If I can’t afford to live in an area, it seems to me the solution is to live somewhere else.
Maybe I’m missing something. I’m open to new ideas here but I really don’t get it.
"The authors estimate that if New York, San Francisco, and San Jose had housing regulations—rules about where you can build, how tall you can build, how much parking you need, and so on—that didn’t protect cute houses and instead were equivalent to the median US city in the period between 1964 and 2009, the US economy would be 9.5% bigger right now, or grow 0.21% more annually. That’s would be a big deal for wages, for the public debt, and for prosperity in general." (https://qz.com/402763/new-york-and-san-fransiscos-insane-hou...)
The average worker's income would increase by $9,000 per year if the Bay Area and New York City relaxed their zoning laws. (https://www.theregreview.org/2018/06/14/somogyi-zoning-codes...)
without even going tiny home crazy, for a single person in an urban neighborhood, a well-optimized 250 ft² (~23m²) apartment is plenty (i've done this too). if stores are plentiful and close, you don't need much storage, which is how all the excess square footage is eaten up in most homes.
They are also better for the environment as they are more energy efficient, produce neighborhood that don't require cars for every errand and reduce the need for expanding the city footprint which lead to public transport being more effective.
The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, but the next best time is now and California is finally deciding to plant some trees.
Certainly the last few times I've been there, before the pandemic, it was like entering the matrix, you get on a ferry and you show up at the Ferry Building, and boom, you're inside the internet, you went through the monitor of your computer. Ads for ad platforms everywhere, startup credit cards, everything targeting startup founders, and you know what that means? Fucking crazy abusive inescapable prices. Even at the MacDonald's, my best recollection is $8.30 for a quarter-pounder. No wonder you would get assistance from the City if you made less than $120,000.
I myself work full time and am going to school for Software Engineering. Right now job prospects in where I would like move don't look great since the last job fair I attended, I got the feeling most companies are planning to axe remote work ASAP. Which then limits my ability to move in the market place for jobs.
Often, the "more money" part is not enough to actually fund living and showing up for work, commute or not.
You cannot live on $17/hr in SF. Your post-tax income wouldn't even cover the the rent of a studio apartment. Not sure how you'd pay for food and transportation on top of that. Let alone actually doing anything fun that would make it worth living here.
That's 40 hrs/wk, of course. Many people end up working twice that, or more, across several jobs, in order to make ends meet here. And at that point I wonder why they stay.
The question is not why others can't; the question is how did you do it.
Please elaborate about your background, education, geography, occupation, whether you have a partner, children, medical issues, and what kind of home you purchased (is this a tent you set up in the woods, or a single-family house), how far it is from work, and how you get there.
Also please include any assistance you got from your family before getting to that point, including contributions to the downpayment, owning property where you could live without paying rent (or allowing you to live comfortably rent-free at their place), co-signing on the mortgage and/or student loans, paying for your education, buying your first car, etc.
Usually, the answer to your question is "because not everyone's parents are well off"; but let's hear your success story.
- America's inability to build mass transit cost-effectively. At this point train rides along BART are mostly between high-cost areas, and discussions of expanding the system even a little more have price tags in the tens of billions, and timelines of a decade or more. Besides, the radius of BART is about as wide as it ought to be — it should be filling in, not sprawling out, and that requires upzoning the areas along the train to be effective.
It'd never pass environmental muster, though. You've got multiple protected species of wildlife in the marshlands, shipping channels, salt flats, whole cities whose selling point is that every house is waterfront property, etc.
He has more work than he'd ever be able to fill, but now has the work/life balance to actually see his kids, too.
The neighbor one more house down is a welder, same deal.
The family at the end of the street, another trade, another SF/SJ escapee.
Hell, I work in tech directly, and am pleased to say that 90% of my clients are within a 20 minute drive. I don't earn a FAANG salary, but I don't need to, either, and I am 100% certain (and I say this non-judgmentally, just a statement of fact) that I actually enjoy my daily life more than many of my former compatriots.
