Affordable housing in California now routinely tops $1M per apartment to build | Hacker News Reader

Affordable housing in California now routinely tops $1M per apartment to build

latimes.com

158 pointsbaron816255 comments

> The Terner Center study on the cost to build low-income housing found that projects paying union-level wages to construction workers could cost $50,000 more per apartment and those built to stricter environmental standards cost $17,000 more per apartment than those that aren’t.

$1m per apartment. So let’s talk about the cost drivers driving 5% and 1.7% of those costs. Just… wat? Let’s start examining the warts on the rhino charging at you?

Also, if your plan to lower the cost of affordable housing is to pay the people who need affordable housing less then I have bad news…

Particularly egregious given that they ignore the Terner Center Study's main finding, which is that the #1 predictor of the cost efficiency of housing is density. If you want cheaper housing, build it more densely. Whether it's union construction or not is a rounding error.

This reads to me to be either deliberately anti-labor or someone who didn't want to make the obvious but hard to fix point in favor or making a divisive and clickbaity one.

> If you want cheaper housing, build it more densely.

NIMBYs hate this one weird trick for cheaper housing!

I think globally it is quite known how to build cheaply while keeping the quality up. The issue is that there are not many incentives to build 20 cheap housing units where you could build 5 high prized ones. Especially if you already have high prized ones nearby and you don't want to "stain" them with the existence of "these people".

Something that works well in Vienna/Austria (and elsewhere) is state/municipiality-owned housing and laws that dedicate a certain percentage of the municipial area to cheap housing. This way (if I recall correctly), whenever a high prized thing is built, they have to negotiate with the city where the cheap housing goes. Into the same spot? A different, less valuable, but bigger lot?

The unexpected benefit of this is that you mix different social classes of people which is ultimately good for society. Many issues between the social classes today stem from a lack of visibility and shared living spaces.

This is what the progressive areas in the US are trying to do as well and are being attacked with an incoherent right wing response about how that obvious and simple solution is actually an elitist, counterproductive, authoritarian blah blah blah, because they represent the people who dont want to live near poor people.

It's not just the right levying those attacks. Wealthy progressives making the exact same arguments.

Wealthy liberals is more like it. Liberals != the left.

At least in my part of Califonia, the "progressive" label is owned by NIMBYs. It drives me nuts; just conservatism with different language.

Anti-union is not anti-labor. Unionization makes it harder for those not employed in an industry to get their foot in the door, by reducing turnover, and by reducing the growth of jobs produced by the industry.

Anti-union is anti—labor; to say otherwise is to be ignorant of the history of labor in the USA during the 20th century.

Unionization generally does not make it harder to get a foot in the door, so long as you’re willing to join the union. Unions want more members; members are their source of power and money.

Is a union appropriate for all jobs? Not necessarily! But construction work? Yes please.

"Anti-union is anti—labor; to say otherwise is to be ignorant of the history of labor in the USA during the 20th century."

Actually, to say that anti-union is anti-labour is actually to be ignorant of history of labour in the USA.

Unions came into existence to give 'some power' to workers with none, but they can definitely take 'most' of the power in many cases and drive a lot of activity to inefficiency or otherwise.

If I were King, I'd probably encourage retail sector and fast food unions, especially Wallmart/Amazon, at the same time dissolve public sector and auto unions.

And completely overhaul doctor and nurse unions.

Construction needs standards and guilds, but not unions.

Only about 5% of physicians in the US are represented by a union—-there are lots of things that contribute to high healthcare cost in the US, but union representation of doctors is not one.

The physicians guild's have incredible control over healthcare in America, essentially they set the terms for what constitutes a 'doctor' and they fight over what nurses can and cannot do etc..

If we were to 'remake' healthcare today with 20/20 - we may not even have doctors.

We may have 'helpers' who don't have direct medical input but do most things a nurse can do, and then have really highly qualified nurses who are allowed to 'diagnose' and 'write scrips' for some things below a certain threshold, doctors who maybe streamline earlier, much more technology earlier.

Etc. etc..

I have no idea, other than to say it probably wouldn't look like what we have today but it won't change because the institutional powers of Doctrs etc. is strong. They go back very far in history. In some ways these organizations predate the states they work within.

Union leaders are elected by their current members. The current members want to create labor scarcity to inflate their own wages. Unions, just like industry associations and all other types of guilds, have a natural incentive to raise the barrier to entry.

That isn't to say unions are bad necessarily. They have plenty of upsides as well. But it's important to recognize flawed incentives where they exist.

I'm generally a fan of unions, but the California trade unions I know of require new members start as apprentices even if they have the skills and decades of experience. That pay cut excludes a huge number of workers.

We need to keep in mind that unions are also organizations of people and have all of the flaws and selfishness that comes with it. A needed counter balance, but not a silver bullet.

Don't confuse a narrative with history.

Unionization reduces turnover, which makes it harder to get a job in the unionized industry. Compare getting a job as a Port of LA longshoreman ($140,000 year with benefits) vs getting a job as a Starbucks barista.

It also reduces the rate at which industries expand, which further increases the difficulty of securing a job in the industry.

It seems to me that any job paying $140K is a lot harder to get than something near minimum wage, so it's not all that obvious to me that your choice of comparison implies anything about unions.

Has anyone in this discussion actually applied for and got a union job? Preferably in the last five years or so?

You're right. Unionization reduces competition in the workforce. That's kind of the whole point of them. If unions tried to create a healthy competitive labor market, their bargaining power would be reduced.

I'm not sure why this is controversial to point out.

I have read that orthodox anti-trust theory in the US in more or less "modern" times holds that anti-competitive behavior by corporations is a problem only if it has a negative effect on consumers.

You could debate whether this is the correct value system, and some people certainly do; you could consider impacts on other people besides consumers, or just feel that anything inhibiting competition is wrong in principle. Go to another country, or back in time decades, and people think/thought differently.

But my point is, that I think the orthodox answer to "is anticompetitive behavior by corporations bad" is "it depends".

And therefore I would expect a conventional wisdom type answer to "is anticompetitive behavior by organizations representing workers bad" to also be "it depends".

Taking the position that it's always bad, even if you are only considering the customers, would seem odd to me and need an explanation.

For me it is simple: the corporation always works for it's own benefit without considering other merits. This means it is reasonable to have other institutions that defend other merits (privacy, the environment, worker rights, ...)

Worker rights make it harder for corporations to extract money from the work, but leave more money with the workers. If the union goes in too much, they endanger the existence of the corporation (which will not benefit the workers they represent) so a balance forms that makes corporations more efficient.at paying workers, but less efficient at funneling money to shareholders.

>the corporation always works for it's own benefit without considering other merits

I agree with you that regulation is required, but I don't agree with you in that I think a completely amoral corporation unconstrained by human values is non-viable no matter what external regulation exists.

Historically, I don't believe people invented collective organizations to be pure and ruthless optimizers, and I think capitalism breaks down if it evolves towards the standard caricature by its enemies.

Regulation can never be perfect enough to substitute for basic decency. It never was, so nobody knows how to do that. Similarly, I think, to trying to substitute computer code for contracts.

You're focusing on ease of getting a job with a particular employer to the exclusion of all else. If you want to make an argument that one thing is better or worse than another, go ahead, but do it by comparing the positives to the negatives, not just by pointing out one single negative.

This has to be a troll attempt right?

Why would unions reduce the growth of jobs? By default unions want more workers, by ensuring things like 40 hour weeks and overtime pay (to encourage companies to hire more people).

I could see if some unions want to limit membership in case pre-existing union membership is required to be hired, but at that point it’s the trade association aspect of the trade union that’s the problem. But you can probably solve this by allowing other unions in the same trade, so that unions that are too closed end up having to compete with unions that train enough people to do more work. Maybe there’s a reason this doesn’t work that I’m not seeing though?

>>Why would unions reduce the growth of jobs

Because they reduce the profitability of firms, and thereby reduce investment in expanding production. This is a long-observed effect:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-232X....

I'm sure it's a long-observed correlation, but corporate anti-union sentiment could easily explain much if not all of that effect. Try translating it to a situation like Germany, where AFAIU industrial labor (union and non-union) has thrived across the board, at least relative to the U.S. (U.S. has still has a strong industrial base in GDP terms, but even where unions are non existent its share of the labor market has been in a long decline much steeper than in places where unions are stronger generally.)

I'm looking for a legal source for reading the paper but not finding any. (e.g. not in JSTOR.) Can you say how they came to their conclusion--does it specifically show causality or is it simply an observational correlation that neatly matches predictions from a classical economic perspective? I guess in some ways I'm splitting hairs, because if U.S. corporate sentiment is inherently anti-union, then the logic behind investment strategies is simply their logic, whether it's a necessary in some universal sense or not. And if we're not going to peek behind the curtains, there's nothing else to say.

