I Have Read Prop F
medium.com
medium.com
One side of the flier has a guy named Aaron Peskin imploring me to vote yes on Prop F and Prop I. Prop F is the mess thoughtfully critiqued in this write-up, Prop I is a moratorium on building new market-rate housing. Oh, and he's on the "more affordable rent" campaign platform, because if you want to make rent more affordable, clearly the best way is by preventing construction of market-rate housing. It's like SF voters are brain-dead.
The flip side of the flier derided another candidate. If the point of the flier was to make me aware of which candidate to not to vote for, mission accomplished.
However, I think you may find that voters are far more opposed to prop I than prop F. My guess is that if someone supports I, they will almost certainly support F, but not the other way around. Time will tell, though.
Are these people completely insane? Shouldn't there be propositions for denser zoning, land reclamation, or other measures that would increase the SF housing stock? Houston has famously lax zoning laws, and as a consequence has seen much greater population growth (31% vs 18% from 1980-2010 per wikipedia) yet experienced none of these same problems.
The anti-development types are taking a very profitable position for themselves.
However, the real problem is that San Francisco is water locked on three sides and boundary locked on the fourth. It has no way of adding housing that doesn't offend some entrenched interest.
Houston's lack of zoning laws (there are HOAs, mind) has certainly created its own set of problems. A friend of mine once described it as less of a city and more of a vast collection of suburbs connected by strip malls - and that isn't entirely unfair.
Whether you view it as "horrible sprawl" or "affordable housing" sort of depends on where you sit, I guess.
And even for all that famous sprawl, Houston is seeing the same sort of urban in-fill that every other major US metro area is seeing... it just has a lot more land to fill before it achieves similar density.
What, and hurt profit margins?
Both have track records in office and the choice can't be more clear. I'm shocked that anyone is supporting Peskin after his term of obstructionism. Esp. in contrast to what Christinsen has accomplished in her recent term.
The author makes a great case against Prop F, prop F seems like a totally shitty law and isn't going to fix the housing problem. It sounds like that isn't what the law is about anyway, but there is a great way to fix the housing problem. The argument he seems to allude to in his notes, is that people seem to choose sides based on their sentiment surrounding the current resedential/housing market.
In economics there are 2 forces at the heart of most problems. These are called "supply" and "demand" and they govern price. SF has not been keeping up with it's infrastructure, is a decade behind in new construction, and building new resedential properties will take ~5-10 years to complete. They are not actively building properties that will sufficiently meet demand even now. So this won't go away.
Unfortunately, people who paid a lot for houses have a vested interest in not raising supply, and the amount of regulation surrounding new construction creates massive amounts of friction. It will be interesting to see how this problem get's solved. I agree with the author though:
It is not going to be Prop F.
Which created a massive incentive to hold real estate as long as possible without selling, since the only time the tax rate can reset to being based on market value is at the time of sale.
Actually, as an outsider looking in, the incentives seem set up such that you'd be far more inclined to rent your existing home than sell it.
Simply by virtue of having owned the property for several decades, you stand to make a significant amount of money from tenants.
Consider someone who has owned a property since the 80's. This person might have paid $600,000 for something valued at double that amount today. Their mortgage (if they even still have one) is $2400/mo, property tax works out to $500/mo, and they can charge $4000/mo for rent.
Lots of people in lots of places around the world rent their properties out for far lower returns.
There are options besides property tax for raising tax revenue. City-level local income tax is the first thing that comes to mind.
That is an untenable situation, and it is a large part of California's problem at a local level.
I'm saying that if you tie your revenue stream (i.e. taxes) to something that is essentially fixed at 1970's levels, but you have to buy things with it in 2015 money, you are going to not have a good time.
You can still keep property tax as part of your revenue stream, but these governments need to diversify. I would personally rather they diversified into income tax than some of the alternatives, such as red light cameras.
Commercial property is also covered under the same rules, and there are ways to keep it from being reassessed [2][3].
Improvements to the property will trigger reassessment, if the changes pass a certain threshold. This incentivizes owners not to improve their property (particularly externally). Look around San Francisco, and you can see the effect this has had (along with other factors like rent control). Anecdotally, I've heard of people replacing one window a year because they didn't want to trigger a reassessment. That is just flat out absurd.
