The Great American Single-Family Home Problem
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It really sucks that so much of peoples' value is often tied up in a single property. It would be a gobsmackingly terrible investment decision, if you didn't need shelter to live reasonably well.
So let's be clear. These people are being incredibly selfish, and that is reprehensible. But they also don't really have a good alternative that wouldn't lose them a lot of money in a time where, if they're not in the class that owns multiple houses, they're already struggling. And that is sort of ameliorating imo.
What they generally want is to enjoy the current character of their neighborhood (big lots, green space, still close to the city, walkable, etc.), but also realize substantial gains in housing value by keeping new housing off the market. They might gain even more money if their particular land could be developed and they moved, but then they woud have to move.
But if they don’t own the property, they need to stop trying to get Berkeley zoning to break Berkeley laws. Thank goodness for Nancy Skinner’s law that will make the city pay legal fees if the city does more crazy stuff like this.
I can’t wait to vote Jesse out of office at the next election.
Why is it that the middle class who only have their single single-family house are the selfish ones?
No, on the eve of what looks like the most disastrous tax policy in the history of this nation for working and middle class folks, I don't think it's the middle class who are being selfish by a long shot.
Why?
The problem with this, of course, is that it involves picking an economic fight against rich people, the people who win economic fights.
Anyway. A lot of zoning policy is set by people who claim to be middle-class but own fabulously valuable property. They could become rich at any moment they choose because they are lucky enough to live in a home that has become worth about $3 million due to the housing shortage. It's in their interest, of course, to stay where they are and keep the housing shortage going until their house is worth $4 million.
If we had a land value tax, maybe people would prefer to have a sensible rate of development that kept their home price stable. But accidentally-wealthy homeowners are a huge voting demographic, on top of the fact that blatantly rich people have a lot of political influence. So the land value tax is politically infeasible.
For starters, that would violate the 5th amendment.
Why should everything be balanced on the backs of the working and middle class if we're talking about architecting a more functional society.
You can believe that "densification" will be applied in-equally as well. Just as it happened to poor or working class folks who were gentrified out of the homes they had inherited, it will move up the 'class' gradient until only the wealthiest own everything.
At some point the practicality of life in a civil society has to trump insane ideologies committed only to protecting 'property rights' of a small minority.
Middle-class people, on the other hand, are not facing their single-family house being taken away; just some of its benefits being reduced and its value possibly dropping.
This thread is largely an assault on the middle class in SF who happen to have been around when it was affordable to buy there by a swarm of very well salaried (but still priced out) techies who've by and large ruined SF with their presence as it is.
Like most Americans, the target isn't the rich because the techies in question see themselves as being those people someday.
These people are property owners in Berkeley, California. While I'm sure yarns can be spun about the difference between asset value and cash liquidity, this is just not an impoverished class, sorry. They've seen their property values go through the roof, then the trees, now through the first cloud layer into the open sky with eyes toward low orbit. Arguing that they don't have an "alternative" is a little spun.
To wit: cry me a river. Build those homes.
Assuming they have little equity to start with, of course.
Can you help me understand why that's a good idea?
There's a hyperbole to express on both sides, but I can understand why people who are worth $1-5 million and are past their 50s might feel threatened by this sort of development.
They aren't in a particularly marginalized position, but they are probably frightened about the rapid change and possibly out hundreds of thousands of dollars plus time they don't have.
I agree, build those homes and reduce the power of small groups to put up large barriers, but I also understand where the residents are coming from to some degree.
They can sell their house and live a life of luxury virtually anywhere else in the world.
I have a hard time sympathizing with such people. They're not out anything—they're amongst the most privileged people in the country.
Sure, I understand where they're coming from. That doesn't mean they have my sympathy. I understand why billionaires advocate for lowering their own taxes—that doesn't mean I give them an ounce of sympathy.
There are taxes, but people who have 100 times the median household income in the bank might be able to figure something out.
It makes sense that they're fighting for their money. And people deserve basic empathy, no matter what the situation. There could be solutions out there that make the most people happy.
The cynical view is that this is their greed, and they are taking money from people with less means with their demands.
Less cynically... we can try to find solutions to assure them their house value won't plummet, but encouraging a view where more prices at least stabilize won't put _that_ much strain on them, compared to the help it would give to other families with less means.
That's usually marketed to older people.
If that's the price that has to be paid, I think there's no moral argument to be made on this discussion, what remains is a legal-political challenge.
Finally, I do believe this is all part of investing into the housing market. If you want a risk-free investment, choose government bonds. If you want to play the housing game, this is part of the story. You can't expect to invest a few million into an overpriced industry with a scarcity-controversy, and expect to reap risk-free rewards. Everyone who buys a house in these areas knows that your money pouring in and your legal defences are inadvertently screwing with housing affordability. If you're okay with that and want to make a risky investment, so be it. But then don't treat it like some kind of safe retirement plan you worked your entire life towards, it's not.
Why not just build a massive cluster of skyscrapers and put all the people who want cheap rent there? It would cause much less impact on the existing homeowners at large. To me that is a much more equitable solution for both parties.
Personally, I would say if you can't afford to live there, don't. There are plenty of places to live and many people do.
1: where? and 2: these homeowners will oppose it, because it still drives down the value of their investment because it drives down demand.
There is no way to drive down demand but keep prices high. That's not how economics works.
2. The logic being, if you have to screw people out of their equity (retirement) might as well make the smallest footprint.
I can't even touch the housing market in an area inconvenient to my work without literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in liquidity. That is cash that I simply do not have, nor do I have wealthy relatives that can front me the money. Please don't assume that just because an engineer has, what looks like a high income on paper, that they can even afford houses that cost millions of dollars in a high cost of living region as the Bay Area.
My coworkers that have set down roots here have to drive hours, and they're also making "at least 100k a year". What about the engineers that need jobs and homes, and the people that move just for their job? City's full, go away.
You are looking to moving out of the Bay Area for cheaper rent. There are people who make a lot less than you who can’t afford to live here. They drive from Tracy and Stockton to get paid a fraction of what you get. Stop crying.
You and the parent agree. guywaffle's comment talks about people who make much less than you and are in the exact same situation. Absolutely true that a high income doesn't make spending 50% of it on housing any better. And someone who makes a smaller amount doesn't even have that option. You're both screwed, just in different degrees.
You're watching it play out, but some seem to not like that the residents of the city have a greater say than the "not residents" of the city. I find that perfectly natural, normal, and desirable.
To sell the 3 units in the new lot, they will have to be relatively high end and there will probably be no clear net plus/minus in property values attributable to them. Instead of fighting the change tooth and claw, the neighborhood should be ensuring that the development as-built is high quality. For one, the lot setbacks look like to be as much as 20 feet, which is quite good.
2. Having moderately higher density has a lot of useful knock-on effects, like better walkability and transit support.
3. The objections are rooted in selfishness and classism/elitism. It's like someone objecting to a homeless shelter in their neighborhood because eww, homeless people. This common attitude doesn't mean we should never build homeless shelters.
My guess is that if we re-zoned the Bay Area and replaced 1/4 of the current single family homes with 3-to-6-story apartment buildings we could cover several decades of regional housing demand and push housing prices down by 50%.
Also, earthquake protection makes SF based buildings more expensive to build, especially as they grow tall.
China has a massive housing imbalance. The skyscrapers are being purchased as investments by the newly rich and are out of reach to low/middle income folks. Also, not all those skyscrapers are good quality. In our condo on the 37th floor, we had to have the bathroom flooring completely redone because there were leaks all over the place. This building was built like 5 year ago! In addition, when you walk around the construction sites of those new skyscraper projects, you see those countryside workers crowded into hastily constructed dorms, 4 or 5 people in one tiny room. You can see them sitting around eating their small portion of rice and veggies. It is definitely a sight that would make most “living wage” Americans cringe...
My wife grew up in China and she loathes skyscrapers. We bought a single family home here in the USA with a nice size backyard and she has the happiest wife in the world. She often goes in our backyard just to sit and watch the squirrels. She also has a piano which she can play any time of the day. In China, neighbors complain when start playing your piano in those crowded skyscrapers....
I have an unproven hypothesis that most people on the planet would love their own single family home like we have here in the US. They aren't living in those dense urban areas because it is hip and cool. They are living there because they have no choice.
A typical two bedroom in Shanghai is $870k [1]. Homes in Chongqing China are more expensive than in Columbus Ohio [2] -- yet wages are about 1/5th ($9k/yr in Chongqing vs $46k/yr in Columbus) [3]
[1] http://fortune.com/2017/07/18/china-beijing-property-housing...
[2] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/278350/average-annual-sa...
I assume you work in some form of technology. Technology and related jobs have seen their wages increase astronomically compared to textiles or fast food. Sorry, you're not impoverished. You, and everyone else in your town, are now subject to 100% tax above a certain threshold, at 110% of full time minimum wage. This is so we can give that money to people who chose to not enter technology.
Ridiculous. Moderate taxation on a progressive marginal increase is fine. The extreme is absurd. Property rights are what make trade work without having to hire armed thugs.
I absolutely reject the notion that a home owner's personal reserve price to walk away from their property should be coercable.
That being said, my neighbor should have little say over what happens on my property outside of mutually agreed covenants.
This IS not a failing in modern debate, but a much bigger issue.
I have seen less educated people show zero empathy for the opposing side many more times than the reverse.
Also you cannot have debates with some people, e.g. right wing authoritarians.
Some people are just born that way.
It does not make sense for renters to vote against developer interests and for homeowner/landlord interests, as a supply constrained housing market increases rent.
Even if you have rent control, wouldn't it be nice if you could move out of your moldy unit into a new one or from a one bedroom into a two bedroom without breaking the bank? Or from Berkeley to Menlo Park if that is where you find a job, without loosing out in rent?
Fortunately there are a lot of options here still, even though I do hope density does not go up too high; oak trees here are protected and a huge part of the city's character. If you want higher density than the trees can allow, maybe go to SF. If you want higher density than they allow maybe go to Chicago, NY, Hong Kong, or London. IDK.
http://www.unitedcountry.com/CountryHomes/img/Country_Homes_...
and some people want to live in a place that looks like this:
https://www.cmgsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Presidio-...
and some people want to live in a place that looks like this:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/Hong_Kon...
The problem is that someone who moves to the first type of place doesn't want to have to move again when it turns into the second type of place, and someone who moves to the second type of place doesn't want to move again when it turns into the third type of place. It's not entirely unreasonable.
Seems like you either stay and fight (which history implies does not work) or keep moving to new similar-to-before places. Always. Expecting otherwise is not entirely reasonable either.
And if the local residents don't want a new housing development because it negatively impacts their home value, then maybe someone will find a way to make it worth their while (i.e. real-estate developer grants current residents a stake in the returns of the new development if they stay for 5 years after the new housing is constructed).
This is the local equivalent of Trump-style “close the borders and build a wall” anti-immigration rhetoric.
