Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence
vox.com
vox.com
It's also really easy: register online and they mail the ballot to you. It's called "Permanent vote by mail". It takes almost no effort whatsoever.
http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voter-registration/vote-mail...
You don't need a California drivers license. You don't need to have lived here for a year. You just have to have the intention to make California your current home (eg not a tourist).
For the lazy, SF Yes In My Backyard puts out voting slates of pro-housing politicians and propositions. Just reference that, draw the lines on the ballot, and drop it in the mail. You don't even have to buy a stamp.
I'm sorry, but those issues are important and for me, many of the people the YIMBY slate endorses are on the wrong side of it.
We don't have to sell out our values to be pro housing.
Down with height limits, down with protracted approval processes for construction, down with many of the things that hold back progress in the city. Let SF reach toward the sky.
But also, down with the YIMBY slate. It's just a set of candidates who aren't what I want to see in the city.
If the YIMBY slate wants to back actual tangible propositions or policy suggestions, I'm all ears. When they ask me to vote for people they selected because they think they might be "pro-housing" (as if anyone in SF is really anti-housing?) then I'm going to tell them the people I select to represent me are my business.
I'm happy to advocate for pro-housing policies. But I sure didn't and won't vote that YIMBY slate, and for the sake of the city I live in, I hope it's soundly defeated.
2) ROI isn't the most important thing about a home.
3) Even if you value property values over other values, affordable housing that can support a strong and diverse environment that is vital to maintaining the strength of the region. If you kill that engine, you kill the thing that created the high values to begin with. You can shoot the golden goose if you want, but don't claim it makes good economic sense. It doesn't.
I agree, though I imagine the people who can actually afford a home in SF in 2016 feel differently.
Edit: clarity
You gotta be at least a little crazy to live in SF. I hope that's still true. It isn't particularly financially responsible, so you have to want to be here. That means the people who live here generally aren't doing it for their ROIs.
More jobs and more population density increases the overall value of a city. New grads and singles moving into a city need a place to live, and rental units provide it.
Think about it this way - if you demolished all the apartment buildings in San Francisco or New York, would the value of single family homes go up or down? Would brownstones in New York be worth more if there were no apartment buildings Harlem or Queens? If you walled off and burned down the Tenderloin and Point Richmond, would that mean that houses in the sunset would be worth more? I doubt it, since the city overall would be a less desirable place to live with fewer opportunities to work, and lower density means that fewer bars, restaurants, retail establishments, museums etc.. could be supported.
No, you also have to be a US citizen, which a lot of newcomers to the Bay Area are not.
ELECTIONS CODE SECTION 2100-2124
2101. (a) A person entitled to register to vote shall be a United States citizen, a resident of California, not imprisoned or on parole for the conviction of a felony, and at least 18 years of age at the time of the next election.
I'm not lazy, just insanely busy.
In all cases, the restrictions are good for the people who are already there.
Especially when starting with a low-density neighborhood that's poorly served by transit and everyone that lives there is tied to their car.
Places like NYC, London, and Paris have great public transit systems, it's easy to live there without a car, but much harder to do that in spread out Silicon Valley, even if you live next to a VTA light rail station, be prepared for a very long trip if you want to go across town.
I live in mid-density housing in a mostly low density area, and many of my neighbors fought hard against a new high density apartment building being built nearby -- 2 of the most common concerns raised were traffic and street parking (oh, and crime was also raised -- apparently they thought that criminals were going to move in to those $3000 apartments).
It's been nearly 2 years, and those concerns are mostly unfounded -- I haven't seen any significant increase in commute time car traffic (though I bike to work, so maybe I just don't see it), there's usually still street parking available in the neighborhood, and afaik, there's been no uptick in burglary.
Also, I know construction in my area has significantly impacted traffic. I leave for work before 7 AM, so I don't see it as badly, but when I leave at 8 AM, my typically 15 minute ride to the BART station can take over an hour. Most of the traffic is spillover from parents dropping kids off at school. I shudder to think of what it'll be like next week after school is out.
Unless you're a prisoner (or someone else is paying for your housing because you can't afford it), you can always choose quality of construction -- it may not be where you want to live, or might be more than you want to pay, but it's still your choice.
You've just chosen to make a tradeoff and accepted the noisy building (and you've rewarded those that built the thin walled, noisy building by paying to live there).
and if we're talking about a real highrise then good luck trying to change a door or window frames there to soundproof ones.
