>> “We’re a small town,” City Councilman W. Clarke Conway said at a meeting on the project last fall, “and we’re a small town by choice.”
>> Last year, Brisbane hired a consultant who found that the city would net $1 million a year in tax revenue by approving the Baylands. But if the city instead approved a project with lots more commercial space, a larger hotel and no housing, Brisbane would gain $9 million annually — an amount equivalent to more than half the city’s current day-to-day operating budget.
>> “I’d like to think if just the fiscal incentives were reversed, if a city could make as much money off housing as they could retail, we’d be having a very different conversation in California,” Stivers said.
>> “I see a lot of stuff,” Dettmer said. “I see beds in garages. You have to increase the [housing] supply. If you really want to help out people, let them live in dignity. It just seems like a no-brainer.”
>> “I do feel sorry that the younger generation is not going to get to live the life that we did,” she said. “But it’s a different time.”
These were the quotes that stood out to me. It seems like, for various reasons, the only benefit to existing residents and policy makers is "we may be able to help other people". That's not enough of an incentive.
If you assume that the property tax on those homes was .011, which is the 1% baseline plus possible voter-approved add-ons, you get $48.4 million per $1 million of value of the average home among the 4400. I paged through the report that is linked to the article [1] and it says that about $9.5 million is the city's share of the property tax revenue (table on page 14 of the consultant's report). So there's a gap to be understood.
I'd imagine the missing $8.5 million of profit goes towards the cost of services for ~10,000 new residents. That's only $850/year/person.
This study [1] should give you an idea: the median residential property operates at a net loss to the city at a revenue to expenditures ratio of 1:1.15 whereas commercial operates at a huge net gain at 1:0.27.
I don't know who is the genius who crunches such kind of numbers. Even though 4400 homes will only get $1 million in direct property taxes. There will be huge indirect economic boost that will happen because of the so many people that will stay. There will be new opportunities for the locals for employments & businesses. There will be lot of restaurants, shopping center etc that will cater to these residents. That will be more than building commercial properties and getting $9 million in property revenues.
Let's assume that the 4400 homes are $1 million each; that will be $4.4 billion in property value; property tax (aside from that dedicated to approved bonds) is fixed at 1%, so with million dollar homes it would gross $44 million in property taxes. So, it'd take much more expensive homes to net around $50 million for the city, and while I don't see a clear estimate of the price of the homes, the fact that the article points to affordability as an issue addressed suggest the plan isn't to build million-dollar homes.
You have things backwards. Planners try to smooth things out or at least prevent disasters.
Most of the existing towns in the SF Bay Area are full of great opportunities for expansion but NIMBYs want their villages to stay the same. That is driven not by planners but reactionaries.
This particular plot of land is a chronically flooded lagoon and swamp which is awkwardly distant from local transit.
It is interesting that instead of being realistic about this land's obviously undesirable nature this article chose instead to print a picture of a nearby plot. The picture shows the former Schlage factory grounds which have undergone extensive remediation and are getting a new high density community built in no small part because of the ongoing efforts of planners to get the highest and best use for that site.
As long as people can't stop lying about what the situation is and what options might be available the chances of a favorable outcome are low.
A "small town" ... 7 miles from the center of a major global city and metro area ... even closer to a major international airport. These people are assholes.
There's nothing wrong with small villages 7 miles from a major city or even a capital city, if the principal city is built properly. If you walk 7 miles from the center of Zurich, Switzerland you'll probably find yourself in the middle of a vineyard or pasture.
I was just objecting to the idea that a small town was inappropriate in this context. With a suitable urban form there's no reason why you couldn't take the entire population of Brisbane and put them all on 640 acres, with 80% open space.
But Brisbane, California is not a "small town" it's a disgusting example of exurban sprawl.
Your link still points to a house outside of Brisbane proper... how transit efficient is San Francisco outside of downtown? BART doesn't reach most of SF, MUNI is abysmal and buses...well, Brisbane has buses too.
I think your assessment is a bit heavy handed considering how bad public transit is in the area in general.
You seem to be defining "Brisbane proper" as the area between San Francisco Ave. and Firth Park. But Brisbane is much more extensive. The majority of its land area is taken up by empty land, single-story material handling facilities, and ludicrous sprawl at "The Ridge".
Brisbane is a small town. It is dense, not sprawling. It has a town square and a handful of shops. It has schools. It is surrounded by empty space on all sides. It is in a canyon of San Bruno Mountain on three sides and surround by bay water and rail yards on the north side. You don't know what you are talking about
That's not the town. That's the industrial park. The town is just south of there. It's made up of houses, not warehouses. Even including the industrial park, Brisbane is small, a town, not sprawling, and is completely detached from SF by water and a couple miles of rail yards. Tunnel Ave is really long and no one drives on it. It is effectively a country road that leads from SF to Brisbane. Go drive it or bike it or walk it some time. Brisbane is a completely separate place from SF
Oh, that makes sense. Instead of talking about what we could actually do -- build high-density by an existing and underused transit hub -- let's complain about the way the entire Bay Area is laid out!
A "small town" ... 7 miles from the center of a major global city and metro area ... even closer to a major international airport.
Nothing weird about that situation at all. In fact it's the way much of planet is organized.
