The poor are better off when we build more housing for the rich
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The politics in SF are weird. Many politicians do superficially irrational things --they look good on the surface, but in effect they are detrimental. On the bright side, the mayors themselves have been rational about attracting business and bringing in development.
If you listen to KQED and their local reporters, it's like they'd like to have SF frozen in time in 1992. As if they'd rather it go down the way of Detroit rather than it become an economic center on the Pacific with the effects they bring ("gentrification" population moves, etc.) They want to eat their cake and have it too. And I understand it. It's very attractive. Let's have a great economy BUT let's have it so all other things stay the same, no disruption, no changes to neighborhoods, etc. Not even China can pull that off. Especially when SF proper is all but 49sq mi. But if we will it that way hard enough...
Poor civic planning, racism and the loss of jobs to non-union Southern plants all paid a part in Detroit's population dropping by two thirds over a fifty year span.
I read a great book over Christmas, Once in a great city by David Maraniss, which covered Detroit at its peak from 1962-1964. Wayne State actually pretty accurately predicted the city's future then but the report was ignored by those in a position to stem its decline.
My biggest issue is the highway theory - build more lanes, commute time is shorter, more people drive, purpose defeated. Here build more market rate housing, prices fall, more people move in that would have loved elesewhere in bay area, prices rise. Purpose defeated.
I like projects that include percentage of units to be affordable, rent control, and programs to build on surplus public land for affordable housing.
Beyond that not sure what else they can do. At end of day government only has so much they can subsidize. Unless they start building homes underground or on the bay...
Traffic throughput is different [unless you are comparing it to the toll express lanes]. Normal highways have no barrier to entry other than the vehicle you need to enter with anyway, so of course people will take whichever way gets you there faster. If before you had to take the 2-hour bus, or the surface streets which took two hours, but now you can take the freeway which takes an hour, all things being equal you take the freeway... Now, if you had to pay a toll to get on the freeway AND there was also public transit which was cheaper, you might take public transit.
The sad thing is politicians on either side ignore economics when it benefits their point of view or it aligns themselves with the ignorance of the people they represent [climate change, fiscal policy, housing, jobs policies, etc] so I'm under no illusions this report by the state gov't[1] will convince city supes.
It's like? I thought that was exactly what they wanted.
This is not surprising to anyone who follows real estate. There's no such thing as "a market for housing" -- there are several markets, each moving more-or-less independently, based on the net worth of the participants involved. A drop in the prices of units in the Millenium Tower doesn't have much of an impact on the rent of a pre-war hovel in the Mission.
The reason that the author doesn't understand this is because there's a latent correlation at play: the communities with the most high-end construction tend to have the most construction overall. But in a city like SF, where all of the new construction would be high-end (if so allowed), all bets are off.
Observing that properties become cheaper as they age is also silly. There are some properties that become cheaper as they age, but there aren't many of them, say, in Pac Heights.
[1] http://wolfstreet.com/2015/11/08/san-franciscos-luxury-condo... [2] http://sfist.com/2015/11/09/at_high_end_sfs_housing_market_f...
http://www.lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3345#Technical_App...
Also, the measure is not whether available housing is getting more expensive, but whether low-income households are being displaced.
My intuition is that they are getting smaller. The old houses are all subdivided. The new apartments are all small. The exception is some large lofts in SOMA but there are plenty of tiny lofts in China Beach, 5th and Mission, 8th and Mission, 10th and Market.
I'm not saying the average is smaller since I don't have any data only personal observation. It sounds like your extrapolating that 2.26 people are getting more space than 3.08 people were before?
Source: http://rationalconspiracy.com/2015/05/25/new-york-times-make...
Also, I should note that, contrary to popular belief, there's not much new luxury housing in the Mission. In fact, there's not much new housing in the Mission at any economic level. In 2014 (the last year for which data is available), there were a grand total of 74 units built in the entire Mission. Not 74 buildings. 74 units.
Source: http://www.sf-planning.org/ftp/files/publications_reports/20...