Anyways i'm not trying to convince anyone, but after more than 30 years spent in different types of appartments i'm pretty happy in my own house.
FWIW, even with a mostly wood based construction, you can still insulate well. It just takes the desire to do so.
and given the way condos built in the US/canada it's just impossible, i was pretty surprised when i saw a six floors condo built with wooden frame, something like that: https://imgur.com/usO1i9r
BTW, wooden frames can be very soundproof, as long as you pack every wall and ceiling with heavy (i.e. rock wool or cellulose) insulation and ceiling and mount drywall on standoffs instead of directly on studs.
i bet they can be soundproof but what i see here is that the builders are trying to cut every corner they can, trying to build as much as possible houses/condos which are sold even before the construction begins (http://www.seattletimes.com/business/home-prices-soar-again-...).
My understanding of the problem is some people really dislike change, and those same people disproportionately vote in local elections and attend city planning meetings. Because planning decisions are hyper-local in America, there's no "regional growth" advocate at these meetings, and nobody is going to attend planning meetings to fight for some developer to build their high-rise, so the opposition wins.
Silicon Valley was a quaint, sleepy semi-rural suburb in 1960, and that's how they want it to stay, at least in terms of physical appearance.
The problem is that, despite these zoning laws, they can't actually stop people from moving in from other regions, which causes property values to skyrocket. You can easily pay 2m there for an ordinary 3 bedroom ranch house that would be 70k in most of the US.
Because they don't just like it. They want a neighborhood that's completely detached single-family homes and where driving is hyper-dominant, and if that means they have to support policies that hurt middle- and working-class newcomers, so be it. Of course, many of the people 'opposed to density' are okay with density somewhere in the bay area, just not where they live, hence the term NIMBY.
Yes, but not in the way you expect, which is why your comparison fails.
In many cases, its not to prop up the market value of their homes, but the features of the community which supports the personal value they place in their homes: its "I live here, and I'd like to keep it the kind of place it is that led me to choose to live here".
It's always seemed a little perverse to me. Cities are dynamic, constantly changing organisms. Trying to keep a city from changing over decades is like forcing a 9-year-old kid to wear diapers and sleep in a crib because you liked the way it was as a baby and you never want it to change.
Well, except that cities, even if viewed as "organisms", aren't people, they serve people, and its quite natural for people to want them kept in the state that they feel best serves their interests.
I think people are afraid of change, not because they know it is not in their best interest, but mostly because they aren't sure, so the status quo seems to be the safer option. It's why humans are averse to change in a lot of scenarios, we sometimes have a little bit of trouble with the long term perspectives.
Sure, and even people that oppose change on one axis (like density) often support other changes in their city.
People, of course, disagree on what changes are desired and which are disliked, but that's the nature of subjective preferences.
Eh, it's possible to take this kind of self-interest too far. Like by the same token, you could say, "well, it's only natural for non-poor people to shoot down programs that will help the poor, because it's not in their interest".
Like, expecting people to give up a little for the benefit of wider society is not unreasonable. We're not talking about forcibly seizing people's homes here, just about allowing their neighbors to sell to developers who will build more housing. That's not exactly a huge sacrifice.
Given the amount of money at stake for said buyers, I can't say I entirely blame them for voting in their financial interests when the alternative might be a very bleak financial outlook, a decent chance of increased crime, traffic, etc.
It simply isn't a black and white issue.
If you bought recently, you probably had some sense that the market was a bit out of whack, but may have decided it was the right decision for other reasons. That doesn't make most people any less concerned about the future value of their house, particularly if they know they are not buying into their "Forever Home" and will one day need to sell and move elsewhere.
If you bought 20 years ago, even if a fire burnt down your house, it's likely that the land alone would give you a healthy profit. If you bought 2 years ago, a significant downturn in the market could leave you underwater.
Few people plan to sell their home shortly after buying it, but a market downturn could leave you without a job and you can't afford to move elsewhere for a job if you can't afford to take a loss by selling your house for less than your mortgage.
But you're making a huge logical jump to say that building housing could magically slaughter my house value and that I'd be underwater because of it.
I'm worried about being underwater because of a recession or cyclical trends or tech jobs wholesale abandoning the area, or any number of things.
The LAST thing I worry about is housing being built so fast that it'll tank the value of my house. It simply won't. If there's enough continued demand for housing, by all means, build, build, build. It means neighborhoods will get more vibrant. I see no scenario where building will tank my house value (short of building and THEN a recession).
