> We are supportive of the preliminary approval of a North Bay Shore precise plan which includes 9,850 units of housing, 1,600 of which would be affordable...
I know exactly what they mean by “affordable”, but how the hell are we ok getting to a point where affordable housing only refers to housing that is affordable because it’s being subsidized?
I think this is terminology. When people hear "subsidized" housing they start thinking about project towers and run down section 8 singe family homes. "Affordable housing" still has a fairly positive connotation that won't cause as many people to oppose a project. I agree, it's unfortunate that housing poor people has to be branded, but that's the society we live in.
ah, the old euphemistic jump strategy at play. I can't say I identified affordable housing in such a light but now that you point it out indeed it is subsidized but dodges all the subsidized baggage like so many earlier language plays in euphemism island hopping in an archipelago of nearby clustered ideas.
In my experience with local politics, "affordable housing" can mean any of three things:
- Subsidized housing
- Public housing
- Increasing density to lower the actual price of housing
But homeowners (overrepresented among voters) generally only support the first, as the other two could make their property value go down (y'know, in the affordable direction).
You can end up with three groups that are all at odds with each other and all campaigning for "affordable housing". Deft politicians can spin this confusion to make housing scarcity sound like altruism.
What's even better is that subsidized housing is generally subsidized by passing on the costs of the subsidy to the unsubsidized units in the development.
That is, if it costs the developer $500k per unit, and they're required to sell 200 of their 1000 units for $100k each, the $80M subsidy gets added onto the cost of the remaining unsubsidized units at $80k each. This effectively removes supply through removing development projects that cannot make an open-market profit while handing out the mandated "affordable housing" subsidy.
It's truly Orwellian that regulations that make housing less affordable get called "affordable housing".
> It's truly Orwellian that regulations that make housing less affordable get called "affordable housing".
To be fair, developers sell units at what the market will bear, rather than on a "cost-plus" basis. Raising developer costs doesn't impact the final sale price.
Now one could argue that reducing developer profits means that fewer developers will try to build... but it's properly zoned land, not developers that is in short supply.
Or maybe you mean that the requirement that some of the housing be "affordable", means only projects that the remainder of the units are "unaffordable" will be built... but that's the case anyway; given the scarcity of land it doesn't make sense to build affordable housing unless forced.
Not that I'm in favor of housing subsidies. It turns a few well-connected or lucky people into lottery winners, and doesn't reduce the overall cost of housing.
>To be fair, developers sell units at what the market will bear, rather than on a "cost-plus" basis. Raising developer costs doesn't impact the final sale price.
Raising developer costs kill off unprofitable developments until the marginal unit created has a cost equal to what the market will bear. It depends on the relative elasticity of supply and demand - we'll hit an equilibrium of fewer units at a higher price, with both less developer profits and less consumer surplus. Whether the loss is mostly borne by purchasers or sellers depends on details of the market.
>but it's properly zoned land, not developers that is in short supply.
Developers in the Bay Area spend lots of money to figure out whether or not land is properly zoned, due to the community review system and other things that'd be fixed with a by-right zoning policy. Things aren't built to the maximum of the zones - they're built to what's affordable by developers attempting to get permission to build.
>given the scarcity of land it doesn't make sense to build affordable housing unless forced
It doesn't matter whether housing is affordable at market rates because we build things that are affordable, or through building so much luxury houses that there's so little demand for existing buildings that they now become affordable.
If the lot next door added a three-bedroom luxury apartment that cost less than your studio, you'd move out of your current place and into that in a heartbeat. Then your studio now goes on the market and gets whatever it can - likely, a much more affordable price.
Adding dense housing makes housing more affordable. It's only obvious if it's cheap and dense - if it's expensive, the affordable units are those that the new residents move out of.
> we'll hit an equilibrium of fewer units at a higher price, with both less developer profits and less consumer surplus.
No we won't, because the limit of zoning and land doesn't allow us to get anywhere near that equilibrium. Your statement would only be correct in a world with infinite land in the Bay Area. But the equilibrium for "fewer" units in San Francisco might be (for example) 50,000 new housing units per year, but you're lucky to get permits and land for couple thousand.
> Things aren't built to the maximum of the zones - they're built to what's affordable by developers attempting to get permission to build.
This is missing the point. 100% of the land that can pass the community review process is profitable to build on. Even with "affordable housing" requirements. Even with reduced developer profits. If you can build on it, you're gonna make money. Therefore, the limiting factor is land; the effect of affordable housing requirements is to lower the windfall profits of any developer lucky enough to get by community review.