You're right. It's not at all -- like not even a little bit -- unreasonable to desire that your neighborhood stay the way it was on the day you bought into it. That's why you bought there in the first place, presumably; you liked it the way it was!
But it is 100% unreasonable to expect the rest of the world to help you achieve that goal. Times change. Places change. Building more density in the Bay Area is good for the most people and should be supported on those grounds.
I desire a lot of things. They aren't unreasonable desires. But that doesn't make them good policy goals for society as a whole.
I might agree that zoning should be all-or-nothing with respect to residential uses, and that there should not be such a thing as a "luxury residential only" (i.e. single family home only) zone.
But this is something totally different.
This is just urban incumbents opposing further urban developments in their neighborhoods on the grounds that they’ve got theirs and there’s no upside to making it any easier for other people to move there, too.
This isn’t about keeping the oil refinery out. This is about keeping other people out.
That’s a fundamentally different thing. NIMBY isn’t even the right word for it.
"Fuck you, I (literally) got mine"?
The entire planet is nontrivially affected by creating and preserving car-dependent settlements; this sort of thing needs to be handled at the level of international climate treaties.
The entire country is nontrivially affected by the inaccessibility of moving to where there are jobs. Shadows on your garden don’t come close to being stuck in a place with no opportunity.
Imagine if other law was made at such a hyper-local level. Should residents of the 1200 block get to write themselves a murder statue that says residents of the 1100 block are fair game?
Good government is an antidote to the patchwork of small-scale actors making decisions in their own interests but dumping the downside of those decisions on society.
I disagree. I think that NIMBY has its place. Maybe not in Berkeley or 101-corridor Marin or in (insert miles and miles of shitty two story residential in SF) ... but I can quickly think of examples where NIMBY created tremendously valuable outcomes that were worth fighting for.
Here are a few, from places I live or have lived:
- West Marin County, with the accompanying Pt. Reyes National Seashore, is an incredible, awe-inspiring example not just of nature, but of the foresight and the hard work that a small community of people had to keep out development and large roadways.
- Boulder, CO, with all of its flaws and idiosyncrasies, is a quite impressive achievement that has grown up over many decades - starting with the original open space ring circling the city and continuing with height and density restrictions, etc.
Those are very expensive places to live with a fairly high bar for entry (and certainly for home ownership) ... and that is OK. It's OK that not everyone can live in Aspen. It's OK that we can't afford a home in Gstaad. It's OK that ranches in West Marin are expensive.
The world does not owe you these things.
The world doesn’t owe anybody anything. You’re right about that. The few white families lucky enough to buy cheap subsidized housing at just the right time in history as new highways ripped through existing (many times conveniently black) neighborhoods didn’t deserve to get rich off that decision.
But here we are.
It’s almost as if deserve’s got nothin to do with it.
Single family homeowners own their own homes. It can't get sold out from underneath them. But they don't own the plots next store or across the street. If their happiness with their living situation is dependent on those plots having the same buildings on them then they need to buy those plots too. Then they get to decide what happens to them.
A homeowner NIMBYite is exactly the same as a renter that agitates for imposing rent control.
When we lived in the city I had to file a permit to fix my 3' high fence. Pay something like $100 just to have "permission" to start working on something that was rotting and falling over. I don't really consider that "owning".
Ditto zoning and a bunch of other things. When we had the chance we moved out to the country so we could use our land how we wanted without having to live in the covenants of what the city lays down(for instance one of the local towns doesn't allow beekeeping, regardless of plot size).
I totally understand that there's a place for high density living and that some people enjoy that life. However when you see rapid change in these tech centers understand that are some people didn't sign up for that when it came around.
[edit]
I should add that I really wish more companies would support remote work. It both solves the housing issue and lets people live in the areas that fit their lifestyle better.
I get that people want it all but for example. Friend bought 26th floor corner apartment in a 32 story buiding with amazing view. 2 years later someone built another 32 story building next door blocking 30% of his view. Did he have some kind of right to prevent that? Another friend bought a lot and had a house built on it in a downtown-ish area. All houses in the area have no yard, at most they have a backyard porch big enough for a couple of chairs. His house now blocks most of the sunlight into at least one of the houses around his lot. His neighbor complains. If she wanted not to be blocked she really needed to by the land.
I don't see any other reasonable solution to these types of problems. The fence seems like yet another where the owner of the land should be able to build the tall fence. I say that as well as my mom used to sunbath topless in our backyard as a kid. She mostly took advantage of the fact she didn't expect anyone to look over the fence but the fence was only about 7ft high and houses around us all 1 story tall.
Isn't it a reasonable expectation for city and suburb dwellers that when you affect your neighbors, you might have to get permission? And when your interest is greater than their inconvenience, that you should be granted permission? And that authority should be an expert at it and impartial?
I wasn't talking at all about what the neighboring plot does. The parent was making the claim that when you 'own' you can do whatever you want with your land which is far from the truth.
Look, I have no beef with people who want to live in high density spaces. That's totally cool(and more power to them) however in our case we had retired neighbors all up in our business(since they had nothing better to do) and city codes dictating exactly what we can do with our land.
Unless you research extensively before you buy(see beekeeping above) it's very easy for your neighbors to make your life a living hell after you buy your house(see also HoAs).
The cops will even close a major street for the food catering trucks for the private parties they throw on public lands and in public buildings.
Also, is there a substantive difference between being a "NIMBYite" and simply opposing market externalities?
A NIMBY says it's fine to do something, just don't do it near me. Yes, freeways are necessary, just not too close to my house. Yes, we need a waste-water treatment plant, just don't put it in my neighborhood.
Unless you are a literal cartoon villain, you probably don't want public policy to minimize having a place to live. You just want people to have their places to live somewhere else.
You could argue it but it would be wrong. They could collectively own a given area -- form a corporation and buy a neighborhood. Then they would collectively own a given area and the collective entity would be entirely within its rights to decide what does or doesn't get built on a piece of land it owns (subject to the corporate governance rules).
That's essentially how co-op apartment buildings work. But these homeowner NIMBYites don't want to do that. They want to exercise the incidents of ownership without making an investment.
Given how local governments are set up they have the raw power to do what they are doing. But the rest of us don't have to pretend it is okay. This isn't stopping a gold mine from polluting a river, it's not building public schools, it's not defending the country from invasion -- it's exercising naked political power to take property rights from people that bought them simply because they want to and they have the votes.
They do, it's called a municipal corporation, and it makes it decisions through voting.
Even better, you don't even need to be a homeowner to influence the decision of this corporation -- anyone living there is allowed to vote.
This cuts both ways -- people who 'didn't invest' also have a voice in property development, precisely through that same democratic process that you seem to consider so illegitimate.
> it's exercising naked political power to take property rights from people that bought them simply because they want to and they have the votes.
I mean -- if you really want to live in a free-market paradise, there are plenty of places that don't practice much zoning, like Houston. Anyone who buys real estate in the Bay Area ought to research exactly what the local laws in the area are first, and if they don't that's on them.
In ancient Athens a plebiscite could exile any citizen. Do you consider that a legitimate exercise of democratic power?
> I mean -- if you really want to live in a free-market paradise
Is it fun to beat up strawmen? Believing the public policy ought to be driven by appeals to public reason and not naked special pleading is more Rawls than Rand.
Absolutely, it was part of the social contract and certainly understood by any citizen that their continued membership in the body public rests at the pleasure of the the public will.
Even today, it's the right of sovereign nations to claim or revoke citizenship as they please
> Believing the public policy ought to be driven by appeals to public reason
I agree that public policy ought to be driven by reason, but presuming that you have reason on your side, when 'reason' just so happens to also be nakedly self-serving, doesn't seem very honest.
Either it's ok to vote and agitate for your self-interest (including yourself), or it's not. You can't say 'it's evil for homeowners to want what's good for themselves', but then not apply that same standard to yourself.
What's to pretend? Local governments have a responsibility to their residents. Granted, that doesn't give them free reign to hurt non-residents, but they can't simply ignore the concerns of those who fund them and elected them into office.
I say this as someone who has been negatively impacted by the restrictive zoning in the bay area. It would benefit me personally more if they allowed more dense housing.
> it's exercising naked political power to take property rights from people that bought them simply because they want to and they have the votes.
Who's property right's are being revoked, the real estate developers? Again, what's the difference between that and the gold mine? The gold mine is a good thing. It provides jobs, adds wealth to the economy, etc. And yet, a gold mine polluting a river increases health risks, mars the natural beauty, and decreases the property value for those living downstream. We expect the gold mine to help reduce or bear the cost to those they affect.
On the other hand, real estate developers who build lots of high-density living also increase health risks (traffic, pollution), mar the natural beauty (bulldozing trees, fields) and decrease the property value of those living nearby. You may argue that it's not to the same degree, and I would agree, but I think it's still the same kind of situation.
But the benefits of resource extraction to society don't justify ignoring the interests of people living nearby. Ditto for creating new housing near highly desirable urban zones.
If anything the gold mine has an advantage in that, while people can live other places (even if at a somewhat lesser quality of life) you can't can't really build the mine somewhere else.
Well, that depends. One could argue that by allowing you to establish a home in their apartment building (in exchange for rent), they've taken on a responsibility towards you. Nobody can build up a decent life if they were under the constant fear to be evicted. That's why as a tenant, you are especially worth of protection from arbitrary actions would make you lose your home, no matter if the building you live in belongs to someone else. In other words, there must be a very good reason for the landlord to make you move out, such as e.g., they need it for themselves to live in.
At least that's one way of seeing it.
Perhaps.
But a democratic process that generates NIMBY policies is the same as a democratic process that generates rent control: neither outcome is off-limits in our Democracy and both should be respected.
I personally value democracy more than I value land-use policy in one particular place. I further find it disheartening to hear of disregarding democratic outcomes from the very same progressive left that should be championing that process.
It is a fundamental principle of American democracy that the people ought to exercise thier power virtuously and it is entirely appropriate to chide them when they do not. Nothing in the “progressive left” philosophy is to the contrary as far as I’m aware.
The simplistic notion that whatever a bare majority of the people want is good went out of fashion more than 2000 years ago.
Ever increasing property values caused by artificially restricted zoning is basically a generational Ponzi scheme. It's stupid and wrong and it can't last forever. And like real Ponzi schemes, the only people who benefit are those who got in early.
Whereas, the whole "enrich myself off property values" thing only works if those values are continually increasing.
That is far from clear. No human civilization has ever had a stable population.
> the whole "enrich myself off property values" thing only works if those values are continually increasing.
That's true, but that's not what I was talking about. What I was talking about is people's reasonable desire for a stable environment. Rising housing costs is just a side-effect of that plus population growth.
You might as well blame the situation on people who have babies as on people who want to limit growth in their communities.
You're damn right. I assume you don't give half your paycheck away either.
>Any conversation about 'right', 'wrong', 'moral', it all goes out the window.
Right wrong and moral? From perspective of whom? Those are such subjective constructs. Is it right, wrong or moral to actively attempt to triple the population of an already densely populated area when there are millions of underutilized acreage in the continental US?
