The San Francisco Bay Area CSA has about the same population as Switzerland, with 2/3 of the area of Switzerland.
Both have similar GDPs.
If someone wanted to live in Germany, and commute to work in Zurich, with Swiss salaries and German cost-of-living, their commute would be about 1h15min.
The housing and infrastructure problems in the SFBA are purely political, and self-inflicted.
If someone lived 80 miles away from Zurich, in a German town such as Sankt Märgen, Google is telling me that it would take 2h 51m [1]. This tells me that if the woman in the Article made that same distance commute in German/Switzerland with, say, 30 minutes of slack, she would have to leave her house at 3:40am to arrive at work at 7am.
Let me now quote the article:
When the second alarm goes off at 3:45 — a reminder to leave
for the train in 15 minutes — her morning shifts from
leisure to precision.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Sankt+M%C3%A4rgen,+Germany/Z...
There are plenty of small towns along the Rhine or near the Bodensee that are commutable to Zurich.
People commute to Geneva from France too.
I'm sure you can find dozens of examples where it isn't.
53 minutes from Singen, DE, to Zurich.
You can buy a 1-2 BR apartment in Singen for <200k euros:
in less than 1.5 hours you can be in Zurich from Konstanz without a transfer (if you insist on 7am sharp then it's one transfer taking less than five minutes). Just in case you want to live in a nice university city and not a little village. And it's way, way cheaper than Zurich https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
That's true, but the implication that these decisions are inarguably stupid ("self-inflicted") is unfair. It's a conscious and IMHO defensible choice by the people who already live here: we would prefer to deal with the problems caused by insufficient housing than by the problems caused by overly dense population.
Pretty sure you're not speaking for me and most of my SFBA friends...
If you could choose to vote where you work instead of where you live, this problem would go away very quickly.
What's happening is that the wealthy are externalizing all the suffering caused by their voracious rent-seeking onto those beneath them, including middle class developers who think their interests align with them (they don't).
But the Stanford professor writing about the plight of the poor workers commuting for 2 hours lives in a multi-million dollar home in Atherton and votes for anti-poor-people zoning laws.
The young, billionaire, startup CEO who wants to cause a positive impact in the world lives in Los Altos Hills, where zoning laws forbid lot sizes smaller than 1 acre, and bans multi-family housing or more than one dwelling per lot.
And the progressive tech worker who advocates for low-income-housing and makes $250k per year lives in a rent-controlled apartment in the Mission paying half of the market rates.
The Bay Area housing situation is a tragedy of the commons.
The adjective "self-inflicted" has an undeniable negative connotation. Why didn't you say, "deliberately chosen" instead?
> The Bay Area housing situation is a tragedy of the commons.
No, it's not. It is neither a tragedy, nor does it have anything to do with commons. Yes, it is a case of the rich making life harder for the poor, but that's only a tragedy for the poor. It's not a tragedy for the rich. It's not a tragedy for tourists who can enjoy the distinctive nature of the SFBay area while it still has redwood trees instead of being paved over with high-rise apartments. It's not a tragedy for the wildlife that lives in the privately owned open space on the Peninsula. And none of this has anything to do with "the commons." All that open space is privately owned, and all of the governments who won't change the zoning laws (including the state government, BTW) are democratically elected.
If you turn the San Francisco Bay into another Manhattan or Hong Kong that would not make it any less of a tragedy. It would just be a different kind of tragedy.
For those who don't appear to know what "Tragedy of the commons" is, it's an economic concept[1] that doesn't necessarily involve a "tragedy" and "the commons" can include private property.
A recent example of "tragedy of the commons" was during the recent California extended drought, Wall Street firms were buying up struggling pistachio farms in California, drilling wells deeper than nearby farmers did, and were undercutting those farmers by siphoning the aquifer from below, encouraging those competing farmers to dig deeper wells and use water faster. "The commons" would be the aquifer / water rights that the farmers commonly depend on. The tragedy was that in the depths of the drought, other pistachio farmers were unable to afford to dig deeper, their harvests were scant, and the price of pistachios worldwide had tripled -- all of which further incentivized well funded outsiders to do the same and buy out farmers.