The poor are better off when there isn't a housing shortage, because (surprise, surprise) the rich aren't the ones who are going to be forced out.
"The poor are better off when we constantly build more than enough housing for the rich."
The last paragraphs actually point that out, albeit in a slightly reversed manner. As long as high-end housing supply is continuously being satisfied, the more aged buildings become affordable even without 95% percentile incomes.
On the other hand, I do find it somewhat insulting that the figures assume a time window of 50-60 years. This kind of approach ignores a crucial externality: if it takes ~3 generations of neglect to see the problem, it also takes another ~3 to repair it. Even assuming a perfect 180-degree flip in housing, zoning and transit policies, that's a century lost to bad decisions and blind greed. And in the meanwhile, the city is pricing itself out.
I'm not a historian, but I sure would like to know a bit more. Has any great city survived 100 years of exodus?
Dislaimer: I live in (Greater) London.
"More housing" is a pretty fluff summary of the intricacies of building sustainable neighborhoods.
Like when you go to the grocery store before a holiday, many people will tend to buy the leftovers [constrained stock] they normally would not buy --so it is with housing.
For every "Rich Person Condo" that is built in SOMA, there is one less "Up and Coming Apartment in The Mission" that gets taken up by a rich techie.
The rich are going to move to the city whether we like it or not. They have the resources, they can buy out whatever place they choose. The only choice we have to make is whether to build housing for them or to just let them displace existing residents.
In other words, building more market-rate housing in a neighborhood helps keep that neighborhood's low-income families from getting displaced. Or, to put it another way, the poor are better off when we build housing for the rich (than when we don't build housing for anyone).
The other problem is that if you're a young professional, you may very well be single. Moving to a small city or town means you will not get a date, unless you want to date some overweight, uneducated woman who has 4 kids and talks about Jesus and guns all the time. If you're on this site, that probably isn't the right demographic for you. You'd have better luck moving to a foreign country; rural and urban America are that different these days.
I think if I wanted to pick a comment as the canonical example what is wrong with people on HN this would be the one.
I think the last statistic I found was something like 140 single men in the 20s-30s age bracket for every 100 single women.
...which is why I'd prefer rural America over urban America any day.
:)
2) I lived in Scottsdale, Arizona. You can live buy a home in the heart of the city for sub $300k.
3) I will not comment on the dating part. To each their own.
4) I understand it will be difficult, but you can consider it a mega startup. You launch it and recruit others who believe in it.
2) Scottsdale is an extremely conservative city with a downright hellish climate. Not everyone wants to live someplace where it's 120F every day in the summer, and never goes below 100F at night.
3) So you wouldn't have a problem with people with entirely different political views from you moving into your city, and then demanding and voting for totally different policies than you're used to? If you advocate for people to move to where you are because the cost of housing is cheaper, then you have absolutely no right to complain when they change the political climate there.
Since we moved here 4 more friends have joined us out here in the country. The only thing we really lack is true high speed fat bandwidth. But that an be worked around as well.
In a similar vein, it's not just foreign investors. It might also make sense to leave the grandparent's house empty while they are in the nursing home if you live further away. If the grandparents don't need to sell the house to pay for retirement, you'd probably come off cheaply enough to leave it empty, pay the property tax and minimal utilities, rather than risk having tenants.
If they pay for supervision, they might as well pay for someone to serve as landlord.
I imagine that there are companies that do exactly that for you taking percentage of rent you'd get if you done all that by yourself. I also imagine there are insurances for landlords and/or investors. There's so much money in this when you approach this as investments (as opposed to not renting your grandfather house because it's too much of a bother to clean it out and think about) that I imagine no sane investor lets their property, they just bought to stand empty.
A few weeks ago, in order to buy any Realestate in the States, all it took was a phone call to the seller's Realtor.
Some mob/drug dealer/corrupt politician guy where-ever, "Hay, by me tat apartment complex in the old U. S. Of A.". Done deal!