There is a cottage industry dedicated to avoiding property tax reassessment, entirely because of prop 13. This isn't how it works elsewhere in the country. There are other, better solutions out there. However, it is virtually impossible to alter or repeal prop 13 because it was a ballot proposition -- it will outlive all of us.
[1] https://www.boe.ca.gov/proptaxes/faqs/changeinownership.htm
[2] http://closetheloophole.com/history
[3] http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert...
There are about 6M housing units available in CA, and about 500k sales per year. That's an entire turnover of inventory in 12 years. Your anecdotal evidence is interesting but wrong.
However it is hardly groundbreaking to state that prop 13 has created a "lock in" effect [1][2][3][4].
[1] http://econweb.ucsd.edu/~miwhite/wasi-white-final.pdf
[2] http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/files/2008-19151-1.p...
[3] http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/prop-13-california-housin...
[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/realestate/07california.ht...
Based on the level of home sales and the current median home prices, it's safe to say that there is more than enough turnover to reset property taxes, and the idea that property taxes are fixed to the 1970s, which was your initial statement, is utter nonsense. Linking articles that are 10 years old and from the middle of the housing bust is also nonsense.
No one is talking about prop 13 now because there is more than enough housing turnover across CA, and more than enough hungry home buyers willing to pay whatever price, regardless of the property tax.
And since I know you just skimmed the articles you posted and didn't read it, here's a finding that pretty much talks about today's environment, and it completely invalidates what you are saying about Prop 13:
"Rapidly rising housing prices may also have contributed to reduced tenure by increasing home sales, including speculative home purchases. Low mortgage interest rates over that period may have also increased home sales, especially for first-time home buyers, which in turn, would decrease average tenure."
To your point that "no one is talking about prop 13": a constitutional amendment to modify it was proposed 3 months ago [1]. Obviously that will never go anywhere -- the state can't even pass a balanced budget with regularity. But then, that's the whole problem with propositions, isn't it?
Otherwise, I think that you can rest easy, your point has been made. You prefer to make accusations (article skimming! anecdotes that are anecdotal!) rather than constructive dialogue. Welcome to the Internet, it's full of people you won't get along with.
[1] http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert...
(With the catch that you have to sell to any would-be buyer who offers to pay the reported value. Just to keep people honest.)
The house we bought was last bought at $150k, and we bought it for 10x this amount. The amount of turnover in real estate in our city in the Bay Area has reached a fevered pitch, so the cities are actually benefiting from more tax revenues.
This is where it’s clear the authors overreached and created a toxic spill waiting to happen.
If the City finds you did indeed host someone or assisted someone else as such, even for one night, then the City can take action against you.
But then it gets absolutely bonkers. If you didn’t host anyone, or it was just your Aunt Rose visiting for the weekend, then your cranky neighbor can still sue you anyway, and the City has to help them do it. And we’re not just talking about filing suit so the City can collect its fines and fees, but filing for “special damages” that the neighbors get to keep for themselves.
This sounds incredibly bad.
Though I don't live in SF and likely never will, so I guess if SF wants to get even crazier than it already is, it can. I have no power to vote in city level stuff in SF.
There is a famous story of the old west. Unfortunately, I can't remember names at the moment to even google it, but supposedly some saddles were stolen and someone was hired to get them back. He ran around shooting people on the brand of saddles that had been stolen. More saddles were returned to the seller than had been stolen. Even people who had actually purchased one no longer wanted to be seen sitting on one.
So I realize the law does not technically make it illegal to have your aunt visit. But if the effect is that you might get sued, the de facto outcome might be that you stop letting relatives come visit if you live in SF because the risk involved in doing something completely legal is nonetheless too high.
You can be guaranteed that that there will be lawyers taking up cases (possibly on contingency) for the most frivolous of claims and offering to settle for a few grand (much less than it would cost to defend the case).
I think you're misunderstanding the point of the proposition a little bit. It's not just about recovering direct damages to neighbors (e.g. noise). It's about using incentives to crowdsource enforcement that the city doesn't have the resources to do.
(I wish there was a meta.n.y.c where we could discuss things like this. Alas.)
When you think about it that way, they almost all look pretty ridiculous. Should the San Francisco city charter have an amendment about whether one particular construction project in 2014 can be built at a certain height? Should we have a ballot initiative every time a new building needs to be built?
That might make sense in some alternate reality if we lived in a direct democracy with routine voting and people actually informed themselves about the issues they were deciding. I think it's pretty safe to say that we aren't living in that world today.
