So how does the process of adding housing units work? If there's space as the article claims, and plenty of demand, whats holding things up? Bureaucracy?
I'd like to see reasonable prices sometime in my life !
Well that valley has pretty much every bit of flat land developed, so where are you going to put these high density developments without knocking down existing houses?
Allow residents of those existing houses to add additional floors, convert garages, add a granny flat, et cetera. Large parts of Boston consist of nothing but 3-story, 3-unit apartments, often with a live-in landlord, and it's quite dense.
I don't think there's enough people in the valley with the money and the desire to convert and rent out part of their house to do much of anything about the demand.
I disagree, but either way, looser zoning would allow it to happen, not force it to happen. If people don't want to sell, well, nobody would make them.
You might have a point about desire, but with the levels of land value inflation there, almost any owner can take out enough of a home equity loan to finance the construction or conversion of additional units.
What's wrong with knocking down existing houses? If the homeowners want to sell to developers that will build higher-density housing on their land, what exactly is the problem?
I mean, probably every dense neighborhood in the world was at one time lower-density, and had its old buildings knocked down and replaced. This isn't anything new.
Source on that? AFAIK eminent domain for private development is rare, the vast, vast majority of the time developers just offer enough money to convince people to sell.
Then the developers offer the holdouts more money. If that doesn't work, they buy homes in a slightly different part of the city to develop on. This is how it works in parts of the countries with looser zoning regulations on density, and it works just fine.
The same places that you put urban developments in most cities - you repurpose existing underused buildings and spaces in existing urban neighborhoods.
There are lots and lots of parking lots, underutilized commercial buildings, and low density apartment complexes that can be redeveloped at a relatively higher density.
I also wanted to note that not all of the new housing is coming on top of houses. Close to where I live, there's a strip mall with an enormous parking lot that just got knocked down and is being converted to mixed-use development, including lots of apartments[1]. A bit further away next to Lawrence Caltrain station, and old suburban-style office park was torn down and again, has a big mixed-use development being built there[2].
Zoning laws. And existing owners who staunchly oppose increasing density by building larger buildings.
A lot of people who bought their single-family homes years or decades ago now live in appealing low-density neighborhoods with home values that are sky-rocketing. They don't want their neighborhoods to change into concrete canyons, and the ever-rising values of their homes fund their retirements very nicely. They therefore fight any attempt to increase density by loosening zoning laws.
This behavior is exacerbated by how California handles its property taxes. Essentially, the property taxes on a home are fixed at the value of the home when you bought it, meaning people living in homes that have increased in value are paying disproportionately low property taxes. This tends to discourage people from moving, thereby reducing the liquidity of the home market.
It is also one of the big reasons California can have such an enormous theoretical tax base, but still manage to run a massive deficit.
You can bet there would be more pushback on those skyrocketing home values if people had to pay the taxes on them. Its too late for a lot of people in the valley, they couldn't afford to pay anything close to what their homes current access at. It is the epitome of Got Mine, Fuck You.
Why do you think I should pay crazy property tax values on the Sunnyvale house I paid $250,000 for in 1988 just because some nut paid $2,000,000 for the identical house next door to mine last year? Why do you want to see my pushed out of my home with a $45,000/year property tax bill? You are pure evil, plain and simple.
The people who bought their houses 30+ years ago I really feel for. The change the area is experiencing is brutal, and imagine if everyone just kept asking you why you don't sell and move away from the very place you built?
It's futile for them to fight things, and honestly it ruins a lot of people's lives that they do. However I completely understand why they would push back on density, most people don't have to deal with growth at these types of numbers over their lifetime.
> most people don't have to deal with growth at these types of numbers over their lifetime.
I used to live in Houston, and my parents still live there, and the growth (in construction, not price) they'd dealt with (and enjoyed) puts anywhere in the SF Bay Area to shame.
That's surprising! I think the big difference between Houston's sprawl and the Bay Area's increase in density is that the style of life your parents lead is probably the same they did before. Do you think that's true?
It is true, and it is only true because Houston allows free construction with no zoning whatsoever, so even when density increases the rents and property values don't go up that much and thus no one is every forced out.
Honest question. How does Party A, living in a house that Party B wishes to replace with an apartment, ruin the life for Party C? Or is it B whose life is ruined? Or A's? Or am I misunderstanding you?
Because now Party C can't get affordable housing. Party A blocks Party B (builders/real estate people) from builing more housing which would make things more affordable for Party C.
It is was only housing! But it's infrastructure, too. You need to put in extra sewage, electric, roads, schools &c to accommodate the rise in population, and that is going to be painful. With Proposition 13, how does a municipality raise funds for new schools or a sewage plant expansion?
Typically through Mello-Roos districts. It's pretty common for residents of newer developments to have an additional line item on their property tax bills. This is to service bonds that were taken out for things like new roads, schools, water, and sewage. Mello-Roos districts are pretty popular with existing residents, since they don't have to pay for new infrastructure to accommodate new residents.
From the wiki page:
>Many communities requiring new schools or other public infrastructure such as public parks and roads impose Mello-Roos taxes as an alternative to (or in addition to) impact fees paid directly by real estate developers. While real property taxes are generally levied as a percentage of the assessed value of the parcel, a Mello-Roos tax is levied independent of assessed property value (a parcel tax), and is not subject to Proposition 13 property tax rate limitations.
I think Mello-Roos is awful in some ways. New owners in the area shouldn't have massively disproportionate tax burdens because they moved there a few years later (in some cases that is a very large difference). Especially when you consider things like the fact that people are still using the resources just as equally.
Areas change, and increasing taxes on all residents (even if it forces some out) is unfortunately part of the downward pressure of house prices that our market is missing.
Elsewhere in the country in saner real estate markets, if taxes increase too much and you need to move as a result, that's what happens. It absolutely sucks, but it helps balance the inventory.
>New owners in the area shouldn't have massively disproportionate tax burdens because they moved there a few years later (in some cases that is a very large difference).
But they're paying for new infrastructure that didn't need to exist if they didn't move there. How is it fair to ask existing homeowners to pay more because new people moved in nearby?
Mello-Roos is really no different than developer fees included in the price of a new home.
Let me paint a picture for you and you tell me if you think this is fair.
If you moved to the area in 2012, odds are you got a very good deal. If you moved in 2015, odds are you paid several hundred thousand dollars more for your home than your neighbor in a comparable home.
Do you think there is such a radical difference in infrastructure needs during that period to warrant shifting a disproportionate percentage of that burden to the person who bought only a couple years later? That is madness when talking about the kinds of dollars we are when things are percentage based.
Further, long-time owners in the area have been paying massively less than newer residents despite taking advantage of any new infrastructure funded by newer taxes thanks to Prop 13. Oftentimes to a comical degree.
>If you moved to the area in 2012, odds are you got a very good deal. If you moved in 2015, odds are you paid several hundred thousand dollars more for your home than your neighbor in a comparable home.
I don't see what that has to do with new infrastructure. If you moved in 2007, people moving to the area in 2011 were paying half what you paid.
>Do you think there is such a radical difference in infrastructure needs during that period to warrant shifting a disproportionate percentage of that burden to the person who bought only a couple years later?
When you move into a Mello-Roos district you're paying for the infrastructure that was built for you. That's not a shifting tax burden. That's paying your own freight. If it's too much, don't move there. There are plenty of old houses that were either never in a Mello-Roos district or for which the bonds are paid off.
>Further, long-time owners in the area have been paying massively less than newer residents despite taking advantage of any new infrastructure funded by newer taxes thanks to Prop 13. Oftentimes to a comical degree.
That's true, but it's also true for new residents who move into an older area.
i went to school with a lot of wealthy kids from the bay area.
they and their families simply do not want to develop the area any further, in order to keep housing as high as possible and the area exclusive as possible. in private conversation they talk about it openly.
personally i don't think it's much more complicated than that.
You don't. Grandma should move to someplace cheaper. The cures are worse than the disease, and if property taxes really have increased that much, she's in for a nice windfall when she sells and buys something cheaper elsewhere.
People don't like to hear this because it is just a very non-PC narrative, but it is the truth.
In other real estate markets, this is a huge downward pressure on housing prices by the fact that if taxes get too high, it increases the inventory by the amount of people forced out. The Bay Area is almost entirely lacking in that pressure, which combined with other Prop 13-related issues and the area's popularity makes a perfect storm for this current fiasco.
Nobody wants ol' granny, or that single mom who has lived there forever, etc. to have to uproot their life and leave, but there simply is no way to have a happy outcome for everyone. And, to your point, if property taxes have increased that much, the increased home value should take some of the sting out of it when they go to sell.
There are very real emotional downsides to all of this, but ultimately I'm of the opinion that people being forced out of areas as they gentrify due to property taxes are a necessary part of a healthy real estate ecosystem.
Really curious to see what happens in the long game as the families who inherit homes that were locked into old tax levels are forced to sell as they can't pass them on to a second generation without the tax rate resetting.
Anyone have an estimate on when that may be? Perhaps we'll see a major correction in Bay Area house prices at that point as the inventory increases from that.
> Really curious to see what happens in the long game as the families who inherit homes that were locked into old tax levels are forced to sell as they can't pass them on to a second generation without the tax rate resetting.
That game has already been played. Transfers between generations do not cause reassessment.
Wow, that's crazy. I knew there was an exclusion of reassessment for initial transfer between parents and children (or grandparents and grandchildren in the event of deceased parents) but I didn't realize it just continued in perpetuity down the generational line. My original understanding was that the home could be transferred without triggering the reset in this manner once, and then subsequent times caused a reset.
Bad into worse just about sums it up. If it wasn't for Prop 58 and 193 you'd expect that eventually, decades from now once the majority were reset, that Prop 13 would have a chance of being struck down, but this just ensures that future generations have every incentive to keep homes in the family.
She can take the payout and buy some place more affordable, perhaps even an apartment in the building that replaces her house. Not the best outcome for her, I'm sure, but beats the hell out of starving municipal and state governments of revenue, broken infrastructure, and forcing everyone else to pay extortionate rents and mortgages just to live there.
If the law allows it and the regulatory compliance costs are low enough, maybe grandma can take out a home equity loan and turn her 1-story ranch into a 3-story apartment and take advantage of the cash flow. If she needs a little more, and her neighbors are also having trouble paying their property taxes, they can pool their resources together and build an even larger apartment block to replace their old houses. Win-win for everyone, except for busybody NIMBYs who care about "neighborhood character" to the exclusion of everything else.
Any argument that boils down to "grandma should move to make room for the techies" lacks perspective and will never gain any political traction. Moving is not just something you "do" after building a life somewhere for 40 years.
