Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

For those not following the California housing crisis and the government's response to it, I would urge you to do so. This is an issue of national significance and Newson is actually trying to do a lot. The article mentions the Berkely case but let me highlight it [1]:

> That’s essentially what Alameda County Superior Court Judge Brad Seligman ruled this week when he froze enrollment increases at UC Berkeley in response to a lawsuit by a local NIMBY group called Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods. The judge found that the university failed to account for the impact of increased enrollment — including late-night parties and crowded parks — in its plans to add more student and faculty housing, in violation of the California Environmental Quality Act, known as CEQA.

Well-intentioned laws (ie environmental impact) are effectively being weaponized for the benefit of rich people.

There have been some victories in Newson's push. A notable example is Santa Monica. The city is quite famous for fighting development to going back decades. Now the state mandates cities have to have a "Housing Element", which is a plan for increasing affordable housing. Santa Monica fought this but got out of compliance. This allowed developed to bypass the city and get thousands of units approved. The city is now in compliance but is lookking at legal options for fighting the approvals.

Santa Monica, like many wealthy cities, also fought against the Westside rail extension into the city [2]. Why? "Crime" of course. What this really means is "undesirables", which itself means "poor people".

You really see the awful cruelty of some people in all this. Rampant NIMBYism and the impact it has on housing supply and affordability is a key contributor to homelessness, poverty and property crime. Oh well, I guess we'll ship everyone off to Martha's Vineyard. Problem solved.

[1]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Edito...

[2]: https://la.curbed.com/2013/7/16/10219386/westside-nimbys-han...

A lot of California's NIMBYism is rooted in Proposition 13, passed in 1978. Many homeowners cannot sell their current home and buy one elsewhere in the state without significantly increasing their annual property tax burden. (Prop 19 in 2020 carved out an exception for homeowners over 55.) When a house is a family's single largest investment, and Prop 13 makes that asset even more illiquid than in other states, stiff opposition to any nearby development should surprise nobody.

Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic but I actually believe the tide is turning on Prop 13 and it may well get repealed in the next decade. I'd probably still bet it won't be repealed but I feel like there's a real chance.

"Throwing seniors out of their homes" was effectively used to give incumbent homeowners a massive tax break. Worse, it gave Disney a massive decades-long tax break. What people often don't talk about with respect to Prop 13 is how it benefitted corporations.

Corporations end up owning property in LLCs and they simply buy and sell the LLCs. This doesn't technically count as a transfer (which would trigger a revaluation for tax purposes) so Disney in Anaheim is paying a tax rate for their theme park that was capped (with 1-2% max annual increases) in the 1960s.

The other horrible part is you can inherit a decades-old preferential tax rate. I mean, you wouldn't want to kick people out of their parents' home would you?

California needs to be more like Texas in this regard. Reassess for property tax frequently. Allow property tax deferral for seniors who don't want to move. And there's no beneficial tax rate to inherit.

> Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic but I actually believe the tide is turning on Prop 13 and it may well get repealed in the next decade. I'd probably still bet it won't be repealed but I feel like there's a real chance.

Why do you think there's a chance?

Almost 80% of home-owners vote - and the CA home-ownership rate is above 55%. Usually less than 50% of renters vote.

Prop 13 is currently popular with both liberal politicians (think about the poor old ladies who'd have to move!) - and conservatives (we actually like regressive taxes).

I can't even see a path to start being hopeful in the next 10 years.

> California needs to be more like Texas in this regard.

California and Texas both need to drop sales/income/property taxes entirely and replace them with land value taxes.

I'm less optimistic than ever. Voters recently rejected the split roll property tax ballot initiative, which would have affected Disney but not their home property tax.

If most people in California are renters, then Prop 13 doesn't apply to them anyway. So maybe in 10 years we will see Prop 13 being repealed.

We had a Prop 13 challenge in 2020 called Prop 15. The idea was to "split" the way Prop 13 works so that homeowners would still have Prop 13, but commercial properties would not (after a phase in of 5 years or something). It was rejected 52-48 in a historical voter turnout election.

I was surprised it failed, but it cemented the idea for me that Prop 13 is untouchable.

That was an extremely evil proposition, and would have put me and many other small businesses out of business. You see, big companies like Apple get to negotiate with their local governments for commercial property tax rates, but small businesses are paying full list price. Adobe, for example, is paying almost no property tax for its first San Jose tower, but the businesses like the electrical contractor, the body shop, and the metal shop on my block pay list price. If prop 15 passed, the increased cost would have put them all under.

(See https://www.sanjoseinside.com/news/labor-business-spar-over-... for information about tax breaks for giant developers)

The people who supported prop 15 are evil and racist (it would have put many minority businesses out of business). The only businesses left would be giant corporations who could make deals. (See https://calmatters.org/commentary/my-turn/2020/10/prop-15-wo... ).

Prop 15 would have made all business pay the same rate. If you think there should be a lower rate for minority owned or small businesses, that's fine, but a subsidy based on the age of your business is not good policy.

No. Big businesses that build their corporate HQ get to negotiate with the county for property tax rates. Small business that buy small buildings don't.

You have every right to want to see small businesses replaced by corporate megaliths, but don't pretend you're doing that out of "fairness." That's evil.