Instead of capping the tax, we should cap the amount of the tax that actually has to be paid in a year in which the property does not change hands. That number could be limited according to the Prop. 13 formula; the city or county would receive a lien for the difference, that lien not becoming due until the property does change hands.
This wouldn't change anyone's cash flow until the property is sold, at which time the city or county would receive the unpaid amount out of the sale. The unpaid amount will be a fraction of the amount by which the property appreciated (or if its value fell, the unpaid amount will be zero), so this will be relatively painless.
I've read that this has been done somewhere, though I don't recall where. It's clearly possible. No one is forced to sell, and the localities still get their tax money.
Consider that the standard commission paid to the listing agent when you sell a property is 6% of the sale price, and you'll see that these amounts are not significant disincentives to selling.
But people certainly should have some degree of autonomy when it comes to their personal property. The question is, what is it?
What I never understood is why short term rental regulations aren't modeled more closely off BnB laws than hotel laws. Many jurisdictions have BnB laws and AirBnBs obviously compare much more closely to BnBs. BnBs typically have lighter regulation, different taxes, are frequently in residential areas, etc.
That is why we elect people. To answer these kinds of hard questions.
> What I never understood is why short term rental regulations aren't modeled more closely off BnB laws than hotel laws.
Part of the whole kerfuffle is because AirBnB was encouraging people to break the laws that actually existed.
For example, if I buy a house in an area zoned "residential", I don't expect to have someone next to me running different people in an out every week as part of AirBnB. If you want to do that you should have to be zoned "commercial", thanks. Then, we'll get to discuss this at the next council meeting when you ask for a zoning exemption. If it's your hunting lodge, probably nobody is going to object. If it's right next to the elementary school, people are probably going to complain. etc.
The "burden" on your neighbors from short-term visitors is highly overblown. What actual impact on the elementary school is short-term visitors going to have? Is their driving to & from the home ever so more frequent than a full-time occupant? Do you think they are having rowdy parties despite self-selecting to stay in a residential neighborhood? Or that they would be a pedophile (which federal laws already ban from staying within a short distance from an elementary school?)
That's a completely different situation, and not at all relevant to this conversation.
"These visitors are renting in a residential area precisely because they want a residential experience."
And I want a pony. Why should I care what they want?
"The "burden" on your neighbors from short-term visitors is highly overblown."
You're gonna have to prove that.
As for detached dwellings? If you're hosting out of country people, how do I, as your neighbor, prosecute them if they damage my property (bust a fence, hit my car, swim in my pool)?
I can keep going, but our current laws were set up with the recognition that transiency does represent a risk. Clearly people DO recognize this as a risk or it wouldn't be explicitly banned by so many HOA agreements.
I'm not sure I follow your comment about detached dwellings and foreign visitors. The biggest issue will be identifying who harmed your property which will be significantly easier if your neighbor used Airbnb as their identification will be on file. Whereas if they just drove by and damaged your property or stayed at your neighbors house through a less formal rental system that will never be as well regulated (Craigslist, local word of mouth, etc.) or a hotel a mile away then it would be much harder to track them down.
> Clearly people DO recognize this as a risk or it wouldn't be explicitly banned by so many HOA agreements.
That's circular reasoning - we ban it in HOA agreements because it's dangerous, and it's dangerous because look - it's banned in HOA agreements!
Several families, with children around the same as the neighbors, tour and bid on the property. However, an enterprising person (who doesn't need the bedrooms for kids) uses the anticipated income from airbnb rentals (not to mention the absence of childcare costs) to outbid all those families. The SFR zoned house, on a SFR zoned block, is now a hotel, for all practical purposes. Guess the kids will have to find neighborhood friends somewhere else.
The visitors are quiet, polite. So, no harm no foul?
I understand that this scenario can occur in the absence of airbnb or even short term rentals(plenty of people rent out rooms in their houses), but there's an order of magnitude difference here. Also, I still see more benefit to this if these are permanent, long term rentals. They may be students who need a place to live, long term residents who need a place to live. I also think that unregulated and unresticted[1] airbnb makes this scenario much more likely (which is one reason why the company is so profitable, it has made it much easier to rent out "spare" bedrooms, creating a new market).
[1] properly regulated airbnb, which allows someone to rent out their house while they are on vacation, now and then, would not cause any of this harm.
Yes, and the people we elected actually already answered this question wrt short-term rentals. Propositions like this one undermine this process.
