"...and rules that compel developers to meet labor and environmental standards that often exceed what’s required for luxury condominiums."
It's not just rules. Funding is competitive, and if you want a competitive bid you need to promise the world. Parking, green technologies, accessibility, community space, lots of amenities for residents, landscaping, not to mention the cost of ongoing compliance.
"Another is California’s labyrinthine financing process, which forces developers to navigate a dozen different funding programs controlled by five separate departments with authority divided between the governor and state treasurer."
Having worked in the industry for 10 years, I'd say this is an understatement. There's also federal, local and county regulations in addition to the multi-tentacled state system.
This is so depressing to see. These are the symptoms of a system slowly grinding to a halt under its own weight. Compare the tax code in 1970 (or earlier) vs today (1). Regulations and laws keep getting more and more complex. It keeps getting slower and costlier to get anything done. Then throw in the aging infrastructure, the greater wealth inequality along with significantly decreased social mobility. Un-affordable healthcare and education costs that cripple you before you can even begin to walk. Completely un-affordable housing after that, or a ridiculous commute without decent public transport. No wonder our political system looks as bad as it does.. people are getting increasingly angrier, more polarized, more frustrated, more desperate. There is such inertia to these 'systems' that it takes overwhelming effort and sacrifice to change its course.
These problems don't seem to be getting solved, they seem to be getting worse. How do you realistically reverse something like this? Are there examples of a successful reversal having been made without hitting the dreaded 'reboot' button on society?
We will probably muddle along during our lifetimes, but I fear for my children's generation.
I sold a piece of software to the state of California once. Among the 100+ page contract was a page where we had to agree that if, during the installation of this web app, a baby was to be abandoned, that we promise that we would abandon said baby at an approved fire station within 3 days of birth.
That was probably 10+ years ago, but it was a real eye opening moment in seeing the mindless wheels of bureaucracy turn. Obviously everyone at every stage of the procurement process knew this page of the contract was insane in the context of installing a simple web app, but no one had the power remove unneeded rules in situations in which they don't apply and no one is going out on an anti-baby-safety ledge. So everyone for the rest of time has to agree on how to properly abandon babies in every contract.
Through my employer, I do work on an open source application. At one point a 3 letter agency contracted us to add some functionality that they needed. Of the developers at the company who work on said application, I happened to be the one picked to work on these features.
Eventually, someone actually read the contract and noticed that it required anyone working on it to have a security clearance. I ended up working on other parts of the same open source application that were being funded by a contract without such a clause, so we could have someone with a clearance charge the contract.
I read an article last year talking about reboot cities/regions. They mentioned places like hong kong, shenzhen, silicon valley, dubai and similar places throughout history where they are given a status that allows for more freedom than surrounding areas usually with less regulation. The thesis was that these areas are essential for making big progress in science or engineering or business , and that they were sort of a double shot in that not only do they have fewer restrictions, but they also attract people who want to accomplish things. These regions never last forever, but really spark kind of a punctuated equilibrium sort of environment for a generation or two.
I’d love to see each state support a city like this. But it can be tricky to balance, especially if it sounds unfair to the rest of the populace. Also, it would require separate governmental systems that could lead to all kinds of problems. As it is the US was set up initially to allow for easier variation among the states to get some of these benefits. But it can be nearly impossible not to end up with similar regulations over time. You even see it within corporations too with similar corporate policies as scar tissue from similar problems they all experience.
I'm still sbuurprised at how many people think we don't have buildings because of NIMBY residents, or because of lack of space. Our building issue is entirely self-inflicted. Do most people even know what it takes to remove an ordinance tree on your property? There's red tape EVERYWHERE, and special interest has made sure that their pet issues have considerations along each step of the way.
The bullshit and nimbyism in California is truly breathtaking.
That happened in the wealthy San Diego County enclave of Solana Beach, where the Pearl was cut from 18 apartments to 10 and its approval required an underground garage with 53 parking spots.
In 1968 the number of books on 'environment movement' here rockets up. It will be more compelling if there is a link between events related to housing regulations and the other massive upswing in 1985, and then the downswing in 1997.
Linking to a ngrams graph that shows "environmentalism" graphed against "civil rights" as evidence that environmentalism is just a fig leaf for segregation is beyond flimsy. Surely this must be the arch example of correlation ≠ causation.
Of course there's so much more to it, but there isn't really a single source I can link you that makes this argument. One example I can easily show is the history of planned freeways in the Bay Area that were canceled due to environmental concerns. Take a look at what areas the canceled freeways would have connected, then take a look at the demographics of those areas. Notice in particular how no freeway (or rail!) connection to the Golden Gate was ever allowed, since that would have connected Marin to the Bay Area megalopolis.
Robert Moses was criticized for doing similar things in New York City (making overpasses too low so buses couldn't go through, etc). Have you read The Power Broker by Robert Caro?
Yep, I have. I'm not saying freeways would be all roses, but I generally believe that connecting people can only be an overall good thing. It's absolutely true that viaduct structures, for example, are visible separations between low-lying neighborhoods, but they weren't intended to stay low-lying neighborhoods. The original planning documents for e.g. the Embarcadero Freeway talk about the proposed developments that would complement it.
I also think the common framing as freeways "cutting a path through neighborhoods" is exactly the wrong way to look at it. San Francisco's, for example, were based on this 1935 traffic study. The whole point was to get already-existing traffic up off the streets and keep neighborhoods livable: https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/5409261018/in/album-...
There's (unfortunately) a real-world example I can point to showing this still holds up in the 21st Century. The northernmost part of the Central Freeway carried more than 50% crosstown (non-neighborhood) traffic in San Francisco but was torn down in the very early 2000s and replaced with the horrible Octavia Blvd that keeps killing cyclists and has made neighborhood traffic worse in every way, even necessitating crosswalk closures. Here's the full study on before and after the "Freeway Removal" (now there's a dogwhistle for ya!) https://www.sfcta.org/sites/default/files/2019-03/Final%20Re...
"In the absence of meaningful improvements to travel improvements, the reduction in automobile capacity has not been accompanied by noticeable mode shift. Instead, the neighborhood has been challenged to effectively deal with high peak‐period traffic levels and resulting congestion"
The canceling of those planned freeways for environmental concerns is not problematic in itself - the failure to deliver the planned rail alternative is. [1]
Freeways vs rail is a false dichotomy. The best transit systems are multi-modal for different needs, and those things do serve different needs. What we're really talking about is establishing rights of way. Once you have those it's usually no harder (politically) to build one type of artery alongside the other, like how BART's Concord and Dublin lines were built in the medians of the existing CA-24 and I-580, respectively.
powerful forces aren't able to block decentralized developments dotting the country, but they're able to gather enough momentum to pass centralized and controversial regulations? that doesn't pass the smell test.
that said, CEQA challenges have become a de facto tool in the nimby arsenal in CA.
A lot of local governments were overtaken by the anti-growth environmental crowd at the time. Marin County in particular had their 1968 growth plan revoked and a famously anti-growth plan replaced it in 1971:
'The decisive blow against growth was initiated in 1971 with the issuance of a Marin Planning Department report that proposed preserving Marin's lands except along the Highway 101 corridor. Entitled "Can the Last Place Last?" the report took its theme from Lew Welch's 1969 poem "The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings" The poem lamented the "hordes" that were "now piling up" and contained a refrain that captured perfectly the sentiment in Marin: "This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go."'
Fair, sorry for my histrionic wording. The "roots of the environmental movement" is more like what I'm getting at. Put it this way: I care about the environment more than ever but no longer consider myself an Environmentalist™ after learning more of its history :)
The city of Bolinas is notorious for vandalizing signs that point to it, to ensure outsiders can't find their way there. And they have a Bolinas Border Patrol, in a "ha, ha, only serious" kind of xenophobic way.
More like "forces seeking to block development lend their backing to environmentalists because they realize that they share some common ground" but I agree that the blanket characterization of environmentalism is an exaggeration.
From the article: "“Low-income people tend to own cars that are in disrepair and ride motorcycles adding to the noise of a ‘lights out at 8 p.m. community,’” Marylyn Rinaldi, a neighboring condominium owner, wrote in 2011 in a letter to the City Council that was later cited in a lawsuit over the project." Nimbyism at its finest.
It's more the sneering, condescending tone of the comment that I thought was jaw-dropping. Sure, noise ordinances are reasonable. But labeling poor people as loud - and thus undesirable - is not okay. I can't believe I even had to explain this to be honest.
what percent of "low-income people" own motorcycles? what would the occupants of 10 apartments have to do such that a small city would no longer be said to be able to have "quiet nights" that could not be enforced against by any method other than excluding the apartments completely?
ooh, I'm gonna go with "a lot". Because motorcycles are a lot cheaper to buy, own, and maintain that cars. And a lot of them don't even require licenses in the US (49cc and smaller, if I'm not mistaken).
A cheap used car provides a lot more utility than an equivalently priced used motorcycle so that's what most people tend to buy if they can only have one vehicle.
Cars do have more utility than motorcycles, but where I live (college town in American midwest) there are many poor people who drive small, cheap motorcycles. Speculation on why:
<50cc scooters are subject to different -- usually lower -- registration, insurance, inspection, and licensing requirements than cars.
State-minimum insurance for my cheap (KBB ~$1000) used (+200K miles) car would be about $700/year. Similarly minimal insurance for a 2010 Honda Ruckus would be $100/year. (I just checked Geico.)