As I mentioned, she doesn't have to 'move' except in the most technical sense--she can take house a home equity loan (made possible by the house's appreciation) and convert her house into an apartment by adding another floor or converting a garage or by demolishing the house and building an apartment block in its stead. She can continue to live in one of the units, probably the first floor, and benefit from a reliable stream of income from tenants.
Oh, and BTW, this idea that "techies" aren't people, or somehow less deserving of moral consideration than everyone else, is reprehensible.
Speaking as a "technie" myself, I feel no one really addresses the undercurrent of entitlement to live in the city. Maybe I'm wrong, but I get the sense that a lot of the housing discussion in the tech community boils down to "but... I really want to live in SF for cheap". From what I understand, it's very common for programmers to live in the (very expensive) city and commute down to the South Bay for work. That's not a pattern borne out of necessity.
- Many people believe living in the place one was born/grew up in should be a right. That's a value difference. Markets do not get to dictate everything if we don't allow that.
Luckily, the market does have a solution to the housing problem itself: build a lot more of it, and prices will drop.
Will highrises and density bring rent down? I think it's been shown that the number of houses needed to actually do that is enormous. In practice, what's likely to happen is that the city will fill up with even more of the well-off. (That is to say, people working in tech.) In a decade rent might come back down, but by then all those groups will be long gone anyway.
Personally, I don't have any vested interest SF housing, as it's really not one of my favorite cities. But I keep thinking of what I would do if this was happening to a city I did actually love and live in, and I think in that situation I would be more sympathetic to the NIMBYs than the newcomers. I don't think there's any moral imperative for cities to keep growing.
At any given density, replacing low-rises with high-rises will bring rent down, as long as construction isn't overly burdened with neighborhood review and low-income-unit requirements. Sure, a lot of units will need to be constructed for rents to come down a significant amount, but a massive swath of the western sections of the city consists of 1-3 story single family houses, maybe with a shop on the first floor, which are ripe for conversion into 5-story walk-ups. That alone will provide a significant boost to housing stock without the seismic and elevator costs of high-rises.
SF isn't my favorite city either, but what has happened in my current and favorite city (Boston) has made my less sympathetic to NIMBYs, both the high-income (I want my house to appreciate without doing any work!) and low-income (I want 20% of units just for me!/Screw the middle class!) types--they are the ones making things worse. Cities grow because businesses move there, and businesses move there because they want to be close to and network with other businesses. Employees can't exactly prevent that by staying in Nowhere, KS. I agree, there isn't any moral imperative for cities for keep growing, but for now at least, there is a practical one, and thus there is a moral imperative for cities to accommodate those to wish to live there.
It is enormous, no question. If governments and people were serious about it, it could be done, though. I don't think anyone is arguing it would be easy.
It is a necessity, because the rest of the Bay Area has even higher housing costs--at least the parts that aren't subject to terrible commutes, which are in large part caused by Proposition 13 starving governments of revenue. They don't want to live in SF for cheap, but they do want to live in SF for not-soul-crushingly-sums-of-money. Wanting to live where you work is certainly not an entitlement, at least not more than wanting your neighborhood to look the way it did 30 years ago forever and ever.
But tech industry salaries are inflated in lockstep. The rule of thumb is 30% of your income for rent, which is appropriate for $100k+ entry-level salaries. Also, out of the (admittedly very small and anecdotal) subset of programmers living in SF I've talked to, most have indicated that they live in SF because they like it there, not because it's cheaper than South Bay.
Any argument that boils down to "this other argument lacks perspective" presumes that there is a preferably alternative without all kinds of unintended consequences.
We're seeing the unintended consequences of one alternative. Of course, we haven't tested all of the possible universes yet.
My point is that changing the deeply-entrenched status quo is not a matter of looking at a spreadsheet and picking the "best" option. The consequences of the alternative have to be preferable over the consequences of the status quo to the voter base. No amount of rabble-rousing will make people vote against their own best interests.
by means testing whether or not people can have their property seized over property taxes for one thing, rather than a blanket freeze on taxation except during sale that has horrific consequences.
Increased density to reduce the upward pressure on the housing market. Basically you have enough homes so the prices don't get bid up to insane levels.
It's basic economics. If you have a somewhat fixed demand and artificially restrict supply, the price is going to shoot through the roof.
The question was simply about how it could be guaranteed that grandmas can't be priced out of their own houses in conditions of sharply rising property values, not about optimal tax structure in general.
Have a narrow version of prop 13 for grandmas. If you've lived there for 10+ years, it's your primary residence, and can prove economic hardship, sure, you can get a break on your property taxes.
A compromise solution is to give people fully-paid relocation / temporary housing (e.g., putting them up in a hotel room), then guaranteeing them an apartment in the new housing development at their old price. Very small price to pay for a potentially massive number of units.
The city puts on the lien on the home for the value of the accumulated rise in property taxes. Once the owner dies, family members sell the house, and pay off the lien.
I have no idea why Prop 13 was created when the aforementioned solution allows grandma to stay in her house without destroying the housing market in the process.
> Which was created to combat the problem of grandma kicked out of her house because she can't afford her property taxes. How do you get around that?
No, it wasn't created to combat that problem; if it was, it would have (even had the same general approach been used) been narrowly drawn to residential property, and maybe even only to properties that are primary residence of the owner.
> How do you get around that?
Lots of ways, including going to full value annual assessment of all property, but allow, for owner-occupied primary residences, deferment of taxes in excess of the lesser of the total tax due in the year of sale [0] increased by 2% per year since the sale or some function of the owner's income (the exact function is an implementation detailed) to be deferred until the property is sold [0], with the taxing authority acquiring a lien on the property.
[0] Note that you can expand "sale" to include the same kind of improvements that allow new assessments under Prop 13, as well.
I live in NJ and the property taxes here are among the highest in the nation. My parents house is currently at 8k per year and that is considered "good".
Even in neighborhoods with shit schools taxes are ludicrous, an acquaintance of my family is paying 14k taxes for a small single family home in a town with a high school ranked 294 out of about 400 in the state. She wants to sell the house but due to high taxes and shit school buyers are hard to find.
Property taxes almost doubled in the past 10 years in my area, I am not looking forward to buying a house and then the property taxes doubling in another 10 years.
Proposition 13 sounds great to someone from New Jersey.
I'm sure there are plenty of non-rich people in older homes who don't want to ruin the feel of their favorite neighborhoods. The current anointed opinion in the tech community is that the housing crisis is mostly caused by the rich trying to fence off the city for themselves, but I do wonder where that split is. Has anybody done an actual survey? I know that if I spent decades building my life in an idyllic city by the bay, you bet I would fight tooth and nail to keep gaudy highrises and corporate influence out of my area.
This attitude works right up until the kids want to start their own families... Then they realize they can't possibly live near the grandparents and having one home worth $1.5m doesn't do anything to help you buy two unless you're already making or have a lot of money.
You can see this split hitting out in sunset, as former NIMBYs flip toward pro-housing as their kids return from college.
I grew up in the San Jose and live in Mountain View. I have never heard anyone in the Bay Area express this opinion, nor do I hold it myself. Moreover, I am a homeowner, and have voted pro-housing in every election where it was an issue, and expressed a strong pro-housing opinion in every survey the city has offered.
Why are people so adamantly opposed to density? Well, I know the reason is to prop up the value of their homes, but if you think about places like New York, London, and Paris, that argument doesn't exactly hold. Those cities are incredibly dense and expensive, but people love living there enough to pay the high prices. People who can live anywhere choose to live there. I'm willing to bet that SV could triple its population, and property values would hold or increase. Supply will create it's own demand.
As a home owner in this area, the majority likely already have double or triple unrealized gains on their home value. The potential to lift that to 'quadruple', for the cost of increased noise, traffic, people, etc is probably not worth the the incremental gain (in theory).
In the previously underdeveloped and less desirable neighborhoods of Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, and even Mountain View, home prices have more than quintupled since the early 90's. In the first two, prices have roughly doubled since 2010.
I think it's because they are so attached to their cars, and more density brings more traffic.
Especially when starting with a low-density neighborhood that's poorly served by transit and everyone that lives there is tied to their car.
Places like NYC, London, and Paris have great public transit systems, it's easy to live there without a car, but much harder to do that in spread out Silicon Valley, even if you live next to a VTA light rail station, be prepared for a very long trip if you want to go across town.
I live in mid-density housing in a mostly low density area, and many of my neighbors fought hard against a new high density apartment building being built nearby -- 2 of the most common concerns raised were traffic and street parking (oh, and crime was also raised -- apparently they thought that criminals were going to move in to those $3000 apartments).
It's been nearly 2 years, and those concerns are mostly unfounded -- I haven't seen any significant increase in commute time car traffic (though I bike to work, so maybe I just don't see it), there's usually still street parking available in the neighborhood, and afaik, there's been no uptick in burglary.
Regarding the crime issue, high density of people paying $3000/mo for an apartment attracts crime from outside the immediate vicinity. You've basically put a good amount of wealth in one place, and added more people. That makes crime more likely to be lucrative, identification harder, and escape easier.
Also, I know construction in my area has significantly impacted traffic. I leave for work before 7 AM, so I don't see it as badly, but when I leave at 8 AM, my typically 15 minute ride to the BART station can take over an hour. Most of the traffic is spillover from parents dropping kids off at school. I shudder to think of what it'll be like next week after school is out.
no, i'm not attached to my car, i just want some privacy and a quite area. i used to leave in 3 countries, changed a number of cities (from 50K to 10M) lived in all types of appartments and i finally have had enough of noisy neigbours in the middle of night.
I live in a townhouse with neighbors on both sides and never hear any of the neighbors (except for when their kids are playing in the back patio). Quality construction can go a long way toward giving you the privacy you desire. no need to separate houses by 30 feet of grass.
Separate houses and grass don't provide any meaningful sound protection. They may get you down from "100 offensive sounds per day" to 10, but that's far less effective than just building proper insulation.
townhouse is almost a house in that regard, now try a highrise where you can't choose quality construction. once when i rented appartments on the sixth floor i had to call the police to stop an argument happening on the 4th floor in the middle of the night. and i'm not even talking about some kids showing off theirs 'sporty' bikes/cars at 2am.
When I lived in a high-rise, I chose one that had quality construction with decent soundproofing between units. I rarely hear neighbors in any direction (above, below or to either side).
Unless you're a prisoner (or someone else is paying for your housing because you can't afford it), you can always choose quality of construction -- it may not be where you want to live, or might be more than you want to pay, but it's still your choice.