But it does matter when discussing what's possible for U.S. labor markets given sufficiently comprehensive cultural change. Racism is endemic and systemic, there are no simple solutions, yet we don't simply stand back and say, "it is what it is, there's nothing we can do about it". (Well, some people say that, but it's not generally considered an honest assessment.) Neither do we say that inducing change would lead to a more inefficient economy, even when there's some evidence showing policy-induced disruptions and dislocations with negative effects. The nearly universal assumption is that improved social equity (as a general matter; obviously we have trouble agreeing on the meaning of that nebulous concept, but few honestly reduce it to merely meaning "whatever the market produces") would result in a more efficient economy and more productivity, we just need to do a better job of it and work harder at threading the needle. It turns out that there are many "naturally" arising power disparities between employee and employer that result in rather inefficient labor system equilibriums, slavery and serfdom being the most obvious, if extreme, cases.

>>I'm sure it's a long-observed correlation, but corporate anti-union sentiment could easily explain much if not all of that effect.

I recommend you look at the literature. There's been a lot of good studies on this and it shows that there is a causative link as far as one can be uncovered in any social science.

And if there is such strong anti-union sentiment among corporations that means unions are not good for shareholders and that means that unionization is going to reduce shareholder profits which is invariably going to have the effect of reducing investment.

Unions are also racist, because they invariably favor seniority and thus older white workers over younger minority workers. In Chicago, the mayor refused to commit to reducing the police force, observing that under union “first in first out” rules, most of the people let go would be Black and Hispanic.

> Unions are also racist, because they invariably favor seniority and thus older white workers over younger minority workers.

That is the most valiant effort I have seen around here to apply the actual definition of racism bluntly, however that is not how it works. You deserve a gold star for getting close, though.

Did you not read the entire article.. They say one of the largest drivers is trying to navigate the bureaucracy and red tape...

---

A 2018 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that 14% of the price tag for California’s affordable housing projects was made up of consulting fees and other administrative costs — the highest in the country and more than developers spend on land.

---

I work adjacent to affordable housing. TONS of tax credits and other funding (relatively) HOWEVER I wouldn't wish these projects on an enemy.

The funding is a million strings attached / crazy opinions. So you have to be EXPERT to apply and manage the intersection of all the credits and funding.

You are still subject to all the zoning / environmental red tape (even if it helps that there is affordable). If you are building luxary units easier to absorb this all, otherwise, again a nightmare.

The places with affordable housing money tend to be wickedly expense. If San Francisco took their affordable housing money, and built out at the ends of BART they could build some multiple number of units. To get 100 affordable units into San Francisco is very very expensive.

Outside of these crazy subsidizes, most other regulatory rules / delays etc argue against building "cheap" housing.

So we house and feed folks in high need in some of the absolutely most expensive places in the US and world. And some of the units (which prioritize families) are relative massive 3 bedroom places. If you go to chinatown in SF, the density is so so much higher (private market) though likely illegal in many cases.

If you spent the $1B/year even in California in one or two of the cheaper areas to live in you'd get so many multiples for it that it would blow your mind. Or if you were allowed to build chinatown levels of density.

> To get 100 affordable units into San Francisco is very very expensive.

What's insane is that 100 units is just two small blocks of flats. That I see hundreds of being built at the moment in my largish sized (<700k pop) city in central Poland, purely commercially with zero support from local government.

Very impressive. This can only happen if zoning / permitting / enviro stuff is not too overdone. To do 100's of affordable units in San Francisco... I can't even imagine what it would take.

I've been to poland. One interesting thing I noticed, some units seemed to be built concrete shells - you could actually buy a unit like this and finish it yourself. Was very interesting. The one I saw had a fair bit of interior surface mount conduit exposed which made repair, expansion etc very easy (in the US you are often going into drywall and more.

Not exactly "concrete shells" - you have windows, you have basic plumbing, central heating, electricity, even cable TV and internet cables already installed, and you have all walls painted in white. Everything else you have to do yourself. All newly built apartments in Poland are like this, because that gives the new owner the opportunity to redecorate the apartment to their liking.

BART (and all subways in the US) costs $2 billion per mile to build a few years ago (somebody posted a while back BART + other subways recent construction costs), probably close to $4 billion per mile now due to inflation and higher materials costs

I don't think spending $100s of billions on subway into the suburbs will even make a dent on housing prices

But if you built housing out near these extensions you can build for a relative fraction. Contra costa zoning / permitting is much easier to deal with than SF for example.

Concord avg home price is in $600K range. SF avg home price is in $1.7M range (3x higher).

And it's easier to do different stuff in Concord. My guess is you'd be 5x cheaper per person unit in concord. 10x cheaper if you get out to places like modesto.

There is plenty of space to do this around existing BART stations. Shouldn’t be necessary to build even more.

you're thinking of the second ave subway. that's where the $2B/mile figure comes from. and that's nothing compared to what we're about to blow on the gateway project. portal bridge was coming in at $10B/mile last time I checked, making it by far the most expensive bridge ever built. and it's just a normal bridge.

but if VTA gets it's way and builds the SJ BART extension i'm sure they can put out some impressive numbers of their own (this extension should not be built at any price btw).

the insane cost of transit development and housing in the states are two sides of the same coin. to a first approximation they are caused by the same thing, and cause the same problems in our cities.

I'm looking forward to the extension if it happens. Then I'd hope you'd get more of a city downtown maybe in terms of feel? Right now there is a bit less of a there there to actually go to and hang out so getting around san jose city is still pretty car intensive in my experience.

I'm for anything transit oriented that gives people options to skip the drives on the highways.

At least San Jose and San Francisco can afford the insane costs of these things. For what it costs to build 2 miles and a station here you could probably do a whole network in africa and asia. Building a train track, while hard, is not totally new tech and has been done before.

or for the cost of the SJ extension you could build the geary subway

Why don’t you think that extension should be built?

downtown SJ is _already served_ by the transfer to VTA at milpitas (which itself probably should not have been built).

extending BART is subsidizing suburban sprawl with transit dollars that are urgently needed in the urban core. it's an s-bahn, and we've got more than enough s-bahn in the bay area. what we need is a proper u-bahn.

SJ is a glorified suburb with delusions of grandeur, whose politicians consistently sabotage regional and statewide transit projects. I am of the spiteful perspective that that alone should exclude SJ from receiving big transit bucks, but even from the more level headed perspective the density simply does not justify it.

why on earth would you trust an organization that built and operates a light rail system that is so poorly designed and operated that it is amongst the least ridden and most subsidized systems in the entire country? in what is supposedly the heart of silicon valley.

san jose is a bad joke, and if you live there I am sorry for you.

Yeah, after they emphasize the important things, they get into 14% of the costs a few paragraphs down.

They still leave some $800k unexplained for each $1M "cheap" apartment.

Land is less than 14% of a average project’s cost? That seems really low to me.

They don't want to address the real cost: the building codes being ridiculous. That would require reducing the amount of regulation. These codes have real cost and they don't necessarily add a lot of quality-of-life for the occupants.

Edit - it was pointed out in another thread that affordable housing has to go through the same ridiculous permitting and environmental bureaucracy as other housing. That also costs a ton, probably more than the crazy building codes.

Some of the building codes are probably overkill, but part of the difference in California building costs compared to other states are energy efficiency requirements (like more expensive windows) that quickly pay for themselves in reduced costs to live in the unit and also reduce per capita energy usage. Unfortunately, neither the developer or landlord (if the unit is built for a rental) has incentive to build an energy efficient building as the tenant is going to eventually pay the energy costs. These requirements absolutely need government regulation because the "free market" leads to a non optimal outcome.

My relatives built a house by the ocean in San Diego. They had huge cost increases and aesthetic limitations caused by these regulations which treat inland housing the same as those right on the water. They also had to give up roof deck for solar panels, which is just stupid because there are better places to host solar panels.

I’m further inland, and I pay basically no money for energy. A box fan and occasionally, a one-room AC unit (because I work from home) or a space heater is all that’s needed. There is absolutely no justification for such energy efficiency regulations in San Diego or the Bay Area, where I used to live. Your argument about reduced cost is purely hypothetical, and not reality.

> These requirements absolutely need government regulation because the "free market" leads to a non optimal outcome.

That would not mean we “need” government regulation. Leave people alone.

Free markets work best when information is available. One option would be to have all rentals require energy efficiency testing with a score being published on all rental listings. That way renters are able to compare properties and factor in this in to their choice.

This actually exists in Germany (Energieausweis or energy certificate), see e.g. https://www.howtogermany.com/pages/energycertificate.html

Free markets can't "work" to solve these kinds of coordination problems unless NP=P, because taking information into account is an NP-hard problem.