One is that minimum wage falling way, way below living wage ensures that the employers can always pay lower for even low-paying jobs.
Another is that perverse zoning laws often don't allow people to work where they live.
You're missing racism and greed.
"We don't want those people in our neighborhood" has been the reason for not allowing fast, dense, efficient, usable public transit to exist in the US.
As for the basic laws of economics, they explain that the benefits of public transit are a positive externality; and therefore, public transit has to be subsidized by the government to actually serve the needs of the people. "Not on my tax dime!", says the US. "Who would even use this, poor people? Of color, even? Not in my backyard, and not with my taxes!"
In the same breath, we pay for the ever-expanding highway systems which don't solve the problem, but without which all the Teslas and Porsches would not be of much use.
On top of it, the higher-paid peons (tech workers) can get to feel superior to the people they depend on for living (service workers) by wasting fewer hours of their lives in traffic each day.
See comments in this discussion saying "I don't believe anyone is entitled to live within a short commute from work".
The world desperately needs a new metaphor. How about "prices zoom to the moon!"
"How can you tell people they are not welcome to live in the cities where they work" is a nice feel good thing to say, but those are feelings. Liberal city people seem to care a lot about feelings. But what matters, and how people actually behave, is what options and choices and reality people have to decide based on. And I might just point out, you probably don't care equally as much about the young families who are in the tech industry who "get told they can't afford to buy a house where they work". Anyway.
No public policy can escape the fundamental demographic truth that we have a surplus of labor, and as cruel as it may sound, as long as people are willing to take the job for less, people will be coming to work in the Bay Area and yet not be able to live there.
Liberal city policymakers believe that forcing cities to pay living wages or mandating housing will "make people feel welcome and that they belong" but there is no escaping these fundamental forces of wage depression due to labor surplus. Then trying to "fix it" by guaranteeing people housing or forcing affordable housing to be true through rent control etc. just creates more unintended side effects elsewhere. It creates housing shortages, sky high rents where not rent controlled, and protects the very NIMBYism that this article is about (where liberal people, believing their responsibility to be fulfilled through tampering with the market, now refuse to give on actual meaningful changes). And most of all, it makes those who had the good luck to get in, better off than those who weren't chosen to receive those benefits.
As much as good intentions are nice, they rarely lead to good outcomes when applied at that level of thinking.
The market price of labor, or of anything else, does not come to us as if handed down by God. It is the result of a social calculation reflecting the things our society values and how much it values them. The fact that MANGA engineers are paid more than teachers is informed by how much we've decided teachers are worth. If everybody woke up tomorrow and decided teachers were more important than we thought today, then teachers would probably get paid more. Our societal values feed into our prices. In this way, we are morally culpable for the consequences of this calculation, and it is incumbent upon us to change things of the results are unjust. For example, by taking a bunch of money from rich people and giving it to poor people. Or by creating conditions for widely-available affordable housing. And I'm not just saying we "guarantee" the housing. We have the state go in and build it.
By the way, I live in Seattle, which raised it's minimum wage to $15 a few years ago to much doomsaying. Research after the fact found no effect on unemployment. It begins to seem to me like the style of laissez-faire economics that have dominated politics for decades (which I recognize may not have much to do with academic economics) is full of shit.
And, yeah, you better believe I care about feelings. Feelings are the filter through which all human experience flows. The economy exists for us, not us for it What good is strong growth if the system that brings it about makes us all miserable?
Well, in theory if raising the minimum wage did not result in unemployment it means that the real wage that these people deserve is higher than the old minimum wage and that employers abused their powers to pay people less. The abstraction of a free market lets people pretend that violence and coercion do not exist. Safety from those things only exists to a limited degree and only because the rule of law made it possible.