How many people do you think voting for Prop F will have read it?
In California, its arguable that the premise of the model of government we have (as articulated in the State Constitution) is more that we elect people to exercise legislative power in the regular case not because we have other things to do on a day-to-day basis, but that the people reserve superceding legislative powers of initiative and referendum specifically because we don't think that the people we hire to deal with the day-to-day drudgery of dealing with legislation are necessarily any better or more trustworthy when it comes to answering the tough questions.
Similarly, a private right of action is meant to deal with situations when the city isn't willing to act. The article makes valid points about the downsides of this, but it's also an accountability mechanism. Should it apply in this case? Seems like a good question for the voters.
Rental agreements often have clauses barring subletting. If you are a landlord and object to a tenant subletting on AirBnB, that's a violation of the terms of the lease, and you can threaten eviction. I would imagine it's obscenely Byzantine to actually get someone evicted, even with good cause and when they are in breach of contract in SF, though.
I'm glad I live in a relatively unregulated area where people mostly mind their own business and aren't jackasses.
It's one thing to zone non-commercial (which has very little to do with individual short-term rentals) and another ban short term rentals altogether.
Feasibility aside, the only problem I see is it'd create a literal underclass—as opposed to the proverbial one that exists now as a result of absurd rent prices.
You can only not build up because of regulation. Building under probably comes with regulation, too.
You have not. You are a rentier. You are running a business. Please stop this violence against the English language.
I use hospitality exchange websites to actually share my home, that is offer my home as a place to stay free of charge. What people do on AirBnB, VRBO, and others is not sharing, it's commerce, and we have different words for describing that.
Appropriating the language of mutual aid and generosity to describe a business transaction is insulting. Please stop it.
for example, there's absolutely ZERO chance a hotel will cancel your room on you 12 hours before you show up in europe.
wrong
But why are you anti-airbnb?
The weasel-wording they use in their ads is to get around TV network (and sports league) squeamishness about running ads for sports betting.
In the case of housing, at the basic level, we pay a monthly rate in order to have a place to sleep (and maybe live & eat). But embedded in our rules and laws are assumptions about how that works, and one of those core assumptions is stability (that is, people who make this exchange of money for housing will remain in the housing for longer spans). Our noise ordinances are based on long timelines for investigation, monitoring, and enforcement because they embed the assumption of stable tenancy. Our building codes assume certain occupancies and our maintenance schedules assume certain rates of wear. Our building security practices assume that people with the keys have an invested interest in restricting access.
These assumptions may or may not be desirable, but they exist, and because of their existence renting an apartment (I have different feelings regarding owned single-family dwellings) for short-term AirBnB-style rentals violates not only the social contract with neighbors, but the unwritten contract involving a number of ambient practices with potentially negative consequences.
I'm not 100% against short-term subletting, and I'm certainly not against having relatives stay over, for example. But this is a classic example of both money and automation fundamentally changing an existing practice -- people are "doing the same thing", but at a scale and in a way that results in an emergent difference.
I do not mean to say that having a permanent traditional life is less desirable to some people. I simply think that the laws of our land should respect freedom of choice and thus not bias any particular lifestyle. I think it is especially egregious to have laws telling people what they can and cannot do with their own home in a manner that has no tangible effect on their neighbors. I find it dubious (and empirically unsupported) that the presence of airbnb guests has any measurable effect on any neighborhood.
Everyone has an opinion about airbnb. Here's my big worry.
San Francisco's population of children has plummeted in my lifetime (I grew up in SF in the 70s). In this time, I think it has gone from about 22% to a current rate of 14% or so. I guess it's just important to me that SF continue to be a place people are from, rather than a place where young people move prior to having families, or (increasingly) a place where empty nesters move and enjoy the city after having families.
Here's the thing, I consider this to be a very economically vulnerable stretch of life. I have two kids, in SFUSD, and I'm starting to see just how colossal a disadvantage a family with two kids would be in a bidding war against someone who intends to put the extra bedrooms in a SFH or a 3 bedroom apartment on airbnb instead.
It's no secret that housing is in short supply in SF, and that the price of a house or apartment in SF reflects what the highest bidder is able to pay. It's also probably not surprising that kids are very expensive. A two income family (pretty tough to live in SF if you aren't) means daycare - and daycare costs, conservatively, over $2,000 a month per kid. Even if they're in SFUSD ("free"), after care at school with run you about $4,000 a year per kid, and summer camps will add another $3000 or so per kid, if you're doing things the inexpensive way.