These people are assholes.
Nothing of the sort. They're long-term residents looking out for what's best for their community.
And it's exactly the kind of completely gratuitous negativity (project by outsiders, who otherwise couldn't begin to care what goes on in their town), exemplified above, which shores up this instinct that many of them have to protect what they have. Because they know that you're definitely not concerned about what impact projects like these will have on their quality of life and long-term fiscal interests.
>They're long-term residents looking out for what's best for their community.
No, they're just looking out for themselves. The community is hurt by their greed for massively inflated property values, low taxes, and keeping the younger generation from living the lives they want.
If that makes me negative, fine. But if they are white-washing their behavior by pretending to be concerned for "the community" when really they only care about themselves, yes, that is the very definition of asshole.
With attitudes like this, why wouldn't the existing owners feel their existing way of life is being threatened? Not everyone loves living in a high-density environment, and some people would tend to want their community and home to have the same properties that made it attractive to them in the first place. When you suddenly get an influx of new population that wants to change the character of a community and starts entertaining schemes of forcible land redistribution, how could one not assume that the locals are going to feel like they're being somewhat invaded?
I can see the grievances of both sides on this, but I honestly wish there was more focus on spreading out these 'tech hub' communities to places beyond just the Bay area. There's a certain absurdity to the idea that the tech industry of all industries has this need to clump everyone together into a hyper-concentrated beehive of activity that irrevocably alters the host communities upon which it descends.
> Not everyone loves living in a high-density environment
No one is suggesting that Brisbane should be paved and turned into Manhattan. People are asking Brisbane to approve development in some fallow fields. Brisbane residents (like many of the small towns in the Bay) benefit financially from office space, but pass the buck on housing those employees to other municipalities.
> but pass the buck on housing those employees to other municipalities.
And this is the key argument to be made here. Building stores and offices has a cost - the people who work on those offices and stores must be housed somewhere. A regional empty homes/unhoused inhabitant number could be used to guide a global rule for new developments. If you want to build offices at some place, you need to build k * offices houses at a nearby location.
I agree. When someone moves to a small town by choice there is nothing wrong with wanting it to remain similar as longs the majority of residents like it that way.
There are many new residents to San Francisco that also prefer living there over places like Manhattan precisely because they enjoy open spaces and non-overbearing buildings. Suppose these new tech employees finally convince housing changes and get some condo buildings put in place of the single residence structures. Fast forward 50 years and now the newest generation that wants to move to the city asks these condo building to be replaced with Tokyo style super dense micro-apartment buildings. Those condo owning old-timers might resist that, no?
And yes, I too fail to see the need for the centralized tech hubs that created this dynamic. Spread it out or build new hubs where land is cheap.
Flooding as quickly as possible into hyper-connected and rapidly changing beehives of activity ("cities") is one of thew few constants of the history of human civilization.
The absurdity is that we have such low need for agricultural labor, and such sophisticated technology for skyscrapers and subways, and still live so far from each other, in such small clusters. The absurdity is that there are still, in 2017, substantial numbers of humans that don't live in major cities.
> Nothing of the sort. They're long-term residents looking out for what's best for their community.
Selfish fucking assholes.
> And it's exactly the kind of completely gratuitous negativity (project by outsiders, who otherwise couldn't begin to care what goes on in their town) which shores up this instinct that many of them have to protect what they have. Because they know that you're definitely not concerned about what the impact is on their quality of life and long-term fiscal interests.
God damn right I'm not interested in helping them to protect their little bubble. They are a bunch of selfish pricks.
The residents of Brisbane get to inhale deeply of the fumes generated by nearby enormous mountains of garbage from SF and the bay area on a daily basis. I understand completely why they'd oppose development. Now I suspect if there were a deal in play to remove the awful stench once and for all, there'd be something in it for them.
Right now, they should drag this out as long and as hard as they can IMO lest they get screwed again. Because if the place didn't smell like a$$ on a daily basis, it would have been discovered and gentrified long ago (I remember checking the place out myself in 2007). It could be a fantastic suburb of SF in a world where win/win usually triumphed over I got mine so @#$% you. But that's not how this area works in my experience.
But why put the onus on a small village when the city of SF itself is unwilling to allow normal city development & construction. If anyone are assholes, it's the city of SF itself --who, by the way, typically rally behind "we don't want to Manhattanize SF." If SF is unwilling to do their part, why would we expect a small village compensate ofr the city's unwillingness to support development?
I (as someone who supports building more in the Bay Area) don't want the onus to be just on Brisbane. I want it to be on the whole Bay Area, and all of its townships.
That one of the major issues I think the Bay Area faces: each township passes the buck to the next: "Why should we build housing, when township X is completely unwilling to do so?" Yes, and they say the same thing about you! With this attitude, nothing will ever get built, anywhere.
I think we should recognize that SF and Brisbane are not in the same league. Anything Brisbane would build would be a drop in the bucket. SF can potentially add a hundred thousand units --two hundred thousand units, no problem without changing the character from village to full-blown city. 4,00 units more than doubles the pop of Brisbane. If we added 200,000 units to _only_ SF, that would add 25% to their pop. Another 200,000 would add 20% to SJ.
The Problem is SF, Oakland and SJ --localities which can/could build if they wanted to but simply don't.