> It doesn't matter whether housing is affordable at market rates because we build things that are affordable, or through building so much luxury houses that there's so little demand for existing buildings that they now become affordable.
Right, everyone who understands math understands this. The issue is that if you don't have land you can build on, you can't build. And if you do have land you can build on, you're gonna make money. Affordable housing requirements do not decrease the amount of net construction, they just move windfall profits from the developer to a few lucky random people.
Zoning is a self-inflicted problem. Land? Hong Kong hosts a population of 7.3 million in an area 427 square miles. The Bay Area spreads a population of 7.7 million over 6,966 square miles. The Bay Area has room for a fifteen-fold increase in population. All it has to do is remove the zoning straitjacket.
That's a fifteen fold increase in garbage. Fifteen fold increase in the number of toilets that flush shit. Probably close to fifteen fold increase in cars; people can't live without those even if the density goes up.
I basically support density if the population remains constant. If we take a sprawled city of two million and make those people cluster together in a region that is 10% of the original area, that is fantastic! We can use the 90% of the area for parks and farmland. Everyone living closer together creates various efficiencies. Cheaper commuting, distribution of goods, HVAC.
So what? Beef up infrastructure by fifteen times as well. What's the problem? Are we running out of concrete? Have we lost the technology needed to build sewage treatment plants? Has actually building stuff become offensive?
I also want increased density. In the Bay Area, zoning regulations keep density artificially low and prices obscenely high. Stop the self-inflicted pain.
>100% of the land that can pass the community review process is profitable to build on.
The thing to look at isn't the after-the-fact windfall profits of successfully getting through community review, but the forward-looking expected profits of trying to get through community review. You don't know ahead of time what will work - the profits from the ones that do have to fund the losses from trying and failing to get through community review, else the whole thing will consistently lose you money.
Here's an advance prediction: the average profit from a successful project that gets through community review times the probability of success is roughly equivalent to the average loss from failing times the probability of failure.
> The thing to look at isn't the after-the-fact windfall profits of successfully getting through community review, but the forward-looking expected profits of trying to get through community review.
I'll concede that lower profits from developer-subsidized housing my drive fewer attempted community reviews, and I'll also concede that it's possible that more attempted community reviews could result in more housing being built.
However, I still believe that the loss of profit from subsidized housing is not the significant factor holding back new construction; at least not when 3 bedrooms goes for 7 figures. Land costs and political friction currently dominate the equation; if you could easily buy a half acre and toss up 100 condos on it, the sale prices of those new condos would drop, and construction profits would become a pressing concern. (of course at that point housing would be affordable, so it's a moot point)
Yeah, there's many factors. It's not like removing subsidized housing would magically fix everything. It would make things better at the margin overall, more than the wealth transfer from developers to subsidized housing lottery winners.
That's right. "Affordable" by itself doesn't say anything about who can afford it. If we were talking about affordable for the middle class, we'd call it "Affordable for the middle class." This is why the term is a misnomer. All housing is affordable, but the term is being used to describe something other than affordability (subsidization).
You're arguing different things. You're using a plain English version of the definition of "affordable," beaner is trying to describe the real estate term of art "affordable housing."
I don't think there's anything pedantic about it. The term "affordable housing" implies that housing which isn't subsidized isn't affordable. But the vast majority of housing is bought, sold, and owned by regular people without subsidizing. The term is not accurate at all. The fraction of housing that is only available to a number of people in the single digits is so small as to not be worth considering. "All but 0.0001% of housing is affordable" would be pedantic; "all housing is affordable" is not.
> I don't think there's anything pedantic about it. The term "affordable housing" implies that housing which isn't subsidized isn't affordable.
No, it doesn't, because “affordable” doesn't mean “subsidized”, it means the purchase or rental cost is (and, usually when it comes to rental-committed units in a development plan, is guaranteed by contract or some other binding arrangement to remain) within the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s income-based affordability guidelines for a specified income level; in the case of the plan under discussion, that income level being 50% of the Areawide Median Income for Santa Clara County.
It's like "accessibility". Several times (long ago) I've mistaken that for meaning "easy to access" and been disappointed to find it was useless. I still don't know what a "walkable neighborhood" is. Can't you walk just as easily in any neighborhood? When I read this article, I wasn't sure if affordable meant restricted to poor people, subsidized, or small (cheap) houses. I only learnt the answer from this thread. These words are only useful to the groups who already use them and impede understanding to outsiders.
The term as actually used in, e.g., the an at issue is not a misnomer, it's a well-defined and precise technical term, with all the relevant qualifiers attached.