You can argue that SF MTA management and SF building / zoning policy isn't in the best interest of SF citizens, but pedantically arguing the semantics of "tragedy of the commons" won't win you any intellectual arguments.
There's no need to become Manhattan or Hong Kong. Just invest in infrastructure.
Most cities are denser than Switzerland. My undergrad town of 25K is over 20 times denser than Switzerland.
Switzerland has excellent public transit. Therefore, if there is a density threshold to offering good public transit, an area would need to be at least less dense than Switzerland in order to argue that it isn't possible.
The SF Bay Area is denser than Switzerland. Therefore, the reasons for not having good transit are not to do with density, but with something else (politics, zoning, public support, etc.). But density is not the issue.
You're not getting the basic point with transit infrastructure: it requires density.
Transit systems are only viable with enough people living and working at walking distance from the stations.
Increasing density decreases traffic, increases transit effectiveness, and reduces environmental impact. It's simple geometry.
That works very, very well for public transportation. The issue with transit and density is not about distances, is actually about the number of people living and working within walking distance of a transit stop.
If you increase density by 5X, that number increases by 5X.
So two cities with the same density, one spread out evenly and the other in high-density islands surrounded by low density seas, have very different viabilities for public transit.
I lived in Switzerland for 9 months last year. They have arguably the best transit infrastructure in the world, with a passenger rail system that is 100% electric.
According to Wikipedia, the density of Zurich is ~4600 people/km^2. The density of San Francisco is ~7170 people/km^2. So what excuse does SF have for being so very, very much worse?
Take a look at the referendums over the past few years: universal basic income? No. More vacation days? No. Forbid speculation on food products? No. Define marriage as man/woman? No. Build a new tunnel across the Alps? Hell yeah!
But it isn't just about density. You can have mid to low average density, but still have a viable transit system.
Public transit doesn't just depend on the overall average density, but on the density of the area surrounding the transit stops.
Switzerland has reasonably dense cities and towns, with very-low-density areas in between. The SFBA has evenly-distributed low density (except for a few areas).
Increasing the distance between dense cores doesn't have as much negative impact on transit viability as spreading people out has.
The SFBA could easily solve this by changing the zoning laws around Bart, Caltrain, VTA and Muni stations.
I totally agree with you here. This is the crux of my argument.
Your statement about Switzerland having reasonably dense cities and towns compared with the Bay Area I'm interested in learning more about - can you cite your source? Having lived in Switzerland for almost a year and in the Bay Area for almost 4, this doesn't ring true to me, but I don't have a heat map of population density to check against; if I get more time at some point I'll try to find more data.
Regardless, we do have some areas of sufficient population density that it would make sense to connect efficiently and we don't. That's the choice I'm talking about. At the very least, it should be easy to get between Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose without needing a car. Within San Francisco, you should be able to go from the east side to the west side without using a system that suffers from being delayed at least 50% of the time.
Also - regarding more vacation days? The government already mandates 4 weeks of vacation (5 if you're under 20) and you are supposed to take at least two of those weeks in a row.
I had some Swiss friends and we were on a train once that was delayed by 15-20 minutes. They were all complaining because this happens once in a blue moon. They mentioned that if the train is delayed by more than 3 minutes it has to be posted on signage and if it's delayed more than 6 minutes or would cause someone to miss a connection it results in fines to the operator. I haven't been able to find a written source to back this up but personally I almost never experienced delays on Swiss transit.
https://qz.com/166186/the-swiss-are-scandalized-by-trains-th...
Swiss media are abuzz with the news of the country’s faltering rail system. Last year, the state-run rail operator missed its target for punctuality; only 87.5% of trains arrived within three minutes of their scheduled arrival.
A national transit system runs like clockwork, every single gear must be turning in sync for the system to work.