I grew up here, it was a very ideal place for families. More suburban than sf (population of less than 5k) but didnt feel like sprawl either. We played in the streets, can't do that in most of sf. Although to be fair this area theyre talking about isnt really in brisbane anyway, its on a industrial stretch.
it reminds me of the mentality of the extreme right and left wing. if they just repeat their rhetoric over and over, and in groups, it gives them a sense of solace that they aren't being inhumane, greedy pigs.
As an outsider, the discussion of San Fransisco housing seems incredibly polarized.
Are advocates of new housing talking about disenfranchising their parents, grandparents, and older aunts and uncles? Are they actually talking about tearing down their old family homes that they grew up in and putting up apartment complexes instead?
If so then... wow that's a level of forward-thinking that's truly rare.
If not ... then these people are trying to have their cake and eat it too.
They want whatever district they move to temporarily for jobs to utterly change its character to suit them, at the expense of those already resident there. And yet anything they find sentimental, and all of their families' land assets, will remain safe in their hometowns far-far from San Fransisco.
You don't get to criticize us for being temporary when it is the policies you write that force us out.
And yes, if for some reason millions of people wanted to move to Wisconsin, I'd rather they built on the site of my family home than lived in RVs and mega-commuted. People's well being matters more than the sentimental value of manufactured goods.
I didn't win the genetic lottery to be born in a place with economic opportunity. But I am an American, and since we live in America and not 14th century feudal Europe, I am not obligated to stay put.
People's wellbeing would be served equally well by the California government designating land for development outside of the intractable San Fran polity, and encouraging tech companies, restaurants, and commercial entities to invest in the area.
The essence of democracy is allowing people to determine their own future, not forcing it upon them due to outside interests.
We aren't 14th century serfs, and closer to home---we aren't waitresses, maintenance workers, or migrant farmers. We are tech workers in a market were demand vastly outstrips demand, so the notion that we are forced to move to San Francisco alone for work lacks perspective.
People want to live in San Fran, not merely because of work, but because of the character of the city, the trendy restaurants, etc. People want San Fran for its luxuries, and its that which I do not believe trumps the ownership stakes of the residents whom already live there.
A local's desire for a quiet street doesn't morally outweigh another American's desire to live on that street.
>The essence of democracy is allowing people to determine their own future
Precisely! We The People determined that it would be our future to have freedom of movement, via the Privileges and Immunities Clause. When we ratified the 14th Amendment, we further reiterated that every American citizen is entitled to equal status under state laws.
That's why prosperous cities resist growth through ham-fisted but plausibly-deniable proxy measures like zoning, rent control, and environmental review. Their goals could be achieved with more elegance and fewer damaging side effects by establishing immigration controls, but they can't, because the American community says that's off-limits.
Subsets of America closing themselves off is a perversion of the right to self-determination, same as it is when people and corporations decide not to pay their federal taxes. It doesn't matter that San Franciscans don't want more neighbors, any more than it matters that the tax evader wants to keep his income. The democratic process ordained that you have to share.
Americans trying to move around America are not outside interests, they are members of the community. Local NIMBY policies transfer wealth to small subsets while harming the community in aggregate, which is right down the middle of behaviors that governments should and usually do shut down.
As people with disposable income, tech workers find a way: redirect some of it to rent. The real victims of opportunity hoarding are the others in the economically stagnant towns we come from would like to follow us but can't. And of course, locals who remain subject to the pressure-cooker housing market, because NIMBY policies are imperfect and ensnare some natives too (those who didn't lock in rent control or mortgages in time).
She may have worded it poorly, but here's the context:
> Still, some Brisbane residents say they don’t trust regulators will get it right, because what’s known about the toxicity of chemicals can change over time. Even though they won’t live in the Baylands, opponents believe they have a responsibility to shield those who might.
I don't agree with them but that's still a valid concern
> if a city could make as much money off housing as they could retail
The article points out concerns about the size of the expansion relative to the current city, which makes sense, but why is tax income a concern for a city? Surely it doesn't exist to make as much money as possible?
Residents have kids who go to school, they need hospitals, they take up services. That million dollars a year net is only going to go down over time as things get more expensive and the real estate taxes stay the same. Eventually they'll lose money.
Cities don't have to make money they just have to not lose it.
> >> “I do feel sorry that the younger generation is not going to get to live the life that we did,” she said. “But it’s a different time.”
63 year old said that. How about in honour of the different time we stop bothering to keep the elderly alive. I feel sorry for them for not getting the health care that they need, but it's a different time.
If Silicon Valley were serious about solving its housing crisis (which it's not), there are solutions. Because while you're concern trolling that Brisbane doesn't feel any sort of civic duty to create some sort of Gibsonian tech ghetto with their valuable (but really smelly) land, the valley could solve this problem on its own by relaxing zoning laws (which they won't).
Now imagine an alternate reality where the BART had circled the bay and then extended northward, southward, and eastward instead of getting @#$%blocked in 1961 by San Mateo county. But since we can't have nice things like that, Brisbane IMO owes SF and the bay area nothing and they should squeeze out the last drop of profit from this situation.
