The YIMBYs lost in California but they’re just getting started
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If SB827 had passed, I am sure some SF neighborhoods and cities in the Bay, would have either defund existing or stop any new public transit projects, to avoid up zoning.
I think the City should just create a plan like Haussmann did in Paris. The City should start by preempting all the lots that are underused (parking lots, gas stations, car wash, single story commercial buildings, etc.) and build to the limit for the area. We could even keep the single story business at ground level (car wash, some parking, etc.). That should bring lots of units to the market.
Cities in the Bay should build more too. It is a bit crazy to have Apple or Google, creating those giant campuses for 10's of thousands employees, in cities that do not build anything close to accommodate the families of those employees. Cupertino and Mountain View welcome taxes from Apple or Google, but do not do much to house those employees and their families. Maybe every city should provide at least the same number of units as they have employees.
Manhattan has ~1 gas station per 42,000 residents, and it seems to be doing just fine. Back of the envelop calculation puts the San Francisco ratio to ~1 gas station per 43,000 residents, so it is about on par with other dense areas of the US.
Google Maps found more than 20 in the southeastern neighborhoods alone!
I don't mean to argue from anecdotes, but I've never known anyone who lives in San Francisco and owns a car to complain that gas stations are particularly rare or hard to find or access here. (They may often complain about parking, but not as much about gas stations.)
Manhattan has ~1 gas station per 42,000 residents
The buses certainly do.
(https://goo.gl/maps/vN2dH4zPd8U2 scroll till you see the Circle K)
Cupertino and Mountain View welcome taxes from Apple or Google, but do not do much to house
Zoning is a problem, but without additional stopgaps to prevent this kind of financialized speculation in the housing market, you can’t resolve the affordability crisis.
I live in the UK and absolutely disagree - I'd much much rather buy an early 20th century house than a brand new build, with its cardboard-thin walls and elevation falling off after few years. I can bet a 1930s house will keep standing for another 100 years, while I know several people who bought new houses 5-10 years and they all need major repairs(in addition to being stupidly small - brand new 4 bed house is usually so small that none of the "rooms" fit more than a double bed).
Of course any of the above could be achieved by a remodel, but then it wouldn't be an old house anymore.
On the other hand I think there's a very good argument that space could open up sufficient development and opportunity that we could return to infinite exponential growth. If the 'new world' spurred the world economy for centuries, one can only imagine the potential of everything from asteroid utilization to colonization of entirely new planets and all of the discoveries and advances this will all bring.
Actually our entire economic system is built on increasing assets and income. A fractional share of which is stacked against debt and interest expense.
Asset growth has outpaced debt growth, income growth has outpaced interest cost increases.
If that weren't the case, the world would have imploded a long time ago given the debt increase over the last 20 years.
China is a particularly potent example of this in action. Their debt accumulation has been very dramatic the last ten years. Despite that, there's no indication their vast income and asset expansion is unable to offset it. Their income expansion continues to exceed the additional interest cost by about a 2x to 3x margin.
Or take the US. US Government interest expense was $458 billion in 2017. It was ~$350b commonly in the mid to late 1990s. The US economy is 2.5 times larger than it was in 1996, and the public debt is about three to four times larger; meanwhile interest costs have increased by about a quarter.
US household wealth was $30 trillion in 1995/96. It's $100 trillion today. Wealth has increased by $70 trillion. Debt has gone from $6 trillion to $14 trillion. Net wealth has gone from $24 trillion, to $86 trillion. Wealth expansion has far outpaced debt expansion. In 1996, household debt was equal to about 20% of household assets; today it's 14%.
US household debt service payments as a percentage of disposable income are the lowest they've been in four decades.
The premise that either the US or global economy is built on unsustainable debt, is false.
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On a more fundamental level money itself is debt. It's how nearly all money is actually 'made.' Think about how banks function. #1 deposits $100 in a bank. That bank is required to only hold onto 10% of this deposit, and so they can and do lend $90 to #2. #2 spends that money which ends up getting deposited at another bank. That bank now lends out $81 to #3 (keeping 10% of that $90 on hand). And this process repeats over and over. In the end $100 of 'real' money ends up creating $1000 of debt. And now add in interest -- that single $100 can actually end up creating thousands of dollars of debt. The vast majority of all money in our economy is somebody else's debt. This is one of the main reasons inflation is seen as so important. It decreases the value of older debts, and also works as a penalty for simply holding onto assets as opposed to spending them and keeping the scheme going.
The next issue is that now a days nearly all wealth is in the form of financial assets which naturally inflate their 'real' value. The current market cap of Apple is $920 billion. And that's made a lot of people a lot of wealth. But the issue is that if any substantial amount of that was attempted to be liquidated, the price would obviously plummet - precipitously. And of course this is the same for all financial assets. And then we get to financial policy. When having literally 0 interest rates was insufficient to get those assets to inflate enough on their own to show growth, we turned to quantitative easing which is effectively buying things with monopoly money in a last-ditch desperate effort to make their price go up. Is this indicative of a sustainable and healthy system?
Developers can bid what they are willing to pay a community for development approval of what they want to build and the communities can compete against each other to win the development. The amount the developer is willing to pay rises each month and the first community to say yes gets the development.
This way rather than all the surplus going to the developer and all the costs to the community, both sides benefit. Win-win.
