In Santa Cruz, a graduate student strike grows out of a housing crisis
newrepublic.com
newrepublic.com
CS PhDs here have it relatively good, at about $55K / year before taxes, but it's still common for us to spend more than 30-50% of income on rent. (Even in shared housing, it's very difficult to find anything cheaper than $1.3K / month.)
I do know that for students in other departments, money is extremely tight, and they often have very limited options and periods of housing insecurity. As a side note, the homelessness problem in Berkeley has gone from bad to insane over the past few years that I've lived here. I essentially never leave my house, in a pretty posh part of Berkeley, without an uncomfortable interaction (homeless people in various states of undress, under the influence of drugs, talking to themselves, or screaming).
Meanwhile, the UCs (and UC Berkeley in particular) continue to expand a very expensive bureaucracy (I question how many $500K/year vice provosts we really need). It's not that they don't have the money to pay grad students more, but that they're not incentivized to allocate it towards making grad students' lives better.
Unfortunately, there's an apathetic attitude among many students on campus of, essentially, "doing your time and getting out," since they know, at least in STEM, that there's a pile of money waiting on the other side.
It will be interesting to see what happens over the next few months and whether the COLA campaign expands to other UCs. The UC administration is very fearful of union organizing (as evidenced by the many weird anti-union emails the university sent out in 2018, during the last contract negotiation).
The housing thing is real. I lived frugally yet well, with most $ going to rent and then food: just biking etc. Places in broken real estate markets like Berkeley/Stanford/UCSF/etc. should make super high density grad housing: grad students know they'll have roomates anyway, and the univs already own crazy amounts of land, so either univs pay it in salary (they won't) or in subsidized real estate (cheaper for them!). Likewise, donors love paying for buildings. I know many top folks who turned down UCSF and Stanford b/c of this, and that trend has been going up, so it should be a top ~5 priority. I wouldn't be surprised if the cities are probably even more to blame here however for not letting folks build, which is esp. uphill for lackadaisical univ staff. It took forever for UCSF's mission bay campus to build up, and 10-15 years later, it led to an emerging neighborhood for young professionals... and is still not built up as much as it could be.
On the plus side, that meant I learned how to live quite well in one of the most expensive US cities on a below median salary. Great skill for entrepreneurs here!
This seems to be a problem everywhere with universities. You may have a bunch of people Talking Big about efficiencies (staff cutbacks, casualization) but meanwhile we seem to have sprouted an insanely large and well-paid layer of middle management. In Australia funding for teaching, research and administration (actually doing the work) seems like a constant battle yet there's always room for another Deputy Vice Chancellor of Something.
It's true that more administrators are being hired to deal with diversity issues. But there are other, additional, reasons that more administrators are being hired, for example:
-- a trend of universities caring more about completion rates, and hence hiring various people in non-faculty jobs to try to keep students on track.
-- Various "transition" programs; for example, my university runs a "University 101" program
https://sc.edu/about/offices_and_divisions/university_101/
Personally, I find the need for these programs a bit questionable, but their proponents have good arguments.
Overall, as a faculty member, my impression is that universities are expanding what they consider to be their sphere of responsibility -- which means hiring more administrators and staff.
Do you have any examples? I feel like I've seen this sentiment expressed before but I can't get a clear image of what people mean when they say something like this.
Really the closest to "molding" I have seen is more indirect from is a toxic culture of petty academic knife fights with obvious ulterior motives for trying to gin up scandals to get rid of competition for tenure. Like trying to oust a community college professor years later because he made Super Columbine Massacre RPG as a teenager as a satirical art game.
Your comment may be true specifically in a few places but frankly it sounds like cartoonish "torn from the headlines" right-wing sour grapes more than an accurate depiction of what's going on in academia.
why did you quote it like that? take home stipend (not including tuition and fees) is 2250 per month for 9 months + ~13k for the summer. that comes out to 33,250 for the year.
That makes my take-home annual pay about $41K. $55K might be from the year I was on fellowship, payed at a slightly higher rate and without taxes taken out.
What? Why would UC Berkeley want to do that, to make itself less appealing as a destination for graduate studies? There’s zero incentive, this is such a silly hypothetical.
30-year olds should not be starting anthro PhDs in almost any circumstances.
Many grad students and adjuncts have made and are making bad life choices: https://jakeseliger.com/2016/02/25/universities-treat-adjunc...
You know what can be a bad life choice? Trying to get through grad school, and then finding a job, and then getting through tenure, all while your biological clock is ticking, ticking, ticking, waiting for that day when you can settled down and have kids, a day that in the end may never come.
Don't discount the drive that caring for a child you love can provide.
(They're all superheroes, and I live in awe of the load they've carried, but I think their child definitely helped them get through some rough times)
This was in mid-90s, at a time when Santa Cruz was already getting expensive (the story in the article is nothing new!)
I remember living in a house in Santa Cruz in '93 and seeing how much the owners paid for it- $250K, which seemed absurd (houses where I grew up were $100K). Now that house would sell for $1.5M.
Doing a Ph.D. in Anthropology is for people with parents or spouses willing to support them or who have independent means. It is not for people who will be even slightly put out financially if they don't get a job afterwards.
[1]https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/jo...
Hell, I ended up supporting her through her master's but we finally had a good "forcing us to stay in a high COL area so you can make $28,000 a year at a job with no security is not helping the family" chat.
She doesn't work in the field anymore.
