To me it sounds like “developers, developers, developers”
But I am glad that the media is reporting this. California is slowly killing itself with its housing policy. I live in an area where there are only people who are either rich retirees or whose parents have bought real estate before the market went crazy. And these people kill any effort to build more. It’s basically impossible for regular people to live here.
The answer _is_ building more. (I'll say this before the people on Hacker News who are opposed to all private property suggest that "prop 13" is the problem. It's not.)
The problem is they don't build enough. Build build build!
They need the California State Government to overrule local zoning limits. We need to allow dense housing near rail lines and major roads. And I think that anywhere a single-family detached home currently exists, a 2-family home should be allowed.
Build more housing! It's that simple. Prices will fall fast.
I'm from Texas, and I don't understand the stigma against developers building more housing. It drives down prices, and increases competition. Why would California citizens ever be against this?
Edit: The reason is because homeowners are competing with developers, so their own asset depreciates when supply increases. I was just thinking from the perspective of renters.
Induced demand is a thing. Not sure to what extent it applies to housing in any particular market, but any destabilizing effects of rapidly adding more housing should be seen as artifacts of the fact that we've let this problem go unaddressed for decades. People need places to live, and if we don't serve that need then the problems are only going to get worse and the solutions more disruptive.
There are also less visible efficiencies in having people living close to their work, like roads that aren't crammed with cars because people don't have to spend three hours behind the wheel every day getting to and from work, and the additional productivity that comes with all that extra time.
Induced demand is where more of some good is supplied, which drives down its price, which increases the amount consumed, which means the price isn't driven down as much as it would have been if there had been no change in amount consumed. (A common example is widening a congested highway: more capacity reduces congestion somewhat, which means that the inconvenience of driving on that highway goes down, so more people drive, so the congestion doesn't go down as much as you'd naively predict.)
What I'm not seeing here is a way for increased housing supply to make the prices go up, as opposed to down, but not as much. Network effects, maybe: increased density of a city could make being in that city more valuable, thus making more people want to live there at any given price, which means that prices would rise.
In a vacuum, no, I don't think simply adding housing can meaningfully drive up prices. But (as you say) obviously it feeds into organic urban growth, which does increase demand, so you have to keep building housing. It seems that the problem we have in our big tech hub cities is that we let that growth happen for a while and then decided that there would be no more housing.
I can imagine an induced demand effect as whole new classes of people realize that they can actually now live close to where they work, and come flooding back into the city. But like I said, that's an artifact of artificially constrained supply.
"Induced" demand is a misnomer for latent demand becoming measurable. It's a signal that a change was good but not enough; backpressure is reduced but not yet zero.
Not really. Probably closer to a Veblen good (which does exist) but, in any case, those are about increased price driving up demand, not increased supply driving up price.
(I suppose increased supply could drive up price if providing that additional supply increased the overall costs but you'd presumably still be constrained by the overall supply/demand curves of the market.)
You are eliding two different kinds of goods here: units of housing, and land. The average price of the former would presumably decrease. The average price of the latter would presumably increase, since loosened restrictions on development would make it possible to build more units of housing on a given lot. For current owners of single family houses, it's likely that the land price effect would outweigh the unit effect, although there will be exceptions (the dynamics of exurbs will be different from those of central areas, for example).
I'm closing next week in SF on my first ever home purchase (after renting for 10 years here, and 6 years prior elsewhere in the Bay Area). Sure, I would like for it to be worth more (outpacing inflation) in 10, 20, or 30 years. But I am not buying a lifestyle, or a guarantee of value increase, or a neighborhood frozen in time at this point forever. I'm buying some floors, walls, and ceilings. I'm buying into a community that I know needs to grow and change if it's to survive and flourish.
It drives down prices. When you bought a house back in 2008 for $300k and now its worth $2M you really dont want anything to touch your nest egg. Its NIMBYism at its finest. Everyone says, "just build affordable housing!" Just as long as its not in _my_ neighborhood.
This doesn’t make any sense because owning stock in one company doesn’t prevent another from also rising or prevent ones own company stock from rising.
In theory perhaps but in practice a) it’s unreasonable to tell people for literally decades that homeownership is the path to security in retirement then move the goalposts and b) tech-driven wealth disparity is fully the root cause of this situation and if it were “corrected” through taxation we wouldn’t even have this problem
It's not unreasonable... it's slowly becoming necessary. Someone will have to eat the bill and it's probably a distributed cost that we have to spread across everyone.
It's not just tech-driven...housing is expensive across the nation and taxing RSUs may help in SF, but doesn't really get to the root of the problem which is zoning restriction, high development costs, increased homeowner rights enabling NIMBYism
If people are actually investing in housing, then I see nothing weird or hypocritical with wanting the value of those investments to go up.
But a primary home is not an investment. Many many many people mistake it for one, or try to treat it like one, but it's not. Often it works out in the end as if it was one, but it's not. There's a reason why we call non-primary homes "investment properties"... because your primary home is not that.
It's a liability. It ages. It requires costly maintenance. It requires upgrades and renovations. In most jurisdictions you have to pay ongoing taxes simply to own it.
The main reason housing prices often rise faster than inflation is because of scarcity, much of which is often artificial and due to zoning and other legal tricks.
Opposing housing in high-demand areas is one of the most selfish things a person can do.
I don’t know how you can say this because for 9/10 people their primary home is de facto their single biggest asset and a significant part of their retirement planning. This is how it actually is in the real world outside the bubble.
It’s easy to sneer at nimby-ism but what you’re actually proposing is to make ordinary people destitute so techbros can have an easy ride. That’s why voters are pushing back and why tech is hated.
It's exaggerated in timescale and returns but not by a huge amount.
Condos I saw for $400K in 2010 are going for about a million. Homes that were about $1.1M in 2010 are about $2.4M. The sibling comment describes homes bought for $500K in 2000 that are now $2M; this is not out of line with what I'm heard from some founder friends I have that are pushing 50. IIRC my wife's parents bought their home for $130K or so back in 1986 and it's now worth $3M.
It really wouldn't. Not any time soon. A developer being able to build a 4-unit place on top of a single family home would increase the value of that land cause now they can sell it to four times as many people.
So it's gonna be that much harder for a "regular" person to buy anything in the short term.
The price the NIMBY in the parent's example would care about is the price of the SFH they already owned. That price goes up - it's now harder to find SFHs, and the land value is also increased because it could be turned into 4 units that will add up to more value than the prior 1.
Here's an agent discussing this happening right now:
> Traditional sales comping remains relevant, but it should no longer be the single factor when determining price. Recent legislation allowing additional dwelling units (ADUs) is a game changer, as savvy investors and agents understand that accurate comps should now include not only neighborhood sales prices but also potential revenue from future ADU development.
> Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a slew of bills that will allow property owners to build a backyard home of at least 800 square feet or convert a garage, office or spare room into an additional living space. Single-family zoning effectively evaporated on Jan. 1 when the new laws went into effect.
If NIMBY's only cared about money this would be a fucking gold mine for them.
The hassles of having tenants make it not worth the extra income for a lot of people who would only have one. There are real examples of tenants destroying a place and moving out leaving the landlord a large cost to fix the place up. There are real examples of tenants using various discrimination and tenant rights laws on false claims to get months of cost free living. I make no claim as to how common it is, but if you are landlord stuck with the evil tenant it doesn't matter if is only 1 in a million who is that evil.
Sure, in this scenario the "protecting their property value" person would just cash out and sell to the developer who's gonna be good with tenants and is willing to pay more since it's no longer single-family-restricted.
But the opposition to upzoning here in LA and the Bay Area is largely coming for qualitative reasons instead of quantitative reasons. And that's lost when you reduce your argument to "they only care about their property values" so you lose any chance to convince them...
Let's say you live in a neighborhood of mostly single family homes. A new law is passed changing the zoning to allow higher density, and other barriers to building up are reduced or eliminated.
A few people near you sell their homes; they're bulldozed and are replaced with multi-family units. Sure, over the short term, your home value might drop because of greater supply helping to meet demand.
However, over the long term, or even medium term, two things may happen:
1. Your home value goes up because single family homes are less available, and are more desirable.
2. Your home value goes up because developers want to buy your home in order to build a multi-family dwelling there.
Meanwhile, more people are able to live nearby, more affordably, likely cutting down their work commute and increasing their quality of life. I guess the incumbent owners really are that selfish that they fight tooth and nail to prevent others from increasing their quality of life.
Or you could have PTSD or just vanilla noise-sensitivity and just living in a quiet neighborhood could be extremely important to you. You might have made very significant personal sacrifices to afford to move to a suburb for exactly this reason. Should you just be forced to go live in the woods as a hermit, cast out by society?
If the city up zones your suburb can empty out making things better for you. It is only those who like their level of busy not far from downtown that will get pushed out.
Well, unfortunately, yes. I don't want to sound heartless, but sometimes the needs of the many do outweigh the needs of the few. This isn't "tyranny of the majority" here.
It's incredibly selfish to use PTSD or noise-sensitivity as a justification for contributing to a situation where tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people have 3-hour commutes when they could otherwise live closer to work.
Speaking as someone who lived in Bay Area California for a few years, and Texas for several decades now, the first thing to know if that not all California has the same attitude on this, for much the same reason that Waco and Austin have different attitudes on a lot of things. In the Bay Area, there are geographical (water and hills) limits to expansion, whereas in Texas when you build more, it usually is out into the abundant open land at the edge of the city.
Also, it is quite often the case that when you build, it is either:
1) made for high-income dwellers, thus not reducing prices, because the high-income and low-income housing markets are often effectively separate markets, like cars and semi-tractor trailors.
...or...
2) the people living nearby, do think it will drive down prices, including the price of their own house, which is their only effective form of savings. If their $400,000 house becomes a $300,000 house, yeah their property taxes may go down, but they lost $100,000 in savings they intended to sell and live on elsewhere after they retire.
> 1) made for high-income dwellers, thus not reducing prices, because the high-income and low-income housing markets are often effectively separate markets, like cars and semi-tractor trailors.
This is really a misnomer (and it is the linchpin of NIMBY arguments, especially in the Bay Area). If high income housing is not built, then high income people will inhabit and buy up the middle income housing, who in turn will inhabit and buy up low income housing, if they can find any at all.
You can see this clearly in the Bay Area. You have tiny houses going for like a couple million dollars.
In such an environment it's impossible to build stuff (at least, legally) that ISN'T high income housing as high income people are the only people who can afford any kind of housing in the area.
"But it's only made for high income dwellers." Build a cheap (but code-compliant) 600sqft studio in the Bay Area? Around $900/ft^2 would be the market price. It's only affordable to high income folk. A studio. This 161sqft studio in San Fran is $2300/month: https://www.businessinsider.com/smallest-apartment-for-rent-...
How is it even possible to build housing that isn't for high earners in San Francisco?
The only way to change is to build a LOT more and keep building. Or, I guess, destroy the entire local economy.
When there isn't enough housing for high-income buyers in their "separate" market, what happens is that 'separate' low-income market becomes market for high-income buyers to go after.
When developers build high income housing, high income households move to those new developments and reduce demand for the places they vacated, making them more affordable for lower income households.
> 1) made for high-income dwellers, thus not reducing prices, because the high-income and low-income housing markets are often effectively separate markets, like cars and semi-tractor trailors.
That doesn't seem right to me. Sure, the develpoers will have incentive to build the largest profit earning housing, which right now (because of a huge housing shortage for all pricing ranges) means building high-income housing. But a high-incomer earner that buys those stops competing for the fixer-upper middle income housing so that's good for other price ranges too. What's more, at some point you run out of high-income earners that will buy your expensive newly built property which requires dropping prices on existing built property _or_ starting to build the next most profitable housing, which is less profitable than before but you don't have a choice.
Now arguably, for all that to happen it takes time and the ability to build a large number of housing units, both of which may not be an option so I'm fine as a compromise to require for certain percentages of new housing to include tiers for lower pricing levels, as a requirement for the housing permit.
> 2) the people living nearby, do think it will drive down prices, including the price of their own house, which is their only effective form of savings.
There is a point where, as a society, you need to decide what's more important: giving existing owners 50%+ returns on their property or supporting new families moving in. As usual the answer is somewhere in the middle but I'm willing to bet it would go a lot against the current situation that the existing owners enjoy. After all, owning a house provides a lot of other benefits so as long as the increase in value covers for the cost (interest + taxes + maintenance) it seems fine to me.
> the high-income and low-income housing markets are often effectively separate markets
That's certainly not true in SF. Housing quality certainly runs the entire spectrum here, but in the last decade I've seen low-income renters forced out of ok-ish buildings, and replaced with several high-income renters who do the roommate thing in order to afford it all.
Over time, even building "market rate" (which some people erroneously call "luxury") housing in SF will start to free up the older housing stock that's being occupied by people who in any other market would be considered high-income, and return that housing to its former middle- or low-income renters.
Regardless, with the exception of subsidized housing, it's not even possible to build low- or middle-income housing in SF right now. If you build anything at any size, it will immediately price out of budget for any low-income renters, and most middle-income renters. Part of that is just because landlords and sellers charge whatever the market will bear (which is a lot), and part is because new housing development gets so much opposition that it costs developers way more than it should to actually complete a project (it can take years and countless lawsuits and legal fees to even break ground), and they need to recoup their costs and make even a modest profit somehow.
It's not just prices, it's also "character." Basically it's about maintaining a small town-ish feel while living right next door to a major city. Frankly I think a lot of it is about parking and traffic.
> I'm from Texas, and I don't understand the stigma against developers building more housing. It drives down prices, and increases competition. Why would California citizens ever be against this?
Also from Texas: In Texas, developers building households generally happens on empty land in the suburbs, or in unused non-residential land.
In LA or the Bay Area, it would happen by replacing single family homes with multi-family housing. Something that would also be anathema in most well-off Texas communities. It's already sprawled about as far as geography permits.
Lots of people don't want to live in those places and would rather keep their existing neighborhoods than invite a lot of new residents and a larger, denser population. Hence their creating those laws.
It's not obvious to me why we should take the desires of the people who want to move there more seriously than the desires of people to keep what they have similarly.
But in that case, we need to stop building a ton of office space in those "full" cities to import a bunch more jobs than we have housing for...
> It's not obvious to me why we should take the desires of the people who want to move there more seriously than the desires of people to keep what they have similarly.
The way I look at it is that the incumbents are there due to mostly accidents (of birth time/place) or of luck. Why should newcomers be disadvantaged due to accidents and luck?
Land is a finite resource, desirable land even more so. This is why we have things like property taxes, to reinforce the idea that property ownership is a privilege, and you have to pay for that privilege by contributing to the common good. We have zoning laws to attempt (though we often fail) to collectively make the best use of the limited land we have.
And from the other side, I just see it as just incredibly selfish to oppose reasonable housing development because people don't like change or are afraid that their home's 400% appreciation in value might drop to only 300% or whatever.
> The way I look at it is that the incumbents are there due to mostly accidents (of birth time/place) or of luck. Why should newcomers be disadvantaged due to accidents and luck?
Most things are accidents of time/place/whatever. Including whatever resources those newcomers are bringing to a city. Is migration and density growth a strict good? A strict bad? Somewhere in between? Lots of ink have been written on that, I'm fairly personally neutral, but I'm very skeptical of the "this is a simple problem with a simple solution" crowd. I'd love to see a decentralization of high-end high-paying jobs. Right now if I wanted to live back near my family, I'd have to work on problems that are less interesting to me for quite a bit less money.
There's nobody exactly being unselfish in this debate... People who want more density or to save their own money argue one way. People who want to live a (different) way argue another... it's basically all wants considering we have so many other cities in the country with plenty of space.
Remember that many renters (>70% in some cities like San Francisco) have price controls on their rents. If you're guaranteed that your rent will effectively never go up, then you're much more likely to block an apartment complex construction because it'll block your view or "change neighborhood character". Price controls on rents means many renters enjoy privileged status that insulates them from housing costs.
I'm not saying building isn't the problem but how do you solve for someone who is in a loan at $1.2M and in one year it is worth $500K on the open market due to all the building. This is something that has to happen incrementally and why people dig in so hard. That property is the main store of wealth for a lot of people. The wrong scheme could bankrupt them and destroy their retirement. Additionally, super dense housing will need major updates to public infrastructure to support these new numbers; from roads to trains to schools to hospitals and more. There is a reason that no one has the political will to do such a thing.
My current house is apparently worth $2 million. Even with California construction costs, replacing it with a new house would cost less than $350,000. If someone could build a lot of houses nearby, it would drive the price of my house down to something realistic.
I’m in favor of lots of construction, because it’s the right thing overall. But it would hit me hard. I’m willing to accept that, so I lobby for new construction when I can. I’m just realistic about the outcome.
I doubt your place will drop even 20% even if construction goes up drastically. Until it happens - you can't really say your home price would drop drastically.
Realistically, it won't. The new supply will be apartments - not single family homes. It's not like people will all want to sell and move into apartments or that the desire for homes will go down. It just means competition for apartments will improve.
Sure it will. Housing is about compromises. If you can rent a 3 bedroom apartment for $900/month would you pay $9000/month (plus taxes and insurance) to buy a house?
The above numbers are realistic. You have a choice to nice 3 bedroom apartments for $900/month in the Des Moines Iowa area. The payments on a 30 year loan for a 2 million dollar house are a bit over 9000/month.
I'm conflating multiple variables, but the whole is reasonable. If SF would build enough apartments (starting 20 years ago!) it is reasonable to expect that you could rent there for not much more than Des Moines. Given that lack of space in SF - they are not making more land - owning a place will always be more expensive than renting, but high rise apartments amortize the land costs over a lot of people and so it need not be that much per person. Neighborhood is important too: if you are right next to the big jobs centers you should expect to pay more (in Des Moines downtown apartments run $2000 for a 2 bed room - they have just started building them though so I expect that price to come down in 10 years.)
Much of your value is in the underlying cost of land. More permissive development rules would increase the value of your land, because it would be possible for a developer to buy it and build more units of housing on it.
If it makes you feel any better, I live in an area that was built with a mix of SFHs and low rise apartment/condo buildings. The SFH are all $1m+ while condo prices range from $160k for a studio to $500k+ for a new 3-4 bedroom. If you figure that to build a new house they have to tear down an existing house, the minimum price for a new construction SFH or multi-unit is greatly increased.
I bet your hypothetical developer would price the new houses at $1.9 million (or maybe $2.1 million, because where else are you going to buy a new house?), and they'd sell out as fast as they could build them, netting them a huge profit and hardly affecting your property values. Now if they could build 10,000 houses nearby it might have more of an effect.
Those numbers seem very unlikely. Ignoring that California is a nonrecourse state. If someone ended up owing 1.2 mil on a 500k house, they could walk away and only be out the house and whatever payments they had already made on the loan. The risk of massive correction simply isn't borne by the individual (especially if they've bought the property in the past 5-10 years).
I own a house in 940xx and am all for more building.
It won't bankrupt anyone. If you bought a house you could afford for "x", and you budgeted as if it cost "x", you still have a place to live if you keep paying the mortgage. All your plans remain exactly the same. If the "value" of the house goes down, you'll save on property taxes.
If you scrimped and saved to pull together a 5% down-payment on a "starter house" and new construction nearby takes your home value own by 20%, you're going to be stuck in that starter home for a very, very long time.
Can you really even get a house here on 5% down? I presumed anything over $750k would require 20% down immediately (and there's basically nothing that you'd want to own under $1m here). At least - that's what I got told when I talked to a guy at a bank about it.
I can see why someone might not want to loose their 40% appreciation of their real estate property but that doesn't make them right.
That is, of course if you change a policy that was primarily designed to inflate housing prices to the stratosphere then it might negatively impact that, but maybe you were wrong to do that to begin with.
> They need the California State Government to overrule local zoning limits
Yes, California and other places with housing problems need as-of-right policies as the article suggests. It's not simply zoning, it's removing all ability of local governments to hold things up, because people will use absolutely anything they can grab onto.
From a philosophical standpoint, people are sometimes uncomfortable with the idea of pre-empting local control—after all, don't they know better? But as the article points out, it's a coordination problem. There is a certain cost [1] to be paid in building housing, unfortunately, and you need a higher-level (in this case, state-wide) view to distribute that cost fairly.
> And I think that anywhere a single-family detached home currently exists, a 2-family home should be allowed.
Make it more like 4–8 (but maybe limited to 3-4 stories), and I'm in.
[1]: As the article points out, however, we think far too often only about the costs. I for one would welcome more neighbors.
I don't understand though how the state government will be expected to implement this different than the local government; they both draw from essentially the same voterbase that is hostile toward the upzoning as the majority of the state population resides in those large cities anyway. The only real difference is that you'll also have a population of rural voters observing from the sidelines as they have no investment in the issue of high-density zoning
The difference is turnout. It's way easier to turn out for one single election (electing someone who will pre-empt this NIMBY nonsense) than it is to turn out to dozens of local meetings most people don't even hear about where these projects are discussed. Historically, the only people who show up to those meetings are the NIMBYs. There was a meeting in my city about housing and transit. On Thursday. At 2pm. How many people are gonna show up for that?
The edges. There are people who want to live in the city who are forced to live outside (a suburb) who cannot vote in the local election but can vote in the state election. Also rural farmers do not like seeing their neighbor's land turned into a subdivision (this is a form of NIMBY of course - more than a few of them lost bids to buy the subdivision and keep farming it), so those on the edges are also likely to vote this way
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How about we talk about building infrastructure? The whole Bay Area is building like crazy, and yet the roads are getting worse (more building? more traffic lights!). Public transportation is a big joke around here. Caltrain from South San Jose to Mountain View? We have the tracks, we have the train... the train just does not go this route on weekends.
We have the same situation as a startup focused on developing a product. We have abidance of developers, and very few infrastructure engineers. When we start deploying what we have built, we are going to have a bad time.
Show the stats that Bay Area is building like crazy. I am so sick of people saying things like New York and Bay Area and California are building like crazy. No they are not. There is not one stat that shows that. Period.
It's really hard to wrap your head around whether a city is building a lot by looking at a raw number. But fewer than 7,000 building permits in a city of 8 million is frighteningly little.
You need to compare it to population growth, decades of building backlog, job growth, etc.
I probably could have made my comment clearer. I'm not assuming anything. It's well documented that NYC is building frighteningly little housing per capita.
I was just pointing out the the linked post shows how NYC construction is stagnant, not "active". It was unclear if he meant "active" as in "they're building a large quantity" or as in "currently happening".
New York City has been losing residents for some time. This is not a supply and demand thing as much as easy money policy chasing hard assets. I’ll have to dig it up the numbers, but Manhattan many condos are vacant, and have been bought by foreign money who don’t live in nyc or investors looking to park assets.
It's a complex problem but the value of NYC real estate for foreign investors assumes scarcity of NYC real estate.
Foreign money or no, if you have a very desirable city with a growing job market and stagnant construction, prices will appreciate. I would challenge you to find a single counterexample
Foreign money doesn't help prices but it's more a symptom of our problems than a cause.
Also, NYC population is not declining. I wish. There have been some stagnant years but nowhere near enough to compensate for 50 years of underbuilding.
"Despite a weak outlook for residential real estate, the number of building permits issued in New York City for new homes surged last year to the highest pace since 2015. It was the second-highest total since the end of the last big building boom in 2008. Permits for 26,547 units of housing were issued in 2019, about 27% more than the year before ..."
The bay area is building, but very unevenly. SOMA has a bunch of visible construction, as do certain places along El Camino. That can give the impression of building like crazy even when the reality is different. The other problem is the bay area only does megaprojects, so the little building it does is the extremely disruptive and visible kind.
That's because only megaprojects can afford to overcome all the regulatory and neighborhood hurdles.
Do you think the average homeowner trying to become a landlord by converting their home into a duplex has enough money to pay for both sides of a law suit, as this developer had to?
I'm not sure that the roads really support more peak traffic at this point. Rather, we can reduce the traffic and train crowding by building more housing near jobs so that workers need not embark on 50+ mile super-commutes each day.
Housing _is_ infrastructure, and it's the piece of infrastructure we're most sorely missing.
Adding extra lanes to a road just increases the amount of people driving on them, instead of easing traffic. So I would bet the same is true of public transit.
Right, so you reduce crowding by shortening trips, not by adding service. Ideally we do both and get lots of people using public transit for short trips.
Yes, but it moves more people. Driving doesn’t need to compete with public transit for speed—transit is immensely slower than driving even in places with excellent transit.
Transit is much faster than driving if it wants to be. Airplanes normally reach 1000km/h (if you are rich you can do the same but very few are this rich). Even if we limit to ground based transport, most drivers on the autobahn self-limit themselves to around 130km/h, trains routinely go 250km/h (only a few routes, but the ability is there to do it safely).
This is not universally true. My BART commute is faster than driving. Both office and home are walkable from a train station and the frequency at my station is pretty good.
This is actually a very American misconception of public transportation. If you're in an area with excellent public tranportation (London, Barcelona, Montreal), it's actually much faster (I've traveled to these places and tried it).
Even in SF, there's some places where public transportation is faster. But in very very limited situations because SF transportation is horrible. But an express Caltrain is often much faster than driving MTV-SF if there's any traffic. With all the (super delayed unfortunately) infrastructure projects going on (new SF subway being installed, Caltrain electrification), things will hopefully get better...
Not unless your starting point and ending point are very close to a subway station and you don’t have to make any transfers. I use to commute from 88th and broadway to 45th and Lex. It was a bit over 30 minutes by subway, more like 25 minutes driving. In the evening, if I was leaving work late, it was like a 20 minute cab ride.
> So I would bet the same is true of public transit.
It is very true but the point of adding capacity (to any form of transit) isn't to reduce congestion at peak hours (that congestion is bounded by what people will tolerate) it's to allow more trips to happen with equivalent congestion thereby increasing the total number of trips and/or decreasing the duration of the congestion.
That is only indirectly true. I know of rural roads in the middle of nowhere that wouldn't get any more traffic from adding more lanes. It is only true in the city because there is unmet demand to get places at in some amount of time, and so adding lanes allows some of that unmet demand to become met demand.
Of course adding enough lanes to meet demand is not worth the cost. However the induced demand argument is wrong, it is a cost benefit calculation: will the additional people who are able to get someplace be worth the cost to add the lane.
Transit does have the same problem, but transit can scale much better in a given amount of space. A bus every 5 minutes can handle more traffic than a lane filled with cars - assuming the bus doesn't compete with the cars. You can run a bus every 3 minutes, and if that isn't enough a train every 45 seconds holding 5 times as many people as the bus. If that isn't enough - okay, it is time to build another track for the train, but that is a huge number of people (ie a good number would find their life improved by a track on a slightly different route that)
I think you have it backwards. We squander the capacity of our main commuter railroad (BART) by surrounding it with dispersed neighborhoods. We need to build dense transit villages around the rail stations we already own.
> We squander the capacity of our main commuter railroad (BART)
Out of curiosity, do you ride Bart at commute hours? At 5pm, the platforms at Embarcadero and Montgomery are dangerously packed. I didn’t think there is much excess capacity for commuting.
