The data is nationwide. But California proves this NOT to be the case.
Sunnyvale/Mountain View have experienced 4 years of building new housing without limits, yet every year is more expensive. The new units (rental or for sale) are way higher than the average rent or price. (e.g. ALL the new housing being built now in the peninsula is priced at $1MM or more) I fail to see the point of pushing for new unregulated housing here besides saying in 30+ years the middle class will move to housing built for the rich now. Sure... In 30 years the middle class won't exist. (and in SV I give it 12-15 years)
It also neglects a huge factor in several hot markets, particularly New York: rich out-of-towners buying apartments as investments, and leaving them unoccupied. The owners aren't living there, and the buildings are typically reworking or replacing former residential units where people actually resided, so the net effect of that new construction is that the stock of housing available to house people who actually live in the city is reduced.
Too naive, I'm afraid (as well as, in my opinion, misguided).
Just put yourself in the shoes of the investor. Government announces they're gonna make you pay through your nose if no one "lives" in your apartment.
Leaving aside the dubious morality of such penalization (it's a slippery slope!), is your reaction going to be "Oh noes, I am ruined! Better sell my apartment now."? Or can you think of half a dozen simple, practical ways around it?
Florida does this already, the Homestead Exemption, which taxes homes (condominiums and townhomes, etc) by lowering the home appraisal by $25,000 (for tax purposes). But it only applies to one house as long as you designate it your "permanent residence" (so if you only live in Florida part time, you don't get it). Somehow, we still have plenty of apartments here in Florida.
It is very hard to get around residency because someone living at that address needs to pay income tax. You can even rebate back the occupancy tax via the income tax or sales tax systems.
If you don’t want to do this you can do random surveys of the suspect property (say any property without a taxpayer) and if it is unoccupied more than a few times and not registered as unoccupied then a big fine results.
Finally, the owner does not need to sell, just have tenants. What you want to avoid is housing sitting empty or only being used as a holiday home a couple of weeks a year.
I hate to break it to you but there are dozen of authorities that can come around and inspect your property whenever they want - this slippery slope has long gone.
I have no problem with someone with the appropriate authority politely knocking on my door to see if I am home if I am claiming a large tax refund for living there. The IRS and its fellow ilk are far more intrusive - the IRS makes my life a pain as it is and I am not even a US taxpayer.
Where do you live that "dozen of authorities" can come around and inspect your property at will?
I see where you're coming from, but as is probably obvious, I don't subscribe to your "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" world view on government surveillance. This seems to be the root of our disagreement here.
I don't get that. What kind of investment is? I buy an apartment that has for sure some expenses related (concierge of the building, taxes) and depreciate over time hoping that prices will go up? Why not renting that apartment? I mean seriously... Why I can't rent that apartment for few thousands dollars a month? A 1M$ apartment that rents for 4k$ a months returns 4.8% before taxes and expenses, probably 2.4% net. Not a great returns but relatively low risk. And then, if market price raises more than inflation, I could have a good return once I sell it in the future. The same apartment, empty, give me money just in the future if prices goes up. Do you have any statistics for this issue besides anecdotal one that is what I found?
The claim in the article and from building proponents is not, "building market rate housing will prevent housing costs from increasing, regardless of all other local market factors." It's: "building market rate housing will result in lower housing costs than would have obtained otherwise."
Where would rents and real estate prices have gone without the new building you're lamenting?
Sunnyvale & Mountain View are interesting cases because nearby employers have experienced hyper-growth and we haven't had a recession any time in the last 4 years.
Rents absolutely did go down in 2009, oftentimes way down, with apartments that rented for $2000+/month in mid-2008 going for $1400/month by mid-2009. There's no incentive to drop rents as long as everybody is making more money and the apartments aren't lying vacant. There's a pretty strong incentive when people start getting laid off and moving back in with parents or roommates, and places aren't renting at any price.
Not in Mountain View & Sunnyvale. The peninsula curves around at the bottom, so north/south routes like 101, 82 (El Camino), and 280 go mostly east/west, with 85 branching off as a north/south spur. The "north" side of 101 is the side closest to the Bay, where Google is. Throws a lot of visitors for a loop.
