Having a Sports Team May help local restaurants, but I would think so would more houses. When there are so many homeless people, the housing stock is more important than a stadium.
There's nothing wrong with building entertainment venues in cities if they're financed without tax payer money.
NIMBYs tend to welcome things that aren't new housing since they are likely to raise their property value. New housing has the potential to do the opposite.
You’re also overstating the support from “local residents”: the fact is that the city council gave a prime plot of redevelopable land (in a city with little available) to a sports team, as part of a sweetheart tax deal. It’s a criminal misappropriation of resources that was made behind closed doors.
Not sure what closed doors you're talking about.
The Warriors stadium is literally a gold standard and a model that other sports teams should follow. Not only did they pay out of pocket, but they donated millions to the city to help manage traffic in the area.
Pacific Bell Park was wholly privately financed, much of that from seat licenses. And the ballpark was key to the redevelopment of the entire China Basin area -- look at aerial photographs of the region before 1999.
Remember, people often have limited understanding of impacts focusing on a small percentage of what’s going on. Aka sound byte politics, a stadium is only half the story rarely used, low density parking can be a larger issue.
No, if you've bought a home, you want ever increasing prices. But people forget that during the first half of life, you generally try to move somewhere bigger each time you move. If prices increase 10% on average, your $500k property is now worth around $550. Yay!
However, the house you want to buy, that cost $1m when you bought your current property, now costs $1.1m. So actually, you lost $50k for the standard of living you're looking for, rather than gained it.
If prices decreased 10%, you would seem to have lost $50k, until you want to move somewhere bigger and therefore can cash in the proportionally bigger "discount".
If yes, everyone will do as you say and vote to restrict housing supply to maximise their property value.
Democracy works great for deciding if your community wants a nicer dog park or a bigger library, not so great for deciding if your community should consists of single family homes or 4-5 story apartments.
I have 50K in cash which I can leverage into 250K worth of mortgage. That gets me more home despite the price increase. In turn, I get to pocket the difference between interest and home value increases when I eventually sell and retire to a place with normal housing cost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13
They can buy multiple houses rent them out, and then let the kids live in them when they grow up.
Also, businesses can own multiple properties and sell them without reassessment (there is a well-known loophole involving shell companies that makes this possible).
Basically the only people that get hit by prop 13 reassessments this are young working families that need to upgrade, or want to buy into a stable housing situation to raise their kids.
It's already not worth any money to me to move between SF and mtv. Tried it for years. It's terrible already .
If you move somewhere especially the Bay Area be prepared to pay the transplant tax.
Leaving aside how these laws led to the dire situation for the UPS guy in the first place, what if he has children? The firstborn maybe gets the place for cheap but others are essentially forced to "pay the transplant tax".
I think it hurts non-homeowning residents because it eliminates a powerful incentive for densification. Where I live, homes are taxed as if they were developed to their maximum zoned potential. This motivates people to move out of single-family homes so they can be redeveloped into higher density and add much-needed supply to the market.
It's true that the homeowner is worse off, but society does not function unless we prioritize the needs of the many over the few. IMHO. Also, the homeowners usually make an incredible amount of money selling homes that they bought for nearly nothing, so they get some compensation for the trauma of having to move.
Sure they could sell the now very valuable home and downgrade, but I find it inhumane to force someone out to "downgrade" from a home they already own.
Housing is expensive in big cities because there are jobs, amenities and entertainment for a diverse group of people. That entertainment includes sports.
You're right of course that the poorest people would still be unable to afford homes. Building more homes would reduce homelessness but not eliminate it.
The problem with NIMBYism isn't saying no to building more homes per se, it is saying no to more homes while saying yes to more jobs and more commerce that creates the problem.
Someone who works in SF, but lives 40 minutes away due to cost, should be considered a constituent of SF and their voice is as valid as that of a resident.
while saying yes to more jobs
I think it’s more likely that mental illness and addiction are bigger factors, along with an absence of good interventions and an abuse of the prison system. Statistics showing a majority of American homeless people are either mentally ill, addicted to drugs, or both certainly support that view over yours, and reveals the deep complexity of solving the problem. You can’t just shove someone from the streets into a house and call it a day, they need far more support than that.
The causality of homelessness and addiction is more like a negative feedback loop. eg No insurance, get sick or injured, self medicate with alcohol or oxy, loose job, loose housing.
