Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California
strongtowns.org
strongtowns.org
> No neighborhood should be subjected to radical change.
Is there any dynamic evolutionary system that actually follows these rules? The tech industry is famous for lumbering behemoths that are constitutionally incapable of innovation and then get replaced wholesale by nimble startups. National borders change all at once, in wars or revolutions, rather than incrementally as demographics change. Human beings don't change much after early adulthood; instead they make new humans who replace them when they die. Evolution itself seems to have periods of equilibrium when resources are abundant and nearly every individual survives, followed by abrupt speciation when resources get tight, individuals die off, and populations get isolated from one another.
The only positive example I can think of is democracy, which is specifically designed to enable gradual change so that radical change doesn't happen, and yet still frequently gets party realignments, charismatic strongmen, and the occasional revolution.
I worry that this philosophy sounds great precisely because it's not how the world works. Human beings are really bad at noticing or reacting to gradual change; it tends to pile up until it becomes too big to ignore, and then rapidly reaches a tipping point and crisis where the newly strong force out the weak. This is undesirable, but also seems largely unavoidable.
Commercial development of the downtown space will only increase the value of homes in my neighborhood.
Arguably, not really. Bernhardt J. Stern's 1930s-40s explorations into resistance of technological innovation has been revelatory to me:
"Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations" (1937) https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...
Markdown: https://pastebin.com/raw/fZajYSGa
Having some item, totem, or mechanism for producing, securing, or controlling wealth, the cheapest way to grow power further is often to defend that against new advances or competition.
Stern describes both technology and housing in his article.
Like I hear about a housing crisis in SF but I go there and there are supermarkets surrounded by parking lots in the middle of the city. There are literal big-box stores like you'd see in the suburbs adjacent to the central business district, like that Petco Safeway block near Mission Bay.
In the Embarcadero there are actual motor inns, crappy hotels with one story raised 10 feet off the ground with parking spaces below them. Like a whole bunch of them. You don't even see those in abandoned small towns any more.
You head to the beach and you go through mile after mile of outer sunset with crappy little 2 story houses and residential streets dominated by garage doors which is like the most people-unfriendly building style known to man.
Like do people know that every little private one-car garage has no benefit on a larger scale? The garage holds one car, and the curb cut prevents parking on the street in front, for a net gain of zero parking spaces.
Yet the entire city is dominated by garages at street level. And two story buildings, and mile after mile of awful zero-architecture postwar commercial properties.
Yes the painted ladies are pretty, don't bulldoze them. Landmark Lombard street and some of the other charming blocks, Sure why not. But it's a global commercial city willing to build 50+ story office towers, and unwilling to do anything about the dozens of square miles of 1-2 story unredeemable residential surrounding them.
It's insane.
It's insane. When I first got here from the east coast, I thought maybe there was some reason involving earthquake codes. And then I learned.
I used to live in NYC, a city that's had its own difficulties adding new housing, corruption in the permitting process, considering too many areas "historic." But the Bay Area is something completely different. It seems that everyone who already owns a single family home is strongly in favor of pulling up the ladder.
Perhaps too much money is riding on the existing "market value" of homes here. If zoning restrictions were relaxed, could house prices collapse? Proposition 13 can't be helping, either.
It honestly didn't seem all that insane to me, because Boston is crazier in nearly every dimension. The peninsula at least has 3-lane boulevards with a reasonable road hierarchy and traffic light timings. Boston has cowpaths branching off in every direction, controlled by stop signs that can literally back up for miles. The peninsula has block after block of Eichlers on 1/4 acre lots. Boston has mid-rise row-houses on landfill in the Back Bay, quickly trailing off to historic old houses on 1.5 acre lots 10 minutes outside of the city. The peninsula refuses to let you put in an in-law unit or cut down a redwood tree without going through an extensive permitting process. The Boston area might refuse to let you put in new window panes if you live in a historic house (my computer teacher lived in one from the 1730s, and it still had all the original glass - which back then was hand made and tended to flow like putty - because it was considered a historic property and she couldn't modify it). The peninsula is due for a natural disaster in the next 30 years. In Boston, as my wife puts it, every winter is a natural disaster. BART has a problem with homeless dudes and property crime. The Red Line has a problem with trains losing the 3rd rail and running 20 minutes late. Caltrain electrification is stuck in limbo. The Big Dig has ceiling tiles that fall down and kill people.
Of course, the flip side of this is that Boston hasn't grown since 1950, and is around the same size as its 1910 population. San Francisco will probably meet a similar fate when the tech boom peters out.
https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/how-does-...
Housing prices in Boston aren't Bay bad or even close to it.
That sounds like a really easy problem to solve ...
"Yes, children - of course you may play baseball in my front yard ..."
It's actually quite the opposite. So-called soft story buildings are more dangerous in an earthquake and property owners are taking quite a while to bring them up to code. Californians just love their cars.
I don't see how that could be the case. The property value of a plot of land on which a 50, or even 5 story building can be built is much higher than the property value of a single-family home.
It's sorta like when labor unions go away. The company that hires non-unionized labor at half the price and double the productivity reaps an enormous windfall. So do the employees, who were presumably in other, less well-paying jobs. Everyone else who chooses not to play the new game ends up out of a job.
Or is this correct: As housing prices rise, it becomes cost effective to replace simplexes with duplexes, threeplexes, etc., causing the value of all simplexes to rise.
That's not completely accurate. Yes, demand might fall, but even so price and value will still rise regardless.