It wasn't me just saying "you need to quit", it was "we have things we want to do with our lives and we can't do them if we're both working just to pay for housing in the middle of an expensive city". We knew we wanted kids ands definitely did _not_ want the kind of mortgage where it dictates what you can do with your life, and when you look at the cost of childcare, or imagine yourself saying "we'll I'd like to have a stab at starting my own business but with a $5000 a month mortgage payment it's just not practical", you realize that if you're not careful it's really easy to build a life for yourself where you _have_ to make tons of money.
I do all right, but I'm not in the extremely high income brackets a lot of people on this site seem to be in. So I got a remote job, we moved to the country, and we had a couple kids. The house is paid off (no rent, no mortgage - we emigrated too, which helped). There are definitely downsides but avoiding the housing debt trap has had a lot of upsides.
Doing a PhD isn't training to get a tenure track job, and going into industry or teaching or whatever else you want in life is not a failure.
> Doing a Ph.D. in Anthropology is for people with parents or spouses willing to support them or who have independent means.
Yeah, all these millionaires are lining up to work in anthropology between trips on their yachts.
Do you not value studying where we've come from at all?
Would you say the equivalent to someone who spends six years trying to break into acting and gives up after that with very little to show for it? An Anthro Ph.D. is necessary for teaching Anthro. There are a very small number of other jobs in "industry" for which having one would be helpful but most of the people with those jobs got them through on the job training, not spending 4-10% of their lives studying. And a Ph.D. will not help you get a teaching job any more than a B.A. will.
You may not think that doing something other than academia after a Ph.D. is failure but career academics disagree and if you're doing a Ph.D. you're going to be surrounded by career academics for four years.
Doing a Ph.D. in Anthropology is like spending six years of your life trying to break into acting, or trying to go pro as a video gamer. Almost everyone will fail to get what they wanted after expending enormous time and effort to do so.
I am currently studying myself. I don't value studying and I despise credentialism. I value learning. I don't see why people should be lied to about there being jobs when they don't exist. I don't support pyramid schemes. I don't think encouraging people to do something as damaging to their mental health as doing a Ph.D. in Anthro is moral when the cost is so high and the chance of a good outcome is negligible.
Does society need 100,000 philosophers? 1 million? 10 million?
How much "studying of where we came from" is required?
For instance, does confronting asshole behavior diminish or enflame the behavior.
And start recording now...
They are trained to independently do research, i.e. manage their work, learn new skills, discipline to work on an enormous multiyear project etc. . There is a reason consulting companies value a PhD highly even if it is in reindeer studies (I think it was BCG who always points to this example and a pianist).
A tenure-track job is by far not the only and not even the main job this qualifies you for.
It is bettering themselves in the sense that you (on average) become a better, more developed person thanks to it. However, I agree that it's not helping your job prospects and bettering yourself is higher on Maslow's hierarchy than securing food and shelter (through job) for you and the child.
In fact, anthropology PhD's don't seem any better than non-PhD's to me. They're about the same as other people their age, maybe worse. This is with a sample size of one.
On the other hand, if you've got a scratch handicap, you are better than me. I played with a +3 handicap once (better than scratch). Never have I seen something more beautiful. And scratch golfers must have a much better trained mind than some median anthropology PhD, or they wouldn't be able to hit the ball so consistently.
obviously I can see why they are striking (I also want more money), but why would I want even more of this?
The other perspective is "I'd prefer to live in a society where people feel comfortable taking time out to educate themselves and contribute to human knowledge". We live in a social contract whereby the state funds people in higher education. It feeds into both practical research and aids the higher goal of progressing knowledge. Maybe these things aren't very important to you, but I think enough people find them important (or not enough find them distasteful) that this is the way things have evolved to be.
Besides, what actual fraction of your tax is going towards PhD students specifically? would be interesting to know the average figure.
Home ownership is out of reach for the vast majority of people who work in the area, and the rental market is dominated by students living off of student loans or family support rather than supported by local jobs.
There is no easy answer, because as others have noted, Santa Cruz is surrounded by ocean and greenspace, and full of NIMBYs who want to limit development. I can't blame them; the city is cute and many of the neighborhoods are lovely. It's just a shame that it's becoming a bedroom community for Silicon Valley rather than a self-sustaining town in its own right.
There is an easy solution: move most land-use regulation to the state level, not the local level. CA's legislature is making some noises in that direction. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-01-06/sb-50-ch...
However, the idea is that as more people join the YIMBY cause, they will elect enough YIMBY representatives that the state will be able to pass solid state level laws about zoning and development that preempt local NIMBY groups.
Your analysis is exactly right, and taking local control away from state and county governments is a partial solution. There should also be financial implications to local governments if they take too long to turn around permit applications. (1.5x actual damages incurred after a cutoff date, paid directly to the home owner, no lawyer required, seems reasonable to me).
In particular, some local planning offices are notoriously obstructionist. In the best case (no zoning exceptions, no objections from neighbors, sympathetic bureaucrats in the office itself), they still needlessly delay the project, and compliance with questionable local regulations with bloat the budget. A San Jose builders association estimates that 25% of the cost of new construction goes to this — I don’t think that includes finance costs due to delay, and it still seems low. Individual homeowners probably pay more as a percentage than well-connected development firms. Alternatively, maybe SJ is more developer-friendly than most places around here.
Over the decades, NIMBYs have passed a set of onerous laws, and created numerous new county offices to enforce them. Of course, the offices are woefully understaffed. There can be a dozen, and they are all backlogged. To resubmit, you have to wait for the slowest office to respond, and with 12 offices, you’ll definitely be resubmitting.