Gibsonian tech ghetto? That's a bit exaggerated. We are talking about building medium density housing and mixed use around a railway station versus commercial property and office parks. Sounds more like what Brisbane wants with the commercial property is closer to a Gibsonian tech ghetto to me.
Sounds to me like they want to max out tax revenue and that's their right. Were you jumping up and down and holding your breath when San Jose built office space and very little housing for exactly the same reason during the first dotcom boom?
All this developer has to do is make building that housing a no-brainer for Brisbane, but I suspect in doing so the profitability plummets or somebody would have already done this, no?
> Were you jumping up and down and holding your breath when San Jose built office space and very little housing for exactly the same reason during the first dotcom boom?
Yes. The sprawling office parks and snakey 8 lane roads of northern San Jose are a fucking miserable mess. But the concentration of offices and condos in downtown San Jose is probably the only thing resembling sensible urban planning in the whole South Bay.
OK, but for me, Brisbane is the Brigadoon of the Bay Area. I don't see why we should have any say whatsoever in how they decide to develop what is theirs. Make it a win/win for them or GTFO IMO.
Try walking downtown on a typical evening. Say, Market to 6th, Santa Clara St. to, say, Reed. Feel the vibe. Research how many businesses (restaurants, bars, clubs, shops) have failed there even during the "recovery".
Then do the same in downtown Santa Clara. Then Willow Glen (Lincoln Ave). Then Mountain View (Castro St.). Then Palo Alto (University Ave). And Menlo Park. Even Redwood City.
Even ignoring that modern downtown San Jose is "planned" and the others "unplanned": if San Jose is "sensible" urban planning, then give me unplanned any day.
I spent 50+ evenings a year downtown for over a 20-year span. Now, I avoid it except for SOMA First Fridays.
It's funny, because you're dead-on about this IMO. Individual cities responding individually to the commuter calamity of the South Bay have done a better job than any high-fallutin' 20-year plan could have.
As for downtown San Jose, it looks like it's about to get a lot better if Google follows through on building a campus there. Meanwhile in my hometown of Santa Cruz, it's bums, needles, and out of business signs thanks to our local rabidly anti-growth government. I'm pinning my hopes on Amazon eventually expanding its downtown footprint as the only way possible way out of the trap the place constructed for itself.
if Google follows through on building a campus there
I wouldn't count on that. They just bought (final) some $600 million worth of real estate in North Sunnyvale.
Those parcels in San Jose were originally acquired for the ballpark that never happened, either. I suspect they offered them to Google at far below their value, as with the A's.
Well, as someone who was once caught in the net of Google's "Let's hire every smart person in the valley and give them menial jobs to keep them off the market" plan of 2011, I wouldn't rule out the "Let's develop the last pieces of available land in Silicon Valley so no one else can" plan of 2018 because WTF else do you do with billions of dollars in profit?
> San Jose is "planned" and the others "unplanned"
I didn't say the others are unplanned. They are entirely planned to stay exactly as they are and constrain growth so that their super wealthy residents can live exactly as they have been for the past twenty years without any change.
> then give me unplanned any day.
Well as said. They are planned to be that way. But sure, I guess if you can afford the $6,000 rents to live there you can have them. But that's not a good vision for the Bay Area, nor a place I particularly want to live even if I could afford it.
> downtown San Jose
I don't disagree with what you say about San Jose. I used to live downtown. Still compared to those other places you mention San Jose actually allows development. And there's a lot more starting to go on there now. Palo Alto is great if you're rich. All the boutiques. And $6000 per month apartments. It has a blue bottle. (But other than that pretty shit options.) Mountain View is an ugly dump of stores that only seem to still exist because they're owned by someone who isn't paying current market rate taxes. And a bunch of ugly out of place buildings at the other edge. But it does have good sushi. Redwood City you mentioned is the place I think is doing a good job from the little I've seen these days, could become a model for the rest of the South Bay. I hope they keep it up.
One relatively simple solution is to pass laws that mandate building homes along stores and hotels. Want to build a large hotel and some stores? Need to also build 4,400 affordable houses. And, since we are fixing the world, add to that mandatory investment in clean energy for seawater desalination, because water and energy for those homes will have to come from somewhere.
And I didn't even suggest higher density habitations.
This has been going around, but even this plan to build 4400 dwellings is still total nonsense, because the plan also includes office space for 15000 people. 15000 jobs requires much more than 4400 dwellings, so this plan will just make things worse.
My current favorite local example of this taken to its ridiculous ends is this one: http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/06/09/internal-affairs-san-j... . Where San Jose and Santa Clara are going back and forth suing each other about who gets to have the businesses and who has to bear the "burden" of having housing.
Redwood City is encouraging apartment construction in a big way. Block after block of buildings in the 8-story range are going up near the railroad station. Meanwhile, Stanford University is building an additional campus about a mile from downtown. The strip-mall area in between is starting to be replaced with larger buildings. It's happening fast; there are construction cranes all over town.
Meanwhile, real estate in SF is dropping in price. The bubble seems to be popping there.
I just found out that Stanford's "Redwood City campus" is entirely administrative. 35 acres of bureaucrats. 2700 people. "School of Medicine administration. Stanford Libraries and University Archives administration. Business Affairs. Land, Buildings and Real Estate. Human Resources. Residential & Dining Enterprises. Office of Development (i.e. fund-raising). And those are just the off-site administrators. There are more back on the main campus.
