Finally, some good news about the Silicon Valley housing crisis | Hacker News Reader

Finally, some good news about the Silicon Valley housing crisis

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43 pointsFuturebot56 comments

I think in some ways that this is one of the issues facing the US right now.

Economists generally suggest that easing the shift from low productivity areas to high productivity areas is very beneficial, but NIMBY housing policies stand in the way.

And these things have repercussions all throughout the country. Here in Oregon, there is a steady stream of people who are bailing out of California in part because of the housing prices. This causes resentment here, because it is pricing locals out of certain markets (Portland and Bend, likely others). Ultimately, without dealing with the root causes of the issue, the process will just keep repeating itself elsewhere.

My view is that there should be a wider range of densities, and more walkable, bikeable neighborhoods. Ultimately, it is a supply issue - you cannot keep that steady and increase demand without forcing people out. Granted, maybe not everyone can have a ranch house with a large yard and a two car garage, but... not everyone needs that, either.

Here are some sites I'm fond of:

http://marketurbanism.com/

http://missingmiddlehousing.com/

https://clubnimbyblog.wordpress.com/

and of course Matt Yglesias' book: http://amzn.to/21hwbb6

Portland, Bend, Boulder, Austin. People are looking for the same young, urban, progressive environment that the Bay Area has provided since the Gold Rush, it seems.

There is something innate the Bay Area that has nothing to do with tech, but tech is in the middle of it and has become the boogeyman of ails to those currently living in SF. It's a misdirection for NIMBYs to focus the agitation towards because the more they deny, the more valuable and scare the homes in this special market become.

I think fighting NIMBYism is a sisyphean obligation for the Bay Area. People will always want to live here -- tech jobs or not.

I live in Mountain View and follow some of the city council discussions here. While the city council approved high density housing, many residents are doing their best to stifle any development up there.

This city's home owners, especially the older ones, are very active politically and also very anti-development. There's this attitude, which I consider to be very selfish, that "I bought into Mountain View for how it currently looks, and I don't want it to change", all the while, these same residents bemoan the high prices of housing and everyone except techies being priced out.

As of today, we're probably going to see a decade of environmental review challenges before a single unit gets built, since this is the most effective way to block development with red tape in California.

> There's this attitude, which I consider to be very selfish, that "I bought into Mountain View for how it currently looks, and I don't want it to change", all the while, these same residents bemoan the high prices of housing and everyone except techies being priced out.

Selfish is in the eye of the beholder. I have no dog in the SFBA prop value fight, but I've definitely seen people who have lived in communities for decades decide to forgo change. And if they're the majority of the community, that's their prerogative.

The issue is that blocking projects via red tape doesn't require a majority at all. It only requires a very small vocal minority.

That's how democracy works, to prevent the tyranny of the majority.

No it's not. Democracy doesn't mean everyone can block anything they don't like.

If they were thinking of the community they wouldn't be fighting the development of more housing to address the expensive housing they publicly moan about. I don't think it's a coincidence that as long as the housing prices stay sky high they're all sitting on incredibly valuable land. Selfish seems about the right word.

No more selfish than tech workers making $100K-200K/year who believe they have a right to the bay area more than those non-tech workers being pushed out.

I don't understand what point you're making.

Its no more selfish for existing property owners to want to keep their community as-is any more than its selfish that highly compensated tech workers who are in the SFBA by choice want cheaper housing.

My point was, selfish is simply an emotionally charged word for the issue. Everyone is self interested, as they should be, and as economics expects everyone to be.

> decide to forgo change

That's not the exactly the issue. It's creating an environment where they reap all the benefits of change with none of the downsides, which is a common theme almost everywhere.

For example, no one is against the change in their home prices or the change in tax revenue that comes from hosting lots of jobs. But they are vehemently against the change in landscape required to house those workers.

A few of us are against it. The value of my home in SV has roughly doubled since I bought it in 2010, but it brings no benefit to me, since I plan to stay put and don't need to borrow against it.

The increased tax revenue has some benefit, but at the cost of pushing renters to the brink. I'd rather have a community where it's not so brutally hard to get by for renters who make a good living.

