California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
* It's good for the economy, as "legitster" points out.
* It's good for the environment if people can drive less (or even walk or bike!) because they live closer to things.
* It's good for the people "on the margins", those struggling to pay rent, or those at risk of homelessness, or those who might like to move to a more productive place for a better job.
It's much easier to make a difference locally: in many places it's not hard to get to know your city councilors, or state reps/senators. One of my prouder YIMBY moments was turning out 5 people on a weekday morning to speak to our state rep, who ended up voting in favor of HB 2001, which legalizes up to 4-plexes throughout most Oregon cities.
I'm very involved with YIMBY Action here in SF: I'm on the board of both YIMBY Action and YIMBY Law, and I'm also running for local office in the current election: https://buss2020.org
If you have any questions about YIMBY, send them my way!
When I researched this I couldn't find any strong evidence suggesting that more building would lead to more affordable housing.
You would think that more construction would lead to more affordable housing, but it seems like more construction doesn't just increase supply, it also increases demand, which can offset any price effects from the increase in supply.
This makes sense when you think that similar people want to live in proximity to people like themselves. So if there are more luxury condos in an area that's going to create demand for more high-end retail, which will enhance that neighborhood's appeals to wealthier customers which will then increase demand for more luxury residences.
Vienna and Singapore seems to be cities that have overcome this trend.
So I used to be an enthusiastic YIMBY, but there just doesn't appear to be any concrete evidence that more construction is going to lead to more affordable housing.
Having said that, I do believe we should promote more construction, I just don't think it's going to reduce the cost of living to a sustainable level.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/How-th...
https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-...
https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...
Tokyo's population has grown 1.5X over the last two decades while rents and property prices have been essentially flat.
Please see this non-exhaustive list of things which all show building more housing leads to housing affordability.
* http://cityobservatory.org/another-housing-myth-debunked-nei...
* https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/12/02/how...
* https://jamesjgleeson.wordpress.com/2018/02/19/how-tokyo-bui...
* https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/How-th...
* https://medium.com/land-buildings-identity-and-values/what-i...
* https://fee.org/articles/why-isnt-rent-in-tokyo-out-of-contr...
* https://www.upjohn.org/research-highlights/new-construction-...
* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/arti...
* https://medium.com/@eddiesun/no-vacancy-the-housing-crisis-l...
* https://twitter.com/noahpinion/status/1165339989774749696?s=...
It's time we stop blaming everyone else and start taking responsibility."
This is encouraging to see. I think Andrew Yang showed there's a real hunger for a solutions and data oriented approach, eschewing tribalism. Although perhaps still in a nascent stage, there finally seem to be signs of an increasing appetite for this.
Good luck!
The demise of Scott Wiener's SB50 this year has certainly been a disappointment, but we try not to pin our hopes on any single solution. It took us 50 years to get where we are, and we expect it'll take at least 10 to get out. That will be a combination of local, state, and federal action.
The thing I've learned being involved in SF politics and YIMBY for the past few years is that politicians don't make change. They don't shift the discourse. Instead, it's grassroots movements like YIMBY Action that build a parade that politicians then jump to the front of. (Of course, this isn't true for Scott. He's one of the few true believers!)
We're building a passionate and vocal community that can do the on-the-ground organizing necessary to make politicians court us. The way forward it to continue building a voting bloc. You only have as much power as the people you can turn out to vote.
- A Supervisor puts a proposition on the ballot - organizations funnel money into the campaign for the ballot prop - then when the ballot prop advertises they include names of the people running for office
It's why SF has _so_ _many_ ballot props: they are the legal way to bypass the fundraising limits we imposed on individual electoral campaigns. Ironically, if we repealed our campaign finance limits, there'd be less dark money and far fewer ballot props.
I don't have a ballot prop to attach my name to, so I have to do old-fashioned campaigning (with some modern, high-tech things, too :)
https://www.thecoastnews.com/city-council-nullifies-conteste...
Or start something yourself! Where do you live?
If you're on twitter, the twitter networks usually bridge cities. I follow a lot of LA area YIMBY groups, but get some cross pollination from other cities too.
I am not from USA, but over here i did have a 'pleasure' contacting them. They worked actively against communities they were supposed to represent. I am talking about both city councilors, and district ones.
You know whats the best part? you have like 3 options to pick, and they all are exactly the same(cozy job, with limited hours for appointments and ignoring your community)
Please cite at lease one example in which this has ever been the case. I do understand the theory behind your argument here, and I assume you are familiar with (leftist) counter-arguments, so this is not an attempt to open a debate. Rather, I want you to be right but until I see some solid evidence I am unconvinced.
>One of my prouder YIMBY moments was turning out 5 people on a weekday morning to speak to our state rep, who ended up voting in favor of HB 2001, which legalizes up to 4-plexes throughout most Oregon cities.
This is a great example of how it seems to me that YIMBYs are anti-NIMBY in the way Democrats are anti-Republican. Time and time again, it appears neither groups are actually doing any thing ‘good for the people “on the margins. Clearly, this policy benefits landlords more than anybody and the implication is that this is besides the fact of lowering rent prices. Fine. But it is not insignificant that all of these efforts primarily promote the perpetuation of rent-seeking.
I watched from the front row as investors bought up Portland. It has been about 6 years since it entered full-swing and rent prices are higher than ever before. This is not good for people “on the margins”. In fact, most of those people were not even on the margins before the investors came in. I am one of them. I should know.