May not be a popular opinion but I'd have to say that I value the idea of having space between me and my neighbors, so I'm definitely not in favor of maxing out the land for homes to the point where the houses might as well be attached and labeled condos or apartments.
I can understand where the people are coming from in wanting to maintain what they've invested into. I'd hate to see a sudden boom in population and sudden traffic spikes due to the knee jerk reaction of building 100's of more houses in an area that wasn't even planned to support more than what is existing.
People do need housing but people also need to be realistic about where they live and how they plan to keep on living there.
With respect to your and our values, the people of the state have mandated that greenhouse gas emissions be reduced below 1990 levels by year 2020, and state law requires every city to adopt a climate action plan to that effect. Brisbane's adopted plan recognizes that transportation is the majority of the city's greenhouse gas emissions, and acknowledges that "Lack of affordability in urban core housing causes people to live far away from where they work", but does not propose fixing this problem. The only solution their climate action plan proposes is to install public electric car chargers!
Prop 13 is the big elephant in the room. Repealing Prop 13 and rent control would probably align everybody's incentives to keep housing "affordable". Owners would probably welcome higher density housing to help keep property taxes down. Renters would likewise welcome more housing to increase the rental supply.
However, there doesn't really seem to be a way to actually repeal any of these laws.
Problem being, a lot of people would get absolutely screwed by that, and end up losing their home. There needs to be a way to fix that, without going back to the original problem Prop 13 was intended to fix, which was people being unable to afford the property tax on homes that they had been living in forever.
Why wouldn't phasing it out across 10 to 15 year period to mitigate the effects, not take care of the bulk of the problem?
If we'd begun a phase out in 2000, during the height of the tech boom, then by now Prop 13 would be gone and the housing situation would be much different.
> Problem being, a lot of people would get absolutely screwed by that, and end up losing their home.
Would there be many? Certainly, there were some cases pre-prop 13, but prop 13 wasn't narrowly focussed on protecting homeowners. Those were exploited as pretext, they weren't the motivation.
And you could make it protect homeowners while fixing the local government incentives by providing a refundable state income tax credit for 100% of the property tax due to assessed value increases beyond the existing Prop 13 limits. You could do this without or without, modifying the 1% fixed rate.
If you don't want that big of a subsidy, you could just allow homeowners to defer without penalty the excess amount until transfer of the property. Still stops people from being priced out of their homes.
In retrospect, even the pretext was bunk. It turns out that turfing old people out of their giant, valuable houses is a benefit rather than a problem. Today, thanks to Prop 13, Boomers are massively over-housed.
You can phase it in over time, and you can give a property tax exemption to the elderly. The current structure is a large windfall for a lot of people that it wasn't meant to be a windfall for.
It's fine to examine the negative effects of repeal, but you also have to consider the negative effects of not repealing.
Prop13 is a monster that will continue to exacerbate inequality. Families that owned homes in affluent areas pre-1970 will continue to pay artificially suppressed property tax rates in perpetuity, so long as they only transfer the house within their immediate family. In that way, Prop13 is a perverse incentive to suppress real estate transactions, which exacerbates the real estate issues we already have.
I think the issue as it stands is that the current residents have only 2 options:
A.) Approve high density housing and then see the value of their current house drop (and rental income drop if they are landlords) and their schools, grocery stores, parks, open space, parking, favorite restaurants, fitness centers and traffic become all be super crowded
B.) Approve high density office and then see the value of their current house skyrocket, see additional community benefits from developer concessions and no impact to their current community amenities.
What happens if the developer proposed a third option of profit sharing so the current residents each benefit as individuals:
C.) Build high density housing and high density office and give a significant share of the profits to the existing residents. For 4400 units, the profits could easily be in the $500M to $1B range. With only ~2350 (4700/2) households, profit sharing of $50 to $100K per household would be $120M to $235M. That could be a nice down payment for a house in the Central Valley if they want to have that small town feel. Profit sharing on the annual office rent could also provide some UBI income for the residents and keep apartment rents stable.
> B.) Approve high density office and then see the value of their current house skyrocket, see additional community benefits from developer concessions and no impact to their current community amenities.
The state of California needs some sort of Beds for Butts in Office Chairs legislation. Want to build office space and expand your tax base? Pony up the space to house those employees.
Agreed! Even then though you still need to get it past the existing NIMBY population. I think buying them out via cash payments is really the only way to get existing NIMBYs on board with high density residential units which were not zoned when the bought into the community.
Basically the issue is that the developers are changing the rules of the game AFTER the existing NIMBYs bought into the community.
As mentioned elsewhere, gross is not net. Once you factor in city services costs for those new residents, the net change is far lower than the gross property taxes per new resident.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] thread>> Last year, Brisbane hired a consultant who found that the city would net $1 million a year in tax revenue by approving the Baylands. But if the city instead approved a project with lots more commercial space, a larger hotel and no housing, Brisbane would gain $9 million annually — an amount equivalent to more than half the city’s current day-to-day operating budget.
>> “I’d like to think if just the fiscal incentives were reversed, if a city could make as much money off housing as they could retail, we’d be having a very different conversation in California,” Stivers said.