If you build a 50 unit complex next door, as long as some of those 50 units sell, then everyone elses 1/4th acre will become more valuable, even if no one ever actually buys them, because land value in the US has very little to do with buyers or demand, and is exclusively valued by whatever property transactions happen to occur nearby it.
land value in the US has very little to do with buyers or demand, and is exclusively valued by whatever property transactions happen to occur nearby it
Most residential properties here could have been snapped up in 2009 for about 60% of current costs... because demand was lower. (Probably several hundred percent in areas like Mission Bay.)
Land value in the US obviously has to do with buyers and demand.
So yes the price of land would go up, but the price of livable space would fall. And the cost of livable space is what we care about with regards to affordable housing.
Elaborate efforts have been made to adapt the contradictory parts, efforts that worked adequately for a while but which are now coming apart, leaving a situation with no way forward at all.
Do an image search for old timey SF and you'll see: the Sunset was sand dunes until about last Tuesday, etc. Dudes used to pan for gold out by Lake Merced.
Also, this was the weirdo town. Bohemia on the Bay. Serious folk didn't really come here to be serious and sane. The old line was, "All the crazy people move to California, and all the crazy people in California move to San Francisco." To which residents add, "And all the people too crazy for San Francisco move to Berkeley."
So yeah, you've got a young town full of nuts and flakes that no one really paid much attention to until the last ~50 years or so, whadda ya expect, eh?
Things are changing though. I was over in the Inner Sunset the other day and the beautiful people were there casting me in the shade because I look too close to homeless on the hipster/homeless spectrum.
My concern is the weakening of the commitment to keeping the wild areas of the Bay Area wild. SF is the largest city with the most wilderness around it in the world. Marin Headlands, Wildcat canyon et. al., nearly half of the peninsula is forest. I saw a coyote in someone's front yard on Junipero Serra the other day not three blocks from Stonestown Mall! In a neighborhood of single family homes, FWIW.
I don't think it would be the best of all possible worlds to make the bay area look like Manhattan or Tokyo. On the other hand, it sucks that I can't afford an apartment in my home town, let alone ever own a home, despite making programmer money. I can't imagine what it would be like if I didn't have tech skills. I'd probably be living in a tent under the freeway.
"I don't think it would be the best of all possible worlds to make the bay area look like Manhattan or Tokyo."
These two sentiments are in direct conflict though. Your options are to either build up or to build out. Building up will preserve the nearby wilderness; building out will see it turned into low density housing, roads, and terrible traffic congestion.
I know. Quoting Whitman, "I am large. I contain multitudes."
> Your options are to either build up or to build out.
Or, in a word, arcologies.
> Arcology, a portmanteau of "architecture" and "ecology", is a field of creating architectural design principles for very densely populated, ecologically low-impact human habitats.
> The term was coined in 1969 by architect Paolo Soleri, who believed that a completed arcology would provide space for a variety of residential, commercial, and agricultural facilities while minimizing individual human environmental impact. These structures have been largely hypothetical, as no arcology, even one envisioned by Soleri himself, has yet been built.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology
If I had my druthers, I would roll up the low density stuff into arcologies and rehabilitate the old creeks that ran and still run to the bay. Use Permaculture (applied ecology) and passive design. IIRC the Australians were going to build a huge multi-acre combined solar chimney and greenhouse to generate electricity and grow food. &c.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_chimney
We have all the solutions we need (often they are decades old) we just have to clue up and get crackin'.
And also the trend of people wanting to live in SF is a pretty recent phenomenon. The population of SF in 2000 was the same as it was in the 1950's. People were leaving SF in droves 40 years ago.
Cities can't just turn on a dime.
Other urban areas undergoing growth seem to have done much better by allowing more density. Unfortunately the California tax system incentivizes municipalities to build office space over housing. With the Bay Area's patchwork local organization and no metropolitan level layer of governance local municipalities instead play beggar-thy-neighbour as they promote only development that expands their tax base while the burdens of providing schools etc. falls to the municipality next door.
https://goo.gl/maps/7iW3oiqN3FcPhVXq6
Who owns it? Why is this still not housing or at least something? Who knows! There's a vacant boarded up mansion/victorian multiunit building on Grove as well that has been that way forever as well.
Also years ago there was a natural grocery store that closed on Divisadero. There was some controversy but the council decided to let it become a Core Power Yoga. That was almost a year ago. Zero progress has been made on building that studio, still an empty shop front.
http://www.sfweekly.com/news/with-corepower-divisadero-loses...
I don't have a strong opinion on that fight, but it's insane that these things take so long. I don't understand it, I've been meaning to go to a neighborhood meeting to ask, but I've been busy the rare nights they happen.
Seems there was once a school there: https://sf.curbed.com/2012/5/31/10366476/painted-ladies-have...
http://www.sfweekly.com/news/news-news/entropy-on-grove-stre... (2017) elaborates on why its been vacant, seems like the owner doesn't have the funds/desire to make it habitable. Also mentions how much red tape exists to develop in the neighborhood in the last couple paragraphs, maybe the owner doesn't feel like enduring that adventure.
The Peninsula is bland and awful. Plenty of affluent folks that just like to fuck with people (a.k.a. Atherton and the NIMBY's asinine fight against electrifying Caltrain). Plenty of folks (a.k.a. Brisbane) that like to pretend they're rich and only want to develop commercial property and leave the housing to SF.
But... the Bay Area is incredibly provincial. San Mateo county (most of the peninsula) is not San Francisco.
Like I hear about a housing crisis in SF but I go there and there are supermarkets surrounded by parking lots in the middle of the city. There are literal big-box stores like you'd see in the suburbs adjacent to the central business district, like that Petco Safeway block near Mission Bay.