Now, imagine that a family with two kids now has to compete against a bidder who plans to put the "spare" bedrooms on airbnb, and who factors that into the bid. The family has two very expensive, non-revenue generating children. The airbnb buyer has a massive advantage here, and I see it as another factor that could potentially put massive new pressures on an already collapsing population of families with children. It could also reduce turnover - someone who no longer needs the extra bedrooms and might have in the past downsized (opening up a SFH for a new family) now rents the bedrooms out full time on airbnb.
Sure, these problems could have existed with permanent, long term tenants, but I do think that it was less likely. Airbnb definitely makes it far easier and more profitable to do this - this is one big reason why the company is so large and profitable itself. Is this happening? I don't know, I don't have the data. Until then, it's just a fear, though not (in my opinion, obviously) an unfounded one. But if they company won't open up the data and recognize the possible danger, my guess is that the public will support strict regulations.
very rare.
bidding against someone who's going to Airbnb the extra rooms
increasingly common.
Could you explain why you don't like airbnb? Did the CEO kick you in the puppies, or something?
Personally, I think AirBnB has not done a very good job helping communities figure out what the best situation should be. Many/most leases and HOAs forbid short-term leases for very good reason and yet AirBnB turns an eye. And for people who own their residences, many areas are zoned non-commercial, again for very good reasons, and AirBnB turns an eye. Prop F looks terrible but if it somehow manages to pass, AirBnB has no one to blame but itself for not participating constructively in a reasonable solution.
People who are either pro-airbnb because they feel it makes some kind of political or economic statement or places them into some kind of club they like, or are anti-airbnb because they are busybodies and like to find things to be outraged over or similarly feel that being so places them in a club they like, find it impossible to imagine having no opinion of airbnb. Personally, I find it impossible to imagine myself in either of those camps. To each of us the limits of our own imagination, I suppose.
Isn't it obvious that these situations are far more likely to happen with short term tenancies than people who rent for a year, or own? It's similar to a mob mentality. "I'll be gone tomorrow." vs "I'll have to deal with my neighbors for the next X years".
These situations have unequivocally become more frequent as a direct result of the existence of Airbnb.
Having an opinion about a company that has streamlined the process for your neighbors to create unsafe or otherwise undesirable conditions in your neighborhood is pretty rational behavior, and not the exclusive domain of your fringe strawmen.
I don't think short-term tenants are any more likely than long-term tenants or owners to be terrible neighbors; I've seen some awful examples of both. Unfortunately, people who are inconsiderate jerks are going to be lousy neighbors regardless of how they came to occupy the premises. Laying blame for a tenant's inconsiderate behavior at the feet of a particular broker is absurd; you may as well ban truckers from entering your city because they might deliver lead-based paint. If airbnb went away, someone else would fill the niche; there's obviously plenty of demand for short-term rental broking. And you're always going to have to deal with bad neighbors -- often of the much more permanent variety. It would be a lot more constructive to think about the behavior you want to prohibit than tertiary factors like who arranged for a lease or how many days it was for. The whole point of inconsiderate jerks -- and if you'd ever had one for a neighbor you would know this -- is that they don't care what you think! They're not thinking "gee, I'd better not be such an asshole, because I'm going to be living next to this guy for years!". They're thinking "I like cranking my death metal to 11 at 3am and there's no law against it so they can suck it." That is, if they're even aware of your existence at all. Because that's the kind of people they are. What's the worst you're going to do, not lend them your lawnmower?
Seriously, I don't care if airbnb succeeds or fails. They don't pay me, I don't own their stock, and I don't pretend that they're making the world a better place or any of that tripe. They're just one more private corporation that wants to make a buck, and they seem to have found a much better way to serve a particular market than the dozens of other substantially indistinguishable competitors. Good for them. If it turns out that the only people who lease short-term rentals are inconsiderate jerks, then airbnb won't be doing much business once those inconsiderate jerks are sitting in jails. The anti-airbnb crowd seems to be shooting the messenger, while the pro-airbnb crowd seems to be elevating a glorified classified-ad publisher to sainthood for doing nothing more interesting than connecting willing buyers and sellers. Everyone needs to get over it and focus instead on what matters. This company just isn't interesting enough to justify having a strong opinion about it.