>> “I see a lot of stuff,” Dettmer said. “I see beds in garages. You have to increase the [housing] supply. If you really want to help out people, let them live in dignity. It just seems like a no-brainer.”
>> “I do feel sorry that the younger generation is not going to get to live the life that we did,” she said. “But it’s a different time.”
These were the quotes that stood out to me. It seems like, for various reasons, the only benefit to existing residents and policy makers is "we may be able to help other people". That's not enough of an incentive.
[1] http://brisbaneca.org/sites/default/files/ccBaylandsHearing_...
This study [1] should give you an idea: the median residential property operates at a net loss to the city at a revenue to expenditures ratio of 1:1.15 whereas commercial operates at a huge net gain at 1:0.27.
[1] http://landuse.uga.edu/Documents/cocsrep.pdf
Most of the existing towns in the SF Bay Area are full of great opportunities for expansion but NIMBYs want their villages to stay the same. That is driven not by planners but reactionaries.
This particular plot of land is a chronically flooded lagoon and swamp which is awkwardly distant from local transit.
It is interesting that instead of being realistic about this land's obviously undesirable nature this article chose instead to print a picture of a nearby plot. The picture shows the former Schlage factory grounds which have undergone extensive remediation and are getting a new high density community built in no small part because of the ongoing efforts of planners to get the highest and best use for that site.
As long as people can't stop lying about what the situation is and what options might be available the chances of a favorable outcome are low.
But Brisbane, California is not a "small town" it's a disgusting example of exurban sprawl.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Brisbane,+CA/@37.679201,-1...
Looking at the map (https://goo.gl/maps/7kvttaK8z7F2), it's not even in Brisbane proper, so I think you're wrong about your assessment.
I have been to Brisbane, the number of large McMansions is very tiny.
Point it the existing built environment of Brisbane, CA is not worth preserving. Its car-dependent nature is a menace to the region.
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.6916572,-122.4087356,3a,90y,...
I think your assessment is a bit heavy handed considering how bad public transit is in the area in general.
That's not what we call an 'exurb', either.
Brisbane is a small town. It is dense, not sprawling. It has a town square and a handful of shops. It has schools. It is surrounded by empty space on all sides. It is in a canyon of San Bruno Mountain on three sides and surround by bay water and rail yards on the north side. You don't know what you are talking about
The entire peninsula is tiny, it's not fair to compare it to Zurich.
Nothing weird about that situation at all. In fact it's the way much of planet is organized.
These people are assholes.
Nothing of the sort. They're long-term residents looking out for what's best for their community.
And it's exactly the kind of completely gratuitous negativity (project by outsiders, who otherwise couldn't begin to care what goes on in their town), exemplified above, which shores up this instinct that many of them have to protect what they have. Because they know that you're definitely not concerned about what impact projects like these will have on their quality of life and long-term fiscal interests.
No, they're just looking out for themselves. The community is hurt by their greed for massively inflated property values, low taxes, and keeping the younger generation from living the lives they want.
If that makes me negative, fine. But if they are white-washing their behavior by pretending to be concerned for "the community" when really they only care about themselves, yes, that is the very definition of asshole.
Or maybe they see positive tradeoffs. Either way it's for them to assess, not you.
Keeping the younger generation from living the lives they want.
As if they have some inalienable right to live in places like Brisbane.
If that makes me negative, fine.
I doubt they care what you think, actually.
Until the state decides to apply eminent domain so more people can better use the space available.
> As if they have some inalienable right to live in places like Brisbane.
As if anyone had an inalienable right not to have neighbors.
I can see the grievances of both sides on this, but I honestly wish there was more focus on spreading out these 'tech hub' communities to places beyond just the Bay area. There's a certain absurdity to the idea that the tech industry of all industries has this need to clump everyone together into a hyper-concentrated beehive of activity that irrevocably alters the host communities upon which it descends.
No one is suggesting that Brisbane should be paved and turned into Manhattan. People are asking Brisbane to approve development in some fallow fields. Brisbane residents (like many of the small towns in the Bay) benefit financially from office space, but pass the buck on housing those employees to other municipalities.
And this is the key argument to be made here. Building stores and offices has a cost - the people who work on those offices and stores must be housed somewhere. A regional empty homes/unhoused inhabitant number could be used to guide a global rule for new developments. If you want to build offices at some place, you need to build k * offices houses at a nearby location.
There are many new residents to San Francisco that also prefer living there over places like Manhattan precisely because they enjoy open spaces and non-overbearing buildings. Suppose these new tech employees finally convince housing changes and get some condo buildings put in place of the single residence structures. Fast forward 50 years and now the newest generation that wants to move to the city asks these condo building to be replaced with Tokyo style super dense micro-apartment buildings. Those condo owning old-timers might resist that, no?
And yes, I too fail to see the need for the centralized tech hubs that created this dynamic. Spread it out or build new hubs where land is cheap.
The absurdity is that we have such low need for agricultural labor, and such sophisticated technology for skyscrapers and subways, and still live so far from each other, in such small clusters. The absurdity is that there are still, in 2017, substantial numbers of humans that don't live in major cities.
So the folks who live there now do because they were born earlier and got to buy a house first?
Selfish fucking assholes.