The media accounts drop the reference to the income-based affordability formula from HUD and the income level in the plan to which the formula is applied, but that isn't a problem with the term, it's a problem, if anything, with the media accounts.
No, it's a fairly precisely defined technical term that has nothing to do with subsidy (but the part about the income group for whom it is affordable and the standards by which it is affordable are omitted from media accounts; there are HUD guidelines for affordability based on income level, and the plan at issue addresses housing affordable, by those HUD standards, for households at or below 50% of the Areawide Median Income for Santa Clara County.)
Purchasable does not mean affordable. Affordable is defined as being "whether you can afford it" which in this case is the aggregate "you", meaning a large plurality of the population.
You can't say something is affordable just because someone can buy it.
If I understood it correctly, Google has offered to tear down office buildings they currently own in order to make room for residential units to be built on Google's property. They are saying that they need to add additional offices as part of this demolition and construction. The article title tries to make it sound like Google is preventing housing from being built on other's land which seems a bit misleading. (Or maybe I just don't understand what the article is saying.)
If I understand it correctly, Google originally offered to place new housing on their land. They are now demanding that they be allowed more office space (on, or near, that same land), or they will prevent the housing.
This is the continuation of a back and forth between the city montainview and Google that goes back to 2015. The intial request was denied by city officials.
How about they build their office space on their existing land? Looking at Google HQ on Google Maps satellite view, it looks like their land is 30-50% parking, i.e. waste.
Why is the law that way? A lot of places in the world have way higher density and they're doing just fine (maybe even better - you can't get anywhere in the valley without a car and it's really a nuisance).
See "the high cost of free parking" for a complete answer
Heavily oversimplified, back when cars first became available to the middle class city politicians had a rude awakening when street parking became congested.
Minimum parking space requirements were decided on with an overly simplistic formula focusing on providing for peak demand.
With the incredible emergency we have, you would think, someone would be working hard to change the laws. It's an entirely man made emergency, that need not be. Perhaps it'll take a start up company of politicians to "change the world" to address these types of issues.
Google not being to develop more offices is by no means “an incredible emergency”. The fact that there’s not enough space for people to live, that may qualify as one.
Growing property values isn't an emergency for homeowners who are the voters who keep these zoning laws in place. It's not that they aren't trying to solve the problem, it's that they are trying to make it "worse" and would fight anyone who tries to solve it. Tyranny of the majority. Politicians don't have that power - they'll be kicked out if they harm their constituents' interests.
It's not just planning rules, but lack of viable alternative transit that force the parking. Taking a bus to Caltrain, Caltrain to Mountain View, then a bus from Caltrain to Google is not a viable alternative to driving.
Privately run buses help, but that's still not a transit solution.
You can't just build a skyscraper because you decide you want to. There are a crazy amount of rules/laws/zoning/permits that surround high density construction.
"40% of the buildings in Manhattan could not be built today."
Yes, but it's the city council that makes the zoning rules, and it's the city council that also gives a comment that makes it sound like Google is keeping houses from people. If the city council allowed them to put up a 100 story tower, I bet they would.
Do we need another 10,000 families in Mountain View [EDIT: in the Bay Area] right now, though?
Central is always backed up, 101 sucks, schools are full, and you can't get into restaurants on Castro without a wait.
Can these companies just expand somewhere else, please?
EDIT: I didn't really mean that Googlers should live outside MV and commute to Mountain View. I mean that it's easy for Google to build office space for 10K new workers... but it decreases quality of live for everyone else when more people cram in. Expand in more cities, like Amazon is doing!
If 10k families expanded elsewhere 101 would suck even more when they commute into Google's offices. I think the point is to put work and amenities close to where they live.
My city of 15k supports its own school district and restaurants. A neighborhood of 10k families (not sure what population that would translate into) certainly could. But I'm not sure if that's in their plans.
Sorry, I didn't mean the families should live elsewhere -- poorly phrased on my part. I really meant that I wish the big companies would expand more in other parts of the country, and not increase the pressure on the Bay Area.
I clarified above: my point was that the entire Bay Area is choking, but these companies keep building office space (which is ultra-compact) and hiring by the tens of thousands.
What I want is: build more housing in Mountain View and elsewhere, but slow down the huge influx of workers.
So on the one hand I'm meant to buy into some fully connected global future, on the other the only way I make real progress is concentrating all my resources into a small amount of territory to maximise productivity.
It's a global network of these dense dots, each specializing in different thing, each exporting their specialties at prices that more bespoke or small-volume producers cannot even approach, and each producing different types of negative externalities for their local environment. You might be facing higher rent, but at least you're not facing cadmium mining runoff in the water, or lead in the water, or acid rain.