This kind of approach has already worked for almost every product category. Your fridge has an energy rating sticker on it because it help you select the least energy using models and in turn incentivizes manufacturers to care about efficiency since consumers care and can now see.

Currently as a renter, if you see a few properties online, you have no feasible way to factor energy usage in to your decision making so landlords have no reason to factor it in since it won't prioritize their property to renters.

The power company could publish this data. I was able to get a flat rate quote on a property that I didn't live in yet using an online tool from Georgia power. It's basically the previous year energy cost divided by 12 and a 5-20% markup depending on past annual variations. It doesn't exactly equal efficiency but I knew what I could pay for an entire year of power.

You do not have to find optimal solutions to find good ones.

How long do you think it takes to recoup an extra half million dollars in energy savings?

Where are you getting the idea that half the cost of constructing an apartment is a result of energy efficiency requirements?

He's implying that if the energy efficiency is a primary cost driver -- e.g. worth even discussing in the context of affordable housing -- then it would take a long time to break even fiscally. Assuming it's 50% is just a little bit of hyperbole.

I think they were just saying some of these regulations are not just good but necessary

Less than the term of the typical mortgage, i.e. these codes are only adopted when it lowers the cost of housing.

With your $500k up front costs, how many units are you spreading that over?

Just ordered new replacement windows from my house. Granted we picked out the most expensive line of windows for aesthetic reasons but the marginal increase for the CA mandated coating was ~5% of the overall cost of the windows. Do I expect to save the entire $22k cost of the windows on my energy bills any time soon? No I do not. Do I expect to save the ~$1500 that I spent on the coating? Sure I'll probably get ROI in 5-10 years with energy bills averaging ~$300/mo (no solar and it's 100 degrees outside today).

It sounds like the $22k energy saving cost would not have been a meaningful contribution to a $1mm/unit cost of construction then.

Everything counts.

This is a straw man to begin with because the building codes are not the issue… the permitting apparatus is.

However, your analysis is simplistic and assumes:

1. The house uses no natural gas (most do)

2. The cost of electricity never goes up (it will in the short term at least)

3. CO2 emissions from wasted energy have no cost (they do)

4. Building energy efficient buildings is way more expensive than the alternatives for new construction (it isn’t)

If the average electricity bill includes houses that use gas for heating, then the electricity bill is grossly inaccurate for houses without gas heating (unless we are discussing an area that requires minimal heating demand)

Weird to look up one number, then fabricate $100k out of nowhere to compare it too. Plus, you are looking only at the energy bill, not the cost of energy saved...

The top comment in this thread states that 1.7% of the upfront cost of the apartment, $17,000, is for energy efficiency improvements.

In fact, the codes that mandate energy efficiency improvements take a detailed cost analysis into account, and only mandate cost-saving energy efficiency improvements.

This article is Northern California, not Southern, but are the building codes so much more ridiculous that the construction cost is higher than you can pay to buy new-build townhouses or standalone houses in LA County?

My other question would be: why are we building new instead of buying up old hotels, old office or condo buildings, etc, if building new costs so much?

It may seem counterintuitive at first but renovating old buildings - especially non residential ones - for occupancy is often more expensive than building new.

There are many reasons; new stuff is usually built on cheaper land, old buildings have lots of issues that make updating them very labor intensive.

It's why most malls can't be easily converted into housing, and usually need to just be torn down completely, often just reusing foundations.

Malls, office buildings are less realistic, sure. Prefering million-dollar-per-unit-construction to existing motels and apartments or condo buildings, on the other hand, appears to be perfect being the enemy of the good.

It's easy for committees of people who largely don't need affordable or last-resort housing to make it practically impossible to create it.

I don’t think there are that many disused hotels or condos just lying around.

Hotels are tricky. There’s rarely even a single kitchen available per floor, let alone per unit, and I would imagine a kitchen is required in the building codes.

Ultimately, conversions have to be brought up to the same building codes as new construction, so you don’t actually get rid of the problem (codes making any construction hard to do.)

To be fair part of the cost of housing is that Single Residence Occupancy is pretty much illegal to build anywhere, except as hotels.

We could reasonably allow hotels to be converted into SROs with communal kitchens (or room + board with staffed cafeteria style kitchens), but as you said that goes against zoning code.

It's not that hard to find boarded up apartment buildings in LA, at least.

Motels were used for homeless housing during Covid, seemed like a good start.

They're already housing-of-last resort options for people, and they're already constructed. Don't hold affordable housing to higher standards than low-end-of-the-market homes or apartments, or you're just going to leave the bottom of the market with even fewer options.

Let market rate construction be the new construction - which has less red tape around qualifying for incentives and government funding, etc - and shore up the quality and quantity of the bottom end with government action. You'll be adding more units than you are today, which is the most important thing here.

Motels were used as homeless shelters in the context of an extraordinary event that decimated travel demand.

At least in the area I’m familiar with (NYC) a lot of them have swung back to being profitable hotels now that people are traveling again.

The state is doing just that, with project HomeKey.

No, building codes are fine. Building codes exist for a reason, and just because you don't know that reason doesn't make them less valid. If you have a particular code example that you think is ridiculous i'd invite discussion on it, you may be surprised how many experts on the subject are floating around.

There are many in CA that are ridiculous. Most are not related to safety, but likely due to lobbying from some industry.

Fire sprinklers are required in single family homes. The very small incremental safety benefit is far outweighed by the initial cost, maintenance cost, and potential failures (more plumbing to leak). If you really wanted to improve fire safety, make it cheaper to replace 1950s-era houses with new construction!

Solar panels are required for new homes, which ironically adds a small amount of fire risk (like all electrical devices). This is required in areas with cloudy conditions, or houses that are shaded by trees. The cost per watt is ridiculous compared to how cost-efficient utility scale solar has become. Not to mention the safety risk to solar workers on a second-story house.

Just in plumbing code, there are several ridiculous restrictions. Some jurisdictions allow air admittance valves, others do not at all. ABS pipe is illegal for commercial buildings, but just fine for residential. IPC allows 1.5" vents for toilets, but UPC requires 2".

sprinklers are not an incremental safety benefit. they're probably the single most effective bit of fire safety mandated by codes. mandates to install them in single family homes is overkill though.

sprinklers are so effective that single means of egress + sprinklers should be the new building standard

> probably the single most effective bit of fire safety mandated by codes.

Surely smoke alarms are more effective? (Obviously so on a per-dollar basis, but I’d wager on a per-unit basis as well. If you gave me a choice of a smoke alarm xor a sprinkler, I’ll take the smoke alarms every time.)

silly contrived comparison you're always going to have both. knowing there's a fire doesn't do much for you if it flashes over before you can leave. sprinklers are ridiculously effective.

Right, sprinklers instead of multiple egress would make sense (or even allowing builds with either a ton of egress or sprinklers). But as it exists today, if the codes require both, it just adds cost for very little marginal safety benefit.

sprinklers are not a marginal safety benefit.

Fire risk is already marginal.

As just one example, Most of the USA's building codes mandate double staircases in buildings over 3 stories for outdated fire concerns which increases cost per unit mainly by reducing the number of units that fit in a given site and the arrangement of those units.

https://www.treehugger.com/single-stair-buildings-united-sta...

https://twitter.com/holz_bau/status/1384670822351048707?ref_...

The Grenfell fire comes to mind for the benefits of multiple stair cases

It's more the zoning than the codes.

Though there are some that make apartments more expensive, like requiring two staircases. This also significantly reduces the pleasantness of the resulting apartments, and typically means that you can't open windows on both sides of the building and get cross flow.

There are many, but this is an example in CA:

All new tenants and new occupancies hereafter constructed, which exceeds 3,600 square feet shall have an approved automatic fire sprinkler system installed throughout.

The problem here isn’t the sprinklers — it’s the cost to install the sprinklers. The cost of a few hundred feet of CPVC or PEX pipe is low. The cost of an off-the-shelf sprinkler riser, pre-assembled, is a couple hundred dollars. The amount a Northern CA contractor will charge to install the parts is insane.

(There is a problem with too little code. NFPA 13R and 13D do not clearly specify backflow protection requirements, and the California Plumbing Code, which follows UPC, only specifies it by reference to a subjective hazard level as determined by the authority having jurisdiction. This means that different local jurisdictions disagree, which creates both added complexity when designing a system and a significant risk of an actual hazardous condition existing. Situations like this are why codes exist, and IMO the code authors thoroughly dropped the ball on determining the extent to which the water in non-passively-purged fire sprinkler system is hazardous and how to prevent it from getting into drinking water. If an actual standard existed, then there could be an off the shelf compliant system, and time and money would be saved.

fire sprinklers are the hill you're going to die on here?

Great response to someone who answered your invitation for a specific example. But I'll die on this hill.