I don't think people worry about growth hurting their home value. I agree with others here that they worry about the impact on what THEY value in their neighborhood, but most people aren't looking to sell their primary residence so a temporary slowdown in the growth rate of the equity is simply not on their radar as an important matter.
P.S: Not saying a carbon tax is the best idea, but urban sprawl (like carbon emissions) have a negative impact on the environment but zero impact on maximizing capital gains. They two must be tied somehow.
A revenue-neutral switch to land value taxes?
High property values also work, as in Europe. In a relatively small European country, there is just a lot less land supply, so it costs a lot and people tend to build much more densely. By contrast the US is huge and has an enormous amount of vacant land, so land is (relatively) extremely cheap in the US, encouraging low density development.
Finally, the main reason low density is tenable is that zoning laws in the US are in most places specifically set up to discourage high density construction and make it unprofitable.
In the early 20th century, zoning laws were first enacted in the US by the so called "Progressive Movement". They observed that the rich enjoyed spacious country estates while the poor lived in crowded, dense slums, so they decided to "help" the poor live in what they deemed better conditions by making it illegal or difficult to build new high density neighborhoods at all.
More on this topic in the book "Living Downtown," by Paul Groth: http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6j49p...
A carbon tax (as long as cars use energy derived from sources covered by a carbon tax, whether that's fossil fuels directly or electricity produced in some share by burning fossil fuels) is a tax on urban sprawl, since urban sprawl forces longer trips and less-fuel-efficient transportation.
I’ll admit that this motivation is no less selfish than the financial one, but I do think it’s different.
But most people I know still go (or at least try to) for their vacation to some tropical paradise. They would live there if they could. But most people can't.
So Sunnyvale has been building a number of apartment buildings and condos around. There has been tremendous back pressure for existing residents (not me but I'm a rarity it seems). The root of their concern is that they don't want the neighborhood experience to change from what they know (or knew) to something they don't know. I talked to some folks who had moved into the apartments near downtown Murphy street. They loved them, easy access to Caltrain, lots of things to do and places to go, they are excited about future growth.
The issue in Sunnyvale at least is that people don't seem to internalize that things change. They won't acknowledge that their cute little bungalow house used to be an orchard (where only birds and perhaps squirrels lived, had we given them a say at City Council there would be no houses anywhere!). They will argue strongly for their values and their memories and opinions of what is "right" and what is "wrong." Meanwhile we have people in their 20's and 30's who don't want to own a car, they want tight walkable spaces with an easy way to get to San Francisco or the airport. Now maybe 20 years from now those same people will be resisting even denser housing or something I don't know.
We could easily build 200,000 market rate dwellings on existing, unused, parcels in Sunnyvale and house close to half a million people in them. But for folks remember empty streets and quiet drives, those people are going to be really really unhappy.
Some of the buildings have less than one parking spot per apartment which in theory is supposed to help encourage people to use transit, in practice people fear it will lead to more street parking in adjacent residential neighbourhoods which already have pretty full streets.
200,000 dwellings in Sunnyvale would be a DoS attack on the city's infrastructure, not some new urban dreamland.
Maybe these possibilities haven't been explained well but I sort of think there are other interests that would prefer things stay approximately as they are.
Edit: one aspect that occurs to me is that developers probably wouldn't want a process that solves the housing crisis immediately either. It seems to me that satisfying the pent-up demand for housing gradually, project by project, would allow a developer to scoop up a lot of the excess, monopoly home-value now enjoyed by homeowners whereas if a huge stock of apartments appeared in one big bang, developers could wind-up selling them at costs plus a small profit level.
1. Considering that some of the apartment dwellers will become homeowners and their place will be taken by new apartment dwellers, how will the overcrowded schools support the influx?
2. Considering people will take public transit to go to work, they still would use cars to move around locally in the area on evenings and weekends. How will the current streets support the greater density of cars? e.g. Central Expressway used to be an expressway now it is a parking lot.
3. Overburdened police and firemen will be exposed to further strain.
4. Parking is a nightmare not just on residential streets but even at local establishments. Space needed for parking is used to build more housing.
Unless you live here and face these issues it's easy to downvote rather than come up with solutions that are at pace with the housing construction boom.
If I paid over a million dollars to buy a house in a school district that has a good score what would you suggest I do when suddenly the student to teacher ratio is so skewed that the education of my children suffers?