Edit. Since it has come up a few times in the comments you can cover the location issue via the developer's bid requirement documentation. For example, they could say they need conditions x, y, & z for any site and only communities with sites that meet those conditions can bid. The developer can make the conditions as narrow or broad as they like (all the way from only one site in state meeting the conditions to thousands of sites). It will be in the interest of the developer to keep the conditions broad since the more flexible they can be the more communities will compete for the development and the lower the cost to them.
Remember that the things that are said to matter the most in real estate are "location, location, and location".
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/magazine/28FOB-onlanguage...
Housing developments and their costs of construction and their suitability for a particular site and their aesthetic appeal to an area and the demand curve that they face there and their utility connection options and the other regulations that they will be subject to apart from permit approval are all different in different places, so a developer's level enthusiasm for building a particular project in one city or another, or one neighborhood or another, is very unlikely to be exactly transferable...
You might say that the auction mechanism would nonetheless take account of this because the developer would only bid amounts that would lead to profitability literally anywhere, but I don't think such amounts exist. ("Cool, the 50-story apartment building concept has been approved for construction on a vacant lot with no existing utility connections 5 km from the nearest other building and 30 km from the nearest bus stop! Let's go build it!")
For example developers could make the conditions so tight that only one location met all the requirements pushing up the cost since that community would know this was the only site and so hold off bidding. Alternatively, the developer could set the conditions broadly so that more communities would bid lowering the cost.
The nice thing about this is the friendlier the developer makes the proposal to a community the lower the price they will have pay. The community gets development that maximises their returns while the developer is encouraged to create community friendly developments.
And, what's more, how eager would they be to be seen to be thinking this way in a public bid? One thing that comes to mind is that some developers might not want to publicly specify some of the features that actually matter to them, for example things about neighborhood incomes, crime rates, homelessness, or other neighborhood demographics. Still, developers may feel that these things will significantly affect the suitability of a site to a profitable project, but not want to deal with the public relations aspects of spelling out their reasoning.
I'm not sure how strong an argument that is against your proposal, but maybe developers would consider it pretty fundamental.
Edit: Also, it's amusing to think about people trying to quantify aesthetic fit. "We want to build this development in a place that McMansion Hell thinks is overall pretty tacky, but not super tacky." "We want to build this development in a place with an average of 12 architectural classiness points, but in any case not more than 17 classiness points."
In practice this proposal would work best when land owners and communities work together to put together potential sites that meet developers needs.
I think developers will hate this idea because instead of the whole surplus going to them and their corrupt buddies in government, it will have to be shared with the local community. Since the bid will be public there is no way to payoff someone in the planning department to get approval for your development. Of course from my perspective this is a feature not a bug.
I would think if there were a lot of developers and a lot of parcels, an alternative is that there would be more supply-side competition for housing and then better-quality housing would be more affordable overall. Do you see factors preventing this outcome from being likely?
The end result is everyone should win - communities get the development that want, landowners get a higher price, and the honest developers can compete with the corrupt. The only losers are the corrupt.
I am, perhaps, a bit of NIMBY. I'm willing to accept that some of my concerns are not in the public interest. I don't want an apartment building in my neighborhood because of the impacts on street parking, traffic, noise, etc. All of those things negatively affect me, and so I take a lot of convincing.
But another issue is that developers have a history of claiming they will ameliorate these issues by improving infrastructure, such as adding underground parking, upgrading sewers, building sound barriers, etc and then do not. Or they exploit loopholes to avoid their obligations. An example where I live is that new developments are required to have sidewalks. Developers simply tell homeowners they are required to build the sidewalk within 2 years which, of course, doesn't happen. 5 years later, the city goes in an builds them and applies specials to the home and everyone is unhappy except the developer, who walked away from the project long ago.
Sometimes its seems that cities are so beholden to developers that they can get away with anything.
Why would existing residents ever agree to new development if they have to pay for it? (Either through taxes to upgrade infrastructure, or by needing to deal with insufficient infrastructure that doesn't get improved as needed) Maybe instead of directly performing the upgrades, developers should be paying extra to the government (either lump sum, or over N years) because in theory the government can then do a few large upgrades rather than developers doing many small ones, but the cost of new capacity should really be the responsibility of the people who need it (developers/new residents).
As to why people would agree to new development—they shouldn’t be allowed to veto it. They should get to decide what level of infrastructure the government will provide to the community. But omce they do that, theh shouldn’t get to discriminate against new residents by forcing those residents to pay a disproportionate share of the common infrastructure.
Part of the problem of this proposal is that you are treating everyone equally in this scenario, but not all development is equal. A single family dwelling creates a different impact than an apartment building. It requires different sewers, road frontage and utilities. Its cost is different. What you are proposing encourages expensive development. If a person pays the same whether they build high density housing or a McMansion, what motivation is there to actually solve the housing problem? If residents can't veto development, and communities can't put limits on it, you're left with very few tools to actually resolve important issues like urban sprawl that got us into this mess in the first place.
If you propose levying different taxes based on the type of development, then we're back around to where we started: shifting the burden of infrastructure to the owners and developers that are utilizing it.
Additionally, I would argue that's not how taxes work at all. There are many "use" based taxes: utilities, sales tax, special assessments, gas tax, toll roads, and so on.