You're putting the cart before the horse. More commuters creates more ticket revenue, which gives BART more resources to expand capacity. They're not going to expand capacity until there's more demand.
BART ridership is currently maxed out in the peak direction at peak hour, and carries triple the design number of passengers. They don’t need to expand, they need to profit from the currently underused directions (eg berkeley to Fremont).
Transit reacts to changes in transportation demand, it doesn't set demand. How do you envision BART would profit from underused directions? Put out ads encouraging people to take these routes for fun?
As I said, pointing out that transit systems are at capacity is not a valid reason to block development. Transit systems always try to operate at capacity because excess capacity means suboptimal allocation of resources. There's no reason to increase capacity until there's demand for that capacity.
The people profit, not BART itself. BART is infrastructure. Like the fire department, it is not intended for it to be internally profitable.
The way the people profit is you put homes in the places that have lots of jobs, mostly so that people can just walk around but also to benefit from people filling up the reverse direction on BART. In places that have mostly homes you buld jobs instead. For places without an abundance of either, such as Orinda and Lafayette, you build both.
It's total nonsense that we build a railroad to a place like Lafayette, but that city has had the same population for 50 years. This goes triple for Berkeley, which has THREE subway stations and the same population it had in 1950! We should expect that adding billions of dollars of infrastructure also adds lots of people.
> Transit reacts to changes in transportation demand, it doesn't set demand. How do you envision BART would profit from underused directions? Put out ads encouraging people to take these routes for fun?
BART could encourage commercial development, instead of residential development, on land it owns near transit stations.
Any possible increase in BART ticket revenue would be a drop in the bucket for the capital funding necessary to significantly increase system capacity. The popular routes are already at capacity so they would have to build more tracks and stations. This would cost hundreds of billions of dollars mostly from federal and state budgets. The planning, land acquisitions (eminent domain), environmental reviews, legal battles, and construction would take decades. We can complain that this is unreasonable, and that it ought to be cheaper or faster. But that's the reality and it isn't likely to change.
> More commuters creates more ticket revenue, which gives BART more resources to expand capacity. They're not going to expand capacity until there's more demand.
BART needs money to expand, and this money is not going to come from commuters. Why?
First, "expand capacity" can mean two things:
1) Buy and/or run more trains on existing tracks, serving existing stations.
2) Build more tracks and/or stations.
For 1), BART already operates at or nearly at maximum physical capacity at commute hours in the peak commute direction: there is not headroom in the Transbay tube to add more trains at rush hour, at least for trips between SF and the East Bay. BART could earn more revenue from more commuters that are not on the peak lines -- but building more housing in the suburbs will not provide this.
For 2), this money comes from the capital budget, not the operating budget. BART fares provide about 70% of the operating costs of BART. There is no profit, no money left over to go to pay for more tracks or stations. That money comes from voters who approve bonds or other sources of funding for this constructions. More commuters will not provide this either.
We need to expand BART, and we need development -- these two go hand in hand!
End the landed gentry by repealing Prop 13, and I'll take arguments like this seriously. Otherwise it just sounds like the priviliged wanting to have their cake and eat it too.
SF is building one new subway, and its ride-able underground portion will be just over one mile long. I agree it's something being done, but it's such a small drop in a large bucket of needs. We shouldn't wait for a public transit silver bullet to bring people to jobs, we need more housing near jobs so that people aren't forced to commute across the region.
Not to mention water, sewer, electrical capacity, schools, parks, police and fire services... You can’t just plop a 100-unit apartment down and then say you helped with the housing problem.
The reason Bay Area cities can't afford their water and sewer and roads is because they are not dense enough. Apartment dwellers demand far less water, and drive on roads much less than people who live in detached homes. Density is the _solution_ to infrastructure funding.
Long term you are correct, but in the near term the current water system needs to be upgraded to pipes large enough to get water to the new apartment before the apartment can go in.
You can get developers to build the infrastructure and finance it on their future taxes. You wouldn't believe the incremental tax from building real buildings in the Bay Area. In one particularly egregious case a single apartment building replaced several detached homes that were paying a total of $1200/year in the city of Berkeley. The apartment building pays over a million dollars per year.
How do you even think this stuff gets upgraded in the first place?
What happens, in every city, is that more housing gets built, then the infrastructure system starts to get closer to capacity, and then the infrastructure gets upgaded.
Saying that they should upgrade all the infrastructure first, before there is any demand, is the same exact thing as saying that it should never be upgraded.
Because the infrastructure isn't going to be upgraded if there is no demand for it yet.
Or the city an decide that the cost of upgrading are more than the future values of the additional units and not upgrade. Some upgrades in capacity have significantly higher costs than others. If the current system is the largest that can physically fit on the land the city owns they need to buy more land first. If they won't get a lot of new development it is better to stay just below capacity.
The above doesn't apply to the cities in CA we are talking about: there is plenty of demand. It does apply to some semi-rural small towns.
> If they won't get a lot of new development it is better to stay just below capacity.
If a developer comes in and says "Hey I want to develop in this area", it is a contradictory response to say that this development should be prevented, because there is not enough demand.
If a bunch of developers are trying to build houses, then by definition, we are in a situation where there is demand.
This supports my point even more, because I was saying that the developers should build first, and then if the infrastructure starts to hit capacity, THEN the infrastructure should be updated.
Don't build the infrastructure first. Instead build the housing, and fix any problems that come with it.
Also, this is how all this infrastructure gets built in the first place, also. The developers, who are building the buildings, will upgrade the infrastructure as part of the process of building the buildings.
You are assuming linear costs. However they are not. The system is good for 1 development at no extra cost, but the second goes over capacity and so they have to tear down the old system and build a bigger one. The new one is good for not 1 more development but 100 - which might or might not come. If it comes good, but if you just have the 1 development everybody is on the hook to pay it off, not that one development.
It is not that there is some constant limit to something, and everything is 100% fine as long as you are under capacity, but breaks entirely when you go over capacity.
Instead, capacity is flexible, and there are costs to it being flexible.
Instead, capacity is something that you start bumping up against, and this starts to cause problems. And the more that you bump up against capacity, the more problems that you get.
So, if you are only slightly over capacity, it means that, your roads will be a little bit congested some but not all of the time, or the town will have to purchase a little bit of energy from the town next over (or raise prices a little bit during certain times of the day to reduce demand), or a school will have a little bit more people attending it than previously intended, or you'll have to pay the police overtime hours more often.
And when these problems get big enough, THEN, people will decide that it makes sense to upgrade the network.
That solves your step wise function, that you are talking about. "Capacity" is actually pretty flexible. And you don't have to do some maximum upgrade, if you go over it. You can instead wait until you are over capacity enough that it makes sense to do the upgrade.
Capacity of a water system is a big deal. You cannot go over capacity without serious health risks. There are a few temporary storage solutions that you can use cheaply, but if you cannot treat all the sewage that comes in over the course of a day you have to release raw sewage somehow.
For drinking water you can do lawn watering bans to get capacity. For roads rush hour lasts longer. However there are still limits that you may not to run up against. If your traffic is already bad you might not be able to build more roads where they need to be (either you tear down something historic, or you have to build overpasses). If you are a small city you may have traffic problems while not having enough population to get your transit system in shape.
So typically, developers pay the fees to develop water, sewer, and electrical capacity, and sufficiently large developments must pay for parks and even schools. Property tax pays for fire service.
Source: schedule fees for various bay area cities on new construction.
> We have the tracks, we have the train... the train just does not go this route on weekends.
This is the easy one to fix — when there is demand, they can just run more trains.
Much harder is the transbay commute at rush hours. There is almost no spare capacity, and it’s not clear how those extra thousands of people in Lafayette will make it in to SF every morning before we build a second transbay tube for Bart — and that’s at least a decade away.
I say this as someone who loves development: for the Bay Area to significantly increase its population, we need a ton more transit and we need to start building it now.
I generally agree, but it seems like jobs should also be moving away from the center? If there are a lot of commuters in Lafayette going to Oakland then the transbay tunnel wouldn't be relevant for them, but there would need to be capacity for local trains.
Or if the jobs were in the other direction like Walnut Creek, it would be a reverse commute.
The problem is they need to create the demand. Anybody who wants to get around and checks transit knows it isn't an option so they find an alternative. If CalTran wants to be useful transit for more than commuters (My understanding as someone not in the area is CalTran runs only a few trips during rush hour - if I'm wrong that invalidates some of my reply...) they need to run more service for a while so people start to think they can count on it.
I just pulled up the schedule, just looking at the schedule I can confidently tell you that the only people taking CalTrain are going to work or have no other choice: From 10-11 am there is 1 stop at most stations/direction. Trains and buses that only run once an hour midday exist only for those who have no choice: those unable to drive (generally disabled - blind). You need to run at least every half an hour to even think about getting people who are not going to work. People going to work generally can adjust their schedule enough to make hourly work and once they figure it out they don't have to think about it again. Also those going to work generally have very heavy traffic as the alternative.
If you want a train/bus to be used by people who have a choice you must run not less than ever half hour for 16 hours a day. The more often you run the more people who will ride, up to about 5 minutes where everybody knows you can just show up and get on. (unfortunately the amount of extra riders you get from coming more often isn't linear so you sometimes cannot justify coming more often by the amount of extra riders you get)
Note, there is a 2 year lag between changes in routes/schedules and riders figuring out the new routes. I think Caltrain could get a lot more non-commute hour riders by coming more often but if you push them to make sure you make everybody aware that it will be 2 years before there is a change.
I'm wondering what your frame of reference is here. As someone who has lived in the Bay Area for most of my 30 years, and lived in Atlanta for a couple years recently, where they are actually building like crazy, the Bay Area seems to be at a total standstill.
Couldn't people just work remotely and then get together for occasional retreats or all-day meetings? It seems that coders could have their own offices at home and just occasionally use transport to get to work.
I completely agree with the sentiment to build more, much more housing. But, in order to make that happen, we also need to:
- get rid of or modify zoning laws (at least in places where growth will happen)
- reduce regulations on builders
- ensure that there are plenty of builders for health competition (so that consumers don't get ripped off)
- provide protections for builders from Sue happy NIMBYs (some kind of legal protection that prevents builders from being sued and penalizes NIMBYs that try to stand in their way).
The benefits of building more are so numerous:
- every house that gets built reduces costs for everyone else as well, as the stress of under supply lessens
- it's easier for people to get to work and find work
- easier for companies to higher people
- more jobs getting created, not just from people able to get to work but new jobs getting created from all that construction
- It'll help the environment immensly! Everyday, I see the 580 - 5 lane highway clogged up with cars crawling by at 10mpg, probably getting very low MPG over a very long distance (this is where most of the CO2 pollution is coming from, at least in the US!)
- over the long term even people with houses already will pay lower property taxes (decreasing values reduce prop taxes)
- as the number of average miles driven per commute comes down, there will be less and less traffic.
Another beneficial change would be repealing proposition 13. Because proposition 13 essentially bans property tax increases for property owners, it creates a perverse incentive to drive property values as high as possible with restrictive zoning. Without proposition 13, property taxes would rise along with the land's economic value, creating an additional incentive for property owners to let the market naturally shift land use to higher-density housing.
There's good reasons to keep part of it. I figure: You get to have the Prop 13 effect on one property - notionally, your home, but since it's difficult / gameable to determine which place is "your home", fuggedaboutit, and just say "pick one".
Because yeah, it'd suck to lose your home that you're supposed to own because your neighborhood got pricey.
I think your point is an important one to consider and mitigate if property tax reform ever comes to the west coast (Oregon has a similar system). However: giving people an incentive to make sure their neighborhood doesn't get too pricey (build more!) is probably not bad, either.
> it'd suck to lose your home that you're supposed to own because your neighborhood got pricey
This would imply that the value goes up (location, location, location). That would cause property taxes to increase and may drive people out that can't afford to stay.
As a purely economic position, sure, it's not awful... But if you're going to chase retirees out of communities they've lived their entire life that's kinda unfortunate.
Lots of states have regimes where you can defer (often interest-free) the amount of property tax increase above a certain limit to time of sale. This may be a better way to handle it than what California does.
That is, if your property tax was $10,000 last year when you bought, and would increase to $12,000 this year, the state would give you an indefinite, interest free loan for $1500 or whatever secured by the property.
Hmm. I like the sentiment, but I'd be worried about the implementation (sounds like complex tax math) and with potential downsides (make less money when selling could lead to selling less; I can imagine a housing bubble popping and you end up under water due to owed taxes when the property was worth more).
Although, if other states do it, should be data to talk to those predictions...
> Hmm. I like the sentiment, but I'd be worried about the implementation (sounds like complex tax math)
You already need to keep track of two assessed values for prop 13, along with history for catch-up basis increase. All you need to keep track of here is original tax rate (to know the maximum for this year) and deferred amount.
> I can imagine a housing bubble popping and you end up under water due to owed taxes when the property was worth more
> No one's guaranteed to make money on every asset.
There's a difference between "I have lost money on this thing" and "I owe more because I sold this thing".
By a house (debt-free) for $100, and, say, tax of $1. Something happens for a decade, so it's worth $1000, tax of $10 per year for 10 years; $90 is deferred. Later, thing un-happens and more, now house is worth $60, with $90 in deferred tax, so if you sell it... you end up owing $30, for a net loss of $70, instead of the $50 in loss on the asset?
...or is there something I'm getting really, really wrong?
Seems simpler (and safer) to say property tax doesn't change (instead of accumulating interest-free debt), and profit from selling is capital gains, but I know jack shit about this stuff and am willing to be wrong.
> By a house (debt-free) for $100, and, say, tax of $1. Something happens for a decade, so it's worth $1000, tax of $10 per year for 10 years; $90 is deferred. Later, thing un-happens and more, now house is worth $60, with $90 in deferred tax, so if you sell it... you end up owing $30, for a net loss of $70, instead of the $50 in loss on the asset?
Takes a long time to get to these situations without crazy valuation swings (+900%, then -94%?) and under 2%-ish tax rates. That would be a net loss of $130, too.
> ...or is there something I'm getting really, really wrong?
Pretty much. In most property tax regimes, it's the parcel itself that has the tax owed, and the assessor doesn't/can't go after past owners. Most mortgages are recourse-free, too-- it may be bad for your credit to not pay, but they take the property and don't come after your other assets.
There's a societal benefit, here, too, BTW. If you have a property that's worth $10M to others, but you employ it for a use that's worth $100k to you... accruing tax on the $10M encourages you to make a transaction that will leave the property better employed.
Prop 13 also has the perverse incentive that once you are in you should vote for tax increases and high spend policies - you won't have to pay for them.
I'm surprised Republicans have not latch onto this as a reason to repeal it - they already like to point out it is easy to spend other people's money as an argument against socialism.
Republicans are also against more taxes, so increasing property taxes isn't very appealing. Plus, the Republican area of northern California (the "State of Jefferson" area) isn't very wealthy, so I think people fear they won't be able to afford paying any more money.
There are no republicans in california. Like, the CA republican party is completely defunct at this point, and I am a (former) California republican; now a republican in another liberal state.
I'm not saying individual republicans dont exist (I was one), but the party organization is non existent. In many local races theres not even a republican candidate or if there is, they're off their rocker (in marin, one had a whole section on the dangers of radio waves).
To be honest, I'm a Democrat at heart. I just got tired of them taking my vote for granted. I know the Democrats will win, and I _usually_ vote for them.
Yes, I don't disagree, and am not asking for 'help'.
The comment above wrote
> I'm surprised Republicans have not latch onto this as a reason to repeal it - they already like to point out it is easy to spend other people's money as an argument against socialism.
I pointed out that there is hardly any Republican leadership in California that would be able to latch onto this issue and amplify it. My observation was an explanation for the dearth of republicans against this issue, not a request for assistance.
Yeah, but I feel like any removal or reduction of prop 13 should be used to help reduce California income taxes, which is abnormally high due to prop 13, not spend more money on stuff.
This repeal effort is specifically motivated by the desire to increase education funding, not to reduce income taxes. It may also have the Georgist side effect of pushing more expensive commercial property into productive uses vs idling as financial instruments.
I'm not saying you have to agree with that cause, but if lowering state income taxes is your goal, then there are plenty of groups in CA advocating for that whose cause you can join.
However, I'd guess that due to political realities, most of them also oppose repeal of proposition 13 also, so you might have some challenges building a movement around that.
My goal is for California to have a more stable revenue story so the state doesn't enter crisis mode every 10 years. California revenue is volatile because of the heavy reliance on income taxes, which are volatile due to the stock market. Property taxes are a much more stable source of revenue to rely upon.
Backing out prop 13 to fund certain ventures is just going to create even more problems down the road. Revenue will still be volatile. Then in the next downturn education will get screwed again, like what happened in the last recession. And you won't have prop 13 to back out anymore. It will be permanently fucked. Maybe the state will bump income taxes even more to fund things.
So more volatile revenue for the state to rely on. More fun times ahead!
> California revenue is volatile because of the heavy reliance on income taxes, which are volatile due to the stock market. Property taxes are a much more stable source of revenue to rely upon.
If that's true, and more of the education budget is funded from property taxes, then how can the following be true:
> Backing out prop 13 to fund certain ventures is just going to create even more problems down the road. Revenue will still be volatile. Then in the next downturn education will get screwed again, like what happened in the last recession.
A recession will hit everything, but if property tax revenues are earmarked for education, its funding should be less volatile than more income tax dependent programs.
So the existing homeowners on retirement income/stuck in a job that pays a certain rate who can't afford the raised tax rates get kicked out to the street?
Home ownership generally slows growth for everything else around that area. Every home owner has this "not in my backyard" mentality and will veto any possible developments in their area.
That is correct. So people who got into the "stock market" are being protective about their investment. Unless there is a path to offer them relief they will always vote against diluting their hard earned money. Most of the people who didn't get in often approach the problem as, "yeah, screw them, make it good for me", and then act surprised as to why they don't get the votes. But it seems like you understand the issue.
And the people who did get in often approach the problem as, "yeah, screw them, I got mine." So we have two groups who have countervailing interests. But of course the property owners have more money--and also time, education, social capital, and so on--so they are the ones who usually win this fight.
A more charitable interpretation is that it takes a lifetime of wealth accumulation to be able to buy a home in today's California, and it is not unreasonable to be concerned about the potential of losing your life's single largest investment. Casting them as a cartoon villains solves nothing.
Is it even primarily an economic self interest thing? If they intend to continue living in their current neighborhood it would be hard to realize that home value, although I'm sure there's some people that plan to sell the house and retire out of state.
Increasing density might not even necessarily be bad for property prices (for people who want to sell) since the land might be redeveloped into more than one unit.
I'm sure the economic angle is part of it, but I don't have a good feel for how big a factor it is compared to disliking traffic / change in "neighborhood character" etc.
I'm sure you're right, in that there are multiple reasons all mashed together. A family that buys in Neighborhood X likely selected that neighborhood because they liked it as it is, so I think it's easy to see why homeowners would be resistant to change, economic or not.
My gut tells me a lot of it is genuinely about the money, though. Of the people I know, most have to spend >50% of their income per month just to maintain a roof over my head. And these are working-professional families, well above median state incomes. That kind of pressure, even under the guise of paying a mortgage instead of renting, is a real stressor.
If that’s the case - which I don’t doubt - why are we encouraging home ownership at all? One of the key metrics the article presents is the drop in home ownership. Wouldn’t encouraging renters be a potential solution?
Economic stability is a necessity for home ownership and is often exhibited by home owners, but home ownership is not a cause nor prerequisite for economic stability. The relationship between the two was muddled in the run up to the last financial crisis- that is, lenders were encouraged to lend to more people to buy houses because it was correlated with economic stability. This is a little like buying someone expensive shoes to make them a better basketball player.
I wrote "greater economic stability", not "a prerequisite for economic stability". Would anybody seriously argue that not having to pay rent, and not facing with the possibility of eventually getting kicked out (even with all the protections, this can happen if the owner is taking the property off the market altogether), does not translate to more stability.
>Would anybody seriously argue that not having to pay rent, and not facing with the possibility of eventually getting kicked out [...] does not translate to more stability[?]
Paul Krugman does. [0]
Subsidies to home ownership increased economic volatility (people spend more when their house is worth more, spend less when its value decreases); weakened financial services; and made labour markets tend to become more rigid. [1]
Not that this detracts from your points, but transportation is responsible for 29% of CO2 emissions[0]. It's the single largest sector, but not a majority contributor.
In California, transportation by itself is 41% of GHG emissions and oil production and refining are another 11% so it is a supportable statement that transportation is the majority of this state's CO2 production.
The highest figure I could find for oil usage by sector gives ~60% for transport, so even that gives only ~47% of GHG emissions for transport in total. Then start to discount for all non-local transport, and you won't get anywhere close to a majority.
Ahead of most of this, you probably need to remove or heavily adjust Prop 13.
The primary problem, as detailed in the article, is that homeowners have every incentive to be against new construction and no incentives to be for it. If property taxes rose appropriately with property values, homeowners would have an interest in maintaining housing prices rather than doing everything they can to keep them rising.
There's also a range of beneficial secondary effects. For example, I've talked to retired folks that have considered leaving the bay due to the increased cost of living. But because they have owned their house for decades + P13, if they bought a _cheaper_ house elsewhere in CA to downsize, they'd be paying _more_ in property taxes, to the point of the move not being worth the cost. (I believe there's been talk of transferable tax rates to fix this specific problem, or maybe something was even passed, but it just goes to show the distortions P13 has beyond the obvious).
Aligning incentives (where possible) is, imo, almost always a better way to do things than creating a new batch of regulations/laws to deal with a problem.
>But because they have owned their house for decades + P13, if they bought a _cheaper_ house elsewhere in CA to downsize, they'd be paying _more_ in property taxes,
California homeowners who are 55 or older get a one time chance to sell their existing primary residence, and transfer its property tax assessment to another house[0]. Only catch is that the valuation of the new property has to be equal or less than the property that you sold, but if you live in the Bay Area you probably meet that qualification.
"if you live in the Bay Area you probably meet that qualification"
Only if you are leaving the Bay Area. Often, these older houses have a lot of deferred maintenance and the retired seller wants to downsize into something in the Bay Area that is newer build/renovated.
Correct. There are many people who come on this forum and others specifically to lie about Prop 13. I wonder who they work for? Maybe the teacher's union?
I don't know a single long time home owner that is NIMBY because they want their house's value to rise. They're NIMBY because they want their neighborhood to stay the same.
> For example, I've talked to retired folks that have considered leaving the bay due to the increased cost of living. But because they have owned their house for decades + P13, if they bought a _cheaper_ house elsewhere in CA to downsize, they'd be paying _more_ in property taxes, to the point of the move not being worth the cost. (I believe there's been talk of transferable tax rates to fix this specific problem, or maybe something was even passed, but it just goes to show the distortions P13 has beyond the obvious).
Tax rates are transferable in the same county, under certain restrictions (less expensive I think). Some counties have deals with eachother to transfer tax rates. I think a big benefit would be to have all counties to be able to transfer rates with eachother.
Another problem with transferable tax rates is most smaller housing units tend to be condos - and all they build new are 'luxury' condos. Even if you could pay for it outright, and get a transferred tax rate, you probably have an insane HOA attached to it. This alone can make it not worthwhile.
But still, I think the best, most realistic way out of the prop 13 mess is to get rid of it for newly bought homes, but allow the transfer rate for downsizing state-wide. And for the love of god, get rid of it from inheritance. Most of these people massively benefiting from it are in their 60s and 70s, so the circle of life will eventually take care of things. If we don't pass something soon the next generation of inheritors will force us to wait another lifetime to fix the problem.
> I don't know a single long time home owner that is NIMBY because they want their house's value to rise. They're NIMBY because they want their neighborhood to stay the same.
There's lots of people who move into a neighborhood near a airport, landfill, etc, and who over some time living there decide the airport is a big problem because it's holding property values down.
Prop 13 would be easy to fix:
1) Limit to primary residence.
2) Charge market rate tax for everyone but for homeowners that want to defer assess it as a lien on the house that is collected once sold. New homeowner tax will drop once tax revenue is more equitable. Make this deferment income based.
3) Remove from commercial property.
I've been wondering about Prop 13 and I've come to the conclusion it's made california into a big ponzi scheme.
Basically, the new arrivals pay for everything. And new taxes added (such as school taxes) follow the same scheme so that long-time residents pay less there too.
That said, the TRUE beneficiaries of prop 13 are corporations anyway.
There is a study that came out this year that I have been obsessed with: If zoning laws in San Francisco and New York City (just two places!) were frozen in place in 1964, the average American income today would be on average $3700 higher.
To clarify,
the issue is that in the 60's, both cities had much looser zoning and allowed dense housing development. Policy changes in the late 60s and early 70s tightened the zoning/reduced a cities ability to create dense housing.
Rezone the area around Golden Gate Park and turn it into a dense metropolis.
You could 10x the density around there and be able to support the population. You’ve got wide streets, services, and it isn’t landfill.
Honestly though, I feel like it isn’t really a crisis. It’s mostly rich people fighting with other rich people over whose backyard to build in. There are no real YIMBYs, just people who want to live in certain areas they don’t currently live in.
Most of the poors have already been displaced. We pretend like they are the focus because it’s good for politics, but the reality is the diversity is already gone.
Every property within 1/4 mile of the N-Judah streetcar line should have over-the-counter, by-right zoning approval for 7-story buildings with zero parking and no setbacks.
I used to live right near the park, 1/4 mile from the N-Judah. The infrastructure in that area can barely support the housing stock that exists right now.
If you upzone far enough builders will fill all the demand for rich apartments, and see the only way to make money is to build apartments for the next level down Some of this is moving the rich to the next style and letting the next level down have their old apartment.
The problem of course is the best time to build affordable housing is 20 years ago. So if you want to really help the poor (as opposed to symbolically helping a few poor while leaving the rest out) you need to go back in time 20 years. You can start today though on a 20 year plan.
There are probably many from 1950 - 1980 to choose from. I've read many science fiction books from that era where the premise was such a bomb (though the destination was different). I'm not a movie buff, but I'd guess there is a superhero blockbuster with that theme somewhere in there (
Superman?).
It involves Superman traveling at faster than c to save the day, rather than breaking a promise made under duress, which makes flunking ethical calculus into a super-vulnerability.
Movies based on comic book characters have come a long way. And even movies based on DC characters have advanced slightly.
There are going to be tradeoffs one way or another.
You can build a bunch of high rises and fill them with people, and private transportation will become impossible. The experience of going to the beach or some hiking spot on the weekend will be degraded. Everyone will be living in a godawful megacity instead of the nice neighborhood they'd rather live in. There's a reason people push back against growth with respect to housing.
The real problem is overpopulation. If you eliminate one negative feedback loop for population growth, you will ultimately run into another one, and all the different kinds of waste we produce (CO2, garbage, light and noise pollution) will only pile up while finite resources in the region (breathing room, nature, water, room on the road and on hiking trails) will be divvied up into smaller portions
Articles like this and the subsequent comments always reinforce to me that the human domain will never, or perhaps can never support wildlife and fauna.
