A legal fund to sue SF over housing deadlock
sfstandard.com
sfstandard.com
> San Francisco openly admits to not following a state law requiring certain permit processing times
> the state has yet to bring a lawsuit against the city over project denials
I like the idea of amassing money that can be used as a threat of a lawsuit. This is the real power that many people do have; this power is possible for all of us, collectively. We can and should influence our elected officials through legal maneuvers, if other efforts fail. It just makes sense.
I've seen enough willfully block affordable housing in violation of law that I've looked several times.
NIMBYs also encourage these sorts of lawsuits, because even if they know they will lose, these projects are 1) so close to not making sense that an affordable housing developer literally can not afford to fight for legal rights, and 2) there's a big fear that fighting the city legally will make all further building attempts by an affordable housing developer even more difficult and likely to fail.
I have zero empathy or sympathy for my NIMBY neighbors that have been displacing so many people in my community after several years of trying to fight for affordable housing. People that are otherwise "nice" behave in the most amoral ways when it comes to excluding people from their neighborhoods. It's been very eye opening for me in a sad way.
In my mind I play out some RICO case takedown where they all get indicted in one fell swoop but surely this is impossible.
In other words, if "NIMBYs" are to blame, it's fine if they are the one that need to pay.
I mean, Kwame is still in jail, right?
I guess that's a different league than this though.
> NIMBY neighbors that have been displacing so many people in my community
Who are the people getting displaced?
The Not In My Backyard people, are they ... rich and affluent who don't want low income people nearby?
https://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/265
The NIMBYs are almost exclusively wealthy homeowners. Not 100% but close to 99%. But in California, the wealthiest homeowners also co-opt the language of the displaced, and take on the mantle of those who can no longer afford rent, even as their actions of exclusion increase their home values and rents in general.
> co-opt the language of the displaced, and take on the mantle of those who can no longer afford rent
Oh this is too abstract for me (I don't understand)
Courts can also order specific performance.
> If you sue the city and win, the judge orders the city to follow the law, and they still don't, do elected officials go to jail or something?
Courts happily hold municipalities in contempt. The community can then figure out how to hold their electeds responsible.
Can you post examples of this happening, and what the ratio is?
https://lawblog.legalmatch.com/2021/05/03/town-of-mooresvill...
One example isn't very telling.
It’s reasonable to favor local governments on local issues, but this stuff is impacting outside their area so it’s no longer a local issue.
It kind of reminds me of a much more innocuous version of the French Revolution when it was going off the rails, and the wrong political opinion meant death. Almost nobody voted in elections, because keeping your head down was the best way to keep it attached to your body.
There are various things that might happen; an obvious one here is that, with the city declining to follow its own procedures, it would be prohibited from enforcing them against you. You would then not require a permit to do whatever it was you were trying to do.
I say this as a pro-development YIMBY.
To close the resulting loophole where they just reject all permits when they have a backlog, there would be automatic penalties for improperly rejected permits, with a floor of an after-tax value of 2 times the financial damage done to applicant; permit office pays legal fees.
These shenanigans cost us rougly $500-1000 a day in insurance, interest, etc. They drug it out for about a year.
The department that decided they liked us has bankrupted multiple people on our street. We'd have at least 5-10% more houses on our street (there is plenty of room) if not for them.
California's state government has an alert on their website specifically listing various things that department did to us and pointing out they were illegal. Instead of suing, we kissed all the right asses in the right order, so now we have a house. Again, this is best case for interacting with them because they liked us, apparently.
Based on conversations with neighbors, my level of satisfaction with this planning office is roughly median for the area, but our experience was way better than average.
Marvin Heemeyer of Killdozer fame is a personal hero of mine now (Don't worrtly, I don't know how to weld. However, I do know how to make campaign donations and vote!):
https://allthatsinteresting.com/marvin-heemeyer-killdozer
Missing from that article are apparently true allegations of direct financial conflicts of interest within the zoning commission, and him being forced to sell land so that one of their cronies could develop it instead. Also note that he fought them for over a decade.
One of our state representatives is running for reelection on a plan to spend huge amounts of state/federal infrastructure money to bypass the office that likes to bankrupt people. 100's of familes will be forced off their land before the plan kicks in (assuming it passes).
So, anyway, there needs to be harsh financial consequences for just rejecting permits for the heck of it.
Ideally, promotions would be tied to correctly processing permit applications. That's probably illegal around here or something.
Capitalism is about amassing resources ahead of time and then trying to buy time, create a stalemate and wait it out until the other party has run out of resources and must give up.
Fighting a war accellerates the rate of capital exhaustion and destroys existing capital. Because everyone starts from a blank slate people do not have enough capital to waste on outwaiting their opponent and they instead focus on cooperation resulting in a few wonderful economic decades until everything goes bad again as people use their amassed capital to fight each other.
We're a medical device company with Breakthrough Device status, and it works largely like this. Whenever we submit, FDA has 30 days to reach a decision from time of receipt, and if they don't decide, we automatically get approval. Really helps with keeping up momentum!
If the latter strategy works out, you don't need to spend the money. So it can be re-used for other threats.
I think it makes a lot more sense then suing the city or issuing fines--at least in theory.
Government is spiteful and vengeful, and wronging them will result in vicious consequence.