EDIT: Additionally, when you say "proportionate share", I think many would argue that's what charging developers and new residents for new infrastructure is. They benefit from the new infrastructure, thus they pay for it.
Everyone that comprises the tax base that pays for the relevant infrastructure. In this case, state and local government.
> A single family dwelling creates a different impact than an apartment building. It requires different sewers, road frontage and utilities. Its cost is different. What you are proposing encourages expensive development.
On a per tax unit basis, apartments create much lower infrastructure cost that single family homes. An condo building with 100 units requires more sewer and road infrastructure than a single family home. But it’s got 100x the number of taxable units, and requires far less than 100x the infrastructure of a single family home.
> If a person pays the same whether they build high density housing or a McMansion, what motivation is there to actually solve the housing problem?
There is a natural incentive to build high density units in response to rising real estate prices, because you can make much more revenue per unit land. The market, unsurprisingly, provides the right incentives.
> If residents can't veto development, and communities can't put limits on it, you're left with very few tools to actually resolve important issues like urban sprawl that got us into this mess in the first place.
Urban sprawl was caused by existing residents legally requiring sprawl. For example, in my county, it’s illegal to build a house in most areas on less than 1/3 of an acre. I live in a pre-zoning law neighborhood where the lots are 1/5 that size. Even with the variances grandfathered in, a local developer had to fight for years to build three new houses conforming to the existing lot plan.
> Additionally, I would argue that's not how taxes work at all. There are many "use" based taxes: utilities, sales tax, special assessments, gas tax, toll roads, and so on.
Having a use-based tax that everyone pays is quite different than forcing new residents to foot the entire bill for shared infrastructure.
> EDIT: Additionally, when you say "proportionate share", I think many would argue that's what charging developers and new residents for new infrastructure is. They benefit from the new infrastructure, thus they pay for it.
Those people would be wrong. For example, people in my dense pre-zoning neighborhood pay our “proportionate share” for shared sewer mains and county roads. But 50 houses in my neighborhood pay about the same in taxes as 50 houses in a less dense area, but it cost the county way less to build sewer and road infrastructure to our 50 houses than to 50 houses in a less dense area.
For better or worse, our tax system is not built on paying proportionate to use. If it were, your point might be valid, but as I said, then new residents would get to avoid paying for a lot of other things they never used. If you charged new residents for the new infrastructure they require, then it’s not fair to make them pay for teachers and other public employees that retired before the new residents moved there. I’d take that deal in a heartbeat.
I also take issue with your use of the term "shared infrastructure". If you view all infrastructure as shared, then the existing infrastructure is being used "for free" by new residents, its costs having been payed for by previous residents. In your proposal the costs are loaded onto existing residents who payed for both old and new infrastructure, as opposed to new residents who only pay for the new. This would seem to balance out whatever new residents are paying in for "things they never used".
EDIT: I should address your point about urban sprawl. I would think that as long as it is cheap to build new, the incentive to infill cities is low. Developers and buyers will prefer new, and that creates a number of negative externalities beyond housing shortages. New construction is obviously necessary, but we need to find ways to align the incentives of developers and communities. I actually think we're off the mark here talking about new residents, since only residents that buy new are saddled with the extra burden. New residents that opt to infill existing neighborhoods do not. Perhaps the better option is to place the burden on the developers, but offer residents other incentives (such as property tax relief on new construction).
It's curious to me that so many people complain about gentrification in terms of destroying the nature of an existing community, but then we also have so many complaints about zoning laws that are designed to protect the visible characteristics of communities.
Rayiner's point is that current tax payers won't pay more, because new residents result in a higher tax base in the first place.
In California with Prop 13 and widespread rent control, this is especially true.
I feel like in California this devaluation argument is not really about economics but rather a proxy for making a case that might not be too politically correct when laid out as it is.
I disagree. The house might be worth less but the plot of land it is sitting on is worth a lot to a developer who wants to build a similar complex there.
The problem is that this doesn't work in practice for individual homeowners. It would only work if all the homeowners who own those "plots" required by that developer are willing/able to sell at once, and that happens approximately never.
Moreover, the value of the house isn't just important at the time of sale but also at times such as mortgage refinances. A drop (or lesser gain) in value can have real negative financial consequences well before any sale.
Perhaps it’s not like that everywhere. But from that background, it seems reasonable for the developer to pay for upgrades.
And to clarify, by new installations I mean paying for half a mile or more of infrastructure. Not a hookup, but running new stuff for a good distance.
Consider San Francisco’s mission bay. UCSF is a bad neighbor - they have large unfriendly buildings that create a dangerous street environment. The adjacent residential isn’t a lot better. Lots of parking garages, no effective street level housing, no effective businesses. There is no legitimate reasons for someone to be hanging around after dark.
I also lived near the Castro and lived thru 5 large apartment infill developments. Only one produced useful ground level business (Whole Foods). All the others had their retail space sit empty for years, Years! This is in an existing neighborhood that has a strong history of mixed retail and residential.
Not to mention that during the construction (1-3 years depending) the sites are the very definition of bad neighbors. They suck away street parking, they cause noise and air pollution (new concrete work causes plenty of air pollution), make it difficult to get around the area.
As an existing resident the upsides are minimal (no effective new business, the new ones tend to be expensive, doesn’t cater to existing residents) and the downsides are guaranteed.