How can I also blame this on AirBnB and possibly extort them for large amounts of money? /s
Yes. Do you even lift?
This article is about SF, which is a city. Most of the busybodies who get up in arms about airbnb are residents of cities as well. Cities are densely populated places with large numbers of tenants per unit area, high residential turnover rates, and lots of tourists. "New strangers roaming around" is just a fact of life, regardless of whether a particular rental broker is in business. If you don't like that, you would probably be better off living in a rural area where you could easily afford a large parcel of land from which others can be excluded. There are plenty of places where you could afford 160 acres of timberland and a very nice house for less than a 2-bedroom TIC in SF. You'd probably average one new neighbor per decade, none closer than half a mile away, and could easily go years without seeing another human if that's what you prefer. That's just not what cities are about.
In dense areas, the solution is pretty easy and widespread: HOAs and landlords forbid it. No one in multi-unit dwellings wants a steady stream of strangers.
It's the less dense neighborhoods where residents resent renters, much less short-term renters.
You asked if I've ever owned a residence. This sounded an awful lot to me like the classic trolly put-down "do you even lift?". See http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/do-you-even-lift. I don't care if you lift weights or if you've ever owned a residence; I just think your response to my comment was pointless and obnoxious. Try addressing the points in my argument instead of my (dubious?) credentials.
How about--because I find the serfitude economy ineffective outside areas that are already well-served through other mechanisms.
Most of these middlemen are actively interfering in the most profitable cities and areas while ignoring those places where they would actively be useful because they are less profitable.
People would find AirBnB, Uber, et al. much less distasteful if they weren't interfering in dense cities where there is existing infrastructure and were instead focusing on areas that are underserved and would welcome them very much. (For an AirBnB example see: Kittanning, PA--almost nothing in spite of the fact that there are no hotels--heaven help you if you need a hotel while helping with a sick relative in that area during graduation season, leaf viewing season, or the start of hunting season--even normal times in winter are difficult because the hotels have quite a driving distance in bad weather).
Add in the fact that these same companies are taking a middleman cut of money in return for pushing all of the risks onto individuals and externalizing the costs onto the general public.
Top it off with the fact that said middleman generally knows that the end users are actively flouting the law.
As for the claim that "these companies" are "pushing all of the risks onto individuals", I would cite the $1,000,000 insurance policy that Airbnb provides the host to take the risk off of them: https://www.airbnb.com/guarantee
It's not their fault. However, AirBnB, Uber and all the other serfitude economy ilk would get a lot less static if the at least tried to incentivize people in order to serve these kinds of underserved areas. Instead, they're trying to elbow their way into the already well-served markets--often while ignoring the law.
> As for the claim that "these companies" are "pushing all of the risks onto individuals", I would cite the $1,000,000 insurance policy that Airbnb provides
Did you read the page you linked? Did you note that it doesn't cover "personal liability"? Which is the whole reason you would likely need $1,000,000 in insurance? And I guarantee that your personal liability insurance won't cover AirBnB rentals.
Given the size of pool and statistics that AirBnB has, the fact that AirBnB doesn't just insure everybody tells me exactly what I need to know. I trust AirBnB's actuaries, and those actuaries have basically said "unprofitable if we cover everybody properly".
So, yeah, my point still stands about "pushing all of the risks onto individuals". These companies are masters of the "$1 MEEEEELLLYON DOLLARS" while burying the important asterisk "*it doesn't actually apply to anything you'd need help for" in the quiet fine print.
I think its a simple numbers thing. Lets say one household in Kittanning is interested in working with AirBnB. For the sake of argument and easy numbers, let's say a household is the platonic 4 people, that's 0.1% of the population. In New York, assuming the same percentage of people that would be willing to be AirBnB rentals and the same household size, that's almost 8500 possible units available for rent.
>serfitude economy
Really? That's a fine description for the terrible 'contractor' jobs, but it doesn't fit renting a room at all. AirBnB makes their hosts less serf-y, with a completely different set of externalities.
Someone really needed to let us know how fantastic things are when the gubmint gets out of the way. Got it.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10281311 and marked it off-topic.
Houston also has four freakin' beltways (I610, TX 8, TX 6, and TX 99).
Comparing a city that is the poster child for "sprawl" with a chunk of real estate that is more than a little landfill and locked on 3 sides with water is more than a little disingenuous.
