Comment by true_tuna | Hacker News Reader

Comment by true_tuna | Hacker News Reader

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California is fucked because normal people can’t afford to live here anymore. At least not in the Bay Area, LA, and San Diego. In San Francisco a favorite pastime is to blame tech workers for “driving up rents” anyone who has taken economics knows prices don’t work that way. Prices go up when demand exceeds supply. We also are quite aware of WHY demand exceeds supply. 1) People keep coming here because we keep hiring, and 2) people who already live here block new housing construction. The objection we see in every community meeting is “we don’t want to change the character of our city”. I assure you, driving out your teachers, bus drivers, baristas and librarians is changing your city even worse. It leads to congestion, increased homelessness, loss of diversity. For every ten jobs we create we build two new houses. It’s not the people with new jobs that suffer.

Here’s the solution. A new state law saying if a city adds a job it also has to permit the construction of a unit of housing. Done.

I assure you if the City of Mountain View has to follow that rule, the muddy lot next to Google campus (currently zoned for hotel) would have a ten story apartment building in it next year. Why hasn’t it happened yet? Not allowed. Well who doesn’t allow it? The city. Why won’t the city allow it? Residents don’t want new housing. Why don’t residents want new housing? A mistaken belief that blocking new housing will preserve their city. Blocking new housing will in fact destroy our communities. We can get out of this mess, but we have to build our way out.

> Why don’t residents want new housing? A mistaken belief that blocking new housing will preserve their city.

It isn't a mistaken belief. If you got in early and own property in a place like SF then rising prices are going to be adding money to your retirement account.

Any real solution (build, build, build!) to the housing market in a place like SF would destroy a lot of value for a lot of people. Most of those people are middle-class, and the money they've stuffed in their bricks is their single biggest investment.

Of course if it all comes crashing down they'll also lose, but right now that's looking a whole lot less likely than them being able to keep riding housing bubble gravy train.

Why would it destroy value? If the area around my home develops into a booming area, some developer will want to buy my home and build something bigger on it. These low-rise buildings must be bought and replaced for the "build, build, build" to happen. The only way this could backfire for some is if the building boom starts and then the economy collapses and the boom never returns. Now you have an old house surrounded by high rises and rent is low because of the surplus that was built. That seems very unlikely though. To me the bigger threat seems to be that some other place with fewer NIMBYs will outgrow SV because of the artificial limit imposed by the NIMBYs.

Sure, some property owners will luck out in the way you're describing. Their lot will be bought out to develop a high-rise.

But it's just as likely that the lot next to them will be bought for development, and theirs will be passed over for the foreseeable future, or that the only reason anyone lives in their suburb is because of unreasonable prices where people actually want to live.

Now their property value will plateau or fall as demand for housing falls due to new development happening elsewhere.

In the long term it's likely that everyone involved will win, but many property owners just have a 10-20 year horizon before they'd like to sell, and might correctly foresee that a deregulated zoning policy might lead to a growth slump in that time frame if the supply doesn't continue to be artificially restricted.

And that is why incentivizing real estate as an investment vehicle exacerbates the housing crisis. Misaligned incentives at the local level means that heavy-handed state measures (SB 827, OP's proposal, etc.) is likely the only way out of this mess.

There's plenty of potential ways out of the mess, but pretending that the status quo is uniformly bad and just needs to be fixed isn't going to help.

The entire reason for why there's a problem is because the current state of affairs is awesome for some people (existing property owners) and bad for pretty much everyone else.

Saying it needs to be a state law is just setting up a different variant of the same intractable problem.

Who's going to care to lobby more when such a law is proposed state-wide in California? A bunch of property owners in SF/LA sitting on a million $ in assets, or potential future California residents who don't even live there because property prices are insane now?

To complete the thought, if government did allow a massive increase in housing supply and all those voters “lose” that money, the associated politicians will be gone in a heartbeat. So while the NIMBYs start this, they’re enabled by politicians in fear of their phony-baloney jobs.

It will take state level intervention. The voting population of the city of San Francisco itself has enormously outsized influence on the regional economy due to their ability to control development within the borders of the city. But they constitute nowhere near the majority of the population of the Bay Area. At some point (ideally) their state level politicians will just get steamrolled by the representatives of the rest of the state's population, and most of their power to control local development will be stripped away.

Presumably the opposition to that won't just be Bay Area NIMBYs, but anyone living in California with an interest in the state not dictating zoning policy to local municipalities.

Basically true, but I'm happy enough to let the market solve this one. California will change or it will fail.

The one thing that should perhaps be legislated is some up-front disclosure in employment offers of typical costs of living in the BA. Many prospective employees from elsewhere will not quickly realize that (absurd as it seems) you can't raise a family there on $200K/y.

Pity, since California is such a nice place weather wise. And there is the crux of the problem: people put up with this madness because there is some other non-market reason that isn't very portable (e.g. Austin has very hot summers).

An alternative/additional solution to "just built more, denser housing" is making remote work much more widely adopted. A lot of roles in software, research, etc. are very well suited for remote work. Bay Area companies should: (1) make remote work more widespread and (2) build more offices outside of Bay Area.

Yep - I agree with the increased dense housing is needed (although I would also argue that with this construction infrastructure / public transit comes for the ride or it is a failure too), but it seems that one of the stop gaps is to promote /incentive remote at companies...

> Why don’t residents want new housing?

Also people who own houses want the cost of houses to be high.

As a homeowner, I don't want home prices to be high.

High home prices mean I can't move my family without incurring a substantial jump in property taxes (even if it's to downsize once the kids move out).

I'd also like my kids to have the option to live here without too much financial difficulty.

You have the right perspective on this IMO. Thinking about owning a home as an investment is foolhardy: very few people are going to get rich off an increase in their home's value, and only a few are even going to significantly increase their retirement funds after downsizing.

Houses are places to live, not investments. It's in all of our interests if they're as affordable as possible everywhere instead of pushing the equivalence of an arms race.

The irony being, of course, that California is one of the few places where your home value could rise 5-10X and your property taxes appreciate at less than inflation.

Prop 13 creates many artificial barriers to selling property and other market distortions, and folks not downsizing when they'd like to is one of the crazier ones.

The most dense cities in the world: Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo even New York City should be the go to locations for tech, but they're not.

The Bay Area has two things going for it that will make it hard to replace.

1. Non-competes are unenforceable. This means that the most talented engineers like working here because they can job hop with ease where in other locales they are locked into jobs working for lousy bosses.

2. Many of the most talented venture capitalists and seed investors like living here. They like it because it's pretty, you can escape the city in no time and be in nature and it's low density. I doubt the kind of people who live in Atherton or Woodside would pick up and move so easily to L.A or Manhattan. The Bay Area with its geographical boundaries provides a pretty good integration of ultra-rich neighborhoods with the middle class workers that make up the bulk of tech's working class.

> The most dense cities in the world: Hong Kong, Singapore, even New York City should be the go to locations for tech, but they're not.

Those places have COL problems as bad or worse than the Bay Area. At least Singapore (and to a lesser extent HK) deals with it via lots of public subsidized housing.

The comment you replied to must have been edited since you replied to it.

Tokyo rents basically haven’t moved in the last 30 years and the population has added 1.5m people. If you want to work in NYC there are many, many affordable options within 1 hours commute.

Commuting 1 hour, especially in public transit in the NYC area, is a terrible way to live.

The current democratic structure clearly doesn't work here. Western democracies are starting to look more and more inefficient these days. They're overwhelmed with complexity and are stuck on short-term egoism.

The cities are quite happy to not add jobs either. The “bluff” will be called.

Baristas?

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