Everyone in California wants to be the last new resident in their neighborhood | Hacker News Reader

Everyone in California wants to be the last new resident in their neighborhood

ochousingnews.com

58 pointsfludlight61 comments

The thing that drives me bonkers about OC and most California suburbs is the lack of town centers.

On the East Coast home buyers have started to discover that all these previously neglected walkable little colonial & 19th century towns and denser suburbs, often adjacent to rail lines, have a lot of value. The smarter municipalities have been taking the hint and zoning in denser development to grow out the town center naturally as it was intended. The east coast can start to regrow a lot of the character that was lost in the 20th century tract housing boom, and begin to resemble the old world in that way.

On the West Coast, most of the small suburban cities never had a town center to begin with. They were designed by real estate developers using standardized high-profit low-density building plans, entirely focused on cars over walking anywhere. (God forbid you live somewhere that you can walk to buy groceries!)

So you end up with these awkward community layouts where there are zero denser centers to grow out of naturally and permanently zoned that way. Nobody wants to take the plunge in having their house re-zoned and experiment with the costly home investment they're sitting on. Mixed use is still a dirty word. So no change occurs.

All that seems to be getting done lately is locking down neighborhood zoning and building fancier and fancier shopping centers. Something in this is going to change eventually, but unless people voluntarily bulldoze their houses to make room for new town plans, I can't imagine what form it will take.

I don't know what you are talking about. I don't believe this to be true of California generally. It is somewhat true of the LA area, but it was always true of LA, before the cult of the car became a thing. In the case of the LA area, it was not possible to develop it without developing large tracts of land in one go because of the cost of bringing infrastructure to the desert. However, when it began, there were trolleys and the like and you could comfortably live without a car. You just used the trolley or other public transit.

Also, the San Francisco Bay Area is one of the few places in the US with population density comparable to parts of Europe. So it has relatively good public transit for the US.

Yes, a lot of America has made it essentially against the rules to create the kind of walkable cities that we once had. The New Urbanism movement was all about trying to find a way to recreate that in spite of the current zoning and legal climate that has whored out development to the cult of the car.

I don't know how to fix it, but I feel like you really don't know the history here that you are badmouthing. It is more complicated than that.

You don't need to know the history to be frustrated with Californian infrastructure.

Been living in southern California for most of my life and have hated most of it. I can't go anywhere without a car. The public transportation is terrible and I have to travel 3 miles for a fucking grocery store. This isn't just southern California and the LA area, but most of California from what I experienced. I'm excited for the day that I can leave, but I have no idea when that will be...

No, of course not. You don't need to know the history of anything at all to be frustrated with it or hate it. But being frustrated with it doesn't make inaccurate blanket statements about the history of the place more accurate. I was not arguing with your right to be frustrated. I was just pointing out that some of your blanket statements were not accurate. Even if it doesn't benefit you personally, I hope it benefits someone.

Good luck getting out.

I'm pretty happy with Bend from that point of view. It has a real downtown:

https://goo.gl/maps/5om22cePPYy

It could go up a story or two in places, and grow some, but it seems to have come through the worst of the 20th century car era in decent shape.

Not too bad for a place that only officially became a city in the early 1900s.

This doesn't really ring true for most of northern california at the very least. San Mateo, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Berkeley, Albany, Pinole, Walnut Creek, Concord, Benicia, etc. all have downtowns. It's even more pronounced outside the bay area. Healdsburg, Sonoma, Napa, Calistoga, St. Helena, Sebastapol, etc. all have tight downtowns. Even in the valley and the sierra foothills have towns/cities with tight downtowns.

I should have clarified this better but I'm talking more about "villages" really. Places that are too tiny to be classified as a city center (by my arbitrary east coast standards at least), but afford a little pocket of shopfronts and rental units amongst lower density residential housing.

Of the cities you listed that I know well, Pinole is actually the best Norcal example I can point to. It's just 2 blocks of shopfronts and most of the residents could walk to the post office if they wanted to. A little 19th century main street that got attached to it's sprawling suburbs much later.

