing the zoning to
| allow higher density, and other barriers to building up
| are reduced or eliminated.
|
| A few people near you sell their homes; they're bulldozed
| and are replaced with multi-family units. Sure, over the
| short term, your home value might drop because of greater
| supply helping to meet demand.
|
| However, over the long term, or even medium term, two
| things may happen:
|
| 1. Your home value goes up because single family homes
| are less available, and are more desirable.
|
| 2. Your home value goes up because developers want to buy
| your home in order to build a multi-family dwelling
| there.
|
| Meanwhile, more people are able to live nearby, more
| affordably, likely cutting down their work commute and
| increasing their quality of life. I guess the incumbent
| owners really are that selfish that they fight tooth and
| nail to prevent others from increasing their quality of
| life.
| majormajor wrote:
| The price the NIMBY in the parent's example would care
| about is the price of the SFH they already owned. That
| price goes up - it's now _harder_ to find SFHs, and the
| land value is also increased because it could be turned
| into 4 units that will add up to more value than the
| prior 1.
|
| https://www.latimes.com/business/real-
| estate/story/2020-01-3...
|
| Here's an agent discussing this happening _right now_ :
|
| > Traditional sales comping remains relevant, but it
| should no longer be the single factor when determining
| price. Recent legislation allowing additional dwelling
| units (ADUs) is a game changer, as savvy investors and
| agents understand that accurate comps should now include
| not only neighborhood sales prices but also potential
| revenue from future ADU development.
|
| > Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a slew of bills that
| will allow property owners to build a backyard home of at
| least 800 square feet or convert a garage, office or
| spare room into an additional living space. Single-family
| zoning effectively evaporated on Jan. 1 when the new laws
| went into effect.
|
| If NIMBY's only cared about money this would be a fucking
| gold mine for them.
| bluGill wrote:
| The hassles of having tenants make it not worth the extra
| income for a lot of people who would only have one. There
| are real examples of tenants destroying a place and
| moving out leaving the landlord a large cost to fix the
| place up. There are real examples of tenants using
| various discrimination and tenant rights laws on false
| claims to get months of cost free living. I make no claim
| as to how common it is, but if you are landlord stuck
| with the evil tenant it doesn't matter if is only 1 in a
| million who is that evil.
| majormajor wrote:
| Sure, in this scenario the "protecting their property
| value" person would just cash out and sell to the
| developer who's gonna be good with tenants and is willing
| to pay more since it's no longer single-family-
| restricted.
|
| But the opposition to upzoning here in LA and the Bay
| Area is largely coming for _qualitative_ reasons instead
| of _quantitative_ reasons. And that 's lost when you
| reduce your argument to "they only care about their
| property values" so you lose any chance to convince
| them...
| aty268 wrote:
| That makes sense, I didn't differentiate between renters
| and and home owners. I guess that's what this debate comes
| down to.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _Its NIMBYism at its finest_
|
| People whose wealth is in company stock say that people
| whose wealth is in other asset classes should give it up,
| for their benefit.
|
| How about we pay for all this new housing by a 90% tax on
| RSUs? No?
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| This doesn't make any sense because owning stock in one
| company doesn't prevent another from also rising or
| prevent ones own company stock from rising.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| In theory perhaps but in practice a) it's unreasonable to
| tell people for literally decades that homeownership is
| the path to security in retirement then move the
| goalposts and b) tech-driven wealth disparity is fully
| the root cause of this situation and if it were
| "corrected" through taxation we wouldn't even have this
| problem
| kelnos wrote:
| If people are actually investing in housing, then I see
| nothing weird or hypocritical with wanting the value of
| those investments to go up.
|
| But a primary home is not an investment. Many many many
| people mistake it for one, or try to treat it like one,
| but it's not. Often it works out in the end as if it was
| one, but it's not. There's a reason why we call non-
| primary homes "investment properties"... because your
| primary home is not that.
|
| It's a liability. It ages. It requires costly
| maintenance. It requires upgrades and renovations. In
| most jurisdictions you have to pay ongoing taxes simply
| to own it.
|
| The main reason housing prices often rise faster than
| inflation is because of scarcity, much of which is often
| artificial and due to zoning and other legal tricks.
|
| Opposing housing in high-demand areas is one of the most
| selfish things a person can do.
| mateo411 wrote:
| > When you bought a house back in 2008 for $300k and now
| its worth $2M
|
| Do you have any examples of this? The Bay Area housing
| market has had a nice run, but it hasn't grow 666% percent
| in the last 12 years.
| wbronitsky wrote:
| FWIW, Personal anecdote:
|
| My parents bought a house on the Peninsula in the SF Bay
| Area for $500k in 2000 and it is now worth at least $2m.
| nostrademons wrote:
| It's exaggerated in timescale and returns but not by a
| huge amount.
|
| Condos I saw for $400K in 2010 are going for about a
| million. Homes that were about $1.1M in 2010 are about
| $2.4M. The sibling comment describes homes bought for
| $500K in 2000 that are now $2M; this is not out of line
| with what I'm heard from some founder friends I have that
| are pushing 50. IIRC my wife's parents bought their home
| for $130K or so back in 1986 and it's now worth $3M.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| If you own a house, you don't want the prices to be driven
| down.
|
| If you had an idyllic childhood in a sleepy town not unlike
| Mayberry, it is entirely reasonable to want the same things
| for your kids.
|
| None of that is realistic anymore--the world is a changed
| place. But these are not irrational preferences to have.
| xamuel wrote:
| Or you could have PTSD or just vanilla noise-sensitivity
| and just living in a quiet neighborhood could be extremely
| important to you. You might have made very significant
| personal sacrifices to afford to move to a suburb for
| exactly this reason. Should you just be forced to go live
| in the woods as a hermit, cast out by society?
| driverdan wrote:
| You can sound proof a home. It's very common in NYC. Not
| everyone can live where they want. That's life.
| bluGill wrote:
| If the city up zones your suburb can empty out making
| things better for you. It is only those who like their
| level of busy not far from downtown that will get pushed
| out.
