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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

I'd classify myself as a progressive and I don't see why every Bay Area city has to make some "contribution" to increased housing.

An acceptable approach would seem to be to have the "center" becoming more dense over time while the outer rings stay less dense.

The problem is that current geography has resulted in natural centers being the ones that refuse to build and that is problematic. Palo Alto and the rest are happy to have Facebook and etc's business but won't make room for Facebook employees.

And the apparently illogical behavior comes out of proposition 13's logic. Cities can tax businesses but property values are immune.

Which is to say that prop 13 needs to be repealed or annulled before any other sort of sanity is going to happen (and maybe that's not happened but, hey, there you go).

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This just leads to pronounced NIMBYism. You see it in all of the community groups in the Seattle Suburbs - we have an agreement that each city must build new housing for X thousand residents in each decade. Every single suburb - Redmond, Bellevue, Kirkland, Woodinville, Bothell, and probably ones whose community discussion groups I don't monitor as well - all ask "why does it have to be here? Why can't people just move further out?"

People want to live throughout. Not everyone works in the canonical centers. Plenty of businesses are among the other cities too, particularly service workers who can't currently afford to live there. ALL of the cities need to build to keep costs under control. No one has any right to have their town stay small forever.

If your city requires minimum wage workers for a significant part of basic infrastructure it should be possible for them to live in your city. Otherwise you're getting subsidized by your neighboring cities that have to pay for the infrastructure to support employees of businesses that only pay taxes in your city.

That's why every city needs to contribute. The ones that aren't are literally leeching off of neighboring cities.

The center is getting denser too though, its just not enough. You can only fit so much housing in SF. The suburb cities dont need to be filled will 20 story apartments, but every city should be building similar percent increases. SF/ oakland/ SJ are all building up and building lots of new units.

Why does only the center have to take on the burden of becoming 10% more dense? Why can't every city increase its housing supply by 10%?

You can only fit so much housing in SF.

That's literally not true. Human density can go far beyond what SF has. In fact, you could fit a lot more people in SF with only part of the city getting higher density.

The idea that each city should "do it's part" has no basis in sane urban planing. We know the current distribution of density isn't useful and this more or less just makes it permanent.

I remember there was a huge discussion about Prop 13 on HN. IIRC, people passed Prop 13 because 1. California government double taxed; 2. Inflation was crazy and people believed that it was cruel that retirees had to leave the home they had been living in for many years just because they couldn't afford the property tax.

What beats me is why Prop 13 applies to commercial properties and investment homes.

Even more surprising we tried to repeal prop 13 for just commercial real estate last election and it failed.

Perhaps taxes are too high?

There are ways to do revenue neutral tax changes, where you raise one and lower another one somewhere else, at the same time.

Maybe, I'm guessing a prop 13 repeal attached to a corresponding reduction in income tax to make it revenue-neutral would have a better time passing.

It failed at least in part because of the timing. A global pandemic that was destroying small businesses was a pretty unpopular time for something that is perceived as damaging to small businesses. Maybe when things are booming and prosperous we could pass that.

The issue is that these same cities are constantly increasing their office space capacity, e.g. trying to have the cake and eat it too.

But has COVID fixed this (we just need time to distribute the fix). Facebook employees don't need to be anywhere near Facebook HQ anymore.

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