I can totally understand requiring them in multi-family or town-homes where there are shared walls - but not in single family homes. A residential fire suppression system for a ~2,500 Sqft home can cost anywhere from $10-25k to include on a new build in northern CA (I know from recent bids). That isn't a negligible cost and mandating them for smaller dwellings (in my county it's anything over 1,000 sqft) is a fine example of regulation that has "great" intentions but is making affordable housing un-afforable.

It's also questionable if they save lives in single family dwellings, and also questionable whether the property damage they prevent from fires is larger than the property damage they cause through inadvertent activation/leaks/etc.

Actually, the statistics are rather stark. Without sprinklers people may be seriously injured or killed by fire. With sprinklers present and functioning risk of injury or death from fire becomes negligible.

> > It's also questionable if they save lives in single family dwellings

> Actually, the statistics are rather stark.

AFAIK, this is all information about multi-family dwellings and has not been demonstrated in single family homes.

The benefit of sprinklers is certainly more obvious in large buildings with multiple residences inside, in slowing fires from reaching new dwelling units.

I find plenty of factsheets about residential sprinklers, that cite numbers of 80% reduction in death... which then ends up relying upon benefits seen in apartments... and which mostly evaporates when controlling for income.

This discussion (both sides) would benefit greatly from some citations to back up assertions.

Is this true in single family dwellings or only in apartment complexes? I would believe that sprinklers have a lot of value in apartment complexes but less value in single family homes. Not to mention that people who buy single family homes are a lot more likely to have more expensive furniture that would be ruined by a flood.

your assumption that only poor people live in apartments is troubling and very american

I do think it's probably a fair assumption that people in apartments have less expensive furnishings than people in houses.

They specifically wrote “a lot more likely” so they clearly do not believe ONLY poor people live in apartments.

Are single family homes what's being considered affordable housing?

This is literally what the article states midway through.

5% and 1.7%.

Bah

Warts on the rhino? That's an idiom I've never heard before!

I was looking at a home with property on the central coast, inland a bit. The gentleman had spent the last 20 years building his own little subdivision. He had 10 or so homesites of 1 acre with modular homes on poured foundations. He told me that he would never do it over again. He told me a story about how he was required by law to build an affordable unit for every however many traditional units, so he had to build one. The problem was that the county also said that the maximum acreage for an affordable unit was .5 acres, but the minimum acreage for a septic system was 1 acre. There is no overlap in that venn diagram. So he was stuck there for a while, then the local government organized a meet and greet where he could meet the folks in local government in that county and tell them his troubles with getting his subdivision built. The guy in charge of the affordable housing laws was on one side of him at the table, the septic guy on the other. In that moment each of those men discovered that the venn diagrams did not overlap. Those two functions of government had never talked, and didn't even known that their regulations were mutually exclusive.

He said it was a lot of that kind of stuff.

What I learned from that whole interaction- don't develop property in California.

> Those two functions of government had never talked, and didn't even known that their regulations were mutually exclusive.

turns out that even in real life, the problem of a company writing internal, incompatible APIs exists.

I worked in the industry for 7 years in California. A big part of it is a race to the "top". If you want to be competitive in winning funding from the 5 or 6 different state/local/federal programs that need to be cobbled together to build a new project, you have to make all of them happy. That means then highest possible LEED certification, on-site resources like computer labs and childcare facilities, plenty of green space, public art, and of course ample parking. That's all above and beyond that already high standards of CA building codes (which, let's not forget, also includes being earthquake-resistant).

Most of the new projects I worked on were very nice. Several had community pools. Most had balconies/patios. Most were well connected to transit (a biggie if you want to be competitive with the funding agencies). Virtually all were mixed income and housed families ranging from below the poverty line to 6-figure incomes. I would have happily lived in most of those complexes if they had been geographically desirable, but most were less urban than I prefer. Though I may still be on the waitlist for one particularly well-located building in SF!

> from below the poverty line to 6-figure incomes.

In SF, thats the same thing man.

In Santa Barbara we just had 31 1-room units built for a total cost of $1.4m. These are spaces to get people off of the streets and are quite basic.

https://dignitymoves.org/santa-barbara/

From what I can tell, the it city and county just went for using emergency rules and bypassed most planning rules (it is on county land).

Will be interested to see how it works out.

Single rooms, and from the very short description, apparently no running water?

> Each room will have a bed, a desk and chair, heating and air conditioning, a window, and most importantly a door that locks.

This is a very special purpose shelter apparently. It's not something I've ever heard of before, but seems to be simply a building full of what most middle class homeowners might describe as "walk-in closets" -- big enough for someone who is otherwise homeless to crash in for the night.

And as you say, by bypassing basically every possible regulation that might have applied to a typical "residence", the baseline construction cost of these 31 "walk-in closets" is indeed fairly low.

This kind of arrangement used to be extremely common before building codes made them illegal. Here's a humorous indication of how normal this would have seemed to people 70 years ago:

> The 1951 sci-fi classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still” inadvertently shows us how. Klaatu, a level-headed extra-terrestrial emissary, escapes captivity at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He wanders down Georgia Avenue, away from not-yet-nuclear-weapon-free Takoma Park, and attempts to disappear into everyday DC.

> To do so, Klaatu checks into a boarding house at 14th and Harvard in Columbia Heights. Each room houses one or two people, and as such there’s scant privacy to be had: everyone overhears everything.

> This is convenient for Klaatu, who knows little of Earthlings’ simple ways, but probably annoying for the Earthlings. Conditions like these were common in DC homes at the time.

Source: https://ggwash.org/view/31818/an-alien-notion-800000-dc-resi...

A single room with your own bed and a door that locks is miles above sleeping on the street, even if it means shared bathroom and kitchen facilities. We need to legalize these options once again.

They'd probably rent for $3k month. With no water.

That's cool, but ironically middle class (even upper middle class) folks cannot find any "affordable housing" in SB. I gave up after saving for 10+ years and moved to San Diego.

It isn't like San Diego is much cheaper. Especially the further west you want to be. A lot of this has to do with the short term industry, which SD just voted to substantially limit. Next year should be interesting for the property market when they roll out the implementation.

> It isn't like San Diego is much cheaper.

It was a lot cheaper a few years ago at least, a 3-4BD SFR was less than 1BD condo in SB when I moved.

Oh, it has changed substantially in the last few years. Covid changed everything.

Yes for sure, I'd not buy anything in California at prices in past 2 years.

I bought the covid dip in SD getting a place under asking, just over a year ago. Small condo facing the ocean in one of the popular beach towns. Best financial decision I've ever made in my life given that it has gone up at least 23% and given the area, won't go down over time. There are deals to be had, you just need to know the market, understand who's selling (and why!) and have a bit of luck with the timing of things.

This reads as being quite arrogant. You may turn out to have made a good bet, though even in that case, you shouldn't be sure that it was a guaranteed thing like you seem to believe.

Given that I was born and raised in the area and my father still lives 100' away from me (and he owns two properties here), I knew the area market extremely well.

I bought the place sight unseen while I was in another state because I knew exactly what the property is and its history. It is also easy to see in this very popular beach area that the prices have appreciated over time.

The people selling the place... well... I googled them and it seemed like they needed the cash. I lowballed the offer (counter to my agents wishes) and they accepted. Business is business.

Apologies if it came off as arrogant, but like I said, I got lucky. The stars aligned into something I knew would be a good investment if I could get it and I did.

One semi interesting side note is that I was originally looking for a place to rent, not buy. One of the other owners in the same building wanted some crazy $6k a month for a 1 bedroom because it is all profitable short term rentals. Because of everything in the area being short term rentals, there is literally nothing to rent. I then saw this place come up for sale and figured I might as well buy. Again, lucky, but also understood very well what I was getting into.

SD routinely beats the rest of the country for "most expensive place to live" due to the ratio of housing cost to wages. More so than the bay area. I'm sure there are issues with this methodology, but still....

> Will be interested to see how it works out

Easy to predict: more over-crowding, more pollution, more traffic, lower quality of living for everyone

Santa Barbara is kind of an interesting informal case study.

It's hemmed in by steep hills and the Pacific ocean and a lot of the available area has already been developed. https://www.google.com/maps/@34.4127513,-119.7096148,12z/dat...

On the other hand, despite great zoning in the core parts of Santa Barbara that outlaws the typical strip mall construction pattern, leaving a relatively dense-feeling downtown, it's extremely car centric. There's noticeable traffic both on the 101 and downtown, especially on weekends.

Spending time in Santa Barbara, you can't help but feel that a) there isn't a lot more room to spread out for more development, but b) there is definitely a lot more "room" for Santa Barbara to improve in terms of sustainably improving density. Santa Barbara makes a lot of concessions to cars, which is not going to scale at all if the population grows. If you take car dependence as a given, Santa Barbara probably cannot afford to grow much more.