Through the peninsula, especially in mountain view, it runs from southeast to northwest, north is towards the bay; south is towards the mountains. ca-85 is much closer to north/south through mountain view.
Yeah, San Carlos air traffic controllers get pissy when you announce northbound over the 101 and you're really flying due west, with the sun in your face even.
"""We use data (.xlsx) on Bay Area census tracts (small subdivisions of a county typically containing around 4,000 people) maintained by researchers with the University of California (UC) Berkeley Urban Displacement Project. This dataset included information on census tract demographics, housing characteristics, and housing construction levels. We focus on data for the period 2000 to 2013."""
This is specifically related to the SF Bay Area and there is a link to the source which has a easy-to-use Excel sheet of the data, so feel free to make an awesome geo-mashup:
I think you two are talking past each other because one of you is referring to "being displaced" in the sense of it happening because of new housing being built, and the other is referring to "being displaced" by the lack thereof.
Many landlords would love to be able to evict their tenants and replace them with new market-rate renters, in exchange for paying the old tenants' moving costs. Or even the moving costs plus a year's rent in the new location.
Somehow, I get the feeling you believe that during a wartime shortage, the government says, "Okay, everyone who's already been using the thing in question gets to keep using it forever." But that's not how it works.
In actual wartime, the item in question gets rationed. To the extent that the metaphor could even apply to housing, it would work like this: "There's a shortage of San Francisco housing. First, the military gets what it needs. If there's anything left, you have to share with everyone else. No hoarding. Each citizen will get a book of 5 ration tickets per year. Each ticket entitles you to spend one week in San Francisco housing. Some tickets will only be valid in even-numbered months; some, odd-numbered."
Everyone (myself included) cries about house prices, yet I believe there are many many truly beautiful small cities and towns where you have great internet access, safety and amazingly affordable housing. People just needs to have the guts to move to these places and recruit friends and family and like minded folks to join them.
You seem to be forgetting that there are no jobs in those places. Affordable housing isn't worth jack when the only job you can get there is working at Walmart, because there aren't any software development jobs there (for instance).
The other problem is that if you're a young professional, you may very well be single. Moving to a small city or town means you will not get a date, unless you want to date some overweight, uneducated woman who has 4 kids and talks about Jesus and guns all the time. If you're on this site, that probably isn't the right demographic for you. You'd have better luck moving to a foreign country; rural and urban America are that different these days.
His choice of words was harsh but I think he does have a fair point. The demographics of rural areas don't make for good dating opportunities for educated, secular professional young people.
So you there there's something wrong with not being an Evangelical Christian? Nice to know that you think this site should only be for Christians. Is this a common sentiment around here? I'm a bit new. I never saw any messages saying this forum was intended only for conservative Christians.
1) 2 hours outside a city is not commutable to your job in the city.
2) Scottsdale is an extremely conservative city with a downright hellish climate. Not everyone wants to live someplace where it's 120F every day in the summer, and never goes below 100F at night.
3) So you wouldn't have a problem with people with entirely different political views from you moving into your city, and then demanding and voting for totally different policies than you're used to? If you advocate for people to move to where you are because the cost of housing is cheaper, then you have absolutely no right to complain when they change the political climate there.
This is hat my wife and I did. We left California for Indiana. We left Indiana for Tennessee. Each time we took our jobs with us. She spent the last 6 years working as a principle engineer for an aerospace company from home. I work in marketing.
Since we moved here 4 more friends have joined us out here in the country. The only thing we really lack is true high speed fat bandwidth. But that an be worked around as well.
It's rough when the rich own numerous suites they rarely dwell in. They have to give some middle-class loner a basement apartment with discounted rent to meet occupant requirements. Yea, that'll help.
You know, it makes sense to me that increasing supply should drive down demand and hence prices. But I frankly don't care.