I'm not very familiar with the specifics, but AFAIU the most important municipalities in the state enjoy so-called "Home Rule" under the California Constitution. I believe that means that a self-executing rule such as you've proposed is unconstitutional. Rather, somewhat like the constraints imposed on the Federal government viz-a-viz the states, the state government is often limited to cajoling municipalities through expenditures, budgeting, and law suits.
There are usually arcane rules. Sometimes things have to get put on by council sometimes cities allow citizen petitions.
Something that changes the charter/constitution versus just an ordinance or a tax/levy.
And sadly activist judges can have too large of a say imho.
I guess I don't really follow. What are they saying exactly? "Hey we have lots of money so listen to us" while simultaneously claiming SF isn't listening to them because the other side has even more money? If it is just a matter of money as they claim but they other side has more wouldn't it seem like they are just going to lose?
I umm... I seriously doubt that
So .. perhaps the profession itself could be said to take money from both sides, but many times, in practice, an individual attorney does not or cannot...
crazy world we live in.
Ideally people should realize that voting for the other party will send the strongest signal to elected officials.
I am still required to pay full property tax on it each year.
If anyone has advice on how I can go about growing a community of people in a similar predicament to eventually engineer a class action suit against the county govt.[1], please share in a reply to this post. (Paging: Peter Thiel.)
[1] on the theory: if you're charging me property tax, then give me a water meter just like my neighbor has. And if I can't do anything productive with this land, then give me a huge discount on the property tax. (I'm not even allowed to park a travel-trailer on it for more than 2 days at a time.)
-------------
Edit: Water Meter Waiting List (there are people on there waiting since 2003 for a water meter):
https://monterey.org/Document%20Center/CommDev/Planning/Wate...
You basically own the land on paper for the privilege of paying taxes but the government reserves fundamental legal rights to what you can do with land you own.
Laws against collecting rainwater are actually pretty common.
Yes, land ownership is pretty much an illusion.
Unless an aquifer is entirely inside your land, it makes plenty of sense not to let you make a well.
Edit: oh this just came to mind. A friend of mine related to me he had similar problems building a house and hired a lawyer to essentially bribe the relevant people.
I see another issue worth suing the city / county of Monterey for:
- prefab housing (such as Boxabl) is banned.
Paging Peter Thiel.
https://california.staterecords.org/propertyrecords#:~:text=....
Not being able to build for an unknown time does reduce the value of the land, and your assessment should reflect that. Your assessor should have information about the procedure for contesting assessments.
Edit: given that the waiting list includes projects from 2003, I have to imagine this has been an issue since at least then. There must have been some land sales since then which would help one understand the value of vacant land without water rights. If you bought after say 2013, I guess I kind of wonder why?
If there's really not enough aquifer water, it seems better to severely restrict growth in the number of fixtures than to let people build more homes that are expected to have insufficient access to water; running out of fresh water is deeply problematic.
If the government is not doing its job, taxpayers should be automatically entitled to withhold an adequate percentage of taxes, while officials in the responsible offices (up to lawmaker level) should automatically get a corresponding pay cut if enough people withhold taxes because of their office. This would introduce some incentives to actually do the job, or to push fellow officials to do their job. I feel like the incentives are skewed and that's the root cause of all these stories.
Does it have to be a water meter issued by them? (Can it be a new or used one you buy from wherever?) Or if it just has to be one of their meters, can you find someone who doesn't need theirs and move it?
Water Availability Status:
https://monterey.org/city_hall/community_development/plannin...
Water Meter Waiting List (there are people on there waiting since 2003 for a water meter):
https://monterey.org/Document%20Center/CommDev/Planning/Wate...
(I guess I should start by contacting everyone on the water meter waiting list...)
Put in a request for "0.00000" if you want to go that route.
Eventually.
- land in Monterey is currently cheap (because of the water meter moratorium)
- there's a mostly-complete project that will make adequate water capacity available soon [1]
- there's a not-yet-fully-approved project that will make lots more water available [2]
- a well-connected insider has told me that water will be available within the next 2.5 years
- you can extract cash up to 50% of your investment value via a HELOC
- if you do get a water meter at some point, your investment will bag 6x to 10x instantly
- it's nice for my ego to get mailers from Sotheby's International Realty asking me if I want to sell my house (they're sending these mailers to everyone, even to people such as myself who don't have an actual house on their land)
- I'm serious about engineering a class-action lawsuit against them to not only issue water meters, but to also allow prefab housing (currently banned) such as Boxabl
- lastly, just between you and me: Monterey is easily a top-5 location in the USA, if not the world. on. every. metric. there's limited land. and no more land is ever going to be produced. grab it while you still can.
[1] https://www.montereyherald.com/2021/09/23/monterey-peninsula...
[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/california-coastal-commission...
Is that an option in your state?
My hometown in western ID is 25K people including the surrounding county. The parts of town that were built along the railroad are 5 stories tall in a few spots. But everything since then has been 95% zoned for single family homes.
Including the Portland Metro region seems sensible. In the Boston metro, municipalities have too much power.
https://commonwealthmagazine.org/opinion/zoning-variances-ar...
I’ve been told that shadows on a park would cause diabetes and covid.