There has been some action at the state level for ADUs (nanny units). Basically, local governments had to remove a bunch of restrictions that were designed to make ADU development impossible, and impose an SLA (of many months, which is lightning fast by CA standards) on permit application processing. If the governments didn’t comply, the law temporarily voided the entirety of their local zoning laws.
Sadly, it only applied to ADU’s, which are limited to being the second house on a lot, with a max square footage of 1200 sq ft.
That’s intentionally too small for families with kids, especially in areas with weird lot shape constraints. I guess this protects affluent schools from poor kids.
Also, they can’t be sold separately from the main house, only rented. Presumably this is to prevent lower class people from owning houses. (If this seems implausible to you, search for “palo alto redlining“ to get an idea of the historical behavior of the city governments around here.)
On the bright side for owners of ADUs, the state-wide rent control laws that were recently passed don’t apply to them (though the anti-eviction clauses might) so home owners can use them to extract extra money from students (and therefore UC), as rent control restricts construction of higher density housing.
We need to elect and re-elect more pro-housing candidates, e.g., Scott Wiener from San Francisco, Shelly Masur from Redwood City, Dave Cortese from San Jose, Nancy Skinner from Berkeley, Marisol Rubio from San Ramon, Maria Cadenas from Santa Cruz.
> That’s intentionally too small for families with kids, especially in areas with weird lot shape constraints.
No, that's just what an ADU is. It stands for accessory dwelling unit, not additional dwelling unit. If you want to argue that people should be able to build additional full-size dwelling units on their property, that's fine, and I might even agree with you. But then we're no longer talking about ADUs, and we have to address a whole different set of practical problems. ADU's have an important role, which would not necessarily be served by unrestricted infill.
> I guess this protects affluent schools from poor kids.
Really? You guess? You can't imagine any other reasons folks might be reluctant to allow unrestricted construction of multiple new residences on existing lots?
> Also, they can’t be sold separately from the main house, only rented. Presumably this is to prevent lower class people from owning houses.
No, it's because selling an ADU separately from the primary dwelling makes no fucking sense whatsoever. An ADU doesn't have it's own separate water, sewer, or electrical service. It shares the lot with the primary dwelling, and you can't subdivide without figuring out right-of-ways, for which there is often not enough room.
> On the bright side for owners of ADUs, the state-wide rent control laws that were recently passed don’t apply to them (though the anti-eviction clauses might) so home owners can use them to extract extra money from students (and therefore UC), as rent control restricts construction of higher density housing.
Great, another variation on the old theme of the landed class extracting money from the working class. Fine, NIMBY homeowners are evil. I agree enthusiastically, without irony. But renting an ADU is much like renting out a room in your house. Imposing restrictions on how much money someone can make from renting a portion of their own residence, or worse yet, preventing a homeowner from evicting tenants from the homeowner's own residence, sure sounds like a recipe for not having any rented ADUs in a city, and accordingly for doing jack shit to improve the housing situation.
Sure, usually they bitch and moan that someone else will take their taxpayer-funded free storage for private property (so long as it has an engine) on a public street.
Of course, this is not a popular view so I remain an eccentric cycling weirdo, except that I got tired of dealing with drivers trying to kill me while cycling in the city, so now I live in the country, and drive everywhere.
I was taking a more conservative stance than that: Why not allow one ADU, and put a limit on the sum of the square footage on the property? Currently zoned for 8000 sq ft + 1200 sq ft ADU? Build two 4600 sq ft McMansions, for all I care.
Going to unlimited infill dwellings regardless of zoning and local infrastructure is pretty radical, and I’m actually not for that.
We’re actually opting for a below-average size house with giant yard for our kids too. :-)
California's coastline is over 800 miles long and most of it is equally as picturesque as Santa Cruz. Driving down the 1 you'll pass through a hundred small towns with relatively affordable homes and plenty of oceanfront scenery. The primary value of SC is that it's close to the Bay Area and that's what it should be optimized for.
What I don't understand is why people who aren't tied down to a metro area would buy in CA instead of elsewhere on the Pacific Coast. Equivalent places in Astoria, OR go for $300K. Weather and politics, I guess: you can also get places like that in Crescent City for $300K or even less, but the fog is a lot heavier than the Central CA coastline, it's colder, and the politics are a lot more red-state.
Job, social circles, family... after you've been in a place for a few years, many people find it hard to leave.
I think about my own situation. I'm happy at my job, but I could feasibly go remote and still work for the same company. I don't have any family in the area (they're all on the east coast). But my social circles are here. I do have good friends who live elsewhere (somewhat scattered, though), but the thought of "starting over" in that regard just sounds like a hill I don't feel like climbing.
I'm not exactly the type of person you're talking about, because I do want to live in a city. But when I look at Seattle, Portland, LA, San Diego, Honolulu, Austin, Chicago, Boston, NYC, DC... while I could see myself living in some of those places, the thought of actually making that leap gives me pause. I'm nearing 40, and I'm not sure I have the appetite to rebuild the relationships I've been building in the bay area over the last 16 years.
In my 4 years at Santa Cruz I was not aware of one low-rent housing development being built. There was one developed on West Cliff near the boardwalk but it was like 3.5k for a 2 bedroom apartment and that was the only one I was aware of.
So, there's a huge demand for housing for rent. But no housing is getting built. Does Santa Cruz have a Tokyo-level population density and there's literally nowhere to put more housing? Doesn't look like it last time I was there. Do hitech companies somehow use their nefarious influence to prevent housing from being built because they know how their workers enjoy long commutes in heavy traffic? Doesn't sound likely to me. So why there's no housing being built? Somehow I don't think it's Netflix's fault...