Part if it is that there are chain retail bans in many neighborhoods, but the other part is where are you going to put the big stores? Cities in San Mateo county fight tooth and nail over the big box stores (see the Target in Colma directly across the highway from the Target in Daly City). Retail = tax revenue. Middle class jobs = less tax revenue. San Francisco can afford to levy payroll taxes and whatnot, but other cities don't have that prestige.
You head to the beach and you go through mile after mile of outer sunset with crappy little 2 story houses and residential streets dominated by garage doors which is like the most people-unfriendly building style known to man.
You're starting to see more multi-unit housing in the Sunset, but again SF is not the peninsula. As bad as things are in San Francisco, things are far worse to the south. The garages are often two car sized and likely converted into illegal residential units.
Like do people know that every little private one-car garage has no benefit on a larger scale? The garage holds one car, and the curb cut prevents parking on the street in front, for a net gain of zero parking spaces.
Curb cuts make walking in SF worse than it has to be, but try walking in the suburbs where there are sometimes no sidewalks, higher speed limits, and wider roads to cross on foot.
Compare with Hong Kong. Right off the Victoria Peak there are 40+ story apartment buildings. There's forest to one side of them, and more 40+ story buildings to the other side.
Incredible that people can be so willfully blind that they don't see how their own actions are contributing to the crisis. It's a real tragedy of the commons
Instead, on April 12, 1962 the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors opted out, citing high costs and concerns over shoppers leaving their county for stores in Downtown San Francisco.
Keep in mind that Silicon Valley did not exist yet. There was no support for BART in San Mateo County-grassroots or otherwise. Many Peninsula civic leaders were also against it–including JR Clinton owner of the San Mateo Times (predecessor of San Mateo Daily Journal). Also opposing BART was David Bohannon the developer of the Hillsdale Shopping Mall, Tom Casey of the San Mateo Co Development Associations. They, and the San Mateo Times, published Op-eds arguing that BART was not needed; instead more freeway lanes was the proposed solution to congestion woes.
The neighboring Santa Clara County's obsession with building and publicly financing the Expressway System (Page Mill, Oregon, Central, Montague, San Tomas, Lawrence, Capitol) didn't help either.
You can read more about it in BART: The Dramatic History of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System by Michael C. Healy.
the Expressway System (Page Mill, Oregon, Central, Montague, San Tomas, Lawrence, Capitol)
As for San Mateo county, Caltrain already served as an artery through it. San Mateo county residents would have been used as cash cows for SF to Western Alameda county, just like eastern Alameda County has been for five decades.
BART is a basket case of incompetence on its own. SF residents were largely willing to support an infill station at 30th and Mission, but BART stuck its thumbs up its ass and eventually built a half-billion dollar cable car to the Oakland airport (ripping up recent renovations to the street along the way).
San Mateo residents bought into BART in the 90s, but as they've learned public transit (BART especially) is a cost not profit center so the regional (SamTrans) service got gutted to fund BART (whose ridership numbers consistently lag predictions).
a half-billion dollar cable car to the Oakland airport
The empty trestles over Hegenberger were reminiscent of the "Freeway to Nowhere" (the 280/680/101 interchange in San Jose).
I think this is the hardest thing to reconcile. I mean it's easy to get riled up against some rich white NIMBYs doing this kind of thing, but now replace those rich whites with x minority like Mexican-Americans who have lived in their Mexican-American majority Southern Californian neighborhood all their life in the same homes they've always been in. Imagine ripping on them for trying to preserve their neighborhood and therefore their culture. And for what? To make it possible for more people to move in and potentially make things worse for the people already there? If it's a minority-majority neighborhood, making it possible for more whites to move in is gentrification. How do you argue for that?
I'm not saying I agree with any of this by the way, just playing devil's advocate.
Regardless, these people are not "natives" who got SF entirely in its current state from God, it was growing up, as prosperous cities do, and neighborhoods were changing. So why should it stop its development in 1976, why are people who moved in to SF back then entitled to this? If you ask me, this is becoming uncannily feudal.
But essentially this basically comes down to gentrification vs preserving culture. Do we value cities as money-making assembly lines where all the workers are replaceable or do we value cities as a living thing, with the culture(s) as their bloodline that makes those cities what they are and gives them their appeal? Do I want to keep my neighborhood as it is, for my children to grow up as I did, or should I just let anyone come and change it, for better or worse?
the letter I used as an example was definitely not from a minority person
The problem is recognizing that appreciation without weathering the crushing taxes. Proposition 5 (portability of Jarvis Gann property tax bases) would have helped, but it was voted down.
Take a single person with $1 million in appreciation. $750K gets hit with (unindexed!) Federal capital gains, full CA income taxes with surtaxes "for the rich" (likewise unindexed), and you'd be starting over with respect to property tax basis (with a few exceptions in 9 counties).
You could eventually do a 1031, but you'd have to move somewhere in the meantime... probably out of state.
[1] https://www.sfcommunityhousingact.com/press/landmark-housing...
San Bruno is working exactly as intended:
It is maximizing the value increase of the home owners of the city. None of that potential is squandered.
Apparently the city governments want lots of these. They call it PDR zoning; apparently auto repair shops pay more for non-college-educated workers than other jobs.
The whole problem could be solved if we gave people the choice of voting where they work rather than where they live.
Currently every city wants all the businesses that they can get because businesses generate lots of tax revenues. Cities do not want apartments because that doesn't generate revenue, and locals object on the basis of NIMBYism. But when everyone adds businesses and nobody adds homes, we get horrible commutes.