I'm excited to see the new Pier 70 development, and I wouldn't have bought if I didn't think the new development was going to be anything other than a nice way to make the central waterfront accessible again and some sorely needed housing. How could I be a NIMBY when the area doesn't even have a grocery store yet?
You know what isn't a livable neighborhood? The Sunset, with its rows and rows of ticky-tackies with ugly little yards in the back. Give me Mission Bay over that pastel low-rise concrete jungle any day of the week.
Also, be prepared for your neighborhood to be overrun on event nights at the new Warriors building and 83+ Giants home games each year. April and May will include both Warriors and Giants games simultaneously at times. Get home early, or stay out late.
You mean, imposes large costs on landlords and home owners. Residents are made better off if they're renters.
Anyone living there, regardless of if they own or rent, is affected by the changes. People currently there bear the burden, people who come in after reap the benefits.
Besides, in California, new owners and renters hugely subsidize the existing ones, because of Prop 13 and rent control.
It sucked. The resulting construction added no flavor to the neighborhood. It was generic and boring looking apartments, no business space, no communal or common space.
If development in the area is a good thing, then the value accrues to the property, which benefits the landlord, leading to increased rents. The renter has to decide if the benefits from the development are worth the increased rent, and this will vary by person.
A 1-3% increase in available units probably won't do anything but change local neighborhood prices, but a city adding 10%+ in units everywhere is going to drop their average rent costs
Today, a big factor driving up rents is the amount of money coming into "hip" areas, seeking profits proportionate to it's investment. I can't see how this scheme wouldn't simply increase the problem - while trampling people ordinary intuition concerning property.
The ideal situation imo is to have certain areas where very high density is the only use and other areas where low density is standard. Here the market would dictate an overall increase in density while relatively reducing the cost of buying land.
Your solution is to effectively steal the rights of the owners of the land (by taking away their ability to control density) without compensation and hand a windfall to developers. How do you think we ended up in the current NIMBYism situation?
With your "reverse auction" approach, the would-be builder has to spend money on both out-bidding others who who'd prefer other uses AND has to spend on the actual cost of building, so two/double costs.
Your solution is to effectively steal the rights of the owners of the land.
My approach modifies the rights of title holders. It's no more stealing than more other measures (such zoning) because it happens in the bounds of the right. Indeed, I am simply proposing extra-aggressive zoning to encourage density. Moreover, your approach also modifies land-holder rights. I mean, landholder have never had unconditional control of their land, that control has devolved to the state or the sovereign all the way back to medieval times and before.
Yes they will have to share some of their profits with the community, but it is better for everyone than the current approach of fight it out through the courts or paying off some corrupt officials.
Your proposal is to take away the rights of the titleholders to achieve the outcome you want (more development in certain locations). While totally non-democratic, this approach is doomed to fail as it is the reason the current development paralysis has occurred. Start taking away the rights of people and surprise, surprise they fight back. Let's instead find an approach where everyone wins.
No, that's exactly what I'm objecting to. The more bidders in an auction, the higher the price, the high the price, the larger the cost of development. This effectively a device to impose an extra tax on people choosing one land use over another.
The whole of NIMBY is a (supposed) community of home owners able to stop development. The story told for this safe streets and "community feeling" but the actual aim and result higher home values at the expense of a bizarrely distorted market.
Today, "the community", other property owners, toss money into legal devices to stop development using environmental impact other ad-hoc methods to stop one property owner from using their property as they wish. In a lot of ways, this confused scheme is codifying this disaster.
What I'd advocate is instead rationalizing the zoning process so the health of an entire region is considered. Have much more definite guidelines about what and where developers can build, remove the million had now infesting development.
The public are the real owners of the land.
The housing crisis is regional; the benefits from development extend far beyond the neighborhood or even municipality in question -- reducing housing prices all over the map. So you can't expect a negotiation between the developers and the community to account for that external benefit, and you're left with a tragedy of the commons where each community wants more housing supply, just not here.
The current approach is designed to maximise conflict and minimise community benefit. Let’s think about creating a system that minimises conflict and maximises community benefit.
I have been surprised how many people have voted it down here. The primary post has been up and down like a yo-yo over the last 24 hours. I would really like to know why.
I will try to write it up in more detail on my blog.
People in office already won office. Why would they be motivated to care to win people who won’t vote anyway? They clearly can get elected without them.
I'm saying the under 40s would vote if there was someone worth voting for. Doesn't vote != won't vote. Its a volcano waiting to erupt.
It can't really wait that long, because the under 40s will be over 40 pretty soon, and then there will be a whole brand new set of young people that have never known politics.
People act like "under 40" is some kind of static group. It's not, it's a totally different set of people every 20 years.
It actually does mean that most of the time. The most reliable predictor of whether or not someone will vote is whether or not they voted in past elections.
1. build a policy set around people who voted last time.
2. only people who voted last time end up voting this time.
3. goto 1
Many young people want to vote, but are discouraged or prevented from doing so.
Other states targeted minorities with similar tactics. Alabama (which needed federal sign-off on changes under the VRA) passed a voter ID law then closed 30-something DMVs across the state, almost exclusively in areas with huge black populations.
So we never again wind up with the tragic situation we're faced with today.
If the YIMBYs want to win they need to realize their opponents are not just homeowners. Low-income renters have issues with them too. YIMBYs are generally in some form of denial about that.