As much as we like to grandstand against mass extinction of wildlife and deforestation, we will always cave to economical and social pressures of modern life which almost exclusively require resource extraction and destruction of the biosphere.
There isn’t a single pro wildlife/forest view expressed in this article, what’s being explicitly fought against here by YIMBY, and later Falk, are:
... letters to elected officials, and at the open microphone that Mr. Falk observed at the City Council meetings, residents said things like “too aggressive,” “not respectful,” “embarrassment,” “outraged,” “audacity,” “very urban,” “deeply upset,” “unsightly,” “monstrosity,” “inconceivable,” “simply outrageous,” “vehemently opposed,” “sheer scope,” “very wrong,” “blocking views,” “does not conform,” “property values will be destroyed,” and “will allow more crime to be committed.”
If preserving wildlife and forests can be equated with preserving suburban lifestyles and property values, then yes, it’s perhaps already lost and we should all be quite sad.
> If preserving wildlife and forests can be equated with preserving suburban lifestyles and property values
It can't, and shouldn't, be equated to that. Denser urban living, i.e. building more housing in cities, reduces suburban sprawl. That's a good thing if you care about the environment.
The haber-bosch process is the worst scientific advance human beings have ever made, much worse than tetra-ethyl lead, CFCs, or the atom bomb. It's not even possible to grow enough food to support the current world population without industrial nitrogen fixation for fertilizer. We've thrown things horribly out of equilibrium by proceeding in this manner and no amount of high density housing, paper straws, or solar panels is going to make things gravy
it's like the bacteria in a biological weapons lab learned how to place orders for and distribute more agar
If California were its own country, would it try to build more housing or would it put up a border wall and halt immigration? It's clear to me that Californians would choose the latter, and I don't really blame them. Deep down, everyone hates change, especially the type of transformative change that is taking place in these California suburbs.
What does Lafayette owe the people of San Francisco?--or more accurately, the people that are not from California that chose to move to San Francisco? The revolving door that defines California immigration today, where wealthy young software developers go in and middle/lower class native Californians go out, is what is hollowing out the population, shifting the culture, and causing the homelessness problem, and building more housing isn't going to fix that.
Building more housing would result in that revolving door just being an entrance. CA would still get the influx of "wealthy young software developers", but would also be able to keep all of the "middle/lower class native Californians," since there would be room for all of the newcomers to live. CA could stop playing this horrendous game of musical chairs, where every techie that moves in displaces a local, and instead have enough room for everyone to live.
It's not just building housing, it's building more of everything including transit and infrastructure, as other commenters have noted. Not to mention, housing cannot be built fast enough. See this earlier discussion [0]. And for what? Why should people happily established in a place have to cater to the whims of people that are not in that place? It's like allowing people in India to vote in American elections so that they can lobby for their own immigration rights. It's patently ridiculous on the scale of a nation and it's still ridiculous on the scale of a state.
If they wanted to halt immigration, why would they build a border wall? That would be a highly expensive and ineffective way to halt immigration, for fairly obvious reasons.
One could halt immigration--or at least the kind of immigration that most anti-immigration people complain about--in a naive and oversimplified fashion by raising the minimum hourly wage of noncitizen permanent residents to the median annual household income divided by 2000 (~$32/h), raising the minimum hourly wage for temporary residents with a work-permitting visa to 125% of that (~$40/h), and raising the minimum wage of persons without any official immigration status to 150% (~$48/h) of that. In order to get a job that pays less, a person would have to show their visa, residency card, or proof of citizenship. For jobs that pay more, who cares, as long as they support local business and pay taxes?
Don't deport anybody. Don't build a wall. Just make any businesses that hire at lower wages, without first verifying citizenship or immigration status, pay the workers all their back wages.
The economics shape and are shaped by human behavior.
This story reminds me of when I was a kid and the school bus would come. Often there were no seats because every seat was taken--one kid each. There was plenty of room there, but the kids who got on the bus first would ban together to prevent new kids from sitting.
Today these kids have grown up and own homes in the suburbs. New kids need to move in, but the kids who got there first refuse to let them build. That's what this story is about.
That analogy isn't exactly accurate. To make it accurate, the kids sitting in the current seats would have to have paid a significant amount to purchase those seats. Also, throw in some kids who, for neurological reasons, become extremely distressed if they're forced to sit next to very loud kids. Because of this, they (or their parents) made a big sacrifice to secure single seats for them at great expense.
You're right, and I feel like this is something that is frequently either downplayed or willfully ignored.
If I live in California where home prices are sky-high, and I've saved up for nearly a decade for a house, why would I be willing to allow legislation that would likely devalue my biggest asset (by far) that I saved and sacrificed so diligently for?
This is a legitimate question, not trying to be a jerk. I'm genuinely curious what the argument against this is.
Increased development wouldn't necessarily devalue you asset, particularly if it's a single family house or a condo in a relatively low-density development.
Right now, the high cost of housing in the Bay Area is largely due to a couple of factors:
1 - high cost of labor. Rezoning won't change that.
2 - restrictions on right to build. Rezoning will reduce this.
3 - high cost of land. Rezoning will increase this, by making it possible to build more units of housing on a given area of land.
For most current homeowners, it's likely that 3 will outweigh 2. Developers will buy up some portion of single family housing stock (and low-density multifamily stock) to rebuild the lots with denser housing. That process will both increase demand and reduce supply of those types of housing, resulting in price increases.
At the same time, the average unit of housing will cost less, because there will be many more condos/apartments available. Owners of high-density condos would be the most vulnerable to seeing their asset values decrease. However, building big condo buildings is still going to be a complicated endeavor, so price adjustments will happen slowly over time. No one's going to get hosed, although their asset prices might go up more slowly over time than otherwise, or even be eroded by inflation in the long term.
At the same time, many of those condo owners will still come out ahead. They may be able to upgrade to a nicer condo than they otherwise could have afforded. They may also benefit from the second-order effects of lower average housing prices, in the form of reduced costs for non-housing items. If they run a business, it will be easier for them to attract and retain workers. Schools and other public services will also be better able to attract and retain quality staff, at a lower wage bill. Etc.
The tough thing is of course you are right. It's obviously in your best interest to vote against new housing if you own a house. But it's not in society's best interest.
1. why are you so sure? What makes you an authority on the whole society's interests?
2. even if so, are you saying that collective interests trump individual rights? This is socialism 101. Government will decide who should live (and work) where, and who should own what.
1. I am not sure. This is all just my layman's interpretation. I'll admit I could be very wrong and have no expertise. I'm just discussing.
2. No, in general I believe there's a difficult balance to be struck between individual rights and collective interests. I tend to lean more toward individual rights actually.
I would love it if local governments would stop restricting the rights of local developers and allow the free market to determine what is built where more often.
> If I live in California where home prices are sky-high, and I've saved up for nearly a decade for a house, why would I be willing to allow legislation that would likely devalue my biggest asset (by far) that I saved and sacrificed so diligently for?
Rezoning would not devalue your house. You'd get more money for it in the long run. Better yet, you'd be able to instantly become a landlord (convert your house into a plex) and move somewhere else that satisfied your desire for a single-family home. Or you'd be able to market to a developer.
Plus, if you just kept living in your house, the value would go up anyway, as it always does.
Same reason people are willing to argue for any tax raises that will cost them money? Because they think the value of a functioning society is greater than the value of the personal assets they will lose.
There's no need to assume this. Even if you treat land & housing as a private good, you're entitled to decide what you do with your own land. You're not entitled to decide what other people do with their land. Zoning laws, development restrictions, and HOAs violate this principle - they give existing homeowners a collective power to decide what other homeowners can do with their private property. This makes housing a weird sort of public/private hybrid where you have the private right to protect yourself from change but also the public right to prevent change within your neighborhood, which biases everything towards the status quo.
(Importantly, no such restriction exists on population: within the U.S. at least, nobody has the right to prevent their neighbors or fellow citizens from having kids, while they do have the right to prevent their neighbors from building more housing units. There's an inevitable mismatch between reality here...)
You are oversimplifying. Are you OK with someone opening hog farms all around your house? Setting up fracking rigs? Building a factory and running heavy industry?
And you're misrepresenting what the OP is saying. Someone opposed to HOA and zoning isn't saying that it should be okay to locate a chemical plant next door to a preschool. It's more that we as a society shouldn't let people with entrenched interests in the status quo dictate that we stay with the status quo even when it's clear how awful the status quo is.
To wit if I want to raise chickens or garden in my suburban backyard that should be my right as long as the chickens don't get out or cause a ruckus. And if the chickens do cause a problem my neighbors' should be limited to seeking legal remedies and not preventing everyone from raising chickens in the future, as most chicken owners are generally responsible. That's very different from running a fracking rig and is much more like the things an HOA prevents you from doing.
I really don't think I'm misrepresenting. I tried to take a literal but good-faith reading of what the OP wrote:
> You're not entitled to decide what other people do with their land. Zoning laws, development restrictions, and HOAs violate this principle - they give existing homeowners a collective power to decide what other homeowners can do with their private property.
Zoning laws and HOAs are (some of the more common mechanisms) we currently arbitrate the boundaries of what are acceptable uses for a property.
You say raising chickens should be your right. You say running a fracking rig should not be my right.
What mechanism do you propose to negotiate that when people disagree? You mention legal remedies "if the chickens do cause a problem". Do you mean to say the process should be for a homeowner wait til the fracking rig is built and running AND causing actual harm BEFORE they have any right to object?
Your reply ran straight away into an absurd reading of the post's point.
There are scales where it is or is not practical to do various things. You might have noticed that fracking rigs, chemical plants, hog farms, et cetera, tend to take up a large area. All the various things one can do on a parcel of land cease to be worth trying to do once that parcel of land goes below a certain size. A fracking rig is unlikely to be practical to erect and operate in a typical suburban lot.
> Are you OK with someone opening hog farms all around your house? Setting up fracking rigs? Building a factory and running heavy industry?
The reason people are not OK with those things next door is that they're loud and smelly etc. It should already be a basic principle that you shouldn't be allowed to invade your neighbor's property with foul sounds and smells. In practice that would de facto require such things to be in a rural area where the owner can surround it with enough empty space that it doesn't impact the neighbors -- but you don't need any zoning for that at all, because it's a restriction on what you can do to your neighbor's property, not what you can do to your own.
You can't get from there to prohibiting your neighbor from building some more housing units on their own property.
Which is the fundamental problem with the whole YIMBY business: solving California's housing crisis requires dense housing, which is much more severely affected by what other homeowners and land-owners do than low density housing with large plots. The only way to avoid loud music blaring from the neighbouring units all day and night, or someone building a wall right in front of all your windows and removing all daylight, or an art gallery setting up shop across the street with an endless stream of visitors looking right into your home, or any of the endless other possible issues is through collective control over what others do with their property. Making everyone personally own the land needed to stop this happening is so inefficient that anything denser than American-style suburbs is impossible.
So long as this idea is a a fundamental plank of YIMBY-ism, all of the pretty claims about how high-density living doesn't have to be a dystopian hellscape are literally worthless, because every one of them relies totally on things outside the residents' control that the YIMBYs will be first in line to try and destroy.
It’s pretty simple. If I own property, I should be allowed to build a home for myself on it, subject to relevant zoning. You, and adjacent property owner, should not be able to deny my private property use.
That is the case in California. If you own property zoned residential and apply for a fully compliant building permit then it will almost always be approved (although fees may be high). Developers and property owners generally only run into long delays and battles with neighbors when they request variances or zoning changes.
It'll be approved although sometimes you get neighbors who would get upset that your house shades their lawn. Typically you want to design your house to be compatible with the neighbors and the neighborhood. Los Angeles is an exception generally which is amazing b/c you get these great wonders of architecture that appear out of nowhere. These tend to be on bigger lots though.
This particular story is about a development which did comply with existing zoning but the neighbors try to stop it anyway, forcing local govt into a negotiation.
If you look at the photo of the lot you can see why: Beautiful rolling green hills. They didn't own the lot so they didn't have any right to stop the development. Nevertheless that's human nature.
That's why I chose the school bus example. You're supposed to get the part of the seat that your butt sits on, not the whole seat. But from childhood to adulthood, people just never change.
I'm a renter but please, this is about families protecting the value of the primary asset that they hope to live on in retirement. Home assets don't skyrocket in value when there is lots of supply. If we frame this thing as reasonable-needs-of-renters vs unreasonable-wants-of-homeowners, then everyone is going to remain at loggerheads.
Since when is homeownership a requirement for retirement savings? What about IRA's, 401ks? That they chose to stake so much on a more volatile asset is not the fault of the people around them. Should cities sacrifice their urban well-being, pushing people out on the streets and guaranteeing lower-income people can never live there, for the sake of some elderly residents who put their eggs in one basket?
No, it's not. In 2008 we saw that that is really not the case. Housing is awful because it's relatively difficult to find an owner and transaction fees are extremely high.
The house that the owner lives in is not an asset. It's a durable consumer good.
Wanting your home to appreciate in value forever is like expecting your 20-year-old car to sell for more than its sticker price. It really only works for art installations, created by a collaboration of architect, engineer, and builder, with some living space inside.
Framed in these terms, most families do not have any significant assets, and a hefty chunk of their resources dedicated to maintaining their gigantic shelter-providing consumer appliance.
If I'm not mistaken, most of the value of the home in places like the Bay area is not the house itself, but the land it sits on. In that case, it's super reasonable to expect it to appreciate in value, just like any other commodity. Arguably more so.
So you're saying that a house is not a good investment? That despite a trend in increasing property values over the long term, as we have seen in the data since .. the beginning of cities, that a price correction is coming where homes will return to ... prehistoric levels? I don't see it. Instead look at a sample of home prices in the last twenty years in the Bay Area for example, and graph it against the value of a sample of cars bought in 2000.
I suppose it's no surprise that tax laws everywhere do not classify homes as durable goods that depreciate in value.
It's the distinction between the building and the land. Buildings usually depreciate over time, but the land appreciates. In the bay area, the value of the land is significantly more than the building which is why so many people tear down houses and rebuild. Where land is cheaper people don't tear down and rebuild houses that have more life in them when they buy a house.
Residences are mainly exempted from depreciation, but commercial real estate is allowed to be depreciated because buildings do have a useful life.
Although recently in the Bay Area construction costs have skyrocketed so much that in the last 5 years my home replacement cost (for insurance) has about doubled causing the land value to actually drop.
Housing returns are so location dependent it's hard to generalize if housing is a "good investment". Historically, buying in the SFBA clearly netted a good return, but what about Flint, Michigan? On the whole, re-invested dividends in an S&P index fund would have better returns than nearly all housing markets -- about 11% annually. The math is more nuanced, since homes mortgages require interest payments, but also offer leverage (only ~20% down payment).
I think the point of the argument is that this trend is abnormal, and the increases we see are the result of (decades of) govt policies distorting the housing market.
The house sits on land and that is in a good school district or otherwise desirable location. That is worth something to someone and why properties become more valuable. When land and development is constrained you have to go up to support the density or out. All new communities are basically townhome communities across the US except in some places where land is not constrained... even then the homes are very similar and sit next to each other. It increases the affordability.. This makes existing homes on larger lots worth more b/c you get space despite needing to remodel the 1960s decor. But you get a nice view.
Wait, what? My regular family house in the Bay Area has almost tripled in 20 years. I'm not banking on that for retirement, but homes can definitely appreciate in value.
> The house that the owner lives in is not an asset. It's a durable consumer good.
Thank you. I had already figured that considering one's house to be an asset is the wrong way to think about it, but lacked the words for how to then accurately describe what it actually is. "Durable consumer good" captures what a house is and does much better, IMO.
Getting this attitude more widespread is going to be difficult, sadly. The land that the house rests upon absolute is an asset, and the house thereupon can't be readily decoupled from the land (trailers and double-wides not withstanding). Thus conflating the actual asset, the land, with the consumer good it is presently being used to produce, the house, is a reasonable mental shortcut.
The location is an asset. But it's one whose value is largely dependent on the value of other nearby locations, and its connectedness to them. As that is something the owner cannot do much to influence individually, that's more a speculation than an investment.
I don't think the US will even be able to start on a tear-down-and-rebuild attitude until there is already a sufficiency of housing. As it is now, it appears to be in a cycle of new development, then decline, then revitalization, where redevelopment only occurs when property values in a place have already collapsed, and ruined those who weren't able to move before the wave hit.
See my comment above, but the economics of increasing supply are actually much more nuanced, and the majority of current owners would probably not see the value of their assets eroded.
I think this is the best point to shout out, in the Bay Area. Show how building projects can alleviate supply concerns for demographics who can't afford your suburban home, and how the increase in population will still help your home price because it will make your fat suburban land parcel look even more exclusive. Everybody wins something.
Rent seeking is bad for society, by economic definition. People relying on appreciating prices of their homes instead of investing into their productivity growth indicate a bug in the system that needs to be fixed (via increasing supply and possibly LVT).
Having been born and raised in a major city, I'm certainly biased, but I truly believe that suburbs should go away. Every part of a suburb seems so insular, so wasteful, so outmoded. A one family house requires maintenance, heating and wiring that would be so much more efficient with even the smallest apartment complex. Lawns are ridiculous, especially in the parts of the country where grass is not indigenous. Why the hell are we spending so much water and energy to maintain a goddamn green rectangle?
HOAs don't seem to do much besides execute petty laws. Neighborhoods, while they can be diverse, will never approach a city in terms of allowing people of different backgrounds, races, etc. to interact. There's a particular reason cities vote more democratic than suburbs: It's hard to vote for such hateful policies when you interact with the people effected every day.
I get that there's this nostalgia or rather inertia about suburbs. I get that people grew up in a one family house with a lawn in their nice homogeneous town. But it needs to go away.
Forcing everyone into cities is also a form of homogenizing. The idea that a city mindset is the only one is just forcing people to conform in a different way.
More like this thing that people like is energy inefficient, produces pollution and leads to more homogeneous, less diverse communities. And therefore it should go away.
I have a coworker who mentioned that he doesn't think my town needs libraries. "I never use them, so why should my taxes go to supporting them?" Trying to have a productive dialogue with someone who doesn't understand the idea of community can be a challenge.
Oh I don't think communities should go away. Cities can have communities if you build them in the right way. I just think these communities need to evolve from the particular format of a single family house with a lawn, car and garage.
Plus I'm a little perplexed at the library analogy. I'm not saying we need to lower funding or anything. If anything we should be pumping more money into suburbs so that they can build and create more healthy, flourishing communities. These communities should just be built in a way that's space and energy efficient.
It's the idea that if someone doesn't like something, it doesn't matter if others do.
In my town, a typical midwest college town, we have suburbs, we have more urban areas with smaller/older houses in row neighborhoods. We have apartments galore, and condos in downtown areas. A bit of something for everyone. Expecting a community to "evolve" means losing something of this. Other than young people who want to live in the downtown area, nobody wants to give up their homes. Apartment living is no fun with families.
And this is normal America. These cities can't be re-designed, can't really evolve. New cities, sure. Build them that way if you can (though I think the market won't support it), but expecting existing cities to evolve into urban worlds with no cars, great public transportation, and centrally located jobs and services won't happen in the majority of US cities.
First of all, I get that people like living in the suburbs. But people also like eating beef and like driving Hummers. Unfortunately we need to do less of all of these.
> Apartment living is no fun with families.
That is a gigantic assumption. I grew up in an apartment and it was great. My parents wouldn't trade living in an apartment in a major city for a house in the suburbs for anything. Plenty of families all around the world do just fine in apartments.
I disagree that existing cities can't be redesigned. Sure, we'd need to invest in public transportation. And sure, we'd have to build other infrastructure. But the case in the article is a pretty obvious case for expansion. You have a town that is 30 minutes by rail from SF, an epicenter of insanely expensive real estate, and yet nobody can expand because people are worried it'll destroy their precious suburbs.
I'd settle for suburban development not being required (through maximum density zoning laws) or subsidized (through disproportionate spending on suburban infrastructure).
Getting involved with a local YIMBY group is pretty easy, fun, and one of the best things you can do on several fronts:
* It's good for the economy, as "legitster" points out.
* It's good for the environment if people can drive less (or even walk or bike!) because they live closer to things.
* It's good for the people "on the margins", those struggling to pay rent, or those at risk of homelessness, or those who might like to move to a more productive place for a better job.
It's much easier to make a difference locally: in many places it's not hard to get to know your city councilors, or state reps/senators. One of my prouder YIMBY moments was turning out 5 people on a weekday morning to speak to our state rep, who ended up voting in favor of HB 2001, which legalizes up to 4-plexes throughout most Oregon cities.
>It's good for the people "on the margins", those struggling to pay rent, or those at risk of homelessness, or those who might like to move to a more productive place for a better job.
Please cite at lease one example in which this has ever been the case. I do understand the theory behind your argument here, and I assume you are familiar with (leftist) counter-arguments, so this is not an attempt to open a debate. Rather, I want you to be right but until I see some solid evidence I am unconvinced.
>One of my prouder YIMBY moments was turning out 5 people on a weekday morning to speak to our state rep, who ended up voting in favor of HB 2001, which legalizes up to 4-plexes throughout most Oregon cities.
This is a great example of how it seems to me that YIMBYs are anti-NIMBY in the way Democrats are anti-Republican. Time and time again, it appears neither groups are actually doing any thing ‘good for the people “on the margins. Clearly, this policy benefits landlords more than anybody and the implication is that this is besides the fact of lowering rent prices. Fine. But it is not insignificant that all of these efforts primarily promote the perpetuation of rent-seeking.
I watched from the front row as investors bought up Portland. It has been about 6 years since it entered full-swing and rent prices are higher than ever before. This is not good for people “on the margins”. In fact, most of those people were not even on the margins before the investors came in. I am one of them. I should know.
Of course, history is littered with cases of YIMBY theory failing urban housing markets, so please show me an example of where your theories have actually succeeded.
Rental housing has price floor that distorts the market. Once a property diverges from the requirements of housing subsidy programs, it usually gets abandoned.
In most places new supply is high end and is making more housing available for people who don’t lack access.
> In most places new supply is high end and is making more housing available for people who don’t lack access.
In most places, new cars are more expensive than used ones, but if you stopped providing new cars, the price of the used ones would shoot up as everyone started competing for a dwindling supply of cars.
>In most places, new cars are more expensive than used ones, but if you stopped providing new cars, the price of the used ones would shoot up as everyone started competing for a dwindling supply of cars
An unspoken consequence of cash for clunkers. Practically overnight 100k miles was considered "low mileage", which was ridiculous before people started needlessly trashing perfectly good used cars.
Eh, I’ve heard that before as well but I don’t know if it’s true. By the time the program ended in 2009, cash for clunkers had taken ~700k cars off the market. The same year, about 35 million used cars were sold in the US[1]. Cash for clunkers was a rounding error.
You can’t compare cars to real estate and property.
For one, most property and real estate appreciates in market value on it’s own. This makes spec construction viable, and why most new apartment buildings in expensive cities are ”luxury” units and rented for very high rates. The owners are happy to let them sit empty and starve the market to max out demand when they know there is enough jobs in the area that people are competing heavily to move there.
In addition, the markets are tiny compared with cars, which are easy to move to cars to other markets (cities).
> In most places new supply is high end and is making more housing available for people who don’t lack access.
People are outraged when you put apartments and condos in their multi-single-family cities because "lower class" people will move in. Don't those "lower class" people currently lack access to live these places?
New supply in housing shortage area is expensive, for the same reason old housing is expensive there: THERE IS A HOUSING SHORTAGE!
Therefore, if you say it's bad to build new housing if it will end up being expensive, you're really saying there should be no new housing built during a housing shortage...
I find it's often better to think it terms of number of homes and housed people than in prices. If 100 new apartments are built, it's hard to say what will happen to prices exactly. But it's undeniable that there will be 100 more homes, and 200-300 more people can live indoors in that city, than without the project.
While I don't doubt that building more homes brings prices down, the real reason housing is cheap in Montreal is because Montreal is poor, has lower immigration, little in the way of industry to attract migrants, language barriers, and it doesn't have a basis of Chinese ex-pats to anchor a lot of foreign buying which is a huge driver of prices in Toronto and Vancouver.
Edit: I should add, I live here and am very intimate with the issue.
Speaking as the SO of a major property management company exec operating in Portland, no it wasn't a policy that benefits landlords. Not in the slightest. More competition and lower prices are a landlord's and developer's worst nightmare.
And yes, due to the scale of development, rents are lower than they expected when they built. Your prices were gonna go up regardless, and the scale of development that happened actually kept prices down.
As I said, rents are higher than ever before. Why should renters care if investors are exploiting them for as much profit as they originally wanted to? My point stands: rents are higher than ever before. Not lower.
> Portland added 4,419 unit of completed housing in 2016, a slight increase from the roughly 4,365 it added in 2015, which combined is more than all the housing units added in the five years prior to 2014, according to the Portland Housing Bureau's 2017 annual report.
> Year-over-year average rents declined by a full 1.2 percent in the city of Portland, with average rents dropping to $1,140 per month for a median one-bedroom apartment, according to the yearly rent report from Apartment List. It's a similar story in Seattle, with Apartment List data showing rents declining 1.6 percent from where they were in 2017. The median monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Seattle is $1,346.
When you don't build more, rents go up. When you start to build enough, rents go down. It's pretty fucking simple. In fact, it is econ 101.
You are absolutely correct that the root cause of the housing crisis is capitalism and the commodification of housing. However, a socialist restructuring of the entire housing market is not likely to happen any time soon.
While we wait for the revolution, we might as well encourage the for-profit developers to build in the least destructive ways, so that less people suffer in the short term from the choked supply and anti-human urban planning that capitalists will exercise if left unchecked.
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. The GP comment shouldn't have been flamebaity, but not taking the bait is actually more important.
> You are absolutely correct that the root cause of the housing crisis is capitalism and the commodification of housing.
Every other commodity in my life, food for instance, is dirt cheap and getting cheaper all the time. Housing is expensive because it is not a commodity. You have to beg the government to allow it to exist.
If housing was not a commodity, then it could not be bought and traded with fluctuations of value and expectations of profit on the part of the owners. The cost of housing would not be a problem if it was priced for the benefit it provides, instead of its profit potential.
It isn't the price of housing that's the root problem, it's the arithmetic. There aren't enough homes in places people want to live for the people who want to live there. The price decides who gets them, but arithmetic causes the underlying suffering.
If there isn't enough food, someone goes hungry. The price just decides who. If there isn't enough housing, someone has to move out. The price just decides who.
Choosing "who" via a more equitable method than price doesn't reduce the amount of suffering, it just spreads it around better.
What you're saying is that price isn't the problem, scarcity is the problem. Price is just an inevitable consequence of scarcity – the symptom, not the cause.
yeah, housing should not be a commodity and should not be subject to market forces; instead, a benevolent committee of compassionate people (well-read into marxism, of course) should decide who gets to live where
You're speaking past each other. In marxist economics literature "commodification" means something is able to be bought and sold, not that it is a commodity in the broader ecconomic sense (an undifferentiated good with broadly elastic demand). "Honor" isn't commodified, "dignity" isn't commodified, "food" is commodified, and "rare collectible art" is commodified.
