3 Kids. 2 paychecks. No home
story.californiasunday.com
story.californiasunday.com
What a shitshow...
Freezing rents or property taxes just delays the negative effects and perversely make it harder to implement a long lasting solution. Frozen property taxes lead to high house prices which lead to high property taxes on the next assessment. At some point the theoretical property taxes become so large it is no longer possible to unfreeze property taxes because home owners cannot afford them. The threat of high property taxes would force NIMBYs to optimize for variables other than their home value. The goal would be to provide as much housing as is necessary to prevent yourself from being priced out of your neighborhood.
To give you some concrete examples; in Mountain View, adding a new unit of housing requires about $80k in impact fees and permit fees from the city, and the permits require bending over backward, since they're sometimes self conflicting. We've now banned natural gas, so homes have to be electric. The only way to heat electrically efficiently is heat pumps, but those are affected by noise ordinances, so it's tricky to place them. Solar panels are mandatory, but you need to pay for a permit to install them. Electric car chargers are mandatory. The fire code, city code, and state building codes conflict at times, so you sometimes have the fire inspection, then change stuff around for the city inspector, etc.
Everybody knows how broken it is, so everyone cheats, and inspectors sign off on temporary kludges, knowing full well they'll be changed right after inspection, but the i's must be dotted, and the t's must be crossed. But hey, "we're" doing something!
Sheesh. I wish tar and feathering of politicians made a return to modern political discourse.
You can't blame the older generation for voting in the interest of maximizing their home values and low taxes for themselves. But you also have to admit how unfair that is to the younger generation who have difficulty finding affordable housing and have to take on a greater property tax burden.
> Sheesh. I wish tar and feathering of politicians made a return to modern political discourse.
Why blame the politicians for doing what their voters wanted? Why not tar and feather the voters?
What we should think about is whether it's a legitimate use of power to limit what an entire city can do with its property. The nice, dense areas of the world didn't start out that way, they grew over time as new replaced old. We've stopped that cycle here, and the politicians are trying to freeze things as they are. We do indeed have a lot of home owners resistant to all change, but those aren't the majority. I'm a grey haired home owner here, and I go to council meetings to support increased density, increased property rights, etc.
Renters and people who appreciate density need to show up if we’re going to counteract that.
The local residents show up in droves to oppose housing, particularly the home owners, with the arguments being "the infrastructure can't take any more". They never hold the city to its responsibility or providing infrastructure, instead, use the bad infrastructure as an excuse to stifle development.
It's a backwards, topsy turvy world here. City governments are meant to serve people, not rule over them.
> The local residents show up in droves to oppose housing
If renters are the majority, why are they not voting out city government representatives who don't support upvoting and density?
In general the story is broad and diffuse support for more housing, tightly concentrated and intense opposition to particular projects. There are many more NIMBYs than BANANA.
Wait, really? Just for heat or also in the kitchen? Electric stove tops fucking suck. Ugh.
Inductive cooktops are pretty good - I’ve grown to prefer it over gas.
One neat thing at my girlfriend’s place was that there was an inductive circle with two possible diameters of heat which seems neat for a gigantic stock pot.
But switching quickly between heats seems like it’d require you to have two “burners” going at once.
At the end of the day I’m not sure if it’d really affect my cooking which I love to do but probably isn’t three Michelin stars or anything, but it’s the first I’ve heard of a preference for electric.
Remember when doctors used to smoke during your exam? That’s how future generations are going to look back at our fossil fuel use.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/11/10/climate-chang...
Natural gas is used quite a bit for cooking and home heating, and we need to phase it out where ever possible.
Which means it's only an emissions win if the electricity is carbon neutral or the multiplier for a heat pump compensates for the generation/transmission losses.