You've just chosen to make a tradeoff and accepted the noisy building (and you've rewarded those that built the thin walled, noisy building by paying to live there).
I live in a relatively new apartment building in SF; and it's fairly well isolated (against sound). I've heard people from above my floor once, and just barely; it sounded like they were moving heavy furniture, i.e. not something you do regularly. If I play music in my apartment I can barely hear it standing directly in front of my apartment's door. They're constructing a bunch more additional buildings nearby, and some of them are the wood style you reference, and others look more solid.
FWIW, even with a mostly wood based construction, you can still insulate well. It just takes the desire to do so.
The obvious solution here is to have zoning that mandates high-quality soundproofing. I don't think the pro-development crowd would object in the least if this was bundled with substantially higher density limits. That's the kind of regulation that's relatively unobjectionable.
That's a call for thick walls (including/especially party walls, floors and ceilings) and triple-pane windows, not restrictions on density. Unfortunately, due to the real estate industry's fixation on square footage and granite countertops to the exclusion of any other measure of quality, that's not likely to happen in most places.
it might be hard due to HOA/condo rules; and if you rent the place than good luck trying to change anything there.
and given the way condos built in the US/canada it's just impossible, i was pretty surprised when i saw a six floors condo built with wooden frame, something like that:
https://imgur.com/usO1i9r
The most effective soundproofing is designed in at construction time, it's difficult to impossible to add it in later, unless you're willing to build an entire noise-isolated shell within your walls.
I have a hard time imagining HOA/condo rules working against soundproofing--if anything they'd be thrilled about it if you were willing to put in the money, since it improves the value of the property and community. Yeah, renters are out of luck, but too many landowners are too short-sighted to improve their properties and increase rent to capture the additional value.
BTW, wooden frames can be very soundproof, as long as you pack every wall and ceiling with heavy (i.e. rock wool or cellulose) insulation and ceiling and mount drywall on standoffs instead of directly on studs.
i mentioned it because i have an anecdotical evidence right now - a friend of mine is fighting with his HOA trying to replace windows in his appartments. The only solution he came up by today is to become a part of HOA committee and then change the rules they have. i have another solution in mind - to stay away from HOA in the first place.
i bet they can be soundproof but what i see here is that the builders are trying to cut every corner they can, trying to build as much as possible houses/condos which are sold even before the construction begins (http://www.seattletimes.com/business/home-prices-soar-again-...).
I suspect that they aren't objecting to the sound proofing itself, but an architectural change of using a different style of windows than the rest of the units.
That's my suspicion too--the most airtight and thus soundproof windows are casements, which are common in continental Europe but less so in Anglophone countries where sash windows dominate, and HOAs (as well as historical preservation committees--the bane of energy efficient retrofits everywhere) often take a dim view of replacing the latter with the former.
We live in a flat that is in ~1800 townhouse that was converted to flats about ~1900. Have never heard a single noise from neighbours (external walls are 1m sandstone!). We also have original shutters on most windows which do a lot to overcome the weaknesses of old sash windows.
Once you move in, you can always save up for a year or two, rip out the drywall, put in some insulation and remount the drywall on resilient channels. Windows generally aren't a problem since even the crappiest code-minimum windows are pretty good these days. Floors are a challenge though, unless you can convince downstairs neighbors to put in some insulation or just straight up pay for it yourself.
That's surely one aspect in this case, as accommodating traffic is an important part of city planning. However, there's way more resistance to building high-density housing in San Francisco, which has an even worse housing crisis than the South Bay but all of the public transit infrastructure required for a car-free life. NIMBYism and dogmatic recreational activists can be powerful forces everywhere. :(
There are even high levels of NIMBYism in downtown Manhattan neighborhoods like the East Village.
My understanding of the problem is some people really dislike change, and those same people disproportionately vote in local elections and attend city planning meetings. Because planning decisions are hyper-local in America, there's no "regional growth" advocate at these meetings, and nobody is going to attend planning meetings to fight for some developer to build their high-rise, so the opposition wins.
As elsewhere in the bay area, many residents of SV want the physical structure of their neighborhood to be forever frozen in amber as it was circa 1960, and they've enacted robust zoning laws to that effect.
Silicon Valley was a quaint, sleepy semi-rural suburb in 1960, and that's how they want it to stay, at least in terms of physical appearance.
The problem is that, despite these zoning laws, they can't actually stop people from moving in from other regions, which causes property values to skyrocket. You can easily pay 2m there for an ordinary 3 bedroom ranch house that would be 70k in most of the US.
Because they don't just like it. They want a neighborhood that's completely detached single-family homes and where driving is hyper-dominant, and if that means they have to support policies that hurt middle- and working-class newcomers, so be it. Of course, many of the people 'opposed to density' are okay with density somewhere in the bay area, just not where they live, hence the term NIMBY.
> Well, I know the reason is to prop up the value of their homes
Yes, but not in the way you expect, which is why your comparison fails.
In many cases, its not to prop up the market value of their homes, but the features of the community which supports the personal value they place in their homes: its "I live here, and I'd like to keep it the kind of place it is that led me to choose to live here".
The desire to keep a city looking the same as it was decades ago does seem to be a powerful motivator for a lot of anti-housing people.
It's always seemed a little perverse to me. Cities are dynamic, constantly changing organisms. Trying to keep a city from changing over decades is like forcing a 9-year-old kid to wear diapers and sleep in a crib because you liked the way it was as a baby and you never want it to change.
Most people simply don't like change. Some changes can't be avoided, such as a kid growing up. Other changes can be avoided, such as by passing zoning laws that make it illegal to substantially change the physical appearance of the town you live in. When it's possible, people seek that out.
It's also hypocritical: for the city to have reached the state which they originally bought into, it had to have changed. If SV was still zoned exclusively for farms or something, then the neighborhood they like so much wouldn't have existed in the first place.
> Cities are dynamic, constantly changing organisms. Try to keep a city from changing over decades is like forcing a 9-year-old kid to wear diapers and sleep in a crib because you liked the way it was as a baby and you never want it to change.
Well, except that cities, even if viewed as "organisms", aren't people, they serve people, and its quite natural for people to want them kept in the state that they feel best serves their interests.
I think this metaphor might actually be able to be stretched a little more. Even as an organism purposed only to serve us, the fact that us humans change means that we're likely to be better served by something that can change with us. Just because you liked it as a baby and think it is best able to suit your needs as it was, doesn't mean that it won't be better suited to serve your needs as a functional adult.
I think people are afraid of change, not because they know it is not in their best interest, but mostly because they aren't sure, so the status quo seems to be the safer option. It's why humans are averse to change in a lot of scenarios, we sometimes have a little bit of trouble with the long term perspectives.
> its quite natural for people to want them kept in the state that they feel best serves their interests.
Eh, it's possible to take this kind of self-interest too far. Like by the same token, you could say, "well, it's only natural for non-poor people to shoot down programs that will help the poor, because it's not in their interest".
Like, expecting people to give up a little for the benefit of wider society is not unreasonable. We're not talking about forcibly seizing people's homes here, just about allowing their neighbors to sell to developers who will build more housing. That's not exactly a huge sacrifice.
For more recent buyers I'll bet the market value piece is pretty high on the list. If you bought in the last couple of years while things have been increasing, you want to see that trend increase. If suddenly prices drop because there's a ton more dense housing (which also impacts the other desirability factors of the neighborhood), you could easily be underwater on your $1M+ mortgage.
Given the amount of money at stake for said buyers, I can't say I entirely blame them for voting in their financial interests when the alternative might be a very bleak financial outlook, a decent chance of increased crime, traffic, etc.
I’ve owned several houses. The more recently I bought, the LESS I care about the value of the house. It’s just numbers on paper. Money isn’t at stake until I’m trying to sell, which I’m certainly not looking to to do if I just recently bought.
Depends on where you are in life financially, the market you're in, and whether this is your first purchase.
If you bought recently, you probably had some sense that the market was a bit out of whack, but may have decided it was the right decision for other reasons. That doesn't make most people any less concerned about the future value of their house, particularly if they know they are not buying into their "Forever Home" and will one day need to sell and move elsewhere.
The bay area is also an unusual case. Somehow I don't think anyone's worried about CURRENTLY being underwater on their mortgage here, and I don't think anyone worries about housing growth happening so fast that it drives their values DOWN.
I would expect it to be the other way around -- the more recently you bought (especially in the over-inflated Bay Area market), the more you need to worry about ending up underwater in your home value.
If you bought 20 years ago, even if a fire burnt down your house, it's likely that the land alone would give you a healthy profit. If you bought 2 years ago, a significant downturn in the market could leave you underwater.
Few people plan to sell their home shortly after buying it, but a market downturn could leave you without a job and you can't afford to move elsewhere for a job if you can't afford to take a loss by selling your house for less than your mortgage.
I bought in the last couple of years while things have been increasing. You're right, I'd rather not be underwater, but I can stomach it or I wouldn't have bought.
But you're making a huge logical jump to say that building housing could magically slaughter my house value and that I'd be underwater because of it.
I'm worried about being underwater because of a recession or cyclical trends or tech jobs wholesale abandoning the area, or any number of things.
The LAST thing I worry about is housing being built so fast that it'll tank the value of my house. It simply won't. If there's enough continued demand for housing, by all means, build, build, build. It means neighborhoods will get more vibrant. I see no scenario where building will tank my house value (short of building and THEN a recession).
I don't think people worry about growth hurting their home value. I agree with others here that they worry about the impact on what THEY value in their neighborhood, but most people aren't looking to sell their primary residence so a temporary slowdown in the growth rate of the equity is simply not on their radar as an important matter.
Mind if I ask if this is your "forever home" or close to it? I'll bet there's a hefty divide in whether or not people are worried about it going underwater based on their outlook for how long they intend to live there.
I think it's a question of local optimization. New housing units increase supply and lower the clearing price. Once people move in, new amenities such as more and better cultural institutions, restaurants, hobbyist clubs, retail establishments, public transit systems, etc. become feasible. So in the long run, the city becomes more civilized and desirable. Clearing price goes up relative to regions that are less-developed. But generally speaking people tend to make short-term and selfish decisions rather than thinking about what could be if many people behave altruistically, forgoing short-term gains and temporary inconveniences in order to reap long-term benefits (global optimization).
There's gotta be a way to economically make a lack of density untenable. Urban sprawl is a threat to the environment, we talk about charging a tax on Carbon, what about on Urban Sprawl?
P.S: Not saying a carbon tax is the best idea, but urban sprawl (like carbon emissions) have a negative impact on the environment but zero impact on maximizing capital gains. They two must be tied somehow.