Small motorcycles consume a lot less gasoline than cars, especially old, cheap ones being driven in-city.
Spare parts for scooters can be purchased and shipped cheaply, and assembled in a minimum of space with cheap hand tools.
Scooters don't require a full parking space to store. They can be stashed against signs, at bike racks, next to doors, in tiny alleys, or any other free spot. Living with other people? You don't need to worry about blocking the driveway, or being blocked yourself. Work downtown? You can get away without buying a pass at a parking garage.
The number of places in the US where the situation you mentioned is reasonable and public transit is not also good enough to go car-less is very small. Carrying groceries on a moped is doable but a pain. Commuting on one in the winter isn't exactly fun either. Carrying kids on a scooter is a great way to meet every cop in every place you drive through. I wish mopeds were more practical but there's a bunch of little reasons that add up to them not working as well as a cheap car.... which is why pretty much nobody around me except a bunch of single people under the age of about 25 rides them.
Everything you have said is generally true. My point is that there are scooters driven where I live, that most of them are driven by low-income people who are in the presumably-uncomfortable position of a scooter being their best option, and that noise regulations would be an indirect regressive tax against them.
motorcycle owners are wealthier on average (this is really easy to google). I don't see really any motorcycles or scooters at all in poor neighborhoods. They generally have beater cars or no vehicle at all.
It may be, but there is a behavioral difference in different economic environments —though even within lower income communities many people who are forced to live there “put up with” these quality of life issues because they don’t have the ability to afford to live in communities that observe these standards. Not all that different from people complaining about the loudness of living next to college student rentals on Friday’s and weekends.
Truth be told I had a loud muffler back when I could barely afford my share of a three way apt rental. Nowadays I would find it hard to tolerate the noise I caused back then. But that was a diff neighborhood and it was accepted.
Declaring that low-income people won't obey noise ordinances is extremely classist in my view. Yes, tell residents before they move in that the area has strict noise ordinances, and then hand out tickets for violators. But don't block affordable housing simply because it "might happen".
I'd like to agree -and in principle I do, just not in practice. In my case, I didn't have a loud muffler because I liked it. It was rusted through and I could not afford the repair. It had to wait. Ordinance or not didn't influence my choice. That's different from the guy who opens the throttle on his wannabe Harley as he accelerates from every stop sign on the street at 10 and 11PM... He does it just because... he's an...
Still, you must concede that the parade of "rusty muffler" arguments are a silly compared to a legitimate housing crisis. Not everything our neighbors/family/friends do makes us happy. And hey, they might have a rusty muffler, but maybe they're less snobbish and more friendly. So while it's totally reasonable to be worried about traffic and school crowding, I feel people should at least try a bit harder to shrug their shoulders about the little things and give it a chance.
I can see a system where you build where land is affordable, you bring transit there and you have buckets of units. Units for families, units for college kids, units for singles and you stratify the units so that like people end up with like people. Those who like quiet get quiet neighbors, those who like noise get noisy neighbors. Mix climbers with climbers and losers with other losers. You don't need groups that drag down others dragging down people who have a chance and you want climbers helping others.
This won't work in the US for various reasons, but it may work in other places where they can move people accordingly.
People disapprove of everything that involves "segregation" of different sub-cultures, even when that segregation is mutually beneficial. The American ideal is a spatially-uniform melting pot.
I’m not so sure people in Eastern Europe or parts of Africa and Asia would have an issue with this kind of stratification, but you may be right, it might go against cultural norms.
Just a thought, but several of my motorbike-owning friends tell me the noise generated from the bike reminds those in larger vehicles of their presence.
It's for public use...which was originally supposed to be paid(to help make the apartments affordable), but got turned into free parking. It was an odd turn of words, but was explained later on.
A friend of mine lived in the bay area for a bit and ended up leaving because he couldn't handle the virtue signaling. From his experience a significant amount of people would talk about helping low socioeconomic folk, oppression, or any other in vogue topic but never actually do anything. These would then be the loudest voices lobbying against having a methadone clinic in their neighborhood. He's living in Denver now which has a similar problem but on a palatable scale, according to him.
My summary of civic philosophy in the Bay Area: "Think liberally. Act conservatively."
In addition to San Francisco I've lived in the US South, the Northeast an in Europe. And out of all those regions I feel the Bay Area has been the most conservative and discordant. It's really a shame how a combination of the Byzantine legal processes and small cadres who know and shape the system have created a tyranny of the minority in the Bay Area and San Francisco in particular.
The culture is fairly different between the South Bay vs. San Francisco. South Bay is largely full of immigrants living the American dream: they work hard at a FANG during the day, buy an expensive suburban house to go home to at night, take their kids to parks and cultural attractions on the weekends and do their best to make sure they get into a good college, and otherwise mind their own business. Basically like the rest of America but less white. SF has many more people who like to stick their nose in other people's business to enact radical social change. It also has more genuine diversity and weirdness. SF is where people like to do large-scale social experiments, the South Bay largely sticks to large-scale technical experiments.
This same distinction also applies to the type of startup that gets founded in each place. South Bay attracts more companies that are capitalizing on a technical change in the world - Google, Apple, Netflix, hardware companies like NVidia and Memorex, drone startups, large scale enterprise software like Cloudera or Palantir. San Francisco attracts more companies that are capitalizing on a social change: AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, Stripe, Zynga, Bird, Lime, Twitter, Medium, etc. Notable exceptions are Facebook (social change but in the South Bay, though they've also built a top-notch technology org) and DropBox (technical, but in SF).
Very true, just go on Nextdoor in the Bay area. The same person who "fights" for social justice for the oppressed is the person who posts "How do I get rid of the homeless tents in front of my house?".
I'm genuinely curious how you are seeing Nextdoor activity outside of your own Nextdoor neighborhood, given that How Nextdoor limits participants by neighborhood and verifies addresses before you can even read postings. I can't even find an option to see other neighborhoods. As my mom was dying and I was helping to find resources and later sell her stuff, the only way I could get access was to register with her address and then wait for the coded postcard.
I admit I don't know much about the affordable housing efforts, but I don't know why anyone would put a lot of work into building affordable housing in Solana Beach.
It's a tiny ( by CA standards ) town right on the beach and most non-service jobs are a crowded commute away. I don't object to having affordable housing everywhere, but if I wanted to build some in San Diego county, it's about the last place I would go.
Yes this feels a bit like clickbait. The town definitely seems to have gentrified in the past 2 decades. Its like trying to build affordable housing in an area where everyone wants to live.
It'd be the equivalent to trying to build affordable housing next to Central Park in NYC or Waikiki in Hawaii. Its great to try but don't make a big fuss when it is expensive.
A slight exaggeration. The Pearl site is only a 5-minute walk from the train station. Other than that yes, grossly uneconomical. As to your question "why": State of California mandate enforced on all incorporated cities, waste of money or no.
And this is why other ritzy areas have no interest in incorporating as cities proper. Rancho Santa Fe has a "Covenant" that performs usual city functions to the maximum extent legally possible e.g. private security guards, while dodging State mandates.
Until the state starts preempting these idiotic local laws and push builders to build, nothing will change. They have the power. Do they have the votes?
Low-income families often pack many people into a small apartment, so it's not unrealistic for one apartment to need 3 parking spots for two working parents and a working child, just as an example.
Now, I'll grant it's only very specific corridors, but the densest parts of California do have passable mass transit. The majority of Californians don't have access to this, but the most crowded parts do.
Mass transit exists but it's really bad -- e.g. Muni and BART and Caltrain in the San Francisco area. Constant delays, mechanical failures, and overcrowding.
Now that Coronavirus and social distancing are the new normal, I expect some of those transit systems to lose funding and perhaps even shut down.
I'm a huge fan of public transit and I'd love to see good transit systems exist in California, but I have no hope that it will happen.
BART! I used it once just to see how it went. A cross between a cattle car and a shipping container. Unbearably noisy and dirty. Reminded me of the public transit in Gotham when Bruce Wayne returned.
I used to take Caltrain to work. The best way to find out about the frequent service outages and accidents was not from Caltrain, but from stranded passengers complaining on Twitter.
Caltrain doesn't really communicate, their delay estimates are as reliable as the progress bar on Windows 3.1, and the stations are unstaffed. It's a total joke from top to bottom.
I used to spend a lot of money on Uber to get home when Caltrain let me down.
Uh, is there any state with decent mass transit in the USA? Some of the cities have "passable" mass transit, but they're an exception imo. Nothing comes close to take-your-pick medium sized town in take-your-pick European country.
Is NYC mass transit not considered decent? The subway always seemed pretty reasonable to me. Admittedly, that's a city, not a state, but states vary wildly.
I'd say it's not too bad, but it's rapidly falling to pieces, and personally I haven't seen the kind of action I think necessary to ensure it functions at all 50 years from now, shit, let alone 20.
And that's a huge chunk of the US population, but still, it's one city. What of Los Angeles, with its buses stuck in permanent traffic, or its subway with, what, 15 stops? What of Houston, with a light rail that travels about the speed of a car but waits at every intersection, and serves something like 10% of the city? What about getting from one city in the US to another?
Sure, it's a big country. Sure, it industrialized the car. Sure. But still.