Don’t big businesses try to do this everywhere in the US? What does that have to do with prop 13?

That’s why “Prop 15” which would have overturned prop 13 protection for business but not homeowners was so obscene: it would only adversely affect small Mom & Pop businesses. Big mega corporations could negotiate.

Big corporations already negotiate subsidies, even with Prop 13. This just makes one less thing that they pay less on by default. You were hoodwinked.

NIMBYs are just people on the business end of falling real estate values, and they can't sell or rent your place for what they paid. For many people, their property is their largest investment and they'll defend this to the extreme.

To dismiss this political reality is to "bring a knife to a gunfight."

Motivations vary, but in my experience the most active individual NIMBYs care more about quality of life issues than real estate values. Most of them have lived in the same home for years and have no plans to sell. But they don't want the noise, traffic, parking shortages, and loss of privacy that come with developing higher density housing in their neighborhoods. That is not irrational. If politicians and housing developers want people like that to stop objecting then they need a better strategy than just labeling NIMBYs as greedy obstructionists.

This might be the case in wealthier neighborhoods among younger families. I grew up in a very poor part of the Bay (starts with "East") and the motivation for people to thwart change was generally around property values. Many of the families that could afford to own where I grew up (many couldn't and rented, as it was a rough area) both leveraged their house for lifestyle reasons and often either relied on it as a retirement nest egg or handed it to their children as a way to transmit generational wealth. Many Bay Area seniors would be bankrupt in retirement without their house.

ALL of the political spam I've been getting has prominently talked about "protecting home values"

Perhaps these NIMBYs should instead come up with their own plans for increasing housing density then, ones that address their concerns. I don't see them doing that though.

It's right there in the name. Build more high density housing, just not near us.

Which is not entirely helpful when the base premise is the higher density housing is needed near them.

Telling other people what they "should" do is seldom very productive.

You're right, which is is why more and more they're not being told what they should do, but what they must do whether they like it or not.

Perhaps "the YIMBYs should instead come up with a way to guarantee rising property values, then talk about development, social agendas, etc."

Again, to property owners this is their biggest asset and they're not playing around.

> Perhaps "the YIMBYs should instead come up with a way to guarantee rising property values, then talk about development, social agendas, etc.

Making large and single family homes more scarce will increase the market value of existing large single family homes.

Allowing more dense development increases land value.

YIMBY policies increase both the improvement and land value of existing real estate with single family homes.

Yyy! I agree with these policies, and put my money where my mouth is, but I'm in NYC... In the suburbs you have issues of traffic, parking, services, infrastructure, etc.

"All politics is local" begins and ends with property values. Everything else is fluff. Crime rate, racism/multiculturalism, etc. The root of it all is property values.

There is zero evidence that build densely decreases property value. Structure is by itself a depreciating asset. Land value will increase when the neighborhood densifies.

Prop 13 is not a national problem. In most parts of the country, municipal governments are incentivized to support residential housing.

NIMBYism is a national problem. It just takes different forms in different places.

For example, in most of the US, it is illegal to build anything other than single-family homes ("SFHs"). This is NIMBYism and intentionally exclusionary. If you have minimum lot sizes and can only build an SFH on it, you're creating an economic barrier to people living there, usually under the guise of preserving the "character" of that commu8nity.

Likewise, most places are completely car-dependent. This too is intentionally exclusionary.

Even in built up areas like Manhattan, a lot of units are bineg built but they're heavily weighted towards the ultra-luxury segment (>$3,000/sq ft). There were tax incentives to build this ultra-luxury property (ie J-51).

Pretty much every facet of US housing is designed to limit supply and be exclusionary at the policy level.

> Likewise, most places are completely car-dependent. This too is intentionally exclusionary.

Which also results in unsustainable neighbourhoods. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0

Santa Monica is not the source of the state's housing crisis, and in a democracy where power should rest at the local level, the people of cities like Santa Monica should be free to determine their future in terms of railroads and housing density.

There's an element of tyranny and expropriation in the YIMBY movement.

The YIMBY's are asking the individual property owners be allowed to decide what to do with their own properties. Not letting government dictate what people do doesn't seem like "tyranny" or "expropriation" to me.

Actually every city in California is mandated to present a realistic plan to satisfy their Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) every 10 years if they wish to keep access to state infrastructure funding in addition to local control of city zoning. That is a law from 1970 reaffirmed and strengthened in 1990 and 2019.

Santa Monica has refused to do so for the past 10 years. This year they just had their entire zoning code essentially overturned by the state (again, per that law) until they were back in compliance. In the 3 months they were deemed noncompliant before they got their act together, applications for 4000 units were filed and now must be approved ministerially, which goes a long away to satisfying their 8000 unit shortage as determined by RHNA!

Beverly Hills and Pasadena just had their housing elements (zoning) thrown out for the same reason. San Francisco, Berkeley, and Palo Alto will be next unless they get their act together. No city itself is the source of the state's housing crisis. But Santa Monica is one part of it.

The only tyranny in California housing politics is the assumption that people who own houses in a town are the only ones who should get to determine the future of that town.

A democracy that defines itself so narrowly as to exclude most people isn't a democracy, it's an oligarchy.

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