For parking, Sunnyvale is indeed surprisingly bad. For a sleepy town with nothing to do you often can't get parking downtown.
As revenue increases, city services can be expanded. Schools on the other hands are basically crooks as far as I can tell. The reason being that I have yet to get the Fremont Union Highschool District to offer up actual budget numbers and actual spend. They will argue all sorts of things about "confidentiality of teacher salaries" or "we're not a government so we don't have to give you that information." but generally I have not been impressed with the way they operate. [2]
Traffic and parking is a legitimate concern. Traffic has gotten worse again (after getting better after the dot com crash). But many programs are targeted at making the city more bike accessible for easier access.
[1] Page 12 -- http://sunnyvale.ca.gov/Portals/0/Sunnyvale/FIN/FY%2015-16%2...
[2] I had an administrator at the district tell me that it was "illegal" to be home schooling my children.
Even if you fear putting the cart before the horse, it simply begs the question of why you don't already have the horse. And the answer to that, I think, is back to what was stated above: fear of change, of urbanization, of government, of government spending, of property value declines, of loss of "heritage" – whatever that means to a farming town that replaced its (AFAIK) last orchard with a strip mall called the "Cherry Orchard" in 1999...
Sadly it's not quite so easy to increase road capacity as unlike a real city where you can add residents without adding vehicles, it's simply not possible to add residents in the 'burbs without adding an equal number of cars on the road. I'd love for it to be otherwise, but the sprawl can't be fixed just by rezoning lots for higher density.
I think it's more an issue of poor planning than fear of change (although yes, some residents want the city to be a 1966-themed amusement park). Hanlon's Razor and all. Personally I have no attachment to the sentimental issues around Sunnyvale but my proposed solution of levelling half the city and rebuilding it like central Toronto seems like a non-starter.
Municipal bonds backed by future property tax flows in the one of the wealthiest cities in the USA is pretty secure, so you wouldn't have to save for a few years.
And a project like that seems like it could result in both keeping single-family housing in many areas and solving the broad housing crisis. These directly hit against zoning limits but I suspect there's more going than inertia.
Maybe I haven't passed that critical milestone, but I can't think of a scenario where I'd complain if my neighborhood decay came with such a surge in net worth? (not trying to be sarcastic, could be an issue of be never having been that attached to a specific neighborhood)
(Naturally, this wouldn't apply to those who are without rent control, and suffer the double-whammy of more outsiders + higher rent.)
This is what someone replied earlier. For some ROI is the most important thing. For someone who lives in the suburbs I can say that for me it isn't the most important thing.
Maybe the smart move is to find a sustainable way to maintain current levels, tell newcomers that maybe a different city is right for them, and focus on improving conditions for the people already living there. There's can be more to city's goals than neverending growth, right?
Assuming this is a serious question and not a troll, see Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City, and/or my own essay, "Do millennials have a future in Seattle? Do millennials have a future in any superstar cities?" (https://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a-fut...).
So density WILL make your life miserable. HoA rules, municipal laws, etc, are virtually not enforced. So you find a spot you consider tolerable, and you hope to god it stays that way. If someone decides to build a rental building near by, then it's basically over. You either learn to sleep through idiot screaming and people keeping a pair of saint bernards barking in a studio apartment near by, and frat parties that the cop will never do anything about or you move out.
Contrast that with up north, where I totally could call the cops on someone walking too loud at night and they'd do something about it (which virtually never needed to happen, since people were much more considerate. And I lived in quite a few places).
Now, I know what you'd say. In Canada/Europe/Whatever, it's just as bad! I had <insert exactly the situation I talked about above> happened a ton of times!.
No no, these situations don't "just happen". It's a constant, multiple times a day thing. And it's a constant struggle between those who don't care and can't understand those who do.
I actually consider it one of the biggest reasons of the divide between the rich and the poor. You have the people with enough money to live on the 40th+ floor of a nice building in NYC, and those dealing with the stress, noise and neighbors at the bottom, thinking they're fine with it (but it probably drastically affect their sleep patterns, productivity, happiness, etc...they just don't realize it). The rich just "run away", because we can't agree on rules and respect them so we can live together.
Also, don't forget how terrible public transportation is. NYC has one of the best systems in NA, and it's not exactly fantastic compared to what you can see in many densely populated cities on other continents. Nevermind other North American cities (Hello Boston?)
