What if those in control of the market are those who can benefit more (in the short term) by restricting the supply? A completely free market works well for many things, but not for housing, in part because there is a extremely limited supply of land, and nobody's making any more.
There is actually a lot of land, what makes land expensive is being close to useful infrastructure. But, the median cost of an acre of land in the US is still well under 10k.
That median acre is also in the middle of nowhere with no power, water, sewer, or roads within thousands of feet, if not miles. It's probably covered in wheat or corn too.
Well sure, but again you can still generally turn that into a house with water and power for vastly less than a tiny SF condo. Hell, you can even add both a small airstrip and an airplane and still be less executive than a SF condo.
Or skip the land and buy a solar powered houseboat which can go just about anywhere for less than a 600sf condo.
How about you make the rules of the game fair in the first place and then let the market work. Let the owners of land pay price for having that privilege (land tax) and only those who make use of that land will hold it. If they decided to just hold the land out of use, they would pay the taxes for you, so it would be win win.
If you deregulate in a market where a group (homeowners and landlords) is already invested, you likely end up with a scenario in which the local politics favor investors and not tenants. While deregulation seems like it might work it would require a blank slate, and no city is a blank slate.
The local politics are always going to side with the people with power and money, that's what politics is. The point of deregulation is to lower the influence of the powerful, which is mostly expressed through their iron grip on local politics.
Because, in practice, governance is positive leverage on power.
Rich people are still more powerful than average/poor people in the absence of intensive, high-impact statist government, but the rich people:everyone else power ratio in traditional western governance is long regulation.
> The point of deregulation is to lower the influence of the powerful
Except all actual concrete deregulation proposals are backed by powerful interests, and not because it reduces their power.
Now, the sales pitch to the public might be about reducing the influence of the powerful, but that's never the actual goal sought by the powerful backers. At best, it'd reallocation of power from one segment of the powerful to another, but more often it's just loosening constraints on the powerful.
I agree that politicians typically side with the powerful but I think a good working definition of politics is the rhetoric used by politicians in public and private meetings. This rhetoric can theoretically benefit any group.
Perhaps I've been misunderstood. I strongly believe in growth and density and believe the SF approach is literally insane. I live in New York City where we have our problems but appear to know how to actually build housing for people.
But with that said, a knee-jerk cry of "deregulate" isn't going to be much better. The right answer is to figure out a more thoughtful system that enables the market to be channeled properly.
Which basically all modern successful cities have figured out.
> I live in New York City where we have our problems but appear to know how to actually build housing for people.
Uh... housing costs in NYC are pretty ridiculous. Commute times as well. The furor over the subway wouldn't be as pronounced if everyone had relatively short commutes.
Housing costs in NYC will remain high as long as it's the greatest city in the history of world civilization of course, that does add an attractive element.
But NYC has a lot of options and many of them are affordable, there's much more to it than just Manhattan and gentrified Brooklyn. It has the ability to actually build, so there's somewhat of a pressure relief valve. And though it's problematic by European standards it clearly has a far more effective and comprehensive mass transit system than any other city in the western hemisphere.
There are reasons why the retired and most families end up leaving NYC fairly quickly. And those reasons are often rent and accessibility of the transit (subways don't have elevators, generally).
NYC is affordable for professionals without kids. It's very expensive in time, money, or both to live in NYC with a blue-collar income.
But Houston is kind of a counterexample of that, no? It's the go-to thing city planners complain about when you just let people build whatever they want without regulation, but the result appears to be a decent second-tier city with a healthy local economy and affordable housing, not Kowloon.
True, Houston is the 4th largest city but it's kind of cheating - it's a very large area with a population density similar to a Northeast suburb. If Houston had Manhattan's population density it would have 43 million people.
Houston's urban geography is not appreciably different from that of LA. Other than it's a lot cheaper. Yes, the weather is terrible and there are no hills or mountains.
I come to understand that its not legally/economically feasible to build affordable housing largely from this post
"I'm an architect in LA specializing in multifamily residential. I'd like to do my best to explain a little understood reason why all new large development in LA seems to be luxury development"
The reasons outlined on that thread are very specific to the Los Angeles area. Not that crazy regulations don't exist in SF, but the car-centric parking space regulations in Los Angeles are a huge part of the outlined cost. I don't think that applies broadly.
I don't know this for sure, but as someone who lives in SF, I would guess that's less the case here than in LA. The city is much less supportive of private vehicle ownership (for good reason imo, but that's a bit off-topic) than most cities in the U.S.