There are lots of ways. Extremely high gasoline taxes seem to be popular in Europe. When driving costs $10 or $12 a gallon instead of $2 or 3, people want to drive a lot less.
High property values also work, as in Europe. In a relatively small European country, there is just a lot less land supply, so it costs a lot and people tend to build much more densely. By contrast the US is huge and has an enormous amount of vacant land, so land is (relatively) extremely cheap in the US, encouraging low density development.
Finally, the main reason low density is tenable is that zoning laws in the US are in most places specifically set up to discourage high density construction and make it unprofitable.
In the early 20th century, zoning laws were first enacted in the US by the so called "Progressive Movement". They observed that the rich enjoyed spacious country estates while the poor lived in crowded, dense slums, so they decided to "help" the poor live in what they deemed better conditions by making it illegal or difficult to build new high density neighborhoods at all.
I wasn't comparing them. I was describing the historical circumstances that led to the zoning laws that still make it difficult to do profitable high density residential development in most of the US, and specifically how the paucity of non-tenement high density apartment buildings is an ongoing side effect of these laws.
> Urban sprawl is a threat to the environment, we talk about charging a tax on Carbon, what about on Urban Sprawl?
A carbon tax (as long as cars use energy derived from sources covered by a carbon tax, whether that's fossil fuels directly or electricity produced in some share by burning fossil fuels) is a tax on urban sprawl, since urban sprawl forces longer trips and less-fuel-efficient transportation.
Even with increased density, the bay area's freeways and transit systems are already jammed up. All those people would have a hard time getting anywhere.
Also because they were there "first". That goes for suburbanites as well as gentrifying creatives, as well as the poor people creatives displaced and the subsequent hipsters and then the professional types who flood the streets with thousand dollar strollers.
I don’t care what the value of my home is until I am ready to sell, and I don’t plan to do that for a long time. I do care if the qualities that lead me to choose to live where I do change. Additional density can drastically change those qualities.
I’ll admit that this motivation is no less selfish than the financial one, but I do think it’s different.
You're presuming people like living in big cities. In reality it could be they are only there because of the jobs and the reasonable commute. Lose a job? Can find another one without moving. And of course, there's the night life, the concentration of museums, art galleries, performance arts, etc.
But most people I know still go (or at least try to) for their vacation to some tropical paradise. They would live there if they could. But most people can't.
FWIW that is the wrong question. People are opposed to change.
So Sunnyvale has been building a number of apartment buildings and condos around. There has been tremendous back pressure for existing residents (not me but I'm a rarity it seems). The root of their concern is that they don't want the neighborhood experience to change from what they know (or knew) to something they don't know. I talked to some folks who had moved into the apartments near downtown Murphy street. They loved them, easy access to Caltrain, lots of things to do and places to go, they are excited about future growth.
The issue in Sunnyvale at least is that people don't seem to internalize that things change. They won't acknowledge that their cute little bungalow house used to be an orchard (where only birds and perhaps squirrels lived, had we given them a say at City Council there would be no houses anywhere!). They will argue strongly for their values and their memories and opinions of what is "right" and what is "wrong." Meanwhile we have people in their 20's and 30's who don't want to own a car, they want tight walkable spaces with an easy way to get to San Francisco or the airport. Now maybe 20 years from now those same people will be resisting even denser housing or something I don't know.
We could easily build 200,000 market rate dwellings on existing, unused, parcels in Sunnyvale and house close to half a million people in them. But for folks remember empty streets and quiet drives, those people are going to be really really unhappy.
Well as an actual Sunnyvale resident the fears are slightly more rational: cars on roads, kids in schools and no increase in infrastructure to go along with the thousands of new residents.
Some of the buildings have less than one parking spot per apartment which in theory is supposed to help encourage people to use transit, in practice people fear it will lead to more street parking in adjacent residential neighbourhoods which already have pretty full streets.
200,000 dwellings in Sunnyvale would be a DoS attack on the city's infrastructure, not some new urban dreamland.
Broadly, there's enough space in the Peninsula to build whole high-density self-contained cities - Facebook wants to build housing at their office park and if the only condition was shops in walking distance too, I'm sure they could satisfy that requirement also.
Maybe these possibilities haven't been explained well but I sort of think there are other interests that would prefer things stay approximately as they are.
Edit: one aspect that occurs to me is that developers probably wouldn't want a process that solves the housing crisis immediately either. It seems to me that satisfying the pent-up demand for housing gradually, project by project, would allow a developer to scoop up a lot of the excess, monopoly home-value now enjoyed by homeowners whereas if a huge stock of apartments appeared in one big bang, developers could wind-up selling them at costs plus a small profit level.
Not sure why I'm being downvoted - my personal opinion is that densification of Sunnyvale and the area in general is fine, but the opposition to it isn't completely irrational. Short of a nuclear bomb going off Sunnyvale is never going to turn into Manhattan or even Staten Island.
I don't know why you're getting down voted either. will the down voters please address the following concerns?
1. Considering that some of the apartment dwellers will become homeowners and their place will be taken by new apartment dwellers, how will the overcrowded schools support the influx?
2. Considering people will take public transit to go to work, they still would use cars to move around locally in the area on evenings and weekends. How will the current streets support the greater density of cars? e.g. Central Expressway used to be an expressway now it is a parking lot.
3. Overburdened police and firemen will be exposed to further strain.
4. Parking is a nightmare not just on residential streets but even at local establishments. Space needed for parking is used to build more housing.
Unless you live here and face these issues it's easy to downvote rather than come up with solutions that are at pace with the housing construction boom.
If I paid over a million dollars to buy a house in a school district that has a good score what would you suggest I do when suddenly the student to teacher ratio is so skewed that the education of my children suffers?
There are a couple of things at play of course. Apartment ownership pays parcel taxes just like single family home owners. However 1/3 of the budget is tax revenue. Of the taxes, the two big heavy hitters are property tax (16%) and sales tax (9%) of the total revenue[1]. More people, more business transacted, more revenue.
As revenue increases, city services can be expanded. Schools on the other hands are basically crooks as far as I can tell. The reason being that I have yet to get the Fremont Union Highschool District to offer up actual budget numbers and actual spend. They will argue all sorts of things about "confidentiality of teacher salaries" or "we're not a government so we don't have to give you that information." but generally I have not been impressed with the way they operate. [2]
Traffic and parking is a legitimate concern. Traffic has gotten worse again (after getting better after the dot com crash). But many programs are targeted at making the city more bike accessible for easier access.
Fremont isn't the only town/city in SV and not all school districts in SV are crooked. Also, you didn't really address one of the big concerns the parent commented pointed out, that is new dwellings would be a DoS on current infrastructure for most places. It's not like you can get that infrastructure in time for it.
Oddly enough the "Fremont Union High School District"[1] is only high schools in the Sunnyvale/Cupertino area. The town of Fremont has a different school district. That said, I realize that new housing would impact schools, especially if people have kids. So far the number of new families who actually have kids that have been moving in seems to be a relatively small ratio (lots of couples who are both working and don't have kids). Its a good question to ask the city manager though. They probably have a handle on what the numbers look like.
Well the increased tax base will help pay for expanded services. Yes there will be a lag time of a few years (if you had a real proactive city council you could be hiring as early as the following year each be property comes online with increased parcel tax revenue), but the schools should have some room to breathe as most of the people moving to these new high density downtown apartments will be empty nesters (freeing up current single family housing) and young mostly childless professionals.
Yes, but do the good people of Sunnyvale vote for infrastructure projects? Do they allocate enough funds for building that infrastructure, and/or do they have rational expectations for where those funds will come from?
Even if you fear putting the cart before the horse, it simply begs the question of why you don't already have the horse. And the answer to that, I think, is back to what was stated above: fear of change, of urbanization, of government, of government spending, of property value declines, of loss of "heritage" – whatever that means to a farming town that replaced its (AFAIK) last orchard with a strip mall called the "Cherry Orchard" in 1999...
(BTW, I don't really mean to pick too much on Sunnyvale in particular here. The increased demand on housing and infrastructure can't be solved by Sunnyvale alone. It's a massive regional problem, if not a state problem, and the entire region is falling way short of meeting its needs.)
There is a new school being built but it's in an area that's already underserved and bussing kids pretty far. SCUSD (much of Sunnyvale is in the Santa Clara Unified School District - why school district boundaries are disjoint with municipal boundaries around here I can't explain) passed a $419M bond measure in 2014 (Measure H) which includes classroom expansions.
Sadly it's not quite so easy to increase road capacity as unlike a real city where you can add residents without adding vehicles, it's simply not possible to add residents in the 'burbs without adding an equal number of cars on the road. I'd love for it to be otherwise, but the sprawl can't be fixed just by rezoning lots for higher density.
I think it's more an issue of poor planning than fear of change (although yes, some residents want the city to be a 1966-themed amusement park). Hanlon's Razor and all. Personally I have no attachment to the sentimental issues around Sunnyvale but my proposed solution of levelling half the city and rebuilding it like central Toronto seems like a non-starter.
Schools district boundaries are distinct from municipal boundaries in California because school districts are separate from municipalities. A school district need not fall within a single county either. Often, you'll hear mayoral candidates campaigning in a platform of fixing schools; they are either misinformed or disingenuous, mayors in California have no official influence on schools.
All of those new buildings and people will result in a far higher property tax revenue base since they are new units not starting from a 1980s prop 13 tax base. From that you can build new schools, hire more teachers and police and develop more transit.
But that revenue will have to be saved for a few years before there's enough to build new schools with, hire teachers with, etc. Moreover there might be other budgetary needs that might want that money unless the money is tied to improving schools, streets, etc.
That is a mismanagement problem there. Why would new permanent income flows not get allocated to support the new flows?
Municipal bonds backed by future property tax flows in the one of the wealthiest cities in the USA is pretty secure, so you wouldn't have to save for a few years.
Even if you diagnose the problem it doesn't help with the symptoms. Infrastructure (i.e. transit, public institutions, etc) will not be able to support it in the short-term.
The thing is there is intense opposition to projects like highrises near caltrain as well.
And a project like that seems like it could result in both keeping single-family housing in many areas and solving the broad housing crisis. These directly hit against zoning limits but I suspect there's more going than inertia.
What confuses me the most is that, for these "change-hating" residents, this "undesirable neighborhood transition" comes right alongside a standing offer of millions of dollars to move a little further away, due to increased home value.
Maybe I haven't passed that critical milestone, but I can't think of a scenario where I'd complain if my neighborhood decay came with such a surge in net worth? (not trying to be sarcastic, could be an issue of be never having been that attached to a specific neighborhood)
(Naturally, this wouldn't apply to those who are without rent control, and suffer the double-whammy of more outsiders + higher rent.)