Anyone complaining how no new low market housing has been built is wishing for a short cut. California has strangled their housing supply for so long there is unmet demand at every market level. To somehow expect development to sneak through at the low end is silly.
Houses and apartments start new then get older. Older things are less valuable and thus naturally low end housing is best met by old less desired housing.
Wishing to see new development first happen at the low end before saturating the high end is like wishing car makers built brand new cars for the used car market.
Development is basically not happening at any end, low-, high-, or middle-!
This is also not the fault of Netflix, et al.
Trying to preserve San Francisco and Santa Cruz as a quaint tourist towns is to blame for their housing strife.
Clearly, that's been working so well.
The only reasonable way out of this is to build. A lot. I don't care if people think that's "unfair" or will "change the character of the neighborhood". It's the only option, or we just end up stretching out this housing shortage crisis forever, or at least until all lower- and middle-income people are forced out of their homes and these areas turn into places where nobody but the rich can afford to live comfortably. (And then the rich realize that there are no restaurants, bars, or anything fun to do anymore because the people who'd take those service jobs don't feel like commuting from 2 hours away. So they flee the area and you end up with a wasteland.)
I've been living in the bay area for 16 years. I didn't feel financially secure enough to buy a place until about 4 or 5 years ago, and have finally managed to do it this year. And I'm one of the highly-paid tech people that you hate. We're here to stay. You can either stick your head in the ground and continue to moan about housing costs, or you can vote in politicians who will build more. Those are really the only two options.
In California we could fix education funding and unfuck our housing market by repealing Prop 13. It's not a total solution but it'd do than building at anything less than Shenzhen rates of construction.
I know several folks who do work in tech and they’re able to buy a house outright and it’s better to commute from Santa Cruz and be able to surf than live in a boring city like Mountain View.
It seems there are a lot of rich people who don't work in tech?
And were the tech companies the ones making it illegal to build homes?
Over last 10-15 years it's become very congested.
And this doesn't even capture the many tech folks who have the luxury of working either 100% remote or commute to the office once a week.
Working in tech and living in Santa Cruz is not new, a good chunk of the Gen X and Boomer crowd in Santa Cruz did that or does that. I don't think its nearly as much of a problem as Santa Cruz refusing to allow any sort of density. The complaints I hear about tiny changes, like a hotel replacing two stories with three stories, are the real cause of Santa Cruz's woes.
SC has tried to be exclusionary for the past four decades, which means landowners get rich and there's no room for anybody who isn't rich. Tech has little to do with this. San Luis Obispo is going through the same stuff, and they can't blame Silicon Valley for that at all.
The problem is not new people, the problem is refusing to share.
It is neither noteworthy, nor harmful, that Santa Cruz maintains itself as a "bedroom community" if there is plenty of density where it belongs: in the city.
It is also failing to build the density that would allow affordable housing for its own workforce, instead maintaining luxury zoning which means that only mansions will be built for out of towners that visit sometimes but not often.
This means big profits for the working class homeowners that are now retired, but exclusion of any opportunity for working class people today.
On the other hand, I do know several people who work on the peninsula or in south bay who have chosen to live in Santa Cruz because they actually like Santa Cruz. Not because of cost or availability or housing policy in the rest of the bay area.
- UC Santa Cruz has increased enrollment to 19,500 students with only just around half of them living on campus. Living on campus is relatively expensive at $1940 for room & board to share a room [1,2]
- Considering Santa Cruz itself has just around 65,000 residents the half of students living off campus make up 15% of population
- Certainly people commute over to tech for higher pay, but according to HUD that number has climbed just 4% from 26-30% between 2005 to 2015 [3]
- Santa Cruz itself greatly limits development with annual permits averaging around 250 for the past 10 years and almost all single family homes and townhomes rather than higher density [4]
- California's entire real estate market has been warped by Prop 13 which fixes real estate taxes to the time property was purchased with limited increases [5]. This incentivizes companies and people to stay on a property longer than other real estate markets as they have lower taxes. It also dissuades towns from building housing as long term the costs such as schools, services, etc. go up with market, but not tax revenues.
The availability and cost of housing in California and Santa Cruz is a real problem for many people. I've seen a lot of finger pointing with people's favorite scapegoats. I'd like to see the same energy go into the difficult work of city planning for construction, transportation, schools, etc.
[1] https://admissions.ucsc.edu/why-ucsc/faq/housing.html
[2] https://housing.ucsc.edu/rates/index.html
[3] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/publications /pdf/SantaCruzCA-CHMA-19.pdf (page 7)
[4] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/publications /pdf/SantaCruzCA-CHMA-19.pdf (page 14)
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13
[edited for formatting]
Certain areas of Cambridge and Boston are very expensive, but we have plenty of options that are easy to make work.
A quick ddg reports much lower rates than what you suggest.
https://studentlife.mit.edu/housing/graduate-family-housing/...
The new grad housing is likely for established families who don’t want to live in a “dorm” but do want to live on campus.
But at this point, we are trapped. The largest retirement asset for most people are their homes. It's political suicide to do anything that would hurt the valuations of homes. If you are an older individual with your home making up a bulk of your retirement nest egg, you aren't going to vote for policies that make homes more affordable. And older folks vote more often and in larger numbers than younger voters.
I hear this argument a lot, but it completely ignores the fact that development can allow more housing and continue to increase the value of existing housing.
The key is that more housing isn’t going to look like existing housing: it’s going to be condos and other apartments. Older folks in single-family homes are not going to see their houses lose value — if anything, the increase will continue, because now a developer can buy their house and turn it into four apartments.