As much as everyone here hates cars, the unfortunate fact is we currently need them. If I could snap my fingers and be able to afford a $1.2M "starter home" within walking distance to work, trust me, I would do it in a heartbeat. If there were any politicians serious about building useful public transit, I'd vote for them. But, for now, at least in most metro areas (where the jobs are), most people can only afford to live in places where you need a car to get anywhere.
I live in a country where very little parking is required and whatever parking is built is either free-for-all or come at a huge price. People cheap out, but still expect to drive.
The end result is parking in grey-legal spots, parking in too narrow streets making it dangerous, parking in ex-greenery-now-sandy-parking-lot and whatnot. And lots of bad blood between neighbours who took whose spot :) Yes, there're rules to fine such behaviour. But it'd be political suicide to enforce those rules because everybody breaks them.
There was some of that where I lived in Italy, very little in Austria, and it was all much better than having vast, empty parking lots sitting there while house prices climb and climb.
I don't think a parking lot in rural Bend (or any rural American town) is the best example to use. People in Bend are going to rely on cars a lot more than people in downtown Portland and property is likely cheaper + regulated less.
Here's the first lot I found in Portland... nice, waterfront parking!
Average house prices are north of 400K in "rural" Bend (which is actually closing in on 100K people - not big, but not tiny, either).
And of course people use cars a lot to get around here. That doesn't mean the government has to require it: any business that depends on car-dependent people is going to want to provide some parking. There's no reason for the government to get involved in it.
Also: part of the reason people need cars to get around is because we fill land up with useless BS like that, rather than housing or businesses or commercial - empty space stretches everything else out so that more trips require a car.
Government not requiring it encourages freeloading on neighbours. In my post-soviet country, there's a lot of pressure on government to require ample parking. Otherwise both residential and commercial buildings tend to freeride on their neighbours and use their parking.
What is interesting, this evolved despite OK public transit and very little cars in the early 90s.
I don't know how things work in your country, but in the US, Austria and Italy, there are street parking spots that are public. They do not belong to anyone. If it's a problem that they're always full all the time, you can adopt strategies to create some turnover.
This is far superior to the government dictating X parking spots per house (2 in the city I live in), and Y per type of business.
"adopt strategies to create some turnover" is a very polite way of saying fine people and tow their cars, ruining their days and sometimes their lives.
Uh, yeah, it's pretty normal in cities the world over, though. You don't just get to park in front of the fire hydrant or not pay for parking in an area where it's required, or any number of other regulations.
In most cases each apartment block have it's own parking lot off the street. Wether it's 5, 50 or 100 years old. Many streets are too narrow for parking on both sides. Tiny lots either cause spill over to other parking lots nearby or illegal parking on the greenery or in the street (illegal because street is too narrow for parking).
A recent example.. There was a mall with a parking lot, not too small not too big. A new apartment building was built. One of their selling points was huge free parking nearby. Mall was pissed off that their parking lot is full and customers can't find a spot and installed barriers to prevent overnight parking (2 or 4h free, longer - €€€). Now people who bought apartments are pissed because they were told the parking lot was public (= gov-owned). Mall customers are pissed because barriers is inconvenience. Mall is pissed because operating barriers cost them extra money. City is pissed because suddenly they have a load of cars on narrow street nearby. The only ones who won are the sleazy developers.
Another issue is small apartment blocks built in single-family houses quarters. Tiny streets over there can easily take a car or two in front of each house. Then suddenly a 6-apartment building comes up and there're 10 cars in front of a property that'd otherwise have 1 or 2 cars. This happens in rather remote suburbs mind you.
Oh, I'm definitely not advocating for such massive parking lots. Just saying that having little parking lots sucks too. I'm talking about soviet times bloks with parking for 0.2 car/apartment or so.
By the way, over there housing costs climb regardless of little parking required. Apartments in central locations (= walkable/bikable to most offices) cost a shitload of money compared to houses in suburbs. Especially once you step in family-sized market.
This is a bit false. It assumes that the cost of living is driven solely by housing. There have been numerous studies done that show that the total cost of living doesn't change much between city and suburbs. Housing costs are higher in the city, but they're largely balanced out by lower transportation costs and house upkeep costs (apartments are cheaper to heat/cool than houses, for example).
My transportation costs (including the purchase price of the car, all gas and maintenance) are an order of magnitude less than the home price delta between where I currently live and where I'd have to live in order to give up my car.
This cannot be stressed enough. Too many people on HN seem baffled by car culture, or think it's some kind of conspiracy, but the answer is right here. Savings on land prices for getting far from the center are massive, the costs of manufactured goods like cars are tiny, and the solution that urbanism offers is is only to raise the price on the latter.
Cars are part and parcel of modern life and they won't be going away any time soon, and I don't think more than a few extremists really want that anyway.