Thanks for the clarification. If it's a definition that applies to literally every physical good in a market economy, then it doesn't have much explanatory power to explain why some things are cheap and abundant, and why some things are expensive and scarce.
yea, I mean there have been large periods in human history in which land was not bought and sold. Many indigenous cultures don't have a strong concept of land ownership. In many modern socialist countries (Singapore, china), you cannot "buy land" you can lease it from the government for a long period of time (usually 99 years). In the united states, "education" is a good/service that transverses a weird line between "marxist commodity"/"non commodity" as we have education as a public good and we also have public schooling.
I want to be clear here that I'm not making any value judgements with my statements about capitalism vs socialism/marxism, and I agree that the "commodification of housing" IMO doesn't explain why its expensive, but to be fair, the people making that argument are generally not making an argument on values (housing aught to be...), and values are kind of a "first principles" type thing that you can't persuade or prove wrong, they just are.
Actually, a lot of values can be obtained from other, more general, values. Not everything of course or we'd all agree on everything! But I wish people would do this more often when they make arguments about rights and wrongs. Something like "I agree with X because it's a special case of Y which I hold as an axiomatic value". Instead, they just seemingly randomly decide which side their opinion falls on then try to make up random pot-shots of excuses to defend it.
In california, landlords largely did get us into this mess though. Like not on an individual scale, but as an organized political constituency they lobbied for the policies that have caused the problems we're experiencing and they're generally lobbying against the solutions.
It's a distraction in that it may lead to bad intuitions about what to do, like trying to "punish" landlords in some way will somehow make up for something.
I do a lot of housing policy activism outside my daily work in tech and I entirely disagree with you. On a large scale, real estate associations and "landlord" associations are an incredibly influential lobbying coalition in the state of California, and on the whole, they exert a hugely negative influence o housing policy. I don't think there is any reason to advocate punishing landlords where "punishing" is throwing them in jail, but the problem is that 99% of landlords will say that anything that you might do that lowers the growth in value of their assets or increase taxes on them is punishment, and they lobby in sacramento on that basis. The reality is that most of the policy changes that California needs (zoning reform, property tax reform, vacancy taxes, etc) will have the landlord lobbies against them on the basis that they are "punishing landlords".
On a larger scale, something like 85% of the state legislators in Caliifornia are themself landlords (they own a unit/home that they lease to someone else) and are profiting off the housing crises not just by owning their own home, but by profiting of the exorbitant rents of others. On some level, the housing crises in california is caused by the state legislature fighting for their own class interest and their own personal financial interest as landlords.
> Clearly, this policy benefits landlords more than anybody
Well... no. If your SFH zoned lot is now duplex-friendly, it means your house goes up in value because it can be immediately rented out to two people or you can rent it out to another family immediately, without asking anyone, as long as you do the required physical modifications. Now your home value is increased by the amount of revenue (at an appropriate discount rate) it would draw in from two simultaneous occupants in perpetuity, which is always higher than the rate possible from one occupant.
It literally benefits everyone
> Of course, history is littered with cases of YIMBY theory failing urban housing markets
No, it's not. History is a constant example of the success of the free market, which YIMBY's are in favor of, and NIMBY's are against. This is ridiculous.
Wait.. so you are just opposed to people having somewhere to live? You’re saying that more apartments on the market makes prices higher? I don’t think I’m going to be able to follow the logic here.
The problem with the “try to understand NIMBYs” concern trolling in this thread is that there isn’t much to understand. The only common thread in NIMBY philosophy is fear of change, and some mild xenophobia.
I think there’s a lot more common ground to be had with far-left PHIMBYs who want the government to build most housing. At least that’s a coherent philosophy and a proposed solution.
When investors buy property, they almost always intend to raise it’s value to increase their profit. That’s how this works. They very often tear down affordable units and build luxury ones, because the YIMBY policies peculiarly never take issue with that.
Realize most property and real estate appreciates in market value on it’s own. This makes spec construction viable, and is why most new apartment buildings in expensive cities are ”luxury” units and rented for very high rates. The owners are happy to let them sit empty and starve the market to max out demand when they know there is enough jobs in the area that people are competing heavily to move there.
I'm not sure exactly what you are looking for to be convinced but I'll try.
First of all, for example in the Bay Area there are more people who would like to live there than there are houses, and so the people with more money bid up the price and "win" the house, while the people with less money are priced out and must live elsewhere. Hopefully you agree with this basic premise?
With this model, if there is one less house, one more person will be priced out, and if there is one more house, one less person will be priced out, since the number of houses determine how many winners there will be (and as long as people don't change their minds about wanting to live there if they could afford it).
I've heard people worry about "induced demand", and I agree it's true that there's probably many people that would consider moving to San Francisco from elsewhere if the price started coming down (and of course vice versa), and that that would prevent the price from lowering too quickly. But those people moving free up housing in Austin, Seattle, etc, and there are more "winners" overall.
I think a lot of the people "on the margins" of being priced out in the Bay Area are not on the edge of homelessness - often they are able to move and drive up demand elsewhere. But I do see more and more people living out of RVs and vehicles parked near freeways.
For the price increases over the last couple decades, I think the demand has gone up for most first world cities. I think this is mostly because the industries that are booming are mostly knowledge work, that tends to have a higher specialization of labor so is more naturally located in places with higher population densities that have more liquid job markets (in addition to network effects within certain industries). I think the solution to this is to build more housing in cities but the alternative is lower income workers/industries are displaced and landowners are enriched.
For a specific example of this theory working, Tokyo is subject to a lot of the same economic forces as other first world cities that drive demand up (wrt labor specialization etc). They've managed to keep housing under control, but in order to achieve that they've had to allow almost double the amount of new housing as all of California (despite Tokyo having only around 1/3 the population) [1].
Citing Japan only further proves my point. Property values don’t appreciate the same in Japan because, and one reason is that they don’t have a finance industry that allows them to. Land owners cannot get rich by mere property appreciation like they can here. I definitely think we should imitate Japan more, but this isn’t simply a matter of “allowing more housing”. Acting like that’s all there is to it is disingenuous.
Japan does real estate development with banks and loans like the US does, and interest rates are even lower so it's easier to borrow a large sum of money. Can you explain what you meant about the finance industry not allowing prices to appreciate?
Their zoning is where they have obvious huge differences. The zoning categories are set at a national level and limit how restrictive local cities can be (there's 12 categories based on nuisance level). The higher zoning usually allows lower density also, so cities just start with a little extra zoning headroom that allows them to grow over time. They also automatically permit things that follow zoning. [1]
In the US zoning is more local, often there are many more zone types that are much more restrictive about what they allow (it's more micromanaged and often prohibits things like mixed-use in addition to multi family). In many of the biggest markets even projects that follow zoning are usually not allowed, every project is an individual years long fight. Also in cities like Los Angeles the zoned-for capacity has actually dramatically decreased over time, even as the population grew. [2]
Some of these policies may be a legacy of people deliberately not wanting it to be too affordable, because neighborhoods didn't want low-income people to move in. Of course now in many places even middle-income people can't afford it.
I think, from a social justice perspective, the US policy has been an abject failure. It's increased pollution (from long commutes) and homelessness. It's deprived people of good paying jobs, since they can't afford to move to the locations where they're available. It's squeezed the middle class and enriched landlords, there's even debate that housing may be the most important contributor to wealth inequality. It's anti-environment since higher density has less environmental impact on a per-capita basis. I'm sure there's some upsides, but I can't see any that remotely justify the long-term costs that these policies have brought about.
I'm very involved with YIMBY Action here in SF: I'm on the board of both YIMBY Action and YIMBY Law, and I'm also running for local office in the current election: https://buss2020.org
If you have any questions about YIMBY, send them my way!
We're growing a lot! YIMBY Action just brought in People for Housing Orange County and Peninsula For Everyone as affiliate clubs. We're in the process of expanding into Denver and NYC.
The demise of Scott Wiener's SB50 this year has certainly been a disappointment, but we try not to pin our hopes on any single solution. It took us 50 years to get where we are, and we expect it'll take at least 10 to get out. That will be a combination of local, state, and federal action.
The thing I've learned being involved in SF politics and YIMBY for the past few years is that politicians don't make change. They don't shift the discourse. Instead, it's grassroots movements like YIMBY Action that build a parade that politicians then jump to the front of. (Of course, this isn't true for Scott. He's one of the few true believers!)
We're building a passionate and vocal community that can do the on-the-ground organizing necessary to make politicians court us. The way forward it to continue building a voting bloc. You only have as much power as the people you can turn out to vote.
Then why align with business interests against the interests of individual citizens? You know that most voters are not high paid tech workers frustrated by the lack of luxury mix used lofts. I’m sure with enough pr money from developers you can trick some poor folks into thinking a development boom will help them, but you are betting on ignorance. The economics are very clear; building in the Bay Area cannot lower prices. Build where it makes sense, outside the Bay Area, at a rate that’s optimal for people and the environment. Plenty of room in Livermore for high density, green, lower cost development. If we added a million people to north beach, it wouldn’t be north beach anymore. Is that the goal?
I'm not sure calling it unfair is necessarily correct, but the incumbents use ballot props to increase their name recognition. It works like this:
- A Supervisor puts a proposition on the ballot
- organizations funnel money into the campaign for the ballot prop
- then when the ballot prop advertises they include names of the people running for office
It's why SF has _so_ _many_ ballot props: they are the legal way to bypass the fundraising limits we imposed on individual electoral campaigns. Ironically, if we repealed our campaign finance limits, there'd be less dark money and far fewer ballot props.
I don't have a ballot prop to attach my name to, so I have to do old-fashioned campaigning (with some modern, high-tech things, too :)
"I won't throw my hands in the air and blame a boogeyman, I won't ignore data because it doesn't fit my ideology...
It's time we stop blaming everyone else and start taking responsibility."
This is encouraging to see. I think Andrew Yang showed there's a real hunger for a solutions and data oriented approach, eschewing tribalism. Although perhaps still in a nascent stage, there finally seem to be signs of an increasing appetite for this.
Thanks! It was a real bummer when he dropped out. I donated to his campaign and have a friend who was organizing for him down in LA. At least he made UBI mainstream!
I used to be YIMBY, but I doubt more construction would lead to lower costs of living.
When I researched this I couldn't find any strong evidence suggesting that more building would lead to more affordable housing.
You would think that more construction would lead to more affordable housing, but it seems like more construction doesn't just increase supply, it also increases demand, which can offset any price effects from the increase in supply.
This makes sense when you think that similar people want to live in proximity to people like themselves. So if there are more luxury condos in an area that's going to create demand for more high-end retail, which will enhance that neighborhood's appeals to wealthier customers which will then increase demand for more luxury residences.
Vienna and Singapore seems to be cities that have overcome this trend.
So I used to be an enthusiastic YIMBY, but there just doesn't appear to be any concrete evidence that more construction is going to lead to more affordable housing.
Having said that, I do believe we should promote more construction, I just don't think it's going to reduce the cost of living to a sustainable level.
The YIMBY argument mentioned in the article is that expensive new housing today becomes mid-range and eventually lower-end housing over decades as it ages. If you don’t put units into the front of that pipeline now, nothing comes out of the other end of it later. This seems plausible to me, and there is research stating the filtering effects may happen a lot faster than that on a regional level: https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2019/06/housing-supply-d...
More than that, "expensive" new housing is typically half the price of the single family homes next to it. It's just marketed as "luxury" because everything is. Typically the people protesting "luxury" housing already live in housing that's more expensive than what is getting built.
The role of new construction in affordability is more direct. The people who live in the shiny new places will just bid up the price of the next best thing if it isn't available, and this ripples down until the people at the bottom are priced out. So by building it, you're preventing other things from being bid up.
Desirable places are never going to be the absolute cheapest option, for sure, but they could be a lot cheaper. Here are some concrete (ha ha) examples:
There's absolutely zero evidence of "induced demand" for housing. And all available evidence suggests that 1: SF & CA have huge shortages of homes and 2: Building more is a good solution.
Please see this non-exhaustive list of things which all show building more housing leads to housing affordability.
While I vigorously support more construction in the SF metro area, I think expectations need to be set correctly as to the amount of construction required to actually bring prices down, instead of just slowing their rate of increase. It's a lot. I don't recall all the numbers, but I believe I saw something suggesting that we need to increase the rate of housing starts by a factor of 4 just to stabilize prices. To actually bring them down would require even more than that. Again, we should absolutely do it, in my opinion, but if we were to only double construction — difficult as that will already be, politically — and prices didn't plateau, people might conclude that it doesn't work. We need to make sure they know what it's going to take.
It's not so much induced demand as it is pent-up demand. Lots more people would already love to live here — indeed, many have moved away solely because of housing costs.
This is definitely a fair point. There's also - in my mind, living in a smaller town - the idea that it'd be nice if everyone coordinated to catch up mostly at the same time, so that it's not just Portland or Seattle or Boulder or San Diego or wherever... but everywhere.
Supposedly, the big selling point was that seniors on fixed incomes were getting priced out of their homes. But that would only happen because they have a substantial, appreciating asset. These aren't poor people who deserve our sympathy; they're relatively well-off people with a cash-flow problem! We could have solved their cash-flow problem without destroying our cities' tax bases by allowing them to defer some of their taxes [0] until their property was sold.
[0] For example, the amount of tax due immediately could be allowed to grow at 2% annually, following the Prop. 13 formula. Also, the tax due at sale could be limited to, say, 70% of the gain on the sale. That limit would probably never take effect, in practice, but I've learned from previous occasions where I've proposed this that people tend to get hung up on the possibility that one might owe more in tax than one stood to make on the sale. In fact, if you run the numbers, it takes some very strange assumptions to make the deferred tax even approach getting that large; but this rule should assuage that concern. (Basically, you'd need several years of strong price growth followed by a sudden, huge collapse.)
Here’s a simple compromise that most people I know support:
Eliminate prop 13 for all but one property, both for individuals and for businesses. This would eliminate the current tax loophole for investment properties, and demand that tech companies that have scaled to more than one campus pay their fair share to the communities they are located in.
Also, have prop 13 valuations reset whenever the property changes hands (including inheritance, and, for commercial real estate, this would get rid of the “sell via a holding company” loophole).
Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of “we’ve been building a ton and prices are still high” comments on Nextdoor and heard the same in person. Not sure if it’s all in good faith, but some people at least seem to be persuaded by what you’re talking about.
the issue is the reference frame. We are building a lot relative to 2009 to 2013, but that time period was a historic aboslute low point in new housing starts, the "boom" that were in now has less new housing production that the majorith of previous "busts" since WWII
"Yes, I unironically want 4 million new homes in San Francisco."
Why would any SF resident care even a little bit what non-residents think of their housing situation?
"The housing shortage in the Bay Area might be the single largest drag on American prosperity."
Have you considered that someone's home, their life is not a function of 'industrial prosperity'? And that they're not interested in having their neighbourhood turned into a bunch of skyscrapers hosting Facebook Engineers?
It's possible they do - but it's entirely up to the residents to decide.
Most new housing in the Bay will go to higher than average income earners, not poorer people, unfortunately. The Bay is a very dynamic city there vastly more people who would like to live there than actually do, given the right conditions. The Bay may have to contend with paying 'regular people' simply a lot more and contemplate actually sharing more of that wealth being created.
I'm not assuming the residency of the commenter, my comments are directed to commenters in general. Everyone seems to have a strong view of how many homes SF ought to have, moreover, most are making false assumptions about the nature of the problem, and the unassailable civic virtue of their own motivations without respecting the valid lamentations of 'the other side'.
In particular, tech people, or even the intelligentsia in general, tend to have an odd disregard for cultural issues and tend to see 'housing' as entirely an economic or civic function (i.e. numbers, pricing, density, affordability) while disregarding the nature of the fact that these are communities and homes. (Witness the fact that everyone on this thread, and in most reference articles tend to talk about issues such as 'price')
I watched in my lifetime the city of Vancouver get bulldozed over and replace with a zillion apartment buildings. The money is nice, but otherwise, it's a brutally garish city, the architecture is thoughtless, it's just another 'pop up' city of the theme of the New Millenium / Pacific Rim. It will not age well. What's more - even as Van has evolved towards this super-high density Hong Kong / New York physicality, costs have skyrocketed and affordability has plummeted. This should be of no surprise of course, as almost everyone in the Western world, more density generally implies less affordability and certainly 'less space'. Have a look [1]. Texan cities like Dallas are considerably more affordable and considerably less dense.
Bulldozing most of a beautiful city possibly against the wishes of its citizens to drive some kind of risky civic/industrial experiment is ... an extreme view.
It’s also up to the residents to pay property taxes, and owners not to horde empty housing units as investments. Also, I’ve been a resident here for over a decasde, and I’m sick of paying small fortunes to landed gentry.
Bay area housing is a ponzi scheme, and younger families have to choose between their careers and buying in at nonsensical pricing.
Local governments suppress housing starts and intentionally snarl the roads to keep the house of cards standing.
Sooner or later the older residents will be outnumbered by people that moved here, and the reckoning will probably be swift and severe. As you said, it’ll be up to the residents to decide.
A few years back, there were signs in Cupertino saying “no four story apartments”. I agree. If you’re within 0.25 miles of transit, it should be illegal to build (or improve) anything that short. I’m guessing this isn’t what the NIMBYs had in mind though.
>housing shortage in the Bay Area might be the single largest drag on American prosperity.
Obviously HN skews towards tech but let’s not fall into the trap that SV is either representative or the center of “American prosperity” for the average citizen
You will just increase the number of unaffordable apartments. The added units will come with added traffic from the new wealthier residents, and higher prices on everything. It doesn’t seem like a win to me, unless you have very narrow goals.
These "wealthy residents" are poorer in their hometowns. They don't migrate out of fun. In middle of nowhere they may get 40k per year and in the bay area it may be 160k or more.
Your point is the same one I’m making. People come here because FANG and tech generally subsidize that movement. It’s great for tech profits and great for that one guy from Russia or wherever who can make 140k salary, but it’s a net negative for society. The housing crisis is the result. A greedy growth at any cost business culture, not senior citizens trying to avoid displacement in their golden years; that’s what caused the crisis. If those businesses all went belly up like in the dot com bust, we’d have the opposite problem, a housing glut and falling prices. Yet, if you removed all forms of nimbyism, things would remain almost exactly where they are at now. The housing problem is a problem of demand- the whole world can’t move to San Francisco just because that’s what a bunch of tech companies want. Nor can the whole world move to Manhattan or Tokyo or any other place with high housing prices and too many people.
Prices are set by the balance of demand and supply. The demand isn't going away. The supply is what we can do something about.
Even building expensive luxury apartments helps, unless no one can afford them at all (which is not what the builder wants to happen). The people who rent those aren't taking up spaces others could have afforded.
Demand is mediated by policy. Tax corporate real estate to create incentives for companies to locate where it’s beneficial to citizens. That’s one way to better manage demand. And we have to manage demand or we create a lot of failed cities like Detroit. Boomtowns are avoidable with sensible policy. We need those policies to keep people from exploiting humans herd like instincts for profit.
> The best example of induced demand ignores price.
> Build more freeways and you get more drivers.
That's like having a McDonalds without enough cashiers and then saying "hire more cashiers and you sell more hamburgers" is induced demand because the hamburgers cost the same but you sell more of them.
That's not induced demand, you're just changing the price. Having to wait in line (or sit in traffic) is a cost. If you reduce the cost, demand goes up, but that's just ordinary supply and demand again.
Comments above are correct, I'd also add that NYC and SF are "inducing demand" not by building housing, but by building office space at a rate 8x-12x that they are building residential dwelling units. Over the past ~10 years, for every home the SF bay has added it has added office space for 8 jobs. Adding housing doesn't create more demand for housiing, adding more offices creates more demand for housinig.
Every city has to ultimately decide what kind of community they want to have and then act accordingly.
As SF is an attractive city, every home ever built there will essentially be bought or occupied, there is nearly an unlimited number of people who would like to live there - so it's merely a matter of what kind of density and price they choose to have.
Do they want SF to be a city of skyscrapers, with tiny expensive flats like NYC?
Or a neighbourhood of fairly expensive homes as it is now.
Nobody anywhere will doubt that 'building significantly more homes' will reduce the average cost of homes but ultimately SF residents will decide what they want to do: if they don't want skyscrapers or high-density style buildings, it's their business.
The homes on Monte Rey are even more expensive but it's beside the point. There is plenty of inexpensive housing in Cali and the US to accommodate most needs.
Everyone deserves 'affordable housing' but not everyone deserves 'affordable housing' in the specific spot they want.
And FYI New York and Hong Kong even more expensive and much denser - should NYC 'triple its density'? Will that make thins better? Or maybe there's something missing from this logic.
> There's absolutely zero evidence of "induced demand" for housing.
There absolutely is. Here's a great paper studying the effect of removing rent control in Cambridge, MA (https://economics.mit.edu/files/9760) which found that rent in non-rent controlled units went up as a result of the removal. The effect is similar to what GP stated -- gentrification causes a feedback loop that can affect all housing.
All said, it is very possible (and I subscribe to the idea) that the Bay Area would not suffer from much induced demand because people are in the area for the economic opportunity, not for local amenities.
The fact that ending rent control increases prices does not support the claim that building more homes increases prices. They should have opposite effects according to basic supply and demand theory.
Ending rent control also should lead to lower prices in non rent controlled housing according to supply and demand.
The sequence of events that lead to a rise in prices are similar - that is there is evidence that more affluent people moving in to a local area can result in rents going up for others in that same area.
A good example is Jerry Brown's 10K Project — his plan to attract 10,000 people to live in downtown Oakland by 2001, which was the cornerstone of his tenure as mayor. The idea was that 10k affluent people would create a positive feedback loop of gentrification. As someone living in the area in the 90s-2000s, I can say it "worked" but at the expense of the working class as Oakland began gentrifying rapidly by 2010.
Raising the price of one good usually causes the price of substitute goods to go up. For example, if the price of wheat goes up because of import duties, the price of rice will also go up as people switch from wheat to rice.
In the rent control example, many people held on to RC apartments because they were a great deal, even though they weren't where they wanted to live. After RC ended, they moved to apartments they preferred (since there was no longer a big price differential), increasing demand (and thus price) for the originally non-RC apartments.
Agree with points 1 and 2. But build the homes in less dense areas where they be seen by the community as a net positive. Or add to existing density where appropriate. Try to add density in the suburbs is inefficient at best, frankly I’m not sure what it solves.
>You would think that more construction would lead to more affordable housing, but it seems like more construction doesn't just increase supply, it also increases demand, which can offset any price effects from the increase in supply.
No shit sherlock. Do you even know where that additional drmand is coming from? It's coming from people in their 20s or even 30s who are forced to live with their parents. It is coming from all those migrants that live together with two other room mates. The pent up demand is so large after decades of stagnation that it will take at least 25 years of building to get where they should be today.
Remember every single constructed unit allows another person to live there. The market rent shouldn't even enter the equation as a policy goal.
I’m not sure you really need to have an aggressive attitude when replying to someone. It’s rude.
The problem with SF is that even if you caught up to this 25 years of pent-up demand, you still have more demand from all over the world to move to the Bay Area. It’s an induced demand problem. Most other cities don’t have this, except in maybe a few areas in those cities.
As much as building housing is promoted, if your adding jobs 1:1 with new housing it’s useless. Are you willing to limit new office space until housing catches up?
It’s only if your don’t have a job. People who need to work and pay income taxes simply don’t have time for all this. Because they know, that market always does its job.
Sometimes people pick other names... maybe search for people talking about housing issues. Not 100% correlated with YIMBY, but people thinking about similar problems: https://www.strongtowns.org/local
If you know of initiatives you care about (like SB 50 for example), look for groups pushing that.
If you're on twitter, the twitter networks usually bridge cities. I follow a lot of LA area YIMBY groups, but get some cross pollination from other cities too.
I find the inclusion of Olga Diaz in the voter guide ironic, considering she voted against infill apartments because they were "out of character with the space". Gotta love politicians claiming they support something in the same breath as letting you know they voted against it.
>It's much easier to make a difference locally: in many places it's not hard to get to know your city councilors, [..]
I am not from USA, but over here i did have a 'pleasure' contacting them. They worked actively against communities they were supposed to represent. I am talking about both city councilors, and district ones.
You know whats the best part? you have like 3 options to pick, and they all are exactly the same(cozy job, with limited hours for appointments and ignoring your community)
I’m not a “NIMBY”, but I believe the YIMBY moniker is counter-productive to your cause.
It automatically frames the question in a sophomoric way, where the “other side” is an evil force to be mocked and dismissed. In reality, there is no such thing as a “NIMBY”, just a collection of people with differing - often rational - interests concerning any given project. Until and unless you address these interests, calling people names and yelling ”just build, dammit!” will not get you what you want.
I think, if you talk to most of these folks, you find that many/most abstractly support the idea that building is required. It’s the specifics where the problems lie, and calling people names doesn’t resolve fundamental issues. This is why the “Yes in your Backyard” line is such a devastating rhetorical criticism: everyone favors development of projects that don’t affect them.
"not in my backyard" is exactly what you describe- the stereotypical liberal response of "yes, we should build affordable housing, but not HERE, where I live- put it somewhere else, where I'm not affected by them- can you imagine all the crime that the Poors would bring to such a nice area".
in other words, virtue-signalling about vague, general principles of increased development...buuut when that development actually impacts them, well! That particular project is just flawed for various reasons. The general idea is good! But it won't work here.
It's the equivalent of the boss who totally supports unions but, you know, a union just wouldn't be right for our particular company culture.
So, yeah, "yes in your backyard" is just the original definition of a NIMBY.
This is an issue that actually doesn't align very well on the liberal/conservative spectrum. Most of the YIMBY folks I've met tend towards the liberal end of things, but there are also "market urbanism" groups out there that are fairly libertarian. I've had great conversations with local politicians of all stripes. There are both liberals and conservatives who are very NIMBY.
In other words, it's not a very useful way to look at the issue in my opinion.
Thank you. I'm so tired of reddit's influence on this discussion and this tireless effort to frame this discussion as nimby vs yimby, nimby being a pejorative term for local while yimby is a self-aggrandizing term for transplant who wished they had more purchasing power, and is social-media-savvy enough to realize if they want something they better make it sound like an existential crisis.
Just to clarify- I very much do not mean "liberal" as "the opposite of conservative", here.
Trying to map the high-dimensional "vector space" of political views onto a 1D line is very, very lossy, and definitely not useful outside of the very narrow context of general elections in a two-party system.
Yes In Your Backyard is literally everybody. That’s the point. It isn’t ideological. Most folks love the idea of building when it doesn’t affect their own lives!
Even most “YIMBY” supporters are actually “Yes In Your Backyard”, because nearly everyone has some local environment they want to protect. Don’t want a pork rendering plant or a sewage treatment center or a strip club next door to your home? Congratulations: you’re a “NIMBY” too! It’s a sophomoric epithet that makes you feel good and superior to fling around, but does nothing to convince people who don’t already agree with you.