> 2) ROI isn't the most important thing about a home.
This is what someone replied earlier. For some ROI is the most important thing. For someone who lives in the suburbs I can say that for me it isn't the most important thing.
Maybe the smart move is to find a sustainable way to maintain current levels, tell newcomers that maybe a different city is right for them, and focus on improving conditions for the people already living there. There's can be more to city's goals than neverending growth, right?
Assuming this is a serious question and not a troll, see Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City, and/or my own essay, "Do millennials have a future in Seattle? Do millennials have a future in any superstar cities?" (https://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a-fut...).
As a Canadian who now lives in one of the US tech hubs, the reason I see at least is that Americans can't respect each other if their lives depend on it.
So density WILL make your life miserable. HoA rules, municipal laws, etc, are virtually not enforced. So you find a spot you consider tolerable, and you hope to god it stays that way. If someone decides to build a rental building near by, then it's basically over. You either learn to sleep through idiot screaming and people keeping a pair of saint bernards barking in a studio apartment near by, and frat parties that the cop will never do anything about or you move out.
Contrast that with up north, where I totally could call the cops on someone walking too loud at night and they'd do something about it (which virtually never needed to happen, since people were much more considerate. And I lived in quite a few places).
Now, I know what you'd say. In Canada/Europe/Whatever, it's just as bad! I had <insert exactly the situation I talked about above> happened a ton of times!.
No no, these situations don't "just happen". It's a constant, multiple times a day thing. And it's a constant struggle between those who don't care and can't understand those who do.
I actually consider it one of the biggest reasons of the divide between the rich and the poor. You have the people with enough money to live on the 40th+ floor of a nice building in NYC, and those dealing with the stress, noise and neighbors at the bottom, thinking they're fine with it (but it probably drastically affect their sleep patterns, productivity, happiness, etc...they just don't realize it). The rich just "run away", because we can't agree on rules and respect them so we can live together.
Also, don't forget how terrible public transportation is. NYC has one of the best systems in NA, and it's not exactly fantastic compared to what you can see in many densely populated cities on other continents. Nevermind other North American cities (Hello Boston?)
> The really strange thing is that the city's officials aren't being irrational.
As Yglesias is well aware, the city officials are only being rational in a very narrow sense.
A building project can only create as many jobs as it can pay for -- and the workers must be payed enough to buy or rent places to live. What lies behind the claim that it will "create too many jobs" is that the construction workers will compete in the housing market against people that the officials want to protect.
And even that "protection" is only coherent within a mindset where it is somehow evil to build new things, or else the stock of accomodation could be increased.
Construction workers already cannot remotely afford to compete in the Santa Clara / SV housing market, and they haven't been able to for a very long time. Construction work is also short-term and temporary in character. That is not the issue. Not everything that happens is a hidden plot against the long-suffering proletariat by the evil, scheming bourgeois.
The issue is what happened in Mountain View with Google, and in Cupertino with Apple -- a company builds a huge new campus that creates 60,000 or 100,000 new permanent, high-paying jobs, but zero new housing gets created, making the cost of living insanely high for everyone (not just for construction workers.)
This is because the cities won't allow any zoning changes to their low-density 1960s suburban setup. Their goal is to preserve the physical infrastructure in that low-density shape, not to keep out lowly poor people as such.
You'd think at some point salaries would climb high enough -- driven by housing costs -- that it stopped making sense to hire people in SV. But that hasn't happened yet, at least not for programmers.
They believe (rightly or wrongly) that the added costs are worth the benefits from the network effect of being in the region, around lots of other tech people.
Many of them are starting to build satellite offices in other places.
I think he was asking what rental price would have you choose to live in a rental house/apartment instead of the VW. Eg, to what extent is your choice out of economic necessity, and what are you willing/able to spend to live in a more conventional residence?
Not quite as old and cool as an aircooled 22 window DIY EV like the electric samba, just a digijet Vanagon Westy water-boxer plankton-burner. If/when I had 12 grand, I'm ripping the gas motor out and going EV because there's so many free/cheap charging places available now. Plus, climate change and jihaadis.
PS: CA, NJ and others plz vote today. I did yesterday. If you want change, you gotta be counted.
Bathrooms in corporate-owned establishments because there's no sense imposing unnecessary costs on independent shops whom cannot best afford it. Plan your day, schedule your meals and surprises are reduced. And for emergency or actual camping use only, I also have a compact, compostable toilet with the disposable bags (it's just a frame and disposable bags).
On a slightly different subject, I suggest anyone considering living a habitable vehicle not use on-board plumbing or sewage systems because they're messy, time-consuming and expensive to maintain. The vehicle I use only has a water tank but I still use water-store RO water in a washable refrigerator bottle. Using a tank and sink system requires flushing and sterilization periodically, and is often awkward to fill sanitarily.
Could you pack people into shared flat- without them noticing? As in - selfre-arranging Walls and Furniture, and Set-Furniture (Kitchen/Bathroom) that quietly pops up even before the user arrives?
Similar forces in effect for school districts. I remember Cupertino being against additional medium density development because of concern over overcrowding of schools. Given that background I'm modestly surprised that the new Vallco redevelopment got approved.
Sunnyvale is likewise overcrowded and parents are PISSED [1]. Can't say I blame them--if you drop a massive amount of money to get into a neighborhood with the school being a large driver of that, only to be told "sorry, we're overcrowded and you're kid is going to go to this school that is known to be significantly worse" I know I'd be livid and consider whatever means necessary to fix it.
While SF's random lottery system certainly has its issues, it does actually solve for some of these problems.
Very few people bother to vote in non-presidential elections. I keep hammering this point to anyone I meet in the startup scene here in SF. If just 1% of you reading this right now (who live in SF) bothered to vote on a pro-housing basis, we'd immediately turn into a huge voting bloc that could not be ignored. You should shame your coworkers and remind people in slack channels too. A few thousand NIMBYs currently control SF housing policy. Filling out an online form is all it takes to change that.
It's also really easy: register online and they mail the ballot to you. It's called "Permanent vote by mail". It takes almost no effort whatsoever.
You don't need a California drivers license. You don't need to have lived here for a year. You just have to have the intention to make California your current home (eg not a tourist).
For the lazy, SF Yes In My Backyard puts out voting slates of pro-housing politicians and propositions. Just reference that, draw the lines on the ballot, and drop it in the mail. You don't even have to buy a stamp.
I support the goals of increased density and more housing. I can't possibly vote the YIMBY slate though, and have advised friends not to as well. The YIMBY slate supports candidates who are the opposite of folks I'd like to see in government. The YIMBY slate endorses people who have voted to restrict people's ability to sit and lie in public places, voted against police reform and voted to make it illegal to be naked in the Castro.
I'm sorry, but those issues are important and for me, many of the people the YIMBY slate endorses are on the wrong side of it.
We don't have to sell out our values to be pro housing.
Down with height limits, down with protracted approval processes for construction, down with many of the things that hold back progress in the city. Let SF reach toward the sky.
But also, down with the YIMBY slate. It's just a set of candidates who aren't what I want to see in the city.
If the YIMBY slate wants to back actual tangible propositions or policy suggestions, I'm all ears. When they ask me to vote for people they selected because they think they might be "pro-housing" (as if anyone in SF is really anti-housing?) then I'm going to tell them the people I select to represent me are my business.
I'm happy to advocate for pro-housing policies. But I sure didn't and won't vote that YIMBY slate, and for the sake of the city I live in, I hope it's soundly defeated.
1) The majority of voters in SF aren't homeowners.
2) ROI isn't the most important thing about a home.
3) Even if you value property values over other values, affordable housing that can support a strong and diverse environment that is vital to maintaining the strength of the region. If you kill that engine, you kill the thing that created the high values to begin with. You can shoot the golden goose if you want, but don't claim it makes good economic sense. It doesn't.
Doubt it. Some friends of mine have bought homes here and none of them cared that much about ROI as a large factor in their purchasing decisions. They were buying a home.
You gotta be at least a little crazy to live in SF. I hope that's still true. It isn't particularly financially responsible, so you have to want to be here. That means the people who live here generally aren't doing it for their ROIs.
Are you sure finances is not a factor for most people making the biggest investment of their life? Well, if it isn't they are in for massive joy as every single person I know who have invested in a home sometime back have gotten really really good ROI (if they survived the housing crash).
#2 Sure ROI isn't everything. But when you forgo every other saving/investment opportunity to buy a house, then ROI becomes almost everything. Because that is your investment/future.
#3 I buy it that adding housing is overall better. I'm pro-housing. But what do you tell the folks who bought million dollar studio this year? That we are going to improve things for everyone (mostly coming in after you) at the expense of your investment? Are you open to building more housing and using tax dollars to reimburse folks who bought at peak?
One or two bedroom apartments don't decrease the value of single family homes.
More jobs and more population density increases the overall value of a city. New grads and singles moving into a city need a place to live, and rental units provide it.
Think about it this way - if you demolished all the apartment buildings in San Francisco or New York, would the value of single family homes go up or down? Would brownstones in New York be worth more if there were no apartment buildings Harlem or Queens? If you walled off and burned down the Tenderloin and Point Richmond, would that mean that houses in the sunset would be worth more? I doubt it, since the city overall would be a less desirable place to live with fewer opportunities to work, and lower density means that fewer bars, restaurants, retail establishments, museums etc.. could be supported.
>You don't need a California drivers license. You don't need to have lived here for a year. You just have to have the intention to make California your current home (eg not a tourist).
No, you also have to be a US citizen, which a lot of newcomers to the Bay Area are not.
ELECTIONS CODE
SECTION 2100-2124
2101. (a) A person entitled to register to vote shall be a
United States citizen, a resident of California, not imprisoned or on parole for the conviction of a felony, and at least 18 years of age at the time of the next election.
I can't really blame residents for wanting to keep the status quo. Living in a neighborhood of single-family homes has always been the image of the American dream. Why would they want to relinquish that?
Having lived in the bay for a long time - there are many "middle" housing places. Just none of them are new. Duplexes, and multiplexes are almost always in the worst areas, because they're not big enough to allow for walking or being close by a lot of services, but are dense enough to be VERY easily annoyed at neighbors. The only thing they're good at is being cheap to build.
Townhomes are popping up frequently and offer a slightly nicer version, but I don't honestly see much difference between a townhome without a yard and a more dense mid-rise other than available floorplans. I'm all for more density, but what frequently happens is that they build in moderately dense housing but all the plots are walled off from each other, there's nowhere to walk and so you just have more and more cars and traffic on the road. Full density or bust, I say.