Being one of the rare natives in Silicon Valley who reads HN, let me chime in here: The history of anti-development in the Bay Area really goes back to Marincello [1]. Back in the mid 60s they had a plan to turn the Marin Headlands into a suburb full of ranch houses and cul-de-sacs.

>"Marincello was originally conceived to house up to 30,000 people in 50 apartment towers, as well as hundreds of homes and townhouses. There would also be a mall and a grand hotel at the highest point of the headlands. [2]"

It got shot down through heroic community activism and now we have that wonderful open space instead of condos. Of course, open space makes people want to live here and then they complain about how it's so expensive because it's so nice and wouldn't it be nice if we built a lot more housing.

Why does everybody have to squeeze into this tiny little area? You've got the whole rest of the country that's mostly empty to work with. There are plenty of alternative metropolitan areas that are far cheaper. Why bring everyone here? I think it's because the wealthy venture capitalists and executives who own the companies and like to be on-site managing and talking to people and such like living here, so everyone else has to live here too in whatever accommodation they can find.

1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marincello

"Why does everybody have to squeeze into this tiny little area? You've got the whole rest of the country that's mostly empty to work with. There are plenty of alternative metropolitan areas that are far cheaper. Why bring everyone here? I think it's because the wealthy venture capitalists and executives who own the companies and like to be on-site managing and talking to people and such like living here, so everyone else has to live here too in whatever accommodation they can find."

Knocked it out of the park. The problem isn't affordable housing. The problem is caused by VCs and tech companies who require labor to be on site.

Open space isn't what gets replaced by development. It's molding crumbling strip malls and lead covered, termite infested, low rise apartments. I think you'll find that every proponent of high density housing is also in favor of public green space.

Only because open space these days usually has pretty strong advocates, especially in the Bay area. Developers would be more than happy to build in green space given the chance--as the parent comment noted.

Your parent is saying today's open space is literally where development was proposed, decades ago.

And he's opposing current housing increases, based on a fight over open space that happened decades ago and was resoundingly and permanently won by open space. This is not the issue anymore, and it's an idiotic equivalence. The Bay is full of crappy construction that is ready to fall over on its own without any help from developers, but sitting on multi million dollar land. This is what needs to be and would be developed. When people today oppose development, it's these shit holes they are protecting.

And for whatever the faults of housing/tax/transit/etc. policies in $POPULAR_CITY--and there are always myriad such--it's pretty much always the case that there's some practical upper limit to how many people can live there (especially when the geography limits outward growth). Clearly cities can grow, including growing upwards, over time. But this is a decades-long process.

The question is what do you define as a community. The housing market is the size of the whole Bay Area, yet local governments responsible for housing are very fragmented and very different. There is a vast difference between San Francisco (850,000+ habs) and its neighbor Brisbane (4,000 habs). Some communities try to reap the fruits of the economic growth of the Bay Area while making other support the cost.

To play devil's advocate, protecting one's (likely) most significant investment is not selfish - it is reasonable. The fact that you do not like their actions doe snot make them any less reasonable and sane.

> protecting one's (likely) most significant investment

Because some additional housing is going to completely crater house prices in the area?

I don't buy it.

You can get more out of a house than resale value, and thus "protecting" doesn't pertain only to resale value.

If you buy a house because it has a nice view of the mountains, fighting billboards that obstruct your view is "protecting your investment".

I can understand protecting genuinely historic stuff, but Silicon Valley? The area is all about change. If there weren't constant change, the area would still be rural.

I can understand wanting to channel it to some degree, too, but it's ultimately an iron triangle where something has to give. Right now, it's the less economically fortunate who are getting turfed out and losing access to an area that generates a phenomenal amount of wealth.

Their property would be worth even more than it already is if more dense development was allowed.

It's reasonably selfish. People by homes expecting their value to be retained; housing density increase tends to have the opposite effect. To the extent they can protect their investments, you'd expect people to do so.

> housing density increase tends to have the opposite effect.

Which is why house prices in Manhattan and Paris are so low?

It's not strictly a matter of protecting investments and real estate values. Many people simply don't enjoy living in dense areas. They prefer having a little space, privacy, and quiet. There's nothing wrong with wanting that, and the complaints by residents who have been there for years about the impacts of greater density are legitimate.