The problem is that the Valley wants to stay suburban and the market is demanding that it become a city. Google could put a set of huge towers on this land with housing and office space and retail.
The Valley is the combined local governments, and the market is the companies and workers who both see value in staying in the area. The land is so expensive that if one locality raised the building restrictions, you'd see massive towers going up.
The Bay Area's housing problems arise largely from fragmentation and NIMBY-ism. The sum of the rationally self-interested being made in all of these tiny, fragmented municipality equals a giant mess that's getting worse every year and that's starting to seriously impair economic growth.
The entire Bay Area needs to be incorporated as one giant city all the way from the Presidio down to San Jose. It's already one giant city: we might we well recognize the fact. We'll reuse the name "San Francisco" for convenience.
Having had SF annex all its suburbs (like growing cities used to do back when we remembered what good government looked like), residents can switch the city to at-large representation and finally start planning the region's growth in a way that makes sense.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 67.7 ms ] threadI know exactly what they mean by “affordable”, but how the hell are we ok getting to a point where affordable housing only refers to housing that is affordable because it’s being subsidized?
Ridiculous.
- Subsidized housing
- Public housing
- Increasing density to lower the actual price of housing
But homeowners (overrepresented among voters) generally only support the first, as the other two could make their property value go down (y'know, in the affordable direction).
You can end up with three groups that are all at odds with each other and all campaigning for "affordable housing". Deft politicians can spin this confusion to make housing scarcity sound like altruism.
That is, if it costs the developer $500k per unit, and they're required to sell 200 of their 1000 units for $100k each, the $80M subsidy gets added onto the cost of the remaining unsubsidized units at $80k each. This effectively removes supply through removing development projects that cannot make an open-market profit while handing out the mandated "affordable housing" subsidy.
It's truly Orwellian that regulations that make housing less affordable get called "affordable housing".
To be fair, developers sell units at what the market will bear, rather than on a "cost-plus" basis. Raising developer costs doesn't impact the final sale price.
Now one could argue that reducing developer profits means that fewer developers will try to build... but it's properly zoned land, not developers that is in short supply.
Or maybe you mean that the requirement that some of the housing be "affordable", means only projects that the remainder of the units are "unaffordable" will be built... but that's the case anyway; given the scarcity of land it doesn't make sense to build affordable housing unless forced.
Not that I'm in favor of housing subsidies. It turns a few well-connected or lucky people into lottery winners, and doesn't reduce the overall cost of housing.
Raising developer costs kill off unprofitable developments until the marginal unit created has a cost equal to what the market will bear. It depends on the relative elasticity of supply and demand - we'll hit an equilibrium of fewer units at a higher price, with both less developer profits and less consumer surplus. Whether the loss is mostly borne by purchasers or sellers depends on details of the market.
>but it's properly zoned land, not developers that is in short supply.
Developers in the Bay Area spend lots of money to figure out whether or not land is properly zoned, due to the community review system and other things that'd be fixed with a by-right zoning policy. Things aren't built to the maximum of the zones - they're built to what's affordable by developers attempting to get permission to build.
>given the scarcity of land it doesn't make sense to build affordable housing unless forced
It doesn't matter whether housing is affordable at market rates because we build things that are affordable, or through building so much luxury houses that there's so little demand for existing buildings that they now become affordable.
If the lot next door added a three-bedroom luxury apartment that cost less than your studio, you'd move out of your current place and into that in a heartbeat. Then your studio now goes on the market and gets whatever it can - likely, a much more affordable price.
Adding dense housing makes housing more affordable. It's only obvious if it's cheap and dense - if it's expensive, the affordable units are those that the new residents move out of.
No we won't, because the limit of zoning and land doesn't allow us to get anywhere near that equilibrium. Your statement would only be correct in a world with infinite land in the Bay Area. But the equilibrium for "fewer" units in San Francisco might be (for example) 50,000 new housing units per year, but you're lucky to get permits and land for couple thousand.
> Things aren't built to the maximum of the zones - they're built to what's affordable by developers attempting to get permission to build.
This is missing the point. 100% of the land that can pass the community review process is profitable to build on. Even with "affordable housing" requirements. Even with reduced developer profits. If you can build on it, you're gonna make money. Therefore, the limiting factor is land; the effect of affordable housing requirements is to lower the windfall profits of any developer lucky enough to get by community review.
> It doesn't matter whether housing is affordable at market rates because we build things that are affordable, or through building so much luxury houses that there's so little demand for existing buildings that they now become affordable.