Of course, history is littered with cases of YIMBY theory failing urban housing markets, so please show me an example of where your theories have actually succeeded.
There are a lot of ways to build more supply:
https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...
I find the 'Montreal' example the most compelling in that it's fairly "human scale", but tastes vary.
Well... no. If your SFH zoned lot is now duplex-friendly, it means your house goes up in value because it can be immediately rented out to two people or you can rent it out to another family immediately, without asking anyone, as long as you do the required physical modifications. Now your home value is increased by the amount of revenue (at an appropriate discount rate) it would draw in from two simultaneous occupants in perpetuity, which is always higher than the rate possible from one occupant.
It literally benefits everyone
> Of course, history is littered with cases of YIMBY theory failing urban housing markets
No, it's not. History is a constant example of the success of the free market, which YIMBY's are in favor of, and NIMBY's are against. This is ridiculous.
The problem with the “try to understand NIMBYs” concern trolling in this thread is that there isn’t much to understand. The only common thread in NIMBY philosophy is fear of change, and some mild xenophobia.
I think there’s a lot more common ground to be had with far-left PHIMBYs who want the government to build most housing. At least that’s a coherent philosophy and a proposed solution.
And yes, due to the scale of development, rents are lower than they expected when they built. Your prices were gonna go up regardless, and the scale of development that happened actually kept prices down.
First of all, for example in the Bay Area there are more people who would like to live there than there are houses, and so the people with more money bid up the price and "win" the house, while the people with less money are priced out and must live elsewhere. Hopefully you agree with this basic premise?
With this model, if there is one less house, one more person will be priced out, and if there is one more house, one less person will be priced out, since the number of houses determine how many winners there will be (and as long as people don't change their minds about wanting to live there if they could afford it).
I've heard people worry about "induced demand", and I agree it's true that there's probably many people that would consider moving to San Francisco from elsewhere if the price started coming down (and of course vice versa), and that that would prevent the price from lowering too quickly. But those people moving free up housing in Austin, Seattle, etc, and there are more "winners" overall.
I think a lot of the people "on the margins" of being priced out in the Bay Area are not on the edge of homelessness - often they are able to move and drive up demand elsewhere. But I do see more and more people living out of RVs and vehicles parked near freeways.
For the price increases over the last couple decades, I think the demand has gone up for most first world cities. I think this is mostly because the industries that are booming are mostly knowledge work, that tends to have a higher specialization of labor so is more naturally located in places with higher population densities that have more liquid job markets (in addition to network effects within certain industries). I think the solution to this is to build more housing in cities but the alternative is lower income workers/industries are displaced and landowners are enriched.
For a specific example of this theory working, Tokyo is subject to a lot of the same economic forces as other first world cities that drive demand up (wrt labor specialization etc). They've managed to keep housing under control, but in order to achieve that they've had to allow almost double the amount of new housing as all of California (despite Tokyo having only around 1/3 the population) [1].
[1] https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-...
Plenty of people buy duplexes and fourplexes and live in them. They are also housing that is cheaper and can be rented at a lower price.
While we wait for the revolution, we might as well encourage the for-profit developers to build in the least destructive ways, so that less people suffer in the short term from the choked supply and anti-human urban planning that capitalists will exercise if left unchecked.
https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/mac.20170388?fbc...
"Our point is that a first-order effect of more housing in Silicon Valley is to raise income and welfare of all US workers."
- get rid of or modify zoning laws (at least in places where growth will happen)
- reduce regulations on builders
- ensure that there are plenty of builders for health competition (so that consumers don't get ripped off)
- provide protections for builders from Sue happy NIMBYs (some kind of legal protection that prevents builders from being sued and penalizes NIMBYs that try to stand in their way).
The benefits of building more are so numerous:
- every house that gets built reduces costs for everyone else as well, as the stress of under supply lessens
- it's easier for people to get to work and find work
- easier for companies to higher people
- more jobs getting created, not just from people able to get to work but new jobs getting created from all that construction
- It'll help the environment immensly! Everyday, I see the 580 - 5 lane highway clogged up with cars crawling by at 10mpg, probably getting very low MPG over a very long distance (this is where most of the CO2 pollution is coming from, at least in the US!)
- over the long term even people with houses already will pay lower property taxes (decreasing values reduce prop taxes)
- as the number of average miles driven per commute comes down, there will be less and less traffic.
The primary problem, as detailed in the article, is that homeowners have every incentive to be against new construction and no incentives to be for it. If property taxes rose appropriately with property values, homeowners would have an interest in maintaining housing prices rather than doing everything they can to keep them rising.
There's also a range of beneficial secondary effects. For example, I've talked to retired folks that have considered leaving the bay due to the increased cost of living. But because they have owned their house for decades + P13, if they bought a _cheaper_ house elsewhere in CA to downsize, they'd be paying _more_ in property taxes, to the point of the move not being worth the cost. (I believe there's been talk of transferable tax rates to fix this specific problem, or maybe something was even passed, but it just goes to show the distortions P13 has beyond the obvious).
Aligning incentives (where possible) is, imo, almost always a better way to do things than creating a new batch of regulations/laws to deal with a problem.
> For example, I've talked to retired folks that have considered leaving the bay due to the increased cost of living. But because they have owned their house for decades + P13, if they bought a _cheaper_ house elsewhere in CA to downsize, they'd be paying _more_ in property taxes, to the point of the move not being worth the cost. (I believe there's been talk of transferable tax rates to fix this specific problem, or maybe something was even passed, but it just goes to show the distortions P13 has beyond the obvious).