San Francisco will always be a distinctive and attractive place, with or without density. And by building more housing and improving transit, it will become less distinctive in negative ways (homelessness for one). NYC has multiple tourist attractions that have almost 3 times as visitors as those in San Francisco.[1]
> tragedy for the wildlife
It is a tragedy for the wildlife worldwide for people who work in cities to have to spend countless hours commuting and expending carbon emissions.
True, rich land-owners may have to pay more tax and some may see slightly lower appreciation rates, but many other rich people and almost all poor and middle class will benefit. No doubt someone of it is "self-inflicted" at the state-level (Prop 13 for one, and "environmental" approvals used to drag down new development), but there are actionable ways to fix some of this -- passing sales tax, easing rigid zoning laws, and using new funds for transit measures like Measure M in Los Angeles, and Measure B in San Jose.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourist_attractions_in_the_Uni...
You yourself said:
>we would prefer to deal with the problems caused by insufficient housing than by the problems caused by overly dense population.
Is problems not a negative connotation?
Yes, it is negative, and it is self-inflicted. In your original comment, you are actually agreeing with the parent.
On the one hand you have more access for more people to one of the most important and dynamic urban areas in the United States. On the other you have the "distinctive nature of the SFBay area" and redwood trees.
I think it's pretty obvious that the first is more important than the latter, but it's fair of you to want to make that tradeoff explicit.
No, all parties take part in it. Rent control, mandating low-income units, preventing new developments, preventing gentrification, etc. all constrain supply. And it isn't just the rich doing it.
A more proper description would be a conflict between the insiders and the outsiders, with the insider being anyone who already rents or owns a place. Insiders don't want change, and want outsiders to be punished and taxed.
The commons in this case isn't the land, it's the government and laws.
[1] http://www.mercurynews.com/2013/10/10/mark-zuckerberg-buys-f...
In the densely populated parts of the Netherlands we've had an unhealthy housing market for decades, partly because of government subsidized mortages through tax breaks.
"Everyone" kind of agrees that is should be abolished, but the polical and popular will is laking, and people won't be able to pay their mortages anymore if it happened too sudden. Also it would cause homes to deflate 10-30% which would be a serious issue for current owners who want to move.
Everyone thinks the market would be better off without the mortgage subsidy, but no-one wants his house to lose value because of a resulting market slump or make higher mortgage payments every month.
- So for example, prop 13 would only apply if your above retirement age for example. (Avoiding old people)
- Or prop 13 only applies to somewhere where you live as a homeowner. (Not a lot of people have second homes)
- No secondary residences or rental properties would get prop 13 benefits.
- Prop 13 benefits cannot apply to corporations / LLCs. (Many people don't have their own house under a corp since they lose a big capital gains tax break if they do)
- Prop 13 benefits cannot be passed on to your children through a trust or whatever else.
That's why I believe housing policy needs to be decided at the Bay Area or CA state level. When these decisions are made at the local level, it's people like your friends who selfishly vote to inflict the high costs of housing on to others. Hopefully this NIMBY-ism can be averted by making sure that all stakeholders get a say in the housing policy of a incredibly interconnected region.
That's not true. It makes it hard to find good help. (That was intended to be humorously ironic, but there's a serious point behind it: everything in the SFBA is more expensive than it would be if housing were more plentiful.)
> you're benefiting through increasing home values
Not really. You only benefit from this if you sell, and if you sell two bad things happen if housing prices are up. First, you take a big hit on capital gains, and second, you lose your prop 13 benefits. So rising prices make it really hard to move within the SFBA even for people who already live here.
Yes, you can sell and move away, but people don't want to do that because everyplace else sucks by comparison. If that weren't true, there wouldn't be so many people wanting to move here driving up our prices!
I have no objections to paying taxes. Quite the contrary.
First you're complaining about "huge" capital gains, which is literally a tax on profit you made for doing nothing. A tax, might I add, that is much less than income tax. Second, you're complaining about Prop. 13, which just means you're upset about the prospect of paying the property taxes you actually owe, as opposed to the wildly deflated ones from when you purchased.