The entire piece reads like an excuse to not do things for the poor. How about we actually do things FOR THE POOR instead of tossing them scraps from the tables of the rich?
No one is tearing down old units. People are trying to get new units built, mostly on vacant lots, and getting blocked by incumbent landlords who want to see prices go even higher.
Tearing down old units is not enough. The construction works need to actually increase the overall housing stock. If old tenement buildings disappear and are replaced by oversize luxury apartments the overall stock goes down and the situation for the poor is made worse.
That trend has been going on in SF for a long time. Dwellings are getting larger steadily over many decades, and the number of people who live in a dwelling has been getting steadily smaller.
The census tracks people per household. In 1940 this stood at 3.08. In 2010 it was 2.26. A "housing unit" built today simply doesn't hold as many people as it once did.
Isn't that the opposite of what you posted above? I thought you were claiming dwellings are getting bigger in SF.
My intuition is that they are getting smaller. The old houses are all subdivided. The new apartments are all small. The exception is some large lofts in SOMA but there are plenty of tiny lofts in China Beach, 5th and Mission, 8th and Mission, 10th and Market.
I'm not saying the average is smaller since I don't have any data only personal observation. It sounds like your extrapolating that 2.26 people are getting more space than 3.08 people were before?
Dwellings are getting bigger. All the new construction is larger than average for the given number of bedrooms. Dwellings are larger, and fewer people are living in each of them. Both of these factors are headwinds for the housing market.
Yes. Contrary to popular belief, not a single housing unit (at any income level) has been torn down in the Mission, for any reason, since at least 2010 (as far back as online records go).
Also, I should note that, contrary to popular belief, there's not much new luxury housing in the Mission. In fact, there's not much new housing in the Mission at any economic level. In 2014 (the last year for which data is available), there were a grand total of 74 units built in the entire Mission. Not 74 buildings. 74 units.
There is nothing in the article to justifying the headline. What the headline should have said is "more expensive housing keeps the prices of the expensive housing lower". While true, this has absolutely no reflection on the affordability, the latter being dependent on things like level of income and such. If the cheap housing is removed to be converted to expensive, there is less cheap housing, and it becomes less accessible, because more poor compete for it.
And if the total housing stock increases then that means that rich people won't be buying up the poor housing stock.
For every "Rich Person Condo" that is built in SOMA, there is one less "Up and Coming Apartment in The Mission" that gets taken up by a rich techie.
The rich are going to move to the city whether we like it or not. They have the resources, they can buy out whatever place they choose. The only choice we have to make is whether to build housing for them or to just let them displace existing residents.
What about the part where it said, "low-income neighborhoods with a lot of new construction have witnessed about half the displacement of similar neighborhoods that haven't added much new housing"?
In other words, building more market-rate housing in a neighborhood helps keep that neighborhood's low-income families from getting displaced. Or, to put it another way, the poor are better off when we build housing for the rich (than when we don't build housing for anyone).
There is nothing in the article to justifying the headline. What the headline should have said is "more expensive housing keeps the prices of the expensive housing lower". While true, this has absolutely no reflection on the affordability, the latter being dependent on things like level of income and such. If the cheap housing is removed to be converted to expensive, there is less cheap housing, and it becomes less accessible, because more poor compete for it.
A housing crisis is pretty much always caused by government policies. It would be perfectly possible to build a satellite town up to 50 miles outside a major agglomeration connected by a high-speed transport link, such as a highway or train. People would live up to an hour from their work places. Housing units costing between 15 000 - 20 000 should be affordable even for the very poor. It is important, of course, to make sure that there is enough local retail and entertainment, but that is just a question of not regulating it out of existence. Without heavy-handed government intervention, it would emerge spontaneously. None of this would be economically a problem. The reason why it does not happen, is government interventionism. Seriously, there does not exist a problem in the world that is not made worse by governments.
Shit I had a 2 hr daily round commute INSIDE San francisco, taking bus from the ocean and then walking to office. Id be beside my self if there was cheap housing an hour commute away.