Tax rates are transferable in the same county, under certain restrictions (less expensive I think). Some counties have deals with eachother to transfer tax rates. I think a big benefit would be to have all counties to be able to transfer rates with eachother.
Another problem with transferable tax rates is most smaller housing units tend to be condos - and all they build new are 'luxury' condos. Even if you could pay for it outright, and get a transferred tax rate, you probably have an insane HOA attached to it. This alone can make it not worthwhile.
But still, I think the best, most realistic way out of the prop 13 mess is to get rid of it for newly bought homes, but allow the transfer rate for downsizing state-wide. And for the love of god, get rid of it from inheritance. Most of these people massively benefiting from it are in their 60s and 70s, so the circle of life will eventually take care of things. If we don't pass something soon the next generation of inheritors will force us to wait another lifetime to fix the problem.
Basically, the new arrivals pay for everything. And new taxes added (such as school taxes) follow the same scheme so that long-time residents pay less there too.
That said, the TRUE beneficiaries of prop 13 are corporations anyway.
There's lots of people who move into a neighborhood near a airport, landfill, etc, and who over some time living there decide the airport is a big problem because it's holding property values down.
California homeowners who are 55 or older get a one time chance to sell their existing primary residence, and transfer its property tax assessment to another house[0]. Only catch is that the valuation of the new property has to be equal or less than the property that you sold, but if you live in the Bay Area you probably meet that qualification.
[0] https://www.sfgate.com/business/networth/article/How-to-tran...
Only if you are leaving the Bay Area. Often, these older houses have a lot of deferred maintenance and the retired seller wants to downsize into something in the Bay Area that is newer build/renovated.
[0]: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
https://ww3.arb.ca.gov/cc/inventory/pubs/reports/2000_2017/g...
Lower rents, and having more affordable housing is obviously something that a person who profits from higher rents, would want to prevent.
https://edsource.org/2019/school-groups-explore-15-billion-t...
Because yeah, it'd suck to lose your home that you're supposed to own because your neighborhood got pricey.
That is, if your property tax was $10,000 last year when you bought, and would increase to $12,000 this year, the state would give you an indefinite, interest free loan for $1500 or whatever secured by the property.
I'm surprised Republicans have not latch onto this as a reason to repeal it - they already like to point out it is easy to spend other people's money as an argument against socialism.
Today these kids have grown up and own homes in the suburbs. New kids need to move in, but the kids who got there first refuse to let them build. That's what this story is about.
Wanting your home to appreciate in value forever is like expecting your 20-year-old car to sell for more than its sticker price. It really only works for art installations, created by a collaboration of architect, engineer, and builder, with some living space inside.
Framed in these terms, most families do not have any significant assets, and a hefty chunk of their resources dedicated to maintaining their gigantic shelter-providing consumer appliance.
Thank you. I had already figured that considering one's house to be an asset is the wrong way to think about it, but lacked the words for how to then accurately describe what it actually is. "Durable consumer good" captures what a house is and does much better, IMO.
Getting this attitude more widespread is going to be difficult, sadly. The land that the house rests upon absolute is an asset, and the house thereupon can't be readily decoupled from the land (trailers and double-wides not withstanding). Thus conflating the actual asset, the land, with the consumer good it is presently being used to produce, the house, is a reasonable mental shortcut.
I don't think the US will even be able to start on a tear-down-and-rebuild attitude until there is already a sufficiency of housing. As it is now, it appears to be in a cycle of new development, then decline, then revitalization, where redevelopment only occurs when property values in a place have already collapsed, and ruined those who weren't able to move before the wave hit.
I suppose it's no surprise that tax laws everywhere do not classify homes as durable goods that depreciate in value.
Residences are mainly exempted from depreciation, but commercial real estate is allowed to be depreciated because buildings do have a useful life.
Land entails a totally separate kind of economics than 'durable goods'.
Possibly, the physical home itself might be considered a 'durable good'.
If I live in California where home prices are sky-high, and I've saved up for nearly a decade for a house, why would I be willing to allow legislation that would likely devalue my biggest asset (by far) that I saved and sacrificed so diligently for?
This is a legitimate question, not trying to be a jerk. I'm genuinely curious what the argument against this is.
Right now, the high cost of housing in the Bay Area is largely due to a couple of factors: 1 - high cost of labor. Rezoning won't change that. 2 - restrictions on right to build. Rezoning will reduce this. 3 - high cost of land. Rezoning will increase this, by making it possible to build more units of housing on a given area of land.
For most current homeowners, it's likely that 3 will outweigh 2. Developers will buy up some portion of single family housing stock (and low-density multifamily stock) to rebuild the lots with denser housing. That process will both increase demand and reduce supply of those types of housing, resulting in price increases.
At the same time, the average unit of housing will cost less, because there will be many more condos/apartments available. Owners of high-density condos would be the most vulnerable to seeing their asset values decrease. However, building big condo buildings is still going to be a complicated endeavor, so price adjustments will happen slowly over time. No one's going to get hosed, although their asset prices might go up more slowly over time than otherwise, or even be eroded by inflation in the long term.
At the same time, many of those condo owners will still come out ahead. They may be able to upgrade to a nicer condo than they otherwise could have afforded. They may also benefit from the second-order effects of lower average housing prices, in the form of reduced costs for non-housing items. If they run a business, it will be easier for them to attract and retain workers. Schools and other public services will also be better able to attract and retain quality staff, at a lower wage bill. Etc.
