Exploring the dividing lines between rich and poor in American cities | Hacker News Reader

Exploring the dividing lines between rich and poor in American cities

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45 pointsmisnamed28 comments

Am I the only one who hates how it's become received wisdom that, to quote the article, "A skyrocketing real estate market, fueled in large part by the tech industry" is the main culprit for this?

What about height and floor area limits, surrounding communities on the peninsula that won't build, aggressive neighborhood associations in San Francisco, overly-restrictive building and zoning codes (wife is architect in SF, currently going through 2-year permitting process on one of her projects), and excessive developer fees?

It's telling that other cities, e.g. Washington, DC, are experiencing similar levels of economic and population growth, without all the hand-wringing, just by building more hosting stock.

It doesn't have to be this way. It's this way because SF's electorate chooses to make it this way.

There are three legal entities governing housing in and around the D.C. Metropolitan area - the District, Maryland, and Virginia. The laws and geography have worked such that Virginia is currently experiencing the benefits (from an economic/tax point of view) of the whole tech fueled growth in DC.

Housing is being built in the district, but there are hard and soft limits to how much can be made available. DC is tiny, and land in and around the city center (or near a metro stop) is at a premium. Furthermore, the District has laws restricting the height of buildings - no new building is allowed to be taller than the top of the Captitol building. That's the hard limit - the soft limit is that D.C. politically is really pushin back against gentrification in all forms. There's a lot of effort being spent to keep neighborhoods and areas the way they are, which makes developing rather difficult.

Maryland has had cheap housing for a while, but it's been developed already - there's nothing new being built, because it's either already at capacity, or the land is never going to be built on because it's in a super rich community. Maryland (well, the parts of Maryland amenable to housing) also has the complication of being separated from the city center by north east D.C., which is mostly residential and terrible to commute through. This wouldn't matter if the metro functioned properly, but it's been on the fritz for about 3 years now.

This has resulted in a massive building spree of high rises, both for luxury condos and cheaper apartment blocks, on the other side of the river in Virginia. The Ballston area in particular has had three new apartment building open up in the last year, with more being built as I type.

Sorry for the ramble, it's just interesting having grown up here, and seeing some of the reasons why things are the way they are.

Your description of Maryland is completely inaccurate. There is plenty of housing being built, and lots of buildable land. NE DC is not "terrible" to commute through: quite the opposite--there are many major commuter routes built to accommodate many cars.

Where exactly? I've been in the area for a decade and there's maybe 1-2 luxury high rises going up at once at the most.

Needless to say that's not even close to keeping up with population growth, let alone to qualify for the definition of "plenty"

OP said "there's nothing new being built" and now you're just talking about "luxury high rises". There is plenty of housing being built that is not "luxury high rises," though even plenty of those are being built too--parts of Silver Spring have been transformed over the past decade.

> There is plenty of housing being built that is not "luxury high rises," though even plenty of those are being built too--parts of Silver Spring have been transformed over the past decade.

That is even less true. There's almost no affordable housing being built in the Silver Spring or Bethesda/Rockville area.

All the condos in new construction start at ~$300k for a 1BR, which is definitely not in the affordable category.

Still waiting for those counterexamples with Zillow listings and the such.

DC's household median income is 75k. [1] Your "unaffordable" condo is 4x the household median income.

In SF, the median household income is 84k. [2] The median 1br sale in SF was for 827k. [3]

I'm willing to debate what constitutes "affordable" but let's call a spade a spade. SF is in an entirely different league of affordability than DC. And my contention is that anti-development policy plays a big part in it.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2016/09/15/d-c-...

[2] http://www.sfhip.org/index.php?module=DemographicData&type=u...

[3] https://www.trulia.com/real_estate/San_Francisco-California/...

Goalposts are moving all over the place here.

OP: "there's nothing new being built", to which I said there is plenty being built.