I don't think you understand just how out of touch you're coming across, and nothing in your statement suggests you have anything but objections to paying your fair share of taxes.
Specifically: the house I own is too big for me. I'd like to downsize. If housing prices were flat I could sell my house, buy a smaller house for less, reduce my property taxes, and only pay the transaction costs. But because my house and all the others around have appreciated, I can't do that. The smaller house I want to move in to costs more than the house I'm in when I bought it, so if I downsize my property taxes go up. Also, I have to pay transaction costs on a much bigger transaction plus pay the capital gains tax on a gain which I don't get to realize. The only way I win is if I move out of the area. But I don't want to do that. I like it here.
None of this would be a problem if prices were flat. It costs me more (a LOT more!) to downsize because the market is up. Hence an appreciating market is not necessarily good for you even if you own.
Edit: perhaps not ‘best’, rather ‘preferable if compatible with your financials’
I don't know how to rebut this, because it's such an absurd sentiment on its face.
Home equity is a benefit. You can borrow against it or otherwise use it as an asset on paper.
> if you sell two bad things happen if housing prices are up. First, you take a big hit on capital gains
Wait, what? You're arguing that it's a "bad thing" if you have to pay a percentage of additional profits? Most primary residences aren't subject to capital gains if you hold them for > 2 years, assuming the gain is less than $0.5million (married, co-owning).
If that happened to enough people, prices would stabilize closer to reality.
At the very least prop 13 should have been restricted to owner-occupied principal residences. But that ship sailed long before my time.
No, except for housing, most things are less expensive, because more housing would mean more population but not proportionally more infrastructure (at least, without higher maintenance costs per unit, because the cheap choices are already built) for imports to the region, which means supply increases less than demand for anything with external inputs, which means prices go up.
This effect is even worse for things that are limited and local in supply, like unique local features, where you get increased demand with no increased supply, not merely supply increase less than proportional to demand. So prices on those go way up.
This is completely untrue. I have a house in 94087 where I live about 7 months/year (the other 5 months are in Tel Aviv, where it's also very expensive!) I own the house, bought in in 1989. I don't benefit at all from increased house prices. It just makes everything more expensive.
And even under Prop 13, my property tax goes up 2% a year. That's more than inflation.
I don't benefit at all from the "increased value" in my house. If I could, I'd tear down the house and build a 2-family house on the property. But even if zoning laws allowed it, the house would be reassessed at current market value, and it wouldn't be worth it to pay $32,000/year in property taxes alone. (I've looked into this to the extent of hiring a real-estate lawyer to see if it's feasible).
If there were no prop 13, people would be forced out of their homes because specu-vesters would drive the prices up making just the taxes affordable.
The solution is to BUILD MORE HOUSES. Build apartment buildings. Close by so people can walk or take existing mass transit to work. And allow people with single family homes to tear them down and build 2-family homes without being reassessed.
It only matters if I decide to sell it AND move somewhere else. Which probably isn't going to happen.
So now people buy in and don't move.
You (quite literally) have a million-dollar offer on the table to move to, say, Austin, TX (or dozens of other great cities). The fact that you choose not to accept that offer does not negate the existence of the offer. The offer is always there. And this is a very real asset that you have (that, I hope it's clear, most people don't have), whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.
Value of primary residence isn't even considered part of your net worth. It exists, but it's not fungible like other assets.
Anything you own that has value, but is not your primary residence, is intrinsically different from your primary residence.
And that difference is reflected in standard financial metrics.
Prop 13 also induces people to not sell their property, or convert properties into more units like you, so there are less available units on the market, which increases prices even further.
For example go look at SF or LA vs Miami on Redfin and see the stark difference in how many units are for sale at one time.
Higher property taxes encourages people to sell their properties if it's not economically worth it anymore to hold the property and give it to people who would actually use it. And it also encourages them politically to build more housing so their property tax bill does not go up too much.
If the city doesn't make enough money, then it become bankrupt. Roads, schools, sewers and police can't function properly anymore. The money has to come from somewhere!