Rezoning would not devalue your house. You'd get more money for it in the long run. Better yet, you'd be able to instantly become a landlord (convert your house into a plex) and move somewhere else that satisfied your desire for a single-family home. Or you'd be able to market to a developer.
Plus, if you just kept living in your house, the value would go up anyway, as it always does.
(Importantly, no such restriction exists on population: within the U.S. at least, nobody has the right to prevent their neighbors or fellow citizens from having kids, while they do have the right to prevent their neighbors from building more housing units. There's an inevitable mismatch between reality here...)
So long as this idea is a a fundamental plank of YIMBY-ism, all of the pretty claims about how high-density living doesn't have to be a dystopian hellscape are literally worthless, because every one of them relies totally on things outside the residents' control that the YIMBYs will be first in line to try and destroy.
Yet this is not the case in California.
What a great article, I'm glad that not all is lost in SF Bay w.r.t. the housing crisis.
TBH, I'm amazed how the above points seem so controversial in SF Bay. It's as common-sense as it gets. Build more, always. Denying market-rate housing projects because they don't have income-restricted units doesn't help anyone in any way; I'm all for free-speech and stuff, but anyone who's trying to argue any such points that interfere with adding more capacity to the market and which make zero economic sense should be escorted out of the meetings.
My ex moved into a condominium complex that has exactly zero parking spots or loading docks for visitors, and no parking for half a mile in either direction. It's an absolute total fail. Neighbors rat on each other to get each other's cars towed because they get so upset. It's literally impossible to have a party there or even invite friends over because they simply cannot park and there is no transit available anywhere near there. There aren't any bike lanes either because it's a financially strapped city and the complex is near the border of a rich city that explicitly does things to make it harder to get between the two townships.
I'm just saying, both hands have to know what each other are doing and people have to make rational decisions at the municipal level.
If the condo complex is sufficiently unattractive, few people will want to live there, and prices will fall to the point where buyers or renters accept the low price and the associated hassle. That's a market decision. If the condo complex is, let's imagine, 50% lower than market, then maybe people will accept the parking situation.
and there is no transit available anywhere near there
Then residents might try demanding it from the city government.
You may like this: https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/193... book.
That being said, I'm not aware of any YIMBYish laws that outright restrict parking in residential areas. The only thing equivalent I can think of is the Market street law in SF, but that's not a residential area, so it actually makes sense.
We have the same situation as a startup focused on developing a product. We have abidance of developers, and very few infrastructure engineers. When we start deploying what we have built, we are going to have a bad time.
https://www.blogto.com/real-estate-toronto/2019/07/toronto-c...
Toronto prices are crazy, so Toronto isn't building enough, let alone the major coastal American cities.
That's because only megaprojects can afford to overcome all the regulatory and neighborhood hurdles.
Do you think the average homeowner trying to become a landlord by converting their home into a duplex has enough money to pay for both sides of a law suit, as this developer had to?
"Despite a weak outlook for residential real estate, the number of building permits issued in New York City for new homes surged last year to the highest pace since 2015. It was the second-highest total since the end of the last big building boom in 2008. Permits for 26,547 units of housing were issued in 2019, about 27% more than the year before ..."
So this is not even 0,5% of overall units.
This site shows active construction in new york: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/buildings/html/nyc-active-major-...
You need to compare it to population growth, decades of building backlog, job growth, etc.
Housing _is_ infrastructure, and it's the piece of infrastructure we're most sorely missing.
Of course adding enough lanes to meet demand is not worth the cost. However the induced demand argument is wrong, it is a cost benefit calculation: will the additional people who are able to get someplace be worth the cost to add the lane.
Transit does have the same problem, but transit can scale much better in a given amount of space. A bus every 5 minutes can handle more traffic than a lane filled with cars - assuming the bus doesn't compete with the cars. You can run a bus every 3 minutes, and if that isn't enough a train every 45 seconds holding 5 times as many people as the bus. If that isn't enough - okay, it is time to build another track for the train, but that is a huge number of people (ie a good number would find their life improved by a track on a slightly different route that)
Out of curiosity, do you ride Bart at commute hours? At 5pm, the platforms at Embarcadero and Montgomery are dangerously packed. I didn’t think there is much excess capacity for commuting.
All other times? Absolutely yes.
I'm wondering what your frame of reference is here. As someone who has lived in the Bay Area for most of my 30 years, and lived in Atlanta for a couple years recently, where they are actually building like crazy, the Bay Area seems to be at a total standstill.
This is the easy one to fix — when there is demand, they can just run more trains.
Much harder is the transbay commute at rush hours. There is almost no spare capacity, and it’s not clear how those extra thousands of people in Lafayette will make it in to SF every morning before we build a second transbay tube for Bart — and that’s at least a decade away.
I say this as someone who loves development: for the Bay Area to significantly increase its population, we need a ton more transit and we need to start building it now.
Or if the jobs were in the other direction like Walnut Creek, it would be a reverse commute.
Also, in this case, they have the infrastructure, the NIMBYs are just hoarding it to themselves, as they do in Berkeley as well.
Source: schedule fees for various bay area cities on new construction.
They need the California State Government to overrule local zoning limits. We need to allow dense housing near rail lines and major roads. And I think that anywhere a single-family detached home currently exists, a 2-family home should be allowed.