> And it's exactly the kind of completely gratuitous negativity (project by outsiders, who otherwise couldn't begin to care what goes on in their town) which shores up this instinct that many of them have to protect what they have. Because they know that you're definitely not concerned about what the impact is on their quality of life and long-term fiscal interests.
God damn right I'm not interested in helping them to protect their little bubble. They are a bunch of selfish pricks.
Right now, they should drag this out as long and as hard as they can IMO lest they get screwed again. Because if the place didn't smell like a$$ on a daily basis, it would have been discovered and gentrified long ago (I remember checking the place out myself in 2007). It could be a fantastic suburb of SF in a world where win/win usually triumphed over I got mine so @#$% you. But that's not how this area works in my experience.
That one of the major issues I think the Bay Area faces: each township passes the buck to the next: "Why should we build housing, when township X is completely unwilling to do so?" Yes, and they say the same thing about you! With this attitude, nothing will ever get built, anywhere.
The Problem is SF, Oakland and SJ --localities which can/could build if they wanted to but simply don't.
Are advocates of new housing talking about disenfranchising their parents, grandparents, and older aunts and uncles? Are they actually talking about tearing down their old family homes that they grew up in and putting up apartment complexes instead?
If so then... wow that's a level of forward-thinking that's truly rare.
If not ... then these people are trying to have their cake and eat it too.
They want whatever district they move to temporarily for jobs to utterly change its character to suit them, at the expense of those already resident there. And yet anything they find sentimental, and all of their families' land assets, will remain safe in their hometowns far-far from San Fransisco.
And yes, if for some reason millions of people wanted to move to Wisconsin, I'd rather they built on the site of my family home than lived in RVs and mega-commuted. People's well being matters more than the sentimental value of manufactured goods.
I didn't win the genetic lottery to be born in a place with economic opportunity. But I am an American, and since we live in America and not 14th century feudal Europe, I am not obligated to stay put.
The essence of democracy is allowing people to determine their own future, not forcing it upon them due to outside interests.
We aren't 14th century serfs, and closer to home---we aren't waitresses, maintenance workers, or migrant farmers. We are tech workers in a market were demand vastly outstrips demand, so the notion that we are forced to move to San Francisco alone for work lacks perspective.
People want to live in San Fran, not merely because of work, but because of the character of the city, the trendy restaurants, etc. People want San Fran for its luxuries, and its that which I do not believe trumps the ownership stakes of the residents whom already live there.
>The essence of democracy is allowing people to determine their own future
Precisely! We The People determined that it would be our future to have freedom of movement, via the Privileges and Immunities Clause. When we ratified the 14th Amendment, we further reiterated that every American citizen is entitled to equal status under state laws.
That's why prosperous cities resist growth through ham-fisted but plausibly-deniable proxy measures like zoning, rent control, and environmental review. Their goals could be achieved with more elegance and fewer damaging side effects by establishing immigration controls, but they can't, because the American community says that's off-limits.
Subsets of America closing themselves off is a perversion of the right to self-determination, same as it is when people and corporations decide not to pay their federal taxes. It doesn't matter that San Franciscans don't want more neighbors, any more than it matters that the tax evader wants to keep his income. The democratic process ordained that you have to share.
Americans trying to move around America are not outside interests, they are members of the community. Local NIMBY policies transfer wealth to small subsets while harming the community in aggregate, which is right down the middle of behaviors that governments should and usually do shut down.
As people with disposable income, tech workers find a way: redirect some of it to rent. The real victims of opportunity hoarding are the others in the economically stagnant towns we come from would like to follow us but can't. And of course, locals who remain subject to the pressure-cooker housing market, because NIMBY policies are imperfect and ensnare some natives too (those who didn't lock in rent control or mortgages in time).
> Still, some Brisbane residents say they don’t trust regulators will get it right, because what’s known about the toxicity of chemicals can change over time. Even though they won’t live in the Baylands, opponents believe they have a responsibility to shield those who might.
I don't agree with them but that's still a valid concern
The article points out concerns about the size of the expansion relative to the current city, which makes sense, but why is tax income a concern for a city? Surely it doesn't exist to make as much money as possible?
Cities don't have to make money they just have to not lose it.
63 year old said that. How about in honour of the different time we stop bothering to keep the elderly alive. I feel sorry for them for not getting the health care that they need, but it's a different time.
An excellent encapsulation of what I call the "fuck you, got mine" mode of American politics.
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2014/02/heres-what-it-would-l...
Now imagine an alternate reality where the BART had circled the bay and then extended northward, southward, and eastward instead of getting @#$%blocked in 1961 by San Mateo county. But since we can't have nice things like that, Brisbane IMO owes SF and the bay area nothing and they should squeeze out the last drop of profit from this situation.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2007/02/05/history-of-bart-to-the...
All this developer has to do is make building that housing a no-brainer for Brisbane, but I suspect in doing so the profitability plummets or somebody would have already done this, no?
Yes. The sprawling office parks and snakey 8 lane roads of northern San Jose are a fucking miserable mess. But the concentration of offices and condos in downtown San Jose is probably the only thing resembling sensible urban planning in the whole South Bay.
Try walking downtown on a typical evening. Say, Market to 6th, Santa Clara St. to, say, Reed. Feel the vibe. Research how many businesses (restaurants, bars, clubs, shops) have failed there even during the "recovery".