| SlowRobotAhead wrote:
| >making things better for you
|
| Ah, surely there is nothing open interpretation there.
| kelnos wrote:
| Well, unfortunately, yes. I don't want to sound
| heartless, but sometimes the needs of the many _do_
| outweigh the needs of the few. This isn 't "tyranny of
| the majority" here.
|
| It's incredibly selfish to use PTSD or noise-sensitivity
| as a justification for contributing to a situation where
| tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people have 3-hour
| commutes when they could otherwise live closer to work.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| > None of that is realistic anymore
|
| It's not realistic when you have unrestricted immigration,
| as the US states have between each other.
| manfredo wrote:
| Remember that many renters (>70% in some cities like San
| Francisco) have price controls on their rents. If you're
| guaranteed that your rent will effectively never go up, then
| you're much more likely to block an apartment complex
| construction because it'll block your view or "change
| neighborhood character". Price controls on rents means many
| renters enjoy privileged status that insulates them from
| housing costs.
| skybrian wrote:
| Rent control gives people an option to buy future housing
| at a fixed price, which works much like a property
| interest.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Speaking as someone who lived in Bay Area California for a
| few years, and Texas for several decades now, the first thing
| to know if that not all California has the same attitude on
| this, for much the same reason that Waco and Austin have
| different attitudes on a lot of things. In the Bay Area,
| there are geographical (water and hills) limits to expansion,
| whereas in Texas when you build more, it usually is out into
| the abundant open land at the edge of the city.
|
| Also, it is quite often the case that when you build, it is
| either: 1) made for high-income dwellers, thus not reducing
| prices, because the high-income and low-income housing
| markets are often effectively separate markets, like cars and
| semi-tractor trailors. ...or... 2) the people living nearby,
| do think it will drive down prices, including the price of
| their own house, which is their only effective form of
| savings. If their $400,000 house becomes a $300,000 house,
| yeah their property taxes may go down, but they lost $100,000
| in savings they intended to sell and live on elsewhere after
| they retire.
| d1zzy wrote:
| > 1) made for high-income dwellers, thus not reducing
| prices, because the high-income and low-income housing
| markets are often effectively separate markets, like cars
| and semi-tractor trailors.
|
| That doesn't seem right to me. Sure, the develpoers will
| have incentive to build the largest profit earning housing,
| which right now (because of a huge housing shortage for all
| pricing ranges) means building high-income housing. But a
| high-incomer earner that buys those stops competing for the
| fixer-upper middle income housing so that's good for other
| price ranges too. What's more, at some point you run out of
| high-income earners that will buy your expensive newly
| built property which requires dropping prices on existing
| built property _or_ starting to build the next most
| profitable housing, which is less profitable than before
| but you don't have a choice.
|
| Now arguably, for all that to happen it takes time and the
| ability to build a large number of housing units, both of
| which may not be an option so I'm fine as a compromise to
| require for certain percentages of new housing to include
| tiers for lower pricing levels, as a requirement for the
| housing permit.
|
| > 2) the people living nearby, do think it will drive down
| prices, including the price of their own house, which is
| their only effective form of savings.
|
| There is a point where, as a society, you need to decide
| what's more important: giving existing owners 50%+ returns
| on their property or supporting new families moving in. As
| usual the answer is somewhere in the middle but I'm willing
| to bet it would go a lot against the current situation that
| the existing owners enjoy. After all, owning a house
| provides a lot of other benefits so as long as the increase
| in value covers for the cost (interest + taxes +
| maintenance) it seems fine to me.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _the high-income and low-income housing markets are often
| effectively separate markets_
|
| That's certainly not true in SF. Housing quality certainly
| runs the entire spectrum here, but in the last decade I've
| seen low-income renters forced out of ok-ish buildings, and
| replaced with several high-income renters who do the
| roommate thing in order to afford it all.
|
| Over time, even building "market rate" (which some people
| erroneously call "luxury") housing in SF will start to free
| up the older housing stock that's being occupied by people
| who in any other market would be considered high-income,
| and return that housing to its former middle- or low-income
| renters.
|
| Regardless, with the exception of subsidized housing, it's
| not even possible to build low- or middle-income housing in
| SF right now. If you build _anything_ at any size, it will
| immediately price out of budget for any low-income renters,
| and most middle-income renters. Part of that is just
| because landlords and sellers charge whatever the market
| will bear (which is a lot), and part is because new housing
| development gets so much opposition that it costs
| developers way more than it should to actually complete a
| project (it can take years and countless lawsuits and legal
| fees to even break ground), and they need to recoup their
| costs and make even a modest profit somehow.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| > 1) made for high-income dwellers, thus not reducing
| prices, because the high-income and low-income housing
| markets are often effectively separate markets, like cars
| and semi-tractor trailors.
|
| This is really a misnomer (and it is the _linchpin_ of
| NIMBY arguments, especially in the Bay Area). If high
| income housing is not built, then high income people will
| inhabit and buy up the middle income housing, who in turn
| will inhabit and buy up low income housing, if they can
| find any at all.
|
| You can see this clearly in the Bay Area. You have tiny
| houses going for like a couple million dollars.
|
| In such an environment it's _impossible_ to build stuff (at
| least, legally) that ISN 'T high income housing as high
| income people are the only people who can afford _any_ kind
| of housing in the area.
|
| "But it's only made for high income dwellers." Build a
| cheap (but code-compliant) 600sqft studio in the Bay Area?
| Around $900/ft^2 would be the market price. It's only
| affordable to high income folk. A _studio_. This 161sqft
| studio in San Fran is $2300 /month:
| https://www.businessinsider.com/smallest-apartment-for-
| rent-...
|
| How is it even possible to build housing that _isn 't_ for
| high earners in San Francisco?
|
| The only way to change is to build a LOT more and keep
| building. Or, I guess, destroy the entire local economy.
| pound wrote:
| When there isn't enough housing for high-income buyers in
| their "separate" market, what happens is that 'separate'
| low-income market becomes market for high-income buyers to
| go after.
| jakemal wrote:
| When developers build high income housing, high income
| households move to those new developments and reduce demand
| for the places they vacated, making them more affordable
| for lower income households.
| bluGill wrote:
| rebuttal https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/7/25/why-
| are-develo...