Then: "there's maybe 1-2 luxury high rises going up at once at the most", to which I said there is "plenty of housing being built that is not "luxury high rises"".

Now the retort is "There's almost no affordable housing being built in the Silver Spring or Bethesda/Rockville area."

I don't even know what you define as "affordable" but I will leave you with a $300k brand new 3BR townhouse condo right near the Beltway. I'm not going to answer your claim about SS/Bethesda/Rockville because nobody ever claimed there is plenty of affordable housing being built there. With that you can go and slide your goalposts around some more even though I have negated every single strawman that has been thrown up here.

http://www.drhorton.com/Maryland/Maryland/Glenarden/Woodmore...

Another story I've heard from a real estate industry employee is a high rise in downtown SF getting killed because someone proved it blocked a butterfly migration path. The local laws that empower this kind of stuff is a source of many issues here.

At this rate LA will have more transit, subways and dense housing than SF in a few decades.

Yep!

> It's telling that other cities, e.g. Washington, DC, are experiencing similar levels of economic and population growth

And not are all tech hubs. Nyc is more finance driven than tech. D.C. is a very different beast.

Housing is the real problem. Let's call it what it is. Once you have a place to live, then the cost of a pleasant existence is a) pretty cheap, b) controllable [eat out versus eat at home], and c) more or less the same in many parts of the country. Education and health care costs are close runner ups but the real affordability crisis that we have to solve for is affordable housing in desirable areas (job centers). On the other hand, there is so much household savings tied up in housing that any major effort to reduce prices would cause a lot of economic pain. I don't have any answers.

Housing is really cheap in the midwest and south. Maybe everyone who can't afford the expensive areas can relocate and telecommute?

Kind of silly, but not entirely.

I would happily move to Nowhere, Kansas, if I could find a semi-stable remote job. I've been looking for about a year and haven't found anything suitable. Meanwhile, I know I can land a decent job anytime, within weeks, in Seattle or Boston. The availability of remote jobs does seem to be on the rise - the problem is that it's small and rising slowly.

I used to do that, but you can make 2x-3x by going into an office. Sadly still true.

Gave up reading after it crashed 5 times on my iPhone. What ever happened to plain HTML?

on my computer the space bar didn't let me move through the article either. I guess they didn't want either of us to read it.

Areas of household income around $16,000, what reported occupations are these? Part time temp work on and off?

Also, isn't there a lot of utility by looking at assets as well. It wouldn't seemingly change a discussion around the article presented, but it is kind of pointless to have a discussion of annual income and neglect people that have assets greater than their income, liquid or not.

> Areas of household income around $16,000, what reported occupations are these? Part time temp work on and off?

Minimum wage is $7/hour. 40 hours a week * 52 weeks and you're not even making $15k despite working full time and not taking even a week off. Pretty abysmal.

Retail and service jobs. I have a few friends who are single parents and make less than $12,000 in retail. Many want full time work, but it's rarely available.

Wow that must be really tough.

Many people are really struggling out there, that is something I think many either aren't aware of, ignore, or forget.

It is so tough that I never want to experience it again and motivates me to work as hard as I do. But not everyone is as lucky as I've been.

It's very, very hard. Need a car repair? That will be 3 weeks take-home pay. I worried about money 24/7.

I couldn't ever forget.

"the upper five percent of Manhattan residents earned more than $860,000 in 2014"

Really? 1 in 20 people make that much money annually?

Only on the island of Manhattan. The other boroughs of New York City do not have the same concentration of households making this much.

The article's sources are listed at the bottom of the page, and they are primarily household income statistics.

I'm surprised they didn't adjust for cost of living across each city. I lived in D.C. for four years, and it was certainly less expensive than NYC/SF, broadly speaking.

Pointless summary of original. Please link to original:

http://storymaps.esri.com/stories/2016/wealth-divides/index....

Thanks, we've updated the link from http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/12/esri-map-income-inequ....

Agreed. Content regurgitation is so annoying.

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