On the other hand, Santa Barbara is famed for its nearly perfect weather year-round. Good weather and and its small size means that almost all trips within Santa Barbara proper can be made easily via E-bike, if only there were more bike lanes, but there are too many 2 lane roads with cars that move too quickly driven by drivers who are not used to sharing the road. But I suspect that Santa Barbara may be too dependent on famously car-centric Los Angeles to ever consider de-prioritizing cars..

It's all moot point, though, because I think most people who actually own homes in Santa Barbara are older and quite wealthy and do not really care too much about abstract things like "sustainable growth" and would quite prefer if Santa Barbara could just stay "the same" for the next 20 years until they die.

State Street was closed to cars during pandemic and it appears that is going to be permanent.

The city also has an e-bike program that I can informally say is used quite heavily. In addition many youths ride e-bikes and I will be interested to see if that reduces car dependence for that generation.

Water availability is an important factor limiting growth (though we do have a desal plant). Wildfires are another problem to pay attention to.

After a couple of years away, I returned last week. Yes, the e-bike program looks quite promising. Closed State Street is a no-brainer, although I've heard a lot of NIMBY-types are opposing it for some reason.

But, after living in San Francisco for a couple of years and becoming used to riding my bike everywhere, I had a realization that while on paper Santa Barbara should be much more inviting than SF for bikes, in practice it's weirdly almost less inviting because drivers do not seem interested in sharing the road at all and there are very, very few bike lanes. Most of the main one-way "through streets" that run north-south in Santa Barbara like De La Vina, Santa Barbara, Anacapa, etc. are decidedly bike hostile because people drive very fast on them and there is no bike lane.

One way to solve this is to make State St, Bath St, and Garden St dedicated north-south bike thoroughfares, and give all of the east-west streets that cross State St. bike lanes. Biking through Santa Barbara would then be a matter of biking north or south on a dedicated, safe thoroughfare before turning off east or west until you arrive where you need.

As it stands, not really very inviting to bike in, _especially_ if you don't know the city by heart..

State Street as a pedestrian mall is interesting in light of Sacramento's K-Street Mall re-opening to auto traffic (2011) and Fresno's Fulton St. (2016).

https://archive.ph/20130221230638/http://www.news10.net/news...

https://cal.streetsblog.org/2016/06/07/fresno-pedestrian-mal...

And regardless of what Santa Barbara itself does, it'll still have a major state highway running through the middle of it.

Yep. In California, there are two answers: density (no cars, remove highways, etc.) or people need to stop moving there.

It’s physics. There is no other way around this.

It doesn't even need to be no cars, just design spaces where people don't need cars.

It is an either or situation. If you give people the option to use cars, they will use them to drive 20min to a Costco and big grocery store for all their needs. They will also politically support measures that make their lives easier, such as minimum parking and bigger roads which then lead to needing cars.

Severely restricting cars is the only way to have viable local businesses tailored to non-car shoppers and political support for advancing non-car infrastructure (i.e. sufficient density for sufficient people to live without cars and support businesses in walking/bicycling distance).

The second a road more than 4 small car lanes across gets constructed (or 40ft), you make walking too cumbersome and risky.

> have viable local businesses tailored to non-car shoppers

i would imagine these local small shops cannot have the economy of scale that would allow a big retailer like costco to have cheap items. Which means the cost of living is going to be higher - it may or may not offset the savings of not having to pay for a car.

Huge externalities of “paying” for a car are not paid by car users. Costs of fossil fuel pollution, tire pollution, brake dust pollution, danger to pedestrians/cyclists, health costs due to sedentary lifestyles, increased fuel consumption due to distances between destinations being further which means mass has to travel further which means more energy consumed.

I could even add kids not being able to play outside freely. Could maybe even more stratified societies and less communal atmospheres due to cars allowing people to be spread out.

Gresham's law of urban planning? Auto-viable design drives out pedestrian-centric usage?

I guess? I think of it as a simple physics problem. Walking and cycling requires distances between destinations to be small. And individual cars, especially the American variety, require tremendous amounts of space. The two situations require complete opposite parameters.

So, yes, that.

But also, once you have and permit cars, there's more that can be done with a car, and other characteristics tend to support them:

- Large car parks and less walkable space.

- Businesses distributed more broadly across the city or town.

- Lack of services for pedestrians (e.g., deliveries for purchases, bus service or transit, etc.)

- Greater risk for pedestrians and cyclists (more and faster traffic).

Et cetera.

So the initial imbalance grows with time.

California is growing slower than the US as a whole and lost a House seat this decade as a result. California has had net domestic outmigration (people leaving) since 1990.

As of 2019 California had domestic out-migration for under-100k earners and in-migration for >100k earners. Plus overall immigration.

That might look different post-Covid, but that was a recipe for an affordability disaster even without growing faster than the US as a whole.

(I think the high-asset crowd is overall at least as responsible as just the high-income crowd, though. Billionaires gentrify the millionaire neighborhoods, the millionaires displace some of the 500kinaires, etc, etc.)

Yep. Sometimes reality sucks. I also have a lot of wishes that will never come true.

So why not impose an internal visa system?

Instead of having people buy up the property and jack the prices to shit, just have some notion of "Californian citizenship".

* If you were born there, you're grandfathered in by birthright.

* If you move out, we'll pay you some money or whatever.

* If you want to move in, either pay a big sum of money or convince the government you're helpful.

Then they could use the money from these sales to invest in the community, rather than it going to property speculators.

Wouldn't such a scheme violate the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the US Constitution? See e.g., Crandall v. Nevada, where the Supreme Court explicitly held that an egress tax was unconstitutional.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crandall_v._Nevada

Certainly you couldn't do it like a straight-up visa policy, but you could probably achieve something very similar by giving them strongly unfavorable property taxes and so on.

Such a taxation scheme sounds like it can potentially run into similar issues as well. For example, from Cornell's Legal Information Institute [0]:

> In the exercise of its taxing power, a state may not discriminate substantially between residents and nonresidents. In Ward v. Maryland the Court set aside a state law that imposed specific taxes upon nonresidents for the privilege of selling within the state goods that were produced in other states. Also found to be incompatible with the comity clause was a Tennessee license tax, the amount of which was dependent upon whether the person taxed had his chief office within or without the state. In Travis v. Yale & Towne Mfg. Co., the Court, although sustaining the right of a state to tax income accruing within its borders to nonresidents, held the particular tax void because it denied to nonresidents exemptions which were allowed to residents. The "terms 'resident' and 'citizen' are not synonymous," wrote Justice Pitney, "... but a general taxing scheme ... if it discriminates against all non-residents, has the necessary effect of including in the discrimination those who are citizens of other States ...." Where there were no discriminations between citizens and noncitizens, a state statute taxing the business of hiring persons within the state for labor outside the state was sustained.

[0]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-4/sec...

No, in this system, they would be "residents", they would just be residents that haven't gone through the sort of procedures that California would like for them to, and so they get absurd property taxes or whatnot.

e.g. if you go don't go through immigration, you can physically live there, but you'll have to pay 105% of your income in tax

If California residents also have to go through that same procedure (i.e., everyone is subject to it), sure, that might pass muster.

Otherwise, it sounds like a distinction without a difference. How do you imagine a "going through immigration" process that doesn't effectively produce "resident"/"non-resident" status?

strongly unfavorable property taxes

Prop 13: Mission accomplished.

It’s an interesting idea, but I think you’d ultimately have to leave the union to implement it because you can’t restrict freedom of movement within the US.

I think there are other potential solutions, however. Finding ways to create incentives for not speculating on property, huge taxes for vacation homes, etc. may work. Though it’s dangerous because you might get something that sounded good at the time but turned out to be a disaster like Prop 13.

We already have this with prop 13, let’s not take it any further, it’s already insane enough.

This would also jack up the prices a huge amount, wealth is anything that people want where there's not enough to go around.

By keeping people out, this will actually increase the scarcity and drive up "prices" even more. Your "big sum of money" acknowledges as much.

So this is a terrible, unfair idea. And if we were to ever implement such a scheme, the only way to make it remotely fair would to heavily heavily tax this wealth, perhaps by charging existing residents a highly monthly rent to stay, and for those that get a grandfathered-in prize, they should have to pay a large amount of capital gains.

The prices of the passports would go up, yes, but the prices of property would go down.

Prices for whom? Only those born into this wealth, or those who have wealth by other means.

It's a recipe for even more massive inequality.

People from out of state. The native Californians would not have to pay, since they already live there.

Exactly, those who have been born into wealth have a gilded life, while the rest of the states struggle.

I think it's important to remember that California's wealth comes not from internally, but from externally. By exporting the goods from labor in the state, labor that is largely the result of immigrants into the state, California is leading the way to a more environmentally friendly path, with greater wealth, for all of humanity.

Wishing to cut that off because of a few conservative "native born" Californians don't want to see apartment buildings is the height of foolishness and greed.