What a lot of people do is to rebalance things so we have more of a 'right tool for the job' culture in the US. Cars for some things, bikes or walking for closer trips (enabled by legalizing things like corner stores or neighborhood barbers again), public transportation for other things.
> the solution that urbanism offers is is only to raise the price on the latter
The solution that urbanism offers is to stop massively subsidizing the latter. Let car culture live or die on its own merits, not because of government subsidies.
Without a corresponding subsidy to lower the cost of urban living, most people will be worse off (maybe the rich in urban centers will save more in taxes than they lose in mobility, doubtful anyone else will).
Subsidizing infrastructure that increases quality of life and lowers cost of living is kind of the point of government.
The intrinsic cost of urban living is much less than the intrinsic cost living in car focused suburbs. It is only more expensive now because of an under supply of urban areas caused by decades of subsidization of car focused suburbs. The ROI of spending on urban infrastructure is much higher than spending on car focused suburban development.
What? The rent in cities is vastly depressed by all the demand that the suburbs soak up. Limit the effective radius of the city to walking distance and it will skyrocket as the same number of people clamor to fit into less space.
Who is talking about getting rid of suburbs or limiting things to walking distance? That would be crazy.
There were suburbs before cars existed and there can be suburbs that don't require cars for every single trip. Before the widespread adoption of cars, suburbs were often served by streetcars that let people travel into the city. They also were walkable for trips within the suburb. Unlike modern suburbs, they also allowed low nuisance commercial properties to be interspersed with residential properties so that many of people's basic errands could be accomplished without traveling large distances.
It's not feasible to build new affordable housing, which is why the article says some people are arguing that building new luxury housing will reduce demand and thus affordability for older housing.
Right...build new luxury housing, and then middle income people will start moving into luxury housing of years past. This happens frequently in other places, where you can find old houses which belonged to very well off families now being occupied by completely middle class folks, because what was once luxurious is now burdensome for those with the means to make the choice.
If the question is whether we should develop policies (i.e. laws) that enable more affordable housing, then I fail to see why you should use existing law as an argument for why it can't work.
I mean, yeah, existing law makes it hard to get affordable housing. But that's what we're trying to change! It's flawed reasoning to use whatever the law is to argue against what the law ought to be.
it hurts some people (those who want to live in SF), but it helps other people (those who already live there), pretty much like any other resource with finite availability
Yes, a bunch of rich people get richer, and the poor get poorer because they can't access jobs in one of the most productive, wealthy parts of the country.
All because we don't allow the market to function properly.
Seems like a failure to me. Here's Ed Glaeser:
"Reforming local land use controls is one of those rare areas in which the libertarian and the progressive agree. The current system restricts the freedom of the property owner, and also makes life harder for poorer Americans. The politics of zoning reform may be hard, but our land use regulations are badly in need of rethinking."
To the contrary, this is market functioning properly - people have something which they are reluctant to share with other people, so they don't. Do you suggest to force them? This will not be a "proper functioning market", you know. Next, somebody will say that having rich people is bad altogether so let's just share money equally.
That would be the case if we were talking about their own property, but they're using rules and regulations to force other people to not do what they want with their property.
In a healthy market, yeah, some people would not sell out and change would be gradual as the city built up incrementally. That's how things should be, but we do not allow that.
Sure, you can criticize and they can ignore it. Worry about making your own city nice, not theirs. That's the whole point of having localized governments.
Let's say you ate two burgers, when you could have easily gotten by with just one. Or even worse, you threw the 2nd burger in trash. You only took it just in case. The guy behind you was left with none.
No. It's more like you took a burger that someone else owned and prevented him from doing what he wants with it. It is an encroachment on the rights of others.
It's more like you prevented a lactose-intolerant person from drinking a bunch of milk because you're both in the same unventilated room and you can't leave or open a window and you really don't want to smell their farts. "NIMBY"
The thing is I see both sides: I am in favor of private property, and I don't like the idea of e.g. home owners' associations that try to limit what color you can paint your own house. But I also grew up in San Francisco, and I really do not think this city will be more livable with ~100,000 or more people trying to live here.
But then how do we decide who does get to live here? And who gets to build what?
It's not easy, but standing around yelling "You NIMBY!" at your neighbors isn't productive.
My mother lives in a rent-controller home in SF. In effect, her landlord is donating ~$1500 to her every month (comparing what she pays with what a new tenant could expect to pay.) On the same token, does ownership of a building really confer on you the right to make as much money as you can, or are you just the temporary steward of a physical artifact the primary purpose of which is to provide a good life for its residents and the neighborhood? What is the purpose of real estate? What is the purpose of a city?