That's totally fair. As a rule, the US's mass transit system is a garbage fire. However, I consider NYC's to be reasonably good, specifically in response to
By reducing number of apartments from 18 to 10 - I assume that by this time the garage had already been built so downsizing it was not possible.
Also, I've just noticed: why on earth would they build affordable housing next to the beach? Is this some twisted take on equality, that poor people also deserve view at the ocean? If "affordable housing" competes for the same land as luxury residences it will end up just as expensive.
Forcing poor people to pay for parking makes their housing more expensive and is part of what is causing huge problems in California. When I lived in Austria, my wife and I lived in a place with no parking included, by choice. We found a public place about a kilometer away that was free. Kind of a hassle, but it was a good compromise for our finances back then.
The government choosing parking minimums is a huge market distortion and antithetical to the freedom of the market to provide a diversity of solutions. There are boatloads of houses in the US with huge 3 car garages. Give people the freedom to live with zero parking!
One thing you'll find about US culture: Even the most stringent, freedom-loving, anti-government types will fully embrace draconian and byzantine laws provided they're issued at the local level. If you want Laissez-faire at the local level without a cabin in the woods you must eschew local government and live in an unincorporated part of a county (and then move in a few years once that gets swallowed up by a growing metro area).
Not sure why this is getting downvoted. I did the census in 2010 and this was something I saw a lot in lower income neighborhoods -- easily 8+ people in 2-3 bedroom apartments.
They got to get to work, school, etc. And in the US you need a car, cuz public transit sucks, ergo, multiple parking spaces.
A dumb law, perhaps, but the parent comment isn't wrong.
I think the original design as implied in the article was that the garage was to be a paid garage for the community and the fees from it would help to repay some of the grants to build the housing. It was not "you need 5 parking spots per unit plus 3 for building management".
This seems to be a trend for medium density construction projects now. In our rapidly-gentrifying suburban city, new buildings above a certain height are only approved if they include public parking spaces, regardless if it's residential, commercial, or mixed use.
I can't speak for other cities, but when I used to live and work in SLC the addition of lots of new underground parking helped bring the downtown back to life.
> Residents and the public would pay for parking in an underground garage, which would help finance the project, as would rent from a small grocery store.
Mixed use is gonna need a lot more parking.
> After a year of negotiations with the city, Hitzke agreed to shrink the Pearl to 10 apartments and make it free for the public to park in the 53-space garage.
Unclear if the grocery store is still there at this point, but now it's a free public garage, not just residents.
This isn't a story of parking minimums, this is a story of a small town being picky about the type of development permitted.
> How did it ever get here? Requiring more than 2 parking spots per apartment is insane.... especially for "affordable housing".
People who live near new property developments don't want to end up with their streets completely full of parked cars from residents and guests of the new building.
I can't say it's unreasonable for the existing residents to feel that way. I lived in a neighborhood where that happened, and parking got so bad it was difficult for people to visit me.
That kind of parking situation is the kind of thing that people are willing to deal with in NYC, not the suburbs. So they pass laws to require parking spaces. This particular example is extreme though.
The government shouldn't be in the business of providing free car storage for residents, anyway. Free street parking is the problem here, not the completely inevitable demand for that underpriced service.
The proposed building site is an existing public parking lot. The underground parking lot isn't just for the residents, it has to replace the public parking capacity it's occupying as well:
Residents and the public would pay for parking in an underground garage,
which would help finance the project, as would rent from a small grocery store.
Housing seems to me to be one of the most government-planned markets due to the strict zoning laws, but I've only seen fairly lefty orgs advocating for relaxed regulation. I'm surprised there isn't more movement from libertarians along the lines that property owners should have more rights for what they can build on their land.
I think the libertarians are worried that their next door neighbor will drag in a trailer. Ideals are one thing, property values are another.
Around here we have a lot of open space advocates that don't want any development (even though we are losing population and in a generation won't be able to fund our schools). I've often wanted to ask one of those folks (normally older with a nice older home) if they are so invested in open space why don't they knock down their house?
Some libertarians are presumably also in support of "you spent money buying land and a house in an area with full awareness of a specific framework of zoning laws and those laws should not be changed without good cause and due process". (Libertarians are not necessarily and are often not anarchists.)
I think there are few true libertarians, and a whole lot more people who call themselves libertarians but instead subscribe to the 'rules for thee but not for me' mindset shared among many neoconservatives.
> Housing seems to me to be one of the most government-planned markets due to the strict zoning laws, but I've only seen fairly lefty orgs advocating for relaxed regulation. I'm surprised there isn't more movement from libertarians along the lines that property owners should have more rights for what they can build on their land.
Not sure about what anyone here considers as libertarian, but if you were to ask a libertarian what they would tell you is that if you own property you are free to do as you please so long as you do not harm someone else.
Also not sure what you mean by lefty orgs, because labor unions, public unions and environmental groups are the biggest lobbyist influence on the high price of housing. When it comes to affordability, housing is generally (ahem - not "always") less affordable in blue states and least affordable in the bluest regions of the blue states.
> Not sure about what anyone here considers as libertarian, but if you were to ask a libertarian what they would tell you is that if you own property you are free to do as you please so long as you do not harm someone else.
I think that's why I'm surprised I don't hear that more. The size of someone's back yard or height of their fence (to a reasonable extent) seems like it wouldn't harm someone else, but they're strongly regulated in much of CA's single-family zoning.
> Also not sure what you mean by lefty orgs, because labor unions, public unions and environmental groups are the biggest lobbyist influence on the high price of housing.
Totally. There are tons of liberal orgs that are contributing to the housing shortage. I mean the few orgs I see advocating for development (eg SF YIMBY, or politicians like Scott Wiener) appear more liberal than libertarian.
> I think that's why I'm surprised I don't hear that more. The size of someone's back yard or height of their fence (to a reasonable extent) seems like it wouldn't harm someone else, but they're strongly regulated in much of CA's single-family zoning.
I'm not sure what you mean, but to clarify: the libertarian position is that if the fence harms no one, then there is no one, not even governments, to have anything to do with said fence besides the fence's owner, as that is the owner's right.
There are two liberties in tension: the right to do what you want on your own land, and the right to live in peace on your own land (which requires you to restrict what your neighbors can do on their land).
It's odd to me that anyone finds this compelling. You have a right to wear whatever t-shirts you like. You don't have a right to prevent other people from wearing t-shirts with colors you find objectionable. Yet, somehow in housing we've decided that, no, you actually do have the right to object to all kind of innocuous nonsense (window styles, setbacks, paint colors, and on and on). There's nothing so trivial that it's beyond objection.
I understand that people would like to control what others do around them, but we should be totally unresponsive to those desires. The sentiment behind modern NIMBYism isn't remotely confusing. Presumably, people who buy a house in a neighborhood do so because they like the neighborhood the way it is and don't want it to change. But...so what? That desire is outweighed by other concerns at every turn.
There are a lot of things that matter more than window styles and paint colors, and they can have a severe negative impact on quality of life and property values and safety.
Re: property values: who cares? Again, I don’t find this even remotely compelling when weighed against the rights of property owners to do what they want with their own property. Again, I understand why rational actors want to protect the value of their property. But we shouldn’t assist them as a matter of policy.
(And this is really neither here nor there, given my stance, but property owners actually tend to be very bad at knowing what’s going to negatively affect the value of their properties over the long term. Allowing more density would increase values, in most cases, yet homeowners universally oppose it.)
Re: safety: sure, there are some reasonable safety rules. Those aren’t what we’re talking about here.
I will never buy a property that's subject to an HOA board of approval for things. Mostly for the reasons you list above.
However, people who did buy in an area subject to an HOA presumably did want that and agreed to it ahead of time. I don't think that should allow someone to come in, buy into the development, and unilaterally decide "because my liberty" that they don't have to follow any of the HOA rules.
HOAs are the vanguard of unreasonableness. What I’m more concerned about has nothing to do with HOAs. It’s zoning, design review, and scores of other unreasonable laws that impact even those of us who aren’t crazy enough to join an HOA.
Sorry, I was trying to say that even though I would personally never buy into an HOA, I support the legal rights of those who did to enforce the bylaws/covenants of the HOA agreement.
I think HOAs are stupid, much the same way I think that many other things are stupid, but I also support the right of people to choose to voluntarily do things I find stupid (like worshipping an obviously incorrect deity [because it's different from mine]).
Building codes and zoning are constitutional, but it's now the case that nobody is allowed to build up to the limits of zoning, and the approval process has been hijacked to impose all sorts of expensive economic programs.
Mao's Great Leap Forward was similar -- essentially an "Affordable Rice" program which drove producers out of the market.
This is pragmatically correct, but it doesn't make it just. The city was given policing authority over those lands, too; that doesn't mean they should have the right to torture you until you confess, even if the democratic voters are in favor of that — as they might be, for example, if you're black.
In theory yes, but there are so many asterisks attached to building a house. You need to run through a gauntlet of bureaucracy to even get permission to build on your land. All of this immensely increases costs and becomes a tool for limiting new housing.
I like strict building codes because they prevent for example fires, or catastrophic failure in a storm or an earthquake. I'm not so much in favor of the weird zoning laws many areas in the US seem to have.