Houston's second beltway would encircle San Mateo, some of Oakland, and Sausalito if transplanted to San Fransico.
If transplanted to San Francisco, Houston's fourth beltway (TX 99--currently under construction) would encompass almost all of San Pablo bay, Walnut Creek (maybe even as far as Concord), easily all of Oakland, Hayward, and Redwood City. And be more than 50% underwater.
The differences are more than the "gubmint reg-you-lashion" my good man.
Also, what's with constant 'gub' slurs, are people on HN little children who must insult people who are willing to criticize inept policy makers?
Actually, you are factually wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
San Francisco is only behind New York, Los Angeles, and Miami in density. It's probably in or close to the top 20 in Europe.
Sure, none of our cities compares to anything in Asia. We also don't seem to like to live that dense.
> Also, what's with constant 'gub' slurs, are people on HN little children who must insult people who are willing to criticize inept policy makers?
Invoking a lack of regulations as proof of success when the factual metrics (Houston's population density is ridiculously, laughably low) easily refute said statement is going to provoke a response appropriate for someone who clearly is impervious to fact.
What are you smoking? I want some of that.
Brooklyn has a density of 35,369.1 people per square mile.
That would make it the 5th most dense city in the US. Behind only other New York areas. It would even put it in the top 10 in density for Europe.
What the hell DO you consider a dense city?
And "not very high rise" is more like "medium-rise", not "low-rise".
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10281311 and marked it off-topic.
Prop I is a temporary (18 month) moratorium in one neighborhood (the Mission), for only a limited subset of projects, coupled with the requirement that the city has to create a "neighborbood stabilization plan" by the end of that period [1].
It is not a "moratorium on building new market-rate housing", as you say.
The idea is that the Mission is undergoing a land-grab by speculators, that poor people are losing (they are), and that the battle will be over by the time a coherent plan is formulated to do anything about it. Whether or not you believe this to be the correct approach, it does nobody any good to mischaracterize it as something that is obviously and painfully stupid.
I realize it's not at all fashionable on HN to point out that life is more complicated than chapter one, paragraph one of a high-school economics textbook...but prop I might actually be a good idea over here in the real world, where actual poor people are being evicted from the only places they can afford in the city, at alarming rates.
[1] http://ballotpedia.org/City_of_San_Francisco_Mission_Distric...
For example, SF's Chief Economist: http://sfcontroller.org/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid...
Viewed in that light, this report is a vote for the plan, not against it: it gives a little breathing room, and probably won't affect prices either way. Whether or not it "works" is entirely speculative: someone has to come up with an actual solution in the longer term.
I believe the advocates of this proposition want the city to buy the remaining vacant lots in the Mission, and use them to build affordable housing projects, but I could be wrong about that.
I've worked hard to understand both sides of the issue. In practice what I strongly believe will happen is that ~800 market rate units will be delayed for 18 months, nothing else will change and the politicians who pushed this won't be taken to task because they're all terming out and eyeing Sacramento.
http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/City-report-Missi...
As I'm sure you know, there is no place on Hacker News for inflammatory attacks against other users.
The commenters who have taken what was a substantive, reasonable thread about an interesting (beyond just local SF politics) subject and turned it into an angry insult match are breaking everything we're trying to achieve in this community. Users who do this disqualify themselves from participating in the discussion.
We've detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10281057 and marked it off-topic.
But this Medium post is also rife with misleading statements and hyperbole, and therefore hypocritical in light of the author's "here's the facts" tone (not a huge surprise since the author earns income from Airbnb, but still annoying):
> (Imagine if we were living under the “MySpace Law” of 2006, eh?)
Hyperbole and strawman; who is calling it the "Airbnb Law"?
> to assist anyone to offer (emphasized twice) > What does “assist” mean? Cleaning a house before guests arrive? Proofreading someone’s listing? Helping a family member find temporary housing? Nobody knows because it’s undefined in the text, even in the lengthy Definitions section. The judge will decide what it means.
Clearly this is referring to the marketplaces and holding them accountable. If I can figure that out, any judge can.
> But wait, there’s more! How do you feel about criminal penalties? ... Six months? (in jail)
The author is a "long-time SF resident" and pretending that an SF judge would want to jail somebody over renting out on Airbnb illegally?
> If you host someone in a room in your home for less than 30 days, you best not miss a quarterly report of dates and durations. You’ll be violating the new law.