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| High end housing and low end housing are not separate
| markets. If there is an inadequate supply rich people bid
| up the price of lower end housing.
| notJim wrote:
| It's not just prices, it's also "character." Basically it's
| about maintaining a small town-ish feel while living right
| next door to a major city. Frankly I think a lot of it is
| about parking and traffic.
| majormajor wrote:
| > I'm from Texas, and I don't understand the stigma against
| developers building more housing. It drives down prices, and
| increases competition. Why would California citizens ever be
| against this?
|
| Also from Texas: In Texas, developers building households
| generally happens on empty land in the suburbs, or in unused
| non-residential land.
|
| In LA or the Bay Area, it would happen by replacing single
| family homes with multi-family housing. Something that would
| also be anathema in most well-off Texas communities. It's
| already sprawled about as far as geography permits.
|
| Lots of people _don 't want to live in those places_ and
| would rather keep their existing neighborhoods than invite a
| lot of new residents and a larger, denser population. Hence
| their creating those laws.
|
| It's not obvious to me why we should take the desires of the
| people who want to move there more seriously than the desires
| of people to keep what they have similarly.
|
| But in that case, we need to stop building a ton of office
| space in those "full" cities to import a bunch more jobs than
| we have housing for...
| kelnos wrote:
| > _It 's not obvious to me why we should take the desires
| of the people who want to move there more seriously than
| the desires of people to keep what they have similarly._
|
| The way I look at it is that the incumbents are there due
| to mostly accidents (of birth time/place) or of luck. Why
| should newcomers be disadvantaged due to accidents and
| luck?
|
| Land is a finite resource, desirable land even more so.
| This is why we have things like property taxes, to
| reinforce the idea that property ownership is a privilege,
| and you have to pay for that privilege by contributing to
| the common good. We have zoning laws to attempt (though we
| often fail) to collectively make the best use of the
| limited land we have.
|
| And from the other side, I just see it as just incredibly
| selfish to oppose reasonable housing development because
| people don't like change or are afraid that their home's
| 400% appreciation in value might drop to _only_ 300% or
| whatever.
| revscat wrote:
| Because it doesn't drive down prices.
| aty268 wrote:
| Simple economics tells me it does. Care to explain?
| jophde wrote:
| Best you are going to get on here is something like
| "increased supply doesn't lower prices in the housing
| market duhhh" without any actual reasons.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| I don't think housing is one of the few (if any) goods
| where increased supply drives up cost, nor do I think there
| is any evidence this is the case.
| aty268 wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what would be a good where increased
| supply drives up cost? I can't reason any off the top of
| my head.
| caconym_ wrote:
| Induced demand is a thing. Not sure to what extent it
| applies to housing in any particular market, but any
| destabilizing effects of rapidly adding more housing
| should be seen as artifacts of the fact that we've let
| this problem go unaddressed for decades. People need
| places to live, and if we don't serve that need then the
| problems are only going to get worse and the solutions
| more disruptive.
|
| There are also less visible efficiencies in having people
| living close to their work, like roads that aren't
| crammed with cars because people don't have to spend
| three hours behind the wheel every day getting to and
| from work, and the additional productivity that comes
| with all that extra time.
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| "Induced" demand is a misnomer for _latent_ demand
| becoming measurable. It 's a signal that a change was
| good but not enough; backpressure is reduced but not yet
| zero.
| pjscott wrote:
| Induced demand is where more of some good is supplied,
| which drives down its price, which increases the amount
| consumed, which means the price isn't driven down as much
| as it would have been if there had been no change in
| amount consumed. (A common example is widening a
| congested highway: more capacity reduces congestion
| somewhat, which means that the inconvenience of driving
| on that highway goes down, so more people drive, so the
| congestion doesn't go down as much as you'd naively
| predict.)
|
| What I'm not seeing here is a way for increased housing
| supply to make the prices go _up,_ as opposed to _down,
| but not as much._ Network effects, maybe: increased
| density of a city could make being in that city more
| valuable, thus making more people want to live there at
| any given price, which means that prices would rise.
| caconym_ wrote:
| Yes, that's what induced demand is.
|
| In a vacuum, no, I don't think simply adding housing can
| meaningfully drive up prices. But (as you say) obviously
| it feeds into organic urban growth, which does increase
| demand, so you have to keep building housing. It seems
| that the problem we have in our big tech hub cities is
| that we let that growth happen for a while and then
| decided that there would be no more housing.
|
| I can imagine an induced demand effect as whole new
| classes of people realize that they can actually now live
| close to where they work, and come flooding back into the
| city. But like I said, that's an artifact of artificially
| constrained supply.
| wiremaus wrote:
| That would be Giffen good, which may not exist at all.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good
| ghaff wrote:
| Not really. Probably closer to a Veblen good (which does
| exist) but, in any case, those are about increased price
| driving up demand, not increased supply driving up price.
|
| (I suppose increased supply could drive up price if
| providing that additional supply increased the overall
| costs but you'd presumably still be constrained by the
| overall supply/demand curves of the market.)
| lthornberry wrote:
| You are eliding two different kinds of goods here: units
| of housing, and land. The average price of the former
| would presumably decrease. The average price of the
| latter would presumably increase, since loosened
| restrictions on development would make it possible to
| build more units of housing on a given lot. For current
| owners of single family houses, it's likely that the land
| price effect would outweigh the unit effect, although
| there will be exceptions (the dynamics of exurbs will be
| different from those of central areas, for example).
| Kenji wrote:
| Haha I thought this was about compilation. This headline is how I
| spend about a quarter of my day.
| gdubs wrote:
| Honest question: how do we address the housing crisis in the Bay
| Area without turning it into Los Angeles?
| driverdan wrote:
| The Bay Area is already like LA. SF has used its land, it needs
| to build up. The surrounding areas have already built out.
| contingencies wrote:
| Avert global warming and maintain current patterns of SF
| weather.
| manfredo wrote:
| By building higher density housing, instead of restrictive
| zoning laws that foster urban sprawl.