If you don’t understand this, you are doomed to fail to achieve your goals.
> "yes, we should build affordable housing, but not HERE, where I live- put it somewhere else, where I'm not affected by them- can you imagine all the crime that the Poors would bring to such a nice area".
> just a collection of people with differing - often rational - interests concerning any given project.
Well of course. It does not surprised me that a wealthy landowner would not want competition, and would not want housing to become more affordable.
Just because someone's self interest is rational, does not me that I cannot criticize it.
Creating more affordable housing, and lowering rents, is obviously something that some people out there would not want, because they make money from rents being high.
You're absolutely right. People are rarely self-consciously irrationally opposed to any given proposal to build housing. In theory, it should be possible to address any given rational concern!
Too tall? Make it shorter. Not enough public space? Make the area in front of it a parklet! Not enough subsidized housing? More BMR units and a donation to a neighborhood group will solve that one. Doesn't fit with the style or is otherwise ugly? Pay attention and design a building that fits, it's not that hard.
Although there might be tricky ones, like maybe the neighbors have been treating the lot as a park and would like to keep it that way or someone is afraid of losing the all-day sun on their backyard garden. Still, all of these should be solvable in principle, right?
Again, as you wisely point to, all of these possible concerns are individually eminently reasonable and addressable. Certainly insulting the people who are just trying to keep their homes and communities they way they like it isn't going to win them over!
With all that said, might there be problems in aggregate? When people are empowered to throw up essentially arbitrary roadblocks, no matter how reasonable their complaints, the result can be near-infinite stonewalling. This has happened enough that some people have lost trust in the process that enabled good, kind, compassionate people to get their perfectly reasonable concerns addressed.
So perhaps there's some room for subtlety here. How do you think YIMBYs should frame things, to avoid the issues you rightly point to?
Well, I think that pretty much anything is more effective than calling people names. But rhetorically, it’s probably a lot more effective to just be honest about what you want: shared sacrifice for lower rents.
It’s cynical to call it YIMBY, because a) it mirrors the name-calling, and b) anyone who is intellectually honest knows that YIMBY really means YIYBY for most people. So stop it. Own that you want something that will be at least a little bit painful for everyone. Then sell the positives.
That's a very helpful insight! Thank you for sharing. I appreciate your positivity and genuineness.
In my personal experience, I've often found it to be extremely difficult to sell shared sacrifice to people who are empowered to refuse to share. After all, why can't this building go in some other neighborhood? Away from them? If you're being honest, it probably can. The next neighborhood over will probably have the same question.
Also, SF has the wrinkle that a lot of people see building housing as pushing up rents, making the framing you suggest very difficult on multiple counts. Attempting to discuss this with people seldom goes as well as could be hoped. This belief seems to have become totemic, making it functionally impossible to discuss.
Perhaps you've had different results than I. I sincerely hope so.
I have found name-calling and coherent branding to be pretty effective at providing people a banner to gather under. It doesn't do anything for those it makes into enemies, but it does something for people who might be your allies. When the NIMBYs are already well organized and Californians For Lowering Rent Through Shared Sacrifice isn't, I can see where someone might make that calculation.
The essence of NIMBYism is wanting to make the value of your own property increase, not by adding any value, but by restricting others from competing with you. That's a net harmful behavior so I think it's fair to describe it as "an evil force to be mocked and dismissed". Kind of like if Google lobbied the government to ban search engines which weren't Google Search. People would see that as evil too.
If it is only in your backyard it is better for your property value in the long run: eventually someone will offer you a ton of money to replace your house with a large apartment complex. If it is everywhere that can build, than the builders can take whatever property comes up - and because they have to compete with other developers for renters they are likely to build smaller so on both counts property values don't increase as fast.
That's what I don't understand, increasing density usually means price / sqft for all real estate in the area goes up. I often wonder if the analysis on why people shoot down zoning changes is incorrectly attributed to price or property tax, and is mostly people resisting any change.
Not every NIMBY is motivated by greed. Some just want to stay put, pay property taxes like it's 30 years ago and drive to their favorite burger shack in under five minutes. That particular generation also holds on to the doctrine that density is bad for environment.
There's only a generational correlation because the 80 year old retiree is much more likely to own nice property with low property taxes (if you live in a state that only reassesses at sale) than the 28 year old with a young family. Young couples with money can be just as viciously NIMBY-esque as old couples with money.
That's not universally true though. Many times new development will block a view, or it might run the risk of bringing in "undesirable" groups which would lower property values. There is definitely a long-run argument that values will go up if you increase the power of network effects...but it's always better if the locality next door does it, and not you.
Unfortunately the incentive problem here is real, and there isn't a super obvious solution to it. At least, not to me. Trying to shift the culture and convince people to vote against their own economic incentives is great and all, but I don't think it is destined for success at any significant scale.
If price goes up or down is complex. In an area that has a small amount of demand stopping building ensures that those who want to live there have to keep bidding higher. If those who want to live there have a lot of money only a few people who want to live there but don't can push prices up greatly. It may well be that the area only needs to build a small number of units to fill demand, and additional units will need to lower prices to get a buyer. Supply is limited of course, but so is demand - I wouldn't take a free house in the Bay Area as my job is several time zones away and so the free house is still a net cost to me (if only to replace the roof ever 30 years)
Its pretty easy, your standard of living declines and sucks.
I grew up in a single family detached home in Queens, NY in the 80s as the shift to bigger condos and rentals started. The newer buildings are almost always shoddy and ugly, and dealing with landlords for property issues suck as compared to the homeowner.
The owner of your detached house would have been very happy though, wouldn't he? The issues you listed wouldn't affect him, but the opportunity to sell to an apartment developer would.
There's resistance to change but economics are far more important and explain the consistent opposition across the state. It's not as simple as sell your house and make a profit, then find something nicer. If your neighbors sell first to the developer of the N-story apartment building it can drop the value of houses around it. Also, buying a house in California resets your property taxes to current property value (a legacy of Prop 13).
I suspect it will be hard to solving the housing problem without unwinding Prop 13 and some of the other issues that make it harder for people to sell homes.
How does Prop 13 make it hard to sell your home? It only affects the owners property taxes but not the property buyer's. At the time of purchase, there's no delta to the buyers taxes vs a property that was taxed at a full market rate assessment the whole time.
Affecting the seller's still creates a delta because the seller is also a buyer of wherever they're going to live next. Causing the new place to have much higher property tax than the existing place makes it harder to leave the existing place. And then fewer people do it, even if they e.g. don't need a place that big anymore.
That seems like a stretch, it doesn't increase the market price or the tax on the new property that the seller is acquiring, if anything it lets the owner save more money so they have more options to buy.
It does increase the tax on the new property that the seller is acquiring, because for a given level of government spending, if the government gets less tax revenue from long-term owners they have to get more from newer owners.
It also increases the minimum price the seller is willing to accept for the property, because they won't sell unless the buyer offers enough to compensate them for the higher tax rate they'll have to pay on the new property. It increases the bid/ask spread on long-held properties, so that more often no transaction takes place at all until e.g. the owner dies and the property is sold in an estate sale for less than the owner would have been willing to accept if they were still alive.
I don't think you understand property ownership in CA. This is most definitely not what happens.
Also to add to this discussion is the various props and "tax treaties" between counties that allow old homeowners the ability to transfer tax basis from their old property to the new one they're buying. But this is a once or twice in a lifetime deal.
It doesn't work quite like that. Builders buying livable property and demolishing it make economical sense only in a very very few percentage of homes. My guess is < 2% of entire area we talk about. For the other 98%, it is far far cheaper for the builder to get it rezoned from the goverment.
Remember, we don't have a lack of land. There is plenty of prime, commute friendly, land available in SF-Bayarea and most other CA cities.
Old SFH will get demo-ed and gets rebuilt as SFH - just because bulldozing a $200k+ building + spending $600k to rebuild - can only be justified by a crazy SFH owner who can justify it all in terms of getting his/her dream home.
There’s already plenty of places to build affordable housing. Nearly all of it is outside the Bay Area. But evidently, living in Modesto, or Bakersfield, or God forbid Kansas is some kind of horrible punishment, and it’s wrong to deny people the “right” to live near San Francisco.
People live where the jobs are. I know someone who bought a house in North Dakota for the value of the propane in the tank outside. There are no jobs in the area so the former owner was just glad to be rid of it. The guy I knew was glad to have a place to sleep near his secret hunting place, he had no intent of spending more than a few days a year there.
I mean, I don't live in SF, but I spent a pretty good chunk of change to buy a house in the Boston area because I can't rationalize living in, say, northern New Hampshire, regardless of the savings. I value other things more that just don't exist there.
People want to live where there's culture and work. Why should they not?
Also a homeowner, and I'm a YIMBY (or PHIMBY) for selfish reasons as well. My neighborhood is mostly old white people, because they bought their houses years ago and stayed put. Not that I have anything against them, but I'd love to have a more diverse, younger neighborhood. More neighbors also means more customers for local businesses, which means more shops and restaurants in walking distance. More neighbors would eventually also mean better public transit, because the ridership would demand it. I think the selfish benefits of more housing are often overlooked due to fear of change.
FWIW I'm seriously considering doing the reverse. I don't care about restaurants, but cleanness and neatness and uniqueness in Slovenia is something I miss dearly in Cali
You know I feel that all the time and then I go back to visit and after two days I’m like “Oh that’s why I left, there’s nothing to do here”
What I miss most is real nature. Trees that are properly green, the changing of seasons, the mountains in the distance. That’s what I miss most. And good european food. Super hard to find in SF
>Also a homeowner, and I'm a YIMBY (or PHIMBY) for selfish reasons as well. My neighborhood is mostly old white people, because they bought their houses years ago and stayed put.
Hmm, here I am thinking I don't really care about the skin color of my neighbors. It's none of my business. But, I try and not judge people on immutable characteristics like color and age.
> I don't really care about the skin color of my neighbors.
That's a nice sentiment, but if you dig a bit, there are probably reasons why his neighborhood is full of "older white people", and there's a good chance that it wasn't a natural process of sorting.
Also a link to a site whose owner makes utter gobs of money if that's of concern to people.
I usually get $10 a month or so if I occasionally post a link that I think is highly relevant to a discussion, that I turn around and spend on more books.
Happy to buy anyone a beer with the massive amounts of cash I'm raking in.
No, I just think an educated forum of people that should know better should not engage in willful casual racism just because it's OK to hate on white people. But I know this is an extreme position I have! I personally have the hope that someday old people will be judged not on the color of their skin, but the content of their character. Perhaps if you didn't post your defense from a throwaway I'd think you weren't just trying to justify virtue - that someone of a specific color and age caused all of California's housing problems.
Do you want to play the "is it racist if we change the color" game?
immuutable: unchanging over time or unable to be changed
Well, crap, that's a fair point... But... You can't go backwards and you can't go forwards any faster than anyone else. You can't change it yourself no matter how hard you try (general relativity spaceships aside of course).
Age is very relevant for schools which are typically paid for with local property taxes. If you somehow find yourself moved to a so-called NORC, naturally occurring retirement community, you'll find that older people people with adult children on limited incomes are more reluctant to fund schools than say young working parents.
You're right. That's a good argument for funding schools with sources besides property taxes. That system intentionally subsidizes renters by getting home owners to pay for schools and tasks people who aren't concerned with the funding to make decisions on it.
edit: YES, it's a nice plan to just raise rent to cover the school taxes. However, unless you are in a popular market, your rent prices may not bear the increase. Example Northeastern PA has cheap rent because there are so many places available, and thus the $4000/yr in school tax portion of the property tax is not able to be passed on to renters.
Renters absolutely pay property taxes - just not directly. Every rental unit I’ve ever owned has had the exact same property tax bill as the ones I’ve lived in, and the taxes were paid from the rent collected.
If property taxes increased substantially, I’d have had to raise rent...
??? Property taxes aren't passed on to renters? Only homeowners pay them, and landlords don't experience them as a cost they need to recover from their tenants?
Correct, also in the places that the market does not bear it. If your only concept of renting is in the Bay Area or Brooklyn or some high end captive market, you don't really get that you can't always just raise rent until costs are covered. Most of the country won't bear it so the landlord eats it. I have rentals, I know this first hand.
Real estate is one of the most efficient markets. Landlords all over make approximately the same returns as one another, outside of a handful of places where where people are making (or losing) money from speculation.
What happens when you increase property taxes is that property values go down to compensate; it's less valuable to own when you have to pay more to do it. So in the short term the property tax increase hits whoever owned the property when the rate change was announced. But then it becomes less profitable to own property in that area, so people invest less in building new housing there, or even in maintaining the existing housing. That tends to constrain supply and cause rents to increase until you're back at equilibrium. The long-term equilibrium is based on the relationship between rents and total costs. Property tax is a cost so in the long-term higher property taxes result in higher rents. (This isn't counting the pathological cases where higher property taxes reduce property values and investment and the government responds by further raising property taxes until the locality is in a death spiral. Naturally rents in dying localities tend to go down.)
> In California long time landlords get Prop 13 tax cuts. New ones don't. They compete for the same tenants and charge the same rent.
"Long time landlords" and "new landlords" are not inherently different people, they're the same people at different points in time. It's like saying a landlord which has paid off the mortgage on their building makes more money because they don't have to make mortgage payments. The value of the future reduction in property taxes gets priced into the purchase -- but then so does the cost of higher property taxes at the beginning, since the government still needs a given amount of revenue.
The thing Prop 13 really does is to discourage long-time landlords from selling the property at all, because the buyer will have to pay higher property tax than the seller which makes the property "worth more" to the seller, even if it's otherwise worth more to the buyer. For example, this can discourage development because the existing owner doesn't have the inclination or the capital for expansion but would demand enough for the property that it would make it unprofitable to a third party who would have to pay higher taxes.
> "Long time landlords" and "new landlords" are not inherently different people, they're the same people at different points in time.
With the way you can inherit property and keep its valuation, there may be a class of "long-time landlords"-- individuals and organizations-- emerging in major cities. Especially, as you note, since Prop 13 discourages transactions.
I grew up in an all-white town. All-white schools, all-white neighborhoods, all-white businesses. I would not raise my children like that. I made sure my current area was colorfully diverse before buying.
While not America, I live in a minority white suburb. I don't want to have a school-age child here because it's, not coincidentally, one of the poorest places in the city and thus is only in zone for the worst schools. Poor people's kids drag down the quality of their schools. So you have to be careful your diversity doesn't overshoot and end up a ghetto.
GP could likely have replaced "mostly old white people" with "mostly the same demographic", but it doesn't convey the same information, even if you don't assume implied racism as you did.
The important thing being conveyed is lack of diversity, not whiteness. In the United States, saying something is "mostly white people" conveys that other ethnic groups are not present for some reason (whether it be them self-selecting to not participate or because of exclusion). The purpose is almost always to note diversity or lack-thereof, and assume that the person is making a value judgement about the people because their skin is white is to completely miss the point.
For example, if you bought a pack of starbust candies, and they were almost all orange, you might note or complain that they were almost all orange. I would do so, and orange is my favorite flavor of those. The issue is, I desire the diversity of colors and flavors, and too much orange is not as good as what the added variation brings.
So, "mostly old white people" as a negative doesn't mean old people are bad, or white people are bad, or old white people are bad, but that mostly old white people are not as good as a group that has more variation in it. "Mostly" is the word you should be focusing on, not the other ones.
I think that depends on the context. If I was visiting that neighborhood in Japan to assess whether I wanted to live there, I think it might not come across as racist as much as similar to how I outlined the prior statement, with some variation because Japan is both a much more homogeneous society, and one where the population as a whole is shifting towards being older on average.
I would also argue that a lot of times people are called racist (or called out for saying racist things) these days are likely because people are also less likely to give others the benefit of a doubt for their actions or words. This is likely complicated in that it appears some people that do harbor racist views feel more emboldened to speak them, but I'm not sure how to pick apart how much is one and how much is the other.
To value diversity of ethnicity or race, you must believe there are intrinsic differences between people which are determined by their ethnicity. That's one of the definitions of racism. A non-racist wouldn't be bothered what race their neighbors were just as most people aren't bothered by the color of their carpets.
In the candy example, you would believe the color is an important determinant of some quality of the candy. If it wasn't, you wouldn't care what color they were.
I should add that it's not the end of the world to be a racist. Most people probably are. It's perfectly legal and normal! Admitting it is hard though.
That's some wild mental gymnastics! Believing that there is value in having ethnic diversity does not mean you believe there are specific differences in races due to biology. It means you believe that people that grew up in different places have different ideas of the world, and different traditions. It means that you are not blind to American and world history and its impact on different immigrant and native cultures. It means you know that white people have differences in culture and tradition, and thus just like having a town full of Steve's would be boring, having a town full of white people is a bit the same.
Since you're running with the candy analogy... your logical next step is way off. GPs candy analogy was supposed to be simple such that we could all start on the same page - either you're being purposefully difficult to try and argue your racism point, or are simply missing it. I like all colors of starburst. They taste different. Different is GOOD. I don't want an all orange package.
> To value diversity of ethnicity or race, you must believe there are intrinsic differences between people which are determined by their ethnicity.
I think that's easily proven false. I value diversity of ethnicity and race because I think it's statistically more likely that it results in diversity of culture, and I think that's the real useful thing to be aiming for.
In the United States "white" isn't a race any more than "black" is. It's a short-hand for a cultural identity that our society foists upon you, and it comes with a mostly shared set of experiences and understanding.
A "black" person (which could be historically from Africa, Asia, South America or elsewhere) will likely face some shared set of experiences, as will a "white" person, or an "asian" person, or a "latino" person. The same could be said for a U.S. citizen or a European.
If you think "white" was used as shorthand for "the largest and most dominant cultural identity in America" as I do, then you think that diversity in that brings different perspectives and cultural norms, and some people find that refreshing and interesting (as well as there being some evidence that it provides many other benefits and detriments to various degrees).
So, do I think skin color is an important determinant of some quality in this discussion? Yes. In the case where you're looking at a mostly homogeneous group based on age and likely cultural identity, I think encouraging differences in both age and that cultural identity are likely to introduce more cultural diversity than some other options, and that's based on sociological and statistical beliefs. You may or may not think that qualifies as racism, but I don't, and part of that is because I don't think the result is based on actual skin color, just skin color in a geographic region (that is, a country with a different cultural and ethnic makeup may not see similar results). That means skin color is little other than a statistical marker for other, more useful attributes in this case.
May I request you to please cut and paste the part of the parent which I might have misunderstood?
This is the parent, afaict:
[..] notJim 2 hours ago | undown | parent | flag | favorite | on: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat push...
Also a homeowner, and I'm a YIMBY (or PHIMBY) for selfish reasons as well. My neighborhood is mostly old white people, because they bought their houses years ago and stayed put. Not that I have anything against them, but I'd love to have a more diverse, younger neighborhood. More neighbors also means more customers for local businesses, which means more shops and restaurants in walking distance. More neighbors would eventually also mean better public transit, because the ridership would demand it. I think the selfish benefits of more housing are often overlooked due to fear of change.[..]
You could absolutely have more diversity by simply adding people, rather than displacing or removing anyone, which is precisely what the comment suggested.
Sure. You can add people. IF they can afford to buy in. Clearly they can’t...that’s not the problem of existing homeowners who aren’t ‘diverse’ enough for the younger generation.
The entire YIMBY point is to allow more dense housing, so that you can in fact move more people into an area to increase diversity, rather than relying on certain populations to get excluded.
I mean, when people move in to a majority black or brown neighborhood they're accused of gentrification. I don't see why this is any different. Elderly people are also vulnerable populations.
What I don’t get is wouldn’t allowing more development in a neighborhood increase property values? Like if your single family home’s lot gets up zoned, didn’t you just hit the jackpot in terms of the land value?
Yes. But you might be irrationally convinced that black people and drug dealers will overrun the neighborhood as soon as an apartment building goes in, and that will make property values decrease instead.
Yes, I don't get this. I would love to turn my home into a duplex (probably going to start with an airbnb though due to bad tenant law in our state). Sounds like the best way to go from homeowner to asset owner.
When all your wealth is tied up in a single leveraged asset anything that might lead to a big change in it is more risk than most people will tolerate.
Fact: No YIMBY, no matter how powerful, can force you to put something in your back yard. They can allow your neighbor to put something in their back yard. You don't own your neighbor's back yard.
Civilization is a balancing of competing interests. Your rights in your property are enforced by the community, with limits and conditionally. The community which you are asking to enforce for you has interests too.
Of course. Which nullifies any argument about whether it is Yes-in-my-back-yard or yes-in-your-back-yard. You only get to make that distinction if you're talking about your own literal back yard.
I think this comment is accurate just from a logical standpoint. Backyard has two possible meanings here:
* Literal backyard: in this case, then maybe one could argue that if we accept the premise[1] that YIMBYs aren't homeowners, then they are in fact arguing about other people's backyards.
* Figurative backyard: in this case, then whether someone is a homeowner is irrelevant, because the backyard refers to the general area, shared by all residents.
Of course, as we know from this thread, backyard in [N|Y]IMBY refers to the figurative backyard. Therefore, we must reject the argument that people are arguing over other's backyards.
[1]: As I argue elsewhere in this thread, I don't think we should accept this premise.
People who don’t own property are entitled to the same representation, rights, and political activities as those who do. That includes activism and advocacy for housing that serves all the community and not just homeowners.
When a developer wanted to build a 5 story condo building on an entire block across the street from the SF property I've owned for the last ten years, many of my neighbors opposed it. I wrote to our building's ownership and told them that we should support that project and that my only question was "can they add a few floors?"
Repeal prop 13 and my taxes will go up enormously--and I'll vote for that repeal at any opportunity.
Some of us do actually believe that the long term common good is worth sacrificing our own personal short term gain.
It's very complicated. People have conflicting ideas - one the one hand, they want affordable housing (ie their rent to go down) or the other, not in my backyard.
I might be hopelessly naive, but why not do the new growth somewhere else? The BA is pretty obviously "full" already, and adding more housing of any kind isn't going to make it better.
The BA isn't "full" by any reasonable measure. See this list of US cities by population density for comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_d.... San Francisco is 21st on the list, at 17,246 people per sq mi; the next densest city in the Bay Area is Daly City, which is 49th at 13,703 people per sq mi.
By contrast, NYC has 27,016 people per sq mi; the densest suburb of Boston (Somerville) has 18,431; West Hollywood has 18,297.
There's plenty of room for more people in the Bay Area, if denser housing is allowed.
It's subjective, of course, but when I worked in NYC, I was able to commute from an area with a density more like 2,000 per sq mi. Maybe an hour each way. That's what I think of as "not full".
I believe I looked for something like that in the BA and it doesn't really exist.
Go ahead and build, but make damn sure you are being rational about people's behavior when it comes to driving and transit.
My ex moved into a condominium complex that has exactly zero parking spots or loading docks for visitors, and no parking for half a mile in either direction. It's an absolute total fail. Neighbors rat on each other to get each other's cars towed because they get so upset. It's literally impossible to have a party there or even invite friends over because they simply cannot park and there is no transit available anywhere near there. There aren't any bike lanes either because it's a financially strapped city and the complex is near the border of a rich city that explicitly does things to make it harder to get between the two townships.
I'm just saying, both hands have to know what each other are doing and people have to make rational decisions at the municipal level.
Wow, seems like there was a leaps-and-bounds approach instead of an incremental style with that building. Their rationale may have been to think of a car-less society?
I think YIMBY is about city restrictions and ordinance. This sounds like the private building developers just wanted to save money and cheaped out on building additional parking space. Unless the city itself imposed a restriction on parking
That being said, I'm not aware of any YIMBYish laws that outright restrict parking in residential areas. The only thing equivalent I can think of is the Market street law in SF, but that's not a residential area, so it actually makes sense.
Sounds like your ex didn't do proper research to understand what they were getting into. If they needed a place with parking and/or easy public transit access they shouldn't have bought that condo.
If the condo complex is sufficiently unattractive, few people will want to live there, and prices will fall to the point where buyers or renters accept the low price and the associated hassle. That's a market decision. If the condo complex is, let's imagine, 50% lower than market, then maybe people will accept the parking situation.
and there is no transit available anywhere near there
Then residents might try demanding it from the city government.
So the wonderful thing is that your ex can sell their condo, take the money and move elsewhere. That is the beauty of a free market. And the absolute magnificence of section 1031 of the IRC.
Do yourself a favor, don't buy real estate in California unless you are rich. It's not financially worth it for the majority of people out there. If you must live in California I'd suggest to rent and invest your money instead.
Then come up with a plan and move to a more affordable/sustainable state or country.
What happens when more people move into the area from the rest of the country and start driving to work from their newly built housing units? Silicon Valley has, at best, poor coverage of Caltrain and no coverage for BART in South Bay. If let’s say 10,000 more families move to San Jose into new housing units and they all need to commute to Palo Alto for work, how exactly would they do that without choking up the already clogged freeway network? Caltrain is already packed beyond imagination during rush hour. Each year, the rush hour commute time between Palo Alto and San Jose increasing by 5 minutes and that’s with limited net population growth in the area. Imagine if the population influx increased 2X or 5X. Housing is not an isolated problem. Due to decades of lobbying by the auto industry and a crippled public transportation strategy, what America really has is a transportation and infrastructure problem.
Without solving that, the housing problem will never be truly solved and building new housing will degrade the quality of life of everyone in the area - both newcomers and existing residents.
You might have it backwards. Traffic is increasing because we're adding offices but no housing nearby. Therefore people need to pour in from further out.
With higher density, alternate transportation options become viable and attractive.
Your argument does not account for people currently outside the Bay Area moving into the Bay Area because of cheaper housing. While people currently residing in far flung places would move closer to their work, the people living in other parts of the country aspiring to live in Silicon Valley would now move to Morgan Hill and Gilroy. Eventually, we will end up with the same housing crunch, except with twice the number of cars on the road.
If you look at the data for SF, 95% of brand new units are first occupied by people who have lived here for a at least a few years. New housing serves people who are already here.
What causes people to migrate to the bay is the office creation, not the housing creation.
That logic doesn't work. 95% of new units going to existing residents doesn't mean that if I built 100 new units, I only get 5 new houses. Those 95% who move to new units leave their old local places open, which in turn go to god knows where.
There is a natural population growth in the bay area from people having and raising children here. Our housing growth rate is slower than the rate of children coming of age. The unoccupied units that current residents are moving into can theoretically be occupied by the children of the current residents as they come of age.
This is the most common argument I hear against building, but I am firmly convinced that the reason you have the commute problem in the Bay area isn't because of the number of people, but because the resistance to building has forced development further and further out.
Consider that there is still housing growth, but its in South San Jose, Morgan Hill, and Gilroy. Those people all have to drive past Los Gatos, Cambell, Cupertino, San Jose, and Sunnyvale to get to Mountain View. All your doing is increasing the amount of Miles people have to drive, and that in term increases the amount of time they spend in their cars, and clogs the roads. If you built houses in Mountain View or Palo Alto, none of those people would be on the roads, and if they were it wouldn't be for nearly as long. You don't have to take my word for it take a look at average commute times in the bay area, those increases aren't due to a 2x increase in Mountain View, its due to a 2x increase far outside with people driving in.