Now, you can go out and convince people that doing something like this will be in their best long term interests, and by all means do so. We have had campaigns in our history that convinced us in a phase change that, for example:
-- smoking was bad
-- food and drug regulation was effective
-- we should have traffic and road safety standards
-- the list goes on and on
And in many cases, after such laws were passed, everyone realized that yes, it was better and we wouldn't change it back. Let's campaign for higher teacher pay. Yes. Let's advocate and convince people that more housing is needed. Great, I agree. But let the democratic process back it.
Now another way is if you change the rules by which democracy operates to encode a general ability for "enlightened fiat" to enable some group that knows better to decide that the things it favors are positive and should be done even if many / most people disagree. This has not gone so well in the past. Just because you used it in a way that you agree with, who is to guarantee that others with not so good intentions (or even just competence) also pass different laws that aren't so good. As a certain unpleasant senator says, "you may come to regret it sooner than you realize."
What I dislike is when people believe they're right from a moralistic point of view — on a very particular and self-selected cause — take it upon themselves to experiment using other people's lives, and add layer upon layer of tinkering onto the systems by which many people have learned to live effectively, trying to solve certain emotionally-touching problems but creating more as they go because the depth of their solution never keeps up with the depth of reality and exceptions to the solution. Don't discount the fact that the system that we have today produced the greatest prosperity and increase in standards of living for many, many people, before you tinker with it.
I don't disagree that some of your goals may be good. In fact I think climate change may be such a problem that needs fiat to overcome popular will. Or public health crises, for example.
But I don't know all the side effects and unintended consequences. For that reason, I don't support you (for example) just being able to say, "I know this is for the greater good so we should put this exception into place against people's democratic choices desiring not to do that thing." Raising a minimum wage definitely does not rise to the level of governing by fiat. And I don’t know how you decided that one issue was the one to invoke this power on. For now, go out and convince people that they should adopt it by an overwhelming majority. Then I will have no criticism.
If they don’t wish to adopt it, maybe it is the fate of the US that democracy cannot survive into middle age and still make the right decisions when people get old, wealthy, and complacent. But let people decide that America has declined because of it and it’s in their best interest to do so.
People are still coming to the US to work for minimum wage. Why are you second guessing that they find it still worth it?
Finally, your example of Seattle minimum has been shown to be full of holes. Just because Seattle's bubble could do it (so far) and not show noticeable unemployment doesn't mean it holds in general. Just ask everyone whose jobs were outsourced to India whether a lower relative wage provides a large incentive to shift labor away from a place with high costs. It's patently apparent it does have effects.
I think it's pretty disgusting that we place the economy and capitalism above the emotional well-being of the people. As the parent said, the economy works for us, not the other way around. It exists only insofar as it provides people with prosperity. If it can't do that, then it's useless. Unfortunately the people in power tend to benefit from it the most (or are heavily influenced by people who it benefits most), and many others are taught to believe in the power of capitalism even when it's not in their best interests to do so.
If you need it written in selfish then the issue is that eventually businesses will struggle to attract these sorts of workers and/or those workers will start living rough or sleeping in their car as a workaround. This causes hard to measure inefficiencies or other social problems and this all increases cost to business or other economic or social costs.
The wheels of the economy function much better if everybody has affordable, secure shelter with a reasonable commute. I don't see how its "feelings" state this, its just basic modelling.
I have to admit, globalization has winners and losers. The nation as a whole is winning but a small portion is losing out and the worst part is that we blame them for that.
Zoning should allow for variety and growth. Japan, for example, does a much better job of this than the U.S. Basic residential zoning allows for multi-unit and mixed use buildings. This is more flexible over time. Cities evolve as the decades pass, they need room to breathe. Single family single use zoning doesn't allow this.
It's a major fail when a society can't provide housing for its people. Seems that a lot of Millennials are concerned about this.
But then I wonder again if this is an issue that the state government should fix instead of the municipalities.
One could certainly argue that that's fine, and that property owners should get to decide every detail of housing policy for their municipality. I don't personally agree with that, but I can understand the argument.
That might not be bad advice at an individual level. But it still seems more optimal to allow people to produce more supply, so more people can get what they want and/or spend less of their income to do so.