| themagician wrote:
| Rezone the area around Golden Gate Park and turn it into a
| dense metropolis.
|
| You could 10x the density around there and be able to support
| the population. You've got wide streets, services, and it isn't
| landfill.
|
| Honestly though, I feel like it isn't really a crisis. It's
| mostly rich people fighting with other rich people over whose
| backyard to build in. There are no real YIMBYs, just people who
| want to live in certain areas they don't currently live in.
|
| Most of the poors have already been displaced. We pretend like
| they are the focus because it's good for politics, but the
| reality is the diversity is already gone.
| thedance wrote:
| Every property within 1/4 mile of the N-Judah streetcar line
| should have over-the-counter, by-right zoning approval for
| 7-story buildings with zero parking and no setbacks.
| i_am_nomad wrote:
| I used to live right near the park, 1/4 mile from the
| N-Judah. The infrastructure in that area can barely support
| the housing stock that exists right now.
| bluGill wrote:
| If you upzone far enough builders will fill all the demand
| for rich apartments, and see the only way to make money is to
| build apartments for the next level down Some of this is
| moving the rich to the next style and letting the next level
| down have their old apartment.
|
| The problem of course is the best time to build affordable
| housing is 20 years ago. So if you want to really help the
| poor (as opposed to symbolically helping a few poor while
| leaving the rest out) you need to go back in time 20 years.
| You can start today though on a 20 year plan.
| notJim wrote:
| What does "turning it into Los Angeles?" mean? Everyone
| replying seems to know what you're talking about, but it's
| totally baffling to me.
| munificent wrote:
| Huge sprawl and a massively car-focused infrastructure that
| requires long drive times on enormous multi-lane interstates
| to get anywhere.
| bovermyer wrote:
| Either build very tall, high density housing to accommodate the
| population... or reduce the population drastically.
|
| A nuclear missile fired into the San Andreas fault, perhaps
| (this is a movie reference, folks, and not a serious
| suggestion).
| nostrademons wrote:
| What movie? It sounds vaguely entertaining.
| bluGill wrote:
| There are probably many from 1950 - 1980 to choose from.
| I've read many science fiction books from that era where
| the premise was such a bomb (though the destination was
| different). I'm not a movie buff, but I'd guess there is a
| superhero blockbuster with that theme somewhere in there (
| Superman?).
| bovermyer wrote:
| This is from the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie.
| logfromblammo wrote:
| Superman (1978), starring Christopher Reeve.
|
| It involves Superman traveling at faster than c to save the
| day, rather than breaking a promise made under duress,
| which makes flunking ethical calculus into a super-
| vulnerability.
|
| Movies based on comic book characters have come a long way.
| And even movies based on DC characters have advanced
| slightly.
| bovermyer wrote:
| Maybe, but the music from that movie is still iconic;
| more so than most other DC movies', except perhaps
| Elfman's Batman theme.
| papreclip wrote:
| There are going to be tradeoffs one way or another.
|
| You can build a bunch of high rises and fill them with people,
| and private transportation will become impossible. The
| experience of going to the beach or some hiking spot on the
| weekend will be degraded. Everyone will be living in a godawful
| megacity instead of the nice neighborhood they'd rather live
| in. There's a reason people push back against growth with
| respect to housing.
|
| The real problem is overpopulation. If you eliminate one
| negative feedback loop for population growth, you will
| ultimately run into another one, and all the different kinds of
| waste we produce (CO2, garbage, light and noise pollution) will
| only pile up while finite resources in the region (breathing
| room, nature, water, room on the road and on hiking trails)
| will be divvied up into smaller portions
| aSplash0fDerp wrote:
| As mentioned in the comments, housing/shelter has a different
| meaning depending on your perspective (renter/owner,
| single/married, young/old or import/local resident).
|
| Unless we define housing types/building codes for specific
| subsets, it'll most likely be just more of the same
| development/investments.
|
| With many major metro areas bursting at the seams, I think they
| need to break ground on new 21st century cities and identify a
| way to lower the populations as a solution/initial step, rather
| than adding more deck chairs to the ship.
|
| This gives the economy a new canvas to work with and the
| opportunity to move forward 100% with sustainable priciples
| without being encumbered by the pre-existing conditions plaguing
| NIMBY strongholds.
|
| With desalination and autonomous vehicles becoming a bigger part
| of the modern economy, California could build horseshoe/teardrop
| shaped autonomous highways from the coastline cities hundreds of
| miles inland that allow modern logistics to fillin the gaps with
| public transportation and servicing basic needs (water,
| sanitation, public services) and accomodate new suburban models
| to house an ever-growing population. Outside of the earthquake
| zones, the can build the high-density housing they need to solve
| a good portion of the social crisis.
|
| Extending cities with autonomous loops may not be the best
| answer, but the existing city planning models need more
| pioneering strategies if they want to seed future growth.
| c0nfused wrote:
| The answer was and always will be to increase density not
| increase transit to the suburbs. This is how you get 2 hour
| commutes. The idea that you are not doing the driving doesn't
| make a 150 mile commute seem better to me.
|
| You can cap density by height like most European cities do or
| go up forever like Shanghai. But simply arguing suburbs +
| highways were the 1950s answer and will be the 2050s answer is
| missing the point.
| 9HZZRfNlpR wrote:
| Californians seem like people who would care about co2 and
| emissions, the only good solution is to build higher and
| denser, instead of long drives.
| aSplash0fDerp wrote:
| I've spent over an hour going 10 miles on the 405 recently,
| so hopefully they'll use the autonomous infrastructure to
| deliver work to the remote extensions/areas as well to turn
| back the clock on congestion a few decades in the existing
| cities.
| aSplash0fDerp wrote:
| Your "always" statement reeks of a legacy mindset that
| doesn't have room to explore implementing new
| technologies/logistics outside of the box as potential
| solutions and you also appear to be oblivious to the
| overhanging threat that earthquakes have in long-term
| planning for high-density housing in California.
|
| Why do you think Cali has not overbuilt skyscrapers to solve
| the housing crisis? The moneys has always been there to build
| them. Its probably something obvious huh?
