San Francisco Progressives Declare War on Affordable Housing
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
That's just not true.
An trending increase in the national average monthly cost of rent shows that people are competing more for housing. But, that can be explained by a migration to major metropolitan centers and/or tech centers. Which is a totally different mechanism than "running out of housing".
A mutual friend is renting a 1br in the city (which has some great food options) for $1400/mo. He was my lab mate in college and the best programmer in our class. He has no intent to move out to higher cost cities.
"Shockingly livable" was my takeaway.
Part of Baltimore's cheapness is that it has one of the highest crime rates per capita. In addition, the dangerous areas are much more interspersed and distributed - at one moment you can be walking down a nice block and the very next block is all boarded up. I've lived in both Baltimore and NYC and definitely never felt unsafe in NYC, whereas there have been multiple times that I had a sudden sense of danger in Baltimore. The Johns Hopkins medical school would routinely post security bulletins about people being mugged a few blocks from campus in the middle of the day.
If it wasn't for Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland Medical school there wouldn't be much to Baltimore.
Simple example that shows this could be no big deal .
incomes = [2,4,8,500, 500] median income = 8
rents = [1,2,4, 250, 250 ] average rent = 101.4
OMG !!! SO MUCH MORE THAN AVERAGE INCOME.
Let me make it easier to understand: "The U.S. is running out of places that people want to live."
We're realizing that living in an anonymous suburb on a tract of cheap land a 90 minute drive from where we work is stupid. It's terrible for the environment, it stunts social and business opportunities, and it is boring. More people in cities is good for the environment, good for economic equality, and good for sanity.
There are an infinite number of places that you "could" live, so your use of "running out of housing" is a straw man. By your definition, it's not even possible to "run out of housing".
When cities become attractive, as the Bay Area is now, they don't respond to the right signals to grow, and when they grow, they grow in unbalanced ways.
I think the solution is through a fundamental overhaul of land-use policy, which is unlikely to happen anytime soon. In the meantime, we'll have failed cities with a ceiling for growth.
I'd love if more companies allowed remote work.
Cry me a river.
Which was followed by:
> land-value taxation...is basically just the idea of giving property tax exemptions for urban buildings.
That is almost the exact opposite of what LVT does.
It won't create more square-footage of land in which people can live, but it makes it more likely that cities will grow in ways to sustain more people.
I must be missing something - housing prices are combination of "affordable minimum" due to costs, and "what the market will bare". In a market with scarce housing and huge housing prices, it should be very doable to offer below-market-rate housing and still be profitable, all without subsidies. Right?
That said, I'm all in favor of increasing density. I forget where I read it, but I saw a great analysis about how it's "cheap" to get city councils to pass limitations on future growth (Nimby), but getting them to pass actions (new housing, etc) often requires they show how it is paid for. As those limitations have an opportunity cost, they too should be justified.
Still though, I don't understand the above part of the article. Help?
With "30% affordable," the extra money comes from making the other 70% of the apartments more expensive. With "100% affordable" there is no built-in source for the extra money so it needs to come from some other source.
Unless you mean that the cost of the land would be priced off of market rate, so the land cost alone would make this undoable. That makes sense.
The sheer cost of land is a big part of the problem, but so are the fixed costs of construction. If you are taking advantage of the density bonus, you are probably also having to move from wood-over-concrete construction to steel framing, the base cost of which doesn't pay off until you have a much taller building to spread the cost over, which is probably taller than you can legally build even with the density bonus.
There are probably opportunities to forgo profit by charging something at or above your costs but less than the market might bear, but the costs of building are still so high that it's hard to get below the threshold to count as affordable even if you aren't trying to make any money.
Just because the supervisors are saying they want below market rate housing doesn't mean they're saying they want landlords to actually lose money. They're instead saying they want landlords to be willing to make some amount less than the theoretical maximum profit on some number of units (whether 5% or 100% of units in a building) in exchange for being allowed to build a whole lot more of them.
That doesn't seem like such an unfair trade-off.