I think 'reasonable' has many nuances. One can definitely sympathize. Although a truly selfish person who isn't shortsighted could be better served by making sure that other members of society on whom he depends on can live in the same neighbourhood as well.

So true, its interesting when you look at the political landscape. Mountain View wants to stay relevant, and they want their share of sales tax and other revenues. The building of new apartment complexes in Sunnyvale's re-done downtown has people moving closer to the action that way, and the population numbers have reflected it. A lot of people remember the difference between San Jose and San Francisco. San Jose has been trying to shake off (for at least a decade) of the city with a downtown that dies at 5PM when everyone goes home. Contrast that with cities like Denver or Austin where downtown is a night time destination and has a lot of foot traffic (and the revenue associated with 18 hours of human activity a day, vs 8)

Cities seem to understand they either have to embrace the "bedroom community" aspect of things, or re-make themselves into something where millenials will choose to live. I don't think the older residents have all gotten the memo yet :-)

With 3 miles between Google <-> Caltrain, maybe a light-rail project could also help push a project like this forward (connecting the new densely populated Google housing with the rest of the area).

This so much. Public transit doesn't stand a chance if it's not accompanied with sensible zoning that favors high density near the stations. Very often I was the only rider in my VTA lightrail on my commute to Intel, passing by block after block of office parking lots.

We'll never get significant ridership on VTA light rail unless they find a way to speed it up. It's just so slow. That would require buried or elevated tracks separated from cars and pedestrians so that it can safely run at higher speeds. But building grade separated light rail tracks would take years and cost tens of billions, so politically it's a non-starter.

I do agree with your point; but traffic must very quite a bit along the line. My VTA commutes are almost always full up, to standing room only, unless I go outside of the to/from-Caltrain schedule (and even then, it's almost never empty south of Convention Center).

As a San Franciscan, I heartily approve. A lot of the conflict in San Francisco is driven not by people who work in the city, but by people who reluctantly commute to places like Mountain View. One study of corporate bus commuters said about half would rather live closer to work.

I think the next step is to create more urban life down there. I frequently hear of people who hate the commute but think the areas near their office might as well be in a desert.

Those who understand the Law of Rent know that artificially increasing supply is not a real solution to the problem. Rent is set by the differential between the locational value over and above the best available rent-free land.

The most effective policy for housing affordability is to exempt improvements from taxation and heavily tax the value of the land, thus encouraging idle speculators to sell it off cheap.

It is good they are going to support the building of more housing. However the requirement to sell twenty percent at below market value is simply going to pass that cost on to everyone else who cannot qualify for the lower priced housing. As in, everyone else pays more. It might be better to work otherwise as those moving into the new housing would surely be vacating other housing. Yes there will be people totally new to the area moving into the new housing but the majority should be local movers.

Before some throw out the idea that its needed to have the developers sell below market it will push some out of the market as well as the cost of the market value homes have to increase to pay for the subsidized homes. In other words, politicians do this to gain votes all the while hoping those who are adversely affected are not annoyed enough to vote against them

> However the requirement to sell twenty percent at below market value is simply going to pass that cost on to everyone else who cannot qualify for the lower priced housing. As in, everyone else pays more.

You say this as if it's a bad thing. It's not.

> However the requirement to sell twenty percent at below market value is simply going to pass that cost on to everyone else who cannot qualify for the lower priced housing.

That's not necessarily true. Future purchasers are one source of money, but others include builders, investors, and landowners. If the 20% requirement is typical and historically consistent, then presumably that has already been priced in by the property market. In other words, the parcel value may already be discounted from your alternate-universe value to reflect the below-market requirement. In that case nobody really pays more; it's just that whoever held the parcel when the requirement was created wasn't able to sell it for as much as they might have.

Even if it were 100% true, I don't think anybody involved would be shocked to hear it. If you have a limited commodity that you sell at auction, the richest people will get the commodity. With housing, that means you may in effect create a community of only rich people. Presumably the citizens of Mountain View want a different outcome. If you just don't like the mechanism, you should suggest a different one. But if you're disagreeing with their goal, then the mechanism's mostly irrelevant.

Beautifully written.

The trouble with below-market-rate requirements is that they distort the market by inhibiting price discovery and imposing a hidden tax on property developers. A fairer solution would be for cities to use their general funds to directly subsidize housing for certain residents. Cities could purchase residences at market rates and then rent or sell (with deed restrictions) to low-income people.