She's also the founder of YIMBY. This is an organization headed by a woman. It's not an individual stockpiling money.
The title could stand to be updated.
I mean, patient killed, but ...details.
I don't know the answer. I do know that some of the tax incentives related to real property in California are seriously problematic. How to fix them? I don't know. Tax law is not one of my areas of expertise.
Repeal prop 13, and replace it with property tax deferral, as done in Texas. If an elderly homeowner living in their house cannot (or does not want to) pay their property taxes, they can elect to defer them for as long as they want to, with some interest accruing. The county puts a lien on the property for the amount of tax due.
When the owner passes away, moves out of the property, or sells it, the tax lien needs to be paid, which can be done with the proceeds from selling the property.
I don't know if that actually works, but I do know Prop 13 is a big problem and this is the first I recall seeing some meaningful attempt to suggest an alternative that is actually in use somewhere, so has some hope of being not completely nuts.
Annually assessing property as the combo of structure + land is what most areas do, but assessing just the land is somewhat easier and is less biased. There are enough vacant land sales, in addition to some very simple regression models that come up with straightforward values per square foot of land. Much harder to game, and less sensitive to the extreme and systematic racial bias that pervades real estate valuation, even to this day.
If you're only assessing the land, what would change when you reassessed it every year? Is the idea that property taxes will go down during droughts and back up during wetter weather?
The first way is that the value comes from what you can do with the land economically, what economic opportunities does that piece of land afford people?
So take plot of land zoned for a office anywhere in Pals Alto and compare it to a plot for offices, in St. Louis. The values are going to be immeasurably different, because there are economic opportunities in Palo Alto that simple don't exist in St. Louis, and being physically present in Palo Alto affords connections and value, at least according to what people are willing to pay for access to that land. This "land rent" is the same whether you're bringing in gigantic government contracts as Palantir, or if you are selling insurance in offices on University Avenue, but the prices are generally set by the greatest opportunity.
Secondly, looking at plots of land for single family homes in Palo Alto and St. Louis, the big difference in the value of the land, millions of dollars, largely comes from the mismatch in supply. Many people in Palo Alto are raking in the gigantic economic opportunities of building software companies on the network of highly specialized labor and capital that exists in Silicon Valley--and they need to live nearby. And there's not enough land to go around, so prices increase until the poorest have been kicked out and are set at the price of that least wealthy wealthy person. In St. Louis, the same number of wealthy people wouldn't have that impact becuase there's enough land to go around to them and more.
The idea of a land value tax is that it make more land available by encouraging far more productive use of that land. The person hoarding a vacant lot has zero carrying costs essentially under a typical property tax, so while land prices are rising, they have very little incentive to develop it. If they wait another five years, they might be allowed to build an even larger structure for even more profit, and in any case the land gains in value provide little incentive to sell.
And unlike commodities, where the cure to high prices is high prices, they aren't making more land. It's finite and limited. So high prices do not result in more land production. Instead, we need to set up the economic system to that as land prices rise, each bit of land itself becomes more productive: it must be put to better use.
Traditional property taxes disincentivize increasing the productivity of the land. But a land tax shifts the property speculation equation: it's never profitable to hold onto land that is less productive than it could be, on the thought that it will result in a windfall of future money. Or rather, it puts a high price on that speculation that matches the amount of value that the land speculator is taking away from society.
The conceptual problem here is that the value of being present in Palo Alto isn't part of the value of the land. It's a development on the land. There's a fashion for Georgism going around right now, but people absolutely refuse to acknowledge this point.
> And there's not enough land to go around, so prices increase until the poorest have been kicked out and are set at the price of that least wealthy wealthy person. In St. Louis, the same number of wealthy people wouldn't have that impact becuase there's enough land to go around to them and more.
And here we see an example of that mistake being made. There's no shortage of land in San Francisco. There's a shortage of floor space. We could easily have ten times the floor space on the same amount of land.
In the absence of development, the land under San Francisco would have inherent value as a port.
By contrast, the land under Los Angeles would have no inherent value of any kind.
Guess which city operates a major port?
There are a couple of ways to define land, for example, 1) ownership of land confers rights in a society, and 2) an economic factor that has finite supply.
I'm not sure if I can reconcile any definition I know, with what you say here:
> the value of being present in Palo Alto isn't part of the value of the land. It's a development on the land
These two things are inextricably intertwined. The value of the land is partially what can be developed on the land, but nearly all of it comes from what is nearby. There's a reason that the real estate motto is "location, location, location" and that's all about what having that piece of land give one access too.
> There's no shortage of land in San Francisco. There's a shortage of floor space.
You can't have a shortage of floor space without that shortage of land, because they are linked by law. And even if there was no limit on floor space in law, the value of the land is still linked to floor space because it costs both time and money to change the amount of floor space.
> In the absence of development, the land under San Francisco would have inherent value as a port.
It only has value as a port if there is development elsewhere around San Francisco that makes San Francisco a valuable location for a port. This is a fundamental Georgist point: development and access to what the amenities of the developments are what makes land valuable.
>By contrast, the land under Los Angeles would have no inherent value of any kind.
Los Angeles has lots of value as a port because of the rail lines that connect it to so much development. And the initial value may have come from the developments on top of land that made Los Angeles a good port, but now there's lots of additional value from the networks of labor and skills that have concentrated in LA.
