Steelmanning the NIMBYs
slatestarcodex.com
slatestarcodex.com
I'm not sure this accurately captures the comparison between Manhattan and SF housing. I'm guessing this figure is an "average cost" but probably heavily skewed by certain downtown neighborhoods. Manhattan is super expensive for sure but I still think the market is substantially better than SF. In NYC you have tons of options as to where to live either within Manhattan or in one of the boroughs, and pretty much everywhere has good transit access to get you downtown reasonably quickly. Yeah, if you try to live in Tribeca you're gonna pay an insane amount for a 1 bedroom, but just go uptown and prices drop off considerably, well below SF prices, and still within quick walking distance to multiple subways. Secondly in NY there's definitely more housing supply: you can go apartment hunting and have a lease signed before the end of the first day. That seems to be how it goes for most people I know here.
Not sure where the $3800 figure came from, but it's easy to be mislead by what you see on Streeteasy, Zillow, etc. The most overpriced units stay on the market for a long time, because they're a bad deal, so you'll see lots of them if you check at any point in time. Underpriced units get rented quickly, so you'll see less of them.
Furthermore, I think the author is losing a bit of historical context. For all of human history settlements have grown from a central point outwards. There has been a highly dense core, with decreasing density towards the suburbs. As time progresses the density spreads too to match demand and economic growth.
Only in the past century or so have large numbers of people been able to demand that this density spread stop or reverse itself, typically with the application of zoning regulations. This has put undue pressure on the cities where this happens between those trying to continue an ancient growth pattern, and those who are trying to stop it.
So from a very large historical view, those living on the outskirts of a city complaining about the spread of density are being unreasonable, because this is exactly what successful cities have done for all of human history.
If you notice that a certain part of a mountain near you has consistent avalanches, then you really shouldn't be surprised if a home built near it gets knocked flat on a regular basis. You can build a giant wall next to it, but at a certain point you should recognize that you ought to build elsewhere.
Similarly, if you want to live a low density lifestyle, don't build close to a thriving metropolis. The only time they don't spread is if they start to fail, or if there is some natural barrier stopping growth.
For most of human history, cities did not actually reproduce enough to maintain their own population. It’s only into the 19th century when cities start to become self sustaining.
If there wasn’t pressure to move to the city then they would’ve collapsed millenia ago. It’s not like there’s this permanent cohort of city weirdos living in the great urban areas, those areas continue to draw in people from the surrounding area.
This has less to do with a change in cities than it has to do with the precipitous drop in demand for rural labor of all sorts, imho.
The overall point is that there has always been a drive to push people into cities (otherwise they’d collapse due to mortality rates). The overall rate of urbanism and urban change has fluctuated over the millenia, but it’s hardly new in any meaningful way.
Hence my assertion that anyone living close to a growing metropolis should not be surprised if the density overtakes them.
They might not like it, that’s perfectly reasonable. But expecting things to not change in your area only is actually quite unreasonable in the long run.
Sure, as a bay developer I could make more money, but my actual spending power would likely be way lower than it already is.
Sure, you as a company are near other tech companies but does physical location really matter in this day and age?
I have a ten minute commute, live in a burb and commute to a neighboring burb. My rent is dirt cheap. I don’t see the appeal, it feels like mass hysteria to me.
Having a utility function that favors certain conditions isn't unreasonable.
> Why would any company or their workers want to be in the bay?
Workers want it for climate, social, and cultural reasons, among others.
Companies want it because that's where the existing pool of workers is and many of them are resistant to leaving. (Also, for some of the same reasons, the VCs and people they want for their boards.)1
This idea is pernicious, that because I can think of a better way for things to work, there should be rules to make them work that way. Its not in alignment with US values, yet so many folks are on that bandwagon. Part of the great divide in US politics at the moment.
On a case-by-case basis, San Francisco gets it wrong quite a bit. A most recent example is the "historic" laundromat that some city officials have prevented from being developed into more housing.