[1] http://therealdeal.com/issues_articles/nycs-construction-cra...
http://sfmohcd.org/current-listings-below-market-rate-owners...
Highrise is not the panacea most people think.
If not furthering their capital, they will use their environmentalism clout to further their world view. It's a less visible but analogous dynamic to the Koch brothers using capital to shape the world after their vision.
Just when you thought you heard it all, journalists find another way to sound supremely stupid. The US ranks 182 out of 244 on the list of countries by population density.
If you took the entire world's population and crammed it into the continental US, we'd be midway between Bangladesh and Taiwan.
Is it safe to say that, in US cities, quality of life generally gets worse with increases in population density?
If so, is it because US local and state governments are pretty bad at managing population increase, in general?
I'd have a hard time saying that.
First, you have "in US cities", so you've already stepped up your density from a non-city situation. Moving to Seattle from smaller East Coast towns and cities was a notable increase in quality of life for me. (more to do, more people that share my interests, less effort/travel involved in doing things, more medical/food resources of various types, better public transit, etc). Historically, urban centers (more dense) have always represented more opportunities than rural areas (less dense). Without a doubt, some people in these dense areas have lower quality of life. But enough have the opposite that it keeps happening.
Second, you'll have lots of individual variation. I've seen HN posters that LOVE their small-town areas, and others that love having everything needed in a high density 10 block areas. Very hard to make a generalization.
All anecdotal, but there it is.
> If so, is it because US local and state governments are pretty bad at managing population increase, in general?
That's a statement I'd generally back. Govts represent the current populace, and the smaller the govt body, the more short-term the vision usually is. Whether it's putting in building height restrictions, avoiding loud construction, or losing a ton of money on stadium construction, there are a lot of examples of poor management. (I suspect there are examples of GOOD management, but that's much harder to _notice_.)
I recall reading a condemnation of cul-de-sacs (they promote heavy car use and tend to create unwalkable neighborhoods, and thus drive away small shops and stores towards stripmalls at best). Despite this, they were (are?) heavily promoted by the federal govt, and you can see from aerial views of areas when they were built. (some areas have cul-de-sacs off the roads. 10 years later you see a fern-like structure of roads having roads off of them that have cul-de-sacs off of them. 10 years after that you gets these fractalish spiraling structures of roads of roads of roads of cul-de-sacs). In my view, poor management repeated over and over again.
The advantage to density is people don't need to travel as far to do things so you can support a lot more niche activities. Making it easer to connect with people and get a bite to eat at 4AM.
Or put another way, you need density to overcome the downsides. Sprawl means you get the same amenitys as a small city which has better traffic and lower costs.
Basically they're taking a situation that is notoriously complex and entrenched, with multiple interlocking tradeoffs and feedback loops; cherry picking a few of the driving factors, and throwing in a few offhand observations about the positions that "progressives" (as if this were an identifiable, let alone unified group) supposedly take in regard to these issues; and concluding with the innuendo that this "Them", this "Other", is "declaring war" on not just affordable housing, but on economic growth and progress itself.
And also:
Unlike progressives in New York City, who are often big supporters of density, San Francisco progressives have decided to focus on kicking the tech industry out of the city.
No, not bending over for every regulatory or other concession certain elements of an industry might want does not equal a drive to "kick them out." This is a scare card, pure and simple; it's meant to befuddle and distract, and sheds no light on the complex issues at root.
It is true that San Francisco's "left" is against housing construction. It is also true that San Francisco politics are an inverted world where "left" and "right" cease to even have meaning. So we need competent writers to try to sort this out. But writing articles like this that just plow through the nuance and make elementary mistakes, like apparently not even reading the language of or rational for Oakland's eviction moratorium, make it harder to get to a bargain on this stuff.
"Rent control is in effect, but that has just increased the incentive for evictions"
... ignore so many issues that it makes it hard to believe the core argument.
Price ceilings cause shortages. Always.
Maybe I'll start calling everyone progressive. They all have opinions about something.