For housing people generally want access to good jobs, shorter commutes, more space, and lower cost. Those all exist on a spectrum, but more supply would allow, overall, more people to get more of those things.
From a philosophical point of view, there's the question of who has a legitimate interest in what can be built... there's the property owner, the people who own houses in the neighborhood, and the people who work there but commute. There's the people who live in the general metro area, where the overall supply/demand will affect prices.
You could even consider the people left behind by "economic geography" - as fewer people are employed in agriculture etc, there are less jobs in rural areas, and as knowledge work becomes more important more jobs are created in large cities with liquid job markets (which can support greater labor specialization).
I think there's a case to be made that all these levels have some reasonable interest in the outcome and not just the local municipal level. And particularly at the local level there may be some bad incentives - approving more housing may generate local downsides like traffic, while not moving the needle too much on prices which may be determined more by the metro area as a whole.
Those people still have skin in the game, but they aren't allowed to vote on that place's housing policy. Consider that the cashier at your grocery store might not be able to afford to live in your city, and has to drive an hour each way to work every day. They have no say in that matter.
(And no, they can't just get a job closer to home. There isn't enough demand for grocery store cashiers there for every cashier-commuter, more or less by definition.)
The burden of proof for an argument should come from the side which is trying to make a change.
"A say" in what subject? Currency used? Sales tax paid? Laws regarding civil rights? Laws regarding non-compete clauses in employment contracts?
We have a complicated legal and governing system that has worked out which subjects are covered at which levels of government. This is pretty much the same with all developed countries. Debating it in black and white terms as you present is not a very reasonable way to look at the issue.
[0] And I don't think we have! This seems to be a constant struggle, with municipalities suing states, the feds suing states, states suing municipalities...
What did you want to say?
After all I own the property - why should anyone else tell me what I can do with it?
If you’re from much of the US, that sounds ludicrous — but then what is the optimal level to put zoning restrictions in?
Simply put: if you get to build your perfect house, with a nice mountain view, the neighbor west of you could build a building the size of the empire state building, and so does your neighbor east of you. Now you don't have any sunlight. The neighbor south of you could build a smelly & noisy factory, and the one north of you could build a nightclub.
I think some zoning does make sense. Totally agreed that we don't want a factory and a nightclub right next to everyone's homes.
But I don't believe that anyone is entitled to their view. The idea that you can buy a plot of land and somehow "own" the line-of-sight between that plot of land and a set of mountains that might be dozens of miles away is just unreasonable, and is not in the public interest.
In your extreme example, it would suck to lose that view, but consider that, after those skyscrapers get built, your property value would likely shoot through the roof. Take that windfall and build a new house on some other land with a great view, land that's less desirable for high-density housing.
My knee jerk reaction says the lowest layer of government should get priority.
When left to their own devices, these people will inevitably take the worst parts of north Jersey and Long Island and implement them wholesale because it's all they've ever known.
The affordable areas low-wage workers could previously live in just 15 minutes away have gentrified over the years, but local homeowners have no real reason to care that their cashier has a 2+ hour round-trip commute. As long as they can still get their groceries, it doesn't affect them. But, crucially, while the employees have to spend a shit ton of time and money getting to and from work every day and likely spend a fair amount of their paycheck in the city they work in (and pay a fair amount in taxes to it as a result), they have no say in its governance since they have to vote where they're registered to.
Local governance utterly fails in these situations, regional planning requires state involvement when municipalities repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot for decades.
And of course, as we hurtle towards a climate catastrophe, we must not forget that most people who commute long hours to and from work everyday drive cars - single occupant vehicles - because the only other way to get there involves an hour+ Greyhound ride (because they travel between multiple independent transit systems). Regional planning is needed to address these issues; the American worship of single-family zoning completely undermines any progress towards meaningfully addressing climate change.
We’ve known for years US central planning is in fact a kleptocracy [1]. So, “no”. Locals can always throw a monkey wrench in any plan a far off bureaucrat makes for them, irrespective of wealth and power disparities. There are countless real world examples of this.
