Bay Area tech boom not cause of region's problems
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
I don't see why the ability to live in San Francisco is any different than the ability to afford a BMW or a Tesla. Should the government subsidize "below market rate" luxury cars too? What would be the incentive to get an education or work hard? Personally I feel somewhat offended when there are dozens of below market rate units available and I'm actually excluded from attempting to buy them because I earn too much money. Meanwhile there are hardly any homes available for people who can afford the houses without subsidies and we bid up the houses to obscene prices due to lack of supply.
Also, if the people who work in SF or other high income areas cannot afford to live there at current wages, there should be pressure on them to leave and work elsewhere. This would increase demand for their labor and drive prices up, all else being equal. (I know, there are other factors here, but those should be dealt with separately, not by adding more layers of complexity to the problem.)
Further, if those workers cannot afford to rent or buy, lowering the cost of renting or buying also reduces the pressure on employers to raise their wages.
People have families and lives built around geographic locations, not cars. I'm not saying we should or shouldn't subsidize housing (I lean libertarian personally), but it's disingenuous to suggest this is like the car market. What's at stake for many people is a foundational part of their lives.
I actually think the car analogy is useful. Not subsidizing housing in San Francisco does not deny people the ability to start families. They can still start them in many other fine places that they can afford. Not driving a BMW or Tesla doesn't deny people the ability to get to work. A Honda or Toyota does that just as well.
NOTE: "Affordable housing" does not apply exclusively to people who have lived in the area for N years previously as far as I know, and even if it did I don't see why that would be fair. If you rent, you rent. When your lease is up, if the price goes up, that's how rent works. Also, there are already rent control policies that would serve this purpose.
Fuck those people - they don't deserve community nor the benefits of it they worked for, because they can't afford the prices you are willing to pay to kick them out (despite most of them being decent citizens with jobs and everything).
It's kinda messed up. Not saying I have a solution, just pointing out a real problem.
Honestly, you are saying that the only consideration people should have for one another is net worth and that interpersonal relationships are of no value, yet you are angry that your lack of those same things could be used to keep you from spending your money (suggesting value). This is a pretty strange.
I do think that perhaps some consideration besides "number of dollars" should be taken in situations like this, because I don't really think a group of people should be able to so fundamentally fuck over another group because they can afford to. But those are my ethics - I value respecting people on more than money.
Public infrastructure is a public good, and service industry workers can't be expected to cab it to oakland when their shifts end. Heck, the bikelane on the new bay bridge segment ends before treasure island. I could NEVER have lived in brooklyn if the non-auto infrastructure was the way it is between sf and oakland.
That... sounds pretty great. As a bonus, it would make public transit usable for recreational use, and probably keep a bunch of drunks off the road.
Frequency might be another answer - run the trains closer together, but again there are limits there too.
Not sure how well it'd work given commuter congestion, but it warrants some consideration.
I seem to remember that BART has an outdated and overwhelmed computer system which requires greater spacing between trains (and sometimes fails all the way down to manual control). At least new cars will have three doors instead of two, which should get a train out of a station faster.
I don't know anything about city planning or the history of it, but places like New York must have gone through similar transitions. What worked, what didn't? I feel like there has to be a lot of history to learn from on the topic.
Things that do work: letting rich people move in, letting developers build what they want, and using that massive tax base to build high-quality public transit.
Secondly, historical preservation makes a city what it is. Would Paris be the same without the Eiffel Tower? Good historical preservation enhances and defines the city.
The biggest controversy seems to be over where private buses that don't have their own private loading/unloading infrastructure can stop and load/unload. Some cities tolerate unofficial use of public bus stops, or look the other way when buses load/unload in a blatantly illegal way (by just stopping in a lane of traffic and blocking it, as "Chinatown buses" typically do). Other cities are less tolerant of that. But when private buses actually pay for their own private loading/unloading facilities on land they either own or properly rent, like Greyhound does, then there's no problem.
Cities don't allow private busses to obtain curb rights in the first place.
Greyhound is intercity, not intracity. Useless for this purpose.
The only controversy stems from taxis & muni busses protecting their turf.
You may know them as Jitneys: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_taxi
> Unlike some public transit systems with multiple sets of tracks on the same routes, BART doesn't have the duplication that would allow us to run trains on one set while performing maintenance on another. Third-rail power has to be shut down for maintenance crews to be able to operate safely and do the work that keeps the system safe and reliable. And the trains can’t run when the power is down.