Tokyo most likely has better building codes and the city is not averse to tearing down buildings and replacing them with completely brand new buildings using the latest materials.
I'm from Europe and I don't understand why 'brand new' would ever be a desirable thing in buying a home. Both the video and you said it as if it was - is that common in the US and Japan?
Where I live in England you want a house that's as old as possible in most cases. Older houses are usually in more desirable locations, with better space around them, and far more character.
New homes are generally more desirable in the US, unless you live somewhere interesting like Boston, NYC, SF, then the old buildings might be much more expensive, due to location and heritage.
I think Japan's zoning laws are great because in the US, generally you cannot walk to anything interesting (bar, coffeeshop, restaurant), because nowhere near your home is zoned for commercial, there are exceptions in the big cities obviously, but much of the population lives in non-walkable suburban layouts.
I sometimes wonder if the Europeans know how good they have it... So many beautiful walk-able cities and only a train ride away. I'm in Minnesota so there's basically nothing interesting for 1000 miles.
This post could benefit greatly from a little more quantitative analysis.
The first, and main point, about whether the supply would appreciably drop the price is a great example of where it is needed.
Has there been any study of the elasticity of house pricing? Give us the range, and then we know roughly how much housing it would take to drop the price by $10/sf.
Then let's see how much extra housing we could build, and what the bottlenecks are.
Now we are having a conversation. Otherwise it is just intuition mongering (which, by the way, is a useful and noble exercise as well, but it is not complete).
> This post could benefit greatly from a little more quantitative analysis.
It sounds like she's just articulating the arguments of both sides, rather than taking a stance herself, so I don't know how much quantitative analysis would really improve it.
> This post could benefit greatly from a little more quantitative analysis.
The article does actually mention quantitative analyses some, and why critics dismiss it:
Critics think advocates put too much trust in quantitative analyses which try to estimate the effect of supply on prices. (Like this one [1] which estimates that adding 5,000 new units each year would be enough to stabilize real prices.) Such studies inevitably make dubious simplifying assumptions, and it’s all too easy to set up an analysis to get the conclusion you want.
6.6 percent is 2.5 percentage points faster than inflation, which doesn’t seem like a lot but when you do it for 60 years in a row it means housing prices quadruple compared to everything else you have to buy.
That’s bad. But that’s SF today, compared to 1956.
So what caused prices to go up? That’s the really exciting part of Fischer’s discovery. Armed with his data, he more or less answered that question....
It would take a 53% increase in the housing supply (200,000 new units), or a 44% drop in CPI-adjusted salaries, or a 51% drop in employment, to cut prices by two thirds.
Why the increase? Asset price inflation of Maslovian goods.
Thanks for that! The article you link to as "some pretty persuasive criticism of Fischer’s initial model"[1] is also very good.
One highlight:
"These kind of responses miss the simple fact that of the three variables in Fischer’s model, only employment and wages really matter. (The demand-only model achieves an R squared value of .924 and adding the supply variable, housing units, gets us to .940)....Another found that the best model of San Francisco rents needs just one variable: wages (although wages and housing were a close second)."
I think that kind of confirms my gut feeling on first hearing about the problem years ago: the issue is that there is too much money flowing into (a particular sector of) San Francisco.
I don't think building more will help. There will always be a finite number of single-family homes in sought-after areas. Building on the outskirts of SF is not a substitute for prime locations
there will only be a legal number of single family homes because we legally require the land to be used for single family homes. Change the land use regulations to change the makeup of the land. If they upzoned the land from RH-1 to RH-4 most of those SFHs would be subdivided into multiple units. Thats the reason many apartments in SF are in divided victorians.
"We"who? If it was a financially good idea, developers would be or are doing it. How about run some realistic rates of return and market analysis? You may also find the biggest reason: it's unworkable because of current San Francisco culture.
A lot of the political debate relates to the regulatory difficulties that developers encounter, and reducing the ability of neighbors and/or politicians to exercise discretion to prevent development projects or place conditions on them.
>If it was a financially good idea, developers would be or are doing it.
Or not. They could not know it is a good idea, fail to do it, and cause a bunch of problems as a result. That could in fact be the very source of the problems being discussed here.
Something can be a good idea and unworkable due to political and regulatory hurdles. Just look at broadband access. Or medical records. Two industries that would benefit greatly from some disruption, but we're not seeing much there because of how hard it is for other than market reasons.
Oddly, cities began to freeze in earnest, via zoning laws, in the 1970s. One can see this both from the link and from Google’s Ngram viewer, which sees virtually no references to gentrification until the late 70s, and the term really takes off later than that.