>It really sucks that so much of peoples' value is often tied up in a single property. It would be a gobsmackingly terrible investment decision, if you didn't need shelter to live reasonably well.
It's actually a pretty decent investment, but does involve risk. Instead of paying someone rent and owning jack shit, you are paying a mortgage and keeping at least some of that money. Most houses will increase in value as well. Also, your mortgage payment won't go up every few years like rents do, particularly in densely populated areas. You also get a decent tax break on a mortgage. You can also borrow against it at much better rates than cards when you are in a pinch (or are even unemployed).
>These people are being incredibly selfish, and that is reprehensible.
Which people? The people who bought houses, or the people who want to devalue someone else's home so they can get cheaper rent in a already overpopulated area that they just have to move to? That isn't entirely clear to me.
It's that land in Bay Area and SF which is underutilized. Because high density makes sense. Yes, I enjoy living in NYC.
> devalue someone else's home
A house is not money. It does not have a guaranteed value. It's property, like stock. If one's shares go down because of e.g. competition, people don't see it as an unjust assault.
By artificially constraining supply you are forcing externalities onto renters as well as new homebuyers, and in the same breath limiting others ability to meet this demand with the land they own. For the majority that can't afford the inflated rent you just kicked them out or made it impossible for them to even move here to seek opportunity.
I do not see how this can be just.
In reality if they do start building up the city extensively, the bubble will have burst by the time the housing capacity is much higher and people won’t want to live there at that time anyway, they’ll move somewhere cheaper - just my two cents.
Quite to the contrary rezoning is a normal way for cities to respond to changes in needs. You do however have a right to decide over your own land and to negotiate with other interests on changes to zoning rules, and I wholeheartedly support that.
Considering that land value has generally risen with density in western society and the economic drivers denser cities have become, I do not think your argument that higher density reduces monetary land value holds up to scrutiny.
A Berkley land owner decided they wanted to build something on their land that would satisfy the zoning requirements. Their neighbors didn't like it, so they lobbied the city government to ignore the zoning requirements and not let them build it.
Good. Your sense of entitlement to drive and park everywhere all the time does not and should not outrank other people's need to live where there are jobs (or, for that matter, the long-term viability of the planet).
>by the way the value of your most valuable asset, your home, was just halved.
I couldn't think of a brighter public policy success story than redistributing the unearned income of the landed aristocracy to people who are trying to make a living. If we build enough for the newcomers, at worst you're going to see returns at parity with inflation. Am I supposed to be sympathetic that you were thwarted from profiteering on a shortage?
Granted, most American cities are this way. That’s because they are shriveled ruins of their former selves thanks to White Flight and deindustrializaton.
There should be a lower return for less efficient land use, buildings that are badly maintained or outdated housing stock.
You seem to have confused land ownership with its complement, ie. the right to dictate the uses of neighboring land but not your own. I don’t see any inverse deeds listed on the MLS. The closest thing I can think of would be voting shares in a corporation that come with permission to live on its land. But I’m guessing you’re not in favor of permitting more coops/TICs.
That many suburbs function this way is an emergent property of the political process, which can and should be unmade through the same process.
Owning a home in a coastal city or other job center is a question of bloodline and being in the right place at the right time; it’s not realistically available for any amount of wage labor, which is why I call it aristocracy. People whose home value corresponds to their earned income (most homeowners) aren’t in that category.
If bay area land was not underutilized you would not need zoning to artificially constrain housing supply. We would also not be supply constrained on housing.
Artificially causing a housing shortage is arguably immoral because it cause high housing costs that in effect limits access to the rare opportunities found here. It makes it almost impossible to grow up with lower middle class parents or work in a low-pay low-skilled position, and mingling with the tech crowd to work your way up.
* A snapshot of more recent U.S. Census migration numbers shows that nearly three-quarters of those who have left California for other states since 2007 earn less than $50k a year.
* San Francisco's African American population has declined from 13.4% of the population in 1970 to 6.1%
* 41 percent of San Franciscans spend 30 to 50 percent on rent, despite a lot of rent control for longer-tenure residents and a population average income being $104k as well as median $77k
It also limits the number of and kind of opportunities that can be found here.
Maybe devalue the actual structure, but upzoned land is worth more. The only people getting economically screwed here are condo owners.
NIMBY means "Not in my back yard." That includes everything from HUD housing, to nuclear power plants, to fracking, to prisons.
I don't see how being afraid of nuclear disasters is in any way xenophobic. I also don't see how not wanting your property devalued by building cheaper houses is either.
I think you don't have a clear understanding of what those things are, particularly in regards to the article we're discussing which happens to be in present day time.
Or maybe that's your "I want to win" tactic and you are just throwing it out there to see if it will stick. That might work in some corners of the internet, but it doesn't seem to be working here. If you have a rational argument about the discussion, I invite you to present it.
Nuclear plants are a ridiculous strawman. We're talking about places for people — living, breathing human beings, with thoughts, dreams and aspirations — to live in.
Ensuring other people have a place to live is more important than your property values and neighborhood character.
I have an extremely clear understanding of how the white upper middle class has systematically used the state's monopoly on violence to exclude anyone else from joining their ranks.
xen·o·pho·bi·a ˌzenəˈfōbēə,ˌzēnəˈfōbēə/Submit noun intense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries.
Nimby ˈnimbē/Submit noun a person who objects to the siting of something perceived as unpleasant or potentially dangerous in their own neighborhood, such as a landfill or hazardous waste facility, especially while raising no such objections to similar developments elsewhere.
In common parlance in the United States, NIMBYism includes opposition to housing. That is also what we're talking about in this thread.
You'll see that the changes don't actually make a difference to any of my arguments.
It's not far-fetched to associate NIMBYism with a fear of the strange and foreign.
NIMBYism prevents outsiders from moving to your neighborhood. It is xenophobic in intent and effect.
Used to get a decent tax break. But Republicans made sure to stick it to Blue states with reducing the mortgage cap for deduction from $1M to $500k.
It's more complicated than that, but you get the idea.
I think it's more complicated than that - certainly $100K houses would not be the same size and features as $200K one, and when determining the price estimates, this is usually taken into account - 1bd/1br is not the same as 3bd/3br.
If houses in a neighborhood were sold strictly on a price / sq. foot basis, there probably wouldn't be much devaluation, in fact you would probably get an increase valuation based the costs incurred to just build a house without regards to sq footage. (meaning the first $125K is the first 1000 sq feet and the 2nd 1000 is only $75K more.
Average home value is largely meaningless if you are averaging substantially different houses. It only has meaning if we're talking about heterogeneous neighborhood or about something like a large area in rough comparison with another large area. Well, maybe not entirely meaningless as you still can get rough indicator of "price level", but useless in comparing the effect of this or that measure. It's like the reverse of the joke when Bill Gates walks into a pub and average income of everybody in the pub doubles. May be technically true but not a useful measure of anything.
That must be a really big pub or have started out with some very rich people in it to have only doubled.
Yet this problem got started in the 1970s: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/12/27/why-did-cities-freeze-in-..., and I don't think human nature suddenly changed then. So what did?
In addition, Tokyo doesn't have this problem: https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-....
So it's probably something other than pure selfishness per se.
That's not true at all. They could sell their homes for their mindbogglingly inflated values to condo developers in exchange for multiple units in the new buildings. They wouldn't have to move at all (except temporarily, while construction is going on), and would even gain an asset that they can rent out or sell later.
What they're fighting for is the right to keep their low-density suburb, single-family home, lifestyle. Which would be fine except that their insistence on doing this is impoverishing everyone else.
They will have a litany of troubles and problems that they go through, ready to fire off, no matter how well off they are.
I know I have one. It's not fair, so I try not to listen to it, but I do have one. A whole litany.
Well the fact remains that it does not happen. When I purchased my home in 2003 I received no tax credits, support from the government, bonuses, or a pat on the back. I put 20% down after saving up everything I could for a solid 5 years after landing a great job after college, which again wasn't subsidized or had grants for.
No one else does this but me and the ridiculous sense of entitlement or attitude of it being "unfair" that someone else can't afford it really stems from a deeper issue.
Get off your high horse about the government charitability towards homes, the government didn’t provide these programs out of its own back pocket, our tax dollars provide these programs.
Are you being sarcastic?
If you're not a Bay Area (or other unaffordable area) resident, then your viewpoint is rational. The price-to-income ratio of your new neighbor should be about the same as your price-to-income ratio when you moved in.
If you're a resident of metro San Francisco, San Jose, Denver, Dallas, Austin, Washington DC, or Boston, then you are expecting different behavior from your new neighbors. They will need to save for 10 or more years for that down payment of 20% due to competition from each other. The income required to live in these metro areas is much higher. The lower-middle class is pushed out. Upper-middle class folks who want to live below their means don't have the option to.
Fairness is the wrong metric; life in all societies is fundamentally unfair.
It is just nonsensical for you to expect other people who are chasing opportunity (those metros are where the best jobs are) to give up, when you chased that same opportunity when you moved where you currently live.
Because our economy is changing, this means it's harder, but don't knock people for trying.
I don't understand why people feel they have a right to move to a particular place and live there at a particular price.
I don't understand why people feel they should have the right to decide what their neighbors do with their property (as long as they're not opening up a waste treatment facility or something). But that's beside the point.
There are two main reasons why "just move" isn't easily actionable advice: jobs and family.
The reason expensive areas are expensive is because they have desirable jobs. (One) reason cheap areas are cheap is because they don't have as many desirable jobs. Those of us working in tech in the Bay Area accept that we earn high salaries in part because the rent is so high. So we grumble but we can make ends meet and life is mostly good.
For those who aren't so lucky to be working in hot industries with good pay, support of family and friends matters much more. Single-mom has grandma looking after the kid so she can work; if she moves to Des Moines or wherever the rent is lower, she loses that free childcare she'd been getting. Since most jobs come through referrals, she'd have to have professional and social networks in those cities before moving. Otherwise it's just a leap into the unknown to move before having an offer in hand. If you don't work in tech, I don't think having 15 recruiters emailing you before breakfast is the norm.
I disagree with the tone. Everyone is selfish. Everyone wants either their own benefit or their own benefit. Everyone is grasping. Moral, wrong or right can't correct that behavior, even if you could agree to it. Thats why the moral, wrong or right decisions dont have to be about what people want, but what you allow people to do or not do.
I own a small house (with a mortgage). I'm hoping house prices go down over the next 10 years. I'll probably want to buy a larger house, so if prices come down I don't have to come up with as much cash. OK, I'll get less for the house I'm selling, but the difference in the prices is also less than if they were to go up.
As long as I sell the current house for enough to pay off what's left of the mortgage, I think I'm winning if house prices go down.
For those people, if their house goes up in value, it represents an important source of financial security (if they haven't gutted it via refinancing and HELOCs for renovations returning $0.60 on the dollar, new cars or vacations)
Even for people with decent financial planning skills, the home is such a large investment and typically bought with 5-33x leverage, that a small price drop is dangerous to their position.