Having lived in the bay for a long time - there are many "middle" housing places. Just none of them are new. Duplexes, and multiplexes are almost always in the worst areas, because they're not big enough to allow for walking or being close by a lot of services, but are dense enough to be VERY easily annoyed at neighbors. The only thing they're good at is being cheap to build.
Townhomes are popping up frequently and offer a slightly nicer version, but I don't honestly see much difference between a townhome without a yard and a more dense mid-rise other than available floorplans. I'm all for more density, but what frequently happens is that they build in moderately dense housing but all the plots are walled off from each other, there's nowhere to walk and so you just have more and more cars and traffic on the road. Full density or bust, I say.
Ask me anything (respectful, non-troll)
EDIT: I don't usually bite, but when I do, I won't eat much.
Although I do have an LED spinning light ball, an old tape-player radio and the world's smallest dance floor.
The same as anyone else. It sounds like you're trying to imply something like stereotypes or biogtry. What are you really asking?
Personally, I'd never let someone rent it without a massive security deposit and a very profitable rate because parts are rare, fragile and expensive.
Obviously, location matters.
http://www.truckchamp.com/images/articles/vw-minibus---abbey...
PS: CA, NJ and others plz vote today. I did yesterday. If you want change, you gotta be counted.
On a slightly different subject, I suggest anyone considering living a habitable vehicle not use on-board plumbing or sewage systems because they're messy, time-consuming and expensive to maintain. The vehicle I use only has a water tank but I still use water-store RO water in a washable refrigerator bottle. Using a tank and sink system requires flushing and sterilization periodically, and is often awkward to fill sanitarily.
I'd like to see reasonable prices sometime in my life !
http://www.lao.ca.gov/reports/2015/finance/housing-costs/hou...
I mean, probably every dense neighborhood in the world was at one time lower-density, and had its old buildings knocked down and replaced. This isn't anything new.
Generally, not all of them do, which is why redevelopment usually involves use of eminent domain.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London
There are lots and lots of parking lots, underutilized commercial buildings, and low density apartment complexes that can be redeveloped at a relatively higher density.
1 - http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2015/10/13/santa-cla...
2 - http://blogs.mercurynews.com/internal-affairs/2014/05/19/san...
A lot of people who bought their single-family homes years or decades ago now live in appealing low-density neighborhoods with home values that are sky-rocketing. They don't want their neighborhoods to change into concrete canyons, and the ever-rising values of their homes fund their retirements very nicely. They therefore fight any attempt to increase density by loosening zoning laws.
This behavior is exacerbated by how California handles its property taxes. Essentially, the property taxes on a home are fixed at the value of the home when you bought it, meaning people living in homes that have increased in value are paying disproportionately low property taxes. This tends to discourage people from moving, thereby reducing the liquidity of the home market.
You can bet there would be more pushback on those skyrocketing home values if people had to pay the taxes on them. Its too late for a lot of people in the valley, they couldn't afford to pay anything close to what their homes current access at. It is the epitome of Got Mine, Fuck You.
It's futile for them to fight things, and honestly it ruins a lot of people's lives that they do. However I completely understand why they would push back on density, most people don't have to deal with growth at these types of numbers over their lifetime.
I used to live in Houston, and my parents still live there, and the growth (in construction, not price) they'd dealt with (and enjoyed) puts anywhere in the SF Bay Area to shame.
The people who have been renting for 30+ years are the ones screwed by this.
Honest question. How does Party A, living in a house that Party B wishes to replace with an apartment, ruin the life for Party C? Or is it B whose life is ruined? Or A's? Or am I misunderstanding you?
San Jose has taken the rare step of publicly opposing the project, saying it would add far too many jobs, exacerbating the region’s housing shortage.
In my opinion, the motivation is that the San Jose City Council is assuming that most of the workers would live in San Jose, exacerbating their housing price pressure while denying them any of the developer-fee benefits or tax base improvement.
And that's true. This has been the pattern throughout the history of the valley: San Jose's traditional business-unfriendliness has resulted in the major Silicon Valley names locating their businesses in Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Cupertino (Apple!), and Mountain View (Google!) over the decades.
San Jose's emphasis was always on grabbing all the land they could (incorporating county lands) without creating a business-friendly environment there. (Look at San Jose city boundaries in, say, 1950 versus now.)
It's another side-effect of one-party rule (for all but one mayoral dynasty) during this period.