With my proposed change, housing developments in cities that have major businesses will get lots of support from people who work there and want shorter commutes. And it seems reasonable to me that someone who spends their waking hours in a city and wants to live there should get the opportunity to have political power there.
This would therefore undo the political log jam. And once you start letting people live close to where they work, commutes go down, traffic gets better, and everyone winds up happier.
• more municipal revenue means better schools and infrastructure
• better schools and infrastructure would support more development
• higher property taxes would remove the incentive to hang on to property forever making it easier to buy and develop property
• removing the disincentive to sell property also reduces the NIMBY imperative, since home owner can move to another area if they don't like how their neighborhood is developing
It's not a silver bullet; we'd still have to tackle zoning issues, remaining (and still powerful) NIMBYs, and the everyone-has-a-veto problem, but it's a good start.
Which isn't to say funding doesn't matter. Just that it's clear that "investing in our children" through school funding was a dead-end, sort of like expecting increased traffic light expenditures to improve school performance. The primary determinants are economic and sociologic factors in the home.
We need decent schools just like we need decent water & sewage, but we're long past the point where such civic infrastructure is capable of transforming our society. Focusing on these things as agents of change is counter-productive if not destructive.
But really, I just mean "neighborhoods more friendly to kids and parents." School quality is a big part of that, but it's also a matter of finding a good school near your home, public spaces where kids can play etc. SF isn't completely devoid of that stuff, but there's a reason new parents move out to the suburbs. The point is that if we want higher density we need more homes, but we also need more of all the other stuff that people want and need nearby.
Living in California and observing (but soon to be participant) in how parent participation works here it seems to me, pretense and motivations notwithstanding, that the sociologic function is really about keeping parents engaged with their children's school. Private schools are even worse in this regard, both the cheaper Catholic ones and the expensive ones drowning in cash.
My point is that we should stop looking to these things as agents of change. Among other things, it causes us to cyclically attempt to disrupt and revolutionize the system, when what such systems need most are stability and consistency. But education in particular sits at this wierd nexus of public policy where everybody thinks they're an expert, everybody has direct experience with the system, everybody thinks it can do more than it can, and it's a politically neutral subject. And for all our supposed expertise and concern, we invariably have the same ideas--more money, more accountability, etc. Given what we know empirically, the feverish focus seems very counter productive.
Well yeah, because there's a huge amount of noise combined with active efforts to spend more on worse schools in the past few decades. I'd like to see an example study with "overwhelming" evidence that expenditures doesn't help.
I don't understand this pessimism re: the role of schools. The science isn't anywhere nearly as settled on "schools do not create change" as this comment seems to imply.
So if you repealed prop 13, the result would likely be a more equitable approach to property taxes, with those protected by prop 13 paying more and everyone else paying less.
There's been so much mythology built up around a common anti-tax movement that I'm not sure what to believe. There is plenty of economic reason to vote for capped taxes even without excessive spending.
1. People don't necessarily want to live immediately next door to where they work. Maybe someone who works in Mountain View wants to live in Palo Alto, but this doesn't help them.
2. A lot of highways bulldozing inner cities were stopped by residents protesting. Under your proposal office workers could just vote in a highway that gets them from A to B quickly while screwing over everyone who lives next to it. I don't know that going back to this model is a good idea.
3. Mixed use housing does not really 'solve' traffic in that people don't actually live close to work even when it is available. Especially if you consider multiple income households. Tokyo is pretty much all mixed use and still people suffer from long commutes.
San Rafael-Sausalito
SF + Daly City + Colma + Brisbane + South SF
San Bruno - RWC
Palo Alto - SV
San Jose + Santa Clara and assorted surrounded munis like los gatos. Honestly you could probably include the Palo Alto-SV area with this one if you wanted.
No idea how to split up the east bay, guessing you will run into issues with nobody wanting to absorb the poor munis.
Anyway, the benefits of this is that it would be easier to align incentives at a regional level rather than creating adversarial, counter productive squabbling fiefs that keep acting optimally at a local level, but very sub-optimally at a regional level. The regions are also big enough that a much larger portion of people would actually live and work in the same area
Move Sunnyvale, Los Gatos, Monte Sereno and Campbell into the San Jose / Santa Clara group as the "south bay" entity.
Then you have your RWC through San Bruno entity for "north peninsula", and everything from South City through SF get lumped into the "SF" entity. That keeps it relatively simple and puts similar NIMBY categories into like groups (I'm mostly looking at the PA / Menlo / Atherton / Los Altos folks here).
There are 9 Bay Area counties, so we agree?
Berkeley is in Alameda County, while Patterson is in Stanislaus County, so no.
Palo Alto is in Santa Clara County, while Los Banos is in Merced County, so no.
The property owners still pay tax on it don't they? I'm sure it is less lucrative per square foot than commercial development, but I assume it is still better than the revenue from the closed furniture store and parking lot, and after all you need people to patronize businesses.
In other parts of the country, municipal treasuries grow as volume and prices of residential units grow.
Plus office complexes don't enrage NIMBYs the way residential projects do. Dense office space equates with rich commuters; dense residential space equates with young and poor people. So commercial pencils out better fiscally, and politically there's less pushback.
In the latter system, the local government gets direct control over the spending, as opposed to needing to lobby the state government for funds for road improvements, schools, etc.
For instance, in California, the majority of K-12 funding comes from Sacramento. In most of the rest of the country, the majority of K-12 funding comes from local, largely property, taxes-- exceptions being low-performing schools targeted for improvement with state funds.