Here’s how it would work: family buys single family home in year A for $100k. Lives there for a while, then sells in year B for $200k. The buyer is a developer, who then constructs a larger building on that same lot consisting of 4 apartments that now each sell for $100k again. Original family gains in wealth, developer makes tidy profit, new families can still buy a place to live for $100k. All numbers inflation-adjusted, you pick A and B to make whatever return you think is reasonable.
This is how densification happened almost everywhere until zoning laws spread mid-century.
Note what you don’t get out of this arrangement: a neighborhood that doesn’t change for 40 years; the ability to live in the same type of house your parents did, in the same neighborhood, for the same price. But you could have the same amount of (indoor) space they did, and outdoor space through public parks and the like.
What’s not sustainable is everyone having a suburban style detached single family home without increasing density in perpetuity.
The non-density alternative is sprawl, where prices rise in long-established neighborhoods, and outlying new developments are where you can buy new houses for less—which is what you observe all over California.
We could probably achieve that through immigration for a while, but there is still a sustainability problem that keeping some constraints on housing construction solves. I say this as someone who would love cheap housing in a desirable area.
Empty buildings tend to create problems, and the energy to tear them down/convert them to something else often isn't there once the population begins decreasing.
The population of the US continues to grow. Empty buildings are not something you need to be concerned about when the current supply is so inadequate.
I don't know about the rest of California, but in the bay area you can find those 4 people with your eyes closed.
Try explaining to somebody who just bought an asset that costs 10x their annual salary, at 5x leverage, that they shouldn't care whether this asset appreciates or not. Be prepared to duck quickly.
> Especially in a country as large as the US
I'm pretty sure there are places in US where housing is literally 20 times cheaper than Santa Cruz. Somehow it doesn't make anybody feel better.
Where I live, a mid-sized metro in the central US, I had some graduate student coworkers recently outright buy a 1500 sqft 2-bedroom house within walking distance of our university for $30K (from foreclosure). Not the best area of town, but it was a perfectly fine house and you can't beat that price. Elsewhere, one can easily get a 2000-2500 sqft home with a sub-$1000 mortgage payment. And everything else, like food and gas, is much cheaper than CA, usually about half the price. And salaries, while lower, are still high enough for this to be a beneficial trade, not to mention the lower tax brackets from having a lower nominal income.
Now if you are pulling down $250K as a tech worker, of course it makes sense to live in the Bay Area. But all these housing insecure people working service jobs? They should come to the central US where they could have a much higher quality of life. And if they did, the housing crises in coastal metros would solve itself, because of decreased demand, and because the local authorities would be forced to make the cities livable for service workers -- assuming wealthier inhabitants want to have any Starbucks, bars, etc.
Another strange paradox is that zoning restrictions are much looser, and more sprawl is allowed in these mid-sized metros, than in places like Santa Cruz, despite the lower overall demand for housing. So there is a double-whammy effect causing a huge difference in housing prices between a few select cities and, well, everywhere else in the US.
Is there any realistic path (even a very optimistic one) towards the Japanese model of house-as-depreciating-asset in the US?
So I guess the most realistic path would be for the big one to hit California and destroy all the housing stock.
The absolute quickest way to kill home value in Japan is have someone die in it. Absolutely nobody will want to live in the place and property owners will warn you before you consider looking at it.
If old people in the US saw their homes as a time-limited investment where they needed to sell them while they still can in order to ensure their spouse/kids have money, prices might drop. Maybe bringing back superstitions is a way millennials can finally take back the housing market.
One path toward that would be to eliminate property taxes. Governments want high housing costs because it increases property tax revenues. Take that off the table by generating the revenue some other way and it becomes a lot easier to pass policies to reduce housing costs. Meanwhile you throw the homeowners a bone, because even though their house isn't appreciating anymore, that's offset by all the property tax they no longer have to pay.
Currently, people are already spending a really big part of their incomes on rent, and hence property. It is not possible that they'll spend any more.
By contrast, increasing property values generates more revenue per capita, so property tax gives the government a perverse incentive to increase housing costs.
The thing about this though: this only matters if you intend to sell your home and move to a completely different area before you die. Alternatively, you're willing to sell your home and stay in the same area, but move into a much smaller home (and/or ditch your single family home for a condo or apartment).
For some retirees, sure, that's their plan. But for those that just plan to stay in their home until they die, the home value really doesn't matter, since they're not going to realize that value in their lifetime.
The one counterargument to that I can think of is that a dropping home value would also drop the amount of money a retiree could extract via a reverse mortgage, but I'm not sure those are all that popular (but I could be wrong).
People would rather live in the nice areas and that drives prices higher and then they complain about it.
Housing cannot both be 'affordable' and a 'good investment' - prices grow faster than inflation.
The key is that more housing isn’t going to look like existing housing: it’s going to be condos and other apartments. Older folks in single-family homes are not going to see their houses lose value — if anything, the increase will continue, because now a developer can buy their house and turn it into four apartments.
Here’s how it would work: family buys single family home in year A for $100k. Lives there for a while, then sells in year B for $200k. The buyer is a developer, who then constructs a larger building on that same lot consisting of 4 apartments that now each sell for $100k again. Original family gains in wealth, developer makes tidy profit, new families can still buy a place to live for $100k. All numbers inflation-adjusted, you pick A and B to make whatever return you think is reasonable.
This is how densification happened almost everywhere until zoning laws spread mid-century.