They like to believe that they are fighting the progressive fight against rich, old homeowners. They like to proclaim they are fighting for "poorer, younger, and (frequently) non-white people" (Stripe).[1] But when it comes to explaining why poorer and non-white renters aren't always on their side, YIMBYs are caught flat-footed. If they're not careful they end up sounding condescending. Like, Didn't you guys take economics? Supply and demand, bro!
That's probably why the bill failed. There were significant amendments added to address the concerns of low-income housing advocates, who see a greater need for BMR units among other things. But these were added only after substantial protest.
One low-income housing activist said it best: "The YIMBY movement has a white privilege problem."[2] They are kind of in denial about the effect of development-stimulated gentrification on rents in affordable neighborhoods. They like to think that young tech workers are in the same boat as minimum wage earners, all in need of "affordable" housing. They really don't like to think about things like induced demand, where adding capacity can actually create more demand.
In the long run even the tech industry needs affordable housing for service industry workers to support its continued growth. It's not just about economic justice or turning back gentrification. Quite simply, if cooks and teachers and artists can't afford to work here it's not going to be as desirable a place to live. If the market alone can't solve that -- and many low-income housing advocates believe it can't -- then we need to fight for BMR and other strategies to create and protect truly affordable housing.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16988398
[2] http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-housing-bill-failu...
The "BMR or nothing" thing that those low-income housing advocates do pisses me off so much (and I say this as someone whose current income qualifies them for BMR housing (the waitlists are many years long so it's not really an option though)) and it's so frustrating to see how effective the "displacement" concern-trolling is at preventing the right actions from being taken; namely "build enough dense/tall/small market-rate housing such that the market-rate becomes affordable for everyone, and remove bans on medium/high-rise buildings, and small apartments/SROs/rooming-houses".
Avoiding eroding/ending NIMBY-enabling zoning/planning/land-use laws because it'll cause disruption/displacement is the same sort of understandable-yet-suicidal decision as someone refusing to push the stick forwards in a stalled plane because they're afraid of causing the thing to pitch down and lose altitude. Doing the non-instinctive/unfamiliar/counterintuitive thing is terrifying and unpleasant; but if you don't wanna hit the ground you gotta point the nose at the ground to get airspeed.
I'm legitimately shocked how even amongst people who don't have anything to gain via artificially scarce housing, the mindset is disturbingly often isomorphic to "pulling back on the stick puts me farther from the ground, time to pull back!" and well, I really don't want to follow that trajectory to its sad, pancake-shaped end.
UC Berkeley's Urban Displacement Project study covers this quite well: http://www.urbandisplacement.org/research#section-84
Key summary: "What we find largely supports the argument that building more housing, both market-rate and subsidized, will reduce displacement. However, we find that subsidized housing will have a much greater impact on reducing displacement than market-rate housing. We agree that market-rate development is important for many reasons, including reducing housing pressures at the regional scale and housing large segments of the population. However, our analysis strongly suggests that subsidized housing production is even more important when it comes to reducing displacement of low-income households."
"At the local, neighborhood scale, however, new luxury buildings could change the perception of a neighborhood and send signals to the market that such neighborhoods are desirable and safer for wealthier residents, resulting in new demand. Given the unmet demand for real estate in certain neighborhoods, new construction could simply induce more in-moving."
"...What we find largely confirms this regional versus local argument;... This suggests that indeed in San Francisco, and by extension similar strong markets, the unmet need for housing is so severe that production alone cannot solve the displacement problem." (p7)
Note that the summary concerns the regional effect of new housing construction -- with a strong emphasis on subsidized housing. Exactly what low-income housing advocates are campaigning for.
The study concludes that housing should be built. It can't be made to suggest otherwise.
You're simply wrong. As cited, "What we find largely confirms this regional versus local argument". And again, the study emphasizes the need for subsidized housing and "investing in the preservation of housing affordability and stabilizing vulnerable communities." That's exactly why low-income housing activists fought against the original YIMBY-supported bill.
Tenants activists in the Bay Area are actually making the problem worse, contributing to displacement, and driving out the very vulnerable populations they claim to protect. It is unfortunate that these groups are putting anti-development ideology over real solutions.
Again, simply incorrect and a miscomprehension of the study:
"These two block groups illustrate the complex relationships between housing development and demographic change. While both neighborhoods have witnessed dramatic development in one of the fastest growing parts of San Francisco, and have similarly seen significant growth in housing prices, one may be classified as experiencing displacement of low-income households, while the other does not." [emphasis mine]
(The one that didn't maintains "high rates of crime and concentrated poverty which may be dampening the attractiveness of the neighborhood" and the majority of units are rent controlled.)
It shows one neighborhood with displacement where development “contributed to the ongoing transformation of the neighborhood.” The other that resisted displacement not only maintained high crime, it also had a higher proportion of rent controlled units (which you didn’t mention).
That demonstrates that development can cause local displacement, although there are many complex factors at play that can resist it. Like if you build right next to skid row, maybe your building is not enough to gentrify the neighborhood, plus rent control protects residents. Absent those, you’ll get displacement.
You are cherry-picking phrases from the study to try to make it sound like it's stating the exact opposite of what it states. This is obviously a pointless game, similar to the one creationists play. If the authors of the study wanted to say "don't build anything", they would have said that in the conclusion. Instead, they said the opposite.