Of course, but you can at least rezone and allow people to bulldoze their own buildings and replace them with high density residential if they choose to. If housing prices are high enough, many of them will choose to do that.
Perhaps the subtlety of the sentence is being missed. It says:
San Jose has taken the rare step of publicly opposing the project, saying it would add far too many jobs, exacerbating the region’s housing shortage.
In my opinion, the motivation is that the San Jose City Council is assuming that most of the workers would live in San Jose, exacerbating their housing price pressure while denying them any of the developer-fee benefits or tax base improvement.
And that's true. This has been the pattern throughout the history of the valley: San Jose's traditional business-unfriendliness has resulted in the major Silicon Valley names locating their businesses in Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Cupertino (Apple!), and Mountain View (Google!) over the decades.
San Jose's emphasis was always on grabbing all the land they could (incorporating county lands) without creating a business-friendly environment there. (Look at San Jose city boundaries in, say, 1950 versus now.)
It's another side-effect of one-party rule (for all but one mayoral dynasty) during this period.
Another demonstration of this nimby-ism is that San Jose and surrounding cities tend to dump problematic development on each other's borders. For example, Santana Row and Valley Fair straddle the San Jose - Santa Clara border. Neither felt any incentive to consider traffic effects of dumping all of this retail in less than a square mile. Result: gridlock so bad that it actually backs up onto the neighboring freeways (280 and 880/17) during November and December, at least.
205 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadI'd like to see reasonable prices sometime in my life !
http://www.lao.ca.gov/reports/2015/finance/housing-costs/hou...
http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/
I mean, probably every dense neighborhood in the world was at one time lower-density, and had its old buildings knocked down and replaced. This isn't anything new.
Generally, not all of them do, which is why redevelopment usually involves use of eminent domain.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London
There are lots and lots of parking lots, underutilized commercial buildings, and low density apartment complexes that can be redeveloped at a relatively higher density.
1 - http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2015/10/13/santa-cla...
2 - http://blogs.mercurynews.com/internal-affairs/2014/05/19/san...
A lot of people who bought their single-family homes years or decades ago now live in appealing low-density neighborhoods with home values that are sky-rocketing. They don't want their neighborhoods to change into concrete canyons, and the ever-rising values of their homes fund their retirements very nicely. They therefore fight any attempt to increase density by loosening zoning laws.
This behavior is exacerbated by how California handles its property taxes. Essentially, the property taxes on a home are fixed at the value of the home when you bought it, meaning people living in homes that have increased in value are paying disproportionately low property taxes. This tends to discourage people from moving, thereby reducing the liquidity of the home market.
You can bet there would be more pushback on those skyrocketing home values if people had to pay the taxes on them. Its too late for a lot of people in the valley, they couldn't afford to pay anything close to what their homes current access at. It is the epitome of Got Mine, Fuck You.
It's futile for them to fight things, and honestly it ruins a lot of people's lives that they do. However I completely understand why they would push back on density, most people don't have to deal with growth at these types of numbers over their lifetime.
I used to live in Houston, and my parents still live there, and the growth (in construction, not price) they'd dealt with (and enjoyed) puts anywhere in the SF Bay Area to shame.
The people who have been renting for 30+ years are the ones screwed by this.
Honest question. How does Party A, living in a house that Party B wishes to replace with an apartment, ruin the life for Party C? Or is it B whose life is ruined? Or A's? Or am I misunderstanding you?
From the wiki page:
>Many communities requiring new schools or other public infrastructure such as public parks and roads impose Mello-Roos taxes as an alternative to (or in addition to) impact fees paid directly by real estate developers. While real property taxes are generally levied as a percentage of the assessed value of the parcel, a Mello-Roos tax is levied independent of assessed property value (a parcel tax), and is not subject to Proposition 13 property tax rate limitations.
Areas change, and increasing taxes on all residents (even if it forces some out) is unfortunately part of the downward pressure of house prices that our market is missing.
Elsewhere in the country in saner real estate markets, if taxes increase too much and you need to move as a result, that's what happens. It absolutely sucks, but it helps balance the inventory.
But they're paying for new infrastructure that didn't need to exist if they didn't move there. How is it fair to ask existing homeowners to pay more because new people moved in nearby?
Mello-Roos is really no different than developer fees included in the price of a new home.
If you moved to the area in 2012, odds are you got a very good deal. If you moved in 2015, odds are you paid several hundred thousand dollars more for your home than your neighbor in a comparable home.
Do you think there is such a radical difference in infrastructure needs during that period to warrant shifting a disproportionate percentage of that burden to the person who bought only a couple years later? That is madness when talking about the kinds of dollars we are when things are percentage based.
Further, long-time owners in the area have been paying massively less than newer residents despite taking advantage of any new infrastructure funded by newer taxes thanks to Prop 13. Oftentimes to a comical degree.
I don't see what that has to do with new infrastructure. If you moved in 2007, people moving to the area in 2011 were paying half what you paid.
>Do you think there is such a radical difference in infrastructure needs during that period to warrant shifting a disproportionate percentage of that burden to the person who bought only a couple years later?
When you move into a Mello-Roos district you're paying for the infrastructure that was built for you. That's not a shifting tax burden. That's paying your own freight. If it's too much, don't move there. There are plenty of old houses that were either never in a Mello-Roos district or for which the bonds are paid off.
>Further, long-time owners in the area have been paying massively less than newer residents despite taking advantage of any new infrastructure funded by newer taxes thanks to Prop 13. Oftentimes to a comical degree.
That's true, but it's also true for new residents who move into an older area.
they and their families simply do not want to develop the area any further, in order to keep housing as high as possible and the area exclusive as possible. in private conversation they talk about it openly.
personally i don't think it's much more complicated than that.
Proposition 13
..and somehow NIMBYs are painted as the heartless ones?
In other real estate markets, this is a huge downward pressure on housing prices by the fact that if taxes get too high, it increases the inventory by the amount of people forced out. The Bay Area is almost entirely lacking in that pressure, which combined with other Prop 13-related issues and the area's popularity makes a perfect storm for this current fiasco.
Nobody wants ol' granny, or that single mom who has lived there forever, etc. to have to uproot their life and leave, but there simply is no way to have a happy outcome for everyone. And, to your point, if property taxes have increased that much, the increased home value should take some of the sting out of it when they go to sell.
There are very real emotional downsides to all of this, but ultimately I'm of the opinion that people being forced out of areas as they gentrify due to property taxes are a necessary part of a healthy real estate ecosystem.
Really curious to see what happens in the long game as the families who inherit homes that were locked into old tax levels are forced to sell as they can't pass them on to a second generation without the tax rate resetting.
Anyone have an estimate on when that may be? Perhaps we'll see a major correction in Bay Area house prices at that point as the inventory increases from that.
That game has already been played. Transfers between generations do not cause reassessment.
http://www.boe.ca.gov/proptaxes/faqs/propositions58.htm#1
Congratulations, California voters. You made bad into worse.
Bad into worse just about sums it up. If it wasn't for Prop 58 and 193 you'd expect that eventually, decades from now once the majority were reset, that Prop 13 would have a chance of being struck down, but this just ensures that future generations have every incentive to keep homes in the family.
Thanks for sharing the link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPX-mW4l1rU
If the law allows it and the regulatory compliance costs are low enough, maybe grandma can take out a home equity loan and turn her 1-story ranch into a 3-story apartment and take advantage of the cash flow. If she needs a little more, and her neighbors are also having trouble paying their property taxes, they can pool their resources together and build an even larger apartment block to replace their old houses. Win-win for everyone, except for busybody NIMBYs who care about "neighborhood character" to the exclusion of everything else.
Oh, and BTW, this idea that "techies" aren't people, or somehow less deserving of moral consideration than everyone else, is reprehensible.
- Service workers (everything from baristas to cops to teachers) either disappear or have to deal with punishing commutes
- Brain drain. When even people making a decent salary get pushed out, it's bad for cities (http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/05/26/silicon-valley-e...)
- Many people believe living in the place one was born/grew up in should be a right. That's a value difference. Markets do not get to dictate everything if we don't allow that.
Luckily, the market does have a solution to the housing problem itself: build a lot more of it, and prices will drop.
Personally, I don't have any vested interest SF housing, as it's really not one of my favorite cities. But I keep thinking of what I would do if this was happening to a city I did actually love and live in, and I think in that situation I would be more sympathetic to the NIMBYs than the newcomers. I don't think there's any moral imperative for cities to keep growing.
SF isn't my favorite city either, but what has happened in my current and favorite city (Boston) has made my less sympathetic to NIMBYs, both the high-income (I want my house to appreciate without doing any work!) and low-income (I want 20% of units just for me!/Screw the middle class!) types--they are the ones making things worse. Cities grow because businesses move there, and businesses move there because they want to be close to and network with other businesses. Employees can't exactly prevent that by staying in Nowhere, KS. I agree, there isn't any moral imperative for cities for keep growing, but for now at least, there is a practical one, and thus there is a moral imperative for cities to accommodate those to wish to live there.
We're seeing the unintended consequences of one alternative. Of course, we haven't tested all of the possible universes yet.
It's basic economics. If you have a somewhat fixed demand and artificially restrict supply, the price is going to shoot through the roof.
The city puts on the lien on the home for the value of the accumulated rise in property taxes. Once the owner dies, family members sell the house, and pay off the lien.
I have no idea why Prop 13 was created when the aforementioned solution allows grandma to stay in her house without destroying the housing market in the process.
No, it wasn't created to combat that problem; if it was, it would have (even had the same general approach been used) been narrowly drawn to residential property, and maybe even only to properties that are primary residence of the owner.
> How do you get around that?
Lots of ways, including going to full value annual assessment of all property, but allow, for owner-occupied primary residences, deferment of taxes in excess of the lesser of the total tax due in the year of sale [0] increased by 2% per year since the sale or some function of the owner's income (the exact function is an implementation detailed) to be deferred until the property is sold [0], with the taxing authority acquiring a lien on the property.
[0] Note that you can expand "sale" to include the same kind of improvements that allow new assessments under Prop 13, as well.
Even in neighborhoods with shit schools taxes are ludicrous, an acquaintance of my family is paying 14k taxes for a small single family home in a town with a high school ranked 294 out of about 400 in the state. She wants to sell the house but due to high taxes and shit school buyers are hard to find.
Property taxes almost doubled in the past 10 years in my area, I am not looking forward to buying a house and then the property taxes doubling in another 10 years.
Proposition 13 sounds great to someone from New Jersey.
You can see this split hitting out in sunset, as former NIMBYs flip toward pro-housing as their kids return from college.
