Facebook’s Answer to Silicon Valley Housing Crunch: Build Apartments
wsj.com
wsj.com
I see in the article how 10-15% of the units will be reserved for "low income". I understand why they do this. If they didn't, it would never get approval from the necessary zoning authority. However, I think it's a mistake.
When people think "low income" they usually think of poignant cases of single mothers trying to raise kids, but in my experience that's not as common as we think.
I live in an SF building where I'd estimate at least 10% of the residents are retired. I think most are on Social Security and using Section 8. I know my neighbor is because she doesn't speak much English (she's Russian) and she brings me her mail to read. I'm guessing the other retirees (almost all Russian immigrants) are in the same boat.
In my opinion, if retirees need public assistance, they should live in a lower-cost area like Livermore, Gilroy, or Santa Rosa, not one of the most expensive neighborhoods in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Heck, I'd love to live in those areas if my job didn't require me to be in downtown SF every day.
But that would make too much sense. Instead, every new housing unit has to have some portion reserved for "low income" so the local politicians can have some currency to spread around among their supporters - and if you don't think they do this you are kidding yourself.
Constantly taking 10-15% of supply and restricting it to low income just raises housing costs for everyone else - and it's a double-whammy too because it's our tax dollars funding this unnecessarily lavish lifestyle (and $3K/month for a studio is lavish - there's no getting around it.)
If you can't afford to live in a certain level of housing in a certain area at market prices, then you shouldn't live there, you should live somewhere cheaper. If the people companies want to hire can't afford to live within a reasonable distance then companies should pay more. If they can't pay more they should leave.
Companies and jobs leaving will be the only way to lower demand and prices - and probably the only way to wake leaders up and get them to address our poor housing policies.
1. I'm not sure if you realize, most people are already living in those far off places, like Santa Rosa, and commuting to SF already. Most of those workers you see in the downtown area are commuters.
2. Section 8 vouchers take up a small percentage of the apartments you would likely want to live in. A lot of the units are run down chit boxes. Many just meet section 8 requirements. Very few landlords rent out to section 8 out of the goodness of their hearts. Yes--I know there's the exception.
2. Tech workers are living pretty well now. I really hope it lasts. I just know too many homless individuals who were once Programmers. I know a key developer of Word Star that's literally begging for money as I write this now. (Give him some money when you see him. He wears a Penquin costume, and strums a toy banjo. He is harassed by cops, and wasen't luckey enough to get section 8.)
3. What a lot of people don't relalize is the cost of living has gotten so outragious, even the requirements for section 8 seem ludicrous.
You would qualify for section 8 if you made less than $65,700 if you're single. If you have a wife, and kid your considered low income if you make less than $84,500.
4. My point is when the party dies, and we all know that time clock is ticking away--you might be the one applying for section 8? Good luck because they aren't even taking applications.
We all know there's not a barrier to entry into this profession, other than a lot of drive, and hard work. It's not like medicine, where there a huge barrier to entry. My point is one day you might be living in that subsidized apartment? In my twenties, I never considered putting myself on that section 8 waiting list, now I wish I did.
As a society, we have experimented sufficiently with ghettos as a city design strategy, and determined that they are terrible in all ways. We do not need to repeat that experiment.
You don't solve the problem of high housing costs by getting rid of the poor people (if you are in the US, you may read that as "black people": that's what this policy has always turned out to mean in that country).
If you want to reduce the cost of living, build more houses.
But the real problem with building in Menlo Park isn't your concern for poor people living there. It's the "village feel" attitude of the zoning commission, who won't let anything substantially larger than a single-family house be built there. In particular, Menlo Park is highly resistant to building vertically - the best way to get more units onto limited land.
> If you can't afford to live in a certain level of housing in a certain area at market prices, then you shouldn't live there, you should live somewhere cheaper. If the people companies want to hire can't afford to live within a reasonable distance then companies should pay more. If they can't pay more they should leave.