The big issue is that cities and counties don't typically collect taxes in California. There are a few statewide organizations (Franchise Tax Board, Board of Equalization) that do instead. There are also tight limits on sales tax (cities can levy up to ~2% beyond the base rate for specific things). Essentially what happens is that the state collects taxes and doles the monies out to cities and counties at their discretion.
EDIT: The closest I could find was an ambiguous stat in a CNN article, https://money.cnn.com/2017/04/27/real_estate/home-prices-sel..., which cites an average of a little over 4 years (2000-20007) that might be for San Jose. However, there's wording that suggests such figures are computed from the tenure of sellers, not across all homeowners, in which case the statistic seem useless (imagine one guy selling every two years and nobody else--that would be a 2-year tenture average but in fact nobody but him is moving). Would nice if the NAR report was freely available.
Prop13 has had a LOT of unintended consequences.
No, those were intended consequences.
Can you imagine it now? Could we ever reach the $10 million mark for a single family Bay Area home?
That’s the kind of leap you’d be asking them to make if you went back 40 years or so.
Prop 13 was sold to the voters on a "granny is losing her home because of skyrocketing property taxes" argument. So, yes, I think that a 100x increase in value was predictable.
And, yes, I could see $10 million homes becoming the norm within my lifetime.
the tax rate never increases
2% isusually going to be sub-inflationary.
For historical reasons ("The City" is much older than the UK itself), things are much more complicated than simply "People who work there get to vote", so I'm not sure it's a very comparable situation. The best explanation I've found is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc
Solved: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/land-value-tax.asp
Then, you just need a simple majority vote.
That's what Proposition 13 was in the first place.
For example, you could exclude commercial property from Prop 13 protections altogether.
If land is taxed based on value, many homeowners would be forced to sell or replace their houses with apartment blocks that can earn enough revenue to pay the land value taxes.
Maybe if people would get one vote in each area, or a double-vote if both were the same place...
Apartments absolutely generate property tax revenue.
<edit> missing word
I wonder: did they just not know the rules? Or was this a cowardly way to vote no without _actually_ voting no: it seems like if you really wanted to recuse in this situation, you just agree to do paired voting, one no and one yes.
At the same time, whether or not this project succeeded or failed, the larger story about how hard it is to build housing remains fundamentally true (and broken).
You might still have a rule that at least two votes are required to pass something (to prevent a 1-0 vote with four recusals). But requiring at least thee votes on a five-member council is requiring an outright majority, which means a recusal is the same as a no vote. That seems unfair.
I'm on the Strong Towns board (though I didn't write the article). Happy to answer questions if anyone has them.
At least housing prices are transparent to those thinking about moving in to the bay area, allowing them to make an informed decision. High traffic, insufficient public transit capacity, and over-capacity public services are less transparent. If we build more housing, do we just push problems elsewhere?
How do we determine the optimal amount of new housing?
it is illegal to build housing almost anywhere in the state of California.
As far as the "optimal amount of new housing," why not just match the number of new households moving into a region? That seems like a good place to start.
Not necessarily. I'd love to live closer to the Bay; if I could get in walking or biking range of CalTrain I could eliminate much or all of my 40 minute highway commute — thus reducing the congestion on the highway. But it would cost me ~$12k/yr. Similarly, if San Mateo had built adequate housing, 70k people might have shorter commutes, requiring less use of roads, transit systems, etc.
Personally, I am also massively for improvements to the various transit systems. If it were easily possible, I'd love to have CalTrain have grade-separation, level-boarding, electric locomotives, and ideally 4 tracks the whole way instead of the 2 they have, to promote passing and ease recovery during issues. We might get the EMUs someday, but I won't be around to see it. The downtown SF transit center finally reopened, I think, but it was a 8? month setback, not to mention it is way over budget. Also, the HOV lanes would be a lot more enticing if there weren't so much traffic in them, and there easily could have been had CA not hadn't out so many HOV stickers. There are SUVs getting stickered that get equivalent gas mileage to my '97. Also, enforcement.
You can get by with 3 tracks. Metra's busy BNSF line is a 3-track mainline, and they manage to launch 21 outgoing trains in the 125 minutes between 3:57 and 6:02. In addition to the ~80ish commuter trains, there's also another ~20 daily Amtrak and freight trains along the same stretch of rail.
People don’t expect just electricity and plumbing, they also expect modern construction techniques, roads, police, fire suppression, emergency response, schools, full-service hospitals, telecommunications, airports, parcel delivery, ....
A big reason that rural / exurban living is cheap in the USA is that we massively subsidize services for people living very spread out.
I agree that gathering people into larger population centers is way more efficient for us and the planet, but I don't think anyone's arguing for us all to spread out on 10 acre farmsteads.
The middle ground is just to build more decently-sized cities in all of the vast available land. Why fight for overpriced artificially scarce land in San Francisco when there are 20 other SF-equivalent cities a state or two away (existing ones, or ones that could be hypothetically built). "Location, location, location" has got to stop being the reason people choose a city.
As a side bonus: by moving a bunch of coastal persons back into the flyover country, you're re-exporting newer cultural norms into those backwaters, perhaps enough to cause meaningful cultural and political reform in places that sorely need it!
Why? I want to live where I get to do the things I enjoy. I would say most people I know prefer temperate, low humidity weather, access to fresh fruits and vegetables, beaches, mountains, lakes, good water quality and security, etc. The places that have these features will cost the most, since more people will be bidding up the price.