The solution is to build more everywhere. More market-rate housing, more subsidized housing. Subsidized housing is especially important, but both kinds help. That is precisely what SB 827 encouraged. That is why nonprofit housing developers supported it. Tenants' groups and the DSA were wrong to oppose it. It is frustrating to see tenants' rights groups refuse to admit responsibility for hurting the groups they claim to be helping.
Every one of your comments contains blatant misrepresentations and devolves into YIMBY talking points. I have clearly represented the study as supporting building. The issue is how much emphasis on BMR and how to protect vulnerable communities from local displacement. The study places strong emphasis on BMR, preserving housing affordability and protecting vulnerable communities — phrases “cherry picked” from its conclusion. Thus it supports the very issues that low income and minority activists have been fighting for against the original YIMBY-supported bill and the amendments that were added to better address their concerns.
I think the source of displacement is change, not development. Development is a kind of change, but it's not the only change. Anyone can move into any neighborhood if they want. If they move into a poor neighborhood and change it so that it's more appealing to them and to people with more money, then those people with more money will be attracted to the neighborhood. What is your method to stop this cycle?
It's anti-development ideology, plain and simple. These groups start from the idea that development is bad and cherry-pick data to fit that narrative. This phenomenon is at work in this very thread, where a study that clearly suggests building more market-rate and subsidized housing everywhere is somehow twisted to imply the exact opposite.
If a place is already expensive and unaffordable, then double the density in THAT place.
Places like Tokyo have figured out how to build tall buildings that are safe for earthquakes.
check the 2nd to last graph on this page: http://www.ppic.org/publication/californians-and-housing-aff...
Second, you're misinterpreting the graph. It just says renters want more housing. But if you scroll up you'll note the kind of housing "strong majorities favor": "affordable housing projects" -- not market rate.
The debate here between YIMBYs and the low-income housing activists is not the same as it is with NIMBYs. Both want more housing. The issue is how much market rate to facilitate vs. how much BMR and other developer concessions to negotiate for.
Most YIMBYs are perfectly happy to add more affordable units, as long as the economics work out so that something gets built. Many (not all) activists would prefer to block everything than compromise.
And not everyone realizes that some of these (air quote) "activists" are really NIMBYs and are bad-actors, claiming to be really aggressive pro-affordable units but so aggressive that nothing is ever good enough. They claim to want to compromise on things like percentage BMR, and then haggle over that for years, knowing that the ratio BMR they want is economically infeasible so the other side won't go for it, but they get to claim a highground under the guise of "trying to work with the other side" that never reaches a compromise.
Meanwhile, they get what they really wanted: everything blocked and no building at all.
The good will and intent of true activists is actively exploited by NIMBYs to cause "delays" (because delays, such as environmental impact studies and community engagement, which take massive amounts of time, are enshrined in law). NIMBYs can claim to be concerned about a bunch of different things that all result in the same outcome: delays significant enough that nothing gets built for a long enough duration that the end result is indistinguishable from explicitly not building anything.
"We want housing to cost less". Start building and keep building.
"We want housing near public transportation". Build near public transit.
Their position is pretty straightforward: remove the barriers to building and build more. Input on the details isn't going to change their position. The sincere activists end up undermining their goals by being opposite, in any capacity, to the YIMBY position. The bad-actor activists get exactly what they want. To pin lack of seeing YIMBY progress solely on YIMBYs themselves is, IMO, a misrepresentation of the situation.
I didn’t pin it on YIMBYs solely. I said they would do better to take seriously what minority and low income housing advocates are saying. You’ve articulated exactly the problem; YIMBYs have an over simplistic understanding of economics yet exhibit extreme confidence and authority. This leads them to be dismissive of and even paternalistic towards those who actually experience the direct effects of displacement and gentrification.
Housing is not the same. Besides the fact that it doesn't share the qualities that make traffic highly susceptible to induced demand (you've gotta sleep somewhere, whereas you can choose not to drive, or at least choose when to drive), even if the end result of building more housing is that prices stay the same, it's still a better situation. The externalities of "people sleeping indoors" are not nearly as bad as "people driving cars", there would be more people living where they want to live, less of them would have to travel to get to work, environmental impact is lower per person when they live at higher density, economic output is greater at higher density, etc.
I get that macroeconomics is not always simple, but that doesn't mean it's always counterintuitive. And let's be honest here: in the Bay Area we've been adding housing much slower than we've been adding jobs for many decades now, and the "over simplistic" econ 101 prediction that prices would go up as a result has been extremely accurate. One point for Occam's Razor.
Activists are implicitly making the argument "yeah, our counterintuitive 'build less to reduce prices' policy hasn't worked in the past, but that's only because we haven't been allowed to implement it fully and prevent any market rate housing from being built!", which is the same kind of bullshit all-or-nothing argument that hardcore anti-government types make when we point out situations where deregulation fails to produce great results. Sometimes we just need to accept that maybe there's nothing subtle going on, apply F = ma, and see if the simple solution works. Especially when we've already been trying the crazy out-of-the-box solution and it's been failing miserably.
Sorry, I thought it was obvious that when I said "build" it was building housing, since that is the YIMBY platform were talking about. The simplicity or not of macroeconomics may or may not come into play, but citing roads as example when we're talking about housing is disingenuous.