|
| Edit: I'm also in Southern California and am impressed with
| the sheer number of bungalows that cover the landscape. They
| would have chosen other alternatives had they been available
| during the growth boom. I also felt the tremors in July of
| last year from the quakes 150 miles away and think that is
| still top-of-mind looking forward.
| uniformlyrandom wrote:
| How about we talk about building infrastructure? The whole Bay
| Area is building like crazy, and yet the roads are getting worse
| (more building? more traffic lights!). Public transportation is a
| big joke around here. Caltrain from South San Jose to Mountain
| View? We have the tracks, we have the train... the train just
| does not go this route on weekends.
|
| We have the same situation as a startup focused on developing a
| product. We have abidance of developers, and very few
| infrastructure engineers. When we start deploying what we have
| built, we are going to have a bad time.
| aggie wrote:
| > The whole Bay Area is building like crazy,
|
| I'm wondering what your frame of reference is here. As someone
| who has lived in the Bay Area for most of my 30 years, and
| lived in Atlanta for a couple years recently, where they are
| actually building like crazy, the Bay Area seems to be at a
| total standstill.
| rjkennedy98 wrote:
| Show the stats that Bay Area is building like crazy. I am so
| sick of people saying things like New York and Bay Area and
| California are building like crazy. No they are not. There is
| not one stat that shows that. Period.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| "In fact, Toronto currently has more cranes in the sky than
| New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle and Boston combined."
|
| https://www.blogto.com/real-estate-
| toronto/2019/07/toronto-c...
|
| Toronto prices are crazy, so Toronto isn't building enough,
| let alone the major coastal American cities.
| wpasc wrote:
| I don't think new york should be lumped in with california in
| that measure.
|
| This site shows active construction in new york:
| https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/buildings/html/nyc-active-
| major-...
| shuckles wrote:
| New York built fewer new homes per capita than the Bay Area
| for half the years in the last decade.
| bobbydroptables wrote:
| It's really hard to wrap your head around whether a city is
| building a lot by looking at a raw number. But fewer than
| 7,000 building permits in a city of 8 million is
| frighteningly little.
|
| You need to compare it to population growth, decades of
| building backlog, job growth, etc.
| irq11 wrote:
| New construction in New York can have hundreds of units.
| I don't know why you would automatically assume that
| 7,000 is a "frightening" number.
| bobbydroptables wrote:
| I probably could have made my comment clearer. I'm not
| assuming anything. It's well documented that NYC is
| building frighteningly little housing per capita.
|
| I was just pointing out the the linked post shows how NYC
| construction is stagnant, not "active". It was unclear if
| he meant "active" as in "they're building a large
| quantity" or as in "currently happening".
| samspenc wrote:
| I'm not sure about the Bay Area, but at least for New York,
| it looks like building is picking up:
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-sees-biggest-home-
| buil...
|
| "Despite a weak outlook for residential real estate, the
| number of building permits issued in New York City for new
| homes surged last year to the highest pace since 2015. It was
| the second-highest total since the end of the last big
| building boom in 2008. Permits for 26,547 units of housing
| were issued in 2019, about 27% more than the year before ..."
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| It apparently has over 8 million units: https://www.google.
| com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
|
| So this is not even 0,5% of overall units.
| rjkennedy98 wrote:
| So New York is building a lot because they are building
| more than any time since 2015? Almost as much as they built
| in 2008? Is this a joke?
| likpok wrote:
| The bay area is building, but very unevenly. SOMA has a bunch
| of visible construction, as do certain places along El
| Camino. That can give the impression of building like crazy
| even when the reality is different. The other problem is the
| bay area only does megaprojects, so the little building it
| does is the extremely disruptive and visible kind.
| tathougies wrote:
| > only does megaprojects
|
| That's because only megaprojects can afford to overcome all
| the regulatory and neighborhood hurdles.
|
| Do you think the average homeowner trying to become a
| landlord by converting their home into a duplex has enough
| money to pay for _both_ sides of a law suit, as this
| developer had to?
| xvedejas wrote:
| I'm not sure that the roads really support more peak traffic at
| this point. Rather, we can reduce the traffic and train
| crowding by building more housing near jobs so that workers
| need not embark on 50+ mile super-commutes each day.
|
| Housing _is_ infrastructure, and it's the piece of
| infrastructure we're most sorely missing.
| rhinoceraptor wrote:
| Adding extra lanes to a road just increases the amount of
| people driving on them, instead of easing traffic. So I would
| bet the same is true of public transit.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| > So I would bet the same is true of public transit.
|
| It is very true but the point of adding capacity (to any
| form of transit) isn't to reduce congestion at peak hours
| (that congestion is bounded by what people will tolerate)
| it's to allow more trips to happen with equivalent
| congestion thereby increasing the total number of trips
| and/or decreasing the duration of the congestion.
| bluGill wrote:
| That is only indirectly true. I know of rural roads in the
| middle of nowhere that wouldn't get any more traffic from
| adding more lanes. It is only true in the city because
| there is unmet demand to get places at in some amount of
| time, and so adding lanes allows some of that unmet demand
| to become met demand.
|
| Of course adding enough lanes to meet demand is not worth
| the cost. However the induced demand argument is wrong, it
| is a cost benefit calculation: will the additional people
| who are able to get someplace be worth the cost to add the
| lane.
|
| Transit does have the same problem, but transit can scale
| much better in a given amount of space. A bus every 5
| minutes can handle more traffic than a lane filled with
| cars - assuming the bus doesn't compete with the cars. You
| can run a bus every 3 minutes, and if that isn't enough a
| train every 45 seconds holding 5 times as many people as
| the bus. If that isn't enough - okay, it is time to build
| another track for the train, but that is a huge number of
| people (ie a good number would find their life improved by
| a track on a slightly different route that)
| xvedejas wrote:
| Right, so you reduce crowding by shortening trips, not by
| adding service. Ideally we do both and get lots of people
| using public transit for short trips.
| maccam94 wrote:
| True, traveling on public transit is just more efficient in
| terms of space and energy.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Transit doesn't suffer congestion to the extent private
| autos do, and is centrally managed such that effects can be
| minimised.
|
| Mind: shared rights-of-way modes (busses, streetcars, LRT)
| can be impacted by _private ve_ traffic, but contributes
| little to that itself.
|
| Fixed-track systems (Muni Metro) can have coordination
| delays if multiple routes join.
| rayiner wrote:
| Yes, but it moves more people. Driving doesn't need to
| compete with public transit for speed--transit is immensely
| slower than driving even in places with excellent transit.
| bluGill wrote:
| Transit is much faster than driving if it wants to be.
| Airplanes normally reach 1000km/h (if you are rich you
| can do the same but very few are this rich). Even if we
| limit to ground based transport, most drivers on the
| autobahn self-limit themselves to around 130km/h, trains
| routinely go 250km/h (only a few routes, but the ability
| is there to do it safely).