Moreover, the book Zoning Rules! discusses how this actually happened: https://www.amazon.com/Zoning-Rules-Economics-Land-Regulatio.... The fact that it used to be relatively easy to build new housing as demand increases means that we could make it easy again. This is fundamentally a legal problem (we should not allow so many property rights to be violated by non-owners) and a political problem (we are not addressing housing and issues at the right level of government).
It's striking how few affordable housing discussions have a historical view of the issue!
That book is awesome - a super deep dive into the nuances of the legalities and economics of zoning. The guy has even visited a number of sites cited in important court cases.
I also like "Zoned in the USA" for its comparisons with other countries, particularly in Europe, which - to my way of looking at things - seem to get some things right that are very strange in the US.
Here's a bunch of other articles and things I've found interesting/useful:
You keep telling yourselves that while we in Seattle keep building and funneling more people that would have lived in San Francisco here because we're able to keep up with Demand ;)
I'm actually pretty proud of Seattle's efforts to re-evaluate zoning regulations in the late 2000's. Almost every neighborhood has been zoned to build taller, and if we're speaking strictly about rents, it's been quite effective. The city added just under 200,000 new residents (2005 - 2017), and the increases in mean rent costs were comparatively modest when compared to increasing demand (https://goo.gl/zadHW6).
There has still been a noticeable increase, but in part because the City of Seattle underestimated the rate of future growth in demand (https://goo.gl/QKpb36). (The city is actually making moves right now to increase housing supply over the next few years to prevent accelerating increases in rents).
Demand, however, is not the only factor commonly cited as putting pressure on housing prices. As tech workers flood the city and mean incomes outpace inflation (which has a positive effect on the overall economy), their purchasing power increases. New construction is of comparatively higher quality, especially in neighborhoods like Capitol Hill, which was not nearly as desirable before 2000.
This is another part of the “noticeable increase”. As neighborhoods become more desirable (such as SLU, Ballard, and Capitol Hill), residents suddenly find themselves paying a premium (which is not reflected in mean pricing). I believe this is much of what has contributed to the idea that rents have risen dramatically (even when the data says otherwise).
Things may not be optimal (there are certainly challenges with market mismatch and misplaced incentives), but I don't think anyone in the industry is saying the major challenges are regulatory.
Seattle has built several times the housing of San Francisco and Oakland combined over the last few years: http://www.spur.org/news/2017-06-15/keep-building-oakland. , and while getting more expensive is doing much much better than the Bay Area at keeping cost down. All the while, being an equally good place to live (I prefer Seattle by leaps and bounds, many prefer San Francisco.). As a result of this, Seattle is also growing at 3X the rate of San Francisco.
There's probably a natural balancing mechanism -- prices go too high, renters are outraged and are moved to action, prices go too low, owners are outraged and are moved to action. Looks like we're in the first zone right now.
Of course we should build more housing. Unless we've decided we're against growth on principle and want housing to remain expensive and growth to stagnate.
(The ecological argument against growth in this case is backwards, though. Urban development is less resource intensive than the alternative of suburban or exurban development that uses up a lot more land and requires much longer commutes. And urbanization also tends to suppress birth rates, if you're concerned with very long-term ecological consequences.)
My sentiment has always been we need a regional (ala ABAG) authority which has oversight over regional growth so that it would be less haphazard and more coordinated.
Yes, build in SF, but also build on the Penn, East Bay, South Bay, etc. and coordinate transit development, zoning, etc., etc.
you should call your state assembly person and have them vote yes on SB35. This bill gives teeth to the RHNA numbers and provides an accelerated pathway to approval for certain developments if the cities are not meeting their housing construction quota as mandated by the RHNA numbers.
WA State has the Growth Management Act. Like everything else smelling of civility or the public good, it's vehemently opposed by the local "libertarians".
If the claim that higher supply doesn't lower prices is accurate, and if we assume that higher density means a higher efficiency regarding city services (which has been historically true), then increasing supply seems like an obvious move since you increase tax revenue which could be directed towards social services that help soften the harshness of the SF housing market.
It's absolutely shocking: the degree of lack of understanding of basic economics, especially in a city with such a high percentage of bachelors Degrees!! I'm deeply concerned for the future of our country - I don't want it to end up like venezuela.
I believe, economics should be one of the primary subjects taught in school in K-12, that and personal finance (learning how to manage your own money). In this day and age, these are the 2 most important subjects you need to learn. We need an informed citizenry, if we're not going to end up like venezuela.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] threadOr skip the land and buy a solar powered houseboat which can go just about anywhere for less than a 600sf condo.