In all cases, the restrictions are good for the people who are already there.
Especially when starting with a low-density neighborhood that's poorly served by transit and everyone that lives there is tied to their car.
Places like NYC, London, and Paris have great public transit systems, it's easy to live there without a car, but much harder to do that in spread out Silicon Valley, even if you live next to a VTA light rail station, be prepared for a very long trip if you want to go across town.
I live in mid-density housing in a mostly low density area, and many of my neighbors fought hard against a new high density apartment building being built nearby -- 2 of the most common concerns raised were traffic and street parking (oh, and crime was also raised -- apparently they thought that criminals were going to move in to those $3000 apartments).
It's been nearly 2 years, and those concerns are mostly unfounded -- I haven't seen any significant increase in commute time car traffic (though I bike to work, so maybe I just don't see it), there's usually still street parking available in the neighborhood, and afaik, there's been no uptick in burglary.
Also, I know construction in my area has significantly impacted traffic. I leave for work before 7 AM, so I don't see it as badly, but when I leave at 8 AM, my typically 15 minute ride to the BART station can take over an hour. Most of the traffic is spillover from parents dropping kids off at school. I shudder to think of what it'll be like next week after school is out.
Unless you're a prisoner (or someone else is paying for your housing because you can't afford it), you can always choose quality of construction -- it may not be where you want to live, or might be more than you want to pay, but it's still your choice.
You've just chosen to make a tradeoff and accepted the noisy building (and you've rewarded those that built the thin walled, noisy building by paying to live there).
and if we're talking about a real highrise then good luck trying to change a door or window frames there to soundproof ones.
Anyways i'm not trying to convince anyone, but after more than 30 years spent in different types of appartments i'm pretty happy in my own house.
FWIW, even with a mostly wood based construction, you can still insulate well. It just takes the desire to do so.
and given the way condos built in the US/canada it's just impossible, i was pretty surprised when i saw a six floors condo built with wooden frame, something like that: https://imgur.com/usO1i9r
BTW, wooden frames can be very soundproof, as long as you pack every wall and ceiling with heavy (i.e. rock wool or cellulose) insulation and ceiling and mount drywall on standoffs instead of directly on studs.
i bet they can be soundproof but what i see here is that the builders are trying to cut every corner they can, trying to build as much as possible houses/condos which are sold even before the construction begins (http://www.seattletimes.com/business/home-prices-soar-again-...).
My understanding of the problem is some people really dislike change, and those same people disproportionately vote in local elections and attend city planning meetings. Because planning decisions are hyper-local in America, there's no "regional growth" advocate at these meetings, and nobody is going to attend planning meetings to fight for some developer to build their high-rise, so the opposition wins.
Silicon Valley was a quaint, sleepy semi-rural suburb in 1960, and that's how they want it to stay, at least in terms of physical appearance.
The problem is that, despite these zoning laws, they can't actually stop people from moving in from other regions, which causes property values to skyrocket. You can easily pay 2m there for an ordinary 3 bedroom ranch house that would be 70k in most of the US.
Because they don't just like it. They want a neighborhood that's completely detached single-family homes and where driving is hyper-dominant, and if that means they have to support policies that hurt middle- and working-class newcomers, so be it. Of course, many of the people 'opposed to density' are okay with density somewhere in the bay area, just not where they live, hence the term NIMBY.
Yes, but not in the way you expect, which is why your comparison fails.
In many cases, its not to prop up the market value of their homes, but the features of the community which supports the personal value they place in their homes: its "I live here, and I'd like to keep it the kind of place it is that led me to choose to live here".
It's always seemed a little perverse to me. Cities are dynamic, constantly changing organisms. Trying to keep a city from changing over decades is like forcing a 9-year-old kid to wear diapers and sleep in a crib because you liked the way it was as a baby and you never want it to change.
Well, except that cities, even if viewed as "organisms", aren't people, they serve people, and its quite natural for people to want them kept in the state that they feel best serves their interests.
I think people are afraid of change, not because they know it is not in their best interest, but mostly because they aren't sure, so the status quo seems to be the safer option. It's why humans are averse to change in a lot of scenarios, we sometimes have a little bit of trouble with the long term perspectives.
Sure, and even people that oppose change on one axis (like density) often support other changes in their city.
People, of course, disagree on what changes are desired and which are disliked, but that's the nature of subjective preferences.
Eh, it's possible to take this kind of self-interest too far. Like by the same token, you could say, "well, it's only natural for non-poor people to shoot down programs that will help the poor, because it's not in their interest".
Like, expecting people to give up a little for the benefit of wider society is not unreasonable. We're not talking about forcibly seizing people's homes here, just about allowing their neighbors to sell to developers who will build more housing. That's not exactly a huge sacrifice.
Given the amount of money at stake for said buyers, I can't say I entirely blame them for voting in their financial interests when the alternative might be a very bleak financial outlook, a decent chance of increased crime, traffic, etc.
It simply isn't a black and white issue.
If you bought recently, you probably had some sense that the market was a bit out of whack, but may have decided it was the right decision for other reasons. That doesn't make most people any less concerned about the future value of their house, particularly if they know they are not buying into their "Forever Home" and will one day need to sell and move elsewhere.
If you bought 20 years ago, even if a fire burnt down your house, it's likely that the land alone would give you a healthy profit. If you bought 2 years ago, a significant downturn in the market could leave you underwater.
Few people plan to sell their home shortly after buying it, but a market downturn could leave you without a job and you can't afford to move elsewhere for a job if you can't afford to take a loss by selling your house for less than your mortgage.
But you're making a huge logical jump to say that building housing could magically slaughter my house value and that I'd be underwater because of it.
I'm worried about being underwater because of a recession or cyclical trends or tech jobs wholesale abandoning the area, or any number of things.
The LAST thing I worry about is housing being built so fast that it'll tank the value of my house. It simply won't. If there's enough continued demand for housing, by all means, build, build, build. It means neighborhoods will get more vibrant. I see no scenario where building will tank my house value (short of building and THEN a recession).
I don't think people worry about growth hurting their home value. I agree with others here that they worry about the impact on what THEY value in their neighborhood, but most people aren't looking to sell their primary residence so a temporary slowdown in the growth rate of the equity is simply not on their radar as an important matter.
P.S: Not saying a carbon tax is the best idea, but urban sprawl (like carbon emissions) have a negative impact on the environment but zero impact on maximizing capital gains. They two must be tied somehow.
A revenue-neutral switch to land value taxes?
High property values also work, as in Europe. In a relatively small European country, there is just a lot less land supply, so it costs a lot and people tend to build much more densely. By contrast the US is huge and has an enormous amount of vacant land, so land is (relatively) extremely cheap in the US, encouraging low density development.
Finally, the main reason low density is tenable is that zoning laws in the US are in most places specifically set up to discourage high density construction and make it unprofitable.
In the early 20th century, zoning laws were first enacted in the US by the so called "Progressive Movement". They observed that the rich enjoyed spacious country estates while the poor lived in crowded, dense slums, so they decided to "help" the poor live in what they deemed better conditions by making it illegal or difficult to build new high density neighborhoods at all.
More on this topic in the book "Living Downtown," by Paul Groth: http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6j49p...
A carbon tax (as long as cars use energy derived from sources covered by a carbon tax, whether that's fossil fuels directly or electricity produced in some share by burning fossil fuels) is a tax on urban sprawl, since urban sprawl forces longer trips and less-fuel-efficient transportation.
I’ll admit that this motivation is no less selfish than the financial one, but I do think it’s different.
But most people I know still go (or at least try to) for their vacation to some tropical paradise. They would live there if they could. But most people can't.
So Sunnyvale has been building a number of apartment buildings and condos around. There has been tremendous back pressure for existing residents (not me but I'm a rarity it seems). The root of their concern is that they don't want the neighborhood experience to change from what they know (or knew) to something they don't know. I talked to some folks who had moved into the apartments near downtown Murphy street. They loved them, easy access to Caltrain, lots of things to do and places to go, they are excited about future growth.
The issue in Sunnyvale at least is that people don't seem to internalize that things change. They won't acknowledge that their cute little bungalow house used to be an orchard (where only birds and perhaps squirrels lived, had we given them a say at City Council there would be no houses anywhere!). They will argue strongly for their values and their memories and opinions of what is "right" and what is "wrong." Meanwhile we have people in their 20's and 30's who don't want to own a car, they want tight walkable spaces with an easy way to get to San Francisco or the airport. Now maybe 20 years from now those same people will be resisting even denser housing or something I don't know.
We could easily build 200,000 market rate dwellings on existing, unused, parcels in Sunnyvale and house close to half a million people in them. But for folks remember empty streets and quiet drives, those people are going to be really really unhappy.
Some of the buildings have less than one parking spot per apartment which in theory is supposed to help encourage people to use transit, in practice people fear it will lead to more street parking in adjacent residential neighbourhoods which already have pretty full streets.
200,000 dwellings in Sunnyvale would be a DoS attack on the city's infrastructure, not some new urban dreamland.
Maybe these possibilities haven't been explained well but I sort of think there are other interests that would prefer things stay approximately as they are.
Edit: one aspect that occurs to me is that developers probably wouldn't want a process that solves the housing crisis immediately either. It seems to me that satisfying the pent-up demand for housing gradually, project by project, would allow a developer to scoop up a lot of the excess, monopoly home-value now enjoyed by homeowners whereas if a huge stock of apartments appeared in one big bang, developers could wind-up selling them at costs plus a small profit level.
1. Considering that some of the apartment dwellers will become homeowners and their place will be taken by new apartment dwellers, how will the overcrowded schools support the influx?
2. Considering people will take public transit to go to work, they still would use cars to move around locally in the area on evenings and weekends. How will the current streets support the greater density of cars? e.g. Central Expressway used to be an expressway now it is a parking lot.
3. Overburdened police and firemen will be exposed to further strain.
4. Parking is a nightmare not just on residential streets but even at local establishments. Space needed for parking is used to build more housing.
Unless you live here and face these issues it's easy to downvote rather than come up with solutions that are at pace with the housing construction boom.
If I paid over a million dollars to buy a house in a school district that has a good score what would you suggest I do when suddenly the student to teacher ratio is so skewed that the education of my children suffers?
For parking, Sunnyvale is indeed surprisingly bad. For a sleepy town with nothing to do you often can't get parking downtown.
As revenue increases, city services can be expanded. Schools on the other hands are basically crooks as far as I can tell. The reason being that I have yet to get the Fremont Union Highschool District to offer up actual budget numbers and actual spend. They will argue all sorts of things about "confidentiality of teacher salaries" or "we're not a government so we don't have to give you that information." but generally I have not been impressed with the way they operate. [2]
Traffic and parking is a legitimate concern. Traffic has gotten worse again (after getting better after the dot com crash). But many programs are targeted at making the city more bike accessible for easier access.