Public transportation is great, but the solution is to build houses near where people work, that means San Francisco and Mountain View.
Well there is also the issue that the VC's and tech executives would rather workers have to do hour plus commutes to offices conveniently close to SFO and Sand Hill Road than they having to drive out to Vallejo. And much less have live in Kansas city or some such god forbidden place.
That is because at the end of the day VC's want you to spend all your money so they can get more of your ownership. There is no incentive for them for fund companies in middle america where their dollars aren't in such high demand.
The market has shown people are willing to make the commute. Not only would you need to induce the current commuters to move, you also need to ensure they aren't simply replaced by more commuters, which isn't necessarily a given.
The market has shown that there is extreme demand at the center. We need to build at the center.
There is a fixed amount of people at any point in time in a metropolitan area. Building at the center will not make new people appear. It removes people from the commuting crowd.
Fun Fact: if three cities(San Jose, San Francisco, NYC) in America were to loosen up housing planning rules, America's GDP would be 4% higher, that is incredible in of itself, source: (paywall - https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/01/16/the-wests-bigge...)
Although I think California especially needs new housing, the bay area in particular has a housing issue which is somewhat artificially created due to a number of large (google, facebook, etc) and smaller tech companies requiring a "buts in seat" mentality and a philosophy that all "important" jobs be based in the bay area near their HQ's. Its really quite sad as a job that can be done anywhere is forced to be located in one of the most expensive areas on earth.
Prices have hit their limits, and companies are more willing to entertain the idea that qualified talent exists outside of the Bay Area. Remote work is growing, and some portion of that growth is certainly attributable to the Bay Area housing market.
Enrico Moretti's research is great. In my opinion it makes a strong argument that the federal government should step in and tear down California's economic wall
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 364 ms ] threadEdit: looks like the title changed now
But I am glad that the media is reporting this. California is slowly killing itself with its housing policy. I live in an area where there are only people who are either rich retirees or whose parents have bought real estate before the market went crazy. And these people kill any effort to build more. It’s basically impossible for regular people to live here.
They need the California State Government to overrule local zoning limits. We need to allow dense housing near rail lines and major roads. And I think that anywhere a single-family detached home currently exists, a 2-family home should be allowed.
Build more housing! It's that simple. Prices will fall fast.
Edit: The reason is because homeowners are competing with developers, so their own asset depreciates when supply increases. I was just thinking from the perspective of renters.
There are also less visible efficiencies in having people living close to their work, like roads that aren't crammed with cars because people don't have to spend three hours behind the wheel every day getting to and from work, and the additional productivity that comes with all that extra time.
What I'm not seeing here is a way for increased housing supply to make the prices go up, as opposed to down, but not as much. Network effects, maybe: increased density of a city could make being in that city more valuable, thus making more people want to live there at any given price, which means that prices would rise.
In a vacuum, no, I don't think simply adding housing can meaningfully drive up prices. But (as you say) obviously it feeds into organic urban growth, which does increase demand, so you have to keep building housing. It seems that the problem we have in our big tech hub cities is that we let that growth happen for a while and then decided that there would be no more housing.
I can imagine an induced demand effect as whole new classes of people realize that they can actually now live close to where they work, and come flooding back into the city. But like I said, that's an artifact of artificially constrained supply.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good
(I suppose increased supply could drive up price if providing that additional supply increased the overall costs but you'd presumably still be constrained by the overall supply/demand curves of the market.)
The burbs however....
I'm closing next week in SF on my first ever home purchase (after renting for 10 years here, and 6 years prior elsewhere in the Bay Area). Sure, I would like for it to be worth more (outpacing inflation) in 10, 20, or 30 years. But I am not buying a lifestyle, or a guarantee of value increase, or a neighborhood frozen in time at this point forever. I'm buying some floors, walls, and ceilings. I'm buying into a community that I know needs to grow and change if it's to survive and flourish.
People whose wealth is in company stock say that people whose wealth is in other asset classes should give it up, for their benefit.
How about we pay for all this new housing by a 90% tax on RSUs? No?
It's not just tech-driven...housing is expensive across the nation and taxing RSUs may help in SF, but doesn't really get to the root of the problem which is zoning restriction, high development costs, increased homeowner rights enabling NIMBYism
But a primary home is not an investment. Many many many people mistake it for one, or try to treat it like one, but it's not. Often it works out in the end as if it was one, but it's not. There's a reason why we call non-primary homes "investment properties"... because your primary home is not that.
It's a liability. It ages. It requires costly maintenance. It requires upgrades and renovations. In most jurisdictions you have to pay ongoing taxes simply to own it.
The main reason housing prices often rise faster than inflation is because of scarcity, much of which is often artificial and due to zoning and other legal tricks.
Opposing housing in high-demand areas is one of the most selfish things a person can do.
I don’t know how you can say this because for 9/10 people their primary home is de facto their single biggest asset and a significant part of their retirement planning. This is how it actually is in the real world outside the bubble.
It’s easy to sneer at nimby-ism but what you’re actually proposing is to make ordinary people destitute so techbros can have an easy ride. That’s why voters are pushing back and why tech is hated.
Do you have any examples of this? The Bay Area housing market has had a nice run, but it hasn't grow 666% percent in the last 12 years.
My parents bought a house on the Peninsula in the SF Bay Area for $500k in 2000 and it is now worth at least $2m.
Condos I saw for $400K in 2010 are going for about a million. Homes that were about $1.1M in 2010 are about $2.4M. The sibling comment describes homes bought for $500K in 2000 that are now $2M; this is not out of line with what I'm heard from some founder friends I have that are pushing 50. IIRC my wife's parents bought their home for $130K or so back in 1986 and it's now worth $3M.
So it's gonna be that much harder for a "regular" person to buy anything in the short term.
1) there is a 100 single family homes somewhere.
2) there are 300 people looking who need to live in that somewhere
3) on top of 100 single family homes now we have 400 units built
..
Can it be that price of the units for sale may get reduced for competitiveness?
https://www.latimes.com/business/real-estate/story/2020-01-3...
Here's an agent discussing this happening right now:
> Traditional sales comping remains relevant, but it should no longer be the single factor when determining price. Recent legislation allowing additional dwelling units (ADUs) is a game changer, as savvy investors and agents understand that accurate comps should now include not only neighborhood sales prices but also potential revenue from future ADU development.
> Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a slew of bills that will allow property owners to build a backyard home of at least 800 square feet or convert a garage, office or spare room into an additional living space. Single-family zoning effectively evaporated on Jan. 1 when the new laws went into effect.
If NIMBY's only cared about money this would be a fucking gold mine for them.
But the opposition to upzoning here in LA and the Bay Area is largely coming for qualitative reasons instead of quantitative reasons. And that's lost when you reduce your argument to "they only care about their property values" so you lose any chance to convince them...
Let's say you live in a neighborhood of mostly single family homes. A new law is passed changing the zoning to allow higher density, and other barriers to building up are reduced or eliminated.
A few people near you sell their homes; they're bulldozed and are replaced with multi-family units. Sure, over the short term, your home value might drop because of greater supply helping to meet demand.
However, over the long term, or even medium term, two things may happen:
1. Your home value goes up because single family homes are less available, and are more desirable.
2. Your home value goes up because developers want to buy your home in order to build a multi-family dwelling there.
Meanwhile, more people are able to live nearby, more affordably, likely cutting down their work commute and increasing their quality of life. I guess the incumbent owners really are that selfish that they fight tooth and nail to prevent others from increasing their quality of life.
If you had an idyllic childhood in a sleepy town not unlike Mayberry, it is entirely reasonable to want the same things for your kids.
None of that is realistic anymore--the world is a changed place. But these are not irrational preferences to have.
It's not realistic when you have unrestricted immigration, as the US states have between each other.
Ah, surely there is nothing open interpretation there.
It's incredibly selfish to use PTSD or noise-sensitivity as a justification for contributing to a situation where tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people have 3-hour commutes when they could otherwise live closer to work.
Also, it is quite often the case that when you build, it is either: 1) made for high-income dwellers, thus not reducing prices, because the high-income and low-income housing markets are often effectively separate markets, like cars and semi-tractor trailors. ...or... 2) the people living nearby, do think it will drive down prices, including the price of their own house, which is their only effective form of savings. If their $400,000 house becomes a $300,000 house, yeah their property taxes may go down, but they lost $100,000 in savings they intended to sell and live on elsewhere after they retire.
This is really a misnomer (and it is the linchpin of NIMBY arguments, especially in the Bay Area). If high income housing is not built, then high income people will inhabit and buy up the middle income housing, who in turn will inhabit and buy up low income housing, if they can find any at all.
You can see this clearly in the Bay Area. You have tiny houses going for like a couple million dollars.
In such an environment it's impossible to build stuff (at least, legally) that ISN'T high income housing as high income people are the only people who can afford any kind of housing in the area.
"But it's only made for high income dwellers." Build a cheap (but code-compliant) 600sqft studio in the Bay Area? Around $900/ft^2 would be the market price. It's only affordable to high income folk. A studio. This 161sqft studio in San Fran is $2300/month: https://www.businessinsider.com/smallest-apartment-for-rent-...
How is it even possible to build housing that isn't for high earners in San Francisco?
The only way to change is to build a LOT more and keep building. Or, I guess, destroy the entire local economy.
That doesn't seem right to me. Sure, the develpoers will have incentive to build the largest profit earning housing, which right now (because of a huge housing shortage for all pricing ranges) means building high-income housing. But a high-incomer earner that buys those stops competing for the fixer-upper middle income housing so that's good for other price ranges too. What's more, at some point you run out of high-income earners that will buy your expensive newly built property which requires dropping prices on existing built property _or_ starting to build the next most profitable housing, which is less profitable than before but you don't have a choice.
Now arguably, for all that to happen it takes time and the ability to build a large number of housing units, both of which may not be an option so I'm fine as a compromise to require for certain percentages of new housing to include tiers for lower pricing levels, as a requirement for the housing permit.
> 2) the people living nearby, do think it will drive down prices, including the price of their own house, which is their only effective form of savings.
There is a point where, as a society, you need to decide what's more important: giving existing owners 50%+ returns on their property or supporting new families moving in. As usual the answer is somewhere in the middle but I'm willing to bet it would go a lot against the current situation that the existing owners enjoy. After all, owning a house provides a lot of other benefits so as long as the increase in value covers for the cost (interest + taxes + maintenance) it seems fine to me.
That's certainly not true in SF. Housing quality certainly runs the entire spectrum here, but in the last decade I've seen low-income renters forced out of ok-ish buildings, and replaced with several high-income renters who do the roommate thing in order to afford it all.
Over time, even building "market rate" (which some people erroneously call "luxury") housing in SF will start to free up the older housing stock that's being occupied by people who in any other market would be considered high-income, and return that housing to its former middle- or low-income renters.
Regardless, with the exception of subsidized housing, it's not even possible to build low- or middle-income housing in SF right now. If you build anything at any size, it will immediately price out of budget for any low-income renters, and most middle-income renters. Part of that is just because landlords and sellers charge whatever the market will bear (which is a lot), and part is because new housing development gets so much opposition that it costs developers way more than it should to actually complete a project (it can take years and countless lawsuits and legal fees to even break ground), and they need to recoup their costs and make even a modest profit somehow.
Also from Texas: In Texas, developers building households generally happens on empty land in the suburbs, or in unused non-residential land.
In LA or the Bay Area, it would happen by replacing single family homes with multi-family housing. Something that would also be anathema in most well-off Texas communities. It's already sprawled about as far as geography permits.
Lots of people don't want to live in those places and would rather keep their existing neighborhoods than invite a lot of new residents and a larger, denser population. Hence their creating those laws.
It's not obvious to me why we should take the desires of the people who want to move there more seriously than the desires of people to keep what they have similarly.
But in that case, we need to stop building a ton of office space in those "full" cities to import a bunch more jobs than we have housing for...
The way I look at it is that the incumbents are there due to mostly accidents (of birth time/place) or of luck. Why should newcomers be disadvantaged due to accidents and luck?
Land is a finite resource, desirable land even more so. This is why we have things like property taxes, to reinforce the idea that property ownership is a privilege, and you have to pay for that privilege by contributing to the common good. We have zoning laws to attempt (though we often fail) to collectively make the best use of the limited land we have.
And from the other side, I just see it as just incredibly selfish to oppose reasonable housing development because people don't like change or are afraid that their home's 400% appreciation in value might drop to only 300% or whatever.
Most things are accidents of time/place/whatever. Including whatever resources those newcomers are bringing to a city. Is migration and density growth a strict good? A strict bad? Somewhere in between? Lots of ink have been written on that, I'm fairly personally neutral, but I'm very skeptical of the "this is a simple problem with a simple solution" crowd. I'd love to see a decentralization of high-end high-paying jobs. Right now if I wanted to live back near my family, I'd have to work on problems that are less interesting to me for quite a bit less money.
There's nobody exactly being unselfish in this debate... People who want more density or to save their own money argue one way. People who want to live a (different) way argue another... it's basically all wants considering we have so many other cities in the country with plenty of space.
I’m in favor of lots of construction, because it’s the right thing overall. But it would hit me hard. I’m willing to accept that, so I lobby for new construction when I can. I’m just realistic about the outcome.
Realistically, it won't. The new supply will be apartments - not single family homes. It's not like people will all want to sell and move into apartments or that the desire for homes will go down. It just means competition for apartments will improve.
The above numbers are realistic. You have a choice to nice 3 bedroom apartments for $900/month in the Des Moines Iowa area. The payments on a 30 year loan for a 2 million dollar house are a bit over 9000/month.
It won't bankrupt anyone. If you bought a house you could afford for "x", and you budgeted as if it cost "x", you still have a place to live if you keep paying the mortgage. All your plans remain exactly the same. If the "value" of the house goes down, you'll save on property taxes.
That is, of course if you change a policy that was primarily designed to inflate housing prices to the stratosphere then it might negatively impact that, but maybe you were wrong to do that to begin with.
Yes, California and other places with housing problems need as-of-right policies as the article suggests. It's not simply zoning, it's removing all ability of local governments to hold things up, because people will use absolutely anything they can grab onto.
From a philosophical standpoint, people are sometimes uncomfortable with the idea of pre-empting local control—after all, don't they know better? But as the article points out, it's a coordination problem. There is a certain cost [1] to be paid in building housing, unfortunately, and you need a higher-level (in this case, state-wide) view to distribute that cost fairly.
> And I think that anywhere a single-family detached home currently exists, a 2-family home should be allowed.
Make it more like 4–8 (but maybe limited to 3-4 stories), and I'm in.
[1]: As the article points out, however, we think far too often only about the costs. I for one would welcome more neighbors.
How fast, and how much?
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We have the same situation as a startup focused on developing a product. We have abidance of developers, and very few infrastructure engineers. When we start deploying what we have built, we are going to have a bad time.
This site shows active construction in new york: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/buildings/html/nyc-active-major-...
You need to compare it to population growth, decades of building backlog, job growth, etc.
I was just pointing out the the linked post shows how NYC construction is stagnant, not "active". It was unclear if he meant "active" as in "they're building a large quantity" or as in "currently happening".
Foreign money or no, if you have a very desirable city with a growing job market and stagnant construction, prices will appreciate. I would challenge you to find a single counterexample
Foreign money doesn't help prices but it's more a symptom of our problems than a cause.
Also, NYC population is not declining. I wish. There have been some stagnant years but nowhere near enough to compensate for 50 years of underbuilding.
"Despite a weak outlook for residential real estate, the number of building permits issued in New York City for new homes surged last year to the highest pace since 2015. It was the second-highest total since the end of the last big building boom in 2008. Permits for 26,547 units of housing were issued in 2019, about 27% more than the year before ..."
So this is not even 0,5% of overall units.
That's because only megaprojects can afford to overcome all the regulatory and neighborhood hurdles.
Do you think the average homeowner trying to become a landlord by converting their home into a duplex has enough money to pay for both sides of a law suit, as this developer had to?
https://www.blogto.com/real-estate-toronto/2019/07/toronto-c...
Toronto prices are crazy, so Toronto isn't building enough, let alone the major coastal American cities.
Housing _is_ infrastructure, and it's the piece of infrastructure we're most sorely missing.
Even in SF, there's some places where public transportation is faster. But in very very limited situations because SF transportation is horrible. But an express Caltrain is often much faster than driving MTV-SF if there's any traffic. With all the (super delayed unfortunately) infrastructure projects going on (new SF subway being installed, Caltrain electrification), things will hopefully get better...
It is very true but the point of adding capacity (to any form of transit) isn't to reduce congestion at peak hours (that congestion is bounded by what people will tolerate) it's to allow more trips to happen with equivalent congestion thereby increasing the total number of trips and/or decreasing the duration of the congestion.
Of course adding enough lanes to meet demand is not worth the cost. However the induced demand argument is wrong, it is a cost benefit calculation: will the additional people who are able to get someplace be worth the cost to add the lane.
Transit does have the same problem, but transit can scale much better in a given amount of space. A bus every 5 minutes can handle more traffic than a lane filled with cars - assuming the bus doesn't compete with the cars. You can run a bus every 3 minutes, and if that isn't enough a train every 45 seconds holding 5 times as many people as the bus. If that isn't enough - okay, it is time to build another track for the train, but that is a huge number of people (ie a good number would find their life improved by a track on a slightly different route that)
Mind: shared rights-of-way modes (busses, streetcars, LRT) can be impacted by private ve traffic, but contributes little to that itself.
Fixed-track systems (Muni Metro) can have coordination delays if multiple routes join.
Out of curiosity, do you ride Bart at commute hours? At 5pm, the platforms at Embarcadero and Montgomery are dangerously packed. I didn’t think there is much excess capacity for commuting.
All other times? Absolutely yes.
As I said, pointing out that transit systems are at capacity is not a valid reason to block development. Transit systems always try to operate at capacity because excess capacity means suboptimal allocation of resources. There's no reason to increase capacity until there's demand for that capacity.
The way the people profit is you put homes in the places that have lots of jobs, mostly so that people can just walk around but also to benefit from people filling up the reverse direction on BART. In places that have mostly homes you buld jobs instead. For places without an abundance of either, such as Orinda and Lafayette, you build both.
It's total nonsense that we build a railroad to a place like Lafayette, but that city has had the same population for 50 years. This goes triple for Berkeley, which has THREE subway stations and the same population it had in 1950! We should expect that adding billions of dollars of infrastructure also adds lots of people.
BART could encourage commercial development, instead of residential development, on land it owns near transit stations.
I'm not, let me explain.
> More commuters creates more ticket revenue, which gives BART more resources to expand capacity. They're not going to expand capacity until there's more demand.
BART needs money to expand, and this money is not going to come from commuters. Why?
First, "expand capacity" can mean two things:
1) Buy and/or run more trains on existing tracks, serving existing stations.
2) Build more tracks and/or stations.
For 1), BART already operates at or nearly at maximum physical capacity at commute hours in the peak commute direction: there is not headroom in the Transbay tube to add more trains at rush hour, at least for trips between SF and the East Bay. BART could earn more revenue from more commuters that are not on the peak lines -- but building more housing in the suburbs will not provide this.
For 2), this money comes from the capital budget, not the operating budget. BART fares provide about 70% of the operating costs of BART. There is no profit, no money left over to go to pay for more tracks or stations. That money comes from voters who approve bonds or other sources of funding for this constructions. More commuters will not provide this either.
We need to expand BART, and we need development -- these two go hand in hand!
Also, in this case, they have the infrastructure, the NIMBYs are just hoarding it to themselves, as they do in Berkeley as well.
What happens, in every city, is that more housing gets built, then the infrastructure system starts to get closer to capacity, and then the infrastructure gets upgaded.
Saying that they should upgrade all the infrastructure first, before there is any demand, is the same exact thing as saying that it should never be upgraded.
Because the infrastructure isn't going to be upgraded if there is no demand for it yet.
The above doesn't apply to the cities in CA we are talking about: there is plenty of demand. It does apply to some semi-rural small towns.
If a developer comes in and says "Hey I want to develop in this area", it is a contradictory response to say that this development should be prevented, because there is not enough demand.
If a bunch of developers are trying to build houses, then by definition, we are in a situation where there is demand.
This supports my point even more, because I was saying that the developers should build first, and then if the infrastructure starts to hit capacity, THEN the infrastructure should be updated.
Don't build the infrastructure first. Instead build the housing, and fix any problems that come with it.
Also, this is how all this infrastructure gets built in the first place, also. The developers, who are building the buildings, will upgrade the infrastructure as part of the process of building the buildings.
This is not how "capacity" works.
It is not that there is some constant limit to something, and everything is 100% fine as long as you are under capacity, but breaks entirely when you go over capacity.
Instead, capacity is flexible, and there are costs to it being flexible.
Instead, capacity is something that you start bumping up against, and this starts to cause problems. And the more that you bump up against capacity, the more problems that you get.
So, if you are only slightly over capacity, it means that, your roads will be a little bit congested some but not all of the time, or the town will have to purchase a little bit of energy from the town next over (or raise prices a little bit during certain times of the day to reduce demand), or a school will have a little bit more people attending it than previously intended, or you'll have to pay the police overtime hours more often.
And when these problems get big enough, THEN, people will decide that it makes sense to upgrade the network.
That solves your step wise function, that you are talking about. "Capacity" is actually pretty flexible. And you don't have to do some maximum upgrade, if you go over it. You can instead wait until you are over capacity enough that it makes sense to do the upgrade.
For drinking water you can do lawn watering bans to get capacity. For roads rush hour lasts longer. However there are still limits that you may not to run up against. If your traffic is already bad you might not be able to build more roads where they need to be (either you tear down something historic, or you have to build overpasses). If you are a small city you may have traffic problems while not having enough population to get your transit system in shape.
For example, for things like water, a city can increase the price of water, to reduce demand, especially for commercial usage.
> However there are still limits that you may not to run up against.
The limits are much further out than you'd think. And systems are often build with a large buffer, to handle spikes and increases anyway.
By the time you get close to hitting the true limit, you would have enough pent up demand that you can just spend the money to upgrade the system.
And the people who are building the new buildings, can also just find it as well.
This stuff happens all the time. Cities run up against limits all the time, and the world does not fall apart.
Instead, they implement stop cap measures, that work, and builders fund upgrading the system as they build new things.
Stuff is also often planned out for a long time.
It is also obviously far cheaper (and better for the environment) to water a single building than to water a bunch of dispersed SFHs.
Source: schedule fees for various bay area cities on new construction.
This is the easy one to fix — when there is demand, they can just run more trains.
Much harder is the transbay commute at rush hours. There is almost no spare capacity, and it’s not clear how those extra thousands of people in Lafayette will make it in to SF every morning before we build a second transbay tube for Bart — and that’s at least a decade away.
I say this as someone who loves development: for the Bay Area to significantly increase its population, we need a ton more transit and we need to start building it now.
Or if the jobs were in the other direction like Walnut Creek, it would be a reverse commute.
But almost no one takes Caltrain at non-commute hours.
If you want a train/bus to be used by people who have a choice you must run not less than ever half hour for 16 hours a day. The more often you run the more people who will ride, up to about 5 minutes where everybody knows you can just show up and get on. (unfortunately the amount of extra riders you get from coming more often isn't linear so you sometimes cannot justify coming more often by the amount of extra riders you get)
Note, there is a 2 year lag between changes in routes/schedules and riders figuring out the new routes. I think Caltrain could get a lot more non-commute hour riders by coming more often but if you push them to make sure you make everybody aware that it will be 2 years before there is a change.
I'm wondering what your frame of reference is here. As someone who has lived in the Bay Area for most of my 30 years, and lived in Atlanta for a couple years recently, where they are actually building like crazy, the Bay Area seems to be at a total standstill.
- get rid of or modify zoning laws (at least in places where growth will happen)
- reduce regulations on builders
- ensure that there are plenty of builders for health competition (so that consumers don't get ripped off)
- provide protections for builders from Sue happy NIMBYs (some kind of legal protection that prevents builders from being sued and penalizes NIMBYs that try to stand in their way).
The benefits of building more are so numerous:
- every house that gets built reduces costs for everyone else as well, as the stress of under supply lessens
- it's easier for people to get to work and find work
- easier for companies to higher people
- more jobs getting created, not just from people able to get to work but new jobs getting created from all that construction
- It'll help the environment immensly! Everyday, I see the 580 - 5 lane highway clogged up with cars crawling by at 10mpg, probably getting very low MPG over a very long distance (this is where most of the CO2 pollution is coming from, at least in the US!)
- over the long term even people with houses already will pay lower property taxes (decreasing values reduce prop taxes)
- as the number of average miles driven per commute comes down, there will be less and less traffic.
Because yeah, it'd suck to lose your home that you're supposed to own because your neighborhood got pricey.
Such as?
https://taxfoundation.org/property-tax-limitation-regimes-pr...
This would imply that the value goes up (location, location, location). That would cause property taxes to increase and may drive people out that can't afford to stay.
That is, if your property tax was $10,000 last year when you bought, and would increase to $12,000 this year, the state would give you an indefinite, interest free loan for $1500 or whatever secured by the property.
Although, if other states do it, should be data to talk to those predictions...
You already need to keep track of two assessed values for prop 13, along with history for catch-up basis increase. All you need to keep track of here is original tax rate (to know the maximum for this year) and deferred amount.
> I can imagine a housing bubble popping and you end up under water due to owed taxes when the property was worth more
No one's guaranteed to make money on every asset.
There's a difference between "I have lost money on this thing" and "I owe more because I sold this thing".
By a house (debt-free) for $100, and, say, tax of $1. Something happens for a decade, so it's worth $1000, tax of $10 per year for 10 years; $90 is deferred. Later, thing un-happens and more, now house is worth $60, with $90 in deferred tax, so if you sell it... you end up owing $30, for a net loss of $70, instead of the $50 in loss on the asset?
...or is there something I'm getting really, really wrong?
Seems simpler (and safer) to say property tax doesn't change (instead of accumulating interest-free debt), and profit from selling is capital gains, but I know jack shit about this stuff and am willing to be wrong.
Takes a long time to get to these situations without crazy valuation swings (+900%, then -94%?) and under 2%-ish tax rates. That would be a net loss of $130, too.
> ...or is there something I'm getting really, really wrong?
Pretty much. In most property tax regimes, it's the parcel itself that has the tax owed, and the assessor doesn't/can't go after past owners. Most mortgages are recourse-free, too-- it may be bad for your credit to not pay, but they take the property and don't come after your other assets.
There's a societal benefit, here, too, BTW. If you have a property that's worth $10M to others, but you employ it for a use that's worth $100k to you... accruing tax on the $10M encourages you to make a transaction that will leave the property better employed.
I'm surprised Republicans have not latch onto this as a reason to repeal it - they already like to point out it is easy to spend other people's money as an argument against socialism.