I agree with the sentiment, but I have to disagree. Strict codes need tend to strict on the wrong thing. I want your house to not spread fire, but that doesn't mean mandate brick or steel construction (and ban many other fire resistant materials that meet the intent but not the letter of the code)
What can't be discounted besides the usual suspects of bad zoning, high cost of land etc. is construction costs. Basically an area gets so expensive that it prices out construction workers and their families. This is being seen in the bay area now as a typical single family home goes for over 1M in the pennisula/SF/South Bay area. Go farther out to the east bay, far south bay(gilroy etc) and prices are still 700/800k+. The need for housing is so great but also it is a vicious feedback loop of ever increasing construction costs to build this housing. For LA/San Diego area it is rather large so more affordable housing can be found but overall it is still extremely expensive compared to the rest of America.
This seems reasonable but I don't think it's a significant contributor to the price of construction.
None of the developers seem to mention it as an issue, and there are plenty of employees that exist in San Francisco that are paid wages that are similar to construction workers.
But there are marginal projects that don't get built because of the higher cost of construction labor. With shortages like the Bay Area, every bit lost, for any reason, hurts.
Is it true that if the labor rates in San Francisco were lower you would have more buildings 100% agreed.
But its like your business is setting money on fire to keep the building warm.
Could you use a regular unleaded instead of premium gasoline? Sure.
Would it be better for the business? Yes at the margin.
Should you spend any time deciding what is the cheapest gasoline to use to set money on fire? Not until you decide to use something besides $10 bills as fuel.
I can ask my friend again who worked on public housing projects ten years ago. But one thing I remember her saying is California is really leery of shoddy construction and the resulting blight. And blighted low income housing is a big big political problem. So low income housing has to be built to take a lot of abuse. Which of course $$$.
The Silvery Towers development[0] in downtown San Jose was busted for importing a bunch of undocumented construction workers and keeping them locked up in Hayward after hours. It didn't get any real law enforcement attention until one was killed.
Hang out at any Home Depot or Lowe's weekday mornings, and you'll see contractor after contractor picking up day laborers with no protection, no Workers Comp, no insurance, no nothing.
And after that Berkeley balcony collapsed from shoddy construction and killed a bunch of Irish kids, not one worker who did the job could be interviewed or identified.
I wouldn't buy a home built in the last 25 years in CA unless I personally knew the contractor.
I would be perfectly fine with 800-1000 sqft and little yard but nobody builds this anymore. And if you have a basement for storage you need less garage too. Why do US houses rarely have usable basements?
Not saying this applies to everything, but the houses I lived in without usable basements were close to the water line, which would have made a full-sized basement a liability for the house.
It depends on where you live. If you live in a place where the ground freezes in the winter, you must build your foundation deep enough below ground or your foundation will go to hell the first winter after you build it. So in large areas of the midwest, for example, pretty much every house has a basement.
In places where the ground doesn't freeze, most people skip the expense of excavating a basement.
Too expensive. The cost of building the new house is incremental to size, not proportional. And there is probably a larger market for homes with more space. Smaller space works for town homes and condos, but that doesn’t align with yard and basement.
The cost of land is too expensive in California. So if you buy a house that needs to be rebuilt, why tear down a 2-bedroom house and build another when you can build a 4-bedroom for 20% more?
My house was built in 1951. It was 2-bedroom and around 1000 sq-ft. A bedroom was added around 2000. We moved in 2013 and added another bedroom in 2017. So we now have a house double the size it was 20 years ago. In the process, a starter home was taken out of the market.
Why didn’t we just move to larger home? Unfortunately, buying a new home would cause property taxes to reset much higher. Buying something 25% more than my home is worth now would cause property taxes to double.
One thing I've found is that it isn't worth it to "win" and be able to afford living in these places, because nobody else can.
In expensive neighborhoods there are good connections from neighbors, but right now - and I have no way to quantify this - it seems like that doesn't apply to places that now become expensive. People with connections are just part of a different generation and live in already wealthy neighborhoods.
The up and coming trendy neighborhood don't have the connected's trust fund children nor a bunch of VCs. Only airbnb speculators, transient corporate housing and some TikTok influencers chasing status.
Everyone has been resigned to imagining their dreams of certain zip codes, and just doing something else that happens to be way more practical. If you actually get into those zip codes, nobody else is there.
So doing extra things for the goal of keeping up against all odds seems to be a fools errand, for housing location at least. Other fun things you can do with your net worth.
Why don’t we just make the poor people move? Once they leave to more rural areas, wages will rise from there being fewer laborers balancing everything out.
Honestly I ran into partially related situation in NYC. I found a 1-bed apartment I liked at a nicer building, I decided to proceed and next thing you know I'm signing the lease. I read the lease and says a few very peculiar things:
1) the rent is 50% higher than what I saw being advertised/communicated
2) there is a massive discount that brings the rent down to what we agreed to on a separate page
3) this turned out to be a rent stabilized building so my rent is protected under rent control and I was informed I have more rights about increased rent
After some more thought I realize building management has been increasing the rent at the government regulated percentage every year behind the scenes and sometimes the market was relatively flat, they continued to raise the actual rent providing discounts, 10 years later they are giving a massive discount so that it actually meets the market demand. Later on they have full control on raising rent as often as to basically whatever price they want. Something about the whole thing seems like this isn't what rent stabilization was for...
So this is saying that you are "agreeing" to the full price, allowing them to one day charge you that full price?
(While hooking you in with the 50% discount?)
they can't just arbitrarily jack up the rent during the term of the lease. but they might when you try to renew the lease, or when you move out. the effect is as if there is no rent stabilization (unless market rents go up above $4000 a month or whatever the "official" number is.)
I know this will be downvoted because people aren't really interested in solving the real problem.
We could fix the whole SF homeless population problem in the space of one parking lot. Just build micro apartments of 10'x10' feet. Make it 150' wide at the base: 15x15 = 225 x 40 stories = 9000 inhabitants. 100' feet might not be much, but it's a hella of a lot more space to live in than hong kong, where people barely get one bed.
And, with SF's enormous homeless budget of over 300 million, combined almost over 500m? there'd be more then enough funds to build as many of these buildings as we need.
The thing that stops these types of solution is rules, rules and more rules. We choose not to solve the homeless situation: it's a political choice.
The first 10K or so units would be for the homeless. But, after that you can rent them out for some small amount to anyone that needs it.
Just imagine, if you're homeless and it's raining. What would you prefer? live in the streets or live in a small micro apartment? Sure, not everyone wants one, but why not give people more choices? Right now, your only choices are this: 2 million dollar condo or 20$ tent under a bridge. Let's give people more options?
You're hand waiving a lot here. Means testing is complex and a 10x10 in SF is valuable enough to bring a lot of bad actors. I'm pointing out that its not as simple as building a 10k occupant building.
How is this a ghetto? This is housing that is more spacious than my dorm room. The current situation is accepting a ghetto to exist on the sidewalks where there is no plumbing or services or shelter or a lock or any semblance of safety.
If you put 10k impoverished persons in a small area then that meets the definition of a ghetto, which is a minority group living in one part of a city. It will gain a stigma, it will become under served by the commercial sector, and those with an address in that area will be treated differently.
It would be better if we could have decentralized housing for the homeless such that they are welcomed into more affluent communities and their financial status can be kept private. This is obviously more expensive.
You already have these areas, in fact the opposite happens. Skid row in LA has been a rough part of town for probably a century. As a result, that's where the vast majority of services are located. On top of that, impovershed people live all over town in CA. Across any arbitrary 500 feet in a CA city you might see one family living in a million dollar+ home, a single family crammed in a tiny apartment, and encampments and RVs spanning the in between. Rich and poor already live on top of each other, this would at least mean the impoverished who are already living in a given neighborhood are housed instead of the status quo which is living in the same neighborhood but in a tarp with no plumbing.
You've just described a 560 foot tall prison cube. No cooking, toilets, corridors or walls apparently. Perhaps the inhabitants whose true crime was poverty, will be happy to inhabit your force walled thought experiment. Some would be reticent. But I foresee great things coming from this most lateral solution.
Actually it currently houses less than 3000 people, and is serviced by enormous green space. That's not remotely comparable to a 9000 seat cube in an urban setting. I can't speak to Croatia, but having travelled in the former Soviet Union often what makes such places livable are the enormous (by Western standards) amount of amenities which survive from Soviet times - skating rinks, public parks, ice skating rinks, bowling alleys etc. Added to which is a grey economy of apartment run stores selling fresh and preserved produce.
Also - and I have no idea how you'd quantify this, lack of negative comparators may play a part. When most people in your city, be it Mariupol or Tallin, also live in enormous modernist silos, it's not a source of resentment.
Finally it's important to note that by comparison to any US city, Croatia has a tiny crime rate, especially in terms of violent offences. It's a safe, relatively ethnically homogeneous, socially integrated country. This is not similar to the lack of social cohesion in play in the American context.
> Actually it currently houses less than 3000 people, and is serviced by enormous green space
That's just normal green space, at least for that part of city :) I lived a few blocks away when I was at university.
> amount of amenities which survive from Soviet times - skating rinks, public parks, ice skating rinks, bowling alleys etc. Added to which is a grey economy of apartment run stores selling fresh and preserved produce.
I would not say that is true of Croatia. Stores are mostly large chains (and it's for the better, in my opinion). Parks are there, sure, but other amenities didn't seem any more prevalent than what I saw in Los Angeles.
Anyway, my general point is that large density housing can be pretty nice and does not need to be ghetto-like.