You seem to be making extremely skeptical mention of Georgism, but at the same time, I think that you are making extremist Georgist points. In most cities, the value of the land isn't from the land itself. Rather, the value of the land is in getting access to all the development around that piece of land. And that gap, between the development on a particular piece of land, and all the development around a piece of land, is what Georgists point to as both a fundamental economic inefficiency and as a way that workers get exploited.
No. All economic factors have finite supply. Many of them are more tightly restricted than land is. Gold would be a paradigm of a "non-land" good, but it is not known for its elastic supply.
> You can't have a shortage of floor space without that shortage of land, because they are linked by law.
I don't think this says what you wanted to say. Your sentence states that, by law, there is a minimum amount of floorage buildable on any given area of land. This is most certainly not the case in California, where the state will go to great efforts to prevent even one story from being built on much of the land.
>> In the absence of development, the land under San Francisco would have inherent value as a port.
> It only has value as a port if there is development elsewhere around San Francisco that makes San Francisco a valuable location for a port.
This is incorrect. San Francisco has a lot of value as a port, regardless of whether there is a port or any other development there, because the location of ports, like the location of farms, is not arbitrary. Denver has no value as a port. This is (part of) the "land value" that Georgism proposes to tax. San Francisco is on better land.
More generally, agricultural, logistical, and military value often inhere in a particular plot of land, but "proximity" value doesn't.
> Los Angeles has lots of value as a port because of the rail lines that connect it to so much development.
Nope. It is a matter of record why the port in Los Angeles (technically, Long Beach) was built - the longshoremen's union in the (then significant, now dead) port of San Francisco objected to container shipping, so the shipping companies paid for the construction of a new port in an area with no longshoremen. That was the value of being in Los Angeles.
> This is a fundamental Georgist point: development and access to what the amenities of the developments are what makes land valuable.
Except that the Georgist proposal is to assess no taxes on developments. People say that access to developments will still be taxed, but this is logically incoherent. Access to developments is itself a development.
Consider the appropriate taxes on the Bay Area. A small plot of land in San Francisco has access to many nearby amenities, and we can assess an imputed value based on that access without needing to take account of anything that might or might not exist on the plot.
But when we analyze the Bay Area all at once, our small plot of land in San Francisco has access to nothing. (Nothing, that is, that we haven't pledged to ignore while we assess land value.) Now it's nearly worthless. So is the rest of the land in our (very large) plot. The assessed value of the Bay Area is probably outright less than the assessed value of the small plot in San Francisco.
This means that implementing a land value tax will inexorably cause intense concentration of landownership, because owning more land lowers your property taxes. Do you see that as a goal of Georgism?
> In most cities, the value of the land isn't from the land itself.
Which means that a land value tax will raise almost no revenue.
> Rather, the value of the land is in getting access to all the development around that piece of land. And that gap, between the development on a particular piece of land, and all the development around a piece of land, is what Georgists point to as both a fundamental economic inefficiency
Again, the inefficiency will be solved by large-scale ownership, so that there is nothing of significance around the plot being assessed. It will all be internal.
I would like to acknowledge my misuse of the word "finite" in the definition of economic land though, that was sloppy. It should be "fixed". And gold would usually not be considered economic land because it is continually mined and the supply continues to grow. However, factors of production, besides physical bits of the earth, are also economic land.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andre...
It's crazy the amount of NIMBYism out there. I've seen clips of straight-faced people at council meetings arguing against this because it would ruin the "character" of Atherton. For those that don't know, Atherton is a billionaire enclave in Palo Alto. It just reminded me how much I hate the Bay Area. It's full of what I like to call PINOs (borrowing from RINO; Progressives in Name Only).
Fun fact: the newly anointed YC president Garry Tan automatically blocks anyone on Twitter who follows anyone who advocates for housing reform or even likes any tweets from such [1].
I'm hopeful about this. What California really needs however is to revert Prop 13.
But yes, San Francisco is going to be a tough nut to crack, particularly with limited enforcement mechanisms in state legislation. Hopefully that too can change. Relying on private enforcement is no solution.
[1]: https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/why-did-garry-tan-the-new-ce...
While the article you cited talks about Garry blocking people on Twitter, it doesn't mention anything about housing reform.
I call them PINO NOIRs: Progressive In Name Only, NIMBY-Only In Reality.
Most livable places I’ve lived have been diverse walkable neighborhoods , which NIMBYs call a nightmare. I think a bunch of strip malls and Targets are a nightmare.
It's funny, because the former is also the most accessible kind of neighborhood for people of all ages and abilities. It doesn't matter if little Johnny or grandma can't drive, they can just walk to the grocery store to run errands or the coffee shop to get some coffee; they're fully independent.
If citizens moved into a community because it was 'spacious and quiet' then it's 100% their right to keep it that way, and utterly bizarre that outsider should think they have the right to force some kind of change.
If community ABC does not want to be NY or Hong Kong that's entirely their perogative.
And FYI there's no evidence that 'density' decreases prices. The most 'dense' places in the US are the most expensive.
Americans do not have an inherent right to live in some place. There's plenty of land in the US meaning, Americans effectively have the right to choice, and to have some affordable abode, but that exists aplenty.