Build more housing! It's that simple. Prices will fall fast.
Yes, California and other places with housing problems need as-of-right policies as the article suggests. It's not simply zoning, it's removing all ability of local governments to hold things up, because people will use absolutely anything they can grab onto.
From a philosophical standpoint, people are sometimes uncomfortable with the idea of pre-empting local control—after all, don't they know better? But as the article points out, it's a coordination problem. There is a certain cost [1] to be paid in building housing, unfortunately, and you need a higher-level (in this case, state-wide) view to distribute that cost fairly.
> And I think that anywhere a single-family detached home currently exists, a 2-family home should be allowed.
Make it more like 4–8 (but maybe limited to 3-4 stories), and I'm in.
[1]: As the article points out, however, we think far too often only about the costs. I for one would welcome more neighbors.
Edit: The reason is because homeowners are competing with developers, so their own asset depreciates when supply increases. I was just thinking from the perspective of renters.
If you had an idyllic childhood in a sleepy town not unlike Mayberry, it is entirely reasonable to want the same things for your kids.
None of that is realistic anymore--the world is a changed place. But these are not irrational preferences to have.
Also, it is quite often the case that when you build, it is either: 1) made for high-income dwellers, thus not reducing prices, because the high-income and low-income housing markets are often effectively separate markets, like cars and semi-tractor trailors. ...or... 2) the people living nearby, do think it will drive down prices, including the price of their own house, which is their only effective form of savings. If their $400,000 house becomes a $300,000 house, yeah their property taxes may go down, but they lost $100,000 in savings they intended to sell and live on elsewhere after they retire.
Also from Texas: In Texas, developers building households generally happens on empty land in the suburbs, or in unused non-residential land.
In LA or the Bay Area, it would happen by replacing single family homes with multi-family housing. Something that would also be anathema in most well-off Texas communities. It's already sprawled about as far as geography permits.
Lots of people don't want to live in those places and would rather keep their existing neighborhoods than invite a lot of new residents and a larger, denser population. Hence their creating those laws.
It's not obvious to me why we should take the desires of the people who want to move there more seriously than the desires of people to keep what they have similarly.
But in that case, we need to stop building a ton of office space in those "full" cities to import a bunch more jobs than we have housing for...
It won't bankrupt anyone. If you bought a house you could afford for "x", and you budgeted as if it cost "x", you still have a place to live if you keep paying the mortgage. All your plans remain exactly the same. If the "value" of the house goes down, you'll save on property taxes.
That is, of course if you change a policy that was primarily designed to inflate housing prices to the stratosphere then it might negatively impact that, but maybe you were wrong to do that to begin with.
How fast, and how much?
The negotiation scene is great stuff. It's gold.
Another very important line:
People have to realize that homelessness is connected to housing prices.
I have been told repeatedly on the internet that the cost of housing has nothing whatsoever to do with homelessness. Homeless people are viewed by many as "junkies and crazies" who just have a personal problem and are not negatively impacted by the housing situation in the US. I've seen people deny that there even is a housing crisis in the US.
Consider that there is still housing growth, but its in South San Jose, Morgan Hill, and Gilroy. Those people all have to drive past Los Gatos, Cambell, Cupertino, San Jose, and Sunnyvale to get to Mountain View. All your doing is increasing the amount of Miles people have to drive, and that in term increases the amount of time they spend in their cars, and clogs the roads. If you built houses in Mountain View or Palo Alto, none of those people would be on the roads, and if they were it wouldn't be for nearly as long. You don't have to take my word for it take a look at average commute times in the bay area, those increases aren't due to a 2x increase in Mountain View, its due to a 2x increase far outside with people driving in.
Public transportation is great, but the solution is to build houses near where people work, that means San Francisco and Mountain View.
What happens is they congest traffic far less than they do now, driving from farther-flung places.
If you focus on dense developments near them, that goes a long way.
When it was Ms. Trauss’s turn to speak, she argued that the entire notion of public comment on new construction was inherently flawed, because the beneficiaries — the people who would eventually live in the buildings — couldn’t argue their side.
Bringing that stuff up gets me called a NIMBY; it sometimes seems like anything that might make it more expensive for developers to build more housing is a crime against humanity. :-/
It sometimes feels like all we’re really doing is enabling developers to mine our quality of life for their own profit, without actually creating enough housing to make a dent in the problem.
I would love to see the city of SF get denser, but building condos isn’t the only answer.
Worth a view The Insane Battle To Sabotage a New Apartment Building Explains San Francisco's Housing Crisis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExgxwKnH8y4
(Edit: the original title was "Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build"! ;)
Unless we define housing types/building codes for specific subsets, it'll most likely be just more of the same development/investments.
With many major metro areas bursting at the seams, I think they need to break ground on new 21st century cities and identify a way to lower the populations as a solution/initial step, rather than adding more deck chairs to the ship.
This gives the economy a new canvas to work with and the opportunity to move forward 100% with sustainable priciples without being encumbered by the pre-existing conditions plaguing NIMBY strongholds.
With desalination and autonomous vehicles becoming a bigger part of the modern economy, California could build horseshoe/teardrop shaped autonomous highways from the coastline cities hundreds of miles inland that allow modern logistics to fillin the gaps with public transportation and servicing basic needs (water, sanitation, public services) and accomodate new suburban models to house an ever-growing population. Outside of the earthquake zones, the can build the high-density housing they need to solve a good portion of the social crisis.