However, the city regulators, like I said above, are stupid, so you often can't get a permit for a heat pump, because of noise ordinances. These things sound like an A/C compressor, so you can only install it if there is enough distance to your neighbors, and that's usually not possible in newer, denser developments, precisely the kinds where natural gas is banned, so you are now forced to use resitive heating, which uses 3-4x as much power as a heat pump, and costs more than 3x as much, due to our tiered electric prices (additional units cost more than early units)
New Step 1 - Have a multiplier for property taxes based on the number of properties owned. If you own and live in 1 property, you pay the base rate. If you live in one property and own x properties (where x > 1), you pay the base rate * x
Step 2 - Profit for municipalities, affordable housing for citizens
> There was one catch. Owned and operated by the Housing Authority of the County of Monterey, the complex had strict rules governing who could reside in its units — and since the apartment was in Candido’s mother’s name, her children and grandchildren were barred from living there. The building’s sympathetic manager, however, assured them that it would be fine; with a yearslong waiting list to even enter the lottery for these subsidized rentals, they certainly weren’t the only ones, he said, who’d be living “off-lease.” Everything went well for about a year. But then a neighbor threatened to report the family. She’d started photographing the kids as they left and reentered the apartment each day, and the manager had no choice but to tell them to go elsewhere. “We were totally scared and shocked,” Brenda said, “and we knew that we needed to get out right away. If not, Candido’s mom might have been evicted, too.”
What heartless NIMBY does this? I am just shocked and appalled at the cruelty of this neighbor - it's impossible that she wasn't aware of the housing crisis in the area.
I have a much harder time understanding why though...
Super shitty, just that’s probably the reason.
I find it hard to understand how a country can be so good in some ways, but so terrible in others. Is it just because the successful truly extract all their wealth from the more unfortunate?
Making $100k+/year now is "easy" in the tech sector, move to any of the major cities. Unfortunately homes cost $750k+ or you take an unpaid part-time job in commuting to the office (2-4 hours/day, 5 days a week).
And yes, that's a HUGE disparity when compared to the people working service industry in the same cities... but it's also a huge disparity compared to C-level and senior managers/owners... that can afford a 1-2 million dollar home and the $15-20+/day "Fast Lanes"... and can often afford to have one of the parents stay at home even!
So do you not consider the $400k FAANG compensation a huge disparity vs the service industry pay? Is it only at the C-level and senior manager/owner level that it becomes a problem?
In addition, My argument was trying to point out that there's multiple levels to this issue, and saying low level employees is the problem is ignoring the fact senior leaders decide to stay in these big cities despite the fact their own employees can't find homes, or commute as a part time job.
One thing you could compare it to is America four decades ago.
Wealth inequality in America seems to fluctuate, there was the gilded age which was greatly unequal, then we tampered it down with very progressive tax codes which we’ve since been slashing away at to produce what you see today (there are other factors as we of course).
Europe has many areas which are far more egalitarian than America but you’re almost certainly correct that the vast majority of Earth’s 7.whatever billion inhabitants live in deeply unequal societies.
So the typical employment force has their education benefit offset by the cost of living increase, putting them in just as bad a situation as living in the middle of no where making low wages (or perhaps worse, since they went into debt for training).
Meanwhile, if your in the top 10% -- a business owner or top management -- most of this doesn't matter because you make enough to take $15/trip HOV Lanes, or buy a $800,000+ home easily. So you want to keep your business near top talent (i.e. cities) but are less impacted by the situation you are encouraging by flocking the business to the city in the first place.
This is super complex, but just my quick-ish generalization... There are lots of factors.
I'd scatter each department to a different rust-belt or similarly hollowed-out city, creating a permanent economic base and allowing redevelopment to jump start.
And if more people worked remotely, stress on large cities is reduced.
I actually liked the concept of wework -- a shared office to work in that is not at home -- to bad there was serious issues with the company. With enough places like this, you can still move people out of cities.
Many people need the human-to-human interaction.. and many people don't. If you and your boss and direct reports are all happy connecting in text, great! But a huge portion of the population wants to see the other person when communicating
I read the article a few hours ago but I think I remember them saying like a quarter of the kids in the Salinas public school system were homeless? I agree that in general, people should be responsible about having children. But let’s be clear: a quarter of a city’s kids being homeless is indicative of a deep systemic problem. That’s not something that we should simply accept as natural because they are poor.
Of course, the big issue which they touch on briefly is that the whole “affordable/subsidized housing” crap is not even close to reaching the scale it needs to be at to address the problem. You can’t solve a housing shortage by selling $10 for $3 to a couple thousand people.