I think you massively overestimate the rural "subsidies". Make it easy to move rural and "go green" with minimal regulations, and you may find the problems nearly solve themselves.
Western Washington state subsidizes Eastern Washington state greatly, and that isn’t even as sparse as South Dakota (or as I like to call it, Tropical Dakota).
World arable land is ~26.2 million square miles, or about 2.2 acres per person. At 11 billion people (projection world population peak by ~2100, you get about 1.5 acres of arable land per person. There is literally, physically not enough space on Earth to put your plane into action.
I like nature, but I think you underestimate the subsidies given for rural development and infrastructure and just how unsustainable our development style in the US is.
There will soon be 11 billion people in the world.
This is a pipe dream, but if it came to fruition it would wreck the planet very quickly.
Running water? Gotta run the pipes further. Road access? Gotta pave (and maintain) more road Power? Same thing
Plus having decent response times for emergency services, quick commute to things like groceries as you mentioned.
Not to mention having critical mass for a commercial district with any sort of variety within reasonable distances of each other to compete and cross-pollinate.
It's incredibly easy to move there. My hometown of ~1,400 has something like a couple dozen vacant properties right now which you could probably buy for $150k or less because all the townies are moving out to the lake. But once you're there, there aren't a lot of good paying local jobs, there is very little to no culture, very few amenities. Not much to do unless you're into hunting and motorcycles. There's a reason it's sparsely populated.
They don't even have to be in the state, right? Because the core concept was that a remote-working code-slinger could live anywhere.
Another neat point about Rugby: it's apparently got gigabit ethernet service through North Dakota Telephone Co, although you'll pay $220/mo for that service.
We're getting to the point where maybe the work part works. College may be able to be fully remote fairly soon (Western Governors University is there already, but only has select majors). Specialized doctors, though... that might be a bit harder.
I mean, yes, you can do "face to face" via Skype. You can't do blood tests that way, though...
Until we can smoothly emulate meatspace with VR, I don't think you can replace face-to-face interaction. If you can't do that, then people will still want to be close to jobs and similar businesses, so they'll continue to urbanize in a natural distribution.
And even if you had your new VR tech with enough bandwidth to run it nicely, you'd still need to be able to provide it to your offworld coloni--I mean rural exclaves.
Economic clusters aren't just valuable for people being in the same office. They produce value because people and ideas meet in bars and restaurants and coffee shops and backyards. All of this is stuff you'd need to replace to "disaggregate the knowledge economy".
This is not something you can accomplish with GitHub and teleconferencing.
I'm pretty young.
Since my birth, the population has expanded by over 40%, and we've increased global temperature by approximately 1 degree Celsius.
The inevitable conclusion of forever-growth is, indeed, that everyone piles in to microscopic communal living spaces, that everything becomes factory farmed, that everything has to be as efficient as possible because we'll be (already are to a large extent) forced into doing it.
We can't go on like this.
There is a huge HUGE difference between "you must own 1/3 of an acre of land to live within an hour commute of your job" and "microscopic communal living spaces", if you haven't looked at a map recently we are much much closer to the prior than the latter.
London is somewhere in-between; so are most of our towns and cities, really.
Tons of semi-detached or terraced homes, well served by public transport, which provide a decent balance.
We still can't just increase the population in those commutable areas without bound though.
What is the stopping point? Why is now the stopping point?
> The inevitable conclusion of forever-growth is, indeed, that everyone piles in to microscopic communal living spaces
I mean, or we become more efficient _now_, buy ourselves centuries more time on the planet, and then figure out a different solution, maybe involving terraforming other planets or something.
Progress isn't linear and it's unfortunate that everyone views it as such.
This is like peak San Francisco housing conversation right here.
Have you guys considering the radical idea of building a couple fucking apartment buildings instead?
I mean, seriously.
The solution right now is to build medium density housing and disincentive individuals from driving their cars alone to work.
That's my main point, not what the solution looks like.
Tall buildings are inherently communal.
Terraforming is an idea so absurd I'm not sure where to start - the dream of a 16 year old science fiction reader.
We have a solution for housing. It's called houses. This breaks down when you get millions of people and stuff them in the same small coastal region. A good start would be to, well, just not do that.
My home town of 200,000 can be cycled across in 20 minutes. It has very few apartments and is primarily made up of terraced or semi detached housing.
Sure and that's _your_ view of the matter (where I'm reading "communal" as "undesirable" here). Hundreds of thousands of people continue to view high-rise apartments as desirable places to live, as evidenced by housing demand in Manhattan, Tokyo, London, Hong Kong, and other world cities. The Bay Area has created bureaucratic and legal roadblocks from allowing these high-rise apartments. If people really didn't want them, then folks would be moving out of these high-rise cities instead of moving into them. There's no need to mandate low-rise by law as the Bay Area has done.
Cool so stop building them.
You can't make the workplaces incredibly dense and the housing incredibly sparse in a geographically constrained area though and expect things to be OK.
For every Salesforce tower build a giant apartment skyscraper. For every Google campus build a major apartment complex campus.
It's fundamentally ridiculous to just have everyone that "matters" live in the same city or small group of cities.
That's what people seem to be talking about here. In the UK it's London, in the US it's SF, NYC and a few others.
If "pack everyone into skyscrapers and have them rent their Logan's Run existence" is the model for the entire economy I'm honestly quite sad about that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility#/med...
If fertility is below 2.1 it's below replacement.
There are not many rich countries with replacement level fertility rates.
Japan's population is decreasing at ~300K a year because they don't allow much immigration. As countries become rich people leave in lower numbers.