The comment above wrote
> I'm surprised Republicans have not latch onto this as a reason to repeal it - they already like to point out it is easy to spend other people's money as an argument against socialism.
I pointed out that there is hardly any Republican leadership in California that would be able to latch onto this issue and amplify it. My observation was an explanation for the dearth of republicans against this issue, not a request for assistance.
https://edsource.org/2019/school-groups-explore-15-billion-t...
I'm not saying you have to agree with that cause, but if lowering state income taxes is your goal, then there are plenty of groups in CA advocating for that whose cause you can join.
However, I'd guess that due to political realities, most of them also oppose repeal of proposition 13 also, so you might have some challenges building a movement around that.
Backing out prop 13 to fund certain ventures is just going to create even more problems down the road. Revenue will still be volatile. Then in the next downturn education will get screwed again, like what happened in the last recession. And you won't have prop 13 to back out anymore. It will be permanently fucked. Maybe the state will bump income taxes even more to fund things.
So more volatile revenue for the state to rely on. More fun times ahead!
If that's true, and more of the education budget is funded from property taxes, then how can the following be true:
> Backing out prop 13 to fund certain ventures is just going to create even more problems down the road. Revenue will still be volatile. Then in the next downturn education will get screwed again, like what happened in the last recession.
A recession will hit everything, but if property tax revenues are earmarked for education, its funding should be less volatile than more income tax dependent programs.
A more charitable interpretation is that it takes a lifetime of wealth accumulation to be able to buy a home in today's California, and it is not unreasonable to be concerned about the potential of losing your life's single largest investment. Casting them as a cartoon villains solves nothing.
Increasing density might not even necessarily be bad for property prices (for people who want to sell) since the land might be redeveloped into more than one unit.
I'm sure the economic angle is part of it, but I don't have a good feel for how big a factor it is compared to disliking traffic / change in "neighborhood character" etc.
My gut tells me a lot of it is genuinely about the money, though. Of the people I know, most have to spend >50% of their income per month just to maintain a roof over my head. And these are working-professional families, well above median state incomes. That kind of pressure, even under the guise of paying a mortgage instead of renting, is a real stressor.
Lower rents, and having more affordable housing is obviously something that a person who profits from higher rents, would want to prevent.
Paul Krugman does. [0]
Subsidies to home ownership increased economic volatility (people spend more when their house is worth more, spend less when its value decreases); weakened financial services; and made labour markets tend to become more rigid. [1]
[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/opinion/23krugman.html [1]https://www.economist.com/briefing/2009/04/16/shelter-or-bur...
[0]: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
https://ww3.arb.ca.gov/cc/inventory/pubs/reports/2000_2017/g...
The primary problem, as detailed in the article, is that homeowners have every incentive to be against new construction and no incentives to be for it. If property taxes rose appropriately with property values, homeowners would have an interest in maintaining housing prices rather than doing everything they can to keep them rising.
There's also a range of beneficial secondary effects. For example, I've talked to retired folks that have considered leaving the bay due to the increased cost of living. But because they have owned their house for decades + P13, if they bought a _cheaper_ house elsewhere in CA to downsize, they'd be paying _more_ in property taxes, to the point of the move not being worth the cost. (I believe there's been talk of transferable tax rates to fix this specific problem, or maybe something was even passed, but it just goes to show the distortions P13 has beyond the obvious).
Aligning incentives (where possible) is, imo, almost always a better way to do things than creating a new batch of regulations/laws to deal with a problem.
California homeowners who are 55 or older get a one time chance to sell their existing primary residence, and transfer its property tax assessment to another house[0]. Only catch is that the valuation of the new property has to be equal or less than the property that you sold, but if you live in the Bay Area you probably meet that qualification.
[0] https://www.sfgate.com/business/networth/article/How-to-tran...
Only if you are leaving the Bay Area. Often, these older houses have a lot of deferred maintenance and the retired seller wants to downsize into something in the Bay Area that is newer build/renovated.
https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_5,_Property_T...
> For example, I've talked to retired folks that have considered leaving the bay due to the increased cost of living. But because they have owned their house for decades + P13, if they bought a _cheaper_ house elsewhere in CA to downsize, they'd be paying _more_ in property taxes, to the point of the move not being worth the cost. (I believe there's been talk of transferable tax rates to fix this specific problem, or maybe something was even passed, but it just goes to show the distortions P13 has beyond the obvious).
Tax rates are transferable in the same county, under certain restrictions (less expensive I think). Some counties have deals with eachother to transfer tax rates. I think a big benefit would be to have all counties to be able to transfer rates with eachother.
Another problem with transferable tax rates is most smaller housing units tend to be condos - and all they build new are 'luxury' condos. Even if you could pay for it outright, and get a transferred tax rate, you probably have an insane HOA attached to it. This alone can make it not worthwhile.
But still, I think the best, most realistic way out of the prop 13 mess is to get rid of it for newly bought homes, but allow the transfer rate for downsizing state-wide. And for the love of god, get rid of it from inheritance. Most of these people massively benefiting from it are in their 60s and 70s, so the circle of life will eventually take care of things. If we don't pass something soon the next generation of inheritors will force us to wait another lifetime to fix the problem.
There's lots of people who move into a neighborhood near a airport, landfill, etc, and who over some time living there decide the airport is a big problem because it's holding property values down.
Just because I bought the same house decades later my property tax is 20x what my neighbor’s is?
Am I really using 20x the resources my neighbor does?
Get rid of Prop 13 and you could probably be revenue neutral and still drop the property tax rate by 50%.
Basically, the new arrivals pay for everything. And new taxes added (such as school taxes) follow the same scheme so that long-time residents pay less there too.
That said, the TRUE beneficiaries of prop 13 are corporations anyway.
And this is why we need the English Rule. We're the only industrialized nation that does not have some form of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_%28attorney%27s_f...
(Edit: the original title was "Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build"! ;)
(https://youtu.be/Vhh_GeBPOhs)
https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/mac.20170388?fbc...
"Our point is that a first-order effect of more housing in Silicon Valley is to raise income and welfare of all US workers."
You could 10x the density around there and be able to support the population. You’ve got wide streets, services, and it isn’t landfill.
Honestly though, I feel like it isn’t really a crisis. It’s mostly rich people fighting with other rich people over whose backyard to build in. There are no real YIMBYs, just people who want to live in certain areas they don’t currently live in.
Most of the poors have already been displaced. We pretend like they are the focus because it’s good for politics, but the reality is the diversity is already gone.
The problem of course is the best time to build affordable housing is 20 years ago. So if you want to really help the poor (as opposed to symbolically helping a few poor while leaving the rest out) you need to go back in time 20 years. You can start today though on a 20 year plan.
A nuclear missile fired into the San Andreas fault, perhaps (this is a movie reference, folks, and not a serious suggestion).
It involves Superman traveling at faster than c to save the day, rather than breaking a promise made under duress, which makes flunking ethical calculus into a super-vulnerability.
Movies based on comic book characters have come a long way. And even movies based on DC characters have advanced slightly.
You can build a bunch of high rises and fill them with people, and private transportation will become impossible. The experience of going to the beach or some hiking spot on the weekend will be degraded. Everyone will be living in a godawful megacity instead of the nice neighborhood they'd rather live in. There's a reason people push back against growth with respect to housing.
The real problem is overpopulation. If you eliminate one negative feedback loop for population growth, you will ultimately run into another one, and all the different kinds of waste we produce (CO2, garbage, light and noise pollution) will only pile up while finite resources in the region (breathing room, nature, water, room on the road and on hiking trails) will be divvied up into smaller portions
As much as we like to grandstand against mass extinction of wildlife and deforestation, we will always cave to economical and social pressures of modern life which almost exclusively require resource extraction and destruction of the biosphere.
... letters to elected officials, and at the open microphone that Mr. Falk observed at the City Council meetings, residents said things like “too aggressive,” “not respectful,” “embarrassment,” “outraged,” “audacity,” “very urban,” “deeply upset,” “unsightly,” “monstrosity,” “inconceivable,” “simply outrageous,” “vehemently opposed,” “sheer scope,” “very wrong,” “blocking views,” “does not conform,” “property values will be destroyed,” and “will allow more crime to be committed.”
If preserving wildlife and forests can be equated with preserving suburban lifestyles and property values, then yes, it’s perhaps already lost and we should all be quite sad.
It can't, and shouldn't, be equated to that. Denser urban living, i.e. building more housing in cities, reduces suburban sprawl. That's a good thing if you care about the environment.
it's like the bacteria in a biological weapons lab learned how to place orders for and distribute more agar
What does Lafayette owe the people of San Francisco?--or more accurately, the people that are not from California that chose to move to San Francisco? The revolving door that defines California immigration today, where wealthy young software developers go in and middle/lower class native Californians go out, is what is hollowing out the population, shifting the culture, and causing the homelessness problem, and building more housing isn't going to fix that.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120479
Don't deport anybody. Don't build a wall. Just make any businesses that hire at lower wages, without first verifying citizenship or immigration status, pay the workers all their back wages.
The economics shape and are shaped by human behavior.
Today these kids have grown up and own homes in the suburbs. New kids need to move in, but the kids who got there first refuse to let them build. That's what this story is about.
If I live in California where home prices are sky-high, and I've saved up for nearly a decade for a house, why would I be willing to allow legislation that would likely devalue my biggest asset (by far) that I saved and sacrificed so diligently for?
This is a legitimate question, not trying to be a jerk. I'm genuinely curious what the argument against this is.
Right now, the high cost of housing in the Bay Area is largely due to a couple of factors: 1 - high cost of labor. Rezoning won't change that. 2 - restrictions on right to build. Rezoning will reduce this. 3 - high cost of land. Rezoning will increase this, by making it possible to build more units of housing on a given area of land.
For most current homeowners, it's likely that 3 will outweigh 2. Developers will buy up some portion of single family housing stock (and low-density multifamily stock) to rebuild the lots with denser housing. That process will both increase demand and reduce supply of those types of housing, resulting in price increases.
At the same time, the average unit of housing will cost less, because there will be many more condos/apartments available. Owners of high-density condos would be the most vulnerable to seeing their asset values decrease. However, building big condo buildings is still going to be a complicated endeavor, so price adjustments will happen slowly over time. No one's going to get hosed, although their asset prices might go up more slowly over time than otherwise, or even be eroded by inflation in the long term.
At the same time, many of those condo owners will still come out ahead. They may be able to upgrade to a nicer condo than they otherwise could have afforded. They may also benefit from the second-order effects of lower average housing prices, in the form of reduced costs for non-housing items. If they run a business, it will be easier for them to attract and retain workers. Schools and other public services will also be better able to attract and retain quality staff, at a lower wage bill. Etc.
Thank you!
1. why are you so sure? What makes you an authority on the whole society's interests? 2. even if so, are you saying that collective interests trump individual rights? This is socialism 101. Government will decide who should live (and work) where, and who should own what.
I would love it if local governments would stop restricting the rights of local developers and allow the free market to determine what is built where more often.
Rezoning would not devalue your house. You'd get more money for it in the long run. Better yet, you'd be able to instantly become a landlord (convert your house into a plex) and move somewhere else that satisfied your desire for a single-family home. Or you'd be able to market to a developer.
Plus, if you just kept living in your house, the value would go up anyway, as it always does.
(Importantly, no such restriction exists on population: within the U.S. at least, nobody has the right to prevent their neighbors or fellow citizens from having kids, while they do have the right to prevent their neighbors from building more housing units. There's an inevitable mismatch between reality here...)
To wit if I want to raise chickens or garden in my suburban backyard that should be my right as long as the chickens don't get out or cause a ruckus. And if the chickens do cause a problem my neighbors' should be limited to seeking legal remedies and not preventing everyone from raising chickens in the future, as most chicken owners are generally responsible. That's very different from running a fracking rig and is much more like the things an HOA prevents you from doing.
> You're not entitled to decide what other people do with their land. Zoning laws, development restrictions, and HOAs violate this principle - they give existing homeowners a collective power to decide what other homeowners can do with their private property.
Zoning laws and HOAs are (some of the more common mechanisms) we currently arbitrate the boundaries of what are acceptable uses for a property.
You say raising chickens should be your right. You say running a fracking rig should not be my right.
What mechanism do you propose to negotiate that when people disagree? You mention legal remedies "if the chickens do cause a problem". Do you mean to say the process should be for a homeowner wait til the fracking rig is built and running AND causing actual harm BEFORE they have any right to object?
There are scales where it is or is not practical to do various things. You might have noticed that fracking rigs, chemical plants, hog farms, et cetera, tend to take up a large area. All the various things one can do on a parcel of land cease to be worth trying to do once that parcel of land goes below a certain size. A fracking rig is unlikely to be practical to erect and operate in a typical suburban lot.
I would hope I would have the common sense to sell my land at that point as well, so I could cash in on the sweet moolah the developers were paying.
The reason people are not OK with those things next door is that they're loud and smelly etc. It should already be a basic principle that you shouldn't be allowed to invade your neighbor's property with foul sounds and smells. In practice that would de facto require such things to be in a rural area where the owner can surround it with enough empty space that it doesn't impact the neighbors -- but you don't need any zoning for that at all, because it's a restriction on what you can do to your neighbor's property, not what you can do to your own.
You can't get from there to prohibiting your neighbor from building some more housing units on their own property.
So long as this idea is a a fundamental plank of YIMBY-ism, all of the pretty claims about how high-density living doesn't have to be a dystopian hellscape are literally worthless, because every one of them relies totally on things outside the residents' control that the YIMBYs will be first in line to try and destroy.
Yet this is not the case in California.
https://twitter.com/eean/status/1228182747149025280
https://twitter.com/neversassylaura/status/96939949395841843...
https://reason.com/2019/01/16/san-francisco-property-owner-f...
I could go on for days.
If you look at the photo of the lot you can see why: Beautiful rolling green hills. They didn't own the lot so they didn't have any right to stop the development. Nevertheless that's human nature.
That's why I chose the school bus example. You're supposed to get the part of the seat that your butt sits on, not the whole seat. But from childhood to adulthood, people just never change.
Wanting your home to appreciate in value forever is like expecting your 20-year-old car to sell for more than its sticker price. It really only works for art installations, created by a collaboration of architect, engineer, and builder, with some living space inside.
Framed in these terms, most families do not have any significant assets, and a hefty chunk of their resources dedicated to maintaining their gigantic shelter-providing consumer appliance.
I suppose it's no surprise that tax laws everywhere do not classify homes as durable goods that depreciate in value.
Residences are mainly exempted from depreciation, but commercial real estate is allowed to be depreciated because buildings do have a useful life.
Thank you. I had already figured that considering one's house to be an asset is the wrong way to think about it, but lacked the words for how to then accurately describe what it actually is. "Durable consumer good" captures what a house is and does much better, IMO.
Getting this attitude more widespread is going to be difficult, sadly. The land that the house rests upon absolute is an asset, and the house thereupon can't be readily decoupled from the land (trailers and double-wides not withstanding). Thus conflating the actual asset, the land, with the consumer good it is presently being used to produce, the house, is a reasonable mental shortcut.
I don't think the US will even be able to start on a tear-down-and-rebuild attitude until there is already a sufficiency of housing. As it is now, it appears to be in a cycle of new development, then decline, then revitalization, where redevelopment only occurs when property values in a place have already collapsed, and ruined those who weren't able to move before the wave hit.
Land entails a totally separate kind of economics than 'durable goods'.
Possibly, the physical home itself might be considered a 'durable good'.
HOAs don't seem to do much besides execute petty laws. Neighborhoods, while they can be diverse, will never approach a city in terms of allowing people of different backgrounds, races, etc. to interact. There's a particular reason cities vote more democratic than suburbs: It's hard to vote for such hateful policies when you interact with the people effected every day.
I get that there's this nostalgia or rather inertia about suburbs. I get that people grew up in a one family house with a lawn in their nice homogeneous town. But it needs to go away.
Plus I'm a little perplexed at the library analogy. I'm not saying we need to lower funding or anything. If anything we should be pumping more money into suburbs so that they can build and create more healthy, flourishing communities. These communities should just be built in a way that's space and energy efficient.
In my town, a typical midwest college town, we have suburbs, we have more urban areas with smaller/older houses in row neighborhoods. We have apartments galore, and condos in downtown areas. A bit of something for everyone. Expecting a community to "evolve" means losing something of this. Other than young people who want to live in the downtown area, nobody wants to give up their homes. Apartment living is no fun with families.
And this is normal America. These cities can't be re-designed, can't really evolve. New cities, sure. Build them that way if you can (though I think the market won't support it), but expecting existing cities to evolve into urban worlds with no cars, great public transportation, and centrally located jobs and services won't happen in the majority of US cities.
... why?
I've lived in apartments with my family for the last three years. It's honestly been great.
> Apartment living is no fun with families.
That is a gigantic assumption. I grew up in an apartment and it was great. My parents wouldn't trade living in an apartment in a major city for a house in the suburbs for anything. Plenty of families all around the world do just fine in apartments.
I disagree that existing cities can't be redesigned. Sure, we'd need to invest in public transportation. And sure, we'd have to build other infrastructure. But the case in the article is a pretty obvious case for expansion. You have a town that is 30 minutes by rail from SF, an epicenter of insanely expensive real estate, and yet nobody can expand because people are worried it'll destroy their precious suburbs.
* It's good for the economy, as "legitster" points out.
* It's good for the environment if people can drive less (or even walk or bike!) because they live closer to things.
* It's good for the people "on the margins", those struggling to pay rent, or those at risk of homelessness, or those who might like to move to a more productive place for a better job.
It's much easier to make a difference locally: in many places it's not hard to get to know your city councilors, or state reps/senators. One of my prouder YIMBY moments was turning out 5 people on a weekday morning to speak to our state rep, who ended up voting in favor of HB 2001, which legalizes up to 4-plexes throughout most Oregon cities.
Please cite at lease one example in which this has ever been the case. I do understand the theory behind your argument here, and I assume you are familiar with (leftist) counter-arguments, so this is not an attempt to open a debate. Rather, I want you to be right but until I see some solid evidence I am unconvinced.
>One of my prouder YIMBY moments was turning out 5 people on a weekday morning to speak to our state rep, who ended up voting in favor of HB 2001, which legalizes up to 4-plexes throughout most Oregon cities.
This is a great example of how it seems to me that YIMBYs are anti-NIMBY in the way Democrats are anti-Republican. Time and time again, it appears neither groups are actually doing any thing ‘good for the people “on the margins. Clearly, this policy benefits landlords more than anybody and the implication is that this is besides the fact of lowering rent prices. Fine. But it is not insignificant that all of these efforts primarily promote the perpetuation of rent-seeking.
I watched from the front row as investors bought up Portland. It has been about 6 years since it entered full-swing and rent prices are higher than ever before. This is not good for people “on the margins”. In fact, most of those people were not even on the margins before the investors came in. I am one of them. I should know.
Of course, history is littered with cases of YIMBY theory failing urban housing markets, so please show me an example of where your theories have actually succeeded.
There are a lot of ways to build more supply:
https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...
I find the 'Montreal' example the most compelling in that it's fairly "human scale", but tastes vary.
In most places new supply is high end and is making more housing available for people who don’t lack access.
In most places, new cars are more expensive than used ones, but if you stopped providing new cars, the price of the used ones would shoot up as everyone started competing for a dwindling supply of cars.
Same goes for housing.
Also, it's a longer term process with housing, but 'filtering' is a real thing: https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2016/05/25/housing-does-f...
An unspoken consequence of cash for clunkers. Practically overnight 100k miles was considered "low mileage", which was ridiculous before people started needlessly trashing perfectly good used cars.
[1] Had a hard time finding statistics for 2009, but it’s in here: https://www.niada.com/PDFs/Publications/2010IndustryReport.p...
For one, most property and real estate appreciates in market value on it’s own. This makes spec construction viable, and why most new apartment buildings in expensive cities are ”luxury” units and rented for very high rates. The owners are happy to let them sit empty and starve the market to max out demand when they know there is enough jobs in the area that people are competing heavily to move there.
In addition, the markets are tiny compared with cars, which are easy to move to cars to other markets (cities).
The reason is that there are implicit price floors through tax policy. It’s cheaper to “lose” money on property to offset taxes on winning properties.
vs. the article:
> ... how expensive new housing today would become affordable old housing tomorrow ...
For complexes, everything is based on depreciation cycles. Apartments typically get shittier over a relatively short timeframe.
People are outraged when you put apartments and condos in their multi-single-family cities because "lower class" people will move in. Don't those "lower class" people currently lack access to live these places?
Therefore, if you say it's bad to build new housing if it will end up being expensive, you're really saying there should be no new housing built during a housing shortage...
I find it's often better to think it terms of number of homes and housed people than in prices. If 100 new apartments are built, it's hard to say what will happen to prices exactly. But it's undeniable that there will be 100 more homes, and 200-300 more people can live indoors in that city, than without the project.
Edit: I should add, I live here and am very intimate with the issue.
And yes, due to the scale of development, rents are lower than they expected when they built. Your prices were gonna go up regardless, and the scale of development that happened actually kept prices down.
https://reason.com/2018/10/10/booming-construction-and-falli...
> Portland added 4,419 unit of completed housing in 2016, a slight increase from the roughly 4,365 it added in 2015, which combined is more than all the housing units added in the five years prior to 2014, according to the Portland Housing Bureau's 2017 annual report.
> Year-over-year average rents declined by a full 1.2 percent in the city of Portland, with average rents dropping to $1,140 per month for a median one-bedroom apartment, according to the yearly rent report from Apartment List. It's a similar story in Seattle, with Apartment List data showing rents declining 1.6 percent from where they were in 2017. The median monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Seattle is $1,346.
When you don't build more, rents go up. When you start to build enough, rents go down. It's pretty fucking simple. In fact, it is econ 101.
While we wait for the revolution, we might as well encourage the for-profit developers to build in the least destructive ways, so that less people suffer in the short term from the choked supply and anti-human urban planning that capitalists will exercise if left unchecked.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Every other commodity in my life, food for instance, is dirt cheap and getting cheaper all the time. Housing is expensive because it is not a commodity. You have to beg the government to allow it to exist.
If there isn't enough food, someone goes hungry. The price just decides who. If there isn't enough housing, someone has to move out. The price just decides who.
Choosing "who" via a more equitable method than price doesn't reduce the amount of suffering, it just spreads it around better.
I want to be clear here that I'm not making any value judgements with my statements about capitalism vs socialism/marxism, and I agree that the "commodification of housing" IMO doesn't explain why its expensive, but to be fair, the people making that argument are generally not making an argument on values (housing aught to be...), and values are kind of a "first principles" type thing that you can't persuade or prove wrong, they just are.
PS, if you're interested in learning more, the wiki article is nice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodification
I’m not saying this happened in California, but it’s what I think happened in the UK, where I am a landlord.
On a larger scale, something like 85% of the state legislators in Caliifornia are themself landlords (they own a unit/home that they lease to someone else) and are profiting off the housing crises not just by owning their own home, but by profiting of the exorbitant rents of others. On some level, the housing crises in california is caused by the state legislature fighting for their own class interest and their own personal financial interest as landlords.
Plenty of people buy duplexes and fourplexes and live in them. They are also housing that is cheaper and can be rented at a lower price.
Well... no. If your SFH zoned lot is now duplex-friendly, it means your house goes up in value because it can be immediately rented out to two people or you can rent it out to another family immediately, without asking anyone, as long as you do the required physical modifications. Now your home value is increased by the amount of revenue (at an appropriate discount rate) it would draw in from two simultaneous occupants in perpetuity, which is always higher than the rate possible from one occupant.
It literally benefits everyone
> Of course, history is littered with cases of YIMBY theory failing urban housing markets
No, it's not. History is a constant example of the success of the free market, which YIMBY's are in favor of, and NIMBY's are against. This is ridiculous.
The problem with the “try to understand NIMBYs” concern trolling in this thread is that there isn’t much to understand. The only common thread in NIMBY philosophy is fear of change, and some mild xenophobia.
I think there’s a lot more common ground to be had with far-left PHIMBYs who want the government to build most housing. At least that’s a coherent philosophy and a proposed solution.
Realize most property and real estate appreciates in market value on it’s own. This makes spec construction viable, and is why most new apartment buildings in expensive cities are ”luxury” units and rented for very high rates. The owners are happy to let them sit empty and starve the market to max out demand when they know there is enough jobs in the area that people are competing heavily to move there.
First of all, for example in the Bay Area there are more people who would like to live there than there are houses, and so the people with more money bid up the price and "win" the house, while the people with less money are priced out and must live elsewhere. Hopefully you agree with this basic premise?
With this model, if there is one less house, one more person will be priced out, and if there is one more house, one less person will be priced out, since the number of houses determine how many winners there will be (and as long as people don't change their minds about wanting to live there if they could afford it).
I've heard people worry about "induced demand", and I agree it's true that there's probably many people that would consider moving to San Francisco from elsewhere if the price started coming down (and of course vice versa), and that that would prevent the price from lowering too quickly. But those people moving free up housing in Austin, Seattle, etc, and there are more "winners" overall.
I think a lot of the people "on the margins" of being priced out in the Bay Area are not on the edge of homelessness - often they are able to move and drive up demand elsewhere. But I do see more and more people living out of RVs and vehicles parked near freeways.
For the price increases over the last couple decades, I think the demand has gone up for most first world cities. I think this is mostly because the industries that are booming are mostly knowledge work, that tends to have a higher specialization of labor so is more naturally located in places with higher population densities that have more liquid job markets (in addition to network effects within certain industries). I think the solution to this is to build more housing in cities but the alternative is lower income workers/industries are displaced and landowners are enriched.
For a specific example of this theory working, Tokyo is subject to a lot of the same economic forces as other first world cities that drive demand up (wrt labor specialization etc). They've managed to keep housing under control, but in order to achieve that they've had to allow almost double the amount of new housing as all of California (despite Tokyo having only around 1/3 the population) [1].
[1] https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-...
Their zoning is where they have obvious huge differences. The zoning categories are set at a national level and limit how restrictive local cities can be (there's 12 categories based on nuisance level). The higher zoning usually allows lower density also, so cities just start with a little extra zoning headroom that allows them to grow over time. They also automatically permit things that follow zoning. [1]
In the US zoning is more local, often there are many more zone types that are much more restrictive about what they allow (it's more micromanaged and often prohibits things like mixed-use in addition to multi family). In many of the biggest markets even projects that follow zoning are usually not allowed, every project is an individual years long fight. Also in cities like Los Angeles the zoned-for capacity has actually dramatically decreased over time, even as the population grew. [2]
Some of these policies may be a legacy of people deliberately not wanting it to be too affordable, because neighborhoods didn't want low-income people to move in. Of course now in many places even middle-income people can't afford it.
I think, from a social justice perspective, the US policy has been an abject failure. It's increased pollution (from long commutes) and homelessness. It's deprived people of good paying jobs, since they can't afford to move to the locations where they're available. It's squeezed the middle class and enriched landlords, there's even debate that housing may be the most important contributor to wealth inequality. It's anti-environment since higher density has less environmental impact on a per-capita basis. I'm sure there's some upsides, but I can't see any that remotely justify the long-term costs that these policies have brought about.