The Copenhagen metro is a 24/7 system, without extra tracks, that uses this method. On maintenance nights a usual pattern is a brief complete-service shutdown 1:00-1:30am to switch from regular operation to single-tracking. One track is taken out of service and powered down, and service at ~20-minute headways resumes on the remaining track. The Atlanta subway also uses this method for longer weekend maintenance sometimes, going to single-track mode all weekend (they don't do 24/7 operation, though, I would guess due to budget issues).
It's possible BART can't do maintenance with single-track operation due to how it's set up, but their message implies it's physically impossible without having spare tracks, which is not true in other systems.
I have a restaurant in East Bay and I have employees on the same side of the bay that will walk 15 more minutes to save 35 cents on BART fares. I pay them more than minimum wage plus overtime and meals, and I offer to pay the 70 cent difference every day since I don't want any of them walking alone too late at night. They just pocket the 70 cents and keep on walking. Compared to my day job and my fiancé's day job and how we'll uber instead of walking 15 minutes...
It's not just improving BART service, it's also about improving public transit in general I think - including to the point that fares drop. My cousin from Seoul completely flipped out on me shortly after coming to the US. He realized that he was spending ~$10 and a couple of hours every day to get to his school in downtown SF from Alameda. Incredibly rude awakening if you're used to one of the busiest and best subway systems in the world, I guess.
The issue is not "I want to move to San Francisco", the issue is "I've lived in this neighborhood my entire life, and now I can't afford to any longer." Let's not even get into how expensive it is to actually move, all of the complication and complexity involved in moving a family with children to a different school district, all of the paperwork that needs updated... it's nontrivial.
You shouldn't be surprised when people who are currently being colonized against their will and having their entire lives thrown into upheaval without any upside are a little bit upset about it.
(I live in the Mission.)
Let's say they can't buy. I am not indifferent to their problem, but I don't see why having lived in a place for a given length of time should mean that person has a right to live permanently in a place they can no longer afford. And I don't see why it should deny someone who can afford to live there the ability to do so.
Choices like these aren't even open to people who are affected by gentrification.
> And I don't see why it should deny someone who can afford to live there the ability to do so.
I, personally, don't feel that those with money should be able to run roughshod over those who don't.
What other method of allocating scarce resources did you have in mind? Random selection seems less fair than high income, because income is at least somewhat correlated with producing value. I mean, if you disagree with this, you basically disagree with the free market. I agree our current market is imperfect but I don't think randomly gifting scarce housing space to people is better.
I do disagree with the notion that a free market (not that such a thing has ever or will ever exist) always leads to socially optimal outcomes, yes.
> I don't think randomly gifting scarce housing space to people is better.
Nobody is suggesting random gifting.
It's not clear to me that this would actually bring down prices, and existing empirical evidence of how development increases in urban cores affects prices is pretty mixed. If all else were held equal, adding supply would bring down prices. However all else tends not to be equal, and development sprees seem to often generate their own upward-spiraling demand, which sometimes actually increases prices above what they previously were, by attracting more demand than the newly added supply satisfies. Some of the concern over gentrification (though often poorly investigated) is about what those mechanisms are. One pattern is upgrading of housing stock, e.g. replacement of 100 mid-range old housing units with 200 high-end new housing units, which often has the effect of increasing all three quantities: price, supply, and demand. That can then lead to some circular migration, as wealthier people move in to the city and poorer people move to formerly-well-off suburbs which as the houses age and deteriorate, become poorer (common in "inner-ring" suburbs of American cities).
That can be good for other reasons, if you see more dense housing as a good in itself. Even if SF ends up more expensive than before, you might prefer an SF with 1 million people over one with 825k. However other people disagree that this shuffling around of rich/poor people is a net improvement. That's something of a subjective debate. However on the more objective question of whether redeveloping SF will solve the specific problem of housing costs, I'm skeptical: I suspect redevelopment of SF will not have much impact on its affordability.
I've always been a fan of allocation based on who had bigger muscles and was better with a club or other blunt weapon. To each his own.
I just bought a house in Berkeley (used to rent in Glen Park). I'm curious what you think about rent control laws. I know a lot of landlords are abusing Ellis Act evictions but outside of those, rent control laws do a fair job at protecting the types of renters you mention.
The city budget is flush with revenue driven from the tech boom. I am not against them using a portion of this to help with housing issues. But it seems mostly to be a lack of ideas that's stopping that from happening.
Some rationales for subsidizing affordable homes specifically: fewer slums, greater social mobility for low income families (expensive areas also tend to have good schools), more stability for the elderly (who make up an astonishingly large proportion of low income folks as they can often no longer work).