Now - when places like Atherton stop secondary projects, such as the electrification of Caltrain - now that's something else entirely - the community overall needs better transport, so Atherton needs to accommodate.
The 'solution' is probably to have much better/deeper/faster integration between transport services, how in holy cow is there not a 'very fast train' that goes around the bay, out to Sac, down to Morgan Hill, and up to Santa Rosa? With great connectors?
Frankly same with LA.
All of North and South Cal should be quickly navigable. That would make it more amenable to development.
Furthermore no one is arguing that density drives down prices. You’re arguing against a straw man here. People are pointing out correctly, and in line with all housing economists, that constraining supply raises prices.
First, it's 100% the right of communities to establish - and change - zoning laws. Those can change after a property is acquired.
More importantly - this issue is not about people having zoning changed from under their noses, rather, it's about developers interested in creating different kinds of accommodation then those that have previously existed under existing rules. They knew what they were getting into when they bought the land. This is not 'zoning rug pull' kind of activity.
Second - this push is mostly about issues affordability. Cali legislation was driven by it.
"Governor Newsom Signs Legislation to Increase Affordable Housing Supply and Strengthen Accountability, Highlights Comprehensive Strategy to Tackle Housing Crisis" [1]
What you are calling a 'straw man' is literally 'the man'.
[1] https://www.gov.ca.gov/2021/09/28/governor-newsom-signs-legi...
That’s not the argument I’m making. I’m saying that communities have no right to arbitrarily block uses that comply with existing code. This is a rule of law issue. SF has admitted to violating state law which supersedes local law.
Again, my point is that YIMBYs are not making the claim that density per se drives down costs.
But yes arbitrarily restricting housing supply does create affordability issues. The NIMBYs of SF in the end if they win will find that they have created a museum of SF.
Ok, well it is also the right of the state to make laws and force these communities to change, under threat of government force.
Which is what is happening right now. There are going to be lawsuits that force communities to allow people to do what they want, with their own property.
Go win a state election if you disagree.
I'm not from the US, would you able to explain why this is a 'right'? Especially when, from my loose understanding of the situation, the state law seems to be on the side of those you call "outsiders"?
Irrespective of the legalities, you do realize zoning is an almost universal concept?
You do realize that you can't just waltz into some neighbourhood, and screw everyone over by building a giant skyscraper in the middle of their land? (Even if this law were supposedly upheld)
Probably over 90% of communities in the US, even those with more open zoning, wouldn't allow any arbitrary thing to be built.
Finally, it's debatable if the 'state law' is on their side, or even if it's constitutional.
A better question would be why you think you have a right to go into a quiet community and screw everyone over?
Your actions affect others. If the community doesn't want some thing, then go elsewhere. There's plenty of land.
In a place like Hong Kong, where land is very scarce, you run into a completely different set of social issues, with the poor being held to the economic wall otherwise. There's plenty of space in the US, even in Cali.
Edit: I forgot to mention all the cheap housing built by profit-hawks on flood plains that was destroyed or severely damaged in Harvey.
>A better question would be why you think you have a right to go into a quiet community and screw everyone over?
I didn't even come close to suggesting that I should be able to go somewhere and screw people over. It almost feels like you're replying to some other comment, given how little relevance it had to my question.
Residential in european countries allows small multifamily and small-scale business like bakeries so it would be considered mixed-use in the US/Canada.
It's disappointing that NIMBYs in the U.S. have basically forced all new construction to big single use single family housing developments on the edges of urban areas. They say they are opposed to large developers, but large developers are the only ones who can navigate the current zoning regime. As a result we car dependent housing developments with no character and no variety.
To encumber someone else from building something on their own land - is strange and greedy. You're trying to capture the value of your neighbours land without giving them anything for it.
If you want to live in a house, surrounded by other houses then you need to buy all the surrounding land so you can decide what gets built on it.
If you allowed the density to increase, single detached "quiet" houses would become cheaper and more people would be able to live in them - because the people who want higher density but can't have it are forced into buying bigger houses at higher prices.
You and I bought our land, not the right to do whatever around. You need to come around to the fact that California is going to get a lot denser when the boomers are dead.
You need to come around to the fact that 'density' is a worthless metric, that has little advantage.
It's laughable that you think 'boomers' are the one's who want to live in peace and quiet, that's 99% of people. Almost anyone, were they able to move to Atherton, would not want low cost density next to them.
FYI people are leaving Cali, build better transport and it'll solve a lot of these problems.
I believe that communities and small cities could be a more vibrant and livable place when they are slightly denser and more walkable.
My smallish city is 20 miles south of SF and it’s becoming more and more walkable and bikeable unlike sprawling San Jose or mansion-only Atherton.
*IMBYism is just a function of their arrival to the orgy. Anecdotes aside, they’re not YIMBYs, they’re mostly YIYBYs. When you talk to them, talk about building towers on Valencia or Dolores. They’ll quickly pivot to what other people need to be doing in Karland.
Given that HN sees SF as a Hellscape now, we did them a favor.
People who live in quiet communities generally don't want their areas turning into Manhatten, that's it, it's the same everywhere.
If your policy makes blown up rubble more valuable, it's a bad policy.