Note what you don’t get out of this arrangement: a neighborhood that doesn’t change for 40 years; the ability to live in the same type of house your parents did, in the same neighborhood, for the same price. But you could have the same amount of (indoor) space they did, and outdoor space through public parks and the like.
What’s not sustainable is everyone having a suburban style detached single family home without increasing density in perpetuity.
The non-density alternative is sprawl, where prices rise in long-established neighborhoods, and outlying new developments are where you can buy new houses for less—which is what you observe all over California.
But if housing costs go down, somebody has to be getting less money, and it's the people who live in the place that isn't rezoned. Because the people who move into those new condos are no longer bidding up the price of their existing houses.
Those people might still want to fight you. Though if they want money then what they should really be fighting for is to be the ones who get rezoned for higher density.
I think you may have missed my point: housing costs go down, but the cost of existing established housing does not — what goes down is the cost of having, e.g., a 2-br unit in a neighborhood — specifically NOT the cost of an existing 2-br detached house, but of a 2-br condo newly built in that neighborhood, where that type of housing did not previously exist.
People are not making the decision to act in a “NIMBY” way for purely economic reasons — the “preserve the character of the neighborhood” is not a smokescreen for economic interests, it often really is a desire to preserve a way of life that seems incompatible with a 20-story tower plopped in the middle of it. (Ask me how I know!)
> Because the people who move into those new condos are no longer bidding up the price of their existing houses
The reality is that most of those people are just priced out, and not moving into the neighborhood — they’re not in a position to “bid up” the prices of the existing houses because they can’t afford it.
The argument for why existing housing goes up rather than down even though the housing supply is increasing is that a developer will pay you more so they can replace your house with condos. But that only applies to houses that are now zoned to allow them to be replaced with condos.
> The reality is that most of those people are just priced out, and not moving into the neighborhood — they’re not in a position to “bid up” the prices of the existing houses because they can’t afford it.
Priced out of what? Living indoors? They live somewhere now. Demand will be reduced there if supply is increased in the place they actually want to live and they move.
Literally what I’m talking about and what is often fought against. But really any development constrain, zoning or not, has this effect.
And: Priced out of the whole area in many cases — folks are absolutely leaving NYC and the SF Bay Area for cheaper locales. Just ask anyone in the Central Valley, Portland, or Pittsburgh.
Housing cannot provide return only at inflation, that would mean nobody would want to invest in real estate.
Well sure, but that's sort of the point. Housing is, ultimately, a durable good. It's more like a car or a refrigerator than like a stock. It has use-value, but its only capital appreciation comes from charging ground-rent on access to nearby economic activity in which the housing itself doesn't participate.
A huge part of the context of a house (and its value) is what it's located around.
A huge part of what a house is located around is predicated on zoning laws that can change at any time.
A huge part of the business of booming areas is predicated on large business in the area. For instance: being an Amazon employee and living in Seattle makes buying a house unappealing. As far as 'investments' go, housing is not a stable proposition, doesn't help diversify against risk for the average use case, and doesn't promote tangible economic benefits that support its own appreciation.
Regardless -- durable goods are often more valuable in certain situations. That doesn't make it an investment to keep one that's more valuable and hold it.
If you're going to invest, at least treat it like a poor speculative investment
The problem is that since housing has been managed at the local level for so long, finding a coherent State level solution is hard and moreover, wealthy interests have influence at the state level also.
The only thing that helps graduate students is in the short term a COLA so they can survive, and in the longer term far far more housing so that there is enough to go around.
The prices are the symptom of the underlying problem. The price controlled stock in Santa Cruz is miniscule, and the lines so long that nobody who lives here less than a decade ever has a hope of getting a price-controlled unit.
Unless we address the shortage, we will have one of high prices, long lines, or lotteries. None of these are acceptable solutions for students. (Or really anyone, for that matter. We have to stop trying to exclude people and finally welcome them.)
Grad students often live in Santa Cruz long term. I know multiple people in Santa Cruz who went back to school for higher degrees, and kept their same housing.
Even students who come from out of town still live there for the duration of their program, which can be 6 years. The rental market changes fast, and rent control for those 6 years would have an impact.
Many grad students live with other students, so the same lease can carry over as long as a leaseholder stays. I lived in one house that had kept the same lease going for over 15 years. That might get harder with rent control in place, but our rent was still comparatively cheap because we’d been there for so long.
Regardless of whether it helps grad students survive, it helps the people who live in Santa Cruz long term. I eventually left because I couldn’t afford to live and work there, and might not have had to make that choice if rent prices hadn’t gone through the roof.
Rent control can help stop the bleeding while building catches up with demand, but it's ultimately a negative over the long term.
Already, even market rate housing has massive lines. Trying to grab anything off of Craig's List is nearly futile, as any new postings will overflow the lister's voicemail box.
Life in Santa Cruz is not like it was 10 years ago, it's far far more difficult to find housing, even with plentiful money.
Rent control, while a good thing that should define its be done, is not a solution to the problems of newcomers, and is not meant to help newcomers. It's meant to let people hold on, not fix the systemic problems with housing austerity.
Speaking as a condo owner in a tech-heavy metro area: fuck my investment! My friends and family deserve to be able to afford to live places more than I deserve to make passive investment income from my own bedroom.
You can’t have both in the same place.
It used to be really great. Abundant free parking, a huge multistory used book store (Logos), and a house turned cozy coffee shop overflowing with college students where you could spend entire days studying/working without going broke (The Perg) and without being a jerk occupying one of the few tables at the Starbucks or Peets.