In cities, it is often that bigger appts are cheaper per sq/ft because the market for them is much smaller than 1br/2br.
Also, because it is highly leveraged for many, especially in the Bay, to have it reduce in value can actually easily bankrupt you. But for many, they feel they need to take the risk to lock in home prices, and also to grab what they still cling to as "the american dream" of owning a small single family home. Can't say I blame people for being upset by that, especially after this tax reform theft.
If you had a single-family home in the middle of Manhattan, it'd be worth a lot just from the land. It seems like you'd want to encourage the city around you to be as highly developed as possible if money was the main concern.
But I wonder if developers offered to buy neighboring houses at the same time they buy the first house, if that would help at all. Then the neighbors have the option of not losing any value because of the shadows that will go up or whatever. This would require by-right type laws where the developers could trust that housing is actually possible to build on these lots, otherwise buying multiple properties may be too big of a risk.
I suspect NIMBYs might like this idea even less since it could more drastically change a bigger part of the neighborhood, but it seems like it would at least partially address their stated concerns of neighbors being financially impacted.
Here's why - it's true that the value of a SFH in many parts of SF would drop if a large apartment were built next door, if that house could only be sold as a SFH. But what would the value of the land beneath it be if zoning restrictions were relaxed?
To be clear, I'm not sure, but I have a friend who owns a SF on one of those rare streets that is zoned R-2, and some of his neighbors have been cleared to build two flats where there was once a SFH. The two flats sell for considerably more than the SFH would have.
Now, this might still reflect scarcity, and a rare flat in an otherwise SFH neighborhood might be more desirable than an entire neighborhood of them (maybe, but not necessarily, I doubt it - nob hill and Russian hill are more expensive than the SFH parts of the sunset and excelsior, and Manhattan/(+ some other parts of New York), one of the few urban areas that is more expensive than SF, is also the only large scale urban area that is considerably more densely built.
Even if lots of people were to build 2 or 3 unit flats, vertically, that's a huge amount of additional housing. The value of the land sitting beneath the SFH would reflect this, even if the current owner chose not to undertake the project. I also believe that greater density in SF might very well stimulate additional economic activity, which could end up offsetting the additional supply, eat least enough that 3 apartments would be worth more than one house on the same plot of land (again, if density meant lower prices, Manhattan would be the cheapest place to rent in the entire US, and Nob Hill would be much cheaper than the Sunset).
When I heard what people on this street had done, I was almost jealous. They replaced their aging SFH with two apartments that were just as spacious and nicer, building vertically. The backyard is now shared, but it's still big. And they got so much $$ for the additional unit that their mortgage is paid off with a nice fat chunk of change left over.
I suspect that much of SF's famous nimbyism is actually motivated by a desire for things to stay the same. People like their SFH neighborhoods, and don't really want it to chance. They don't want to tear down their house and build a bunch of flats, even if this would be a way to wring a lot more money out of their investment - and because they don't want to, they don't stand to benefit if their neighbors do this either. Alternatively, they might not be aware of this possibility. Or, in a city of 75% renters, they may rent and not see any benefit to this new construction - at best, disruption during construction, at worst, losing their current rental.
It may indeed be selfish, but I'm not sure it's asset maximization behind all this.
> a gobsmackingly terrible investment decision
Here is a somewhat paraphrased version of the author's main points:
* Not just an initial, but a relentlessly ongoing drain on the cash reserves of the owner requiring an endless parade of repairs and maintenance without which it will crumble
* Illiquid. It takes months of time and effort to buy or sell
* Expensive to buy and sell with very high transaction costs: 5%+ commissions, buying and selling
* Undiversified. Represents a disproportionate percentage of a person’s net worth
* Complex to buy or sell
* Lots of extra fees and reports and documents you must pay for
* Generates low returns. At or below the inflation rate
* Leveraged. If the price goes up a little bit, leverage will magnify this and people will convince themselves it’s actually a good investment! Most will never consider that leverage is also very high risk and could just as easily wipe them out
* Mortgaged. You pay interest on the loans. Many people borrow money against it more than once
* Unproductive. Never pays interest, never pays dividends
* Immobile. Fixed to one geographical spot so at any given time only a tiny group (if any) of potential buyers for it will exist
* Subject to the fortunes of a single neighborhood
* Fragile. Easily damaged by weather, fire, vandalism and the like. As such it requires expensive insurance to cover these risks. Often the the bad things that are most likely to happen aren’t actually covered
* Heavily taxed.
* * If it should go up in value, we tax that gain. If it goes down in value we do not offer a balancing tax deduction on the loss like with other investments
* * Taxed annually, not just when bought or sold
* * Tax rate goes up as value increases. Does not go down when value decreases
* Subject to eminent domain
* Increases stress, leads to more divorces, but then be impossible to divide
(Note, I am biased against homeownership. Which hasn't stopped me from recently buying a house for a variety of reasons, mostly revolving around space needs for my family that could not be met with the available rental options in my current city)
The tax rate usually doesn't change in either direction with value, except in states like California which limit assessment increases, where the effective rate decreases if value increases rapidly (because the tax basis increases less than the full increase in value).
And in most jurisdictions, value decreases are fully reflected in tax assessments, even when increases are only partially captured.
There is NO reason we can't have the same rate of home construction as Seattle, which built homes at the fastest rate in the nation. No infrastructure? Build it. No school slots? Build more. The Bay Aarea can easily accommodate double digit population increases with almost no perceived increase in density. It just requires action rather than whining about neighborhood "character" or traffic.
Better: people are self-perserving.
This crisis is one of those "You reap what you sow" moments caused in large part by institutionalized racism. It is not hyperbole, I have seen the old covenants included with my parent's house, also in the East Bay, that literally said no POC could live there. These covenants are of course now invalid, but thats where zoning comes to into play.
The rules now latched on by NIMBYs, such as minimum lot sizes, low lot occupancy, low heights etc. were precisely implemented to keep POC from being able to afford to move into largely white suburban neighborhoods. Depending on the racial composition of certain neighborhoods, they would be zoned to allow denser development, or restrict them to SFH. All this combined with lending practices where banks "redlined" neighborhoods that were deemed too full of POC has brought us where we are today, even in the progressive Bay Area [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/books/review/richard-roth...
It is a figure that makes me want to throw up, and I'm not even black. I feel like this country owes blacks (as a group) probably a few billion dollars in some sense. Barriers to home buying for African Americans constitutes actively preventing them from creating savings and financial security. Homeownership has historically provided half or more of the value of the nest egg for most ordinary (aka not rich) Americans.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans_and_the_G.I....
This, and redlining, are the core of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s very compelling argument for reparations on the order of trillions in 2017 dollars. We’ll never do it, of course, but it would be the moral and just thing. It’d probably have a positive effect on the economy, too, but Trump voters wouldn’t stand for it.
It tends to go poorly to try to fix such things with money per se. I saw a thing on TV years ago about someone rich whose will stated their estate should be spent on something like medical care for blacks. Nope, it didn't happen. A different show indicated someone gifted an island to the black slave descendents. It was being profiled because they would sell their land, blow the money on a car or whatever and ...it just did not give these folks access to real wealth and power.
Kind of like the "Black Wall Street." Whites burned it down, then instituted new building codes to prevent them from rebuilding. The excuse was these were fire safety codes. The reality was it burned down because whites burned it down, not because the buildings were defective in some manner.
But I wonder if perhaps smaller initiatives that aren't simply a case of throwing money at the problem might grow out of the growing realization that, no, seriously, they are poor because they were denied access to the means to not be poor, not due to ignorance, laziness, etc.
My off the cuff thought is that someone should start a no money down mortgage program for descendents of people of color who were veterans of WW2. Maybe even our government.
Like I said, pretty compelling arguments and plan.
I only recently heard of the very low numbers I cited above and have been feeling like "Damn! Someone should do something to redress this!" And then you said your thing and my big feels and half baked idea came spilling out.
It very much upsets me. My dad was career army and fought in WW2. I grew up in a nice house in the suburbs financed by the GI Bill.
My dad was part Cherokee. Only about 1/16th, but there is an actor who is full blooded Iroquois who looks uncannily like my father in some photos. Dad was very white passing. But then about 70 percent of African American DNA is European. In the US, if you are 1/8th African, you are "black." It is very arbitrary.
So, I find myself pretty incensed. It hits a nerve for me.
Yes, this 10x over: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas...
The fact that american politicians can't even have a conversation about reparations is a disgrace.
I'd also point out the effects of allowing casinos for Native American tribes, too. Money doesn't always help.
This might come as a surprise to you...but this country has exploited many people (immigrants, non-whites, etc.) over the course of history - if the country had to pay for all the wrongs, we'd be bankrupt.
Do you genuinely believe this to be a possible outcome? The incentives for those with wealth, and very real political power, would be to rest any financial burden upon the tax payer. We have sent thousands overseas to die or be horribly maimed forever, and then burdened their children with the bill for the whole endeavor - what would be different here?
Women eventually gained the right to vote. That was a long, hard battle too.
Average education level of women in the era of Lincoln was elementary school age. Slaves were forbidden from being allowed to learn to read.
I have read that in terms of relative wealth, our first president was the richest president we have had. So it seems to me that we have made progress on that at the societal level already.
It doesn't have to happen, say, in the span of a year or two for me to think it worth espousing. I am an old woman who raised two special needs kids. I am okay with taking a longer view than the next 5 minutes, so to speak.
The ugly history of people of color outlined in one of the links in this discussion has some things in common with the outcomes women have.
But I don't really feel like arguing it. This is an overwhelmingly male forum. I increasingly feel it is pointless to try to give a female point of view here. It will be downvoted, dismissed and attacked. If The resist, I will be accused of behaving badly while the insults to me are treated like reasonable statements that I am simply overreacting to.
So, suffice it say, I don't agree with you. If you were correct, then women should have economic parity with men. They don't.
The exact details may vary a bit, but the feminization of poverty is a phrase in our lexicon for a reason. When people talk like it isn't real, I never know quite what to think of that. I have a really hard time accepting that people sincerely don't see something so obvious for which there is overwhelming evidence.
Yet I also realize it is obvious to me because I happen to be female. There are lots of details about the Black experience that I am inadequately aware of. So that gives me pause when it comes to trying to assess why men say such things. But I feel pretty worn down and hopeless of late.
Every statistic I've seen seems to indicate that modulo life choices that seem correlated with gender (ie, on average women prefer different things to men, though individuals vary greatly), there is economic parity between men and women (in most developed nations, but I'm most familiar with the US).
There are some very real issues with the direction that women are steered by society, but there are also some real issues that men face (eg, school, legal system, etc).
However, there's also a non-trivial number of women (in places like the US) who blame sexism for the consequences of choices they've had to make in life between things that they want, and seem to treat it as an affront to their gender that they're not treated as catered princesses by the world -- getting to have every want. And then hide that behind talking about "economic parity".
> The exact details may vary a bit, but the feminization of poverty is a phrase in our lexicon for a reason.