Then do the same in downtown Santa Clara. Then Willow Glen (Lincoln Ave). Then Mountain View (Castro St.). Then Palo Alto (University Ave). And Menlo Park. Even Redwood City.
Even ignoring that modern downtown San Jose is "planned" and the others "unplanned": if San Jose is "sensible" urban planning, then give me unplanned any day.
I spent 50+ evenings a year downtown for over a 20-year span. Now, I avoid it except for SOMA First Fridays.
As for downtown San Jose, it looks like it's about to get a lot better if Google follows through on building a campus there. Meanwhile in my hometown of Santa Cruz, it's bums, needles, and out of business signs thanks to our local rabidly anti-growth government. I'm pinning my hopes on Amazon eventually expanding its downtown footprint as the only way possible way out of the trap the place constructed for itself.
Those parcels in San Jose were originally acquired for the ballpark that never happened, either. I suspect they offered them to Google at far below their value, as with the A's.
I didn't say the others are unplanned. They are entirely planned to stay exactly as they are and constrain growth so that their super wealthy residents can live exactly as they have been for the past twenty years without any change.
> then give me unplanned any day.
Well as said. They are planned to be that way. But sure, I guess if you can afford the $6,000 rents to live there you can have them. But that's not a good vision for the Bay Area, nor a place I particularly want to live even if I could afford it.
> downtown San Jose
I don't disagree with what you say about San Jose. I used to live downtown. Still compared to those other places you mention San Jose actually allows development. And there's a lot more starting to go on there now. Palo Alto is great if you're rich. All the boutiques. And $6000 per month apartments. It has a blue bottle. (But other than that pretty shit options.) Mountain View is an ugly dump of stores that only seem to still exist because they're owned by someone who isn't paying current market rate taxes. And a bunch of ugly out of place buildings at the other edge. But it does have good sushi. Redwood City you mentioned is the place I think is doing a good job from the little I've seen these days, could become a model for the rest of the South Bay. I hope they keep it up.
One relatively simple solution is to pass laws that mandate building homes along stores and hotels. Want to build a large hotel and some stores? Need to also build 4,400 affordable houses. And, since we are fixing the world, add to that mandatory investment in clean energy for seawater desalination, because water and energy for those homes will have to come from somewhere.
And I didn't even suggest higher density habitations.
I recommend comparing and contrasting with this plan for Coyote Valley, to see what real urbanism looks like. http://www.greenbelt.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Coyote-V...
While prop 13 limits increases, for new units, they would be assessed at current value.
Meanwhile, real estate in SF is dropping in price. The bubble seems to be popping there.
Stanford has only 2,180 faculty members.
I can understand where the people are coming from in wanting to maintain what they've invested into. I'd hate to see a sudden boom in population and sudden traffic spikes due to the knee jerk reaction of building 100's of more houses in an area that wasn't even planned to support more than what is existing.
People do need housing but people also need to be realistic about where they live and how they plan to keep on living there.
They aren't building new houses between old houses...
Prop 13 ruins everything.
However, there doesn't really seem to be a way to actually repeal any of these laws.
If we'd begun a phase out in 2000, during the height of the tech boom, then by now Prop 13 would be gone and the housing situation would be much different.
Would there be many? Certainly, there were some cases pre-prop 13, but prop 13 wasn't narrowly focussed on protecting homeowners. Those were exploited as pretext, they weren't the motivation.
And you could make it protect homeowners while fixing the local government incentives by providing a refundable state income tax credit for 100% of the property tax due to assessed value increases beyond the existing Prop 13 limits. You could do this without or without, modifying the 1% fixed rate.
If you don't want that big of a subsidy, you could just allow homeowners to defer without penalty the excess amount until transfer of the property. Still stops people from being priced out of their homes.
Prop13 is a monster that will continue to exacerbate inequality. Families that owned homes in affluent areas pre-1970 will continue to pay artificially suppressed property tax rates in perpetuity, so long as they only transfer the house within their immediate family. In that way, Prop13 is a perverse incentive to suppress real estate transactions, which exacerbates the real estate issues we already have.
Easy solution.
A.) Approve high density housing and then see the value of their current house drop (and rental income drop if they are landlords) and their schools, grocery stores, parks, open space, parking, favorite restaurants, fitness centers and traffic become all be super crowded
B.) Approve high density office and then see the value of their current house skyrocket, see additional community benefits from developer concessions and no impact to their current community amenities.
What happens if the developer proposed a third option of profit sharing so the current residents each benefit as individuals:
C.) Build high density housing and high density office and give a significant share of the profits to the existing residents. For 4400 units, the profits could easily be in the $500M to $1B range. With only ~2350 (4700/2) households, profit sharing of $50 to $100K per household would be $120M to $235M. That could be a nice down payment for a house in the Central Valley if they want to have that small town feel. Profit sharing on the annual office rent could also provide some UBI income for the residents and keep apartment rents stable.
The state of California needs some sort of Beds for Butts in Office Chairs legislation. Want to build office space and expand your tax base? Pony up the space to house those employees.
Basically the issue is that the developers are changing the rules of the game AFTER the existing NIMBYs bought into the community.