> And FYI there's no evidence that 'density' decreases prices. The most 'dense' places in the US are the most expensive.
What is causality.
'Productivity / Square Km' is a nonsense metric. It means nothing.
It doesn't matter what the causality of high density rent is, what matters is 'affordability' which is a stated object of the 'build out' people.
No, it's not. If you want the entire town to be frozen in time then you should purchase the entire town. Your right to control development ends at the property line.
It's also utterly hypocritical in the Bay Area's case because it contradicts the position taken by most of the local and state governments on immigration; they proudly proclaim their status as "sanctuary cities" where all immigrants are welcome, but at the same time they don't want anybody new (whether they're immigrant or not) moving into their neighborhoods.
The NIMBY attitude in Bay Area cities is ridiculous because it's Trumpism on a local scale. They want to prevent "outsiders" from living in their community because they perceive that they are somehow negatively impacted by other people being able to obtain affordable housing.
>The 'solution' is probably to have much better/deeper/faster integration between transport services, how in holy cow is there not a 'very fast train' that goes around the bay, out to Sac, down to Morgan Hill, and up to Santa Rosa? With great connectors?
because NIMBYs don't want it. They'll complain about the noise, or that it ruins "the view"/"the character"/etc, or that it might indirectly urbanize their town despite no new housing being constructed, or that it'll make it easier for homeless people to come in, etc.
That’s not true about Garry Tan though.
This is something I adore about hacker news.
Person a: “I saw a person doing something super interesting the other day”
Person b: “Hi! That was me.”
Happened to me just a week ago (I was person a)
On the subject of Garry though, there's a lot of credible evidence to the contrary (eg [1][2]).
[1]: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23blockedbygarrytan&src=hashta...
100% factually incorrect. In addition to NOT being part of the City of Palo Alto, The Town of Atherton shares no land border with Palo Alto and is not even in the same COUNTY as Palo Alto. Maybe it's a good idea to learn about other cities, towns and people before you try to dictate land use policies from afar.
> 100% factually incorrect. In addition to NOT being part of the City of Palo Alto, The Town of Atherton shares no land border with Palo Alto and is not even in the same COUNTY as Palo Alto.
So what? There are parts of New York in several different states. What's relevant about the county boundary?
(also see all the sanctuary cities that are complaining about how unfair it is that texas has started giving migrants free bus rides to their cities).
So there are several issues here. We, as tech people, when scaled up to be a significant demographic are in totality a pretty boring lot. There are an awful lot of tech people who view their stock options as a (defining) personality trait.
As for the label "liberal", it's not one I prefer because it's so often misunderstood and misused. For example, most conservatives and "liberals" can all be described as liberals in some sense. Also, "liberals" often mean "neoliberals".
"Progressive" or "leftist" tends to be cleaner teminology (IME) but there are relatively few of these in the US. It's why I say PINO (Progressive in Name Only) when referring to Bay Area "progressives" because in reality they're largely just neoliberals with a trendy veneer of social progressiveness over neoliberal values.
You might find such people self-describe as "socially liberal, fiscally conservative". This is a contradiction in terms. The slavish devotion to markets by neoliberalism is incompatible with social issues because capitalism here is a tool for exploitation and oppression.
Case in point: the very NIMBYism we're talking about. A free market purist will typically argue the free market is deciding on home values and that's most efficient when there's really no such thing as a free market. Zoning laws determine what you can build on land, the minimum lot size, etc. It's how most of the US bans anything other than single-family homes.
So NIMBYism constrains supply and increases property prices. Great for existing landowners (to some degree). Not so great for everyone else. Most notably the homelessness crisis which is a direct result of housing unaffordability and crime being a natural consequence of poverty.
> also see all the sanctuary cities that are complaining about how unfair it is that texas
Certain states (cough Texas cough) very much are in the business of "solving" their homelessness issues by simply shipping their problems to blue states and letting them pay for it. That's not really solving anything.
Atherton is a distinct town that is neither in nor even adjacent to Palo Alto. It's not even in the same county.
At least people like this legal fund are fighting back
Can I ask some naïve questions here and have them interpreted kindly, I’m not trying to point to suggest anything or push any agendas. I don’t and won’t live there just trying to understand the dynamics.
A proportion of the population will have mental health issues that are perhaps incurable and treatable to certain degrees.
Couple severe mental health issues with lack of free and competent medical treatment and access to hard drugs.
Now also make it known country wide that there is a place where you’ll be given (relatively generous) financial assistance and little to no oversight and lax police enforcement when you use drugs.
Now also build more housing and shelters and combine with amenable weather.
Isn’t SF just the most attractive place for self destructing mentally I’ll people to flood to?
Anyone in the US from any state can walk into California and receive the benefits and get handled by California police and funded by California tax dollars.
This feels like having your cake and eating it to? Shouldn’t this be a federal problem? What would happen if people from Alabama and Texas were shipped back to their states or deprived of financial assistance, or maybe assigned the assistance they get back home?
Many of my questions here are based on assumptions and “facts” that are possibly totally wrong. So be kind.
I’m just wondering, doesn’t the problem need to be handled at a “systems thinking” level?
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2021/08/i-believe-c...
Climate and Unsheltered Homeless in the Continental United States
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/10/climate-and...