Doesn't this mostly have to do with poor women being forced to carry the economic burden of many children in developing nations?
It's also definitely not a common term to use -- which makes me think that you likely have a biased view from hanging out in a very polarized, niche crowd.
> But I feel pretty worn down and hopeless of late.
As a fellow human, are you sure you're not inventing a narrative that's worse than the truth, and then stressing yourself out battling phantoms? (This is something I do all the time, on issues small to large.)
There are real issues in the world -- quite serious ones, at that. But modern charities and other social purpose organizations deploy weaponized psychology meant to send you into an emotional state in order to boost their funding (or membership, but really power), and the consequence of everyone doing this "for the right reasons" is a completely toxic society, polarized in righteous anger over every issue to the point its emotionally burnt out and fragmented. This habit has even been exploited by foreign states to attack the nation. (True for virtually every country, and definitely all of the European and "Western" ones.)
This is quite possibly the best of times on any of those issues, so instead of worrying about how you're going to feed every woman in Africa with too many kids (hint: you won't), just try to focus on what's the next small step that you can take to fix one of the issue a little. Then do that.
That's something you can actually do right now, won't exhaust you even if you have to do it for the rest of your life, and would completely fix the problem if everyone would just stop panicking and do that.
> top 3 students of my graduating high school class ... > I failed to be a self made millionaire by age 30
Each year in the US there is around 900,000 students that will graduate in the top 3 of their high school class. Assuming that no other person in the nation would become millionaire, that is still way more than the number of new millionaires each year. Becoming a millionaire at some point in your life time after graduate in the top 3 is still a very rare event, and extremely rare if the target is to achieve it before the age of 30.
> feminization of poverty is a phrase in our lexicon for a reason. I have a really hard time accepting that people sincerely don't see something so obvious for which there is overwhelming evidence.
As evidence go, the the wast majority of the homeless are men. The bottom 1%, those that earn least and have least power and wealth in society are mostly men. Maybe those evidences are obvious to me because I happen to be male, but it would not be how I would phrase it. I don't think my gender give me any special insight to interpreting statistics or that there is a male point of view to it.
http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2017/07/ge...
To counter some of the arguments in there. Men in general has smaller social network. Where the blog argues that friends and relatives are much more concerned about a woman being out on the street because women tend to have a much harder time on the street, the fact found from medical research and statistics is that those friends and relatives simply are not available to the same extent for men. Men at the bottom of society don't generally have a social support network where they can ask for help.
The blog claims that women tend to make less money than men when homeless. No they don't. Data on begging finds that society is the most generous when it comes to young women, and among people who beg in the street they are the highest earners. "able bodied men", refer to the abusive tactics of exploiting desperate people into dangerous low paying temporary jobs, sometimes illegal, and can be about as healthy as selling sex on the street. Its a common tactic heard from paperless which are bounced between illegal construction sites, sometimes sold like cattle.
The blogs claims that men choose to become homeless and women do not. That is victim blaming. No one choose to be at the bottom of the social ladder.
The blog briefly touch on the subject that society sometimes welcome women, even homeless and without any wealth or status to their name. As the blog points out this is mostly to do with sex, but what it miss is that comes from the cultural values in dating. Women are not primarily judged based on how much money they have, so homelessness is not as dooming factor as it is for men. Cultural values make it so that fewer women would ever consider dating a homeless man compared to the number of men who would consider dating a homeless woman.
I have no idea how you are getting that from the post at all. I also get really tired of being accused of victim blaming for trying to address complex subjects with a bit of nuance. It begins to feel to me like a cheap shot hurled by people who don't actually have a good rebuttal, so they figure mudslinging will suffice.
The point is not that men choose homelessness and women do not. The point is that choices made at the bottom of the social ladder are made within a particular context and this context varies some in part based on gender. Men and women make different choices in part because they are faced with different choices.
I happen to be the author of that piece. In addition to firsthand experience with homelessness, I had a college class on the subject many years before spending some time homeless.
I didn't give you the link to imply that a blog post somehow is more authoritative than me commenting on HN. Since I wrote it, it is exactly like if I wrote a long comment here, only it has already been previously written and that has certain advantages, like saving me time and, hopefully, having fewer typos and being perhaps a little more thoughtful because I had time to think through what I wished to say.
Your rebuttal about social networks strikes me as essentially a different way to make the same point. Poor men simply lack the option of staying with friends or family that so often keeps women from being literally on the street. Framing it as a rebuttal sounds intentionally and unnecessarily fighty.
Social support network is commonly used in medical research. The gender difference are seen in all levels of society, from rich to poor, and as such is not the same as the point you bring that friends or family are more likely to help a woman in need. Data on the size of social network (number of friends, contact with family and children, friend of a friend distance) is different for women and men. If all that was different was the rate that family and friend would offer help, then those numbers should be identical. According to some research, the difference in life expectancy between men and women are partially caused by the difference of social support during the elderly years. The cause of that in turn is generally blamed on gender roles and social expectations, where men are expected to prioritize work over building family and social ties and women expected to do the opposite.
All people make choices, even very poor people who are faced with nothing but bad options. In such a situation, the best you can do is try to choose the lesser evil. But it is really disingenuous and dehumanizing to act like homeless people make no choices whatsoever.
Talking about choices when all options are bad sounds like the wrong word. Naturally choosing the best option is good, but a bad option is still bad. Similarly talking about being empowered to pick the best option between an multitude of bad options sounds wrong. It might be correct when talking about a individual person, and from the sound of your comment it sounds like you made decisions based on your own values even when it cost you a place to stay, and that is strong.
Under the absolute worst circumstances, the right to choose is critical to one's ability to self advocate. It is a right routinely denied the poorest of the poor. It is a right I try to help preserve.
Social safety nets frequently disrespect the right of the individual to choose. They frequently dictate limitations on what you can and cannot do.
I tried to write about accessing support that does not impinge on your freedom.
I am aware it "sounds wrong" to a lot of people. That is exactly why I felt I needed to write about it.
does this exist anywhere? let’s make this happen. anyone interested? email me and we’ll figure out next steps all together.
Depends on how you measure it. Women have about 80% of the income of men, but they also have about 70% of total purchasing power (in the United States for both numbers). Women's disproportionate purchasing power comes from their tendency to make "family" purchases (in the majority of household, women do more errands than men) and to outlive men. This fact is well known in the advertising industry..
My point was not that society is fair to women, and I'm sorry if it sounded like that. My point was that gender injustices are different from racial injustices because racial injustices are inherited while gender injustices are not. Once we get to a point where society is 100% fair racially and genderally, gender inequality will die out with the old generations, while racial inequality will live on due to its inherited nature.
Racial inequality is caused by current societal problems as well as past societal problems. But gender inequality is just caused by current societal problems.
The fact that women can get pregnant but men cannot has a huge raft load of implications that influence the attitudes and choices of both men and women. Women I have known who thought they could live their life like a man did fine until they had a baby, at which point their assumptions of independence and self determination had an unpleasant wake up call.
There may be things society can do to mitigate that reality, but most discussions I see of gender equality make zero effort to mitigate it. Instead, most people seem oblivious to its existence. This does not bode well for the possibility of creating policies that genuinely help level the playing field. I believe there are inherent challenges in creating good policies in this area, so it likely won't happen by serendipity.
The current result seems to be a growing divide between the quality of life for empowered women and disempowered women. That divide seems to be strongly influenced by reproductive choices in ways that are not obvious or straight forward.
Every country.
Every time this conversation happens, everyone acts like the US is the only country that was ever involved in the slave trade. Almost every nation, including majority-black nations, were guilty of this. Many of them are still engaging in it to this day (there are more slaves right now than there have ever been at any point in history, and relatively few of them are in the US).
What's most exceptional about the US on this subject isn't that we have exploitation and slavery in our history, but that we fought a civil war (with more casualties than any other war in American history) in part to end slavery and that today we're further ahead of virtually every major nation on the planet in terms of race and gender equality.
Yes, I know, he was a bad guy so the good guys (who the hell is that?) didn't have to be ethical toward him, by good old American cartoon-character standards. However, he wasn't selling thousands of migrants into slavery so that's something. Also, his continued existence after giving up his weapons had inspired others like DPRK to slow their nuclear roll. After we shoved a bayonet up his ass, they changed their minds...
If Qaddafi were still alive we would at best see exactly the same problem in a different country.
Even really basic research into what’s happening there reveals this stuff. People just seem to assume that things are shitty because the West invaded, and don’t bother looking any deeper.
Here’s one (of a great many potential) source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/world/africa/slave-market...
I suppose the operative phrase in your post here is "in the news". It's not news or generally interesting (for whatever reason), but there is tons of slavery in no way related to Libya or Qaddafi.
Thanks for giving me a more positive view of my country.
The way the end of the US Civil War went down was remarkably enlightened and created a new template for putting conflicts to rest which is likely partly responsible for the fact that WW2 has not (yet?) fostered a WW3.
Historically, people who surrendered paid war reparations to the winning side and it was generally pretty ugly. This is part of why General Lee was very reluctant to surrender. It was considered to be a fate worse than death.
But there were only three conditions of his surrender at Appomattox. One of them was that the North would come in and help them rebuild. This was an unprecedented break with human history.
It is rare for a nation to only have a single civil war. Typically, the end of one plants the bitter seeds of the next. Rinse and repeat. It is remarkable the US has only seen one.
The end of WW1 also planted the bitter seeds of WW2. When WW2 ended, the US went in to both Germany and Japan and helped them rebuild. The world also created a number of institutions aimed at preventing another global conflict.
These are mostly financial organizations, like The World Bank. It was widely recognized that the global depression was a major root cause of WW2. Some world leaders vowed "Never again" and did what they could to make that vow a commitment the world could bank on.
Edit: FWIW, I was born and raised in Georgia, though daddy was a Hoosier and mom is a German immigrant, so no one ever saw me as "Southern" until I moved to the West Coast.
I would call that not enlightened enough.
Real progress is quite hard. A lot of discussions about ideals fail to recognize that there are pragmatic limits. Any mention of pragmatic limits is attacked as an excuse for continued bad behavior.
As a current example, I am not for UBI. I don't think it really works in practical terms. It sounds like a nice ideal, but when you dig into the details, I think it simply doesn't work.
It is really, really common for new initiatives to wind up falling far short of their stated goals. It would be nice if the North had done more for the freed slaves. But I don't think that failure really suggests that it would have been better if the handling of the end of the Civil War had sowed the seeds of the next American civil war. I can't say that I really believe that Black Americans would be better off if the country were locked in a vicious cycle of civil wars.
I am finding myself deeply disturbed by the things I am learning here lately about the history of how Blacks have been treated. I am newly off the street and back in housing and I am seriously medically handicapped, so there is significant limits on what I, personally, can do about anything beyond just coping with my own survival. But perhaps my upset over these injustices will stay with me and perhaps that will lead to something constructive happening, at some point.