Some don't, and it can make sense. If you rent it out, then you have to be a landlord, which puts you on the hook for repairs, finding tenants, and collecting rent or evicting them. There's always the possibility of tenants trashing the unit to a large degree. Some of these problems become way worse when left untreated for a week, a month, or longer. I can imagine it making sense for foreign investors to leave units empty in these circumstances.
In a similar vein, it's not just foreign investors. It might also make sense to leave the grandparent's house empty while they are in the nursing home if you live further away. If the grandparents don't need to sell the house to pay for retirement, you'd probably come off cheaply enough to leave it empty, pay the property tax and minimal utilities, rather than risk having tenants.
> you have to be a landlord, which puts you on the hook for repairs, finding tenants, and collecting rent or evicting them
I imagine that there are companies that do exactly that for you taking percentage of rent you'd get if you done all that by yourself. I also imagine there are insurances for landlords and/or investors. There's so much money in this when you approach this as investments (as opposed to not renting your grandfather house because it's too much of a bother to clean it out and think about) that I imagine no sane investor lets their property, they just bought to stand empty.
Property Management companies can be extremely inept. At the end of my last lease the property managers for my place were fired for letting the owners family home degrade so far. The property managers then tried to pass all the damages off to my roommates and I, but we had extensive documentation of the existing damages.
Renters, especially in highly regulated cities/states, substantially reduce the liquidity of the investment. In a lot of places, you can't just evict someone because you want to sell, or you have to adhere to a process that can take over a year. An entire housing market can crash during that time.
I heard they(I don't know who--irs? Banks?) are trying verify the money to buy this Realestate is made legally. I don't know how they are going to pull this off. I think it's just posturing.
A few weeks ago, in order to buy any Realestate in the States, all it took was a phone call to the seller's Realtor.
Some mob/drug dealer/corrupt politician guy where-ever, "Hay, by me tat apartment complex in the old U. S. Of A.". Done deal!
(I've always felt you should have to be a citizen of a country in order to buy that land.)
My hope would be the supervisors for The Mission district as well as Chinatown in SF would read this and take notice. But... given their politics, even if they came to understand it, I don't think they'd come around on this, to the detriment of those they purport to represent.
The politics in SF are weird. Many politicians do superficially irrational things --they look good on the surface, but in effect they are detrimental. On the bright side, the mayors themselves have been rational about attracting business and bringing in development.
If you listen to KQED and their local reporters, it's like they'd like to have SF frozen in time in 1992. As if they'd rather it go down the way of Detroit rather than it become an economic center on the Pacific with the effects they bring ("gentrification" population moves, etc.) They want to eat their cake and have it too. And I understand it. It's very attractive. Let's have a great economy BUT let's have it so all other things stay the same, no disruption, no changes to neighborhoods, etc. Not even China can pull that off. Especially when SF proper is all but 49sq mi. But if we will it that way hard enough...
I do not think that San Francisco can in any way be compared to the decline of Detroit.
Poor civic planning, racism and the loss of jobs to non-union Southern plants all paid a part in Detroit's population dropping by two thirds over a fifty year span.
I read a great book over Christmas, Once in a great city by David Maraniss, which covered Detroit at its peak from 1962-1964. Wayne State actually pretty accurately predicted the city's future then but the report was ignored by those in a position to stem its decline.
You're right, it's not the same. Detroit is a remarkable exception. But, SF in the late 80's early 90's was not a place you might think would grow. People were leaving the city for other bay area cities. Labor intensive industries were leaving [bedding for one] SOMA, Tenderloin, Market were severely depressed areas. And companies can go --just like they left Detroit; just like they left SF in the late 80s early 90s.
I thought the article was weak. There was barely a change in displacement with new market rate housing vs not.
My biggest issue is the highway theory - build more lanes, commute time is shorter, more people drive, purpose defeated. Here build more market rate housing, prices fall, more people move in that would have loved elesewhere in bay area, prices rise. Purpose defeated.
I like projects that include percentage of units to be affordable, rent control, and programs to build on surplus public land for affordable housing.