Sounds self correcting, then. Someday it may reach a point where you won't be able to afford to live where you can commute to downtown SF and your company will either have to pay you more or you'll have to leave.
There are a ton of externalities already priced into your rent. Not sure why you're singling out this one versus, say, the overwhelming source of high rents: lack of supply.
If lack of supply is a problem, then restricting that supply by 10-15% is part of the problem.
It is. Due to government-mandated lack of supply, the market is working its magic to make you have to move to the east bay.
> If lack of supply is a problem, then restricting that supply by 10-15% is part of the problem.
Sure, and if taxes were cut 25% you'd save a lot of money too. You still haven't identified anything special about section 8 that is holding you back from your dreams of temporarily lower rent. What about proposition 13? What about insane zoning rules trying to preserve the "character" of generic suburban neighborhoods?
I'm usually afraid to say it out loud though, because everyone accuses me of oppressing the poor or something similar.
It likely was subsidized housing for the poor in a cheaper area, but now its no longer cheap.
What isn't covered in your proposal is how to handle picking up and moving those poor people every 10 years when somewhere cheap becomes popular.
People who write about cities have often said that a city is most healthy when people of all walks of life are able to live in proximity with each other, and it's possible that without these assistance programs (as short-sighted as they may be), we'd see more cities turn into strictly playgrounds for the rich.
I agree, but it's not rich neighborhoods or rich people paying the price but the young middle class.
The public effort to encourage mixed-income housing and mixed-income communities in order to fight the effects of concentrated poverty is not just about politics. There are real issues at play here, e.g., societal, economic, environmental, etc.
Also, consider the benefits, to yourself, of living in a mixed community instead of a socioeconomically homogenous cluster.
So, do you have any numbers? I agree that your argument is appealing. But I really distrust appealing arguments nowdays.
It only makes sense from a fairly warped point of view.
If their friends and families care so much they should take them in, not put them on the public dole. As retirees they are probably better off living somewhere cheaper anyway, like a retirement community in an exurb, where everything, food, medical, and entertainment was a lot cheaper.
If we're going to set aside subsidized apartments in newly constructed buildings close to job centers for low or moderate income people, I don't think it's especially callous or outrageous to insist that they be provided to people who need to be close to job centers for employment reasons.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like either outcome, really, I'd prefer to see an elderly person get to stay close to where he or she lived for many years. But I also see the effect that these brutal commutes have on low income workers who can'r afford to live near the job centers, how little they see their families or kids, how much it takes out of them. Seems like there's a lot of harm there you aren't really considering.
Even in that case, though, I might be ok with telling people that they may have to transfer units if they are no longer working. We are talking about providing free or heavily subsidized housing for people who can't afford it, and there isn't a unlimited supply of this, especially near high cost job centers. There's pain in the displacement you have described, but I was responding to the comment that said that it is a warped point of view to prioritize working people when assigning spots in subsidized housing in job centers. There's a lot of pain in the commutes low income workers must endure to feed their families, too, a pretty heavy human toll involved in soul crushing commutes from the exurbs to the job centers. Would it warped to say to low income seniors: "we will continue to provide you with clean, safe housing, but now that you are no longer working, we will provide this further from the job centers, so that we can reserve the more expensive and scare units near the job centers so that low income workers don't have to commute two hours each way in traffic and rarely see their families."
Honestly, it does seem a reasonable allocation of scarce public resources to me.
This is the common retort.
Here's the thing: This goes for pretty much everyone ever born somewhere, so, uh, everyone.
You simply can't have everyone live somewhere. Imagine if everyone in the world wanted to live on a a small, 10 square mile island. You'd agree this is impossible (blah blah blah, current technology, blah blah blah), right?
How do you decide who gets to live there and who doesn't?
At least, IMHO, the best way is not "blood right" (IE i was born there, or spent most of my life there, i get to live there). It's essentially being "born lucky". It wouldn't work anyway. At the rate people have kids, you still run out of room. It's simply not a viable mechanism of deciding who gets to live where.