I have a tendency to try to light one small candle rather than the curse the darkness. Although it seems to have so far failed to establish any kind of reputation of a sort where I can use it for purposes of being a resume or making money or having serious influence, I have a track record of making a difference.
Though a tree falls and makes no sound, still, it falls.
tldr; It's not my fault. If you don't like your circumstances, work hard to change them.
--
Worse, caucasian americans are made to feel guilty about it, as if it were their fault (despite the fact that the perpetrators and the victims have long since been deceased.) Personally my family has only been in this country for 40-45 years. I'm sorry that slavery happened here, but it happened virtually everywhere, to all peoples (that doesn't make it right.)
I grew up in a poor neighborhood (though my immediate family was middle-class.) I saw many white/african-american/hispanic folks who floundered, and some that worked their asses off, determined to succeed despite their current circumstances. It is frustrating that the race/slavery/discrimination card is used by the SJWs to provide a crutch to those who don't want to work hard towards a better lot in life. By saying this I'm opening myself up to a shitstorm of criticism because somehow the above statements must mean I'm either: A) a racist or B) that I "just I don't understand what it's like to be an african-american." To those folks I say this: Go talk to 1st generation immigrant from anywhere and you'll likely meet someone who's working his/her butt off to realize the american dream. It is a privilege to live in the USA, no matter your race or ethnicity. It truly is the land of opportunity. However, no one is going to just give you that pretty house on the hill with a white picket fence - and you're certainly not going to get it handed to you because you have a sense of entitlement because someone (severely) wronged your ancestors generations ago.
I've lived enough of my life sharing a wall or two with neighbors. Smelling their soup. Listening to them have sex. Wondering if their meth cooking was going to burn down our whole building. Having to go for a long walk to find some green space for a kid to play in. Having everyone knowing when I'm coming and going. Screw that.
Let me keep the option of living in a single family home. Build more of them so I'm not confined to a tiny few 1960's-era neighborhoods. I'm fine with having to pay through the nose for a little privacy and a backyard, given the alternative. Go build your apartments and town-homes over in apartment-land. Being able to reach out my window and touch my neighbor's house is NOT a selling point.
What I don't suggest is moving to a dense urban area and then complaining about it being a dense urban area.
But you got yourself a deal: I won't argue for building single family homes in downtown San Francisco (really, who is?) and you don't argue for building apartment complexes in Tracy and Gilroy.
It just doesn’t want to acknowledge that due to NIMBYs
Tiny back yards, but mine (which was built by the same developer as the cargo bike picture development in the article) is big enough for me. Not my wife, but c’est la vie.
Like 95+% of the suburbs in the USA are at little to no risk of urbanization in our lifetime.
Many people did exactly that, back when the Bay was half orchards and no one knew tech was going to explode.
You realize Manhattan used to be mostly farmland too, right?
I'm struggling to understand how this could work, except as a prior restraint on childbirth. Otherwise, if someone comes into being and no community wants to house them, what do we do? Execute them? Cast them out into the countryside, see if they can survive as a hermit off the land? (Whose land?) Lifetime imprisonment for trespassing, since there are zero places they're entitled to be?
Is the privilege revokable? Can I decide my neighborhood is too crowded, get together with 51% of my neighbors, and vote the other 49% out? Bulldoze their houses and turn them into open space preserves?
There is plenty of available space in the USA. It doesn’t have to be some crazy dog pile into desirable areas. Spread jobs and amenities out and we all don’t have to jam into a few cities or fight people off our lawns.
It’s all well & good to say a solution but when that solution is a complete fantasy it’s hsrdky helping
Successful economic centers grow; failed ones shrink. Yes, there is cheap housing around economically crumbling places, but bricks and dirt don’t sustain life. Economies do.
You could try to counteract economic centralization by restricting commercial development as aggressively as residential in growing places, but (as with housing) you’ll see all but the highest value businesses displaced. I don’t see how you could pull off decentralization without full-on central planning. Capitalism wants megacities, badly. To decentralize the economy, you need extreme policy interventions for every aspect of life and commerce. It might work, but what’s certainly not working is making the intervention only for housing.
> Let me keep the option of living in a single family home.
This is the basic demand that effectively all of the current residents of everywhere are making.
Why not let me have the option of living in dense urban housing? If not your city or your neighborhood, then which one?
Currently, pretty much every city and every neighborhood is vetoing any increase in density anywhere. Political conflict is inevitable!
I also grew up in the city, had loud neighbors, flooding us, elevators full of piss, sometimes didn't work and had to climb stairs 9 floors up. Public transport was fun and great, unless people step on your toes or there are pickpockets and such. For all the hate suburbia gets here, I'll pay extra for my house and a lawn.
The market wants denser housing because people want it. I have no problem with single family homes being allowed all over the place, I just don't think they should be mandated, which you apparently think is a good idea. It's an injustice that this preference for SFHs is written into the law when people want something else, and indeed, there are many advantages to denser urban forms.
I moved to Munich last year. I can hardly even tell which neighborhoods are affluent or poorer, it's so different from the US.
What I'm saying is that we have entrenched economic segregation in our country, and people like you defend it because "whatever is desirable is acceptable".
We tried letting cities decide on their own, the results have been atrocious. That's why recently the state legislature recently passed a bunch more laws to compel cities to allow more housing. If you want affordable rents, the status quo is clearly broken.
My data point: I've lived in two 2-3 story apts in suburbs and lived in a 5 story condo in city and never had noisy or bothersome neighbors. None of these were particularly new or fancy, but not trashy either. Just middle of the road housing.
My impression is it helps if you live on the bottom or top floors. Bottom floor I think guarantees cement walls, which are good sound insulators. Some apts have multiple floors of cement which helps a lot. TMYK.
One could argue that, despite high house prices in the Bay Area, homebuyers are actually drastically underpaying for their land!
If we upzoned all of, say, Berkeley, to 3 units per lot rather than the current 1 unit per lot, SFH prices would probably double. (This is because, even if the extra supply reduces home prices, say, from $1m to $700k, each lot will now have the potential to build 3 houses on it, making the lot's land value $2.1m. Of course, this isn't exactly correct—I did not account for construction costs—but you get the idea.).
So, in a unzoned/loosely zoned/"fair" world, you would pay a pretty dime for a SF house in a desirable city like Berkeley—a lot more than SF homebuyers pay today.
This is something people don't appreciate—SF zoning actually subsidizes SF homebuyers by artificially depressing the value of the land, and therefore not making buyers pay the full opportunity cost for underutilizing the land. (Here the opportunity cost is the 3+ houses that could be built on it instead.)
(Not trying to attack OP, who doesn't seem to live in, or want to live in, Berkeley anyway, just making a general point here.)
Seoul tried to address by going to outskirts of the city where land price was much cheaper and essentially built high rise clusters with parks, stores, and modern amenities. They took the, "build it and they will come" approach, with good success. Now some people in city center are kicking themselves in their undeveloped, old residential zones with tight ally.
It took well over 10 years to fully build out subway systems, but you have to start somewhere (literally and figuratively).
In the end they asked that neighbor why they did it, and turned out that the neighbor obstructed just because they could, as a sort of last stand for their generation in the neighborhood.
On the other hand, places like Portland have made the opposite mistake of extreme (vs incremental) upzoning [1] which also causes housing market problems.
1. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/9/revisiting-what...
incremental zoning increases is important for actually realizing developments. or at least that is the argument.
Bay Area housing woes summed up in one sentence.
If, however, your priority is greenhouse gas emission control and mitigation, then solid locally grown food production would be seen as more important.
A few urban gardens do not a serious supply chain make: better to preserve real farmland outside of cities.
The US has an enormous amount of farmland (915 million acres; two thirds of all land is farmland) [1], able to provide food for many times our current population. The problem with housing is "What do you want to be near, and how much will you pay to do so?" Try mandating or financially incentivizing remote work to employers, thereby disconnecting geography to income before dictating housing density. San Francisco's problem, for example, is that too many people want to live in the same place. You will never be able to satiate demand to be there (similar to how more roads begets more traffic).
[1] https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Online_Resou...
You have a lot of demand, and limited supply: prices go up.
Why do you have a lack of supply in that area? Read the article.
That we'd all fit if the dirt were evenly divided among us is irrelevant.
Then you move to a self-sustaining homestead in Idaho. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Is it? One could argue that commercial farming produces far less greenhouse gas emissions than a lone farmer in his backyard. Shipping a few hundred tons of tomatoes a few hundred miles is probably less CO2/tomato than a guy driving around Berkeley in his beater, dropping of a few pounds of tomatoes to his customers.
Cities are efficient in housing people, farms are efficient producing food. You can comingle that if you live in a suburb, or a rural area.... But in a city that invites this kind of NYMBYism.
Else, if they really want to, make use of greenhouse technologies.
Architects are trained to consider lighting as a part of livability of a home.
There's medical studies that say sunlight affects mood and health.
If you love sun and/or spent a bunch of money on an architect to design a home centered around sunlight and a giant track home gets erected next to yours blocking all of your sunlight you've lost alot of value in your home.
It becomes an even more interesting when your home is solar powered. Blocking your sun is literally reducing your energy and costing you money.
An old building should have decreasing rent over time if the quality of the landlord does not invest in getting the units up to standard, unlike in the bay area where even moldy out-of-date units are going for about he same as a new luxury building unit.
Now imagine they were currently constrained to just those 1000 cars and lobbying to build more. The car NIMBYs would be saying, "But look! They only build Lexuses! They'll just build more Lexuses!"
But we know that's not what actually happens. And it won't be true with homes either.
I agree with the sentiment that luxury apartments is a start/ better than nothing, but I think the benefits for the lower end of the housing is overstated.
Unlimited is quite the stretch goal, but, frankly, why not? We've done it before. San Francisco doesn't need to be Midtown Manhattan to drastically increase its population. It just needs to look like most of Queens (or Brooklyn, which would be even better).
We've built Queens before. We've built Brooklyn before.
It's not impossible, assuming you don't make it illegal.
Because of prop 13 property taxes are also fixed and decreases to nothing as the property depreciates over 29 years. Prop 13 in effect removed much of homeowners incentive to support policies that promote development.
Restricting housing supply has priced out a previously thriving african american and hispanic community, as well as most working class families.
In Norway, where I come from, this would not be considered a progressive opinion at all. Quite to the contrary it would be considered an extremely conservative opinion, and possibly also classist.
* get children
* get grandchildren they want to be close with while their child can’t afford to live next door because of inflated rents caused by housing shortages
* become old and need to live in a building adapted to their needs
*their friends might move away because of high housing costs
Reducing prices solves these problems.
* San Francisco: 65% renters
* Oakland: 60.2% renters
* Berkeley: 57.3% renters
* San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro area: 43.7% renters
Their entire ask is the desire to keep their neighborhood the same. The only way to give them that carrot and build more is to build humongous interconnected complexes underground which, besides being too expensive, is arguably unethical (lack of sunlight / fresh air).
https://www.brookings.edu/research/reforming-land-use-regula...