A lot of California’s wealth comes from its vast natural resources, including some of the most desirable weather and topography in the world. This will, on its own, attract investment from richer entities. It is also a prime beneficiary of imports from Asian due to its ports in prime location on the Pacific Ocean.

Water supply issues notwithstanding, which could easily change California’s intrinsic desirability.

Internal immigration reduces California’s population (more people leave than come in). It’s international immigration and births that drive’s the state’s population growth.

That's only due to the rationing system that California has already implemented by having a housing shortage. We only give places to those with the highest amounts of money, so California is kicking out its children year after year.

Thanks, Prop 13!

You’d better take down all those “refugees welcome” signs then

There are comments here about what "affordable" should mean in the US.

I have two kids (1 boy and 1 girl, one special needs) and we live in a two bedroom (850sqft) with the living room doubling as our bedroom so the kids get rooms.

When I go visit friends or family that have 3/4/5 bedrooms it feels like a mansion, so I guess what's normal is a function of what you are used to. I will say that the challenges that come from living this small are very different from what my friends and family talk about.

This is in SoCal for location reference, and I WFH.

I know it doesn't make you feel any better but that size of a home for family of 4 in Europe would be absolutely normal. For me it sounds like the topic is not even about "affordable housing" here anymore.

Some non-California houses for comparisons sake:

$195,000; 3,500 sq. ft.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1222-Broad-St-Grinnell-IA...

$165,000; 2,500 sq ft

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/541-N-Walnut-St-Red-Cloud...

$122,500; 2,560 sq ft

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/301-S-Blackhoof-St-Wapako...

$249,900; 3,136 sq ft

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1217-River-Ave-E-Ladysmit...

$225,000; 3,395 sq ft

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/10369-Ackley-St-Rapid-Riv...

Houses can be cheaper in Rust Belt areas, but often for a reason. Sometimes that reason is that over the last ~20 years, people have been working hard to escape those areas due to stagnant or failing economies.

One of your listings, for Ladysmith, Wisconsin in particular, has been dropping in population by roughly 10% each decade since 2000. Same goes for the house in Nebraska, the town it's in has been dropping in population at about the same rate since 1980.

It might work out if you can do remote work for the rest of you career, but some of those listings, like a different one from Michigan, are for homes in towns with about only 1,700 people total in a 160 sq. mile area and with a per capita income of about $18,000 a year. Your options for work dwindle really fast if you lose your job after moving there.

The first house in in zip 50112, which has a 90% higher crime rate than other cities and town in Iowa.

Here's a link for houses in Iowa between $150,000 and $250,000, with four or more bed rooms that are larger than 2,500 sq. ft..

https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/house_type/4-_beds/1.5...

Source?

That's a highly rural ZIP Code whose principle town is home to Grinnell College.

That hardly strikes me as likely to be a consistently high-crime area, most especially of violent crime.

City: https://www.homesnacks.com/ia/grinnell-crime/

College: https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/grinnell-college/stu...

From the Homesnacks link:

>According to the most recent data from the FBI, the total crime rate in Grinnell is 2,185.9 per 100,000 people. That's -6.83% lower than the national rate of 2,346.0 per 100,000 people and 9.20% higher than the Iowa total crime rate of 2,001.7 per 100,000 people.

Also interesting to compare:

  Location      | Rate
  --------------+-----
  Grinnell, IA  | 2,185
  U.S. Avg.     | 2,346
  San Francisco | 4,938
  Oakland       | 6,456

https://www.homesnacks.com/ca/san-francisco-crime/

https://www.homesnacks.com/ca/oakland-crime/

Your first link is returning 500 errors.

The second ... shows low overall rates of crime, as of a decade ago.

Grinnell has a population < 10k. There's likely some variance over years, and there may be specific years with a large number of reported incidents. There is also the possibility of changes in reporting or enforcement, or of specific events resulting in a large number of charges.

Without more specific and detailed information, I'm going to call your initial claim largely unsupported.

Archives of the HomeSnacks link show a larger number of aggravated assault claims for a single year. What that might be based on deserves further clarification.

I think that depends on where in Europe you’re located. That’s about 80 sqm if I’m not mistaken and it’s definitely on the lower end for a family of four in Germany, though clearly not outrageously small. (+) Our friends from my wife’s part of the family in eastern Poland happily have flats that many Germans would consider shoeboxes - I’d roughly estimate 2/3rds or less of the size.

(+) for example social security rules for flat sizes that need to be paid for are (roughly) 45sqm for the first person, plus 15 sqm for each next, so 4 adults would get up to 90 sqm.

Only as a reference/comparison, in Italy the mimimum apartment allowed (intended for 1 person) is 28 sqm, to which you add 10 sqm for each adult more, children below 14 (if I remember correctly) do not count.

The typical 28 sqm apartment (they are called here "popular houses" and are usually built by some public entity and rented out to people in need at lowish rates) is actually fine (in a minimalistic view) for a single, as it usually includes an entrance/dining room/kitchen, a bedroom and a bathroom, but the 38 sqm and larger houses for 3 or more people do actually look like "shoeboxes".

It doesn't bother me; I grew up poor and my wife is foreign so we are used to "small" places. :)

I’m amused that you start by mentioning affordable and then make no reference to cost

It's SoCal, so cost is relative. It's absolutely ridiculous what things cost here.

My place would rent for about $3400 if it hit the market. I think market value is around $1m, and it was built in the 1920's.

If we estimate something like $35k (the poverty line in California) then each affordable house costs twenty eight years of poverty line income; maybe it'd be cheaper to pay them to move far away.

Yes, there are obvious problems with this, but the scale is getting out of hand.

And in this proposal who is going to work as baristas, janitors, and delivery drivers?

If you reduce the supply of labor willing to work at low prices, employers will need to pay more to fill those roles or choose another path forward (automation, scale down businesses that rely upon low-paying labor, etc).

So, presumably you'd have more expensive lattes, more expensive janitorial services, and perhaps some of the less viable coffee shops close.

And once higher labor costs drive up the cost of living, you just ship away the next tranche of people who are now below the poverty line?

It doesn't run off to infinity, because the high cost of living city is connected to other markets. E.g. the price of groceries might increase a little. Price of low-end housing could be expected to fall a little from reduced demand.

There's a transfer of wealth to people who are at the bottom of the income scale.

Whenever people assume something runs to infinity, it's fun to imagine what would happen - baristas in San Francisco pulling down 5x top tech salaries, Google employees working at the grocery store after hours to make ends meet, etc.

Poverty like means "regular life is unaffordable" by definition. The solution to "poverty line" is people getting more income, not cheaper housing.

"28 years" is still too high, but the units don't compare directly. Use "living wage" income for that.

Limited housing supply must necessarily be unaffordable to someone. The only question is where we strike the balance between scarcity and abundance, and correspondingly at what income percentile it will be unaffordable.

We could also use non market allocation schemes, which would displace the problem of “can’t afford housing” to “stuck on the waiting list” or “my lottery number never comes up.” Same thing in the end.

Hmm, "living wage" puts a single person at $25k or so in some parts of the country, so it still might be cheaper to just pay them to move away.

Doesn't solve the real underlying problem which is that there are too many jobs that need to pay too little.

Honestly if it weren’t so depressing I’d enjoy the schadenfreude of watching Californians sacrifice one sacred cow - science (economics), for another - their social mores.

I’m constantly amazed by my friends who can get into the minutiae of Covid epidemiology or climate science, can’t or won’t embrace the most rudimentary economic concepts and principles because it conflicts with their social beliefs

I generally find that when I look into it the 'crazy, communist, californians' are doing stuff that even right-wing parties in Europe take for granted as being a basic part of modern civilization, because its what the relevant experts in the field recommend, so I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for California to collapse into anarchy.

This is just a slightly less fanciful trope than the "being nice to gays causes hurricanes" thing. You can tell its not actually believed for similar reasons.

If being nice to gay people actually caused hurricanes there's all sorts of useful information we could glean from that and use to make the world better, to fix droughts for example.

But the meteorologists weren't the one that noticed this surprising link, were they? It was the people who don't like gay people who spotted it.

Similarly, if there was actual useful information about how progressive policy X was bad for progressive goal Z, then people would want to know that information and use it. But weirdly, it's the non-progressives who have all these reasons why progressive stuff is bad for progressives.

So you're left in a climate change denial type situation where you need to believe that the whole of academia and government around the world is in cahoots to cover up the truth for unclear reasons.

"They're killing all the birds to make expensive unreliable energy and climate change isn't even real!" Well the bird experts, economists, climate and energy folk all think you're wrong but don't let that stop you.

Wow kind of a making my case here - you’ve assumed that I have some anti-science position (and why are we talking about gay gay people?) and have said nothing of the sort. when in fact it’s really just that seemingly numerate and intelligent people lose their minds when you point out that any of their pet social goals are in conflict with each other.