Extending cities with autonomous loops may not be the best answer, but the existing city planning models need more pioneering strategies if they want to seed future growth.
You can cap density by height like most European cities do or go up forever like Shanghai. But simply arguing suburbs + highways were the 1950s answer and will be the 2050s answer is missing the point.
Why do you think Cali has not overbuilt skyscrapers to solve the housing crisis? The moneys has always been there to build them. Its probably something obvious huh?
Edit: I'm also in Southern California and am impressed with the sheer number of bungalows that cover the landscape. They would have chosen other alternatives had they been available during the growth boom. I also felt the tremors in July of last year from the quakes 150 miles away and think that is still top-of-mind looking forward.
Just a bold statement. I wish for change but i don't see it happening. I love the weather, love the environment and sometimes love the people here but after living here for a number of years, I am started to not understand it. I pay pretty high taxes to live here. We have the most embarrassing property tax laws that include business property. I walk to work and walk through so many homeless camps filled with poop, trash and needles. Many of our communities have failing roads, some of the worst I have experienced in the world. The roads have started groups such as "pot hole vigilantes". In most of the communities I never see a police presence. We say we are green and love the environment but we have made little progress on public transportation since the 70s. I mean hell, we cannot even get a quick rollout of new BART cars. So we want to hate on building new roads but we have no new public transportation. I am starting to run out of reasons to participate in California.
I'm Californian (7th generation) born and raised and I had to leave for the aforementioned reasons, I spent a summer in Sunnyvale and I just couldn't cope with the dreariness of it all, (this is also about the time I became really fascinated with the Cyberpunk genre, because I felt it had already happened there).
If I'm honest the Bay area feels the least like the California I knew and love(d). I'm originally from SoCal, but my family is from NorCal (Santa Cruz and San Jose) and its just not worth it. The costs, the traffic, the taxes, the headache of just being somewhere that shutdowns so early but feels like its never dormant. I used to go to San Jose in the 90s and the feel and the vibe of the place is night and day to present-day.
I've traveled all over Europe and lived in Hawaii for a while, and the World is much bigger than California. The one thing California does have above over every other place is the weather, and that's debatable as I thought NorCal weather was far too muggy and sticky for my preference and I lived in Coast in SoCal, and the diverse cultural environment. In OC I can honestly immerse myself in Vietnamese, Laotion, Chinese, Japanese, Korean centric towns within a 45 miles radius all in the same day. Its amazing if you're into food culture, LA is even better, San Diego less so but still good.
Where as if I lived in Germany or Italy, while they have their own regional 'cuccina tipica' it was just not the same at all. And that's what I missed the most when away from California, everything else I can cope with.
With that said, I hate the BART, its gross and a relic of terrible system. It was cool to see it from afar, but having to go from Sunnyvale to the East Bay, to SFO on a regular basis... I'll never see why anyone would do that instead of ride a motorcycle or an EV and drive in the carpool for free if you value your time ad health. I got stuck in SFO on a Sunday for 13 hours because I forgot the BART stopped early.
An SFPD cop told me years ago that they won't get involved because of social media. Social media outrage doesn't care about context, and their job and pension is on the line, so it's just better to do nothing unless someone's in real danger.
Beyond that, the SF DAs haven't prosecuted petty crimes in years. In fact, the new one is not only not going to prosecute, but is saying he wants to simply pay back people for their broken car windows.[1]
It's really going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
[1] - https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/SF-auto-burglary-e...
There's a class of people that own housing that pay very little property tax because they bought years ago and are protected by Prop 13.
These people vote to prevent building anything because they benefit both from insane house prices and property tax protection.
All the new people live with a handful of roommates and still pay $1400-$2200 in rent.
I have met many people who complain non-stop about things, while not being able to name the politician they are voting for in a local or regional election, or even a politician they just voted for in a recent election.
So, I wouldn't say OP is describing a specific part. It's rather pervasive all over.
Anyway, just because there are some safe burbs does not mean what I describe is wrong. Our roads suck, we have a backwards property tax, its expensive to live in a decent school district and I generally feel pretty unsafe here.
As much as we like to grandstand against mass extinction of wildlife and deforestation, we will always cave to economical and social pressures of modern life which almost exclusively require resource extraction and destruction of the biosphere.
it's like the bacteria in a biological weapons lab learned how to place orders for and distribute more agar
... letters to elected officials, and at the open microphone that Mr. Falk observed at the City Council meetings, residents said things like “too aggressive,” “not respectful,” “embarrassment,” “outraged,” “audacity,” “very urban,” “deeply upset,” “unsightly,” “monstrosity,” “inconceivable,” “simply outrageous,” “vehemently opposed,” “sheer scope,” “very wrong,” “blocking views,” “does not conform,” “property values will be destroyed,” and “will allow more crime to be committed.”
If preserving wildlife and forests can be equated with preserving suburban lifestyles and property values, then yes, it’s perhaps already lost and we should all be quite sad.
It can't, and shouldn't, be equated to that. Denser urban living, i.e. building more housing in cities, reduces suburban sprawl. That's a good thing if you care about the environment.
I'm not asking rhetorically.
Although I think California especially needs new housing, the bay area in particular has a housing issue which is somewhat artificially created due to a number of large (google, facebook, etc) and smaller tech companies requiring a "buts in seat" mentality and a philosophy that all "important" jobs be based in the bay area near their HQ's. Its really quite sad as a job that can be done anywhere is forced to be located in one of the most expensive areas on earth.