I hate to categorize people in such a conveniently black and white way but there seems to be a group that desperately need social assistance: housing, health, some upskilling etc and they would rejoin society and live happy productive lives drug free.
But also a group that just needs ongoing mental health treatment. I expect the second group to be way smaller of course.
These drugs weren't invented in SF and Vancouver, and yet those cities are blighted by them.
Across the board, on a city-but-city basis, homelessness correlates with housing costs more than any other factor
I mean, not to say there aren't homeless people with problems, but there are also filthy rich people with raging drug addictions in that area...
A.) Live in most expensive city in world
or
B.) Be homeless in most expensive city in world
If housing prices have become unaffordable for many people in SF, there are other places on the planet. I moved out of SF 2 years ago, after living there for 7, partly due to outrageous cost.
Nobody is making the claim that supply and demand doesn't exist for housing, they're claiming that supply isn't limited to the highly sought after, geographically contained peninsula of the bay. They're also claiming that "housing first" is an absurd oversimplification of the problem, and disregards all manner of highly important factors.
And with the disability and other entitlements they receive, they could afford an apartment in another city—-but most don’t really care about housing as a priority. They like being able to live without rules and consequences and we’ve enabled that.
No, it does not solve all the worlds problems immediately. But it helps with some of them.
This is the equivalent of saying murders are correlated with ice cream sales.
In other words, housing isn’t the only issue with San Francisco’s poor stewardship of the public realm.
West Virginia, for instance, has a huge opioid problem. And far lower rates of homelessness, because housing is cheap.
Separately, all the antisocial people make living in subsidized housing awful. SROs are the most prolific evictors in San Francisco because their residents commonly have behavioral health issues or are outright criminals.
So what problem does giving a homeless person a house actually solve?
But not enough funding is provided to treat the problem as what it is: a national issue.
Then it creates this horrendous impasse between helping and providing medical care but also wanting to live in a clean, safe city.
Seems to me the problem is California is dealing with a National problem but without national funding.
Well, yeah.
I grew up here. The joke is, "Folks too crazy for the rest of the country come to California. The folks too crazy for California move to San Francisco." (And then we mutter under our breath, "And if you're too crazy for San Francisco you go to Berkeley.")
Go look for footage of San Francisco from about 1965 to 1980, it's a freak Mecca. Before that it was "Bohemia by the bay".
California was Alta Mexico, basically Outer Mongolia, and then moments after some USA-ians took it by force from the Spanish, who had taken it by force from the Ohlone, gold was discovered, only about a hundred and fifty years ago.
Most of those folks were pretty wild. That was like the day before yesterday. Seriously, go check it out... God Bless Emperor Norton III
Anyway, the really crazy thing was when silicon valley (that's about an hour south of SF) transformed into the Dot Com Boom and invaded the City. Y'all fucked it up pretty good (and I say that as a computer nerd) and now it's a weird 90's Cyberpunk Dystopia version of what it used to be.
To sum up, yes, SF is and always has been crazy town literally. (I don't know what it was like when it was just the Ohlone here.)
In CA, people with low/no income can get fully subsidized Obamacare plans for $1/month... even if here illegally.
Which makes sense since the goal is to reduce the number of uninsured and the undocumented are mostly taxpayers as well.
In California, yes it (Covered CA) does.
https://www.coveredca.com/learning-center/information-for-im...
Since I can see the same people day after day, see where they sleep, I'm reasonably sure they largely don't seem to have mobile devices with data plans, no regular Internet, they probably know how to read but don't seem to be spending time in libraries researching comparative crime enforcement strategies from cities around the nation. I'm not seeing a whole lot of people who seem to be picking from among everywhere in the US they might go and then figuring out a way to go there.
Instead, I see them yelling at ghosts that aren't really there. As you said, these are often people with severe mental illnesses. Maybe on the margins a few are leaving for greener pastures, but I'm not sure the resources and capacity for rational decision making are really there for a whole lot of them to be doing that, at least the truly worst-off that are going to be homeless basically no matter what if we don't provide free long-term care facilities for mentally ill that are not effectively prisons. Plus, I can see they largely aren't leaving since I see the same people here years later from when I first saw them (usually men, mind you - I'm guessing the women are more likely to just get killed at some point).
While I don't want to doubt your personal feelings of safety in one city versus another, it's worth considering that, for whatever reason, San Francisco does a worse job or just doesn't try to keep the homeless out of the places richer people might frequent, but they exist in other cities as well, including cities in Texas and Alabama. Are they dangerous? I don't know. I know one guy my wife and I used to call "Santa Claus" because of his long white beard was arrested a while back for stabbing a guy to death, and is probably in prison now since we haven't seen him in five years, but the guy he stabbed was another homeless person. I've never heard of one of them attacking a "citizen." The few times I've had contentious interactions, usually due to my past spine problems that led to some serious pain and anger issues on my part, I'm pretty sure I scared them more than they scared me. After all, I'm well-fed, sleep in a bed, and have access to a gym. I should be and probably am a lot stronger than they are.