Sure there's more places like this in Norcal than Socal, but it's overall pretty rare anywhere in CA to live in a low-density outer suburb and still comfortably walk to a legacy village center rather than a strip mall or gas station. By contrast most 'burbs in the Northeast have these pockets of villages available to incorporate into mixed use zoning plans (but seriously fail at appreciating their potential).

Just an unfortunate roadblock in the way of balancing suburban housing density in Western states that I don't feel a lot of people are even fully aware of

You just described west Omaha.

Almost none of the people currently living in SF will get to see their grandkids. Statistics tell us the vast majority of their children will be forced to move away; even if you have a good career ahead of you and in theory would be able to afford to buy in the bay area, that's typically later in your career.

Are you really going to live with your parents after you've been married for a year and have two kids? (Yes I know some people will but the vast majority won't).

Move to Hayward or other. Build your earning power and your assets. Buy a smaller house/condo in the skirts. Fix it up a little through sweat equity. Sell and move to a larger condo/home. Rinse/repeat until you make it where you want to.

I couldn't buy in my folks' neighborhood for over a decade out of college. Now I can, but don't choose to.

Seems like entitled thinking to assume you can live where your parents worked their collective lives to attain.

You make the assumption that most people have the free time, know-how and physical strength to do this.

Most people don't, so rely on hiring contractors (expensive), and waiting on prices to go up with their earning power to be able to put down a larger down payment and upgrade that way.

Although I never quite got how that works because if the market goes up and you sell, well, prices are higher than when you originally bought, so minus taxes, odds are you might not come out ahead unless you've bought in at the right time or went through several cycles.

I'm not suggesting flipping a house.

Nearly everyone can scrape, clean and paint. Most can install something like laminate flooring, engineered wood, and even tile. Honestly it's more about effort than know-how. When it comes to electrical and plumbing, unless you have the skills and tools, hire someone.

Plus it feels good to do stuff with your hands now and again.

Obviously if your time is worth more money than what you'd pay a contractor, then get a contractor.

This whole thing works because of building equity. Simple example is if you buy a 400k place and in 3-7 years have 150k equity through appreciation and mortgage payments, you can upgrade and with 20% down buy a 750K place.

From my experience there's only been a few downturns in my lifetime that more time did not wash away. And it's not so much taxes as it is other fees with housing.

I always wished I'd bought sooner or upgraded sooner than I have. But I get comfortable.

Your market assumption is that the place appreciates at a rate where you have that much equity. But if the market appreciates at that rate, aren't homes that are now $750k comparable to the homes that were once $400k? Or am I missing something there in how that works?

Are you suggesting renting doesn't exist?

This pretty much matches my experience with friends who now in their 20s grew up in the bay. Most are in Seattle, Sacramento, Portland, or other more affordable places. The ones who couldn't/didn't finish college or get into tech live elsewhere.

I have a friend who is coming up on 28, having just moved from his parents house in Los Gatos a year ago. He moved into the slums with 3 roommates, paying around 60% of what his parents pay for their mortgage for his share of rent. He managed to find a job in tech which is how he can afford the place. Basically you move out of a mansion and into a ghetto, stay under your parents, or move away.

I'm up in Seattle desperately trying to save money for a down payment faster than housing prices are going up - if I wait a year it'll be an extra 30-50k for the same property. But if I overextend to try to buy a place and the market crashes I'm completely SOL. Its very difficult to make any long-term decisions or enter the housing market.

But still, if you're not in it, you're giving up a lot of your future buying power. Friends of mine managed to buy a very very cheap place in the bay and lived there for a few years, and used the equity to buy a much nicer place in the Seattle area. No idea really what to do - I feel like the market is totally capping out at some point and isn't sustainable - I have to place a bet whether it will rise continuously or crash and if I get it wrong I'm up shit creek.

