Liberal Hypocrisy Is Fueling American Inequality. Here’s How. – NYT Opinion
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But rural areas have far less opportunity than urban areas, and the wealthy often pass their empires down to their children, further hoarding opportunity. So even though there is a ton of wealth for a few at the top, there's extremely little opportunity. Urban metropolitans often offer much more opportunity, as well as greater amenities in the form of culture etc.
There's also been considerable price increases in the Fresno area, too (though it's still possible to purchase brand new homes there under $400K), which is outside the normal Bay Area commute orbit, though now with WFH, an occasional trip from Fresno to Silicon Valley or San Jose isn't that bad. The only places I haven't seen dramatic appreciation in house prices are smaller, more isolated metro areas that haven't attracted those leaving the Bay Area or Los Angeles, such as Hanford and Visalia.
Coming from a guy who grew up in Sacramento, yes the Central Valley is hot, but the best part about the Central Valley is its relative affordability and its proximity to many interesting places. Portions are close enough to the Bay Area to commute (though I wouldn't do it every day), and while it's farther away from the beach than the Bay Area, it's closer to the Sierra Nevada mountains, and SoCal is still within weekend-trip range. Living in the Central Valley allows people to take advantage of California amenities without having to get on a plane or take a very long road trip (though, admittedly, Reno and Las Vegas are also close enough to many of these same California amenities, sometimes even closer depending on your destination).
EDIT: There are some other cheap parts of California. Many of the desert areas of the state are affordable. Lake County, north of Napa, is quite cheap.
and yeah, I was specifically talking about Visalia, Hanford, Fresno,
These ideologies are not opposites, they have different concerns, but they might contradict in practice. Sometimes they are also compatible, they accept same tools for different reasons. (For example, property ownership is a policy tool acccepted by liberals for reason of personal freedom, and by conservatives for reason of preserving value. Or basic income is accepted by progressives as means of including everybody in the society, and by liberals as way to promote personal freedom.)
There's lot more to this but that's the gist of political philosophy, I think.
Doing neither of these things would result in a more equitable and satisfactory outcome for all.
I dislike living in SF so I didn’t get a job there
I can’t afford SFH in Palo Alto so I don’t live there - don’t know what is wrong with that either
is it a human right to live in Palo Alto ?
People have choices and if something is too expensive or inconvenient they can pick a better option
I reiterate that there's no human right to live in Palo Alto, but companies based in Palo Alto and other Silicon Valley locations who demand that their workers work on-site may increasingly find it difficult to hire people if their housing options are limited to situations that require multiple roommates to bring the cost down to affordable levels, or commuting from far-away areas. If enough people refuse to work in Silicon Valley, then this decreases Silicon Valley's desirability as a place to work, which in turn may decrease the property values there since there will be less demand to live there. The Bay Area has to be very careful not to kill the goose that has been providing it golden eggs.
Why is it Ok to live in Palo Alto, but it’s wrong to live in Manteca ?
People are making a choice that best fits their needs, and they choose affordable housing over commute distance
California is expensive because everyone wants to live there - you can’t make that affordable.
How many condos do you have to build in the bay area to make it cheaper than Tracy ?
Tokyo and its suburbs are a great example of how densification could work. Roughly a quarter of Japan's residents live in the Kanto region of Japan where Tokyo and its suburbs are located. While the inner core of Tokyo is quite expensive, there are many affordably-priced neighborhoods just 30 minutes away from Tokyo via normal commuter trains. Even with Japan's falling population, Tokyo's population has been growing before the pandemic due to population drain from Japan's rural areas. It seems that Tokyo is better able to accommodate its demand than the Bay Area; there are very few people commuting 60 miles into Tokyo.
It doesn't necessarily need to be cheaper, but comparable when including transportation costs. And I think the answer for that would be, not very many, as a percentage of the land area.
By definition, if we took 1/10th of the already residential area of San Jose, and increased the density 10x, we'd be able to almost double the housing capacity (1.9x). That's not hard to do if we build 6-7 stories high and the entire surface area covered is housing without lawns and so on.
If our goal is a more modest 5x increase in density, which is easy with typical 4+1 story apartment builds, we could re-zone 10% of the residential area for that and capacity would be 1.4x what it is now. For a city like San Jose with a population of over 1,000,000, that means it could support a further 400,000 people.
We could also add some residential mini-skyscrapers in downtown Mountain View, Palo Alto, and other smaller cities, possibly with reduced parking, for people who want to live, work, and shop downtown.
According to Wikipedia, the 9-county "SF Bay Area" has a population of 7.76 million. If we remove San Francisco and Oakland from this, plus round that up to removing 2 million let's say for the areas that we can consider "sufficiently dense", that still means about 6 million people live in areas that are suburban-like and could be densified. By increasing density 5x in 10% of already residential areas of these cities by building upward, more than another 1,000,000 people could live in the Bay Area. And obviously we could apply this to 20-30-40% rather than just 10% to support much larger populations, and build slightly higher as well.
Do you want that ? Are there a million people out there without better alternatives?
I think I’ll stay in my SFH in the middle of Podunk, USA and happily make less money, less fancy restaurants, yet have more wealth.
Plus the only excrement I have to endure is the manure the farmer down the road uses on his tomato rows.
Pretty soon ambulance drivers won't afford to live within driving distance of you.