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| This is not universally true. My BART commute is faster
| than driving. Both office and home are walkable from a
| train station and the frequency at my station is pretty
| good.
| jsharf wrote:
| This is actually a very American misconception of public
| transportation. If you're in an area with excellent
| public tranportation (London, Barcelona, Montreal), it's
| actually much faster (I've traveled to these places and
| tried it).
|
| Even in SF, there's some places where public
| transportation is faster. But in very very limited
| situations because SF transportation is horrible. But an
| express Caltrain is often much faster than driving MTV-SF
| if there's any traffic. With all the (super delayed
| unfortunately) infrastructure projects going on (new SF
| subway being installed, Caltrain electrification), things
| will hopefully get better...
| thedance wrote:
| I think you have it backwards. We squander the capacity of our
| main commuter railroad (BART) by surrounding it with dispersed
| neighborhoods. We need to build dense transit villages around
| the rail stations we already own.
| zamfi wrote:
| > We squander the capacity of our main commuter railroad
| (BART)
|
| Out of curiosity, do you ride Bart at commute hours? At 5pm,
| the platforms at Embarcadero and Montgomery are dangerously
| packed. I didn't think there is much excess capacity for
| commuting.
|
| All other times? Absolutely yes.
| thedance wrote:
| A fun fact is that BART has 48 stations.
| manfredo wrote:
| You're putting the cart before the horse. More commuters
| creates more ticket revenue, which gives BART more
| resources to expand capacity. They're not going to expand
| capacity until there's more demand.
| thedance wrote:
| BART ridership is currently maxed out in the peak
| direction at peak hour, and carries triple the design
| number of passengers. They don't need to expand, they
| need to profit from the currently underused directions
| (eg berkeley to Fremont).
| manfredo wrote:
| Transit reacts to changes in transportation demand, it
| doesn't set demand. How do you envision BART would profit
| from underused directions? Put out ads encouraging people
| to take these routes for fun?
|
| As I said, pointing out that transit systems are at
| capacity is not a valid reason to block development.
| Transit systems always try to operate at capacity because
| excess capacity means suboptimal allocation of resources.
| There's no reason to increase capacity until there's
| demand for that capacity.
| thedance wrote:
| The people profit, not BART itself. BART is
| infrastructure. Like the fire department, it is not
| intended for it to be internally profitable.
|
| The way the people profit is you put homes in the places
| that have lots of jobs, mostly so that people can just
| walk around but also to benefit from people filling up
| the reverse direction on BART. In places that have mostly
| homes you buld jobs instead. For places without an
| abundance of either, such as Orinda and Lafayette, you
| build both.
|
| It's total nonsense that we build a railroad to a place
| like Lafayette, but that city has had the same population
| for 50 years. This goes triple for Berkeley, which has
| THREE subway stations and the same population it had in
| 1950! We should expect that adding billions of dollars of
| infrastructure also adds lots of people.
| nradov wrote:
| Any possible increase in BART ticket revenue would be a
| drop in the bucket for the capital funding necessary to
| significantly increase system capacity. The popular
| routes are already at capacity so they would have to
| build more tracks and stations. This would cost hundreds
| of billions of dollars mostly from federal and state
| budgets. The planning, land acquisitions (eminent
| domain), environmental reviews, legal battles, and
| construction would take decades. We can complain that
| this is unreasonable, and that it ought to be cheaper or
| faster. But that's the reality and it isn't likely to
| change.
| Apes wrote:
| End the landed gentry by repealing Prop 13, and I'll take
| arguments like this seriously. Otherwise it just sounds like
| the priviliged wanting to have their cake and eat it too.
| notJim wrote:
| Isn't SF building two new subway lines right now? I agree it
| should be faster and better, but I don't think it's true that
| nothing is being done.
|
| Also, in this case, they have the infrastructure, the NIMBYs
| are just hoarding it to themselves, as they do in Berkeley as
| well.
| xvedejas wrote:
| SF is building one new subway, and its ride-able underground
| portion will be just over one mile long. I agree it's
| something being done, but it's such a small drop in a large
| bucket of needs. We shouldn't wait for a public transit
| silver bullet to bring people to jobs, we need more housing
| near jobs so that people aren't forced to commute across the
| region.
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| Couldn't people just work remotely and then get together for
| occasional retreats or all-day meetings? It seems that coders
| could have their own offices at home and just occasionally use
| transport to get to work.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Not to mention water, sewer, electrical capacity, schools,
| parks, police and fire services... You can't just plop a
| 100-unit apartment down and then say you helped with the
| housing problem.
| tathougies wrote:
| So typically, developers pay the fees to develop water,
| sewer, and electrical capacity, and sufficiently large
| developments must pay for parks and even schools. Property
| tax pays for fire service.
|
| Source: schedule fees for various bay area cities on new
| construction.
| thedance wrote:
| The reason Bay Area cities can't afford their water and sewer
| and roads is because they are not dense enough. Apartment
| dwellers demand far less water, and drive on roads much less
| than people who live in detached homes. Density is the
| _solution_ to infrastructure funding.
| bluGill wrote:
| Long term you are correct, but in the near term the current
| water system needs to be upgraded to pipes large enough to
| get water to the new apartment before the apartment can go
| in.