They could just be efficency apartments or have a shared community kitchen or something. No need to dive into semantics, the argument is sound imo. High rise public housing works in other countries, in some cases they are architectural marvels and not prison cubes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edif%C3%ADcio_Copan
I'm certainly not arguing against public housing. It can be an incredible good, and in almost all Western countries is considered a right.
However, we've been down this road before. Cramming people - especially homeless people, frequently with mental health concerns, polydrug use, and severe behavioral issues; into a giant cube isn't how you solve homelessness.
These people need their own homes, in neighborhoods with services that support them, integrated into the community.
Disastrous efforts to ghettoise the poor in small under-serviced apartments in the 1960s lead to social problems that persist to this day in both Europe and the US. I believe the're generally termed 'the projects' in America.
My comment was a sarcastic reaction to the ahistorical and ludicrously reductive lack of insight or thought in the original proposal.
Your proposal is ridiculous but it illustrates the political source of housing shortages: The landed class has the right to say no, and the landless class has no right to say yes.
You mean well but I don't think this solution is robust.
-many of your pods will become filthy without the gov also agreeing to cleaning services.
-people will find ways to own multiple so that gov will have to continuously moderate ownership.
-the residents won't pay i presume, so this cost will never recoup itself for the gov.
-requirements for applicants will want to prove homelessness and what else? citizenship? they may quickly become to stringent, unable to qualify most of the homeless population.
The alternative is the status quo which is living on the sidewalk with no plumbing nor cleaning nor services. I'd take the tower and make the rooms easy to power wash.
People would rather leave those on the streets to do whatever they want, including settling down on the street, even if it means more suffering for them from the weather and danger from criminals outside.
Instead of seeing laws that keep people from the street as empathetic (because you force them to shelter), they are seen as cruel. Of course lack of enforcement sends a message and further discourages people from trying to find an alternative. Year by year this gets reinforced and it will be that much harder to fix the problem.
After moving to America a while ago, one thing that struck me is how a lot of things are designed as effectively regressive taxes: the poor pay more than the rich.
I opened a basic bank account with a giant American bank. The account has an exorbitant monthly fee, something like $15, but it’s waived if you keep a sufficient balance or have a steady salary. So the only people who pay the crazy fee are the broke people with irregular income. This is one example out of many such seemingly structural biases in everyday services.
And the dark patterns of opening accounts without your permission, burying fee information in the fine print, etc etc...? It's not just business; it's predatory.
I don't get why people pay money to put their money in the bank. What exactly is the bank giving you these days? Credit Unions are everywhere, and I don't know anybody who pays fees to the CU just to put money in there. The amount of free shit I get from my CU is absurd compared anything the big banks offer.
Plenty of banks do this, it's very common. Usually if they offer some student account, they waive this fee that is present in a basic checking or savings account.
> The account has an exorbitant monthly fee, something like $15,
Maybe it is really exorbitant but I have seen fees even in third world for keeping account which maintain lower than minimum balance specified. Would it also be the structural bias all over the world that stores give more discount to people who spent more money there.
I mean, this is entirely anecdotal. I'm just surprised by how American corporations seem to have laid such deep roots for price-gouging the most vulnerable. So many things come with hidden fees, impenetrable cost structures and customer-hostile communication.
It has made me realize that consumer-facing companies in my home country Finland seemed to be traditionally more aligned as participants in society, rather than money-extracting machines outside of it. Maybe one reason is that some basic industries like banking and grocery stores are dominated by co-ops in Finland.
$15/mo is far too high at current interest rates so your point stands, but, rich people with steady balances are also paying the bank a fee in the form of an interest-free loan that the bank re-invests.
$15/mo is equivalent to ~$14,400 balance at 1.25% APR [0] so anyone with a higher balance than that across their big bank low-interest/no-interest accounts is paying more than $15/mo.
[0] I chose this number as something you can actually get in an FDIC-insured account at a more generous online bank like Ally
From a business perspective, the $15 a month makes sense.
However, I'd consider banking an essential need to modern day life. Thus I think it is worth looking at through a humanities perspective. Unfortunately in our current situation, it's very expensive to be poor.
This is a popular progressive opinion in the United States, currently pushing for "Postal Banking," AKA simple banking and check cashing at post offices for no cost. The conservative position currently being pushed is privatizing or shutting down the USPS.
A similar experience happened to me while I was in school, and opened a bank account through the university which had a partnership with $BANK since there weren't any nearby ATMs in-network with the credit union from my hometown. Thinking that having access to cash would be in my best interest in case of needing to buy things secondhand like from Craigslist; and didn't see a clause in the contract which required a minimum balance for both the signup bonus and until seeing a $15 monthly fee withdrawn from the account which had a small deposit made into. It ended up being a net loss-- missing that work to open a bank account with an unattainable minimum balance meant the entire process ended up costing almost 2 hours worth of pay.
Google Wallet solved this problem while they were still around but the service was canceled likely due to being a loss leader for the company, and have since switched to Simple which has several ATMs available in my area.
Haha, most government money projects in California are a mechanism to funnel tax money into chosen pockets. The interests in play encourage that because:
* Most Californians don't like other people living near them. They want to live like in the suburbs and it annoys them if that changes.
* They can fig leaf in 'environmentalism' or 'traffic' or whatever in order to do that. Sometimes they'll fig leaf in 'gentrification' and 'affordability'.
* They want to be able to complain about government spending but not really do anything about it. The best part is that this allows you almost all the real benefits of actually having government spending change: you still get the funneling, and you get all the social value of being against overspending.
* The last thing is that Americans as a whole hate being told they've been defrauded. It's like the worst thing in the world to be a sucker here. So the right response is always to pretend like you aren't being suckered. That's crucial. You can always choose to say things like "San Francisco is built upon 150 years of shipwrecks" or "America is a big country" or "California is diverse".
My hope is one day to embed myself in enterprise sales to government. It's the good life.
One thing I would really like a clear explanation of:
When public officials in CA cities talk about "affordable housing", there is actually some definition of this, isn't there? And it doesn't usually match what people in casual conversation mean by affordable housing, right?
"Affordable housing" doesn't just mean a normal house or apartment at an affordable price, does it? Does it mean public housing units built and managed by the city? Or it means housing built by private developers, that's only available for renting or ownership by people meeting certain criteria?
If "affordable housing" means public housing complexes, then I think people voting or advocating for it don't really understand what they're getting into. Because those don't really have a great track record of success.
"Affordable" can mean a lot of things. Usually the official definition is housing that costs less than 30% of the income of someone at some multiple of the local poverty income level. Housing can meet that bar in a number of ways: rising incomes, smaller/less equipped units, no parking, public subsidy for rent, public subsidy for land or development fees, etc. Due to the terrible experience with public housing across the USA in the 1950s-1980s, most governments avoid owning the units if they can avoid it.
It's a means-tested govt program for below-market rate apartments, with tons of red tape. Which in true government fashion exacerbates the problem it is meant to solve.
Right now there's the colloquial meaning, and a proper noun which means taking 10-30% of housing output and selling it at a government-set price to government-approved people.
Man this hits deep. I moved out to Southern California a few years ago from the south east. It’s crazy, I can barely afford to buy a house here with a 300k/yr income. Even then it’s gonna be some non remodeled, in need of upgrades 700k home. To get anything decent (new kitchen, windows, working hvac) it’s at-least 900k+. I don’t get how people are buying these homes.
Help me understand. An average mortgage is 200k, at the average household income of 63k and a 30 year at 4.1%, thats 18.5% of your pretax income going into a mortgage. The same numbers for a 300k income and a 700k house works out to 13.5%. Seems like you are doing significant better than most? Happy to be corrected.
Yeah I'm not sure what he's talking about either. $900k home on $300k income is entirely reasonable and a better ratio than what the average person does
no employee making $300k per year in California gets to keep that amount.. tax rate is 40% + overall last I heard, differing slightly by county and tax details
They might be able to afford a house, but the community around them will not (the average household income in San Diego is around 100K, not 300K). By pricing out young people and stunting their communities, California NIMBYs reduce opportunity and social mobility.
The ultimate result of the totality of California housing policies is that California senior homeowners transfer resources from the rest of society to themselves while reducing quality of life for everyone else.
>It’s crazy, I can barely afford to buy a house here with a 300k/yr income.
How can you barely afford a house?
Lets say you pay 100K in taxes and 50K in food, gas, healthcare, luxuries, etc. You could save 50K and still have an extra 100K a year to spend on the mortgage. You would be able to pay off your house in less than 10 years. Many people take out 30 year loans for their house!
Its a massive investment and probably not worth it for the price but it definitely seems like you could afford to buy a house.
The houses he mentions are likely 4-6x his take-home. Coming from the south-east, he may well be used to a market where good houses are 2x your take-home.
Some parts of the country do have similar price-to-income ratios for property as California, but in general I think you're getting a much newer & better condition house at that ratio compared to California real estate. For example much of the Bay Area was built in the 60's.
By SF criteria yes. But by the criteria he's used to maybe not. An adjustment period may be required.
Once upon a time three times your annual gross was considered an expensive house. And a little more than ten years ago, six to eight times your gross was considered prudence.
The sad part is because it's so competitive it seems like no one has any money left over to renovate, which has the rather perverse outcome of the nicest locations in the world to live, having the worst houses to live in.