There are quite a few countries in the world that are already experiencing population decline :
Here's a great visualization of how we use our land: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/
But they'll have to stop building massive office buildings if so.
If you wait longer you're increasing the number of people that have to suffer during the transition period and increasing the ecological load of the stable population's lifestyle.
It’s not an issue of limitless growth of the population, it’s an issue of the population consolidating into a smaller footprint (which from an ecological perspective is a Good Thing) and stupid policies blocking it from happening.
Cut out meat, suburban lawns, and the cars that go with them, and the earth could support 10B people right now, at the living standards of a typical Millenial in a cosmopolitan metropolis.
Unfortunately, there's pretty good indications that most people on earth want those meats, suburban lawns, and cars, so I think it's more likely we'll get war instead. But it's totally doable, at a standard of living that people will grumble at but could abide.
Can I opt out of the coming war if I don't want these things?
There is more issues to be solved, yes - but reversing wasteful land use is a HUGE component of preserving our planet and quality of life.
Indebted, underemployed people with just a rented bedroom and dysfunctional social safety nets are, for some odd reason, less eager to procreate.
If you don't have enough grandkids, there won't be enough able-bodied people around to wipe the drool off your generation's collective chin and push your age cohort's wheelchair out to the common room. That's the real cost of pulling up the ladder after yourself. You break the generational compact by denying opportunities to young folks, and they not only won't take care of you in your sunset years, but they won't even exist to do anything for you at any price.
Maybe we shouldn't have those programs structured as they are now. But we do, and a shock to the system will result in unprecedented economic misery and social instability. If we want to talk about how to deal with demographic change, there's an important long-term conversation to be had about preserving the social safety net. But any solution that wants to avoid a potentially-catastrophic economic crisis must have a serious, realistic answer for this. Not building housing is a fundamentally unserious policy, driven by a preference for the suburban lifestyle and the fear of change more than any realistic concerns about sustainability.
This is an interesting contradiction. I agree we need to be more efficient with land use, but listening to some of the climate change predictions, we're going to need as much land as possible to sustain a population living in areas where agriculture may be limited or impossible.
For some concrete examples: NYC has far better public transit than the peninsula. The block layout of NYC means you can live on a purely residential block but generally never be farther than a few short blocks from a busy commercial area with small shops and restaurants.
I could imagine something like making developers pay for blocking views/sky/sun, or for creating noise, or making them pay for the change their development causes in the market value of others' properties. Not exactly that, but something along those lines. I'd bet it could bring some NIMBYs around. They'd no longer lose out when beneficial change happens.
If you want a guaranteed good view, go buy a big plot of land way out in the middle of nowhere. You have no right to it in a city; other people's right to have housing is way more important.
It also happens to have the nice property of not making Alice worse off when we improve things for everyone else, which morally feels nice.
Either way, the question isn't about the ethics or pragmatics. It's whether this has been tried anywhere.
It would be simpler if everyone just stopped viewing their home as an investment. The meme that 'homes are investments' is a very recent invention. They not investments; they're depreciating assets.
I'd totally buy into a system that incentivizes the positives too. If I'm paying for the amount it affects me by, sure. That's why I pay my taxes. On the other hand, ratchet-like systems by which things can't get worse than they started seem fair too. It's okay to be asymmetric.
Specifically, the example that comes to mind as a fair reason to be pissed (or vote against development/rezoning) is changing something like this:
https://ssl.cdn-redfin.com/photo/9/bigphoto/398/486398_44_2....
to something like this:
https://ssl.cdn-redfin.com/photo/9/bigphoto/440/486440_28_0....
How is a house a depreciating asset when home values continually rise over the long term, especially in CA?
You may want them to be a depreciating asset but they are not. Real-estate ownership has arguably been one of the most secure forms investment.
Not verified but what I was told by arch.
It makes sense that the Bay area would be priced high given its tremendous desirability (which may be tapering off now). If people are willing to work there for low wages, then that is their choice - they have opted into a tradeoff they are OK with, and they/others should not demonize those who were already there and want to preserve their culture/way of life/standards of living. There are numerous affordable places to live in the US that are not [New York, San Francisco, Seattle, etc.] - you may not have every big city amenity you want, or maybe even be able to do the exact job you want - but such compromises are also just a regular part of life, aren't they?
To me the reframing of this issue as a policy problem, or a rich versus poor thing, or through use of pejoratives like "NIMBY" serves to distract from the plain truth, which is simply that people are acting in their own self-interests. And yes, this includes the folks who believe they have an unalienable right to live in the Bay area and demand that local governance be replaced with top-down forceful governance (overriding local zoning policy). And the reality is proposals like the one around the missing middle will not solve the underlying issue - it just shifts the timeline around a bit until population growth brings us back to the same point anyways.
Lets accommodate the people who own land, propose building upon it and meet and all relevant zoning codes and regulations but are denied because reasons:
```Marty Medina said he wished an agreement could have been reached which would have allowed the development to advance but he was unable to detail the specific size and scope of a project that he would have supported. “I don’t regret my decision because I have to live with it,” he said. “But I just wished for a different outcome.”```
...
> through use of pejoratives like "NIMBY" serves to distract from the plain truth, which is simply that people are acting in their own self-interests.
The two "selfs" are not the same. The one group is literal millionaires (home owners) while the other is the working poor/middle class who would prefer to avoid 2 hour commutes.