(I've always felt you should have to be a citizen of a country in order to buy that land.)
Shit I had a 2 hr daily round commute INSIDE San francisco, taking bus from the ocean and then walking to office. Id be beside my self if there was cheap housing an hour commute away.
And there may be some hope - marin and Sonoma counties just built a train. http://main.sonomamarintrain.org/
How about using international data?
Edit: I'm curious what people are disagreeing with here. Do you think that moving to a new city doesn't require expenditures?
ftfy
In actual wartime, the item in question gets rationed. To the extent that the metaphor could even apply to housing, it would work like this: "There's a shortage of San Francisco housing. First, the military gets what it needs. If there's anything left, you have to share with everyone else. No hoarding. Each citizen will get a book of 5 ration tickets per year. Each ticket entitles you to spend one week in San Francisco housing. Some tickets will only be valid in even-numbered months; some, odd-numbered."
The entire piece reads like an excuse to not do things for the poor. How about we actually do things FOR THE POOR instead of tossing them scraps from the tables of the rich?
No working class housing groups are trying to stop new buildings. They're just asking for the same things groups like these have asked for almost a century.
Article translation: "Hack employee of the Washington Post Co. says wealthy parasite developers and trustafarian transplants should ignore everything long time, mostly working class black people want, they don't matter". Well why not, that's the same message we've been hearing in this election campaign all year.
Ahem:
http://www.savethemission.org/save_the_mission_district_yes_...
Sunnyvale/Mountain View have experienced 4 years of building new housing without limits, yet every year is more expensive. The new units (rental or for sale) are way higher than the average rent or price. (e.g. ALL the new housing being built now in the peninsula is priced at $1MM or more) I fail to see the point of pushing for new unregulated housing here besides saying in 30+ years the middle class will move to housing built for the rich now. Sure... In 30 years the middle class won't exist. (and in SV I give it 12-15 years)
Just put yourself in the shoes of the investor. Government announces they're gonna make you pay through your nose if no one "lives" in your apartment.
Leaving aside the dubious morality of such penalization (it's a slippery slope!), is your reaction going to be "Oh noes, I am ruined! Better sell my apartment now."? Or can you think of half a dozen simple, practical ways around it?
I bet you have already.
If you don’t want to do this you can do random surveys of the suspect property (say any property without a taxpayer) and if it is unoccupied more than a few times and not registered as unoccupied then a big fine results.
Finally, the owner does not need to sell, just have tenants. What you want to avoid is housing sitting empty or only being used as a holiday home a couple of weeks a year.
Did I mention "slippery slope"?
You don't have to be a diehard libertarian to find this whole concept somewhat creepy.
I have no problem with someone with the appropriate authority politely knocking on my door to see if I am home if I am claiming a large tax refund for living there. The IRS and its fellow ilk are far more intrusive - the IRS makes my life a pain as it is and I am not even a US taxpayer.
I see where you're coming from, but as is probably obvious, I don't subscribe to your "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" world view on government surveillance. This seems to be the root of our disagreement here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument#Argum...
Where would rents and real estate prices have gone without the new building you're lamenting?
Rents absolutely did go down in 2009, oftentimes way down, with apartments that rented for $2000+/month in mid-2008 going for $1400/month by mid-2009. There's no incentive to drop rents as long as everybody is making more money and the apartments aren't lying vacant. There's a pretty strong incentive when people start getting laid off and moving back in with parents or roommates, and places aren't renting at any price.
It gets more fun in the East Bay: you can be going Eastbound on 580 and Westbound on 80 at the same time (it's a shared road)!
That whole area is direction-impaired. The city of East Palo Alto is northwest of Palo Alto and in a different county!
"""We use data (.xlsx) on Bay Area census tracts (small subdivisions of a county typically containing around 4,000 people) maintained by researchers with the University of California (UC) Berkeley Urban Displacement Project. This dataset included information on census tract demographics, housing characteristics, and housing construction levels. We focus on data for the period 2000 to 2013."""