Rise of the yimbys: the angry millennials with a radical housing solution
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
A lot of fresh grads in the industry think that spending 50-70% of their net income on rent is a completely reasonable thing to do. Though my observations are unscientific, plenty of my friends are living paycheck to paycheck, eating out all the time, constantly travelling, by choice because their friends are doing the same. They don't want to take the extra 15 minutes on a train to visit their friends by living in a more affordable area. When I lived in Oakland for instance, my friends in SF would almost never visit me because it was just a bit too far even though I'm walking distance from the Oakland City Center BART station.
This insatiable desire for young techies to spend a stupid amount of their money to be part of this elite club is astounding.
Also I'm surprised East Palo Alto hasn't gentrified
We're living in boom times, and one layoff or closure will make people rethink their behavior. I don't care how expensive a place is, you're just an idiot, plain and simple, if you're a 25-year old straight out of school, no kids/dependents, making 150k and can't afford to put away 15-30k/year. People will bitch and bitch about high rents, student loan payments, high taxes, etc. but it's like, show some discipline and skip the $30/person brunch for _one weekend_.
I do wonder why some of the people getting crushed on rent don't just move farther out the bart or even muni line. There are still cheap spots south of 280 in SF that are an extremely short hop to the mission or downtown (like, 8-12 minutes on bart, if that).
Thing is, while people may complain, they often aren't quite as irrational as they seem. There may be exceptional value in living in the intense concentration of young tech workers and artists (well, with the latter rapidly diminishing).
In spite of being a programmer who spent almost my entire life in SF, I never really was in the thick of it. I think this might partly be age - I'm in my mid 40s now, and when I was in my 20s, SF wasn't nearly as big a part of tech as it is now. There were a few startups and design companies, but "Tech" was really mainly South Bay. Even well into the 1990s, SF proper was actually law firms, a few bankers, and a bit of publishing and media, with a generally much more conservative dress and business culture.
But watching it now - obviously there's something very valuable in the network effects of being in the thick of things. And by that, I actually do mean bumping into people you know or will know soon, working on similar things. Almost none of these young people expect to stay in SF (from the sound of it, many don't want to), but they're building careers in a way that, again didn't really exist to the same extent 20 years ago. SF just wasn't an "alpha" city for careers, it was a beta plus, a perfect fine place to have a career, but not the place. The most ambitious career driven types almost all lived elsewhere - even if it was tech, it was South Bay.
In short, if you're going to sacrifice your 20s to live in the Bay Area and pursue your career in the alpha city for that career, it actually might make sense to pay through the nose to truly live in the thick of it. Even a 15 minute drive on bart might deprive you of 90% of those in the moment interactions that make the whole difference.
It's just a thought, but there may be a higher career cost for those intensely career drive people than we realize if they live just a bit further, add just a bit more friction to interactions. Truth is, I've never really been one of them. I'm from an era where staying in (or moving to) SF was something you did because you liked SF, and you were willing to live in a good but not best city for your career.
Of course, it's changed the culture dramatically, to say the least. But if you've decided to live in an outrageously expensive place to pursue your career, perhaps it also makes sense to pay through the nose to live in the epicenter rather than merely nearby?
California just passed legislation -- with teeth -- to stymie the attempts of local municipalities to block development.
This manifested, since the early 00s, in housing construction that was mainly due to the mayor and some council-members influencing the planning department behind the scenes.
But then, the YIMBY argument (which is admittedly somewhat wonky) has within the last decade taken root broadly among the electorate, and there has been a lot of such large developments built - Hollywood has been transformed. It has also manifested in the resounding defeat of Measure S (went down 31/69 %, see https://la.curbed.com/2017/3/7/14850898/live-election-result...) in LA.
Of course, it's not 100% YIMBY. There are plenty of cases where neighborhoods have been transformed too fast, especially by house flippers (who are not really creating new housing), and there has been strong resistance.
You are correct that people think like that. But it is nearsighted because even if the price of your home goes up, you cannot sell it because you need a place to live. It is a lose/lose. It takes away a significant part of purchasing power. Money that could be spent on shopping, entertainment, etc is used to pay the mortgage. Younger people are even more screwed, it is a tax from the young to the old.
It is forced savings for retirement. Most people downsize once their kids leave home, cashing out their equity (as long as you haven't cash out refi'd your home to buy cars and vacations).
Except you can't do that in California, because then you're walking away from your Prop 13 "rent-controlled" property taxes.
51% of the people will vote for rising house prices
It is a similar pattern to San Francisco and other big cities mentioned in the Guardian article. The new construction is aimed toward generally young, generally single, tech workers at Google, Apple, Facebook and other employers within easy commuting distance of Mountain View. Many existing apartments have remodeled and boosted rents, effectively evicting many people with lower paying jobs. There is minimal construction of apartments for lower paid folks.
Google has the political clout in Mountain View to get more apartments for its tech employees despite the NIMBYs. Rental costs are a major negative for Google since the high cost means California tech salaries are actually among the lowest in USA adjusting for local cost of living. The disparity with the Plano Texas region (so-called Telecom Corridor) is astonishing.
People with lower incomes who are disproportionately Hispanic in California don't have a powerful force like Google to stand up for them.
There was a rent control measure (Measure V) passed in Mountain View about one year ago and remarkably actually enforced despite legal challenges.
However, if inexpensive apartments are either bulldozed or remodeled to become luxury apartments, eliminating inexpensive options for the lower paid. That has been happening in Mountain View and probably in San Francisco which the Guardian article directly discusses.
isn't there a compromise to be reached between the two groups?
latinos want to stay in the neighborhood but can't afford $4K rents (who really can? or should? $48K in rent, yikes!). yimbys want more units. so give developers a sweetner so they can be profitable but also build more affordable units. i know it's harder than it sounds, but it's been done many times before, so it's achieveable. but when it starts becoming us-vs-them, that just makes it so much harder.
Below market rate units ("affordable" units) are by definition always in short supply.
If you'd permit me to add another couple letters, though, I might call them YIMAYBY (yes in my and your backyard).