Beyond that not sure what else they can do. At end of day government only has so much they can subsidize. Unless they start building homes underground or on the bay...
The thing is the people who can afford to buy a house or pay the high rents will push out the people who can't, regardless of housing stock. Someone with money can buy the unit I rent, and, given it's private property there is no reason in the world they should not be able to move in --we're not at the stage of confiscating property.
Traffic throughput is different [unless you are comparing it to the toll express lanes]. Normal highways have no barrier to entry other than the vehicle you need to enter with anyway, so of course people will take whichever way gets you there faster. If before you had to take the 2-hour bus, or the surface streets which took two hours, but now you can take the freeway which takes an hour, all things being equal you take the freeway... Now, if you had to pay a toll to get on the freeway AND there was also public transit which was cheaper, you might take public transit.
The sad thing is politicians on either side ignore economics when it benefits their point of view or it aligns themselves with the ignorance of the people they represent [climate change, fiscal policy, housing, jobs policies, etc] so I'm under no illusions this report by the state gov't[1] will convince city supes.
I wish the Mission activists would spend some effort teaming up with http://www.spur.org and similar organizations to promote improved zoning and housing development in other SF neighborhoods, e.g. the Richmond/Sunset/Parkside, which consist nearly exclusively of single family houses, and waste tremendous amounts of space on wide streets with massive amounts of street parking. Turning a few more streets in those neighborhoods into mixed-use commercial corridors or even denser (3–6 story) residential could add a huge amount of housing stock to the city. (Not to mention advocating for more housing development in the peninsula and south bay, where the worst employment/housing imbalances are.)
The language in this is Orwellian. She talks about how new construction is needed and how people are stopping it. Then she points to examples where people are not stopping it, just not letting developers do whatever they want (the dangerous junk developers build near me is insane), then she goes back to saying we need more housing.
No working class housing groups are trying to stop new buildings. They're just asking for the same things groups like these have asked for almost a century.
Article translation: "Hack employee of the Washington Post Co. says wealthy parasite developers and trustafarian transplants should ignore everything long time, mostly working class black people want, they don't matter". Well why not, that's the same message we've been hearing in this election campaign all year.
It's only misleading in the sense that it would better to say "The poor are better off when we build more housing of any sort, even if they can't afford the units being built."
I'd say the title omits an important context. Let's see how it looks like if I add a few extra specifiers..
"The poor are better off when we constantly build more than enough housing for the rich."
The last paragraphs actually point that out, albeit in a slightly reversed manner. As long as high-end housing supply is continuously being satisfied, the more aged buildings become affordable even without 95% percentile incomes.
On the other hand, I do find it somewhat insulting that the figures assume a time window of 50-60 years. This kind of approach ignores a crucial externality: if it takes ~3 generations of neglect to see the problem, it also takes another ~3 to repair it. Even assuming a perfect 180-degree flip in housing, zoning and transit policies, that's a century lost to bad decisions and blind greed. And in the meanwhile, the city is pricing itself out.
I'm not a historian, but I sure would like to know a bit more. Has any great city survived 100 years of exodus?
It's not misleading. It makes some assumptions of the reader [that the context is housing and that given constrained supplies, the pressure on affordable housing is eased when more market rate stock is built for those who can afford it --i.e. they have other stock to choose from].
Like when you go to the grocery store before a holiday, many people will tend to buy the leftovers [constrained stock] they normally would not buy --so it is with housing.
Funny thing about this theory: the luxury housing market in San Francisco is in decline, and yet, it's still a seller's market for middle- and down-market properties. [1][2]
This is not surprising to anyone who follows real estate. There's no such thing as "a market for housing" -- there are several markets, each moving more-or-less independently, based on the net worth of the participants involved. A drop in the prices of units in the Millenium Tower doesn't have much of an impact on the rent of a pre-war hovel in the Mission.
The reason that the author doesn't understand this is because there's a latent correlation at play: the communities with the most high-end construction tend to have the most construction overall. But in a city like SF, where all of the new construction would be high-end (if so allowed), all bets are off.