Also, responding to the comment that did go there, talking about who's allowed
Really? If you wanted to build an abattoir, or a factory, on the property your house is on, that would be allowed?
And also, how would you feel about rich people saying that they like having lots of money, and how are these poor people to demand that they give up money in taxes when that would degrade their quality of life? It's totally true that for rich people paying taxes will make them worse off. But that's to a lesser extent than the extent to which it will make poor people better off. So I don't think it's illegitimate for rich people to be forced by the electorate to pay taxes at a higher rate even if rich people don't want that. And I don't think it's illegitimate for California to force SF to build local housing for the people currently commuting 2 hours to jobs in the city even if that makes current residents a bit worse off.
Best line in the article. The author legitimately raises many good points. I’ve never understood the supply and demand argument for YIMBY’s, particularly in the Bay Area. That’s not how cities work in the 21st century. More housing would just make SF into a stronger more desirable economic epicenter thus keeping rents high. Manhattan is a perfect example.
The points about Austin stand as well. Austin has had tons of available prime real estate for a long time. It still has plenty. Having, over the past 20+ years, watched SF become Mordor, Seattle become SF, and Austin become Seattle. I think this may just be the natural progression of things.
San Francisco bears way too much resemblance to an end-stage game of Monopoly, where one player owns almost all the properties, there’s no more paper money in the bank, and there are no more houses or hotels left in the box. That last $150 house on Marvin Gardens (the only misspelled property) isn’t getting built to generate a good ROI- it’s built to either ruin the competition when they stay there (driving them to the poor house- sound familiar?), or because there’s literally no more places to stash your wealth.
Tossing the game board sure sounds like the only good move left to make. That, or getting up to leave.
* a rental vacancy rate of 4.2% (8th lowest out of the 75 largest metro areas)
* a homeowner vacancy rate of 0.7% (11th lowest)
The rates were similar for the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro area. It's possible there are issues with this data, or that it's not measuring the phenomenon you're discussing, but this certainly seems to suggest that SF doesn't have a ton of vacant properties.
Buildings off the rental market don’t count as vacant rentals. Failure to understand this normally subtle distinction retards the progress of this discussion.
If I said there are very few single women in SF because 98% of marriage-minded women are married, you’d see the flaw in the reasoning I’m talking about.
I'm left wondering what you mean, but also afraid to engage because you're pretty hostile to what seems to be some great data around what you're saying. But to address that data, you now say that clearly what we thought you were saying was not what you meant, and that we should be disallowed from bringing up data?
But at the risk that I'm continuing to misunderstand what you're saying, could you point out an example of a building that should be for rent but that is vacant instead, as an example so that we can understand you?
What mechanism do you suggest that can find such buildings and compel them to become rented?
Are you suggesting something like building on vacant land or underutilized land (the YIMBY position), or just existing buildings?
I'm left wondering what you mean,
For example properties for occasional use, properties empty for repairs or renovation, those used as offices or storage, guest houses and AirBnB properties, properties where the owner hasn't decided what to do, and so on.
If you look at [1] (which sadly doesn't provide breakdowns by individual metropolitan area) you'll find that inside US metropolitan statistical areas, 2.4% of properties are vacant but for rent; while 4.8% of properties are "Held off market"
In other words, for every one vacant rental home, there are two homes that aren't on the rental or sale market.
[1] https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/q218ind.html Table 10. Percent Distribution by Type of Vacant by Metro/Nonmetro Area [XLSX - 375 KB]
SF's population has increased 10% since 2010, and I don't know how many people have been priced out, but it's probably at least on that order of magnitude. Held off existing properties don't make much of a dent into that delta, and it's unclear how to lower them even more if they're already so low. It's also unclear why it shouldn't be allowed to be brought up.
And I believe the census goes by what the property owner claims. “My 120-unit condo building with nobody living in it? Yeah, that’s not housing, Ms. census taker.” “Ok.”
And even that doesn’t include industrial, commercial, and office properties that should be converted to housing in response to fair market demand, artificially withheld to make them more liquid as stores of value. The town is full of these and few people notice because they’re not housing and they’re not for rent.