I feel weird sort of agreeing with the wealthy home owners in outlying small towns. Why should the state adopt a "more of everything" policy? The American and California model of low-density suburban building is completely broken and "more of everything" is basically saying more of the same. A higher density approach with the building concentrated in the centralized cities and perhaps some of the "towns" surrounded by city (Menlo Park or Brisbane).
I mean, it's obvious false that "more of everything is the only way to meet the goal". Of course, you could build that much housing in higher density urban areas.
Different people value density differently, but apparently my willingness to pay a premium to live somewhere with lower density makes me an evil NIMBY.
You could 10x the density around there and be able to support the population. You’ve got wide streets, services, and it isn’t landfill.
Honestly though, I feel like it isn’t really a crisis. It’s mostly rich people fighting with other rich people over whose backyard to build in. There are no real YIMBYs, just people who want to live in certain areas they don’t currently live in.
Most of the poors have already been displaced. We pretend like they are the focus because it’s good for politics, but the reality is the diversity is already gone.
The problem of course is the best time to build affordable housing is 20 years ago. So if you want to really help the poor (as opposed to symbolically helping a few poor while leaving the rest out) you need to go back in time 20 years. You can start today though on a 20 year plan.
You can build a bunch of high rises and fill them with people, and private transportation will become impossible. The experience of going to the beach or some hiking spot on the weekend will be degraded. Everyone will be living in a godawful megacity instead of the nice neighborhood they'd rather live in. There's a reason people push back against growth with respect to housing.
The real problem is overpopulation. If you eliminate one negative feedback loop for population growth, you will ultimately run into another one, and all the different kinds of waste we produce (CO2, garbage, light and noise pollution) will only pile up while finite resources in the region (breathing room, nature, water, room on the road and on hiking trails) will be divvied up into smaller portions
A nuclear missile fired into the San Andreas fault, perhaps (this is a movie reference, folks, and not a serious suggestion).
HOAs don't seem to do much besides execute petty laws. Neighborhoods, while they can be diverse, will never approach a city in terms of allowing people of different backgrounds, races, etc. to interact. There's a particular reason cities vote more democratic than suburbs: It's hard to vote for such hateful policies when you interact with the people effected every day.
I get that there's this nostalgia or rather inertia about suburbs. I get that people grew up in a one family house with a lawn in their nice homogeneous town. But it needs to go away.
Plus I'm a little perplexed at the library analogy. I'm not saying we need to lower funding or anything. If anything we should be pumping more money into suburbs so that they can build and create more healthy, flourishing communities. These communities should just be built in a way that's space and energy efficient.
The city I live in has been growing a lot, but so has traffic and crime.
Mello Roos more than doubles my Prop 13 property taxes. My neighborhood gives way more than its fair share. The schools suck, the roads are too narrow, I could go on. Its poor planning and probably out-right corruption.
And this is why we need the English Rule. We're the only industrialized nation that does not have some form of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_%28attorney%27s_f...
Even international law admits that.
High cost of real estate should force many people to sell their homes and leave to cheaper places.
Are you implying that if in your case if they were reversed we would see some sort of different outcomes? Asians are more open to getting their house values going down by new development?
By contrast, NYC has 27,016 people per sq mi; the densest suburb of Boston (Somerville) has 18,431; West Hollywood has 18,297.
There's plenty of room for more people in the Bay Area, if denser housing is allowed.
I believe I looked for something like that in the BA and it doesn't really exist.
California can move it’s operations to these cheaper places.
Edit: looks like the title changed now
But I am glad that the media is reporting this. California is slowly killing itself with its housing policy. I live in an area where there are only people who are either rich retirees or whose parents have bought real estate before the market went crazy. And these people kill any effort to build more. It’s basically impossible for regular people to live here.
Why don't we assume more housing will not simply bring more non-homeless from elsewhere? The homeless are certainly not the most competitive home buyers.
Hmm but this is not a given is it? I think many would move to SF if housing was only slightly cheaper.
Here are NYC ones, the biggest prjects are 1000-2000 units each https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_Housing_...
What we need is to stop clustering so much around SF and LA. There are lots of places in CA that are basically empty. What we need is more ways for people to make money remotely so they can live in lower density areas and still make good living. High density is not the answer, people need space and we have space.
* European way - build centrally design urban cities, with infrastructure, schools, public transportation, community spaces, recreation/business spaces.
* American way - let for-profit developers build luxury houses around enormous google/fb/other tech giant campuses, and let struggling communities to figure out how to live with it...
Medical care:
* European way - build an efficient medical system which is paid by taxes, affordable to everyone.
* American way - let medical system to be a for profit business and put a burden of medical insurance for all on the medium income population and let them figure it out
Good news on the housing - the companies reached the plato of the salaries for the bay area employees and many actively moving to the other urban areas which should spread the stress from the bay area. Its is 21st century, and if a company can't establish an effective distributed collaboration processes, it does not deserve to be a leader in high tech space.
In either case, I see quite a different approach - attempt to provide social oriented services by just relaying the problems on the working population, instead of owning the problem and solving the proper way.
Every high density over crowded over built city ..and this is global..is unaffordable. It has expensive utilities, higher taxes and bad declining infrastructure that the government can’t seem to replace or upgrade.
We have pestilence, rodent infestations, higher crime, big government and more taxes.
I also don’t understand the fairness of a non house owning young majority with little or no financial intelligence or experience due to being educated by free public education and state nannyship getting to vote on imposing punitive high taxes aimed to displace the very people whose taxes and employment history and financial savvy that actually funded said free public education.