This has a limit, namely, that we who move in are going to vote to change things, and the only way bay area property owners can prevent that is to not get rich off their property by selling or renting it at sky-high prices to new residents. To put their money where their mouth is and not change things, bay area residents need to not be getting rich off the density that they are nominally trying to fight. Otherwise it's just delaying a lost cause - population growth, and a shift in demographics from owners to renters, will inevitably happen barring some big tech recession. Once there are enough renters voting in municipal elections, change will come
This argument the two of you are engaged in would be more interesting and relevant, I think, if there were not a literal 50% off sale every 7-10 years in the bay area.
The busts will continue to come and the more you think "it's different this time" the closer we are to one. Conversely, I'll bet I could pick up print publications in the alternative press from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s wherein the same lamentations and accusations are leveled during the run-up to each peak.
I quote the lead article from the OP:
"... helplessness pervades many of my conversations with friends in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I lived for seven years ..."
I guess these days such people will have to either get top jobs, live with parents forever or move town away from their family. Or suffer long commutes from faraway suburbs or near but crime afflicted places.
Now arguably there is a sense of entitlement if anyone expects to live in their home town, and there are people with bigger problems. But it’s not necessarily old timers vs new people thing.
I find this position extremely odd. I am unaware of other examples of non-federal (county, city, etc.) US governments and respective constituents opposing non-local residents relocating, for any reason (including "culture/way of life/standards of living"). I have seen this before in the Bay Area--I was refused an apartment viewing earlier this year in San Francisco because I am from New York.
I think this relates to the Constitution's "Privileges and Immunities Clause" [0], which an 1832 federal court case, Corfield v. Coryell [1], ruled that all US citizens enjoy the right "to reside in any other state...; to take, hold and dispose of property, either real or personal; and an exemption from higher taxes or impositions that are paid by the other citizens of the state." I am not aware of any Bay Area laws which explicitly violate any of these rights. However, I do not see how Prop 13, which "prohibit[s] reassessment of value... except in cases of (a) change in ownership," required for non-renting non-locals, "or (b) completion of new construction," [2] i.e. new housing developments, does not indirectly violate non-residents' "exemption from higher taxes." Note that I have zero law experience, I just googled "discrimination based on state of residence."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privileges_and_Immunities_Clau...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corfield_v._Coryell
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13
If we could have high resolution video, audio and even VR for business, would people be required to be colocated as often?
That way people could live wherever they want.
Could be, but Japan has lots of earthquakes too, and they don't seem to mind building huge/tall buildings.
As to a), I find that the democratic process is actually very engaged in making housing decisions. As a resident of Alameda, we are constantly getting new housing approved, because our voting populace happens to support it. In other towns, maybe that's not the case. But the laws and regulations that protect against development are not necessarily byproducts from a former age that are no longer applicable, but in fact still representative of the will of the people. And in any case, the will of the people can change them!
As to b), I think there are great reasons why someone would be against development other than greed and entitlement. If rich and powerful interests (such as Big Tech) threaten to change your way of life, don't you have the right as an American to vote your conscience, even if it goes against the tides of change? Or are we only allowed to vote in a way that would ultimately favor Big Tech in some way? People that think in this way remind me of the current situation in Hong Kong - where it's a "democracy," but you're only allowed to vote for the "approved" candidates. In other words, no democracy at all.
An objection has been raised that people who don't like the tech industry being here can move somewhere else. Well, the same is true for the tech industry itself. In fact, it appears that Big Tech is playing a game of chicken, and banks on the fact that the Bay Area towns will blink first. We have seen this before, where Uber deliberately broke the law by running a commercial car service without paying for the required licenses and permits. Then, they sicced their lawyers on the towns that tried to stop them until people got so enamored of the service they couldn't imagine life without it, and the political will was decidedly in their favor. All in the name of "disruption."
I have no issue ascribing legitimate motives to those who wish not to be "disrupted," and refuse to accept that as an inevitability. What would the answer be to a big corporation belching toxic fumes into the atmosphere? "Well, that's just the march of progress, we all need to adapt?" I didn't think so. Instead, we will continue to put these things to a vote (or fight for our right to do so where we wrongfully can't). That's how we make decisions in America.
It's about time for the next Bay Area recession. Some of those buildings will never be fully occupied. Remember 2008? 2001?
If you want to see slums I can share some pins of places in the East Bay and the hinterlands of SF, and you can tell me if you think midrise condos on the caltrain/camino real corridor in the peninsula will ever look like that. I'll even take out a 15 year bet with you
No economist agrees with you. It's indisputable that there is a housing shortage in the Bay Area.
> It's about time for the next Bay Area recession.
Do you really want misery for the working class because you don't want to see "cheezy luxury condos" along the tracks?
> Some of those buildings will never be fully occupied.
I recently bought a condo near 22nd St. and I can tell you the building filled up very quickly. With real residents, not foreign investors.
The likely ossification of such midrises shows why incremental, small-scale increases of density, like allowing threeplexes on small lots, is so useful.
I used to live in the "slums" of the bay area back in 2008. Trust me - by now even those slum houses are going for at least 2008 prices before crash and better and the neighborhood I lived in in SF is crazy expensive.
Aren't those buildings fully occupied today?
I mean I've encountered this enough that I know the answer now: obviously.
You won't ever get them to admit it though
Yeah, and every office park that felt empty in the fallout of 2008 is now bursting with businesses and people. Why are you so worried about the threat of a recession and unoccupied land that you don't want to add housing in a region with record homelessness numbers? This feels extremely conservative.
> add housing in a region with record homelessness numbers
is disingenuous as it suggests that one cause of the homelessness problem is actually the only cause of it