This is part of the problem though--because the housing market takes such huge swings, people can't plan for their future.

Do you take the gamble that you'll be able to save up and buy a home somewhat near employment one day if the market comes down? Or do you just live your life with the assumption of never buying, and if luck strikes and prices plummet, buy then?

This is why so many people move to Texas: http://ideas.time.com/2013/10/17/10-reasons-texas-is-our-fut.... Most years, three to six of the fastest growing counties are in Texas. Texas's biggest cities have relatively free land-use laws, so that as demand rises new housing gets built and, in city centers, denser housing gets built.

This dynamic has been going on for a while: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/a-tale-o...:

In 2000, my husband and I moved out of our mid-1970s three-bedroom town house in Los Angeles and into a brand-new three-bedroom town house in Uptown Dallas. At the time, the two were worth about the same, but the Dallas place was 1,000 square feet bigger. We’ve moved back to L.A., and we’re glad we kept our old house. Over the past seven years, its value has roughly doubled. By contrast, we sold our Dallas place for $6,500 less than we paid for it.

It’s not that we bought into a declining Dallas neighborhood: Uptown is one of the hottest in the city, with block upon block of new construction. But the supply of housing in Dallas is elastic. When demand increases, because of growing population or rising incomes, so does the amount of housing; prices stay roughly the same. That’s true not only in the outlying suburbs, but also in old neighborhoods like ours, where dense clusters of town houses and multistory apartment buildings are replacing two-story fourplexes and single-family homes. It’s easy to build new housing in Dallas.

Not so in Los Angeles. There, in-creased demand generates little new supply. Even within zoning rules, it’s hard to get permission to build. When a local developer bought three small 1920s duplexes on our block, planning to replace them with a big condo building, neighbors campaigned to stop the project. The city declared the charming but architecturally undistinguished buildings historic landmarks, blocking demolition for a year. The developer gave up, leaving the neighborhood’s landscape—and its housing supply—unchanged. In Los Angeles, when demand for housing increases, prices rise.

Seattle has been better about expanding housing supply than most of CA, but it's not nearly as good as Texas cities.

Expanded housing supply to me just means sprawl unfortunately. I do agree that Seattle/CA should be building way faster on existing land and upzoning. Its gonna take them 20+ years to put a light rail in, which to my mind is pretty nuts.

There is a perfectly valid reason for this: overdevelopment, particularly in the Californian style of "chew up green space for tract homes", sucks.

There was a time when new development was viewed as a good thing. We built high quality buildings and established new towns. Now we chew up land to produce this:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3264/2643280748_7799215dc3.jp...

What human can look at that, even if they are forced by circumstances to live in it, and not want to hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats?

> not want to hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats?

Slitting throats? Really? Not me.

Someone get this guy a medal.

It’s a quote.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken#Prejudices.2C_Fi...

There is no "green space" in Southern California. The only green there is, is supported by sprinklers watering tract home lawns.

Completely untrue.

where is that neighbourhood located ?

You could always do density. It works pretty well for Europe.

That requires transit infrastructure, which most Americans (even some to the left) steadfastly oppose.

The two things go hand in hand. Start allowing density, and then you start doing transit as needs be.

That sorta works but some planning about how to grow transit down the line ahead of time makes sense, if for no other reason than reserving space for light rail etc later.

Otherwise putting a transit system in as a retro-fit becomes very expensive.

Southern California passed this point long ago and nope. LA traffic is torture but look into all the anti-Metro sentiment and NIMBYism. They're building it anyway because LA literally can't grow anymore but the opposition is strong.

If we had density, though, transit would be a lot more viable. Most of our cities are too spread out (not dense enough) for transit to work very well.

Many places (especially in Silicon valley) restrict the height of buildings, and the number of apartments, etc. When you can't build up, you have to build out.

But you can build a community where the houses aren't all identical to each other. With cul-de-sacs and winding roads and trees lining the street, and little boxes every couple of feet for FTTN or FTTP internet, and wide sidewalks where kids feel comfortable walking to school.