In the context of housing, "We want less traffic" is equivalent to "We want housing near public transportation", to which the YIMBY solution is the same "Build [housing] near public transit". Attacking it from the other side, build more public transit, is entirely possible too, and is a problem worth tackling, and fits within the YIMBY platform in general, but it's not directly about housing. And YIMBYs have rightly realized that focusing on too many solutions at once spreads effort too thin and plays into the incessant delays that result in nothing getting done.
You’ve articulated exactly the problem; YIMBYs have an over simplistic understanding of economics yet exhibit extreme confidence and authority. This leads them to be dismissive of and even paternalistic towards those who actually experience the direct effects of displacement and gentrification.
So while we're here, your claim that YIMBYs are not listening to low income communities could use some substantiation. Which concerns are being ignored by the platform of build more? And you can't say "more below market rate housing" because driving down prices by encreasing supply is exactly the position that YIMBYs have.
Unless we're concerned that a protected class of people would disappear because housing would be affordable and there would be no need for a BMR classification to rally for.
have an over simplistic understanding of economics yet exhibit extreme confidence and authority
You can say this about pretty much EVERYONE on EVERY SIDE of this issue. This is really a debate about which economic solution is the best/most appropriate, which is why it makes no progress. Everyone and their dog can show up and spout off.
That being said, I find the refutations, refutations of well established and accepted supply-and-demand solutions, to this problem to be naive and unfounded. And part of the problem is that even trying to experiment is difficult because good ideas and compromises are shutdown. And those who prefer the status quo of no building get exactly what they want, so status quoers are incentivized to muck up the process and cause delays by whatever means necessary.
Part of the debate is if those who prefer the status quo should have as much voice or influence as they do.
She has to put up with all the same crap--the community input circus, being slow-walked by the zoning board (no matter that they were literally begging her for the housing only months earlier), endless CEQA litigation, etc.
Even though she's being given money by the state (as transferable tax credits) to build housing that is wholly, perpetually BMR and which municipalities are legally obligated to push through (because of the quota system), she's pretty much in the same position as any other developer. Even though she'll have all her ducks lined up and pretty much prepared to break ground the same day she submits her full proposal, it can still take years and ridiculous amounts of money (tax payer money!) before she can break ground. She has to swim up the same sh*t creek as for-profit developers because the situation is just... that... bad.
You ever wonder why it takes an eternity for the City of San Francisco to complete a housing project by itself and with fully allocated funds? Even though the mayor, zoning board, and every other involved official sincerely wants the project to succeed and doesn't perceive any serious impediment or harm? It's because the consequence of streamlining the process for themselves would be some marginal streamlining of the process for market developers. Somehow anti-development sentiment has become so pathological that politicians and activists will literally spite themselves. Except not really, because they're not the ones getting screwed. But at least they can feel good about themselves for standing up for the guy they just kicked to the curb.
[1] http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/communities/east-county/... [2] http://www.thecoastnews.com/affordable-complex-gets-green-li...
[1] https://www.janekim.org/2018/05/01/housing-that-works-for-sa...
https://sf.curbed.com/2016/2/3/10942390/inside-the-fuzzy-mat...
Which of those specific, concrete suggestions do you find objectionable? Like some other YIMBYs (myself included) he even admits that we may need to expand rent control.
NIMBYs can't shake their fingers at housing developers and will them into burning money on unprofitable projects. And even a city government as rich as San Francisco couldn't build a small fraction of the units necessary to relieve the pressure before it would bankrupt the city.
This is the cold, hard truth. Renters have exactly two choices: continue opposing (by action or inaction) new development while prices rise and the rent-controlled stock slowly disappears, or be part of the solution. But tacking on BMR requirements is not a solution--it's no different than saying, "you can build new housing, but you still need to jump through all the same hoops and, oh, yeah, you have to give it away". WTF!?
On top of all that, while NIMBYs complain about displacement and the depletion of rent-controlled housing, there's literally no organized movement on their part that I'm aware of that proposes mitigations as part of a grand bargain. All I hear is, "no, no, no; but, but but." Rather, it's the YIMBYs proposing comprehensive solutions, including expansion of rent control. The funny thing is, rent control and density go hand-in-hand. The more units in a building the greater the turnover and the less the burden on an individual landlord.
And yet SLSs are dying in Los Angeles. Los Angeles has run
out of missing middle zoning, and they are not creating any
more of it in plan updates. The city has recently looked to
tighten rules on the development of SLSs. Recent increases
in fees (See rule #10) has hit SLSs hard. Entitlement
applications for SLS have dropped.
The problem with BMR requirements is that though they make politicians appear responsive to voters and tough on developers, the greater effect is that they permit politicians, voters, and developers alike to avoid difficult decisions. Such as, for example, expanding rent control, changing master zoning plans rather than relying on negotiated variances (a costly process), investing in transit, reducing parking requirements, etc.
At the risk of sounding excessively cynical, I think the most exclusive cities are pretty able to foist this burden onto those workers by making them travel long distances.
There was a really great map that I'm trying to find again, comparing how far you could travel from an affordable market-rate unit on mass transit in an hour in different metros. In NYC you could reach most of Manhattan from affordable neighborhoods in Brooklyn or Harlem. In SFBA, the vast majority of SF was unreachable. Just small areas around the BART stops basically.