| thedance wrote:
| You can get developers to build the infrastructure and
| finance it on their future taxes. You wouldn't believe
| the incremental tax from building real buildings in the
| Bay Area. In one particularly egregious case a single
| apartment building replaced several detached homes that
| were paying a total of $1200/year in the city of
| Berkeley. The apartment building pays over a million
| dollars per year.
| stale2002 wrote:
| How do you even think this stuff gets upgraded in the
| first place?
|
| What happens, in every city, is that more housing gets
| built, then the infrastructure system starts to get
| closer to capacity, and then the infrastructure gets
| upgaded.
|
| Saying that they should upgrade all the infrastructure
| first, before there is any demand, is the same exact
| thing as saying that it should never be upgraded.
|
| Because the infrastructure isn't going to be upgraded if
| there is no demand for it yet.
| bluGill wrote:
| Or the city an decide that the cost of upgrading are more
| than the future values of the additional units and not
| upgrade. Some upgrades in capacity have significantly
| higher costs than others. If the current system is the
| largest that can physically fit on the land the city owns
| they need to buy more land first. If they won't get a lot
| of new development it is better to stay just below
| capacity.
|
| The above doesn't apply to the cities in CA we are
| talking about: there is plenty of demand. It does apply
| to some semi-rural small towns.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > If they won't get a lot of new development it is better
| to stay just below capacity.
|
| If a developer comes in and says "Hey I want to develop
| in this area", it is a contradictory response to say that
| this development should be prevented, because there is
| not enough demand.
|
| If a bunch of developers are trying to build houses, then
| by definition, we are in a situation where there is
| demand.
|
| This supports my point even more, because I was saying
| that the developers should build first, and then if the
| infrastructure starts to hit capacity, THEN the
| infrastructure should be updated.
|
| Don't build the infrastructure first. Instead build the
| housing, and fix any problems that come with it.
|
| Also, this is how all this infrastructure gets built in
| the first place, also. The developers, who are building
| the buildings, will upgrade the infrastructure as part of
| the process of building the buildings.
| notJim wrote:
| > Apartment dwellers demand far less water
|
| It is also obviously far cheaper (and better for the
| environment) to water a single building than to water a
| bunch of dispersed SFHs.
| zamfi wrote:
| > We have the tracks, we have the train... the train just does
| not go this route on weekends.
|
| This is the easy one to fix -- when there is demand, they can
| just run more trains.
|
| Much harder is the transbay commute at rush hours. There is
| almost no spare capacity, and it's not clear how those extra
| thousands of people in Lafayette will make it in to SF every
| morning before we build a second transbay tube for Bart -- and
| that's at least a decade away.
|
| I say this as someone who loves development: for the Bay Area
| to significantly increase its population, we need a ton more
| transit and we need to start building it now.
| skybrian wrote:
| I generally agree, but it seems like jobs should also be
| moving away from the center? If there are a lot of commuters
| in Lafayette going to Oakland then the transbay tunnel
| wouldn't be relevant for them, but there would need to be
| capacity for local trains.
|
| Or if the jobs were in the other direction like Walnut Creek,
| it would be a reverse commute.
| bluGill wrote:
| The problem is they need to create the demand. Anybody who
| wants to get around and checks transit knows it isn't an
| option so they find an alternative. If CalTran wants to be
| useful transit for more than commuters (My understanding as
| someone not in the area is CalTran runs only a few trips
| during rush hour - if I'm wrong that invalidates some of my
| reply...) they need to run more service for a while so people
| start to think they can count on it.
| _hardwaregeek wrote:
| Having been born and raised in a major city, I'm certainly
| biased, but I truly believe that suburbs should go away. Every
| part of a suburb seems so insular, so wasteful, so outmoded. A
| one family house requires maintenance, heating and wiring that
| would be so much more efficient with even the smallest apartment
| complex. Lawns are ridiculous, especially in the parts of the
| country where grass is not indigenous. Why the hell are we
| spending so much water and energy to maintain a goddamn green
| rectangle?
|
| HOAs don't seem to do much besides execute petty laws.
| Neighborhoods, while they can be diverse, will never approach a
| city in terms of allowing people of different backgrounds, races,
| etc. to interact. There's a particular reason cities vote more
| democratic than suburbs: It's hard to vote for such hateful
| policies when you interact with the people effected every day.
|
| I get that there's this nostalgia or rather inertia about
| suburbs. I get that people grew up in a one family house with a
| lawn in their nice homogeneous town. But it needs to go away.
| lthornberry wrote:
| I'd settle for suburban development not being required (through
| maximum density zoning laws) or subsidized (through
| disproportionate spending on suburban infrastructure).
| greedo wrote:
| I have a coworker who mentioned that he doesn't think my town
| needs libraries. "I never use them, so why should my taxes go
| to supporting them?" Trying to have a productive dialogue with
| someone who doesn't understand the idea of community can be a
| challenge.
| _hardwaregeek wrote:
| Oh I don't think communities should go away. Cities can have
| communities if you build them in the right way. I just think
| these communities need to evolve from the particular format
| of a single family house with a lawn, car and garage.
|
| Plus I'm a little perplexed at the library analogy. I'm not
| saying we need to lower funding or anything. If anything we
| should be pumping more money into suburbs so that they can
| build and create more healthy, flourishing communities. These
| communities should just be built in a way that's space and
| energy efficient.
| greedo wrote:
| It's the idea that if someone doesn't like something, it
| doesn't matter if others do.
|
| In my town, a typical midwest college town, we have
| suburbs, we have more urban areas with smaller/older houses
| in row neighborhoods. We have apartments galore, and condos
| in downtown areas. A bit of something for everyone.
| Expecting a community to "evolve" means losing something of
| this. Other than young people who want to live in the
| downtown area, nobody wants to give up their homes.
| Apartment living is no fun with families.
|
| And this is normal America. These cities can't be re-
| designed, can't really evolve. New cities, sure. Build them
| that way if you can (though I think the market won't
| support it), but expecting existing cities to evolve into
| urban worlds with no cars, great public transportation, and
| centrally located jobs and services won't happen in the
| majority of US cities.