Very true.. And they do build, but they cost more.. LOTS more.. you can build a neighborhood of 500 homes with 5 plans, and a few tweaks here and there (maybe put the garage on the other side on some houses based on plan A). For a developer, you can now order 100 of each type of front door, X number of truckloads of timber, roofing shingles, can lights, etc. that is known and planned ahead of time. Each bit of customization adds time to plan and build, and special orders that cost more.

And it's not just limited to SF. You can go out to Tracy or Fairfield where there's miles and miles of space in every direction and yet, you still see the houses piled on top of each other with less than 5 feet in between each house, all because the greedy government and it's citizens won't allocate more space for residential areas. It's just crazy. Somehow, these democratically controlled areas just feel that everything (traffic, fishes, insects, a river, etc) is more important than basic human needs (shelter). They need to start putting basic human needs first, above all the other petty stuff.

This misses the mark from my point of view. Green space is good. Density is good. Density is how you make walkable neighborhoods.

You're advocating for addressing the need for housing in the form of sprawl. Communities need to build, but that's the wrong direction to build in.

The problem with low density housing is you then need to drive a long way to get to someplace that isn't just more tract-housing.

I saw this a few years ago, what's interesting is the high variation in density, from 4 units per acre to over 300. A density variation of 75 to 1.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUvR9QNAzvc

Yes, but having slight density, where single family houses are 10 feet apart does not create the environment your talking about. For that, you need 5+ story buildings and you need to build the city in a way that supports walkability - which is not how 99% of america is built.

We do want some Densely populated city areas that allow for walkable neighborhoods.

But,If we're going to have non-walkable suburbs we should definately have some space around our houses and not crowd them up together when there's space in every direction you look.

Because of prop 13, each new house costs the EXISTING homeowners money. That's because the taxes on the new house will never pay for the additional public infrastructure (roads, schools, public safety, etc) to support its residents. So, at some point, there will be "parcel taxes" for a new wing on the school, a new library, and a new fire house, and then "sales surtaxes" for a new overpass, a Bart extension, etc ...... In San Mateo county, this is where most of the opposition comes from.

Prop 13 favors current homeowners at the expense of future homeowners. This NIMBY-written FAQ[0] exposes the structural unfairness pretty well.

And yes, property taxes are an ideal way to pay for local infrastructure, and California is suffering the consequences of defunding this.

[0] http://www.hjta.org/propositions/proposition-13/what-do-you-...

I tend to think that cost of a house is the carrying costs, mortgages, interest, maintenance, taxes. In a built up area, carrying costs are determined by what the local economy will support.

Reducing property taxes just drives up the price and thus mortgage payments. Difference is property taxes tend to pay for local services and infrastructure that increase the real value of a home. Where mortgage and interest paid flee to places elsewhere.

There is no hypocrisy at all. If residents [0, N-1], resident N, and residents [N+1, ∞) are all distinct sets of residents. I don't have to apply the same rules and standards to these sets.

Is it "hypocrisy" or a "double standard" if a train car is full and no more people can get on? Surely, a different rule or standard is being applied to the people already on it and to the ones on the platform, right? No; the principle is that the N people already on got the first "dibs" at the resource, making it unavailable for the N+1-th person, too bad.

When you move somewhere, though you are yourself contributing to the traffic and density, the fact is that in that moment it is as quiet as it will be.

It's perfectly human, after discovering something great, not to want to attract others there. If you find a great camping spot in the woods or whatever, you just keep your mouth shut, otherwise it will be spoiled by every tom, dick and harry who will trample everything and leave garbage and so on.

I know of a good bakery and a few restaurants. I never recommend them to anyone, because they will just get more business and get all uppity and raise their prices and lower their quality.

As a resident of Irvine there are many aspects at play here, and this is an over-simplification. Though I do agree with the underlying author's feeling; NIMBYs are annoying, and illogical.