In addition, why should the wealthy be the only ones to object to high density housing as the one and only prescribed solution to housing affordability? Couldn’t the root of the housing affordability problem lie elsewhere, e.g. in investors who lack long-term residency parking their cash in inflation resistant assets? How about the lack of high speed rail networks, or human overpopulation in general?
[1]: http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materi...
EDIT: Another thought. And people the person works in SF, but lives elsewhere, who doesn't get to vote, but still have skin in the game for policy in SF.
That said, ecological concerns will drive more and more of us to the cities, and we need to accommodate those folks. I hope we figure out a way to do it while maximizing quality of life for everyone.
Is the concept of "it would take 3 hours one way to commute to work which isn't done remotely" really that hard to grasp?
Or is the concept of relocation being difficult, costing a lot of money, and sometimes not feasible because it means other family members losing jobs too hard to get?
I'm not even getting into the completely ephemeral ideas, like being priced out of the city you grew up in and have family + social connections in. The two above would be a good place to start.
The alternative is what? Struggle and live in your car for years hoping that state legislation will magically build enough affordable units?
You can’t always legislate every problem away. Life is hard and filled with struggle. I do not buy the idea that anyone is entitled to live anywhere and be able to afford rent and have a short commute. We may as well just ask for a utopia.
Sharing your living space with a dozen people. Either family or random roommates.
What kind of economic background do you have to be asking this kind of question?
> I do not buy the idea that anyone is entitled to live anywhere and be able to afford rent and have a short commute.
I don't buy the idea that anyone is entitled to enjoy the benefits of essential infrastructure (which includes groceries, deliveries, restaurants, stores, etc) if it requires the people that power it to spend hours each day in commute.
>We may as well just ask for a utopia.
High-density, mixed use walkable neighborhoods aren't "utopia", it's how the cities always have been. Suburban cars-first developments and residential-only zoning are not some sort of natural order.
Speaking of cars, without tax-funded highways, the suburban sprawl would not exist.
NYC is far from utopia, but you can rent a studio today within 8 miles of Wall Street for $1400, in a safe neighborhood, next to public transit that will get you there in under an hour, with groceries and restaurants and stores in walking distance.
>Life is hard and filled with struggle
And this is a justification for what exactly?
Better to fix the supply side than just say "move to texas".
but "move to texas" is a solution. The "fixing supply" hasn't worked, for a long time, so why are people lamenting that instead of making "move to texas" easier?
Single family homes are inefficient! Compare us to Japan or China where density is legal, the difference is night and day.
In addition, it's very exclusionary to tell the less well-off to move away. Why embrace exclusivity when we can build more housing?
Let's see what one needs to do to move:
You need to find a job in Texas. That means in-person interview for service workers. That means also losing current job, because you need to be away from your job for interviews, and those jobs don't have vacations.
So, to boot, you need:
* Enough money to keep your family afloat while you're looking for a job
* Money to pay for hotel while you're interviewing
* Money to pay for a deposit on a new lease in Texas
* Money to cover breaking the lease in your hometown
* Money to go back and forth and actually move your possessions and family (several thousand dollars to either move things or sell/buy everything)
Oh wait, your service job wasn't enough to provide for your family to begin with. Your spouse had to work too, and either or both of you had a "side gig", i.e. a second job to make ends meet.
New task:
* Have spouse find a job or two in the same area
* Find a second job for yourself in Texas that works with the hours and commute for your first job
* Have money to cover the deficit in the meantime
Oh wait, but you also have children. How do you have kids if you're both working?
* Have money to pay for childcare
Haha, of course not. You can't afford that; yours and your spouse's parents were helping out. New quest:
* Also move them to Texas, find places for them to live at, jobs to work at (retirement? Hahahaha), and so on.
But wait! Everyone in your family has health issues, because working those jobs isn't healthy. Your job was crappy, but at least it had health insurance.