Rich people are still more powerful than average/poor people in the absence of intensive, high-impact statist government, but the rich people:everyone else power ratio in traditional western governance is long regulation.
Except all actual concrete deregulation proposals are backed by powerful interests, and not because it reduces their power.
Now, the sales pitch to the public might be about reducing the influence of the powerful, but that's never the actual goal sought by the powerful backers. At best, it'd reallocation of power from one segment of the powerful to another, but more often it's just loosening constraints on the powerful.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/608w97/asset_p...
Classic tragedy of the commons problem. In an actual literal sense in this case, as we all have to share "the commons" in cities.
It's not like those last 2 million people are what prevented it from being a 1000 year old, bike-friendly northern european hamlet or something.
But with that said, a knee-jerk cry of "deregulate" isn't going to be much better. The right answer is to figure out a more thoughtful system that enables the market to be channeled properly.
Which basically all modern successful cities have figured out.
Uh... housing costs in NYC are pretty ridiculous. Commute times as well. The furor over the subway wouldn't be as pronounced if everyone had relatively short commutes.
But NYC has a lot of options and many of them are affordable, there's much more to it than just Manhattan and gentrified Brooklyn. It has the ability to actually build, so there's somewhat of a pressure relief valve. And though it's problematic by European standards it clearly has a far more effective and comprehensive mass transit system than any other city in the western hemisphere.
There are reasons why the retired and most families end up leaving NYC fairly quickly. And those reasons are often rent and accessibility of the transit (subways don't have elevators, generally).
NYC is affordable for professionals without kids. It's very expensive in time, money, or both to live in NYC with a blue-collar income.
Pity about the climate though.
Of course it does lack many of the things people consider essential for modern urban living, and is highly bound to the automobile.
https://urbanedge.blogs.rice.edu/2015/09/08/forget-what-youv...
"I'm an architect in LA specializing in multifamily residential. I'd like to do my best to explain a little understood reason why all new large development in LA seems to be luxury development"
https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_ar...
As much as everyone here hates cars, the unfortunate fact is we currently need them. If I could snap my fingers and be able to afford a $1.2M "starter home" within walking distance to work, trust me, I would do it in a heartbeat. If there were any politicians serious about building useful public transit, I'd vote for them. But, for now, at least in most metro areas (where the jobs are), most people can only afford to live in places where you need a car to get anywhere.
http://www.bendbulletin.com/opinion/5249862-151/guest-column...
The end result is parking in grey-legal spots, parking in too narrow streets making it dangerous, parking in ex-greenery-now-sandy-parking-lot and whatnot. And lots of bad blood between neighbours who took whose spot :) Yes, there're rules to fine such behaviour. But it'd be political suicide to enforce those rules because everybody breaks them.
https://www.google.com/maps/@44.0492073,-121.3266077,3a,75y,...
Is a pretty common sight in the US. What a colossal waste of land!
Here's the book everyone cites on the issue:
https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/193...
Here's the first lot I found in Portland... nice, waterfront parking!
https://www.google.com/maps/@45.5319709,-122.6711514,3a,60y,...
And of course people use cars a lot to get around here. That doesn't mean the government has to require it: any business that depends on car-dependent people is going to want to provide some parking. There's no reason for the government to get involved in it.
Also: part of the reason people need cars to get around is because we fill land up with useless BS like that, rather than housing or businesses or commercial - empty space stretches everything else out so that more trips require a car.
What is interesting, this evolved despite OK public transit and very little cars in the early 90s.
This is far superior to the government dictating X parking spots per house (2 in the city I live in), and Y per type of business.
A recent example.. There was a mall with a parking lot, not too small not too big. A new apartment building was built. One of their selling points was huge free parking nearby. Mall was pissed off that their parking lot is full and customers can't find a spot and installed barriers to prevent overnight parking (2 or 4h free, longer - €€€). Now people who bought apartments are pissed because they were told the parking lot was public (= gov-owned). Mall customers are pissed because barriers is inconvenience. Mall is pissed because operating barriers cost them extra money. City is pissed because suddenly they have a load of cars on narrow street nearby. The only ones who won are the sleazy developers.
Another issue is small apartment blocks built in single-family houses quarters. Tiny streets over there can easily take a car or two in front of each house. Then suddenly a 6-apartment building comes up and there're 10 cars in front of a property that'd otherwise have 1 or 2 cars. This happens in rather remote suburbs mind you.
By the way, over there housing costs climb regardless of little parking required. Apartments in central locations (= walkable/bikable to most offices) cost a shitload of money compared to houses in suburbs. Especially once you step in family-sized market.
"A cheap home isn’t affordable if it comes with high transportation costs."
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/06/the-problem-with-how-...