US $414,000 per apartment was the original bid? Something has gone terribly wrong with your civilization.
— ⁂ —
I think about the Isla Maciel slums where I used to volunteer. They're on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, and although I'm not familiar with any official statistics, I think the average daily income is under a dollar per person per day, with significant variation above and below that level. Some of the roads are dirt while others are paved, and the buildings are mostly somewhat ramshackle houses made of hollow brick with corrugated iron roofs. It's sort of similar to some of the neighborhoods I lived in as a kid in the US before I moved into a trailer park.
Despite this astonishing level of income, there is no homelessness (though there is elsewhere in Buenos Aires), and almost nobody rents. This is because people build their own houses. The most common material is hollow ceramic brick, the kind that's a latticework of thin red-clay walls; you have to scavenge or buy these https://articulo.mercadolibre.com.ar/MLA-821163523-ladrillo-... at a cost of about AR$6000 (US$50) per pallet of 144 bricks, which works out to about 35¢ per brick. The poorest people instead build with wood, like people in the US. (We haven't had an earthquake here during human habitation.)
If you do the figures, you can see that a generous 7 m × 3 m wall contains about US$130 worth of bricks, plus a smaller and cheaper amount of sand and cement. You can build a 49 m² house from four of these walls (US$520) plus 49 m² of corrugated steel, which if you have to buy it https://articulo.mercadolibre.com.ar/MLA-799438818-chapa-aca... is about AR$24000 (US$200). Putting these parts together into an actual building envelope typically takes a semi-skilled laborer a week or two, and most people either do it themselves or have their sons, boyfriends, or husbands do it, since they don't have any money to hire someone else. Adding a toilet, a sink, a bidet (we are not barbarians, after all), some PVC pipes for water and sewer, and a kind of shitty electrical installation (hopefully with at least a circuit breaker) might bring the total out-of-pocket cost close to US$1000.
You might note that US$1000 is significantly less than US$414000.
Now, Isla Maciel is a dangerous place. Everyone has lost family members either to gang violence or to police violence. I wouldn't advise visiting without knowing anybody there any more than I'd advise trying to visit the US without a visa; people there laugh about the stories of the tourists who mistakenly wandered into their neighborhood and got robbed. I'm not holding it up as an ideal of human civilization. But I'd much rather have a house in Isla Maciel than a park bench in Los Angeles or a rat-infested motel room in Solana Beach.
And I don't think the violence there is a result of a lack of enforcement of building codes, as someone will no doubt attempt to argue in response to this comment. Rather, both the insecurity and the freedom to build your own house result from the lawlessness of the neighborhood, which in turn proceeds from a general feeling that the law establishes oppression rather than justice — a proposition with ample empirical support within the confines of Isla Maciel, in my view, as well as other similar slums in Buenos Aires. This in turn undermines officially recognized systems of land tenure, with the consequence that residents of Isla Maciel can often claim land by building on it, i...
I grew up in SB, moved away in 95. Went back last summer for a wedding in La Jolla. Town sure has changed. House prices are crazy as ever, and even the poorer parts of town had crazy prices for housing. But it has the best Mex restaurant in SoCal (Tony's Jacal).
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadIt's not just rules. Funding is competitive, and if you want a competitive bid you need to promise the world. Parking, green technologies, accessibility, community space, lots of amenities for residents, landscaping, not to mention the cost of ongoing compliance.
"Another is California’s labyrinthine financing process, which forces developers to navigate a dozen different funding programs controlled by five separate departments with authority divided between the governor and state treasurer."
Having worked in the industry for 10 years, I'd say this is an understatement. There's also federal, local and county regulations in addition to the multi-tentacled state system.
These problems don't seem to be getting solved, they seem to be getting worse. How do you realistically reverse something like this? Are there examples of a successful reversal having been made without hitting the dreaded 'reboot' button on society?
We will probably muddle along during our lifetimes, but I fear for my children's generation.
(1) https://taxfoundation.org/how-many-words-are-tax-code/
That was probably 10+ years ago, but it was a real eye opening moment in seeing the mindless wheels of bureaucracy turn. Obviously everyone at every stage of the procurement process knew this page of the contract was insane in the context of installing a simple web app, but no one had the power remove unneeded rules in situations in which they don't apply and no one is going out on an anti-baby-safety ledge. So everyone for the rest of time has to agree on how to properly abandon babies in every contract.
Eventually, someone actually read the contract and noticed that it required anyone working on it to have a security clearance. I ended up working on other parts of the same open source application that were being funded by a contract without such a clause, so we could have someone with a clearance charge the contract.
I’d love to see each state support a city like this. But it can be tricky to balance, especially if it sounds unfair to the rest of the populace. Also, it would require separate governmental systems that could lead to all kinds of problems. As it is the US was set up initially to allow for easier variation among the states to get some of these benefits. But it can be nearly impossible not to end up with similar regulations over time. You even see it within corporations too with similar corporate policies as scar tissue from similar problems they all experience.
e: I can't get the direct link to work properly, but press the blue "Search lots of books" button and it will work.
https://www.kurumi.com/roads/3di/sanfran.html
http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?bayarea
I also think the common framing as freeways "cutting a path through neighborhoods" is exactly the wrong way to look at it. San Francisco's, for example, were based on this 1935 traffic study. The whole point was to get already-existing traffic up off the streets and keep neighborhoods livable: https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/5409261018/in/album-...
There's (unfortunately) a real-world example I can point to showing this still holds up in the 21st Century. The northernmost part of the Central Freeway carried more than 50% crosstown (non-neighborhood) traffic in San Francisco but was torn down in the very early 2000s and replaced with the horrible Octavia Blvd that keeps killing cyclists and has made neighborhood traffic worse in every way, even necessitating crosswalk closures. Here's the full study on before and after the "Freeway Removal" (now there's a dogwhistle for ya!) https://www.sfcta.org/sites/default/files/2019-03/Final%20Re...
"In the absence of meaningful improvements to travel improvements, the reduction in automobile capacity has not been accompanied by noticeable mode shift. Instead, the neighborhood has been challenged to effectively deal with high peak‐period traffic levels and resulting congestion"
1 - https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5057/5423961825_2d5af7cef4_o.... (Proposed rail lines for BART, 1961)
that said, CEQA challenges have become a de facto tool in the nimby arsenal in CA.
http://www.sausalitohistoricalsociety.com/new-blog/2018/3/7/...
'The decisive blow against growth was initiated in 1971 with the issuance of a Marin Planning Department report that proposed preserving Marin's lands except along the Highway 101 corridor. Entitled "Can the Last Place Last?" the report took its theme from Lew Welch's 1969 poem "The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings" The poem lamented the "hordes" that were "now piling up" and contained a refrain that captured perfectly the sentiment in Marin: "This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go."'
https://www.belle-aurore.com/mike/2013/05/bolinas-vigilante-...
<50cc scooters are subject to different -- usually lower -- registration, insurance, inspection, and licensing requirements than cars.
State-minimum insurance for my cheap (KBB ~$1000) used (+200K miles) car would be about $700/year. Similarly minimal insurance for a 2010 Honda Ruckus would be $100/year. (I just checked Geico.)
Small motorcycles consume a lot less gasoline than cars, especially old, cheap ones being driven in-city.
Spare parts for scooters can be purchased and shipped cheaply, and assembled in a minimum of space with cheap hand tools.
Scooters don't require a full parking space to store. They can be stashed against signs, at bike racks, next to doors, in tiny alleys, or any other free spot. Living with other people? You don't need to worry about blocking the driveway, or being blocked yourself. Work downtown? You can get away without buying a pass at a parking garage.
Truth be told I had a loud muffler back when I could barely afford my share of a three way apt rental. Nowadays I would find it hard to tolerate the noise I caused back then. But that was a diff neighborhood and it was accepted.
This won't work in the US for various reasons, but it may work in other places where they can move people accordingly.
I don't necessarily agree with it, but that's the common refrain yes.
In addition to San Francisco I've lived in the US South, the Northeast an in Europe. And out of all those regions I feel the Bay Area has been the most conservative and discordant. It's really a shame how a combination of the Byzantine legal processes and small cadres who know and shape the system have created a tyranny of the minority in the Bay Area and San Francisco in particular.
This same distinction also applies to the type of startup that gets founded in each place. South Bay attracts more companies that are capitalizing on a technical change in the world - Google, Apple, Netflix, hardware companies like NVidia and Memorex, drone startups, large scale enterprise software like Cloudera or Palantir. San Francisco attracts more companies that are capitalizing on a social change: AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, Stripe, Zynga, Bird, Lime, Twitter, Medium, etc. Notable exceptions are Facebook (social change but in the South Bay, though they've also built a top-notch technology org) and DropBox (technical, but in SF).
I'm genuinely curious how you are seeing Nextdoor activity outside of your own Nextdoor neighborhood, given that How Nextdoor limits participants by neighborhood and verifies addresses before you can even read postings. I can't even find an option to see other neighborhoods. As my mom was dying and I was helping to find resources and later sell her stuff, the only way I could get access was to register with her address and then wait for the coded postcard.
https://goo.gl/maps/X1MN673Pwc57eS2C9
It's a tiny ( by CA standards ) town right on the beach and most non-service jobs are a crowded commute away. I don't object to having affordable housing everywhere, but if I wanted to build some in San Diego county, it's about the last place I would go.