If it's a paid rental. That's the whole point of the law! In order to regulate the short-term rentals, the city needs you to report your rentals. And remember, up until this year it was completely illegal to rent for less than 30 days.
> Why are in-laws banned, even for one night per year? Nobody knows.
The reason Prop F bans in-laws that they are a hot-button issue, generally speaking, to do with the legality of the construction of the units and the connection thereof with new rent-controlled housing units (IE the city may be willing to bless your unpermitted in-law, if you rent it out under rent control).
ps. did anybody else get "Aw snap!" opening the post in Chrome?
It seems like giving judges that power because "they obviously won't use it" has gotten us into a lot of trouble in the past.
> idea being the new in-laws are hoped to contribute to regular (mostly rent-controlled I believe)
No, the idea is to increase specifically rent-controlled stock, with the preference of no new rental space at all over new rental space that is not rent-controlled. At least this is how it looks from the proposals.
I agree that's how it looks from proposals, I think you have articulated the politics in a helpful way.
I think a lot of people do, not only in SF. Same for Uber laws, etc. Of course, they don't call it exactly that, but the intent is clear.
> Clearly this is referring to
Judging laws by "clearly this is referring to" is rather risky proposition, unless you are one of the nine people who have the power to actually decide such questions (aka The Supreme Court). Because otherwise you won't be deciding it, the judge or jury would, and what is clear to you may not be as clear to them. And you can land in a big trouble for it.
Not to mention being pursued by regulators is a very expensive and complicated thing even if you win. And regulators can be very zealous in their prosecutions, and they would try to twist every letter against you. There are numerous cases where judges had to rebuke regulators and prosecutors for excessive zeal and misinterpretation of the law. You do not want to be on the wrong end of that. So any law that leaves opening for that is extremely dangerous for the citizen.
> SF judge would want to jail somebody over renting out on Airbnb illegally?
It doesn't have to get to the judge even. It can be just "do you want to close your business now or do you want to risk prosecution that can land you in jail?" Criminalization of regular business behavior is dangerous because it grant immense powers to prosecutors by leveraging the threat of imprisonment - even if imprisonment itself does not follow. I.e. if prosecutors want something from you (like testify on unrelated case) and they discovered you let your friend stay in your apartment and took money for it, or even helped one friend to star at other friend's house (and you had no idea if any money changed hands, but prosecutors say they did so you are prosecutable now for "assisting") - they can threaten you with 6 months in jail now. Would you risk it, relying on the kindness of SF judges, or would you just bend over and do what the prosecutors tell you to do? Criminalizing common behavior may not land you in jail immediately, but it makes you more and more dependent on the good mood of the law enforcement. It is not a good thing.
> If it's a paid rental.
"Paid" is a very stretchable term. Any consideration can be considered payment. Did they offer to pay for your tickets on the game you go to see together as thanks for hosting them? This can be treated as the same as rent - you hosted them and got something in exchange. Etc., etc.
> And remember, up until this year it was completely illegal to rent for less than 30 days.
"It was worse in the past" is not really an argument for it being good currently. You can always think of something worse.
> The reason Prop F bans in-laws
is that they want less rentals unless it's under conditions under which people do not want to rent. Somehow it does not sound to me like and argument for, but a rather strong argument against.
I am not arguing for or against the proposition - I just don't think the OP is a quality article around which to have this debate. It's a political scare piece.
For example, private right to action is very scary - it generates immense amount of abuse for such things as ADA and Prop 65, most of which only reallocates money from businesses to slimy lawyers while contributing exactly nothing to the welfare of the intended beneficiaries. And to add one-way attorney fees shifting to that? This moves it from the "bad idea" territory to "these guys are completely insane, everybody, turn and run!" territory. This is practically begging for the law to be abused. I think with such starting point one has to work very hard to write a piece that would be scary enough.
The OP on the other hand, well I really tried in my first comment to show the OP's hypocrisy, I am not going to be able to do a better job here.
I suppose one measure is, how much did private right to action and one-way attorney fees come up in the HN discussion of the article? Not enough, and never (?) with the kind of historical context you are hereby providing (also missing from the OP). I'd posit that the OP did successfully scare more than 0 readers into considering voting against the proposition. So while the article may not be entirely without social utility (scare pieces have utility!), it's not a "smart" article, and it didn't do a good job of explaining the real critical problems with F. And it successfully made me feel alienated from and judgemental toward the No On F crowd.