| sokoloff wrote:
| "I get that some people like it, but I don't, so it needs to go
| away."
| _hardwaregeek wrote:
| More like this thing that people like is energy inefficient,
| produces pollution and leads to more homogeneous, less
| diverse communities. And therefore it should go away.
| bathtub365 wrote:
| Forcing everyone into cities is also a form of homogenizing.
| The idea that a city mindset is the only one is just forcing
| people to conform in a different way.
| downerending wrote:
| I might be hopelessly naive, but why not do the new growth
| somewhere else? The BA is pretty obviously "full" already, and
| adding more housing of any kind isn't going to make it better.
| lthornberry wrote:
| The BA isn't "full" by any reasonable measure. See this list of
| US cities by population density for comparison: https://en.wiki
| pedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_d.... San Francisco
| is 21st on the list, at 17,246 people per sq mi; the next
| densest city in the Bay Area is Daly City, which is 49th at
| 13,703 people per sq mi.
|
| By contrast, NYC has 27,016 people per sq mi; the densest
| suburb of Boston (Somerville) has 18,431; West Hollywood has
| 18,297.
|
| There's plenty of room for more people in the Bay Area, if
| denser housing is allowed.
| downerending wrote:
| It's subjective, of course, but when I worked in NYC, I was
| able to commute from an area with a density more like 2,000
| per sq mi. Maybe an hour each way. That's what I think of as
| "not full".
|
| I believe I looked for something like that in the BA and it
| doesn't really exist.
| pruneridge wrote:
| What happens when more people move into the area from the rest of
| the country and start driving to work from their newly built
| housing units? Silicon Valley has, at best, poor coverage of
| Caltrain and no coverage for BART in South Bay. If let's say
| 10,000 more families move to San Jose into new housing units and
| they all need to commute to Palo Alto for work, how exactly would
| they do that without choking up the already clogged freeway
| network? Caltrain is already packed beyond imagination during
| rush hour. Each year, the rush hour commute time between Palo
| Alto and San Jose increasing by 5 minutes and that's with limited
| net population growth in the area. Imagine if the population
| influx increased 2X or 5X. Housing is not an isolated problem.
| Due to decades of lobbying by the auto industry and a crippled
| public transportation strategy, what America really has is a
| transportation and infrastructure problem. Without solving that,
| the housing problem will never be truly solved and building new
| housing will degrade the quality of life of everyone in the area
| - both newcomers and existing residents.
| mertd wrote:
| You might have it backwards. Traffic is increasing because
| we're adding offices but no housing nearby. Therefore people
| need to pour in from further out. With higher density,
| alternate transportation options become viable and attractive.
| pruneridge wrote:
| Your argument does not account for people currently _outside_
| the Bay Area moving into the Bay Area because of cheaper
| housing. While people currently residing in far flung places
| would move closer to their work, the people living in other
| parts of the country aspiring to live in Silicon Valley would
| now move to Morgan Hill and Gilroy. Eventually, we will end
| up with the same housing crunch, except with twice the number
| of cars on the road.
| tmh79 wrote:
| If you look at the data for SF, 95% of brand new units are
| first occupied by people who have lived here for a at least
| a few years. New housing serves people who are already
| here.
|
| What causes people to migrate to the bay is the office
| creation, not the housing creation.
| koboll wrote:
| >What happens when more people move into the area from the rest
| of the country and start driving to work from their newly built
| housing units?
|
| What happens is they congest traffic far less than they do now,
| driving from farther-flung places.
| wbl wrote:
| You can actually hire Germans to run your trains.
| dkhenry wrote:
| This is the most common argument I hear against building, but I
| am firmly convinced that the reason you have the commute
| problem in the Bay area isn't because of the number of people,
| but because the resistance to building has forced development
| further and further out.
|
| Consider that there is still housing growth, but its in South
| San Jose, Morgan Hill, and Gilroy. Those people all have to
| drive past Los Gatos, Cambell, Cupertino, San Jose, and
| Sunnyvale to get to Mountain View. All your doing is increasing
| the amount of Miles people have to drive, and that in term
| increases the amount of time they spend in their cars, and
| clogs the roads. If you built houses in Mountain View or Palo
| Alto, none of those people would be on the roads, and if they
| were it wouldn't be for nearly as long. You don't have to take
| my word for it take a look at average commute times in the bay
| area, those increases aren't due to a 2x increase in Mountain
| View, its due to a 2x increase far outside with people driving
| in.
|
| Public transportation is great, but the solution is to build
| houses near where people work, that means San Francisco and
| Mountain View.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Well there is also the issue that the VC's and tech
| executives would rather workers have to do hour plus commutes
| to offices conveniently close to SFO and Sand Hill Road than
| they having to drive out to Vallejo. And much less have live
| in Kansas city or some such god forbidden place.
| jayd16 wrote:
| The market has shown people are willing to make the commute.
| Not only would you need to induce the current commuters to
| move, you also need to ensure they aren't simply replaced by
| more commuters, which isn't necessarily a given.
| francisofascii wrote:
| Add bus lanes and HOV lanes which don't require additional
| lanes and improve efficiency. Charge more per vehicle.
| subsubzero wrote:
| Fun Fact: if three cities(San Jose, San Francisco, NYC) in
| America were to loosen up housing planning rules, America's GDP
| would be 4% higher, that is incredible in of itself, source:
| (paywall - https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/01/16/the-
| wests-bigge...)
|
| Although I think California especially needs new housing, the bay
| area in particular has a housing issue which is somewhat
| artificially created due to a number of large (google, facebook,
| etc) and smaller tech companies requiring a "buts in seat"
| mentality and a philosophy that all "important" jobs be based in
| the bay area near their HQ's. Its really quite sad as a job that
| can be done anywhere is forced to be located in one of the most
| expensive areas on earth.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| Prices have hit their limits, and companies are more willing to
| entertain the idea that qualified talent exists outside of the
| Bay Area. Remote work is growing, and some portion of that
| growth is certainly attributable to the Bay Area housing
| market.
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