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Comment by hangonhn | Hacker News Reader

Lumping Mountain View in there with Palo Alto and others is really unfair. MV is doing the best it can but it can't carry all the weight of Bay Area growth. 1/5 housing starts in Santa Clara county was in MV. MV issued more permits than ALL its neighboring cities COMBINED. MV issued more permits than even San Jose.

https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2018/09/28/mountain-view-leads...

Unless the whole of Santa Clara county and San Mateo county work together instead of playing chicken with each other, we will make no progress on this problem. MV has been willing to do more but it would be unfair for MV to carry the weight while all the other cities limit housing to maintain the "character" of their towns.

The tech boom is a huge blessing that any city, state, or even country would be lucky to have. However, people wanting it all and NIMBYism are turning an opportunity into a problem.

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> it would be unfair for MV to carry the weight

The fact that it's perceived as a sacrifice to build housing is one of the core problems.

And one of the main reasons for this perception is that, for the city, it is true. Due to Prop 13, CITIES LOSE MONEY BY HAVING RESIDENTS. As long as that is true, don't expect much to change around housing in California.

>> it would be unfair for MV to carry the weight

> The fact that it's perceived as a sacrifice to build housing is one of the core problems.

In the short term, increased housing will decrease property values. This has to be the case because rentals are a direct competitor to real estate ownership.

In the long term, increased housing should increase property values; however, few people are willing to place much value on something even 2 years in the future, much less 20.

> Due to Prop 13, CITIES LOSE MONEY BY HAVING RESIDENTS.

I'm not sure how much I buy this. I'm not super familiar with California, so I'm not going to say it's false, but there should be a number of other methods (sales tax comes to mind) for cities to raise revenue from residents.

> increased housing will decrease property values.

How? It means you get either a new nice property on a lot, or a lot more properties on a lot. (If density increases.)

Increased density increases demand which draws in services and attention, which increases property values.

Of course there's an inflection point, but the US/Cali/Valley/SF is a looooong waaaay awaaaaay from worrying about slums.

> short term

Yes, people don't like constructions, but that's it probably. After it's done, no one cares.

>> In the short term, increased housing will decrease property values.

> How?

If you keep demand constant and increase supply, you will decrease price. This is one of the most basic tenants of microeconomics.

If that's too abstract, just imagine you're a landlord in SF who's used to increasing your rent by 10% per year (no idea what the actual number is) because there are 1% vacancies in the city. Now imagine that all of a sudden more housing came on line so that there are now 20% vacancies in the city. You probably wouldn't be able to increase your price and may have to drop it.

Now imagine that the number of bedrooms in SF increased by a factor of 10 overnight. The price of real estate would crater.

In the long term, the price of real estate will go up with density. All you have to do is look at places like Manhattan, Tokyo, Hong Kong, etc. This is because cities tend to draw in new citizens from the surrounding area until it is too expensive or too uncomfortable to live there. However, it takes time for those people to move to the city and fill vacancies.

> Due to Prop 13...

I'm not following. Prop 13 doesn't apply to new residents. It only applies to existing residents. Building new homes increases revenue.

Or an I missing something?

Prop 13 cut the tax rate below the cost of services the city provides residents. Building more housing, especially cheap housing makes the cities financial situation worse. One of the ways cities try to make up for this is by charging fees for new construction. Which also drives up the cost of housing.

Also doesn't help that prop 13 limits property tax increases for commercial property. And corporations live forever.

In the Bay Area, commercial property is often owned by shell companies. When commercial property is purchased or sold, the shell company is sold instead of the actual property so the property value is never reassessed for tax purposes.

> Building new homes increases revenue

In year 1, yes. Then that revenue is never increased, while inflation goes up.

The alternate use of the land for retail (sales taxes!) and office buildings is far more favorable, especially long term.

That's weird. I was driving around MV and Sunnyvale this weekend and was surprised by how much more residential (apartment complexes/townhoses) building seemed to be happening in Sunnyvale (along Evelyn Ave) than MV.

Could it be that these Sunnyvale developments were just issued permits earlier (2016 or 2017), and we're just seeing it further down the pipeline?

MV is issuing permits mostly for townhouses, IIRC. In my neighborhood alone a number of townhouse communities have gone up. One single family home is being replaced by a 4 unit townhouse. So I wonder if that explains the difference. I also think that higher density housing is where we need to go. We don't need to go to high rises just yet but townhouses is much more efficient use of the limit space.