What a lot of people do is to rebalance things so we have more of a 'right tool for the job' culture in the US. Cars for some things, bikes or walking for closer trips (enabled by legalizing things like corner stores or neighborhood barbers again), public transportation for other things.
The solution that urbanism offers is to stop massively subsidizing the latter. Let car culture live or die on its own merits, not because of government subsidies.
Subsidizing infrastructure that increases quality of life and lowers cost of living is kind of the point of government.
There were suburbs before cars existed and there can be suburbs that don't require cars for every single trip. Before the widespread adoption of cars, suburbs were often served by streetcars that let people travel into the city. They also were walkable for trips within the suburb. Unlike modern suburbs, they also allowed low nuisance commercial properties to be interspersed with residential properties so that many of people's basic errands could be accomplished without traveling large distances.
Exactly! Things like corner stores, or neighborhood barber shops. Illegal in many suburbs of the US, these days.
https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2016/05/25/housing-does-f...
I mean, yeah, existing law makes it hard to get affordable housing. But that's what we're trying to change! It's flawed reasoning to use whatever the law is to argue against what the law ought to be.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/business/how-anti-growth-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/10/why-c...
All because we don't allow the market to function properly.
Seems like a failure to me. Here's Ed Glaeser:
"Reforming local land use controls is one of those rare areas in which the libertarian and the progressive agree. The current system restricts the freedom of the property owner, and also makes life harder for poorer Americans. The politics of zoning reform may be hard, but our land use regulations are badly in need of rethinking."
https://www.brookings.edu/research/reforming-land-use-regula...
That would be the case if we were talking about their own property, but they're using rules and regulations to force other people to not do what they want with their property.
In a healthy market, yeah, some people would not sell out and change would be gradual as the city built up incrementally. That's how things should be, but we do not allow that.
How dare people elect politicians to represent their own interests, rather than the interests of the allegedly marginalized.
Absolute majority rule has some serious downsides.
The thing is I see both sides: I am in favor of private property, and I don't like the idea of e.g. home owners' associations that try to limit what color you can paint your own house. But I also grew up in San Francisco, and I really do not think this city will be more livable with ~100,000 or more people trying to live here.
But then how do we decide who does get to live here? And who gets to build what?
It's not easy, but standing around yelling "You NIMBY!" at your neighbors isn't productive.
My mother lives in a rent-controller home in SF. In effect, her landlord is donating ~$1500 to her every month (comparing what she pays with what a new tenant could expect to pay.) On the same token, does ownership of a building really confer on you the right to make as much money as you can, or are you just the temporary steward of a physical artifact the primary purpose of which is to provide a good life for its residents and the neighborhood? What is the purpose of real estate? What is the purpose of a city?
(also, the ecological "footprint" of that burger compared to a salad or veggie-burger or something blah blah yadda-yadda...)
* The skyscrapers in SF did not have problems during the last big one.
* Tokyo has earthquakes too, and manages to house a lot of people at 'reasonable' rates.
"How an Average Family in Tokyo Can Buy a New Home" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGbC5j4pG9w
Where I live in England you want a house that's as old as possible in most cases. Older houses are usually in more desirable locations, with better space around them, and far more character.
I think Japan's zoning laws are great because in the US, generally you cannot walk to anything interesting (bar, coffeeshop, restaurant), because nowhere near your home is zoned for commercial, there are exceptions in the big cities obviously, but much of the population lives in non-walkable suburban layouts.
I sometimes wonder if the Europeans know how good they have it... So many beautiful walk-able cities and only a train ride away. I'm in Minnesota so there's basically nothing interesting for 1000 miles.
It'll be interesting to see how the Millennium Tower fares in a meaningful earthquake.
The first, and main point, about whether the supply would appreciably drop the price is a great example of where it is needed.
Has there been any study of the elasticity of house pricing? Give us the range, and then we know roughly how much housing it would take to drop the price by $10/sf.
Then let's see how much extra housing we could build, and what the bottlenecks are.
Now we are having a conversation. Otherwise it is just intuition mongering (which, by the way, is a useful and noble exercise as well, but it is not complete).
Edit - I found some: http://urbanpolicy.berkeley.edu/pdf/HQ_REStat80.pdf http://budgeting.thenest.com/price-elasticity-affect-housing... https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2009/R284...
Berkeley and Rand, so trying to cover different views.
It sounds like she's just articulating the arguments of both sides, rather than taking a stance herself, so I don't know how much quantitative analysis would really improve it.