What is happening here is no different. If you have too many people who want to live in one place, you have to decide who gets to live there somehow. While i'm not necessarily a fan of "whoever pays the most", i'm even less of a fan of "because i spent 50 years there" or "i grew up there". Great, so you got to enjoy it for 50 years, let someone else have a turn.
Let's also add that the only reason, at all, those people are there in the first place, is because someone moved away. The likelihood that we are talking about people where generations of their family lived and died in the same place is very very low. In all likelihood, the only reason they have these "support networks", etc, is because someone uprooted the family and moved them somewhere else. After all, the vast majority of us are immigrants. How soon we seem to forget that.
Do i feel for folks who get displaced? Of course. But i don't believe in magic, and, eventually, you run out of room.
(now, there is a reasonable argument we aren't there yet, and we should do it to provide as nice an environment for people as long as we can, but in the end, someone is going to get screwed here)
There's two sides to that coin.
You could eliminate Section 8 today and this would not be solved in the bay area.
But you don't need to throw out attacks like "warped." :-)
It is unethical and impractical to hold wealthier individuals accountable for the financial missteps of individuals. Especially when hardworking and financially responsible people get crowded out from living in a desirible location who could actually afford it.
Of course, this assumes that anyone can acquire as much wealth as they desire regardless of circumstance, which, as we have seen numerous times, is as much a "theory" as gravity is.
Are a bunch of 20/30 something tech workers really wealthy? How much money do these kids have in the bank? How much school debt? What percent of their income do they have to spend on rent?
In the calculus of renting vs buying a home you gain flexibility in renting. You can pick up and leave with minimal hassle. The risk you incur by doing so is that housing and rental prices might go up. You can't just reap the benefits of renting and then claim foul when the market prices them out and make others pay for it indirectly via externalities. If we're talking about people who are young enough that they've been priced out of home ownership in San Francisco their entire lives, then maybe they should have seen the writing on the wall and made a life for themselves somewhere they could afford it.
And, if their families want these people around so badly, why aren't they boarding them? It's the norm in plenty of other cultures.
The 2 lane road leading to my house is already overloaded and a builder is wanting to build another 2000 houses at the end of the road. Instead of waiting and relying on the state to improve the road, maybe we should do a better job at shifting the infrastructure costs to the builder when they put up a new apartment building or neighborhood.
A quick and ugly policy hack like a housing moriturium is the same way.
This is the sort of administrative choice that led to the Bay's housing crises.
"Bob, I'm sorry we had to have this meeting. But your performance has been slipping, and we've decided that today will be your last day as an employee with us. We have some boxes for you to clean out your cubicle, and the moving company will be here this afternoon to help you pack up your apartment."
Google's been trying to do this for years, but the Mountain View city council keep blocking it. :(
I rented a house in Monta Loma (across the 101 from Google when I worked there). The same neighbors would on one hand complain that building housing in North Bayshore was a terrible idea, because the people there would stay there, and not contribute the the Mountain View economy. And on the other hand, they'd complain that development there was sure to increase traffic because more people would be driving to/from N. Bayshore. I tried to argue that it would decrease traffic, because people would no longer be driving in from San Jose, the east bay, or Gilroy.
These were the same people that complained that Google giving free lunches hurt local restaurants, and in the same discussion complained about all the traffic Google generates and how hard it was to find a place to park on Castro.
I'm so glad I moved away.
https://www.amazon.com/Site-Reliability-Engineering-Producti...
The reason Menlo Park allows building those new apartments is because Menlo Park has a serious segregation problem. North side of 101 is mostly black and latino communities and they usually don't have any representatives in the city hall and don't get involved with the proposals much. So the people of rich side of the city shoot down any construction near their homes but approve anything on this side so they can get the taxes come in to make their neighborhood even nicer.
This new proposal is in this side of 101 again. They're going to make this side of Menlo Park very crowded and keep their nice homes and probably enjoy even higher property values.
https://steveblank.com/2009/05/15/supermac-war-story-11-the-...