"Reforming local land use controls is one of those rare areas in which the libertarian and the progressive agree. The current system restricts the freedom of the property owner, and also makes life harder for poorer Americans. The politics of zoning reform may be hard, but our land use regulations are badly in need of rethinking."
It's like they want the market to be able to match demand with...supply, or something weird like that.
Doing this a house at a time is a fruitless effort. The neighbors will crush you -- rightfully so (why shouldn't the people who own propery have a say?). It sucks, but it seems like that's how it is.
EDIT:
The only interesting thing here is that people are so fixated on just a few spots in this country. You'd think the natural conclusion of this would be employers going to the cheaper areas and this problem would solve itself.
But maybe not how it should be? You own your plot of land... I don't see how it's reasonable for you to claim any control over how other owners use their plot(s) of land, within reason. If a building proposal fits within the current zoning, the default should be approval. I don't think it's reasonable for neighbors to be able to kill a project over shadows on their vegetables.
It happened to me, and just like it happens to virtually everybody in the same situation.
In the Bay Area somehow we have moved to where people somehow have power to stop building even when the building meets the current zoning laws. This really needs to change. There is some movement at the state level to help with this problem and I hope they pass legislation that, if your building plan is withing zoning laws, you get to build it.
(former submission)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540845
http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html
My take on staying low impact would be to encourage single-story //above// ground development, and require underground spaces for each building (potentially shared), including parking.
to make that happen, cities should price in the cost of street parking (one of the externalities that developers try to take advantage of, in their arguments about the high cost of parking ordinances). for instance, require every car parking on the street to have a neighborhood permit (many municipalities do this, but not widely). price the permits progressively. make each additional permit per household more expensive. use the funds to maintain both roads and public green space.
as LA did in the 50's(?) in downtown bunker hill, on major thoroughfares, you could have two levels of streets, one at ground level and one underground. underground streets could have direct access to underground parking structures.
in higher density areas, you could even build single family homes on top of mixed-use, multi-story buildings. it wouldn't be quite the same, but for many, it would be the best of both worlds.
ps - i saw the japanese zoning article the first time around and thought it was intriguing.
In 100 years, it will seem as silly as archaic as making your own clothes rather than buying them.
Of course that costs more AND yields less available face-to-face communication in that it limits that communication to employees in the satellite office.
Without remoting, for the entire organization, it gets a lot more expensive and most of the cost is deferred to the employees who have to do the moving and the transportation and the time loss, etc.
So ask yourself: why aren't they? Do they just hate money? Are Google and Apple logistically incompetent companies?
This is not a problem that can be solved by piecemeal legislation or random lawsuits. It is also inextricably tied to effective mass transportation and needs regional planning, legislation, and funding over the next couple of decades. We should be designating major swaths of the Bay Area as urban corridors with high density housing, world class rail service, and highly incentivized job centers. We would also need to overpay the existing residents in the path of these new urban corridors with either shiny new digs in the luxury high rises or well above market buyouts.
We need a regional leader who can articulate and sell this vision to all the residents and politicians of the Bay Area, not just the young, professional city dwellers. The approach has got to be a win-win investment that every type of person sees some benefit with (even if that benefit is "great, focus all the city folk to those corridors and stop bugging me about changing my neighborhood").
But San Jose is larger by population...if you propose that this same layer of government instead be centered in San Jose, all of a sudden people lose interest.
If three levels of government can't get anything done, how will four help?
In any case this "regional" government already exists in the form of transit agencies, utilities, waste and water districts, etc....I see very few people clamoring to give the bureaucrats of BART any more power.
BART is run by Contra Costa, Alameda, and San Francisco counties; CalTrain is run by San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara counties. And so the two don't meet up, because there's not a single government for the Bay Area that can coordinate. (The new Transbay Terminal that joins them together is in part a state initiative.)
These kinds of ad hoc special purpose districts are an extremely inefficient way of running a regional government.
WRT the San Francisco vs. San Jose issue - the interests of these large cities in the Bay are largely aligned. They are relatively dense, are irritated by the obstructionism of smaller towns when it comes to housing and infrastructure development, and would like decision-making to be more fairly based on population.
(BTW, there are actually three large cities in the Bay Area, with approximately equal populations - San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland.)
Nice to see someone say that there is an actual connection between insane housing prices and homelessness. Most discussions of homelessness frame it as if it is merely a personal problem, like people on the street are merely junkies and losers and not in any way, shape or form victims of something gone bad wrong with the fabric of society. And most discussions of housing problems in the US don't really acknowledge that this issue is pertinent to the folks on the street.
This problem has substantial costs throughout the U.S., too: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/05/new... : "Using a spatial equilibrium model and data from 220 metropolitan areas we find that these constraints lowered aggregate US growth by more than 50% from 1964 to 2009."
I'm not so sure if that's always going to be the case. Increased supply could very well turn San Francisco into cities like Hong Kong or New York - More houses but just as expensive.
If you think the current San Francisco as a small bucket full of water, will increase the size of the bucket stop the water from being full? well, that will depend on out how much water out there that wants to flow in right? If there are more water wants to come in than the size increase, you will just end up with a bigger bucket full of water.
You will see the same thing happen in the Bay Area...there is no law that requires new construction to be allocated to "locals". The YIMBY crowd will still be locked out.
Certainly the set of people who are willing to move to SF and pay $Y < $X is larger, but then SF is not "just as expensive" anymore if it achieves rent $Y. If rents start to rise up towards $X again, then the pool of people willing to move here shrinks accordingly.
HK has more nimbers than US, the biggest of whom is the Hongkong government.
Instead of finding ways to pack more people into those handful of cities, why not spread the economic development out a bit? That would improve quality of life for the people of an area while reducing regional inequality at the same time.
An interesting idea. Maybe this could be done by lottery -- choose 10% of people who live in the trendy coastal areas at random and force them to move to, say, Detroit, or Akron, Ohio.
(note: not a serious proposal)
Here is an interesting article[1] on the issue that talks about regional inequality, its causes, and possible solutions. Basically, a reintroduction of anti-trust laws would do a lot to turn things around.
[1] https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and...
I hate to use this word, but complaining about a problem without proposing a solution is basically just whining.
As far as anti-trust goes, Walmart has done more to equalize the playing field for rural and "underserved" areas than all the public policy think tanks in the history of the world.
They "extract massive amounts of money" by providing goods that people in the area want to buy.
"and doesn't replace all the workers that were displaced."
Typical rural areas didn't have any jobs to begin with. Now they do. Granted, a Walmart job isn't the greatest one in the world, but it sure beats no job at all.
Those rural areas had jobs before Walmart came into town. It's not like people lived without dishes or lawn mowers before Walmart was here. Demand was met with small businesses, and profits were almost always kept in the local economy. With Walmart, those profits are extracted out of the area, causing an economic drain on the area.
No, they did not. Do you know what the word "rural" means?
My doctor, dentist, electrician, plumber, and mechanic don't tell me I'm "basically just whining" if I call them and tell them that something's not working.
Mind, if I've got an idea as to what's wrong, or can point out additional information or context, they're generally happy to hear it. But they're the experts in this context, and are far better than I at identifying just what's gone wrong.
Doesn't mean I can't tell something's broke.
But you'd need to convince a lot of "them" to move.
And you'd have to coordinate that move to a single second locale.
The network effects and low-friction of local contacts are real. Distance is time and time is money. All take energy, infrastructure, and capital.
Ironically, the more ephemeral a product, the more concentrated its development, because the one thing you need to work on it is people (including all the support and acilary staff). An earlier example of this was Hollywood. Films can be shot anywhere, and the end product was a few cans of celluloid that could be shipped to theatres.
But it was the actors, and cameramen, and catering staff, and carpenters, and electricians, and equipment support, and musicians, and effects people, and .... that were expensive. And who'd clustered in Los Angeles.
Factors that did lead to spreading out the industry? Language. And occasionally government regulation limiting the import of American film. But France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Russia, Japan, China, India: all developed their own local film industry, of at least some size, in large part because Hollywood couldn't make talking pictures their audiences could understand.
(Also: cultural, location, and other factors, but language was a biggie.)
So the friction of what language are we going to develop in (as in human language) actually lead to a decentralisation of production.
Ironically: better and more efficient technology leads to greater density, not less. Though it's rapidly running up against housing-as-asset as a massive problem.
Major changes to a company are always a risk. Even the founders may not fully understand all the pieces that make it a success, so trying to change the formula can kill the company.
Presumably, the people running YC have no reason to move it elsewhere and lots of reasons to stay. Yes, their existence contributes to the housing issues there, but that isn't really a good reason to move the company. If they are concerned about it, there are other ways they can try to address it without risking killing their own company in the process.
Quite frankly, I think the market, in this case, will fix the problem. If people want to live in the popular places so much, then they will put up with whatever they have to. If people get fed up, then they will demand enough pay to make the employer consider moving to a not as popular place.
The real problem is each individual, especially smarter ones, are able to produce so much more than before that there aren't that many quality jobs to create that pressure for higher wages so they're stuck making ends meet. The solution is...to be smart and have a valuable skill set.
A lot of the country is experiencing growth with both growth in sprawl (fewer bodies of water locking things in) and in-city density. And those places don't have $3K+ rent.
Housing is such a clusterfuck because we've decided to centrally plan where people live (claiming they should be uniformly dispersed over the country) while leaving in place a system of economic growth that overwhelmingly tends towards centralization.
Sonja Trauss sure gets mentioned in a lot of articles for her work at the San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation. No surprise to see she's running for Supervisor now.
Oh, the horror!
But now think if you happen to live on just that one plot of land in the street, right next to the development, that will now be in the shadow of the new building.
Would you be happy about it?
I wouldn’t, and neither would you.
Until it happens to impact me personally.
I’m not proud of it, but I haven’t seen anyone who doesn’t react the same way. Nobody like to give up good things that they already have (especially if they paid $1M+ for it.)
And it’s great progress if people at least realize that they are, or would be in the same situation as that Berkeley neighborhood.
They have regulations for this in NYC: if you want to control what can be built next to your building you can buy the airspace surrounding it. For large buildings this is usually done in a deal that involves a concession such as a public park. If you don't want to pay to preserve the open space next to your building you don't get to keep it.
If having a garden is a high priority for him, he has several options. He could buy the plot of land from the developer for $1.4MM or he could move to an area more amenable to gardening.
Why are you pushing for only one of these groups of people? And why should other people take the same position? And how should outsiders generally side between them?
And I know from experience that what looks ridiculous and petty for an outsider is suddenly much less so when it impacts you personally.
I propose total, brutal honesty and transparency: more density means more housing, more people, more traffic, more shadows, and less parking.
It also solves one of the largest issues facing our cities: affordable housing.
Let's just be entirely clear that that's a more important outcome than the impacts on your free parking spot, the shadows on your garden, the number of people crowding up your favorite parks and cafes, and on and on an on -- even on the loss of existing home values.
I hear your objections. I don't think you're wrong to have them. They are perfectly rational.
They're just less important than the alternative.