This statement smells really, really bad.
As the article stated, she had to leave the SFBA because she was evicted and the housing prices had gone up too much. She lived there, and didn't chose that. As with all gentrification, the population that lived there didn't chose for affluent (typically white) people to move in and raise their rents forcing them further and further away from what had been a home to them for generations.
[UPDATE] Let me clarify: I can see how you could object to various aspects of our political system. I myself am active in trying to tackle the problem of income inequality and getting Citizens United repealed. But the housing problems in the SFBA are just symptoms of this much larger overlying problem. You can object to those, and I'll be right beside you. What I'm talking about is focusing on the high cost of housing in the SFBA in isolation as if it's a standalone problem that has a simple and obvious solution that the Powers That Be are just too dim to see or too corrupt to implement. That is not the case.
Because of this, I don't think local governments should have control over zoning. The impacts are at least state wide so they should be regulated at the state or national level.
What you are saying, is after her building was bought out and she and her neighbors were then about to be homeless, they should have formed a political organization? Where, exactly? I mean, she went to one town, who knows where the other 5/10/50 people went.
That kind of argument comes from a very privileged position of a person who hasn't been gentrified out of their neighborhood.
This is a direct result of greed; not capitalism or democracy (I mean, we aren't even a democracy, but a representative republic).
No. By then it's obviously too late. You have to act before laws are passed that drive your constituency out of town. But there are a lot of places where this has happened and renters have a lot of rights. And, BTW, the city of San Francisco is one of them. I am not a landlord, but I am told that it is nearly impossible to evict someone in SF.
From the outside it looks like you've created the worst of both worlds.
But a non-political solution to affordable housing could be coming soon in the form of rapid transit via Hyperloop. Hyperloop could put deflationary pressure on housing prices.
If Hyperloop actually materializes, and their route transit times are anywhere near what they say they will be, then real estate prices should decline in the bay area, or at the worst level out.
I doubt people will continue to pay crazy prices in SF when you can commute from almost anywhere on the west coast to SF within an hour on Hyperloop.
Furthermore, a Hyperloop might get you from city to city, but then local transit is needed for those last couple miles.
The stations have to go somewhere, the tunnels have to go somewhere, etc.
I really hope that's not true
It's sad at first to see that someone who is simply in a different area geographically is afforded so much for so little effort. However when you factor in the cost of living there, it feels (slightly) better. I say slightly, because every time I've visited SF the actual costs of things has not been significantly different. I haven't had to pay rent or mortgage there, though.
Edit: And I don't live somewhere off in the woods, either. The county I live in is in the top 10 wealthiest counties in the country. There is something wrong in SF that is not just cost of living.
Regarding cost of living here, I just did some basic research using Portland as an example and it looks like I could reduce my mortgage by anywhere from 25-50% pretty easily without giving up anything in terms of bedrooms, square footage, location, etc. In terms of rentals, it looks comparable. Of course I probably couldn't get a job earning what I do in SF either. I haven't looked at relocating because (surprise!) we actually like it here and with kids you get pinned down unless things are pretty bad.
It's worth noting that I live in Alameda, the island/town the woman in the article was living in when she got evicted. We are literally having riots (two now) at city hall when tenant-friendly changes to local law have been discussed. They keep passing the ballot, though!
Alameda passed an anti-density measure in the early 70's in response to developers demolishing old Victorians in order to build crappy apartment buildings. That measure has in turn kept high density development from being done _anywhere_ on the island, including the old naval base where there is nothing historic to be preserved (except the ships floating on the water). Current anti-density arguments primarily come from people who don't want additional commute-hours congestion and landlords who are perfectly happy to rent a 2-bedroom apartment for $2200/mo. (Cheap compared to SF!)
For the Canton of Zurich (can't find city-specific info), financial services accounts for 21% of GVA, telecommunications accounts for 27%, industry and mining for 14%, entertainment for another 14%.
Zurich is a major tech and manufacturing hub.