Another demonstration of this nimby-ism is that San Jose and surrounding cities tend to dump problematic development on each other's borders. For example, Santana Row and Valley Fair straddle the San Jose - Santa Clara border. Neither felt any incentive to consider traffic effects of dumping all of this retail in less than a square mile. Result: gridlock so bad that it actually backs up onto the neighboring freeways (280 and 880/17) during November and December, at least.
Yay.
they and their families simply do not want to develop the area any further, in order to keep housing as high as possible and the area exclusive as possible. in private conversation they talk about it openly.
personally i don't think it's much more complicated than that.
Proposition 13
..and somehow NIMBYs are painted as the heartless ones?
In other real estate markets, this is a huge downward pressure on housing prices by the fact that if taxes get too high, it increases the inventory by the amount of people forced out. The Bay Area is almost entirely lacking in that pressure, which combined with other Prop 13-related issues and the area's popularity makes a perfect storm for this current fiasco.
Nobody wants ol' granny, or that single mom who has lived there forever, etc. to have to uproot their life and leave, but there simply is no way to have a happy outcome for everyone. And, to your point, if property taxes have increased that much, the increased home value should take some of the sting out of it when they go to sell.
There are very real emotional downsides to all of this, but ultimately I'm of the opinion that people being forced out of areas as they gentrify due to property taxes are a necessary part of a healthy real estate ecosystem.
Really curious to see what happens in the long game as the families who inherit homes that were locked into old tax levels are forced to sell as they can't pass them on to a second generation without the tax rate resetting.
Anyone have an estimate on when that may be? Perhaps we'll see a major correction in Bay Area house prices at that point as the inventory increases from that.
That game has already been played. Transfers between generations do not cause reassessment.
http://www.boe.ca.gov/proptaxes/faqs/propositions58.htm#1
Congratulations, California voters. You made bad into worse.
Bad into worse just about sums it up. If it wasn't for Prop 58 and 193 you'd expect that eventually, decades from now once the majority were reset, that Prop 13 would have a chance of being struck down, but this just ensures that future generations have every incentive to keep homes in the family.
Thanks for sharing the link.
If the law allows it and the regulatory compliance costs are low enough, maybe grandma can take out a home equity loan and turn her 1-story ranch into a 3-story apartment and take advantage of the cash flow. If she needs a little more, and her neighbors are also having trouble paying their property taxes, they can pool their resources together and build an even larger apartment block to replace their old houses. Win-win for everyone, except for busybody NIMBYs who care about "neighborhood character" to the exclusion of everything else.
Oh, and BTW, this idea that "techies" aren't people, or somehow less deserving of moral consideration than everyone else, is reprehensible.
- Service workers (everything from baristas to cops to teachers) either disappear or have to deal with punishing commutes
- Brain drain. When even people making a decent salary get pushed out, it's bad for cities (http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/05/26/silicon-valley-e...)
- Many people believe living in the place one was born/grew up in should be a right. That's a value difference. Markets do not get to dictate everything if we don't allow that.
Luckily, the market does have a solution to the housing problem itself: build a lot more of it, and prices will drop.
Personally, I don't have any vested interest SF housing, as it's really not one of my favorite cities. But I keep thinking of what I would do if this was happening to a city I did actually love and live in, and I think in that situation I would be more sympathetic to the NIMBYs than the newcomers. I don't think there's any moral imperative for cities to keep growing.
SF isn't my favorite city either, but what has happened in my current and favorite city (Boston) has made my less sympathetic to NIMBYs, both the high-income (I want my house to appreciate without doing any work!) and low-income (I want 20% of units just for me!/Screw the middle class!) types--they are the ones making things worse. Cities grow because businesses move there, and businesses move there because they want to be close to and network with other businesses. Employees can't exactly prevent that by staying in Nowhere, KS. I agree, there isn't any moral imperative for cities for keep growing, but for now at least, there is a practical one, and thus there is a moral imperative for cities to accommodate those to wish to live there.
We're seeing the unintended consequences of one alternative. Of course, we haven't tested all of the possible universes yet.
It's basic economics. If you have a somewhat fixed demand and artificially restrict supply, the price is going to shoot through the roof.
The city puts on the lien on the home for the value of the accumulated rise in property taxes. Once the owner dies, family members sell the house, and pay off the lien.
I have no idea why Prop 13 was created when the aforementioned solution allows grandma to stay in her house without destroying the housing market in the process.
No, it wasn't created to combat that problem; if it was, it would have (even had the same general approach been used) been narrowly drawn to residential property, and maybe even only to properties that are primary residence of the owner.