Observing that properties become cheaper as they age is also silly. There are some properties that become cheaper as they age, but there aren't many of them, say, in Pac Heights.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadSunnyvale/Mountain View have experienced 4 years of building new housing without limits, yet every year is more expensive. The new units (rental or for sale) are way higher than the average rent or price. (e.g. ALL the new housing being built now in the peninsula is priced at $1MM or more) I fail to see the point of pushing for new unregulated housing here besides saying in 30+ years the middle class will move to housing built for the rich now. Sure... In 30 years the middle class won't exist. (and in SV I give it 12-15 years)
Just put yourself in the shoes of the investor. Government announces they're gonna make you pay through your nose if no one "lives" in your apartment.
Leaving aside the dubious morality of such penalization (it's a slippery slope!), is your reaction going to be "Oh noes, I am ruined! Better sell my apartment now."? Or can you think of half a dozen simple, practical ways around it?
I bet you have already.
If you don’t want to do this you can do random surveys of the suspect property (say any property without a taxpayer) and if it is unoccupied more than a few times and not registered as unoccupied then a big fine results.
Finally, the owner does not need to sell, just have tenants. What you want to avoid is housing sitting empty or only being used as a holiday home a couple of weeks a year.
Did I mention "slippery slope"?
You don't have to be a diehard libertarian to find this whole concept somewhat creepy.
I have no problem with someone with the appropriate authority politely knocking on my door to see if I am home if I am claiming a large tax refund for living there. The IRS and its fellow ilk are far more intrusive - the IRS makes my life a pain as it is and I am not even a US taxpayer.
I see where you're coming from, but as is probably obvious, I don't subscribe to your "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" world view on government surveillance. This seems to be the root of our disagreement here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument#Argum...
Where would rents and real estate prices have gone without the new building you're lamenting?
Rents absolutely did go down in 2009, oftentimes way down, with apartments that rented for $2000+/month in mid-2008 going for $1400/month by mid-2009. There's no incentive to drop rents as long as everybody is making more money and the apartments aren't lying vacant. There's a pretty strong incentive when people start getting laid off and moving back in with parents or roommates, and places aren't renting at any price.
It gets more fun in the East Bay: you can be going Eastbound on 580 and Westbound on 80 at the same time (it's a shared road)!
That whole area is direction-impaired. The city of East Palo Alto is northwest of Palo Alto and in a different county!
"""We use data (.xlsx) on Bay Area census tracts (small subdivisions of a county typically containing around 4,000 people) maintained by researchers with the University of California (UC) Berkeley Urban Displacement Project. This dataset included information on census tract demographics, housing characteristics, and housing construction levels. We focus on data for the period 2000 to 2013."""
http://www.lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3345#Technical_App...
Also, the measure is not whether available housing is getting more expensive, but whether low-income households are being displaced.
Edit: I'm curious what people are disagreeing with here. Do you think that moving to a new city doesn't require expenditures?
ftfy
In actual wartime, the item in question gets rationed. To the extent that the metaphor could even apply to housing, it would work like this: "There's a shortage of San Francisco housing. First, the military gets what it needs. If there's anything left, you have to share with everyone else. No hoarding. Each citizen will get a book of 5 ration tickets per year. Each ticket entitles you to spend one week in San Francisco housing. Some tickets will only be valid in even-numbered months; some, odd-numbered."
The other problem is that if you're a young professional, you may very well be single. Moving to a small city or town means you will not get a date, unless you want to date some overweight, uneducated woman who has 4 kids and talks about Jesus and guns all the time. If you're on this site, that probably isn't the right demographic for you. You'd have better luck moving to a foreign country; rural and urban America are that different these days.
I think if I wanted to pick a comment as the canonical example what is wrong with people on HN this would be the one.
I think the last statistic I found was something like 140 single men in the 20s-30s age bracket for every 100 single women.
...which is why I'd prefer rural America over urban America any day.
:)
2) I lived in Scottsdale, Arizona. You can live buy a home in the heart of the city for sub $300k.