The last time I went there ~2 years ago I couldn't find any free parking other than the grocery store lot, and the coffee shops were hipster cafes without outlets and overpriced everything on very limited menus. At least there's still the Red Room.
I'd like to know where the students go to study now instead of The Perg. I hope they're not paying through the nose at Verve Coffee.
Back when rents were considerably more affordable, most of California received a similar level of visitor and had similar growth rates. The changes have been driven by massive money coming into real estate, restrictions on building, and an economy where real wages are stagnant.
That one was a bad thing, right?
The town has changed since then, there's a lot more traffic and yuppies everywhere. The loss of free parking is just one symptom of how the place has changed. There's a lot more people and money now.
It's not like the elimination of free parking has reduced the number of cars in town, it's changed the kind of people parking there. The lots still fill up, just instead of run down vans and RVs/buses and beater student vehicles it's more nice expensive vehicles.
I fully expect downtown Santa Cruz to look like downtown Burlingame in the future, complete with polished stone pavers for parking spaces. That's the trajectory they're on when I last visited.
verve roasts some killer beans
Not the coast, or the redwoods, or the cool book store, but the free parking.
I lived in a redwood forest near the coast at the time, so what Santa Cruz offered in those areas didn't really affect me. I didn't go to Santa Cruz to see redwoods or the ocean, I went for the quirky town and to hang out around interesting people in a nearby urban center (I lived in Butano SP).
It wasn't illicit, the area around the park isn't well defined and there's plenty of private property out there which the park's trails run straight through.
I don't know what you're talking about WRT "frontiersman fantasy", my downtown Santa Cruz complaints have absolutely no relation to a frontiersman fantasy.
The fires are the result of power lines and infrastructure supporting unnecessary exurban sprawl out into our redwoods. Not to mention the septic leaking from houses into the rivers and springs.
People should not live up there.
And if it's something you really love, there is tons of it available in Walmarts all around the midwest.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/11/20/the-many-cost...
What's wrong with the college library?
UC housing apparently has to be paid through campus funds, not through what the state gives it.
When I lived there, I looked into adding an ADU. The city wanted north of 40k in fees and "improvements" like putting in a sidewalk where one didn't exist (and doesn't on the whole block).
Gives me some hope for the city :)
Among the 30 or so people I became friendly with at grad school I think 3 of them have tenure track jobs at research institutions. 3 or so are at private liberal arts colleges. I would say 5 or so are at public liberal arts colleges. I was lucky, after adjuncting for 3 years I finally got a full time job at a community college. There are a number of people I have lost track of but I can think of more than 10 that have left academia because they couldn't find jobs. (I could hit up facebook and track people down to get an accurate count but I need to go jump in the shower so I can finish getting ready to go teach!)
So.. implying it isn't a legal position to bargain? So bargaining for wages is therefore ..illegal by default? I don't get this.
If you want to assert that this process is universally too long, what makes you think that?
Not to get too personal, but I notice that you got your PhD 8 years after your Masters, albeit in 4 years after starting. Are you sure the intervening extra 4 years didn’t help?
> If you want to assert that this process is universally too long, what makes you think that?
If the goal of a PhD is to teach someone to research, introduce them to the community, get them to make their own unique contribution, and have it tested by publishing something good, ready to start doing unsupervised research full time in academia or industry, then they've usually done that by three or so years. What are they doing after that point?
> Are you sure the intervening extra 4 years didn’t help?
You mean because I was more grown up? Maybe, but I also had a wife and house and later a family to worry about - most students can just focus on their research.
I disagree here. This is not always the goal of every research student. Some set the bar at solving a problem, and not going through a fixed number of mechanical steps of learning how to do research.
I think otherwise too, your statement misses a lot of nuances. Publishing "something good" can take drastically different levels of effort based on where you want to publish, what area and problem you are working on, who you are collaborating with, whether your problem is interdisciplinary, empirical or theoretical etc
You could say "schools should ensure PhDs finish in fixed x number of years" (with the understanding that it will change research outcomes) but to say that a PhD program naturally fits into x yr long time span is wrong IMHO.
This seems like an incredibly optimistic timeline, especially outside of computer science. In some fields, you might finally be able to start collecting data after a year or two of experimental design/setup/optimization, even if things go perfectly. Of course, they often don't: trained animals die, instruments fail, and so on.
On top of that, it depends on the "scope" of the PhD. Some of the short PhDs (and postdocs) seem to involve parachuting someone into a functioning research program and having them run a slightly different version of the last study. This certainly gets you /some/ research training, but maybe not enough to actually run a group lab on your own. In fact, I think some of the most useful parts of my (much longer) PhD and postdoc were seeing many things go wrong and then learning when/how/if to fix or salvage them. This necessarily takes time though...
True, their rent costs are also very very very high but based on the current exchange rates the $500 the tag line example person has left over, after rent each month, is comparable to the amount left after rent, food, etc when doing a PhD in the UK 6 years ago in a not London location.
It seems that the PhD wages are very high already to compensate for the very high rent costs.
If the anecdotal evidence given by people in the comments here, concerning TAing and moonlighting at other nearby research institutes (for ~$10K !) are both true and common then what is the problem?
To me, $500/month sounds like very little. I wasn't trying to pay for a child either!
In Belgium, PhD are paid salaries that are competitive with entry-level programming positions (though under what you can get if you are a little bit discriminate), and that's for all subject matters. Most of these positions are state-funded (directly through tax-exempt scholarships, or indirectly via TA contract with the state-subsidized universities).
I feel like a big reason US universities can get away with this is that they draw a lot of international students who are happy to accept lower wages for a chance to live and work in the US.