The link between mental illness and homelessness is pretty straight forward.
Because I've never seen anything that suggests that a majority of homeless people have addiction/mental illness problems. A higher percentage of such issues then the housed population, sure, but not a majority.
AFAIK, you can find a direct correspondence between increased rental prices and increased homelessness, and that's the main contributor. https://www.zillow.com/research/homelessness-rent-affordabil...
I mean unless you go back to the 1970's before the U.S. Government literally decimated it's housing budget (https://www.kcet.org/shows/socal-connected/the-rise-of-homel...)
https://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/addiction.pdf
https://sunrisehouse.com/addiction-demographics/homeless-pop...
https://mentalillnesspolicy.org/consequences/homeless-mental...
In January 2015, the most extensive survey ever undertaken found 564,708 people were homeless on a given night in the United States. Depending on the age group in question, and how homelessness is defined, the consensus estimate as of 2014 was that, at minimum, 25 percent of the American homeless—140,000 individuals—were seriously mentally ill at any given point in time. Forty-five percent of the homeless—250,000 individuals—had any mental illness. More would be labeled homeless if these were annual counts rather than point-in-time counts.
https://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/addiction.pdf
Although obtaining an accurate, recent count is difficult, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (2003) estimates, 38% of homeless people were dependent on alcohol and 26% abused other drugs. Alcohol abuse is more common in older generations, while drug abuse is more common in homeless youth and young adults (Didenko and Pankratz, 2007). Substance abuse is much more common among homeless people than in the general population. According to the 2006 National Household Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), 15% of people above the age of 12 reported using drugs within the past year and only 8% reported using drugs within the past month.
https://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/fixing-the-system/fe...
https://nationalhomeless.org/about-homelessness/ lists housing and poverty as the major factors contributing the homelessness, and under other contributing factors says that, "Approximately 16% of the single adult homeless population suffers from some form of severe and persistent mental illness"
I could go through and argue these step by step, but I think my larger point is that homelessness is an economic issue. Drug addiction rates haven't increased over time (see https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/chart-s... ) It's harder to talk about mental health rates, since so many mental health issues are untreated and increased mental health treatment can be mistaken for new rates, but I've seen nothing suggesting that rates have increased dramatically since the 1970s. Homelessness however, increased dramatically. So I don't think you can place addiction or mental illness as the main contributor.
Getting to your statement on housing first initiatives, even if homelessness was 100% addiction and mental illness related, a stable location allows better continuity of care, provision of treatment, followups etc. Certainly sticking someone in a house isn't enough, but it can be a meaningful start, even if the person suffers from addiction or mental illness. It also reduces street victimization, infectious disease spread, hypothermia, etc.
Also, I'd note that homelessness is not just a single person issue. Many families become homeless, the National Center on Family Homelessness estimates 1 in 30 children are homeless (https://www.air.org/center/national-center-family-homelessne...). Housing first helps kids and families. Incidentally domestic violence is one of the biggest causes of women and families being homeless :-(.
I believe treating homelessness as merely as mental health/addiction/public health issue and not an economic consequence to reductions in affordable housing, housing assistance, and lower real wages for low income workers misses the point.
We've probably strayed a bit far from talking about stadiums, so I'll leave it be.
Solving the entire problem is more complex than more housing supply, that doesn't mean that more housing supply isn't an important part of the solution.
Even in SF with the legendary homeless problems there 1000 people off the streets would make a gigantic impact.
But what about building a giant homeless shelter instead of a stadium? Or.. how about having homeless dorms in the stadium? May be just trying would help?
For the new MLS stadium being built here, the stadium is being privately financed. Public money is going to be used for a parking facility and other supporting infrastructure like streets, etc.
Yes, the enhancements are needed because of the new stadium, but the benefit is not entirely to the MLS team.
And these are nothing like the deals made many years ago where the city/county build stadiums for the Bengals and Reds and covered the entire cost, which is what was alluded to in the parent.
That’s a huge subsidy. The lost property taxes on the developed stadium alone are huge
Call it NIMBY call it whatever you want but there is _no_ incentive for long term SF residents (10+ years) especially home owners to support more housing, especially for tech transplants.
I understand that the problem feels intractable, but it's because we treat the people make it so like something that simply is. It is not a thing that simply is, it is a moral choice made my hundreds of thousands of people over and over again and it is their failure.