Right, everyone who understands math understands this. The issue is that if you don't have land you can build on, you can't build. And if you do have land you can build on, you're gonna make money. Affordable housing requirements do not decrease the amount of net construction, they just move windfall profits from the developer to a few lucky random people.
That's a fifteen fold increase in garbage. Fifteen fold increase in the number of toilets that flush shit. Probably close to fifteen fold increase in cars; people can't live without those even if the density goes up.
I basically support density if the population remains constant. If we take a sprawled city of two million and make those people cluster together in a region that is 10% of the original area, that is fantastic! We can use the 90% of the area for parks and farmland. Everyone living closer together creates various efficiencies. Cheaper commuting, distribution of goods, HVAC.
I also want increased density. In the Bay Area, zoning regulations keep density artificially low and prices obscenely high. Stop the self-inflicted pain.
The thing to look at isn't the after-the-fact windfall profits of successfully getting through community review, but the forward-looking expected profits of trying to get through community review. You don't know ahead of time what will work - the profits from the ones that do have to fund the losses from trying and failing to get through community review, else the whole thing will consistently lose you money.
Here's an advance prediction: the average profit from a successful project that gets through community review times the probability of success is roughly equivalent to the average loss from failing times the probability of failure.
I'll concede that lower profits from developer-subsidized housing my drive fewer attempted community reviews, and I'll also concede that it's possible that more attempted community reviews could result in more housing being built.
However, I still believe that the loss of profit from subsidized housing is not the significant factor holding back new construction; at least not when 3 bedrooms goes for 7 figures. Land costs and political friction currently dominate the equation; if you could easily buy a half acre and toss up 100 condos on it, the sale prices of those new condos would drop, and construction profits would become a pressing concern. (of course at that point housing would be affordable, so it's a moot point)
"Affordable" in this context is a misnomer that just means "subsidized."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_housing
No, it doesn't, because “affordable” doesn't mean “subsidized”, it means the purchase or rental cost is (and, usually when it comes to rental-committed units in a development plan, is guaranteed by contract or some other binding arrangement to remain) within the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s income-based affordability guidelines for a specified income level; in the case of the plan under discussion, that income level being 50% of the Areawide Median Income for Santa Clara County.
Very little Bay Area housing meets this criteria.
The media accounts drop the reference to the income-based affordability formula from HUD and the income level in the plan to which the formula is applied, but that isn't a problem with the term, it's a problem, if anything, with the media accounts.
I really dislike the "affordable housing" model. The right solution for supply constraints in any market is to increase supply!
You can't say something is affordable just because someone can buy it.
But they are actually going to still build some housing which is generous.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/05/07/why_mount...
Frankly if I was the city I’d block any of their future developments. Screw these kind of dishonest games.
Heavily oversimplified, back when cars first became available to the middle class city politicians had a rude awakening when street parking became congested.
Minimum parking space requirements were decided on with an overly simplistic formula focusing on providing for peak demand.
And it never really got better from there
Privately run buses help, but that's still not a transit solution.
"40% of the buildings in Manhattan could not be built today."
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-...
Central is always backed up, 101 sucks, schools are full, and you can't get into restaurants on Castro without a wait.
Can these companies just expand somewhere else, please?
EDIT: I didn't really mean that Googlers should live outside MV and commute to Mountain View. I mean that it's easy for Google to build office space for 10K new workers... but it decreases quality of live for everyone else when more people cram in. Expand in more cities, like Amazon is doing!
My city of 15k supports its own school district and restaurants. A neighborhood of 10k families (not sure what population that would translate into) certainly could. But I'm not sure if that's in their plans.
There's so much room for more housing in Mountain View, and people are always like "Not here! I've got mine, screw you I'm pulling up the ladder."
What I want is: build more housing in Mountain View and elsewhere, but slow down the huge influx of workers.
It's a global network of these dense dots, each specializing in different thing, each exporting their specialties at prices that more bespoke or small-volume producers cannot even approach, and each producing different types of negative externalities for their local environment. You might be facing higher rent, but at least you're not facing cadmium mining runoff in the water, or lead in the water, or acid rain.
Probably.
The entire Bay Area needs to be incorporated as one giant city all the way from the Presidio down to San Jose. It's already one giant city: we might we well recognize the fact. We'll reuse the name "San Francisco" for convenience.
Having had SF annex all its suburbs (like growing cities used to do back when we remembered what good government looked like), residents can switch the city to at-large representation and finally start planning the region's growth in a way that makes sense.