It really isn't. I recently finished my PhD, and now I'm a postdoc. My stipend was $30K, but, crucially, I wasn't living in a place like Santa Cruz. It was very easy to live on such a stipend where I was at. I paid $800/mo for a 2-bedroom apartment all to myself. This was not a CS PhD, it was biomedical, so the stipend was comparable to the normal B.S. salary in that field.
These students' problem is that they chose to do their studies in Santa Cruz. This is not a normal US PhD student situation, it is yet another dysfunctional California situation.
If someone is pursuing a PhD, yet can't do the basic math to determine, before accepting an offer, whether the stipend will allow them to live in the area, I can't summon much sympathy.
This does not seem to me incompatible with the idea that not paying your TA a living wage is shameful.
I also think most of the strikers did think about it. But if the opportunity comes up to join a movement (which can achieve something, unlike you own solitary actions) to fix a flawed standard... why not joint it? Be prepared to face the consequences if it fails though.
While increasing dollars allocated to grants is hard and requires changing grant agencies, having TAs make much more than RAs would not really be feasible. I'd like the universities to greatly increase the amount of (greatly) subsidized housing available for graduate students, which would go a long way toward addressing the problem.
Ideally, you want to improve the latter without compromising the former, but this is made politically difficult because the people gaining from the former often aren't willing to take any risk to improve the latter, while those on the downside of the latter are relatively politically powerless, so the status quo is sticky.
The local organic produce is very good too.
Typically the fees are proportional to the facilities provided. CA often provides well maintained and regularly cleaned flush toilets and even hot showers at the state parks w/campgrounds, this is far less common in other states.
CA does it so well I generally prefer camping there over staying in hotels. It's typically too much of a hassle elsewhere in the country, where KOA "campgrounds" are often the only options with such facilities.
I've also done a lot of day hikes in CA state parks where there's no fee. You just park at a trail head and off you go, and these sometimes even have pit toilets at the lot, still with no fee at all.
Your perspective strikes me as misinformed.
+Daily overtime for hourly workers
Notably, California had a budget surplus despite a relative lack of high-profile IPOs the past several years.
It helps that many of CA's biggest industries are at the high-end of the value spectrum (i.e., tech, biotech, Hollywood, and video games).
Spending 80% of your income on housing is just poor budgeting no matter how you look at it.
If someone decides that accepting a ~5 year position that pays close to minimum wage in one of the highest COL areas in the country is the right choice for them... then what?
Academia is kind of like the video game industry - plenty of young people with a dream who want to get in, get abused and spat out by the system. Because guess what, it gets even harder after your PhD. You’ll be paid barely more, except with even less job stability (you’re now looking for a post doc every 1-2 years, or jumping from adjunct contract to adjunct contract) and more stress and responsibility. And of course by that point the sunk cost fallacy has fully set in, you now think of yourself as an Anthropology Professor and there’s no way you’re going to go back and pick up plumbing or programming.
Ideally grad students would stop pouring in, free labor would dry up at universities, and they’ll have to raise grad student salaries to acceptable wages again. Seems unlikely given how badly people want to do anthropology PhDs, and that there’ll always be people who can afford to take a poorly paid position like that because their partner or parents are paying the bills. Maybe unions are the right call, but seems like a strong uphill battle.
I like how you phrased that.
One potential solution is some feedback loop telling students how many PhDs in anthropology we really need. We're currently producing way more PhDs in non-STEM disciplines than there are post doctoral academic positions (I mean that broadly; e.g. post-docs, tenure track, full time lectureships).
Instead of giving out 5 PhD spots, maybe a program can give out 1 PhD spot and pay that student 3x more. They'd save money and could focus on creating one really good professor, instead of 5 struggling lecturers.
How sad was I to realize that I was the only one in my PhD program who had chosen that route because I was as passionate about teaching as I was about research!
Feynman:
If you're teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things that you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn't do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? Are there any new problems associated with them? Are there any new thoughts you can make about them? The elementary things are easy to think about; if you can't think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you do think of something new, you're rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at it.
The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I've thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn't do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It's not so easy to remind yourself of these things.
http://www.math.utah.edu/~yplee/teaching/feynman.html
Well in the end I dropped out (:
Like... a cost associated with the program... and long term potential earnings?
The economics are already there for increased grad students, yet we want to artificially restrict it to prevent what? Sounds more like enforced elitism.
77% of take-home pay is closer to 40% of income. It's only a little higher than sustainable levels. When housing costs grow 5-10% per year and PhD programs last 3 years longer than they need to, anyone who had a reasonable budget at the beginning could end up with an unreasonable budget by the end.
[0] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr-edge-featd-articl...
[1] https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/comm_planning/affordable...
40% of gross income becomes 77% of net income given 48% of deductions. 48% of deductions for a grad student making $25k a year would also be insane.
70% of net is 1575. 1575 is 63% of my gross pay.
Remember, these workers are paid so little they are in the bottom tax brackets at 10-12%.
That won't happen. Universities will bring in foreigners instead unless Congress gets involved.
On a PhD you do your own research. You aren’t working for anyone but yourself. You may do some teaching but that’s just an optional part-time job.
Graduate school is very much directed? The usual criticism is that it’s completely undirected and you can drift if you aren’t careful!
If you want to have a PhD you need funding. To get funding you need to work.
Then you get to research in your free time.
Source: I’m a PhD student.
Something tells me you have not been through PhD, or are have not interacted with other PhD students. You absolutely work on what your PI got their grant for.
I can't speak to what your experience is, but what I am saying here is typical in US universities.