> How do you get around that?
Lots of ways, including going to full value annual assessment of all property, but allow, for owner-occupied primary residences, deferment of taxes in excess of the lesser of the total tax due in the year of sale [0] increased by 2% per year since the sale or some function of the owner's income (the exact function is an implementation detailed) to be deferred until the property is sold [0], with the taxing authority acquiring a lien on the property.
[0] Note that you can expand "sale" to include the same kind of improvements that allow new assessments under Prop 13, as well.
Even in neighborhoods with shit schools taxes are ludicrous, an acquaintance of my family is paying 14k taxes for a small single family home in a town with a high school ranked 294 out of about 400 in the state. She wants to sell the house but due to high taxes and shit school buyers are hard to find.
Property taxes almost doubled in the past 10 years in my area, I am not looking forward to buying a house and then the property taxes doubling in another 10 years.
Proposition 13 sounds great to someone from New Jersey.
You can see this split hitting out in sunset, as former NIMBYs flip toward pro-housing as their kids return from college.
From the wiki page:
>Many communities requiring new schools or other public infrastructure such as public parks and roads impose Mello-Roos taxes as an alternative to (or in addition to) impact fees paid directly by real estate developers. While real property taxes are generally levied as a percentage of the assessed value of the parcel, a Mello-Roos tax is levied independent of assessed property value (a parcel tax), and is not subject to Proposition 13 property tax rate limitations.
Areas change, and increasing taxes on all residents (even if it forces some out) is unfortunately part of the downward pressure of house prices that our market is missing.
Elsewhere in the country in saner real estate markets, if taxes increase too much and you need to move as a result, that's what happens. It absolutely sucks, but it helps balance the inventory.
But they're paying for new infrastructure that didn't need to exist if they didn't move there. How is it fair to ask existing homeowners to pay more because new people moved in nearby?
Mello-Roos is really no different than developer fees included in the price of a new home.
If you moved to the area in 2012, odds are you got a very good deal. If you moved in 2015, odds are you paid several hundred thousand dollars more for your home than your neighbor in a comparable home.
Do you think there is such a radical difference in infrastructure needs during that period to warrant shifting a disproportionate percentage of that burden to the person who bought only a couple years later? That is madness when talking about the kinds of dollars we are when things are percentage based.
Further, long-time owners in the area have been paying massively less than newer residents despite taking advantage of any new infrastructure funded by newer taxes thanks to Prop 13. Oftentimes to a comical degree.
I don't see what that has to do with new infrastructure. If you moved in 2007, people moving to the area in 2011 were paying half what you paid.
>Do you think there is such a radical difference in infrastructure needs during that period to warrant shifting a disproportionate percentage of that burden to the person who bought only a couple years later?
When you move into a Mello-Roos district you're paying for the infrastructure that was built for you. That's not a shifting tax burden. That's paying your own freight. If it's too much, don't move there. There are plenty of old houses that were either never in a Mello-Roos district or for which the bonds are paid off.
>Further, long-time owners in the area have been paying massively less than newer residents despite taking advantage of any new infrastructure funded by newer taxes thanks to Prop 13. Oftentimes to a comical degree.
That's true, but it's also true for new residents who move into an older area.
As Yglesias is well aware, the city officials are only being rational in a very narrow sense.
A building project can only create as many jobs as it can pay for -- and the workers must be payed enough to buy or rent places to live. What lies behind the claim that it will "create too many jobs" is that the construction workers will compete in the housing market against people that the officials want to protect.
And even that "protection" is only coherent within a mindset where it is somehow evil to build new things, or else the stock of accomodation could be increased.
The issue is what happened in Mountain View with Google, and in Cupertino with Apple -- a company builds a huge new campus that creates 60,000 or 100,000 new permanent, high-paying jobs, but zero new housing gets created, making the cost of living insanely high for everyone (not just for construction workers.)
This is because the cities won't allow any zoning changes to their low-density 1960s suburban setup. Their goal is to preserve the physical infrastructure in that low-density shape, not to keep out lowly poor people as such.
Many of them are starting to build satellite offices in other places.
While SF's random lottery system certainly has its issues, it does actually solve for some of these problems.
[1] http://www.mercurynews.com/sunnyvale/ci_26825651/sunnyvale-s...
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Of course in the real world, you can't arbitrarily bulldoze existing zones to replace them with high density residential :|