This is a huge problem for the service industry, for example. It is getting very hard to hire restaurant and retail staff in SF without jacking up prices so high that the business fails. Not a lot of people want to commute 3 hours a day to a minimum wage job.
The reason prices keep going up when you build more has nothing to do with inducing demand. The demand was already there and already growing, for a million reasons you have no control over. Prices keep going up because you're not building enough. And if you refuse to accommodate or allow growth, you're gonna get displacement. The reason San Francisco has become a displacement nightmare is exactly because of the stupid induced demand myth, that somehow by not accommodating new arrivals that they'll just stop coming. San Francisco's problems are only the fault of people like you who refuse to accept economic reality.
YIMBYs sometimes argue that we can solve the affordability crisis by simply building more market rate housing, because the law of supply and demand dictates it will bring prices down. But that is a simplistic understanding of supply and demand; even in Econ 101 we learn that the price change depends on the demand curve. So what’s the demand curve for housing in SF?
Induced demand is the phenomenon where lowering cost motivates people to change their behavior and start using the good. It shifts the curve. This counterintuitively keeps the cost high despite expanding supply. It’s why roads are always congested even after expanding them.
There are a lot of tech people in the world who would still like to move to SF. There are speculators too. Like adding lanes to a highway that never gets better, it’s possible that a purely market rate based approach will not result in prices low enough to address the affordable housing crisis for folks who are not making tech industry salaries. YIMBYs as a rule really do not like to admit that.
Adding lanes too a highway can help put more people on the road who can tolerate high (opportunity) costs, but you’ve got to look at other solutions too like protected lanes for qualified vehicles. The analogous things in housing would be things like BMR units for qualified residents.
Induced demand in traffic is also (mostly) a myth. The myth is perpetuated by the same ignorance of another government intervention: artificially low prices. Increasing capacity doesn't reduce congestion because the quantity demanded is so far beyond are ability to supply that it is impractical to meet it at those prices. To illustrate, consider Lamborghinis with prices capped at $1. At that price level, quantity demanded is so high that any increase in quantity supplied is immediately consumed. That doesn't mean that lamborghini is inducing demand by building more cars, because at market rates making more doesn't mean people consume more. And it can be demonstrated perfectly by the countries that do price their roads correctly: when they build more roads, it actually does reduce congestion.
Adding more supply doesn't change the demand curve, it changes the equilibrium price. In all cases, supplying more means more is consumed. That doesn't mean demand curve has shifted, it means the quantity demanded has changed to reflect the new equilibrium. The price still drops, even with a higher quantity demanded. That is not induced demand, that's the same fucking supply and demand curve doing exactly what it always has done.
Induced demand is where the demand curve changes in response to a change in quantity supplied. You have no evidence that that is happening, because it isn't, regardless of whether it is in Silicon Valley or Indianapolis. Demand curves for housing are largely the result of income factors: people can make more money in SV. If SV companies keep paying workers more and more, the demand curve is going to keep shifting. It's not caused by housing growth, that's idiotic. And because the demand shift is not caused by housing, restricting housing only makes it worse.
The problem with trying to get BMR units everywhere is that less units are created. Big picture, you're just helping two classes: those who qualify for BMR and those who are rich enough to buy the units that are subsidizing the BMR. What happened to the people in the middle?
It's certainly true that magically freezing California in time would solve displacement and gentrification. (Of course, it's not possible to do so, and it would be deeply unfair for the same reason the Chinese hukou system is unfair, but that doesn't stop them.)
The timeline on induced demand for number of houses required has to be pretty long. Also, if you are worrying about induced demand from housebuilding, then you are attempting population control with homelessness.
Allowing the market to solve the problem would happen if we significantly upzoned the land. (ie, we need to double the allowable density across SF).
The best way to produce more affordable housing isn't that build so many houses that the market price is BELOW the affordable housing price.
But if you really care about affordable housing, one thing that could be done is incentives.
IE, if you make 30% of your units affordable then in exchange, you can build you building to be 3 times the height of whatever it is currently zoned for.
YIMBY people would absolutely be in favor of an incentive like this, that triples density, in exchange for making 30% affordable.
I appreciate that every place is subject to some kind of disaster, but massive, regular earthquakes liquefying soil is second only to massive floods for destructive capacity. It’s also true that if for example you live near a Great Lake, you have water. In terms of risk to people and infrastructure, tornadoes are pretty minor compared to earthquakes and drought.
Until the water runs out, people will waste it.
The same mythical creatures that can stop people from moving to Silicon Valley.
Or you could just price water appropriately and watch them disappear on their own. Quadrupling your water bill increases the cost of being a human by a percent at most, but increases the cost of owning a lawn several fold.
Who said anything like that? Not me. I just asked a question as to why, I never deluded myself into thinking I would change it. If you want to be snarky though, a high 7, low 8 quake will do it. For raising water prices though, it would need to be raised first and foremost on agriculture, which uses the majority of water in California. They have good nationwide lobbies, so it would be a mythical force indeed.
For public servants, and other people whose salary is directly or indirectly tied to government salaries housing will only get less affordable as prop 13 guarantees that landlords can profit from true market value of their properties without paying taxes on that value. Prop 13 is literally a tax payer subsidy to businesses and nothing more.
Perhaps you had the impression that your title and deed gave you property rights over your neighbor's yard merely because you live in the same neighborhood. If so, you were mistaken.