Like for example, when rich towns have a home sale tax to fund “community preservation” (buying vacant land- decreasing supply), strict zoning codes (no multi-family for example - decrease supply) then also feel the need to have an affordable housing effort (building homes, increase supply). You literally have people in the same town government working at cross purposes!

If my local tarot card reader with a healing crystal store doesn’t believe in basic economic theory, not exactly a big shock! But they also don’t exactly purport to be “data driven”

> More than half a dozen affordable housing projects in California are costing more than $1 million per apartment to build

A quick summary of the supposed reasons for the high price tag discussed in this article:

- increases is labor and material prices

- stringent environmental and labor standards

- high parking requirements

- lengthy local approval processes

- bureaucracy to secure financing

- [paying] construction workers union-level wages

- paying attorneys and consultants to navigate state and local bureaucracies to secure financing

- consulting fees and other administrative costs

conveniently, they leave out the #1 cause of high construction price. Lack of density. Residential construction gets cheaper the more of it you build in an area. It's possible this is not a popular notion amoung the readers of this article and that's why it was left out but it is in fact the main conclusion of the Terner Center study that they cited.

> Residential construction gets cheaper the more of it you build in an area.

This is only partially true, currently. It definitely used to be the case that larger developments would leverage economies of scale so that the more you built, the cheaper it cost. But I believe (as someone who works on multi-family housing projects in the Bay area) that we've reached a point where the larger projects do not have that reduced cost advantage because they have more legal/administrative/consulting costs that offset the lower labor/material costs.

Could be, but your conclusion does not match the study quoted in the article. Even in the bay area the cost savings for high density units are substantial.

> Even in the bay area the cost savings for high density units are substantial.

If that were the case, than how do we arrive at the article's headline of ~$1M per unit? Affordable housing is synonymous with high density so I'm failing to see how your "high density reduces cost" premise holds true when the main conclusions of the article show the opposite. Where are all the savings at $1M per unit?

High density in the Bay Area isn't really high density at all. Even some new luxury condos in Toronto have higher density than the 'affordable housing' in the Bay.

Because the units the article is discussing are not high density.

I think historically there’s been a preference in some areas—like SF Bay—to build single-family homes, sure. But more recently there are a lot of higher-density projects being built around SF Bay, at least in South and East Bay and to a lesser degree in the North Bay, and it’s my understanding that many of these have been planned years and years before the construction actually started. The delays have been virtually all regulatory/bureaucratic.

IMO parking should not be required if there's a light rail or bus line nearby. It should even be discouraged in city planning.

Can they not spend $1.5 million per unit to build luxury housing and then allow the old luxury housing to become affordable? This kind of economics has worked in the past for housing when we built a lot more units, and it's kind of the natural lifecycle of a building.

The dirty secret is that "affordable housing" is usually a certain number of "dwelling units" in a new development (think apartment building) and so they dump as much as possible of the entire cost of the building into the cost for the "affordable units".

If I am building a building with 50 high-end condos, I won't bother making cheaper ones for my affordable units, I'll just designate some as affordable and maybe skimp on the trimmings, but even then probably not much because of the hassle.

First off inclusionary units are not a “secret”. But more to the point, that not the kind of affordable housing that the article is talking about: The article is about 100% affordable developments which are almost always by non-profits receiving government funding.

It's not a dirty secret, it is by design. Having mixed income properties is thought to significantly deter the sort of blight caused by "ghetto projects".

I’m not against mixed income developments as a way to combat ghettoization, but in a lot of cases in CA the costs are born by the developer (and thus indirectly the people purchasing the new units) which keeps the regulatory burden/costs of new developments high. So while it does create some below-market housing for those lucky enough to finagle their way in, it keeps the actual market rate construction expensive.

In my opinion it would be better for local governments to buy off the units from developers if they so chose, so the full cost is born by the program. Of course, that wouldn’t really solve the problem unless new construction were less restricted, since not enough is being built anyway for the % of “affordable” units to be able to make much more of a dent.

What bothers me is that a lot of people don’t actually know how “affordable housing” is implemented, and if they did I bet most wouldn’t support it. Not only because of the complexity and costs it adds to new market rate construction, but also that you still need an income of like $70-$150k to qualify for owned BMR housing in SF and I don’t really care to subsidize people at those income levels.

this isn’t a secret it’s section 8 and not the problem. new construction doesn’t need to be cost effective affordable housing. new construction can and should be luxury. affordable housing can be older buildings. it’s not a secret because the market is already priced this way

The problem is that when people are suffering now, they don’t want to be told to wait a decade or two for current luxury housing stock to filter down and become affordable. Just imagine closing a local food bank and replacing it with a vague promise that the local grocery store prices will improve. How well is that going to go over?

Long term, we do need more market rate (“luxury”) housing stock. But they cannot be instead of trying to help people who need it now

Some places do social housing where they rent a fraction of the units to upper income individuals to subsidize the rest. However in the US funding sources generally have rules that say the units can only be rented to households making less than X% of the area median income. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing: even in a properly functioning housing market there are going to be some people who cannot afford mark rate housing, and the assumption is that everyone else will rent market rate units

“Affordable housing” is a scam.

If you want you want real affordable housing you need market rates that are affordable, not special set aside units.

Housing construction costs are a nonsensical number to look at. If I’m going to build and sell a 2 million dollar property, I’m not going to spend 100k building a tiny home.

Developers need to compete at this price point, the cost of construction is probably a loosely linear function of land value. Land value has been inflated by a puzzling combination of NIMBYs, interest rates, and economic growth.

Everybody wants "affordable housing" - but many do not want more people. This is the fundamental disconnect. Many folks just do not want to make it any easier for more people to move in. They would like rents/prices to be lower though.

This is how we end up with rent control and tight building restrictions - because it solves both problems. Roll up the drawbridge against new people by blocking development, but then make the housing affordable by fiat.

The only remaining problem then is 10 year waitlists to get into one of those rent controlled spaces. Bummer on that...

Many people do want more people because global populations have been continuously centralizing. Cities have become more dense and rural towns have drained out. People have made this choice on their own.

People want to move to population centers - but many (not all) people in population centers would rather they didn't. So they make it hard to build.

> will offer two-, three- and four-bedroom apartments for between $1,186 and $2,805 a month

Honest question: why does affordable housing needs to be 3 or 4 bedroom? Shouldn't they be mostly Studio and 1-bedroom apartments, and at most, 2-bedroom, that too rarely?

4-bedroom sounds like a luxury apartment and not an affordable apartment.

The only affordable housing is lots of housing: https://www.brookings.edu/policy2020/bigideas/to-improve-hou....

From there, people should be able to decide for themselves; "decide for yourself how much housing unit you want to buy" was common, until the '70s: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/12/27/why-did-cities-freeze-in-...

>Shouldn't they be mostly Studio and 1-bedroom apartments

No. It's not an intuitive result, but it makes sense when you think about it. Bedrooms are cheap to build. Kitchens and bathrooms are expensive to build. Building 3 units with a total of 3 bedroom, 3 kitchens, and 3 bathrooms is a much less efficient setup than building a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom unit. If you incentivize people to have roomates or co-habitate with extended family by building bigger suites you can make housing cheaper overall.

Not sleeping a family of 4 to a single room, 19th Century New York Tenement Style, is considered a luxury now?

For the record, I was referring to 3-4 bedroom, and not 1-2 bedrooms. If one is looking for subsidized housing, isn't kids sharing room a reasonable compromise?

Regarding 3-4 bedroom, yes for most of the world they will be luxury.

> For most of the world, yes.

This is not really true for most values of "most", and the places it is true, the culture tends to be much different than you would find in California, eg) you are generally not looking at children being assigned hours of homework to perform in which they have no space to work on it, nor ability to work on it without distraction while the rest of the family lives on top of them.

> If one is looking for subsidized housing, isn't that a reasonable compromise?

You may want to look up the history of tenements in the US. Broadly speaking the answer turns out to be: no, this is not a good compromise.

how many bedrooma should a famiy with 4 kids have?

What if a grandparent or two lives there?

More bedrooms meaning more people makes kitchen and bath more efficient.

More bedrooms means the apartment can house more people. While the entire unit is more expensive, it’s probably cheaper per-bedroom. A four-bedroom affordable housing unit could be occupied by a multi-generational household, or maybe a bunch of young adult friends.

There are occupancy requirements. One person cannot rent a 2-bedroom, for example.

Families aren’t limited to just a couple with a single kid.

People have elderly parents too.

And even if you allow that there are families with more kids, three bedrooms is kind of a minimum if you put the parents in one, the girls in the second, and the boys in the third.

Of course, for many people today kids sharing a bedroom is tantamount to child abuse.