Clearly this means that we have done a bad job of public education using property taxes. In fact, most of the wealth is accrued due to immigrant net worth and who didn’t even avail the free public school education.
Wasting more public money on public education and using property taxes to fund said education is the real problem that needs fixing. There is no end to taxation. Especially because those who are not home owners can force more property taxes on the minority who own it.
Put another way..why should someone who can’t handle their personal finances be allowed to make decisions at govt level. This would never happen with employment. How can the unsavvy have-nots have a say about punitive taxation upon the haves who get to gain nothing from the punitive taxes. This is especially crucial to ask considering that the government in Sacramento has a piss poor track record on managing money and shown a lack of transparency.
That's not true. Houston and Dallas are big cities without affordability problems. Sunnyvale, CA (quite dense, and becoming more so, but suffering from these NIMBY problems) is one of the safest cities in the country. Well below the average crime rate of many rural towns.
2. Dallas and Houston are not in the same category as Bay Area. Texas is not California.
3. Crime in California stats are unreliable due to passing of Prop 47. Crimes are not reported or recorded or booked due to not wanting to incarcerate people. This has actually increased petty crimes all over Bay Area(I don’t know about other cities in CA..I do know about my backyard however)..you only have to subscribe to NIXLE to see that even those reported is increasing.
The cops won’t even come to an ongoing crime scene unless someone’s life is in immediate danger.
Wrt San Francisco..just type ‘Chesa Boudin’ in google news to see what’s happening in San Francisco. This is our lives and our backyards and built upon our tax dollars and work. It’s being auctioned away by those who have no stake and have never contributed to it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_...
How about what do in Singapore? 97% of the population lives in state owned apartments on 99 year leases. Affordable to luxury homes for all income levels.
Wealth is a construct built upon the notion of scarcity. One has wealth BECAUSE another doesn’t have it. If everyone had one million dollars, then a million has no value.
Imagine I inherited a diamond necklace from my grandmother who inherited it from her mother and so on. The original price of it was $200 and today it is worth a million dollars.
Yes, I inherited it. It’s mine. It’s valuable. Because someone else covets such a diamond necklace doesn’t mean that it is unfair that I inherited it.
Most of the YIMBY arguments seems to be based on ‘unfairness’. How is it unfair to hold something of value that others covet? To be punitively taxed on an asset that one owns free and clear just because someone younger doesn’t own it is a gross violation of property rights. It’s also ignorant and misleading. Most of all, it’s immoral and petty.
Make an informed choice rather than blindly picking sides.
A satellite community of multiple such youthful communities is a win-win for all. That’s what real estate companies do, but they profit enormously from it with little value. They are building on top of existing infrastructure and not passing the monetary benefits of it and pocketing it for their purposes.
I am not being flippant because I have spent a few years on such a model. A community of 6000 can be supported in 600 acres that will actually not only be self sustaining but can also be income producing if you add farms and value added businesses for those who don’t wish full time jobs. There are monetary and communal benefits. There will be less reliance on govt and less wastage of resources.
120 is a good number because it would satisfy the Dunbar number limits. It shouldn’t be difficult to have a nice proportion of ageing, young and middle aged populations for diversity.
It’s just a modern tech supported version of eco villages and ..dare I say..cults. But they fail because they never take the necessary survival factor of monetary stability and most eschew technology. These don’t have to and will be better supported.
It may be possible to create an extremely dense, high population, productive charter city with an enormous investment of capital, but it would be far easier to simply remove the restraints that hold back our existing cities.
If you want older people/property owning seniors on fixed incomes to move out, pay them. It’s as simple as that.
The truth is that most cannot pay. The value of the dollar they earn is imaginary. The whole system from Wall Street to wages to taxes is a Ponzi scheme.
Land has value. Water or access to water has value. Inherent value. Everything else is value-added. So you have to pay more for a resource that is fixed or shrinking while population increases.
It’s very simple. Buy it off people. OR. It’s far cheaper to add value upon affordable land and water. To not build on something available and abundant and to not ADD value to it is a poverty of creativity and intelligence. To want to evict older citizens or punitively tax them to displace them to take their land and water is not only lazy but also immoral.
The value of the house is not in $ but the number of man hours that go into it. Maybe tax the kids and grandkids who get tax free and tax saving inheritances. Property tax is as valorem. There is no value added to a home until it’s sold at the new higher price.
Property taxes are a way for the government to make sure that you never truly own your home 100%. They are not a means for young professionals to avail free public education for their own kids. It’s double dipping since they already availed free education paid for by the very same seniors who paid by taxes to support public schools and build city infrastructure.
I am sorry to know that those who want their kids to be in nice neighbourhoods cant afford to pay rent or pay for private schools, but that’s no reason to promote elder abuse by way of punitive property tax increases to displace them from their homes to build more.
What does Lafayette owe the people of San Francisco?--or more accurately, the people that are not from California that chose to move to San Francisco? The revolving door that defines California immigration today, where wealthy young software developers go in and middle/lower class native Californians go out, is what is hollowing out the population, shifting the culture, and causing the homelessness problem, and building more housing isn't going to fix that.
Repeal prop 13 and my taxes will go up enormously--and I'll vote for that repeal at any opportunity.
Some of us do actually believe that the long term common good is worth sacrificing our own personal short term gain.
... woosh .... I guess.