One of the key drivers for BMR requirements is that municipal workers can't afford to live in the cities where they work. So the obvious solution there is to simply pay them more.

Of course with Proposition 13 imposing a straitjacket on city budgets it's nearly impossible to put market-based solutions like these in place.

Looks like bus rapid transit (BRT) could be a great solution for SV. If they could get dedicated bus lanes (which is probably politically impossible) you could really clear up a lot of traffic and establish a way for people to forgo owning a car.

The problem with BRT is that according to California's definitions, it has an unavoidable negative environmental impact. It took six years to do the environmental assessment for the Van Ness BRT in SF.

http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/07/transit-projects-are-...

So essentially this 2013 environmental report says that it'd make traffic tougher - assuming the same number of cars and no decrease due to bus ridership.

Note: "The encouraging news is that this law is about to change. California will soon reform traffic analysis under CEQA by replacing "level of service" with another metric more in line with its environmental and urban mobility goals. "

Does anyone know if this has indeed changed?

What're the legal requirements if Google chooses to make a "company town" - ie all the other benefits are included already, perhaps they'll start throwing in a 1BR apartment within spitting distance of the campus and a tram / peoplemover connection between the two. Would they still be required to meet the Section 8 / Affordable provisions if the units were only available to employees?

I imagine the city would pick who gets to stay in the affordable units through a lottery or similar; IIRC, Facebook has a similar development next to their "1 Facebook Way" building.

10k housing units might be enough to give one or two years' worth of Google new hires an apartment; there's no way that it's sustainable to just throw it in as a benefit (plus the tens of thousands of existing employees would be outraged). I imagine they'd use it for temporary new-hire housing and/or intern housing.

The "city" of Magarpatta outside Pune, India, seems to have worked out a good option of "walk to shop, walk to work" (though vehicles are still allowed). I've been there a bit.

Google the name and check the first few results.

I'm not saying that their model can be a solution for the SV issue, just mentioning it as an interesting related story.

What makes it more interesting is that the people behind it are from a farming family (but educated), not city types.

That's not a real solution, because its not scalable. They should literally be scaling horizontally rather than vertically. There's a lot of less densely populated space around.

>The city approved a new planning document for its North Bayshore district that envisions the creation of up to 10,250 units of high-density housing. Mountain View only has about 32,000 households total, so that would be a substantial 32 percent increase.

It's a little disappointing when the only solution to housing prices is to cram thousands of new dwellings together in a pile. My experience has been that quality of life suffers in such "developments" but maybe it will surprise us all to the contrary.

This is the first instance though (that I know of) where such housing is being prepared for mid to high income individuals and not stuff like the Projects in the large cities that were subsidized housing for the economically challenged. Let's be real here, it's not cruel to say people with less disposable income make for less attractive homes.

If the population increases in an area, how else are you going to deal with it besides density, or simply telling them 'GO AWAY', which most economists agree is a terrible idea, given that adding people in highly productive areas is such a win.

Population density is generally very low in most of the US. It can go higher without too many problems.

Modulo the load on transportation and infrastructure--which seems likely to be substantial--to the degree that you're going to add that much housing, this seems a pretty sensible way to do it. It's generally impractical to bulldoze a large tract of low-rise housing to build slightly higher housing. So just about the only solution is to put high-rise housing somewhere that it has a minimal [EDIT: the least] impact.

That said, I wonder how well it will work to build a bunch of high-rise suburban housing while making it difficult for residents to have cars and without great transportation options.

If anything, the load on transportation would actually go down. One of the big problems in Silicon Valley is that many of the cities (Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino) are adding tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of housing units. Which means that the only option is for people to either commute ever longer distances or crowd ever more people into the existing housing. And while it's not practical to bulldoze housing for even a 100% increase in density, there are plenty of single family houses that can be replaced with 6-10 unit apartment buildings. Even in SF itself.

There is a whole country full of beautiful affordable places to live.

Silicon Valley? Yuck. I will never live there again (thank goodness).

i only wish the federals followed the suit and let 100M (1/3 of the US population, about the same as MV new allowed units ratio to existing) new immigrants into the country

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