This is an enormous country. There is room out there for your single-family housing. But not in our most urban areas. There are policy goals that vastly outweigh anybody's desire to live in a bucolic country ranch minutes from skyscrapers.
That's half the problem; these aren't urban areas. Now people that don't live there want to urbanize them, and the people that do live there don't.
There is room out there for your single-family housing
Somewhat of an ironic statement, given there was plenty of room for their house when it was built.
2) The Valley used to be perfect for single-family houses and peach-tree orchards or whatever. And at one point in very recent history the island of Manhattan was a dense forest.
Who cares?
Neither fact has literally anything to do with the maximally beneficial housing and zoning policies we should be pursuing in those places today.
I don't mind converting neighborhoods so much after the original inhabitants have moved on, but there are still countless people around who moved there & bought when it was all peaches and single-family homes were entirely reasonable. I'm not really OK with evicting them.
I don’t want to evict anybody. I want people to make the totally banal and normal year-over-year decision about where to live that literally every human being has made for all of human history.
We don’t “roll in” and make them leave. We roll in and make them a market offer that they can accept or decline.
And, crucially, I’m proposing the sort of development that makes rents lower, not higher. (Incumbents always win this game, anyway. Don’t feel sorry for incumbents.)
What you don’t get to do is stop progress because of nostalgia. Short of that, I have no desire to make anybody live anywhere.
NIMBYs want us to accept their selfishly dicking other people over as acceptable. It's not.
Surely they have more rights that people moving to the bay area. If they want to keep things as they are that should be all that counts.
Yes replacing these suburbs with medium or high density housing will temporarily reduce prices and allow more people to move there but why should current residents have to sacrifice their lifestyle?
> If they want to keep things as they are that should be all that counts.
I'm of many minds about both your original statement as well as, to me, the obviously related immigration issues. There's no obvious right answer, to me. Conflict is inevitable!
Yes raising taxes might let us build some public infrastructure that will be useful for a little while, but why should rich people have to sacrifice their lifestyle?
"Why should I have to recycle? The environment? Pffff."
"Why should we let in immigrants and compromise our lifestyle? Build the wall!"
Also America: "Why do people keep trying to move to where the few good jobs are?? Ugh, stupid entitled millennials!"
- there's a lack of deep investigation and analysis into why people prefer single-family neighborhoods so strongly; the few articles that do go into the social and psychological picture tend to be ultra-leftist and include such themes as "anti-privacy" which I'm obviously against
- the debate over housing types is tied to the debate over transportation types, and there's no representation for people who agree modern houses are too big but still prefer to own a car (even if we don't use them all the time)
- the whole conversation is pretty much set up and run (on both sides) by people who aren't severely affected by any of the policies they're advocating, and who will be able to afford the lifestyle they want regardless of what policy passes, even if it might force them to take two annual trips to Jackson Hole instead of three
- truly unique ideas have a tendency to get lost in the fray, like even if you run the one of most popular blogs in urban planning and propose a solution to housing prices in (e.g.) Portland [1], the typical voter will never ever hear about your idea, nobody will ever turn it into a workable policy or perform a serious analysis of what it might do, and legislators won't give it a moment's thought, so why are we even posting about this (I'll throw in my $0.02 -- green roofs should count at least partially towards open space requirements)
- the fact that some people just don't like certain kinds of people, motivated by race, religion, lifestyle, politics, aesthetic sensibilities, or even vocation, is always bubbling beneath the surface
- it's not clear how we're going to modify political, legal, and educational systems so that if people ever DO accept sensible growth policies, they're doing it because they understand it will improve their lives and not because they've been threatened or bribed or shamed into genuflecting in the presence of economists
1: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/10/30/spiking-a-ris...
* mountains: expensive to build on, definitely not a good place for affordable housing
* water: in the past 100+ years there has been substantial build-out onto the Bay. Any further encroachments are met with stiff resistance.
* far: to get past the above 2 difficulties, you're looking at an hour+ to get to SF. Things are (relatively) affordable in Sacramento, if you're willing to deal with that commute.
It's a beautiful but cursed geography, this SF Bay area.
And then there's this, from the article: "Neighborhoods in which single-family homes make up 90 percent of the housing stock account for a little over half the land mass in both the Bay Area and Los Angeles metropolitan areas", so there is an understandable urge to increase density in some of those SFH areas.
During the 1990s and 2000s building booms, housing was built in Solano County, Sacramento, and San Joaquin counties, as well as along the delta (Antioch, Pittsburg) and along the Livermore/580 corridor. Those are now hellish commutes, most in toward the urban core.
See this Google Maps view, roughly 100km on an edge: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7938826,-121.9739388,10.66z
And even that cuts off Sacramento, which does see a fair bit of commuting to the Bay Area.
Compare a roughly similar region around London: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5645481,-0.0649439,10.33z
Google Maps doesn't show you densities, but through much of the SF Bay Area those are low. Going from SFD simply to duplexes would be a huge progress. Multi-storey rather than single-storey dwellings. Denser localised urban cores rather than spread-out development in the various cities throughout the region.
This is before considering the suitability (or lack) of undeveloped lands to development.
That often happens to people unfamiliar with Haskell.
About a year ago I decided I was going to stop moving around the country chasing opportunities and move to a place I actually wanted to live, assuming I'd be able to get reasonable remote work. My salary fell from $180K to $60K because it was impossible to find suitable remote work after 6 months of looking and I got stuck at a local small-time outfit. Hell just take a look at the "Who's Hiring" post on the homepage, even in the tech space remote work is basically non-existent.
So, how do you decrease demand? For one, prevent non-citizens from purchasing property. That is common in the rest of the world.
But, if you're not a fan of that, you can still decrease demand by encouraging growth in other urban areas - give out grants, economic development, tax incentives, education funding, infrastructure funding, etc.
And, if that doesn't work, then just make high-demand areas less attractive. Some of that would just work out naturally as wages increase and services become more expensive.
I respect the NYT, but I can't help but wonder if the building and development industry influenced this.
Would a prize for tweeting your photo at polling place improve turnout? Change policies?
And then your house will get re-appraised for higher and your property taxes will go up, all while you were busy planting tomatoes.
Here's an example of what happens when there is a rapid increase in density in a formerly suburban town with minimal transit options: https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2016/12/02/traffic-mess-...
'The number of exhaust-spewing vehicles lined up in front of Downtown North and the Crescent Park homes was stunning, even to residents who endure heavy traffic in those neighborhoods.
"Last night was similar what happens most weeknights on Middlefield, just on steroids and over a wider area. There were double lanes of traffic on the four blocks of Middlefield north from about 3:30 to after 7:30 p.m. I did not see exactly when it cleared," said John Guislin, who has been working for years on traffic-calming measures along Middlefield.
"I had planned to go out to do errands but was completely blocked from leaving my driveway. Remember, Middlefield has two lanes in each direction, so backing out is extremely difficult because even if a car in the curb lane stops for you, the center lane can't see you until it's too late." he said.'
Silicon Valley VCs and YCombinator need to encourage growth where there is existing mass transit and the infrastructure/city services can support 20 story residential. They should definitely look south toward San Jose (BART, High Speed Rail).
Watch this PBS news hour segment starting at minute 7. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/ever-growing-tech-giants-h...
My take on this is to compare the types of proposed lot layouts in the article where they have three almost normal sized buildings per plot instead of one, with the "tiny house" concept. If people aren't aware, "tiny house" is a really interesting concept that you may want to google. I would argue the sustainability of tiny homes is more of a plus than a primary reason for most people really, but since people are sustainability-minded and for practical purposes, some of these homes do not have wet toilets and instead have composting toilets.
The reason people are going for tiny homes is because of the lack of affordable "normal-size" housing. So, if people are willing to buy a house that is actually tiny and does not have a flush feature, maybe the next step up is a quite small but not tiny two-story house that has normal features like flush toilets.
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Details on picture:
So I have been thinking for awhile along the lines of the article, but my buildings are two stories, fairly small but not quite "tiny", and have more space between them, which is explicitly dedicated to something like permaculture in order to be more sustainable. They are built with space-saving furniture and designed somewhat similarly to tiny-homes, except they have two full floors.
As noted in the picture, I am proposing much more living space than is available in tiny homes.
The permaculturish part means that the landscaping is designed to produce food. So the large circles on the picture are dwarf fruit or nut trees, the smaller circles berry and nut bushes (like American filbert for example). The rectangular strip is something like walking onion or maybe another perennial like yam. Around the entire property is an artificial raceway stream/pond with paddles to keep the water moving. This artificial stream/pond is used to farm a few fish. There are also one or two chickens on the property to produce eggs.
The furniture can be things like wall beds that convert to sofas for downstairs, wall beds that convert to desks for upstairs. The construction would use SIPs and HRV/ERV. The raceway pond could also have a pipe at the bottom for purposes of geothermal cooling/heating for the buildings. The buildings would have solar panels on the top of course.
With that in your arsenal you understand that this is a political issue.
Really? I know a certain President who emphatically agrees, but in my experience what the more serious parts of the press say is important very much is.
Meanwhile in San Mateo County, everyone parks on the street for free when that land should be just as valuable as their $2 million houses.
I'm surprised everyone's not tired of the same news over and over again.
Voila.
Don't want a single-family suburban home? Don't buy one.
Your tastes are not those of others, and you don't get to tell them how they should live.
You mean highways that go to where they want to go?
"could instead be spending it in a more efficient manner: in an urban environment"
Well, we could be spending it all on barracks where we all sleep in bunks and eat in military-style chow halls. That would be even more efficient, right?
"Efficiency" is not the primary purpose of human life. It's probably not even in the top ten.
The suburban lifestyle needs to be subsidized in order to be sustainable, but good luck getting people to keep up with proper infrastructure investment. Even cities are failing at it (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...), but suburbs have even more infrastructure to maintain with a much smaller tax base.
That guy is a good speaker if you ever get the chance.
All infrastructure is subsidized, including the lifestyle so beloved by young urban hipsters with no children. So?
Lafayette, Louisiana is in trouble because it had an oil boom followed by an oil bust.
And the idea of dividing up regions of the city by whether they "make a profit" or not is, to be blunt, just goofy. Yeah, revenue is generated in the industrial and business regions of town rather than in the residential regions. That's...unsurprising.
To expand a bit, imagine a block that has a branch of Bank of America, five apartment buildings, a small park, and a clinic operated by a non-profit.
Using the exact technique shown in your article (but on a smaller scale), the BofA branch would have a huge green spike, while all of the others would be red.
By the "reasoning" in the article, everyone except BofA should have their taxes raised.
Umm... no.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/11/20/mapping-the-e...
You'd see exactly the same pattern if you divided the "dense urban core" up into smaller regions made up of businesses and apartment buildings. The business buildings would make money, and the apartment buildings would not.
And?
Actually, according to current zoning standards in most of the US, you very much do get to dictate that in large swaths of our cities, including things like how many parking spaces your house must have, how many feet your front yard must cover between your house and the street, and so on.
I agree with your sentiment, though.