As for commercial space that's not housing, that's up to the city government to change, and the city government and resients who show up to planning meetings oppose that sort of rezoning. This being a conscious action of owners of industrial and commercial property. Are commercial sites more valuable than residential right now in SF? What sort of use brings these owners more gain than renting our properties that they are legally allowed to rent?
Remember the Ghost Ship fire? The proprietors were charged with involuntary manslaughter for using a warehouse as housing:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Oakland_warehouse_fire
I guess I'm just very confused about what you consider to be very obvious. I can't see evidence of people hoarding buildings that could be used for housing. I do see SF residents preventing more buildings being used for housing, and preventing the building of more housing on infill sites.
And that makes me take the comment about whether the tech industry should be in the bay area fairly seriously.
I work for a Big Tech company, and our org, which has highly visible products and exciting work, is struggling to hire people in the bay area. People don't want to move there, and there is huge competition for the people already there, including from other internal teams, so we're expanding more at other sites.
I do think that moving tech companies out of San Francisco is the only feasible solution to housing prices. I don’t understand why people keep starting them there, or why they stay there. There’s no way the premium they pay to have an office there can be worth it.
It doesn’t matter what is past the ellipses, because in the absence of a crime against another, a government should never force its people to do or give up anything.
Or in this case: force one set of people to do what they don't want to do, at the behest of a different set of people. You can't argue for the benefit of "the people" when you're privileging one subset of "the people" over another.
https://sf.curbed.com/2018/6/11/17449460/bart-screen-convers...
Coming to the Bay Area from living in NYC or traveling around Europe, you see a city full of 1-2 story single family homes, or Apple building a massive campus with literally no connection to rapid transit, and it’s like watching someone living off Mountain Dew and donuts and wondering why things aren’t going well.
Like build some fucking apartment buildings and run some trains to places where the jobs and housing are. It’s not that fucking complicated.
NYC was able to do this because they did it 50, 70, 100 years ago. Today, they're just building over the same footprints as they had already carved out. Property was less expensive, and the government/companies under fewer moral constraints then.
If you dispute this, go look at how much unused transit capacity exists in East and South San Jose while places like Mountain View and Cupertino receive no attention. You can't even take the VTA to San Jose airport, because flying is also something rich people do. It got so bad that Palo Alto threatened to leave the VTA entirely.
This is what happens when a transit agency stops addressing transit needs to focus on "justice". If you think anything has changed, go look at the VTA's projected plans...dumping even more government spending in places where their existing investment sits idle. Indeed, the VTA is actually reducing their commitments outside of San Jose over time...its all in their plans available for public review.
Are you addressing what the author wrote because it seems like Scott Alexander says it may be more complicated than you claim. He wrote:
>suppose San Francisco dectupled its housing growth for decades, until it was packed border to border with skyscrapers, and was exactly as dense as Manhattan. In a simple supply-based model, the glut of supply should make rents crash to only a few hundred dollars a month or less. But in actual Manhattan, single-bedroom apartments cost $3800 a month – even more than in San Francisco! If your theory predicts that turning a city into Manhattan will make rents plummet, then consider that turning Manhattan into Manhattan made rents much worse, and so maybe your theory is wrong.
Also how many of those high rises are residential?
And this phenomenon is unknown in other cities?
Single bedroom apartments within a short, reasonably efficient, rapid transit commute of midtown can and do go for drastically less money.
The world is literally full of cities that have sane housing and transit policy. If you don’t like New York, try Barcelona or Paris as examples.
The Bay Area is just an abject failure at this, and it’s getting worse. My argument stands, commenting on this topic is like watching one of those “My 600lb Life” shows or something and screaming at the TV. Sure, I get that eventually there’s subtlety to this topic, but for now maybe stop eating 15,000 calories a day.
Or, in this case, stop building massive centers of employment that are 3 stories tall and surrounded by parking lots and wondering why shit isn’t working.