* Have enough money to cover all medical expenses out of pocket while you were looking for jobs
Oh, and you're still paying out loans on your vehicle that you need to get to work (and maybe a degree that didn't pan out), plus credit card debt (because you never have enough money to pay it all off)
* Have enough money to cover all the debt that you have because you don't have the money to pay for things that you need to make money
Too bad though, it turns out that you took a risk looking for jobs in a different city that didn't work out. The jobs in Texas that you can find are available because they don't pay enough for the locals to take them. Go figure, minimum wage in Texas is half that of your home state.
Now you're out of money, out of work, without insurance, and with an employment gap what makes it harder to find work.
Having lost medical care, your health issues get worse, making it harder to find work.
So, what exactly should California do to make the above "move to Texas" easier?
Im a first generation American and my mother was a refugee. Get off your fucking high horse and go virtue signal somewhere else.
People like you have no idea how the world works. You so desperately need to be seen as a “good person” it’s pathetic.
Im really glad it worked out for her, but that doesn't mean that problems don't exist nor that you or your family didn't contribute to the issue. Many people admire the same billionaires and are "happy" willful slaves. What seems to piss off the happy willful slave more than anything is truth.
> People like you have no idea how the world works.
Apparently you do? Care to explain it to me? Want to tell me that people don't get exploited and they should just change their attitude?
Wow that's some incredible mental gymnastics you're performing there. So despite the fact that my family has never "killed and genocided the original land dwellers, kidnapped, raped and enslaved people" somehow my family and I still contribute to the issue.
> Apparently you do? Care to explain it to me? Want to tell me that people don't get exploited and they those that are should just change their attitude?
Sure. Exploitation and market forces are a part of human society. Baselessly calling everybody evil without offering any sort of solution does nothing except help convince yourself that you're some kind of martyr.
People absolutely are exploited in every society that has ever existed. We're talking about the housing crisis in California cities here. People are not entitled to live in the most expensive, overcrowded cities in the world with low rent and short commutes. Somehow you've dumbed down a complicated issue into a blanket condemnation of the entire country.
There is an abundance of work available right now. Many jobs can be done remotely, especially the tech jobs in SV.
Yes, that is what I'm saying. Many people participate in this system of oppression without intentionally doing so. It is very difficult to avoid, but even many products that you use and purchase contribute to a system of oppression that in return helps increase profits for companies that were formed by the oppression that I mentioned and who actively lobby and persuade public opinion to continue the oppression.
> Sure. Exploitation and market forces are a part of human society. Baselessly calling everybody evil without offering any sort of solution does nothing except help convince yourself that you're some kind of martyr.
150 or so years ago people would have said, child labor is part of society. Marrying 12/13/14 year olds is just part of society. Blacks not being vote is just part of society.
Do you want to be in the group that excused the behavior, or the group that was opposed to and helped change it?
We're not talking about entitlement here. If you want to talk about entitlement, then look at people who feel entitled to oppress and make life difficult for the minority or those placed into a situation where economically they had a far less chance at being successful, and maybe that had to do with morals... yes, you have the opportunity to get rich in America, but often that comes with sacrificing your morals in order to do so. Are you suggesting somehow that people willing to commit immoral actions to gain wealth are more entitled?
You have contributed precisely ZERO substance to the topic at hand. Instead of mentioning restrictive zoning and prop 13, you rant about genocide, rape, child labor, and black suffrage.
Do you have any point at all? I suspect you’re just a narcissist who thinks they’re saving the world.
Even good transit easily creates a 1hr commute each way.
And no city in the US has good transit. NYC has barely adequate transit[1], and even then, the ridership of NYC rail systems exceeds that of the entire West Coast and Midwest combined.
[1]Have fun taking the subway from Bay Ridge to Kings Highway and Ocean Ave. A century ago, streetcars were running across Brooklyn; they were replaced with buses, which sucked then, and suck now.
How many houses do you have to build in Palo Alto before you run out of rich people to pay insane prices?
You can build housing but the market decides if it's affordable.