It'd be the equivalent to trying to build affordable housing next to Central Park in NYC or Waikiki in Hawaii. Its great to try but don't make a big fuss when it is expensive.
A slight exaggeration. The Pearl site is only a 5-minute walk from the train station. Other than that yes, grossly uneconomical. As to your question "why": State of California mandate enforced on all incorporated cities, waste of money or no.
And this is why other ritzy areas have no interest in incorporating as cities proper. Rancho Santa Fe has a "Covenant" that performs usual city functions to the maximum extent legally possible e.g. private security guards, while dodging State mandates.
How did it ever get here? Requiring more than 2 parking spots per apartment is insane.... especially for "affordable housing".
I lived in a household like that growing up
Now that Coronavirus and social distancing are the new normal, I expect some of those transit systems to lose funding and perhaps even shut down.
I'm a huge fan of public transit and I'd love to see good transit systems exist in California, but I have no hope that it will happen.
Caltrain doesn't really communicate, their delay estimates are as reliable as the progress bar on Windows 3.1, and the stations are unstaffed. It's a total joke from top to bottom.
I used to spend a lot of money on Uber to get home when Caltrain let me down.
And that's a huge chunk of the US population, but still, it's one city. What of Los Angeles, with its buses stuck in permanent traffic, or its subway with, what, 15 stops? What of Houston, with a light rail that travels about the speed of a car but waits at every intersection, and serves something like 10% of the city? What about getting from one city in the US to another?
Sure, it's a big country. Sure, it industrialized the car. Sure. But still.
> Some of the cities have "passable" mass transit
>is there any state with decent mass transit in the USA?
Also, I've just noticed: why on earth would they build affordable housing next to the beach? Is this some twisted take on equality, that poor people also deserve view at the ocean? If "affordable housing" competes for the same land as luxury residences it will end up just as expensive.
Forcing poor people to pay for parking makes their housing more expensive and is part of what is causing huge problems in California. When I lived in Austria, my wife and I lived in a place with no parking included, by choice. We found a public place about a kilometer away that was free. Kind of a hassle, but it was a good compromise for our finances back then.
The government choosing parking minimums is a huge market distortion and antithetical to the freedom of the market to provide a diversity of solutions. There are boatloads of houses in the US with huge 3 car garages. Give people the freedom to live with zero parking!
They got to get to work, school, etc. And in the US you need a car, cuz public transit sucks, ergo, multiple parking spaces.
A dumb law, perhaps, but the parent comment isn't wrong.
Mixed use is gonna need a lot more parking.
> After a year of negotiations with the city, Hitzke agreed to shrink the Pearl to 10 apartments and make it free for the public to park in the 53-space garage.
Unclear if the grocery store is still there at this point, but now it's a free public garage, not just residents.
This isn't a story of parking minimums, this is a story of a small town being picky about the type of development permitted.
People who live near new property developments don't want to end up with their streets completely full of parked cars from residents and guests of the new building.
I can't say it's unreasonable for the existing residents to feel that way. I lived in a neighborhood where that happened, and parking got so bad it was difficult for people to visit me.
That kind of parking situation is the kind of thing that people are willing to deal with in NYC, not the suburbs. So they pass laws to require parking spaces. This particular example is extreme though.
The proposed building site is an existing public parking lot. The underground parking lot isn't just for the residents, it has to replace the public parking capacity it's occupying as well:
Around here we have a lot of open space advocates that don't want any development (even though we are losing population and in a generation won't be able to fund our schools). I've often wanted to ask one of those folks (normally older with a nice older home) if they are so invested in open space why don't they knock down their house?
You kid, but redevelopment of less productive buildings is a pretty important part of preserving open space.
Not sure about what anyone here considers as libertarian, but if you were to ask a libertarian what they would tell you is that if you own property you are free to do as you please so long as you do not harm someone else.
Also not sure what you mean by lefty orgs, because labor unions, public unions and environmental groups are the biggest lobbyist influence on the high price of housing. When it comes to affordability, housing is generally (ahem - not "always") less affordable in blue states and least affordable in the bluest regions of the blue states.
I think that's why I'm surprised I don't hear that more. The size of someone's back yard or height of their fence (to a reasonable extent) seems like it wouldn't harm someone else, but they're strongly regulated in much of CA's single-family zoning.
> Also not sure what you mean by lefty orgs, because labor unions, public unions and environmental groups are the biggest lobbyist influence on the high price of housing.
Totally. There are tons of liberal orgs that are contributing to the housing shortage. I mean the few orgs I see advocating for development (eg SF YIMBY, or politicians like Scott Wiener) appear more liberal than libertarian.
I'm not sure what you mean, but to clarify: the libertarian position is that if the fence harms no one, then there is no one, not even governments, to have anything to do with said fence besides the fence's owner, as that is the owner's right.
I understand that people would like to control what others do around them, but we should be totally unresponsive to those desires. The sentiment behind modern NIMBYism isn't remotely confusing. Presumably, people who buy a house in a neighborhood do so because they like the neighborhood the way it is and don't want it to change. But...so what? That desire is outweighed by other concerns at every turn.
(And this is really neither here nor there, given my stance, but property owners actually tend to be very bad at knowing what’s going to negatively affect the value of their properties over the long term. Allowing more density would increase values, in most cases, yet homeowners universally oppose it.)
Re: safety: sure, there are some reasonable safety rules. Those aren’t what we’re talking about here.
However, people who did buy in an area subject to an HOA presumably did want that and agreed to it ahead of time. I don't think that should allow someone to come in, buy into the development, and unilaterally decide "because my liberty" that they don't have to follow any of the HOA rules.
I think HOAs are stupid, much the same way I think that many other things are stupid, but I also support the right of people to choose to voluntarily do things I find stupid (like worshipping an obviously incorrect deity [because it's different from mine]).
Mao's Great Leap Forward was similar -- essentially an "Affordable Rice" program which drove producers out of the market.
There are just very few of us, and we don't matter.
As long as you by land that doesn't have a lien on it you can build a house.
None of the developers seem to mention it as an issue, and there are plenty of employees that exist in San Francisco that are paid wages that are similar to construction workers.
But its like your business is setting money on fire to keep the building warm.
Could you use a regular unleaded instead of premium gasoline? Sure.
Would it be better for the business? Yes at the margin.
Should you spend any time deciding what is the cheapest gasoline to use to set money on fire? Not until you decide to use something besides $10 bills as fuel.
The Silvery Towers development[0] in downtown San Jose was busted for importing a bunch of undocumented construction workers and keeping them locked up in Hayward after hours. It didn't get any real law enforcement attention until one was killed.
Hang out at any Home Depot or Lowe's weekday mornings, and you'll see contractor after contractor picking up day laborers with no protection, no Workers Comp, no insurance, no nothing.
And after that Berkeley balcony collapsed from shoddy construction and killed a bunch of Irish kids, not one worker who did the job could be interviewed or identified.
I wouldn't buy a home built in the last 25 years in CA unless I personally knew the contractor.
[0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/08/16/silvery-towers-projec...
In places where the ground doesn't freeze, most people skip the expense of excavating a basement.
In expensive neighborhoods there are good connections from neighbors, but right now - and I have no way to quantify this - it seems like that doesn't apply to places that now become expensive. People with connections are just part of a different generation and live in already wealthy neighborhoods.
The up and coming trendy neighborhood don't have the connected's trust fund children nor a bunch of VCs. Only airbnb speculators, transient corporate housing and some TikTok influencers chasing status.
Everyone has been resigned to imagining their dreams of certain zip codes, and just doing something else that happens to be way more practical. If you actually get into those zip codes, nobody else is there.
So doing extra things for the goal of keeping up against all odds seems to be a fools errand, for housing location at least. Other fun things you can do with your net worth.
It would be financially irresponsible to buy property here even if I could afford it.
1) the rent is 50% higher than what I saw being advertised/communicated
2) there is a massive discount that brings the rent down to what we agreed to on a separate page
3) this turned out to be a rent stabilized building so my rent is protected under rent control and I was informed I have more rights about increased rent
After some more thought I realize building management has been increasing the rent at the government regulated percentage every year behind the scenes and sometimes the market was relatively flat, they continued to raise the actual rent providing discounts, 10 years later they are giving a massive discount so that it actually meets the market demand. Later on they have full control on raising rent as often as to basically whatever price they want. Something about the whole thing seems like this isn't what rent stabilization was for...
We could fix the whole SF homeless population problem in the space of one parking lot. Just build micro apartments of 10'x10' feet. Make it 150' wide at the base: 15x15 = 225 x 40 stories = 9000 inhabitants. 100' feet might not be much, but it's a hella of a lot more space to live in than hong kong, where people barely get one bed.
And, with SF's enormous homeless budget of over 300 million, combined almost over 500m? there'd be more then enough funds to build as many of these buildings as we need.
The thing that stops these types of solution is rules, rules and more rules. We choose not to solve the homeless situation: it's a political choice.
You're grossly oversimplifying the issue.
Just imagine, if you're homeless and it's raining. What would you prefer? live in the streets or live in a small micro apartment? Sure, not everyone wants one, but why not give people more choices? Right now, your only choices are this: 2 million dollar condo or 20$ tent under a bridge. Let's give people more options?
It would be better if we could have decentralized housing for the homeless such that they are welcomed into more affluent communities and their financial status can be kept private. This is obviously more expensive.