3) I will not comment on the dating part. To each their own.
4) I understand it will be difficult, but you can consider it a mega startup. You launch it and recruit others who believe in it.
2) Scottsdale is an extremely conservative city with a downright hellish climate. Not everyone wants to live someplace where it's 120F every day in the summer, and never goes below 100F at night.
3) So you wouldn't have a problem with people with entirely different political views from you moving into your city, and then demanding and voting for totally different policies than you're used to? If you advocate for people to move to where you are because the cost of housing is cheaper, then you have absolutely no right to complain when they change the political climate there.
Since we moved here 4 more friends have joined us out here in the country. The only thing we really lack is true high speed fat bandwidth. But that an be worked around as well.
The entire piece reads like an excuse to not do things for the poor. How about we actually do things FOR THE POOR instead of tossing them scraps from the tables of the rich?
How about using international data?
My intuition is that they are getting smaller. The old houses are all subdivided. The new apartments are all small. The exception is some large lofts in SOMA but there are plenty of tiny lofts in China Beach, 5th and Mission, 8th and Mission, 10th and Market.
I'm not saying the average is smaller since I don't have any data only personal observation. It sounds like your extrapolating that 2.26 people are getting more space than 3.08 people were before?
Source: http://rationalconspiracy.com/2015/05/25/new-york-times-make...
Also, I should note that, contrary to popular belief, there's not much new luxury housing in the Mission. In fact, there's not much new housing in the Mission at any economic level. In 2014 (the last year for which data is available), there were a grand total of 74 units built in the entire Mission. Not 74 buildings. 74 units.
Source: http://www.sf-planning.org/ftp/files/publications_reports/20...
For every "Rich Person Condo" that is built in SOMA, there is one less "Up and Coming Apartment in The Mission" that gets taken up by a rich techie.
The rich are going to move to the city whether we like it or not. They have the resources, they can buy out whatever place they choose. The only choice we have to make is whether to build housing for them or to just let them displace existing residents.
In other words, building more market-rate housing in a neighborhood helps keep that neighborhood's low-income families from getting displaced. Or, to put it another way, the poor are better off when we build housing for the rich (than when we don't build housing for anyone).
Shit I had a 2 hr daily round commute INSIDE San francisco, taking bus from the ocean and then walking to office. Id be beside my self if there was cheap housing an hour commute away.
And there may be some hope - marin and Sonoma counties just built a train. http://main.sonomamarintrain.org/
In a similar vein, it's not just foreign investors. It might also make sense to leave the grandparent's house empty while they are in the nursing home if you live further away. If the grandparents don't need to sell the house to pay for retirement, you'd probably come off cheaply enough to leave it empty, pay the property tax and minimal utilities, rather than risk having tenants.
If they pay for supervision, they might as well pay for someone to serve as landlord.
I imagine that there are companies that do exactly that for you taking percentage of rent you'd get if you done all that by yourself. I also imagine there are insurances for landlords and/or investors. There's so much money in this when you approach this as investments (as opposed to not renting your grandfather house because it's too much of a bother to clean it out and think about) that I imagine no sane investor lets their property, they just bought to stand empty.
A few weeks ago, in order to buy any Realestate in the States, all it took was a phone call to the seller's Realtor.
Some mob/drug dealer/corrupt politician guy where-ever, "Hay, by me tat apartment complex in the old U. S. Of A.". Done deal!
(I've always felt you should have to be a citizen of a country in order to buy that land.)
The politics in SF are weird. Many politicians do superficially irrational things --they look good on the surface, but in effect they are detrimental. On the bright side, the mayors themselves have been rational about attracting business and bringing in development.
If you listen to KQED and their local reporters, it's like they'd like to have SF frozen in time in 1992. As if they'd rather it go down the way of Detroit rather than it become an economic center on the Pacific with the effects they bring ("gentrification" population moves, etc.) They want to eat their cake and have it too. And I understand it. It's very attractive. Let's have a great economy BUT let's have it so all other things stay the same, no disruption, no changes to neighborhoods, etc. Not even China can pull that off. Especially when SF proper is all but 49sq mi. But if we will it that way hard enough...