All that said, while I'm not convinced that the very worst of the more or less permanent homeless due to mental health are really migratory enough to be considered a national problem, that doesn't mean federal funding of solutions wouldn't help. Realistically, while I think cities should be the ones doing something about this, they either don't or their solution is to round up the homeless on buses and send them to other cities. That practice should definitely be banned and that would have to happen at a level of government higher than cities.
> Flaunt vs. Flout: Usage Guide
> Although the "treat contemptuously" sense of flaunt undoubtedly arose from confusion with flout, the contexts in which it appears cannot be called substandard.
A much better writeup with a listing of many dictionaries and grammar guides that take the correct approach is here:
https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2017/06/flaunt-flout.html
That means YOU, The City and Public Officials of San Francisco. Wake up.
Your city is messed up and smelly, and it's time to take out the trash and clean the dirt from the streets (literally).
New housing is going to built, as that is what the law says. If you don't like it, then go try and change california law.
Why should part of California secede? We are still a democracy. That’s why we should vote on this. Otherwise it’s taxation without representation and that should be illegal. It’s about time we put an end to this conversion attempt to communist regime in CA.
That was absolutely hilarious. I really love finding me a "communism is when capitalism" out in the wild.
This is a game of political musical chairs where they are simply creating chaos by shuffling responsibility from county to county and city to city.
If housing activist really want to create change, let them support NIMBYs request for local governance. So cities that support these mandates will get it done and NIMBYs will be powerless against majority vote.
This whole YIMBY movement is a small sliver of the population and the vocal supporters are poseurs. They only donate and support this because they want to keep moving populations to other zipcodes than their own…covert crypto NIMBYs.
California has more NIMBYs and crypto NIMBYs than YIMBYs. YIMBYs are a minority that is being played by the politicians. The rest of us suffer. If Sacramento really cared, with the billions they bilk from us in the form of taxes, everyone would have had a home. Maybe not in San Francisco or Bay Area while on welfare but everyone would have had a roof over their heads. Wake up.
Can we please be honest and at least when YIMBYs stop throwing a tantrum and realize that they are only tolerated and coddled because they are a useful vote bank, we can get some work done. None wants anyone in their backyards. Not if they paid for their homes and their taxes and mortgages.
Go become a politician if you don't like it. The laws are passed, and the fines are legal. And these cities are going to be sued until they allow more housing.
> by shuffling responsibility from county to county and city to city.
Oh, but the shuffling will stop, due the the lawsuits. Either they allow the housing, or they will get sued.
> If housing activist really want to create change
Actually, it seems like the lawsuits will work just fine.
> let them support NIMBYs request for local governance
Why do that, when we can force cities to do certain things, with a lawsuit?
> So cities that support these mandates will get it done
Ok, but what if we want to force the cities, that oppose the mandates, to build more housing? That is the whole point of a mandate. To force a city, under threat of a lawsuit, to do something.
> This whole YIMBY movement is a small sliver of the population
Hey, it is a sliver that apparently is effectively getting laws passed!
You'd think one of these advocacy groups could hire some planning consultants/researchers and submit an example zoning map, preferably something more sophisticated than "just make everything fourplexes!", preferably. It's easy to argue ad nauseam about vague concepts like "more housing" but having a real plan to talk about would force everyone, be they in support or opposition, to deal with the realities.
> The group is also involved in two suits against San Francisco related to two of the most high-profile housing denials over the last few years—the planned projects at 450 O’Farrell St.and 469 Stevenson St.
That's not proactive, it's reactive. It's not even close to what I'm talking about. I said propose a policy, this is piecemeal.
The poster below you linked this page:
http://cayimby.org/2021-legislation/
These are state laws, mostly cutting red tape (which is good). The two proposals which go further than duplexes in zoning reform are SB10, which provides for up to ten units near transit, and AB1075, which provides for up to ten units almost everywhere, provided the building is less than 26 feet tall, complies with setbacks and has not been rented in the last three years, and also provided (a lot of legalese).
This is okay, insofar as it's about as good as you can do at state level. But it's not what I meant either, because I was talking about local politics. It's going to be hard to get things done while acting only at state level and tying your hands behind your back with the height and rental provisions.
You can't say "we're preserving local control", not engage in local politics, and succeed. Most of the cities where housing is expensive have present zoning ceilings well above 26 feet — most of SF is already built to three stories.
Check out the legislation page: http://cayimby.org/2021-legislation/
They treat neighborhoods and cities like museums that must be crammed as full of new residents as humanely possible, without doing a single thing to make any more square footage of "nice city". They only build more people warehouses everywhere and call it a day. Then they complain about the traffic and criticize existing residents for complaining about the increased crime rate.
I hate the ugly, boxy, copy-paste apartment buildings looming up all over my hometown, but what am I to do? The future belongs to the tasteless perma-renter.
The system is so bad it’s beyond tragic to the point of farce. There are better alternatives (search for the CNU Charter Awards for examples), but very few have been able to break through the regulatory slog.
Every city has done this to itself.
If the building rules need to be changed for sensible city development and design, then that should be the battleground that YIMBYs are focused on, rather than raucously cheering on every new development owned by an out-of-state investment group (whose board of directors--surprise!--universally live in actually nice areas) and then acting confused when the price of housing doesn't go down across the decade.
The 4-plexes are actually the fault of NIMBYs because they refuse to allow taller apartments and so this is a compromise.