The article does actually mention quantitative analyses some, and why critics dismiss it:
Critics think advocates put too much trust in quantitative analyses which try to estimate the effect of supply on prices. (Like this one [1] which estimates that adding 5,000 new units each year would be enough to stabilize real prices.) Such studies inevitably make dubious simplifying assumptions, and it’s all too easy to set up an analysis to get the conclusion you want.
[1] http://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employmen...
However, it does focus the debate on better issues.
The question of housing may hang on exactly how much new housing is introduced by allowing people to kill more birds, for instance.
Without the quantification, you might still be arguing about how much green space should be mandated.
(These examples are pulled out of thin air).
To put my point another way, the absence of criticism is not a benefit of quant analysis.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=ekXr
https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/Akjfruv9...
San Francisco rents over 70 years, showing a 6.6% annual rate of increase.
https://medium.com/newco/a-guy-just-transcribed-30-years-of-...
6.6 percent is 2.5 percentage points faster than inflation, which doesn’t seem like a lot but when you do it for 60 years in a row it means housing prices quadruple compared to everything else you have to buy.
That’s bad. But that’s SF today, compared to 1956. So what caused prices to go up? That’s the really exciting part of Fischer’s discovery. Armed with his data, he more or less answered that question....
It would take a 53% increase in the housing supply (200,000 new units), or a 44% drop in CPI-adjusted salaries, or a 51% drop in employment, to cut prices by two thirds.
Why the increase? Asset price inflation of Maslovian goods.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/608w97/asset_p...
One highlight:
"These kind of responses miss the simple fact that of the three variables in Fischer’s model, only employment and wages really matter. (The demand-only model achieves an R squared value of .924 and adding the supply variable, housing units, gets us to .940)....Another found that the best model of San Francisco rents needs just one variable: wages (although wages and housing were a close second)."
I think that kind of confirms my gut feeling on first hearing about the problem years ago: the issue is that there is too much money flowing into (a particular sector of) San Francisco.
[1] https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/05/27/rents-in-san-francisc...
Unless you increase land taxes, that's what you end up with.
Or not. They could not know it is a good idea, fail to do it, and cause a bunch of problems as a result. That could in fact be the very source of the problems being discussed here.
Oddly, cities began to freeze in earnest, via zoning laws, in the 1970s. One can see this both from the link and from Google’s Ngram viewer, which sees virtually no references to gentrification until the late 70s, and the term really takes off later than that.
Moreover, the book Zoning Rules! discusses how this actually happened: https://www.amazon.com/Zoning-Rules-Economics-Land-Regulatio.... The fact that it used to be relatively easy to build new housing as demand increases means that we could make it easy again. This is fundamentally a legal problem (we should not allow so many property rights to be violated by non-owners) and a political problem (we are not addressing housing and issues at the right level of government).
It's striking how few affordable housing discussions have a historical view of the issue!
I also like "Zoned in the USA" for its comparisons with other countries, particularly in Europe, which - to my way of looking at things - seem to get some things right that are very strange in the US.
Here's a bunch of other articles and things I've found interesting/useful:
https://bendyimby.com/2017/06/12/yimby-reading/
http://www.dpz.com/Projects/All
There has still been a noticeable increase, but in part because the City of Seattle underestimated the rate of future growth in demand (https://goo.gl/QKpb36). (The city is actually making moves right now to increase housing supply over the next few years to prevent accelerating increases in rents).
Demand, however, is not the only factor commonly cited as putting pressure on housing prices. As tech workers flood the city and mean incomes outpace inflation (which has a positive effect on the overall economy), their purchasing power increases. New construction is of comparatively higher quality, especially in neighborhoods like Capitol Hill, which was not nearly as desirable before 2000.
This is another part of the “noticeable increase”. As neighborhoods become more desirable (such as SLU, Ballard, and Capitol Hill), residents suddenly find themselves paying a premium (which is not reflected in mean pricing). I believe this is much of what has contributed to the idea that rents have risen dramatically (even when the data says otherwise).
Things may not be optimal (there are certainly challenges with market mismatch and misplaced incentives), but I don't think anyone in the industry is saying the major challenges are regulatory.
(The ecological argument against growth in this case is backwards, though. Urban development is less resource intensive than the alternative of suburban or exurban development that uses up a lot more land and requires much longer commutes. And urbanization also tends to suppress birth rates, if you're concerned with very long-term ecological consequences.)
Yes, build in SF, but also build on the Penn, East Bay, South Bay, etc. and coordinate transit development, zoning, etc., etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_State_Growth_Manage...
I believe, economics should be one of the primary subjects taught in school in K-12, that and personal finance (learning how to manage your own money). In this day and age, these are the 2 most important subjects you need to learn. We need an informed citizenry, if we're not going to end up like venezuela.