Poor civic planning, racism and the loss of jobs to non-union Southern plants all paid a part in Detroit's population dropping by two thirds over a fifty year span.
I read a great book over Christmas, Once in a great city by David Maraniss, which covered Detroit at its peak from 1962-1964. Wayne State actually pretty accurately predicted the city's future then but the report was ignored by those in a position to stem its decline.
My biggest issue is the highway theory - build more lanes, commute time is shorter, more people drive, purpose defeated. Here build more market rate housing, prices fall, more people move in that would have loved elesewhere in bay area, prices rise. Purpose defeated.
I like projects that include percentage of units to be affordable, rent control, and programs to build on surplus public land for affordable housing.
Beyond that not sure what else they can do. At end of day government only has so much they can subsidize. Unless they start building homes underground or on the bay...
Traffic throughput is different [unless you are comparing it to the toll express lanes]. Normal highways have no barrier to entry other than the vehicle you need to enter with anyway, so of course people will take whichever way gets you there faster. If before you had to take the 2-hour bus, or the surface streets which took two hours, but now you can take the freeway which takes an hour, all things being equal you take the freeway... Now, if you had to pay a toll to get on the freeway AND there was also public transit which was cheaper, you might take public transit.
The sad thing is politicians on either side ignore economics when it benefits their point of view or it aligns themselves with the ignorance of the people they represent [climate change, fiscal policy, housing, jobs policies, etc] so I'm under no illusions this report by the state gov't[1] will convince city supes.
[1]http://www.lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3345
It's like? I thought that was exactly what they wanted.
No working class housing groups are trying to stop new buildings. They're just asking for the same things groups like these have asked for almost a century.
Article translation: "Hack employee of the Washington Post Co. says wealthy parasite developers and trustafarian transplants should ignore everything long time, mostly working class black people want, they don't matter". Well why not, that's the same message we've been hearing in this election campaign all year.
Ahem:
http://www.savethemission.org/save_the_mission_district_yes_...
The poor are better off when there isn't a housing shortage, because (surprise, surprise) the rich aren't the ones who are going to be forced out.
"The poor are better off when we constantly build more than enough housing for the rich."
The last paragraphs actually point that out, albeit in a slightly reversed manner. As long as high-end housing supply is continuously being satisfied, the more aged buildings become affordable even without 95% percentile incomes.
On the other hand, I do find it somewhat insulting that the figures assume a time window of 50-60 years. This kind of approach ignores a crucial externality: if it takes ~3 generations of neglect to see the problem, it also takes another ~3 to repair it. Even assuming a perfect 180-degree flip in housing, zoning and transit policies, that's a century lost to bad decisions and blind greed. And in the meanwhile, the city is pricing itself out.
I'm not a historian, but I sure would like to know a bit more. Has any great city survived 100 years of exodus?
Dislaimer: I live in (Greater) London.
"More housing" is a pretty fluff summary of the intricacies of building sustainable neighborhoods.
http://www.lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3345
Like when you go to the grocery store before a holiday, many people will tend to buy the leftovers [constrained stock] they normally would not buy --so it is with housing.
This is not surprising to anyone who follows real estate. There's no such thing as "a market for housing" -- there are several markets, each moving more-or-less independently, based on the net worth of the participants involved. A drop in the prices of units in the Millenium Tower doesn't have much of an impact on the rent of a pre-war hovel in the Mission.
The reason that the author doesn't understand this is because there's a latent correlation at play: the communities with the most high-end construction tend to have the most construction overall. But in a city like SF, where all of the new construction would be high-end (if so allowed), all bets are off.
Observing that properties become cheaper as they age is also silly. There are some properties that become cheaper as they age, but there aren't many of them, say, in Pac Heights.
[1] http://wolfstreet.com/2015/11/08/san-franciscos-luxury-condo... [2] http://sfist.com/2015/11/09/at_high_end_sfs_housing_market_f...