[1] https://marketurbanism.com/2019/03/19/why-is-japanese-zoning...
[2] https://www.salon.com/test/2015/04/05/the_incredible_shrinki..., graph at: https://www.austincontrarian.com/.a/6a00d8341d04dc53ef01b8d2...
I'm very involved with YIMBY Action here in SF: I'm on the board of both YIMBY Action and YIMBY Law, and I'm also running for local office in the current election: https://buss2020.org
If you have any questions about YIMBY, send them my way!
The demise of Scott Wiener's SB50 this year has certainly been a disappointment, but we try not to pin our hopes on any single solution. It took us 50 years to get where we are, and we expect it'll take at least 10 to get out. That will be a combination of local, state, and federal action.
The thing I've learned being involved in SF politics and YIMBY for the past few years is that politicians don't make change. They don't shift the discourse. Instead, it's grassroots movements like YIMBY Action that build a parade that politicians then jump to the front of. (Of course, this isn't true for Scott. He's one of the few true believers!)
We're building a passionate and vocal community that can do the on-the-ground organizing necessary to make politicians court us. The way forward it to continue building a voting bloc. You only have as much power as the people you can turn out to vote.
- A Supervisor puts a proposition on the ballot - organizations funnel money into the campaign for the ballot prop - then when the ballot prop advertises they include names of the people running for office
It's why SF has _so_ _many_ ballot props: they are the legal way to bypass the fundraising limits we imposed on individual electoral campaigns. Ironically, if we repealed our campaign finance limits, there'd be less dark money and far fewer ballot props.
I don't have a ballot prop to attach my name to, so I have to do old-fashioned campaigning (with some modern, high-tech things, too :)
It's time we stop blaming everyone else and start taking responsibility."
This is encouraging to see. I think Andrew Yang showed there's a real hunger for a solutions and data oriented approach, eschewing tribalism. Although perhaps still in a nascent stage, there finally seem to be signs of an increasing appetite for this.
Good luck!
When I researched this I couldn't find any strong evidence suggesting that more building would lead to more affordable housing.
You would think that more construction would lead to more affordable housing, but it seems like more construction doesn't just increase supply, it also increases demand, which can offset any price effects from the increase in supply.
This makes sense when you think that similar people want to live in proximity to people like themselves. So if there are more luxury condos in an area that's going to create demand for more high-end retail, which will enhance that neighborhood's appeals to wealthier customers which will then increase demand for more luxury residences.
Vienna and Singapore seems to be cities that have overcome this trend.
So I used to be an enthusiastic YIMBY, but there just doesn't appear to be any concrete evidence that more construction is going to lead to more affordable housing.
Having said that, I do believe we should promote more construction, I just don't think it's going to reduce the cost of living to a sustainable level.
The role of new construction in affordability is more direct. The people who live in the shiny new places will just bid up the price of the next best thing if it isn't available, and this ripples down until the people at the bottom are priced out. So by building it, you're preventing other things from being bid up.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/How-th...
https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-...
https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...
Please see this non-exhaustive list of things which all show building more housing leads to housing affordability.
* http://cityobservatory.org/another-housing-myth-debunked-nei...
* https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/12/02/how...
* https://jamesjgleeson.wordpress.com/2018/02/19/how-tokyo-bui...
* https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/How-th...
* https://medium.com/land-buildings-identity-and-values/what-i...
* https://fee.org/articles/why-isnt-rent-in-tokyo-out-of-contr...
* https://www.upjohn.org/research-highlights/new-construction-...
* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/arti...
* https://medium.com/@eddiesun/no-vacancy-the-housing-crisis-l...
* https://twitter.com/noahpinion/status/1165339989774749696?s=...
It's not so much induced demand as it is pent-up demand. Lots more people would already love to live here — indeed, many have moved away solely because of housing costs.
This is especially true in California, due to Prop 13.
If we reformed the relevant rules, so cities profited from allowing new housing, I think a lot would change in this area!
Supposedly, the big selling point was that seniors on fixed incomes were getting priced out of their homes. But that would only happen because they have a substantial, appreciating asset. These aren't poor people who deserve our sympathy; they're relatively well-off people with a cash-flow problem! We could have solved their cash-flow problem without destroying our cities' tax bases by allowing them to defer some of their taxes [0] until their property was sold.
Here's a great article from 2014 that talks about it: https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/
As for cities profiting from allowing new housing, this might interest you: http://www.henrygeorge.org/pcontents.htm
[0] For example, the amount of tax due immediately could be allowed to grow at 2% annually, following the Prop. 13 formula. Also, the tax due at sale could be limited to, say, 70% of the gain on the sale. That limit would probably never take effect, in practice, but I've learned from previous occasions where I've proposed this that people tend to get hung up on the possibility that one might owe more in tax than one stood to make on the sale. In fact, if you run the numbers, it takes some very strange assumptions to make the deferred tax even approach getting that large; but this rule should assuage that concern. (Basically, you'd need several years of strong price growth followed by a sudden, huge collapse.)
Eliminate prop 13 for all but one property, both for individuals and for businesses. This would eliminate the current tax loophole for investment properties, and demand that tech companies that have scaled to more than one campus pay their fair share to the communities they are located in.
Also, have prop 13 valuations reset whenever the property changes hands (including inheritance, and, for commercial real estate, this would get rid of the “sell via a holding company” loophole).
The housing shortage in the Bay Area might be the single largest drag on American prosperity.
BUT you couldn’t move the people through the city and bay area with current infrastructure.
Money (in big amounts) needs to be taken away from roadwork and poured into public transport.
Why would any SF resident care even a little bit what non-residents think of their housing situation?
"The housing shortage in the Bay Area might be the single largest drag on American prosperity."
Have you considered that someone's home, their life is not a function of 'industrial prosperity'? And that they're not interested in having their neighbourhood turned into a bunch of skyscrapers hosting Facebook Engineers?
It's possible they do - but it's entirely up to the residents to decide.
In particular, tech people, or even the intelligentsia in general, tend to have an odd disregard for cultural issues and tend to see 'housing' as entirely an economic or civic function (i.e. numbers, pricing, density, affordability) while disregarding the nature of the fact that these are communities and homes. (Witness the fact that everyone on this thread, and in most reference articles tend to talk about issues such as 'price')
I watched in my lifetime the city of Vancouver get bulldozed over and replace with a zillion apartment buildings. The money is nice, but otherwise, it's a brutally garish city, the architecture is thoughtless, it's just another 'pop up' city of the theme of the New Millenium / Pacific Rim. It will not age well. What's more - even as Van has evolved towards this super-high density Hong Kong / New York physicality, costs have skyrocketed and affordability has plummeted. This should be of no surprise of course, as almost everyone in the Western world, more density generally implies less affordability and certainly 'less space'. Have a look [1]. Texan cities like Dallas are considerably more affordable and considerably less dense.
Bulldozing most of a beautiful city possibly against the wishes of its citizens to drive some kind of risky civic/industrial experiment is ... an extreme view.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
Bay area housing is a ponzi scheme, and younger families have to choose between their careers and buying in at nonsensical pricing.
Local governments suppress housing starts and intentionally snarl the roads to keep the house of cards standing.
Sooner or later the older residents will be outnumbered by people that moved here, and the reckoning will probably be swift and severe. As you said, it’ll be up to the residents to decide.
A few years back, there were signs in Cupertino saying “no four story apartments”. I agree. If you’re within 0.25 miles of transit, it should be illegal to build (or improve) anything that short. I’m guessing this isn’t what the NIMBYs had in mind though.
Obviously HN skews towards tech but let’s not fall into the trap that SV is either representative or the center of “American prosperity” for the average citizen
Prices are set by the balance of demand and supply. The demand isn't going away. The supply is what we can do something about.
Even building expensive luxury apartments helps, unless no one can afford them at all (which is not what the builder wants to happen). The people who rent those aren't taking up spaces others could have afforded.
If housing prices were cut in half in SF you’d see WAY more people moving here.
Induced demand is "adding supply increased the price"
Build more freeways and you get more drivers.
> Build more freeways and you get more drivers.
That's like having a McDonalds without enough cashiers and then saying "hire more cashiers and you sell more hamburgers" is induced demand because the hamburgers cost the same but you sell more of them.
That's not induced demand, you're just changing the price. Having to wait in line (or sit in traffic) is a cost. If you reduce the cost, demand goes up, but that's just ordinary supply and demand again.
Prices are a function of demand and that's it.
Every city has to ultimately decide what kind of community they want to have and then act accordingly.
As SF is an attractive city, every home ever built there will essentially be bought or occupied, there is nearly an unlimited number of people who would like to live there - so it's merely a matter of what kind of density and price they choose to have.
Do they want SF to be a city of skyscrapers, with tiny expensive flats like NYC?
Or a neighbourhood of fairly expensive homes as it is now.
Nobody anywhere will doubt that 'building significantly more homes' will reduce the average cost of homes but ultimately SF residents will decide what they want to do: if they don't want skyscrapers or high-density style buildings, it's their business.
At a median home price of $1.7m, owning a home in SF is reserved for those grandfathered in or the wealthy.
Everyone deserves 'affordable housing' but not everyone deserves 'affordable housing' in the specific spot they want.
And FYI New York and Hong Kong even more expensive and much denser - should NYC 'triple its density'? Will that make thins better? Or maybe there's something missing from this logic.
There absolutely is. Here's a great paper studying the effect of removing rent control in Cambridge, MA (https://economics.mit.edu/files/9760) which found that rent in non-rent controlled units went up as a result of the removal. The effect is similar to what GP stated -- gentrification causes a feedback loop that can affect all housing.
All said, it is very possible (and I subscribe to the idea) that the Bay Area would not suffer from much induced demand because people are in the area for the economic opportunity, not for local amenities.
The sequence of events that lead to a rise in prices are similar - that is there is evidence that more affluent people moving in to a local area can result in rents going up for others in that same area.
In the rent control example, many people held on to RC apartments because they were a great deal, even though they weren't where they wanted to live. After RC ended, they moved to apartments they preferred (since there was no longer a big price differential), increasing demand (and thus price) for the originally non-RC apartments.
Tokyo's population has grown 1.5X over the last two decades while rents and property prices have been essentially flat.
No shit sherlock. Do you even know where that additional drmand is coming from? It's coming from people in their 20s or even 30s who are forced to live with their parents. It is coming from all those migrants that live together with two other room mates. The pent up demand is so large after decades of stagnation that it will take at least 25 years of building to get where they should be today.
Remember every single constructed unit allows another person to live there. The market rent shouldn't even enter the equation as a policy goal.
The problem with SF is that even if you caught up to this 25 years of pent-up demand, you still have more demand from all over the world to move to the Bay Area. It’s an induced demand problem. Most other cities don’t have this, except in maybe a few areas in those cities.
Or start something yourself! Where do you live?
If you're on twitter, the twitter networks usually bridge cities. I follow a lot of LA area YIMBY groups, but get some cross pollination from other cities too.
https://www.thecoastnews.com/city-council-nullifies-conteste...
I am not from USA, but over here i did have a 'pleasure' contacting them. They worked actively against communities they were supposed to represent. I am talking about both city councilors, and district ones.
You know whats the best part? you have like 3 options to pick, and they all are exactly the same(cozy job, with limited hours for appointments and ignoring your community)
... woosh .... I guess.
It automatically frames the question in a sophomoric way, where the “other side” is an evil force to be mocked and dismissed. In reality, there is no such thing as a “NIMBY”, just a collection of people with differing - often rational - interests concerning any given project. Until and unless you address these interests, calling people names and yelling ”just build, dammit!” will not get you what you want.
I think, if you talk to most of these folks, you find that many/most abstractly support the idea that building is required. It’s the specifics where the problems lie, and calling people names doesn’t resolve fundamental issues. This is why the “Yes in your Backyard” line is such a devastating rhetorical criticism: everyone favors development of projects that don’t affect them.
in other words, virtue-signalling about vague, general principles of increased development...buuut when that development actually impacts them, well! That particular project is just flawed for various reasons. The general idea is good! But it won't work here.
It's the equivalent of the boss who totally supports unions but, you know, a union just wouldn't be right for our particular company culture.
So, yeah, "yes in your backyard" is just the original definition of a NIMBY.
In other words, it's not a very useful way to look at the issue in my opinion.
Trying to map the high-dimensional "vector space" of political views onto a 1D line is very, very lossy, and definitely not useful outside of the very narrow context of general elections in a two-party system.
Even most “YIMBY” supporters are actually “Yes In Your Backyard”, because nearly everyone has some local environment they want to protect. Don’t want a pork rendering plant or a sewage treatment center or a strip club next door to your home? Congratulations: you’re a “NIMBY” too! It’s a sophomoric epithet that makes you feel good and superior to fling around, but does nothing to convince people who don’t already agree with you.
If you don’t understand this, you are doomed to fail to achieve your goals.
The caricature doesn't really help things.
Well of course. It does not surprised me that a wealthy landowner would not want competition, and would not want housing to become more affordable.
Just because someone's self interest is rational, does not me that I cannot criticize it.
Creating more affordable housing, and lowering rents, is obviously something that some people out there would not want, because they make money from rents being high.
Too tall? Make it shorter. Not enough public space? Make the area in front of it a parklet! Not enough subsidized housing? More BMR units and a donation to a neighborhood group will solve that one. Doesn't fit with the style or is otherwise ugly? Pay attention and design a building that fits, it's not that hard.
Although there might be tricky ones, like maybe the neighbors have been treating the lot as a park and would like to keep it that way or someone is afraid of losing the all-day sun on their backyard garden. Still, all of these should be solvable in principle, right?
Again, as you wisely point to, all of these possible concerns are individually eminently reasonable and addressable. Certainly insulting the people who are just trying to keep their homes and communities they way they like it isn't going to win them over!
With all that said, might there be problems in aggregate? When people are empowered to throw up essentially arbitrary roadblocks, no matter how reasonable their complaints, the result can be near-infinite stonewalling. This has happened enough that some people have lost trust in the process that enabled good, kind, compassionate people to get their perfectly reasonable concerns addressed.
So perhaps there's some room for subtlety here. How do you think YIMBYs should frame things, to avoid the issues you rightly point to?
It’s cynical to call it YIMBY, because a) it mirrors the name-calling, and b) anyone who is intellectually honest knows that YIMBY really means YIYBY for most people. So stop it. Own that you want something that will be at least a little bit painful for everyone. Then sell the positives.
In my personal experience, I've often found it to be extremely difficult to sell shared sacrifice to people who are empowered to refuse to share. After all, why can't this building go in some other neighborhood? Away from them? If you're being honest, it probably can. The next neighborhood over will probably have the same question.
Also, SF has the wrinkle that a lot of people see building housing as pushing up rents, making the framing you suggest very difficult on multiple counts. Attempting to discuss this with people seldom goes as well as could be hoped. This belief seems to have become totemic, making it functionally impossible to discuss.
Perhaps you've had different results than I. I sincerely hope so.
I have found name-calling and coherent branding to be pretty effective at providing people a banner to gather under. It doesn't do anything for those it makes into enemies, but it does something for people who might be your allies. When the NIMBYs are already well organized and Californians For Lowering Rent Through Shared Sacrifice isn't, I can see where someone might make that calculation.
Unfortunately the incentive problem here is real, and there isn't a super obvious solution to it. At least, not to me. Trying to shift the culture and convince people to vote against their own economic incentives is great and all, but I don't think it is destined for success at any significant scale.
I grew up in a single family detached home in Queens, NY in the 80s as the shift to bigger condos and rentals started. The newer buildings are almost always shoddy and ugly, and dealing with landlords for property issues suck as compared to the homeowner.
I suspect it will be hard to solving the housing problem without unwinding Prop 13 and some of the other issues that make it harder for people to sell homes.
It also increases the minimum price the seller is willing to accept for the property, because they won't sell unless the buyer offers enough to compensate them for the higher tax rate they'll have to pay on the new property. It increases the bid/ask spread on long-held properties, so that more often no transaction takes place at all until e.g. the owner dies and the property is sold in an estate sale for less than the owner would have been willing to accept if they were still alive.
Also to add to this discussion is the various props and "tax treaties" between counties that allow old homeowners the ability to transfer tax basis from their old property to the new one they're buying. But this is a once or twice in a lifetime deal.
Remember, we don't have a lack of land. There is plenty of prime, commute friendly, land available in SF-Bayarea and most other CA cities.
Old SFH will get demo-ed and gets rebuilt as SFH - just because bulldozing a $200k+ building + spending $600k to rebuild - can only be justified by a crazy SFH owner who can justify it all in terms of getting his/her dream home.
People want to live where there's culture and work. Why should they not?
Big reason I moved from Ljubljana, Slovenia to San Francisco. There’s just more stuff here and it’s amazing.
The economies of scale are insane. I have more good restaurants within walking distance now than I used to have in the whole city.
What I miss most is real nature. Trees that are properly green, the changing of seasons, the mountains in the distance. That’s what I miss most. And good european food. Super hard to find in SF
Hmm, here I am thinking I don't really care about the skin color of my neighbors. It's none of my business. But, I try and not judge people on immutable characteristics like color and age.
That's a nice sentiment, but if you dig a bit, there are probably reasons why his neighborhood is full of "older white people", and there's a good chance that it wasn't a natural process of sorting.
Recommended reading: https://amzn.to/2St6rOM
I usually get $10 a month or so if I occasionally post a link that I think is highly relevant to a discussion, that I turn around and spend on more books.
Happy to buy anyone a beer with the massive amounts of cash I'm raking in.
Do you want to play the "is it racist if we change the color" game?
Well, crap, that's a fair point... But... You can't go backwards and you can't go forwards any faster than anyone else. You can't change it yourself no matter how hard you try (general relativity spaceships aside of course).
edit: YES, it's a nice plan to just raise rent to cover the school taxes. However, unless you are in a popular market, your rent prices may not bear the increase. Example Northeastern PA has cheap rent because there are so many places available, and thus the $4000/yr in school tax portion of the property tax is not able to be passed on to renters.
If property taxes increased substantially, I’d have had to raise rent...
What happens when you increase property taxes is that property values go down to compensate; it's less valuable to own when you have to pay more to do it. So in the short term the property tax increase hits whoever owned the property when the rate change was announced. But then it becomes less profitable to own property in that area, so people invest less in building new housing there, or even in maintaining the existing housing. That tends to constrain supply and cause rents to increase until you're back at equilibrium. The long-term equilibrium is based on the relationship between rents and total costs. Property tax is a cost so in the long-term higher property taxes result in higher rents. (This isn't counting the pathological cases where higher property taxes reduce property values and investment and the government responds by further raising property taxes until the locality is in a death spiral. Naturally rents in dying localities tend to go down.)
In California long time landlords get Prop 13 tax cuts. New ones don't. They compete for the same tenants and charge the same rent.
Long time landlords have much bigger profit margins because of that law.
Other states have property tax restrictions but I don't know as much about them.
"Long time landlords" and "new landlords" are not inherently different people, they're the same people at different points in time. It's like saying a landlord which has paid off the mortgage on their building makes more money because they don't have to make mortgage payments. The value of the future reduction in property taxes gets priced into the purchase -- but then so does the cost of higher property taxes at the beginning, since the government still needs a given amount of revenue.
The thing Prop 13 really does is to discourage long-time landlords from selling the property at all, because the buyer will have to pay higher property tax than the seller which makes the property "worth more" to the seller, even if it's otherwise worth more to the buyer. For example, this can discourage development because the existing owner doesn't have the inclination or the capital for expansion but would demand enough for the property that it would make it unprofitable to a third party who would have to pay higher taxes.
With the way you can inherit property and keep its valuation, there may be a class of "long-time landlords"-- individuals and organizations-- emerging in major cities. Especially, as you note, since Prop 13 discourages transactions.
The important thing being conveyed is lack of diversity, not whiteness. In the United States, saying something is "mostly white people" conveys that other ethnic groups are not present for some reason (whether it be them self-selecting to not participate or because of exclusion). The purpose is almost always to note diversity or lack-thereof, and assume that the person is making a value judgement about the people because their skin is white is to completely miss the point.
For example, if you bought a pack of starbust candies, and they were almost all orange, you might note or complain that they were almost all orange. I would do so, and orange is my favorite flavor of those. The issue is, I desire the diversity of colors and flavors, and too much orange is not as good as what the added variation brings.
So, "mostly old white people" as a negative doesn't mean old people are bad, or white people are bad, or old white people are bad, but that mostly old white people are not as good as a group that has more variation in it. "Mostly" is the word you should be focusing on, not the other ones.
I would also argue that a lot of times people are called racist (or called out for saying racist things) these days are likely because people are also less likely to give others the benefit of a doubt for their actions or words. This is likely complicated in that it appears some people that do harbor racist views feel more emboldened to speak them, but I'm not sure how to pick apart how much is one and how much is the other.
In the candy example, you would believe the color is an important determinant of some quality of the candy. If it wasn't, you wouldn't care what color they were.
I should add that it's not the end of the world to be a racist. Most people probably are. It's perfectly legal and normal! Admitting it is hard though.
Since you're running with the candy analogy... your logical next step is way off. GPs candy analogy was supposed to be simple such that we could all start on the same page - either you're being purposefully difficult to try and argue your racism point, or are simply missing it. I like all colors of starburst. They taste different. Different is GOOD. I don't want an all orange package.
I think that's easily proven false. I value diversity of ethnicity and race because I think it's statistically more likely that it results in diversity of culture, and I think that's the real useful thing to be aiming for.
In the United States "white" isn't a race any more than "black" is. It's a short-hand for a cultural identity that our society foists upon you, and it comes with a mostly shared set of experiences and understanding.
A "black" person (which could be historically from Africa, Asia, South America or elsewhere) will likely face some shared set of experiences, as will a "white" person, or an "asian" person, or a "latino" person. The same could be said for a U.S. citizen or a European.
If you think "white" was used as shorthand for "the largest and most dominant cultural identity in America" as I do, then you think that diversity in that brings different perspectives and cultural norms, and some people find that refreshing and interesting (as well as there being some evidence that it provides many other benefits and detriments to various degrees).
So, do I think skin color is an important determinant of some quality in this discussion? Yes. In the case where you're looking at a mostly homogeneous group based on age and likely cultural identity, I think encouraging differences in both age and that cultural identity are likely to introduce more cultural diversity than some other options, and that's based on sociological and statistical beliefs. You may or may not think that qualifies as racism, but I don't, and part of that is because I don't think the result is based on actual skin color, just skin color in a geographic region (that is, a country with a different cultural and ethnic makeup may not see similar results). That means skin color is little other than a statistical marker for other, more useful attributes in this case.
It is more than selfish. This is bigotry against the elderly.
This is the parent, afaict:
[..] notJim 2 hours ago | undown | parent | flag | favorite | on: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat push...
Also a homeowner, and I'm a YIMBY (or PHIMBY) for selfish reasons as well. My neighborhood is mostly old white people, because they bought their houses years ago and stayed put. Not that I have anything against them, but I'd love to have a more diverse, younger neighborhood. More neighbors also means more customers for local businesses, which means more shops and restaurants in walking distance. More neighbors would eventually also mean better public transit, because the ridership would demand it. I think the selfish benefits of more housing are often overlooked due to fear of change.[..]
https://www.dartmouth.edu/~wfischel/Papers/00-04.PDF
When all your wealth is tied up in a single leveraged asset anything that might lead to a big change in it is more risk than most people will tolerate.
* Literal backyard: in this case, then maybe one could argue that if we accept the premise[1] that YIMBYs aren't homeowners, then they are in fact arguing about other people's backyards.
* Figurative backyard: in this case, then whether someone is a homeowner is irrelevant, because the backyard refers to the general area, shared by all residents.
Of course, as we know from this thread, backyard in [N|Y]IMBY refers to the figurative backyard. Therefore, we must reject the argument that people are arguing over other's backyards.
[1]: As I argue elsewhere in this thread, I don't think we should accept this premise.
Repeal prop 13 and my taxes will go up enormously--and I'll vote for that repeal at any opportunity.
Some of us do actually believe that the long term common good is worth sacrificing our own personal short term gain.
Worth a view The Insane Battle To Sabotage a New Apartment Building Explains San Francisco's Housing Crisis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExgxwKnH8y4
By contrast, NYC has 27,016 people per sq mi; the densest suburb of Boston (Somerville) has 18,431; West Hollywood has 18,297.
There's plenty of room for more people in the Bay Area, if denser housing is allowed.
I believe I looked for something like that in the BA and it doesn't really exist.
My ex moved into a condominium complex that has exactly zero parking spots or loading docks for visitors, and no parking for half a mile in either direction. It's an absolute total fail. Neighbors rat on each other to get each other's cars towed because they get so upset. It's literally impossible to have a party there or even invite friends over because they simply cannot park and there is no transit available anywhere near there. There aren't any bike lanes either because it's a financially strapped city and the complex is near the border of a rich city that explicitly does things to make it harder to get between the two townships.
I'm just saying, both hands have to know what each other are doing and people have to make rational decisions at the municipal level.
That being said, I'm not aware of any YIMBYish laws that outright restrict parking in residential areas. The only thing equivalent I can think of is the Market street law in SF, but that's not a residential area, so it actually makes sense.
If the condo complex is sufficiently unattractive, few people will want to live there, and prices will fall to the point where buyers or renters accept the low price and the associated hassle. That's a market decision. If the condo complex is, let's imagine, 50% lower than market, then maybe people will accept the parking situation.
and there is no transit available anywhere near there
Then residents might try demanding it from the city government.
You may like this: https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/193... book.
Then come up with a plan and move to a more affordable/sustainable state or country.
What causes people to migrate to the bay is the office creation, not the housing creation.
What happens is they congest traffic far less than they do now, driving from farther-flung places.
Consider that there is still housing growth, but its in South San Jose, Morgan Hill, and Gilroy. Those people all have to drive past Los Gatos, Cambell, Cupertino, San Jose, and Sunnyvale to get to Mountain View. All your doing is increasing the amount of Miles people have to drive, and that in term increases the amount of time they spend in their cars, and clogs the roads. If you built houses in Mountain View or Palo Alto, none of those people would be on the roads, and if they were it wouldn't be for nearly as long. You don't have to take my word for it take a look at average commute times in the bay area, those increases aren't due to a 2x increase in Mountain View, its due to a 2x increase far outside with people driving in.
Public transportation is great, but the solution is to build houses near where people work, that means San Francisco and Mountain View.
There is a fixed amount of people at any point in time in a metropolitan area. Building at the center will not make new people appear. It removes people from the commuting crowd.
If you focus on dense developments near them, that goes a long way.
Although I think California especially needs new housing, the bay area in particular has a housing issue which is somewhat artificially created due to a number of large (google, facebook, etc) and smaller tech companies requiring a "buts in seat" mentality and a philosophy that all "important" jobs be based in the bay area near their HQ's. Its really quite sad as a job that can be done anywhere is forced to be located in one of the most expensive areas on earth.