[1] Page 12 -- http://sunnyvale.ca.gov/Portals/0/Sunnyvale/FIN/FY%2015-16%2...
[2] I had an administrator at the district tell me that it was "illegal" to be home schooling my children.
[1] http://www.fuhsd.org/
Even if you fear putting the cart before the horse, it simply begs the question of why you don't already have the horse. And the answer to that, I think, is back to what was stated above: fear of change, of urbanization, of government, of government spending, of property value declines, of loss of "heritage" – whatever that means to a farming town that replaced its (AFAIK) last orchard with a strip mall called the "Cherry Orchard" in 1999...
Sadly it's not quite so easy to increase road capacity as unlike a real city where you can add residents without adding vehicles, it's simply not possible to add residents in the 'burbs without adding an equal number of cars on the road. I'd love for it to be otherwise, but the sprawl can't be fixed just by rezoning lots for higher density.
I think it's more an issue of poor planning than fear of change (although yes, some residents want the city to be a 1966-themed amusement park). Hanlon's Razor and all. Personally I have no attachment to the sentimental issues around Sunnyvale but my proposed solution of levelling half the city and rebuilding it like central Toronto seems like a non-starter.
Municipal bonds backed by future property tax flows in the one of the wealthiest cities in the USA is pretty secure, so you wouldn't have to save for a few years.
And a project like that seems like it could result in both keeping single-family housing in many areas and solving the broad housing crisis. These directly hit against zoning limits but I suspect there's more going than inertia.
Maybe I haven't passed that critical milestone, but I can't think of a scenario where I'd complain if my neighborhood decay came with such a surge in net worth? (not trying to be sarcastic, could be an issue of be never having been that attached to a specific neighborhood)
(Naturally, this wouldn't apply to those who are without rent control, and suffer the double-whammy of more outsiders + higher rent.)
This is what someone replied earlier. For some ROI is the most important thing. For someone who lives in the suburbs I can say that for me it isn't the most important thing.
Maybe the smart move is to find a sustainable way to maintain current levels, tell newcomers that maybe a different city is right for them, and focus on improving conditions for the people already living there. There's can be more to city's goals than neverending growth, right?
Assuming this is a serious question and not a troll, see Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City, and/or my own essay, "Do millennials have a future in Seattle? Do millennials have a future in any superstar cities?" (https://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a-fut...).
So density WILL make your life miserable. HoA rules, municipal laws, etc, are virtually not enforced. So you find a spot you consider tolerable, and you hope to god it stays that way. If someone decides to build a rental building near by, then it's basically over. You either learn to sleep through idiot screaming and people keeping a pair of saint bernards barking in a studio apartment near by, and frat parties that the cop will never do anything about or you move out.
Contrast that with up north, where I totally could call the cops on someone walking too loud at night and they'd do something about it (which virtually never needed to happen, since people were much more considerate. And I lived in quite a few places).
Now, I know what you'd say. In Canada/Europe/Whatever, it's just as bad! I had <insert exactly the situation I talked about above> happened a ton of times!.
No no, these situations don't "just happen". It's a constant, multiple times a day thing. And it's a constant struggle between those who don't care and can't understand those who do.
I actually consider it one of the biggest reasons of the divide between the rich and the poor. You have the people with enough money to live on the 40th+ floor of a nice building in NYC, and those dealing with the stress, noise and neighbors at the bottom, thinking they're fine with it (but it probably drastically affect their sleep patterns, productivity, happiness, etc...they just don't realize it). The rich just "run away", because we can't agree on rules and respect them so we can live together.
Also, don't forget how terrible public transportation is. NYC has one of the best systems in NA, and it's not exactly fantastic compared to what you can see in many densely populated cities on other continents. Nevermind other North American cities (Hello Boston?)
As Yglesias is well aware, the city officials are only being rational in a very narrow sense.
A building project can only create as many jobs as it can pay for -- and the workers must be payed enough to buy or rent places to live. What lies behind the claim that it will "create too many jobs" is that the construction workers will compete in the housing market against people that the officials want to protect.
And even that "protection" is only coherent within a mindset where it is somehow evil to build new things, or else the stock of accomodation could be increased.
The issue is what happened in Mountain View with Google, and in Cupertino with Apple -- a company builds a huge new campus that creates 60,000 or 100,000 new permanent, high-paying jobs, but zero new housing gets created, making the cost of living insanely high for everyone (not just for construction workers.)
This is because the cities won't allow any zoning changes to their low-density 1960s suburban setup. Their goal is to preserve the physical infrastructure in that low-density shape, not to keep out lowly poor people as such.
Many of them are starting to build satellite offices in other places.
Ask me anything (respectful, non-troll)
EDIT: I don't usually bite, but when I do, I won't eat much.
Although I do have an LED spinning light ball, an old tape-player radio and the world's smallest dance floor.
https://xkcd.com/1101/
The same as anyone else. It sounds like you're trying to imply something like stereotypes or biogtry. What are you really asking?
Personally, I'd never let someone rent it without a massive security deposit and a very profitable rate because parts are rare, fragile and expensive.
Obviously, location matters.
http://www.truckchamp.com/images/articles/vw-minibus---abbey...
PS: CA, NJ and others plz vote today. I did yesterday. If you want change, you gotta be counted.
On a slightly different subject, I suggest anyone considering living a habitable vehicle not use on-board plumbing or sewage systems because they're messy, time-consuming and expensive to maintain. The vehicle I use only has a water tank but I still use water-store RO water in a washable refrigerator bottle. Using a tank and sink system requires flushing and sterilization periodically, and is often awkward to fill sanitarily.
While SF's random lottery system certainly has its issues, it does actually solve for some of these problems.
[1] http://www.mercurynews.com/sunnyvale/ci_26825651/sunnyvale-s...
It's also really easy: register online and they mail the ballot to you. It's called "Permanent vote by mail". It takes almost no effort whatsoever.
http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voter-registration/vote-mail...
You don't need a California drivers license. You don't need to have lived here for a year. You just have to have the intention to make California your current home (eg not a tourist).
For the lazy, SF Yes In My Backyard puts out voting slates of pro-housing politicians and propositions. Just reference that, draw the lines on the ballot, and drop it in the mail. You don't even have to buy a stamp.
http://www.sfyimby.org
I'm sorry, but those issues are important and for me, many of the people the YIMBY slate endorses are on the wrong side of it.
We don't have to sell out our values to be pro housing.
Down with height limits, down with protracted approval processes for construction, down with many of the things that hold back progress in the city. Let SF reach toward the sky.
But also, down with the YIMBY slate. It's just a set of candidates who aren't what I want to see in the city.
If the YIMBY slate wants to back actual tangible propositions or policy suggestions, I'm all ears. When they ask me to vote for people they selected because they think they might be "pro-housing" (as if anyone in SF is really anti-housing?) then I'm going to tell them the people I select to represent me are my business.
I'm happy to advocate for pro-housing policies. But I sure didn't and won't vote that YIMBY slate, and for the sake of the city I live in, I hope it's soundly defeated.
2) ROI isn't the most important thing about a home.
3) Even if you value property values over other values, affordable housing that can support a strong and diverse environment that is vital to maintaining the strength of the region. If you kill that engine, you kill the thing that created the high values to begin with. You can shoot the golden goose if you want, but don't claim it makes good economic sense. It doesn't.
I agree, though I imagine the people who can actually afford a home in SF in 2016 feel differently.
Edit: clarity
You gotta be at least a little crazy to live in SF. I hope that's still true. It isn't particularly financially responsible, so you have to want to be here. That means the people who live here generally aren't doing it for their ROIs.
More jobs and more population density increases the overall value of a city. New grads and singles moving into a city need a place to live, and rental units provide it.
Think about it this way - if you demolished all the apartment buildings in San Francisco or New York, would the value of single family homes go up or down? Would brownstones in New York be worth more if there were no apartment buildings Harlem or Queens? If you walled off and burned down the Tenderloin and Point Richmond, would that mean that houses in the sunset would be worth more? I doubt it, since the city overall would be a less desirable place to live with fewer opportunities to work, and lower density means that fewer bars, restaurants, retail establishments, museums etc.. could be supported.
No, you also have to be a US citizen, which a lot of newcomers to the Bay Area are not.
ELECTIONS CODE SECTION 2100-2124
2101. (a) A person entitled to register to vote shall be a United States citizen, a resident of California, not imprisoned or on parole for the conviction of a felony, and at least 18 years of age at the time of the next election.
I'm not lazy, just insanely busy.
Having lived in the bay for a long time - there are many "middle" housing places. Just none of them are new. Duplexes, and multiplexes are almost always in the worst areas, because they're not big enough to allow for walking or being close by a lot of services, but are dense enough to be VERY easily annoyed at neighbors. The only thing they're good at is being cheap to build.
Townhomes are popping up frequently and offer a slightly nicer version, but I don't honestly see much difference between a townhome without a yard and a more dense mid-rise other than available floorplans. I'm all for more density, but what frequently happens is that they build in moderately dense housing but all the plots are walled off from each other, there's nowhere to walk and so you just have more and more cars and traffic on the road. Full density or bust, I say.
...
Of course in the real world, you can't arbitrarily bulldoze existing zones to replace them with high density residential :|
San Jose has taken the rare step of publicly opposing the project, saying it would add far too many jobs, exacerbating the region’s housing shortage.
In my opinion, the motivation is that the San Jose City Council is assuming that most of the workers would live in San Jose, exacerbating their housing price pressure while denying them any of the developer-fee benefits or tax base improvement.
And that's true. This has been the pattern throughout the history of the valley: San Jose's traditional business-unfriendliness has resulted in the major Silicon Valley names locating their businesses in Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Cupertino (Apple!), and Mountain View (Google!) over the decades.
San Jose's emphasis was always on grabbing all the land they could (incorporating county lands) without creating a business-friendly environment there. (Look at San Jose city boundaries in, say, 1950 versus now.)
It's another side-effect of one-party rule (for all but one mayoral dynasty) during this period.
Another demonstration of this nimby-ism is that San Jose and surrounding cities tend to dump problematic development on each other's borders. For example, Santana Row and Valley Fair straddle the San Jose - Santa Clara border. Neither felt any incentive to consider traffic effects of dumping all of this retail in less than a square mile. Result: gridlock so bad that it actually backs up onto the neighboring freeways (280 and 880/17) during November and December, at least.
Yay.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11854989