It probably doesn't matter long term. Any growing city serious about affordable housing long term need to figure out how to develop new areas essentially indefinitely. Whether you look like Boston, Vancouver or Hong Kong is in reality less of an issue.

I think that's largely it. MV was radically anti-housing until there was a big shake-up in the city council in 2014 (IIRC 4 grey-haired NIMBYs lost their seats in favor of 20- and 30-something techies and progressive activists). The flood of permits followed after that, and construction lags permitting by several years.

Sunnyvale has been reliably pro-housing since about 2010, which means that a lot of new supply came on the market in 2015 and 2016, which has alleviated the housing supply issue significantly. I left MTV in 2014 after having my rent double in 3 years, from $1400 to $2800; my rent in Sunnyvale has gone up by about $30/month total in the 5 years since, and the 2 BR townhome I'm in now currently rents for less than the 1BR in MTV that I used to live in.

Sunnyvale and Mountain View aren't really different rental markets, though, so I'd be surprised if the difference in rent increases you saw between the two are related to differences in new housing permits.

Put another way, restricting housing supply in Mountain View likely impacts rents its socioeconomically similar neighbor, Sunnyvale.

They are, though. I wouldn't have expected it, but I was just looking at Craigslist now and rents in Mountain View seem to go for about $700/month over roughly equivalent housing in Sunnyvale. I'm in a pretty old 2BR right next to the Mountain View border for $2600; the equivalent would be a 2BR in the California/Escuela area, which rents for about $3300/month. Perhaps it's just my neighborhood (rents in new construction near the downtown areas are about $4500 for a 2BR in both places), but there's a similar differential among 1BRs north of Central: $2500-$2800 in MTV, $2000 in Sunnyvale.

Among likely differentiators: 1.) Traffic. If you're traveling to Google or Facebook Sunnyvale adds an extra 15-20 minutes to your commute. 2.) Schools. They're better in Mountain View, at least for now, though both regions are rapidly gentrifying. 3.) Cachet. Mountain View has the name because of Google. Sunnyvale doesn't really, and also feels like more of a sterile suburb than a lively community. 4.) Shuttle stops. I don't know exactly where they are now, but that'd explain why the downtown areas go for relatively equal expensive rents, while my neighborhood (which AFAICT has no tech shuttle stops anywhere near it) rents for a lot less than other neighborhoods in the area.

Those factors do make sense, although I'd think Sunnyvale would have a shorter commute to employers like Apple.

I definitely don't have a nuanced enough understanding of the difference in civic liveliness of the two cities - and resulting desirability - they both always felt pretty suburban to me. But I've never lived in either one.

They definitely are - two years ago I left a previous place that had jacked up my rent for a 1 bed/1 bath place to a little over $2600, and was frustrated by the housing market in Mountain View. Most places were charging over $3k, with some going even over $5k. I ended up settling in Sunnyvale for a 2 bed/2 bath place for $2700.

Mountain View has permitted a large amount of housing development west of 101 along San Antonio Road for what feels like 15 years (these were all one-two story businesses or Sears/Montgomery Ward open mall, now mixed used with four story apartment/condos, new Facebook offices), also a lot of development along Rengstorff and some right on El Camino during the same time. Friends who left and came to visit recently said it was tremendously different than they remembered.

San Antonio Center opened in IIRC 2012, 7 years ago. The area was all desolate parking lots around Walmart/Sears/Shockley when I first moved here 10 years ago.

I leave in MV for a few years: in my opinion there has been many development of dense complex in the recent years (not to say that it is enough): especially alongside El Camino and also in the San Antonio area.

I guess another way to look at it is how much office space has Mountain View approved to be developed? If they're super happy to have a Googleplex expansion that will fit another 5,000 Googlers, but only approve 1,000 more units... how do you reconcile that?

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you - every single place should want to build more housing! But when has MV said "You know what? take your fancy office complex and move it somewhere else."?

Quick Edit: My point is mainly that all of these Bay Area governments are more than happy to get more lucrative office space built that employs thousands of employees, but suddenly hem and haw about "neighborhood character" when it comes to housing that lucrative workforce.

This is the most important part of the equation but it is very intentionally omitted. Another factor is financial mismanagement on the part of municipalities like the debacle with San Jose’s fire chief pensions and police salaries. People want to simplify the issue to nimby old people versus the rest of decent society but the reality is that it’s a problem of unsustainable population growth and myopic and incompetent governance.

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