It's not Apple that's responsible for building rail, for zoning for apartments, it's the city. The city itself is not responsible for Apple's success either, and many of the residents would rather that Apple had never been sited in Cupertino so they wouldn't have to deal with all those other people.
That's the problem with Cupertino; a bunch of people moved there and changed it, and thought, "now that I'm here it's finally perfect and we shouldn't let anybody else in." That type of planning attitude, of "build it once and never let it change," is not something that's succeeded ever in the history of mankind. But we'll see how long it lasts this time.
This is the BS part of the article. The author shouldn't be comparing to other US cities, but to other large cities in the world that don't have a housing crisis. His argument is picking a sick person, and comparing to other sick people for differences, instead of comparing to other healthy people.
Almost all the cities he mentions have housing crisis, but he was either too ignorant or too dishonest to realize that.
Tokyo, no available land, builds an entire new San Francisco every 2.5 years for the past 20 years.
The article is incompetence at best, but most likely, given the "depth" of the analysis, intellectual dishonesty.
[1] https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/cost-living-single...
https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3...
https://www.weetas.com/article/rent-income-ratio-17-major-ci...
With the possible exception of Oakland, of which I know little, none of these cities are affordable. Boston and Vancouver, in particular, are among the most expensive cities in North America.
> So here are some YIMBY claims and why I cannot be entirely on board with them.
It isn't necessary in order to provide a factual refutation, and weakens the credibility of the rest of your post.
The typical response is that infrastructure will eventually address congestion concerns...meanwhile BART still has not fulfilled the vision that was laid out in 60s. How long are people supposed to wait?
Long term planning that is set in stone would solve this problem, but doubt it's politically feasible in many places.
An underappreciated source of the bay area's problems is that its enormous immigrant population cannot vote for 10+ years after they arrive, so the people who didn't want it to change have all the political power.
Having to commute from the outskirts isn't nearly so bad if the infrastructure supports it, but you have to build transit for where your city will be in ten years, not where it is now, and we're barely even doing the latter in Austin.
This is why I dislike “Steelmanning” arguments since nobody spends the time to research the opposition and just better articulates strawmen.
I’m not a member of the hyper logical brain geniuses society that eats this stuff up, but if you want to zero in on stuff YIMBYs are weak on consider ableism, school crowding and (If applicable to a region) water availability.
Why do supposed “rationalists” insist on trying to advocate everything through dispassionate, logical discourse? Do they really not realize how ineffective that is in the competition of ideas for human mindshare? Do they have zero understanding of human psychology and sociological group dynamics?
Every group has people who advocate for the group beliefs in emotional, close-minded ways. Groups that have accurate beliefs will also have people who argue more dispassionately.
If you see a discourse dominated almost exclusively by tribal back-patting, it should put their beliefs in question.
If your goal is to be convince if you're right, and be convinced if you're aren't, they become less so.
There are multiple audiences and many will reject emotional appeals out of hand. Certainly if you oppose New Urbanism, a guy ranting about how you're a racist is unlikely to change your mind.
For an example of what a devolution into appeals to emotion and base notions looks like, turn on Fox News or MSNBC during the evening and witness the demagogues screaming straight at your amygdala and hippocampus. The current cycle degradation of discourse has opened the door to "fake news" and other very real problems. In this case, the bogeyman is real.
They generally don't; reacting negatively, as here, to what is seen as a particularly egregious example of emotional manipulation without accompanying substantive argument isn't the same as insisting on all promotion being purely rational, and very few “rstionalists” take the extreme position you describe.
Still, they do tend to object to egregious examples because the nature of emotional manipulation is that once you recognize it directed at yourself, it naturally produces a strong negative emotional reaction and a reactive deepening of skepticism (the nature of such manipulation is that it is most likely to be noticed, even by sophisticated information consumers, when deployed in favor of a cause the listener is already skeptical of) of the substantive justification of the party deploying it.
> Do they have zero understanding of human psychology and sociological group dynamics?
It seems that, aside from the strawman problem, the question you ask demonstrates exactly the problem you complain of.