> Of course, for many people today kids sharing a bedroom is tantamount to child abuse.

Well, then they should not be looking for affordable (as in subsidized by other taxpayers) housing, no?

The problem comes when the legislature decides that it literally is child abuse, and mandates things like minimum bedroom laws (usually aimed at things like frat houses, but the effect can end up the same).

That's easy to say until you consider that the people who need subsidized housing are also the people least likely to be able to attain contraceptives and abortion services.

Real question is why a blue state is failing at that.

It’s not. Half of California’s births are from Hispanics, who are more likely to be morally opposed to those things. (And good for them-that’s called winning.)

Because more people want to live there than can be housed.

Abortion as a substitute for affordable housing? I propose this: we legalize euthanasia then use that as an excuse to strip you of all other entitlements. You don't deserve a home, that's just luxury because you could get yourself painlessly euthanized instead.

According to the USICH [1] there are 271,528 students experiencing homelessness in California. Presumably some of these students would benefit from living in units like these.

[1] https://www.usich.gov/homelessness-statistics/ca/

I dont think bedroom # equates with luxury as long as n < 5.

It can be a matter of perspective. I go by the necessity -> comfort -> luxury scale.

Where, necessity = roof over head. Comfort = a warm, safe place with simple amenities, people sharing bedroom and so on.

So, for me, Luxury = anything beyond that, as in no one shares bedroom, guest bedroom and so on.

Just because a beggar is asking for food doesn't mean he is expected to accept even spoiled food, don't you think?

Given budget constraints, better to feed two people a bowl of beans than one person a steak, I think.

Better have one happy person vote for you than having two unhappy persons voting for your opponent.

having roommates is not akin to eating spoiled food?

it's single-bed apartments that are the luxury. who do you know that lives alone except single young professionals? everyone else has family or roommates.

Legally, a bedroom sleeps at most 2 people.

Federal occupancy standards require landlords to allow at least 2 persons per bedroom, not limit it to 2.

Luxury relative to what, exactly? I think people in America are generally accustomed to one-bedroom-per-child; that's the standard our popular media promotes. I grew up in a family of 5 with a 3 bedroom house; meaning two of us were always sharing a bedroom even as teenagers (we switched up who was sharing every year, meaning none of us had a fixed bedroom.) I think by American standards that was not entirely atypical, but certainly short of luxurious. But you seem to think 3 bedrooms qualifies as luxurious, and don't seem to make any consideration for family size.

In some countries, cultures or communities, a family of ten might be living in a single bedroom. Maybe anything more spacious than that should be your standard for luxury. Or further maybe; any shelter that keeps you dry is the bare minimum. If it keeps you dry and warm, that's luxury. Why not? If you get chilly you can use a blanket; furnaces are luxury. Do you really need anything more than a primitive FEMA tent? Running water plumbed straight into your home is a luxury, you can bring a water bucket to a community spigot every day. If you think that's too much work you're just being entitled.

Anecdata from a number of friends in NYC: the mafia controlling much of the market on glass (windows) and other construction materials, along with union jobs costing a premium… with YoY increases because they can, is driving prices much higher than where they should be.

Mafia never left. Just transformed

Has there been research on subsidized apartments versus paying people the difference and letting them choose where to live? Rather than applying for a subsidized apartment, apply for a $1k-$2k/month rent subsidy from the government and live in market rate units.

Rent subsidy is always better than affordable housing. The government should buy land and lease it out to raise revenue. At some point we can extend it to more people and call it a citizen's dividend.

Just a thought: Why not pay the fly-over states to build new housing ($128,868 on average for a new 1,200 sq ft home in Iowa [1]), to accommodate "low-income Californians"? You could tie the expatriate home subsidies to online jobs in California, and reduce your costs to less than 13% of what they are now. Many communities in Iowa have gigabit residential optical Internet, and the cost of living is substantially less than California. It could be great for both the economies of California and Iowa (or wherever).

[1] https://www.zenithdesignbuild.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost...

Who's gonna do all the traditionally low-income jobs?

The entire point is that they shouldn't be low income.

A $1M house would cost someone about $5,800 per month just to pay a 30 year mortgage at current rates without a down payment and that excludes property taxes, insurance, utilities, repairs, and all the other minor costs that go along with ownership. How can anyone possibly expect to be profitable in the slightest building that housing. Not even luxury housing would be doable at that price. The only return these investors get is from hoping the cost of the property goes up in 10, 20, 30 years, not from the income generated from rent. Companies actually refuse to build in California because what happens when the anti-landlord, anti-profit government decides they don't even deserve enough in rent to stay afloat until they reach those breakeven years 20 years later. The government implements rent control, decides that tenants don't have to pay, decides that tenants can't be evicted if they don't pay, and decides you are the bad guy for being a landlord, or that you are gentrifying the area. There is this assumption some government grant or combination of 5 of them should be the incentive to build there. Why not just allow those properties to actually be profitable an build there - then they would build more housing? Housing built to be affordable housing and those built to be luxury aren't even that different in building costs but you only get incentives if you build the affordable housing. 1000 new units at the top end still increasing overall housing by 1000 units. Instead they incentivize building 1000 units at the bottom end. Why not have the developers actually be the good guys, the hero's that are coming to build housing, sure at their profit but refusing to allow people to become profitable landlords is like saying we don't want more doctors in the world because doctors make too much money. There is an obvious need right now and they sacrifice the entire housing market in order to 'help the poor' but in the end it's a sacrifice. any economist knows that implement pricing controls (like affordable housing) only causes shortages. You have reduced supply because no one wants to build anymore, You have increased demand because everyone wants to pay that lower price. Pricing controls are the biggest disaster in the country and have probably caused more homelessness in their desire to lower prices.

Clearly California should form a committee to require developments containing affordable housing to submit construction cost impact reports, subject to public review and committee approval.

Any mature and great resident area would be expensive. With network and mostly work at home may be it helps. Otherwise look around it is always expansive for city cf rural … I am not sure there is a solution. When the house value comes down … it is more trouble.

Of course $1m is still quite high, btw.

Costs for everything are becoming stupidly inflated or just an outright scam for necessities: housing, college education, childcare, food, gasoline, new/used vehicles. America just keeps making things harder and more unsustainable.

Related, lots of things used to be built faster and cheaper than in the modern world: https://patrickcollison.com/fast

Surely cost of land is a big part of this amount?

Definitely. Housing in LA is not affordable. It would make more sense to build houses in the lowest cost of living area in California.

Let's solve problems created by massive regulation using even more regulation and government involvement. Brilliant idea, why has nobody thought of it earlier??!

Because cutting regulations would require some uncomfortable changes. You would have to tax land and excess liquidity. Nobody wants that. Land ownership redistributes wealth to landowners. Withholding liquidity from the market causes economic downturns and speculative activity.

If you solved those two things a lot of politics would become redundant.

California should just eminent domain all these office buildings that nobody wants to drive to and renovate them for housing. Too bad all the politicians are too corrupt or weak to do anything like that.

$1M per apartment, those money buckets must have a lot of leaky holes in them.

Possible, but not as cheap and easy as it might seem.

https://sfstandard.com/housing-development/turning-downtown-...

Affordable housing has to fight through the same permitting and environmental review process as any other housing. Then there are the lawsuits and planning delays and ballot initiatives by neighbors. Then the housing has to get built, likely with only unionized workers since State money is involved. And it has to follow the same building codes: parking minimums, balconies, mandatory solar panels, etc.

With all the barriers involved, its amazing affordable housing gets built at any price.

Why don't they just get rid of the process?

Hold a referendum to elect the constitution. Assuming it passes, you select a commission of people in charge of it. They get absolute power over anything relating to property - eminent domain, changing zoning laws, and giving building code exemptions.

It would only work if there's a democratic majority in favor of it, but if it did, what would be the issue? Then it would be very simple: just buy up some land, start building, and rezone anyone who complains as heavy industry and evict them.

I'm of course writing this in jest - hopefully they wouldn't have to be that draconian - but why hasn't anyone tried this? Is there not an electoral majority?

>I'm of course writing this in jest - hopefully they wouldn't have to be that draconian - but why hasn't anyone tried this? Is there not an electoral majority?

Because the electoral majority is a part of, or gets kickbacks from, the massive amount of bureaucracy! The vast majority of voters own property, and having a constrained supply benefits them, so barring a massive economic crash that wipes out most their property values.

Why would they ever change their ways? Clearly, people are still dying to move there, because that's why the prices are so high in the first place- so unless California became the next Detroit (and there are no signs of that so far) they're going to continue.

I often joke that after the next big earthquake levels everything that it'll take a hundred years to rebuild half of it, and the folks who finish the first half will vote down the second half.

Because the tenants will surely be thrilled to commute from places “nobody wants to drive to”

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