Its not an easy problem to solve.
It's a normal building with normal apartments, not a ghetto or a prison.
Also - and I have no idea how you'd quantify this, lack of negative comparators may play a part. When most people in your city, be it Mariupol or Tallin, also live in enormous modernist silos, it's not a source of resentment.
Finally it's important to note that by comparison to any US city, Croatia has a tiny crime rate, especially in terms of violent offences. It's a safe, relatively ethnically homogeneous, socially integrated country. This is not similar to the lack of social cohesion in play in the American context.
https://cafebabel.com/en/article/life-in-mamutica-the-bigges...
That's just normal green space, at least for that part of city :) I lived a few blocks away when I was at university.
> amount of amenities which survive from Soviet times - skating rinks, public parks, ice skating rinks, bowling alleys etc. Added to which is a grey economy of apartment run stores selling fresh and preserved produce.
I would not say that is true of Croatia. Stores are mostly large chains (and it's for the better, in my opinion). Parks are there, sure, but other amenities didn't seem any more prevalent than what I saw in Los Angeles.
Anyway, my general point is that large density housing can be pretty nice and does not need to be ghetto-like.
However, we've been down this road before. Cramming people - especially homeless people, frequently with mental health concerns, polydrug use, and severe behavioral issues; into a giant cube isn't how you solve homelessness.
These people need their own homes, in neighborhoods with services that support them, integrated into the community.
Disastrous efforts to ghettoise the poor in small under-serviced apartments in the 1960s lead to social problems that persist to this day in both Europe and the US. I believe the're generally termed 'the projects' in America.
My comment was a sarcastic reaction to the ahistorical and ludicrously reductive lack of insight or thought in the original proposal.
-many of your pods will become filthy without the gov also agreeing to cleaning services.
-people will find ways to own multiple so that gov will have to continuously moderate ownership.
-the residents won't pay i presume, so this cost will never recoup itself for the gov.
-requirements for applicants will want to prove homelessness and what else? citizenship? they may quickly become to stringent, unable to qualify most of the homeless population.
People aren't big on walls, so it might work.
Instead of seeing laws that keep people from the street as empathetic (because you force them to shelter), they are seen as cruel. Of course lack of enforcement sends a message and further discourages people from trying to find an alternative. Year by year this gets reinforced and it will be that much harder to fix the problem.
I opened a basic bank account with a giant American bank. The account has an exorbitant monthly fee, something like $15, but it’s waived if you keep a sufficient balance or have a steady salary. So the only people who pay the crazy fee are the broke people with irregular income. This is one example out of many such seemingly structural biases in everyday services.
Maybe it is really exorbitant but I have seen fees even in third world for keeping account which maintain lower than minimum balance specified. Would it also be the structural bias all over the world that stores give more discount to people who spent more money there.
It has made me realize that consumer-facing companies in my home country Finland seemed to be traditionally more aligned as participants in society, rather than money-extracting machines outside of it. Maybe one reason is that some basic industries like banking and grocery stores are dominated by co-ops in Finland.
$15/mo is equivalent to ~$14,400 balance at 1.25% APR [0] so anyone with a higher balance than that across their big bank low-interest/no-interest accounts is paying more than $15/mo.
[0] I chose this number as something you can actually get in an FDIC-insured account at a more generous online bank like Ally
However, I'd consider banking an essential need to modern day life. Thus I think it is worth looking at through a humanities perspective. Unfortunately in our current situation, it's very expensive to be poor.
Google Wallet solved this problem while they were still around but the service was canceled likely due to being a loss leader for the company, and have since switched to Simple which has several ATMs available in my area.
* Most Californians don't like other people living near them. They want to live like in the suburbs and it annoys them if that changes.
* They can fig leaf in 'environmentalism' or 'traffic' or whatever in order to do that. Sometimes they'll fig leaf in 'gentrification' and 'affordability'.
* They want to be able to complain about government spending but not really do anything about it. The best part is that this allows you almost all the real benefits of actually having government spending change: you still get the funneling, and you get all the social value of being against overspending.
* The last thing is that Americans as a whole hate being told they've been defrauded. It's like the worst thing in the world to be a sucker here. So the right response is always to pretend like you aren't being suckered. That's crucial. You can always choose to say things like "San Francisco is built upon 150 years of shipwrecks" or "America is a big country" or "California is diverse".
My hope is one day to embed myself in enterprise sales to government. It's the good life.
When public officials in CA cities talk about "affordable housing", there is actually some definition of this, isn't there? And it doesn't usually match what people in casual conversation mean by affordable housing, right?
"Affordable housing" doesn't just mean a normal house or apartment at an affordable price, does it? Does it mean public housing units built and managed by the city? Or it means housing built by private developers, that's only available for renting or ownership by people meeting certain criteria?
If "affordable housing" means public housing complexes, then I think people voting or advocating for it don't really understand what they're getting into. Because those don't really have a great track record of success.
If OP feels the main entering the bottom of the market with their exorbitant salary, imagine how the the average person feels.
The ultimate result of the totality of California housing policies is that California senior homeowners transfer resources from the rest of society to themselves while reducing quality of life for everyone else.
How can you barely afford a house?
Lets say you pay 100K in taxes and 50K in food, gas, healthcare, luxuries, etc. You could save 50K and still have an extra 100K a year to spend on the mortgage. You would be able to pay off your house in less than 10 years. Many people take out 30 year loans for their house!
Its a massive investment and probably not worth it for the price but it definitely seems like you could afford to buy a house.
Some parts of the country do have similar price-to-income ratios for property as California, but in general I think you're getting a much newer & better condition house at that ratio compared to California real estate. For example much of the Bay Area was built in the 60's.
Once upon a time three times your annual gross was considered an expensive house. And a little more than ten years ago, six to eight times your gross was considered prudence.
You can renovate and get a newer and better condition house. You can't get SoCal weather and natural features at any price. Hence the high prices.
After my neighbors moved out, they had the kitchen and bathrooms gutted and redone.
After the new buyers took over, they gutted it all again and threw out brand new appliances and cabinetry.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HzSAmOQuyjU
We can replace New Zealand with the US, Canada, UK and Austrailia and the story is almost exactly the same (even the bad actors are consistent).
Take the money and run (now that WFH/WFA has gained ground).
Running in place financially does not build character, contrary to popular belief.
— ⁂ —
I think about the Isla Maciel slums where I used to volunteer. They're on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, and although I'm not familiar with any official statistics, I think the average daily income is under a dollar per person per day, with significant variation above and below that level. Some of the roads are dirt while others are paved, and the buildings are mostly somewhat ramshackle houses made of hollow brick with corrugated iron roofs. It's sort of similar to some of the neighborhoods I lived in as a kid in the US before I moved into a trailer park.
Despite this astonishing level of income, there is no homelessness (though there is elsewhere in Buenos Aires), and almost nobody rents. This is because people build their own houses. The most common material is hollow ceramic brick, the kind that's a latticework of thin red-clay walls; you have to scavenge or buy these https://articulo.mercadolibre.com.ar/MLA-821163523-ladrillo-... at a cost of about AR$6000 (US$50) per pallet of 144 bricks, which works out to about 35¢ per brick. The poorest people instead build with wood, like people in the US. (We haven't had an earthquake here during human habitation.)
If you do the figures, you can see that a generous 7 m × 3 m wall contains about US$130 worth of bricks, plus a smaller and cheaper amount of sand and cement. You can build a 49 m² house from four of these walls (US$520) plus 49 m² of corrugated steel, which if you have to buy it https://articulo.mercadolibre.com.ar/MLA-799438818-chapa-aca... is about AR$24000 (US$200). Putting these parts together into an actual building envelope typically takes a semi-skilled laborer a week or two, and most people either do it themselves or have their sons, boyfriends, or husbands do it, since they don't have any money to hire someone else. Adding a toilet, a sink, a bidet (we are not barbarians, after all), some PVC pipes for water and sewer, and a kind of shitty electrical installation (hopefully with at least a circuit breaker) might bring the total out-of-pocket cost close to US$1000.
You might note that US$1000 is significantly less than US$414000.
Now, Isla Maciel is a dangerous place. Everyone has lost family members either to gang violence or to police violence. I wouldn't advise visiting without knowing anybody there any more than I'd advise trying to visit the US without a visa; people there laugh about the stories of the tourists who mistakenly wandered into their neighborhood and got robbed. I'm not holding it up as an ideal of human civilization. But I'd much rather have a house in Isla Maciel than a park bench in Los Angeles or a rat-infested motel room in Solana Beach.
And I don't think the violence there is a result of a lack of enforcement of building codes, as someone will no doubt attempt to argue in response to this comment. Rather, both the insecurity and the freedom to build your own house result from the lawlessness of the neighborhood, which in turn proceeds from a general feeling that the law establishes oppression rather than justice — a proposition with ample empirical support within the confines of Isla Maciel, in my view, as well as other similar slums in Buenos Aires. This in turn undermines officially recognized systems of land tenure, with the consequence that residents of Isla Maciel can often claim land by building on it, i...
Existing apartments for 100k in nice areas, why even try to build for 400k on prime beach areas?
Think about it: Miguel Zamora has been living on government housing vouchers since 1992 waiting for an apartment whose cost rose from 400k to 1MM.
If he had received as settlement enough money for a downpayment (20-50k) he would own his own place and would have participated in the equity growth