I do however take great offense to being referred to as a xenophobe simply because of where I live, that's asinine.

Well IMO NIMBYism is perfectly logical and aligned with the residents' self interests.

But they are often hypocritical with their other positions.

Ironically, after looking at Bay Area housing, Irvine seems a downright bargain.

The Irvine company has also been courting medical and technology companies, so even as the housing shortage continues, they'll have plenty of doctors and engineers willing to pay up.

No one wants to spend a great deal of money for a house and then have some changes come in that sees the price of it drop. This isn't just California, it's everywhere around the world, it's simply human nature.

Not exclusive to CA! This happens everywhere

I specifically recall Google's proposed Boulder Campus expansion eliciting similar sentiment from current residents.

A subset of people in Boulder are convinced that the problem is not housing, but "too many jobs". I wish I could send them to spend a year in Greece or Southern Italy or some other such place that is blissfully free of those awful jobs.

Send them to Detroit or Cleveland or any other rust belt city suffering from a lack of jobs.

There is no such thing as too many jobs. And any area that is turning away jobs is going to find itself in for a world of hurt.

Always look to the future. Always embrace more jobs. Because the good times aren't around forever.

Interesting... I've heard "It's not the lack of jobs that's the problem, it's the lack of demand. We're out of demand." before, but didn't think I'd ever hear "we have too many jobs"...

http://www.dailycamera.com/guest-opinions/ci_28237442/sally-...

"A couple of weeks ago, I went to the East Boulder workshop and couldn't wait to discuss my ideas about slowing down job growth in Boulder and other ideas for the housing issues."

Wow, I cannot believe this is not the Onion!

All sorts of new development in Boulder is restricted. Not sure the specifics, but it's kept prices quite high. Tiny 50 year old shacks go for a million dollars.

I've heard the prices there are comparable to Bay Area prices, but compensation is way below--is that accurate?

It's particularly acute in California. The East Coast has many denser areas. California has a stunning lack of density given how many people live there and want to live there.

The DC area is right there with wealth with SF and Silicon Valley and is more educated. While still being rather expensive, it's much cheaper than SF and Silicon Valley. Why? Much better density and land use. Not only is the District adding 100,000 housing units a decade, Arlington, Alexandria, Bethesda, Silver Spring, etc. have downtown areas with density that are Metro accessible and more are being built and added to.

And we still deal with NIMBYs out here! Everyone does. But you have to put rules in place that limit their influence. People need to live somewhere. Density is good for the environment (and California has major issues with air quality in certain areas).

These are all things that people in California understand, but NIMBYism is carried out at the local level, and there aren't strong enough land use laws in place to brunt their force.

Every metro in the country would love to have a huge influx of white collar companies and workers. The idea that this is the fault of tech companies or tech workers is ridiculous. The problem is very poor land use policies, and people are taking out their frustration out on individuals just trying to work and live, when the real problem is not being addressed at all.

Author makes blanket absolutes about the State of California and the American Dream. Don't agree. Also, article funnels into a home listing.. fwiw

It's a housing news site, with ads. Many tech blogs have a big call to action pitching their mailing list for their info-products or training on every article.

HN is commonly filled with blanket false-absolutes about SJWs, or Republicans, or those of faith, or those into Bitcoin, etc...

Great article, but... still politics. Even if they're politics that I think are extremely important in many places in the US right now, it probably still doesn't belong.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

How does some politics not belong on a board that deals primarily with startups and entrepreneurs, neither operates in a vacuum and the availability of good staff who can afford to live where you want to set up premises etc is a crucial thing.

Where I live in the UK we have the fastest average internet speed (by quite a margin), top 5 lowest cost of living and excellent transport links, We have basically no external investment and that is in part down to politics.

You can ignore politics but it won't ignore you.

Because politics is more important, and of broader appeal than most of what we discuss here, it will consume the site if allowed to.

Or: how much do you really want to read about Trump vs Hillary here?

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