A society where the raw effects of market forces were allowed to act on people would be really unpleasant (I grew up in one and have been to several) - free markets are a fantastic way to generate wealth but a poor way to ensure balanced social outcomes.
This is an argument for subsidizing housing out in Santa Clara county. None of the public schools in San Francisco are particularly great.
I don't see why a poorly run bank which has made bad investments in toxic assets should be bailed out with taxpayer's money when it should be allowed to fail, with good banks picking up clients and assets and growth in market share...
My point is there are few markets which are truly allowed to operate freely. If housing markets were not regulated, the uber rich would buy up every piece of real estate and then we'd all be stuffed.
> we bid up the houses to obscene prices due to lack of supply.
People can only bid what they can afford, and what they can afford is driven by loose lending and cheap credit. Tighten bank lending and housing prices will start falling.
So, what would that look like.. Some thoughts..
Good luck staffing jobs at the current SF minimum wage. You want baristas and servers and bar backs? And you want them to commute into the city? You'll get some (as you do now) but enough to run all of the cities establishments? We're talking a massive number of jobs. Sure, people will do it, for the right wage. So you're seeing wage inflation that will hurt small business owners a great deal.
Ethnic diversity would take a big hit. You'd see asian american and caucausions pushing out other groups that are on balance less affluent.
You can easily see NIMBY taken to an even further extreme that it currently is.
Commercial rents would presumably follow residential rents, further reducing low-margin businesses (like restaurants) in favor of high end retail and similar. (See: the Grove in Marina closing for this very reason).
I could go on, and certainly I am not listing the positive consequences of such a transformation. But I see strength through diversification and so I can't shake the feeling that this would be a weaker, less desirable San Francisco.
And if that were the case, if it truly did make it a less desirable place, well, now you have the positive feedback loop moving in the opposite direction, leading people OUT of the city until an equilibrium is found.
The problem is that people who can't afford to live where they currently live also can't afford to move.
(1) It's a "squeaky wheel gets the grease" policy (2) They are just sticking fingers in the cracks in a dam that is leaking everywhere to plug a few holes.
The biggest problem with mollifying a large segment of the population with a lottery system is that it legitimizes a solution that never really solves the problem.
BMR housing is typically accessible to people with 70-110% of the area's median income. For every unit, there are 100+ applicants, and those are just the ones that are aware of the program's existence. The program is also riddled with fraud, with many applicants misrepresenting their income to be eligible or adding family members to the application even when that family member isn't going to live with them in the unit.
The worst effect though is that it removes many people from becoming advocates for re-zoning and building of new units. Each of those 100 people per unit now directs their time and attention towards a lottery system instead of demanding real changes from their representatives in local government. Removing those people leaves the very rich and very poor. The poor know they don't have a chance and are living hand to mouth so they won't participate at all. The rich are either well off enough to be insulated from the issue so they complain but never do anything, or the rich are the property owners extracting rent. Ultimately the only people really participating in numbers are the landlords.
"The hard truth is that the Bay Area's housing and transit systems are bursting at the seams. According to the San Francisco Apartment Association, last year the city added 68,000 new jobs and just 120 new housing units. Silicon Valley's rental vacancy rates are even lower than the city's."
That's math that just undeniable.
"research from the Bay Area Council Economic Institute showed that each of these tech jobs had an astounding effect of creating an additional 4.3 jobs in the local economy."
http://www.bayareaeconomy.org/media/files/pdf/TechReport.pdf
Second, while I'm the first to acknowledge that SF needs to build up, it's clearly absurd to say that the tech boom is "not the cause" of the city's housing problems -- that's like saying that skiing isn't the cause of Aspen's housing prices. Nonsense. It's plain that tech is the proximal cause, even if you believe that the boom has brought both positive and negative consequences to the city (as I do).
Fair debate on this topic has to begin with the acknowledgement that the tech companies' policies are indirectly driving a displacement of non-tech workers from the city. It's dishonest to claim otherwise.
[1] http://www.bayareacouncil.org/about-us/member-companies/
It's half of the proximal cause. Housing prices have increased because of the interaction of supply and demand. Blaming the tech boom focuses only on the demand side, but the supply constraints (height limits, zoning density limits, etc.) are just as important.
Are you kidding? Remember the big white buses that everyone is mad about? They play a role here.
The valley tech companies have mitigated the natural barrier that would ordinarily limit the number of tech employees living in the city -- the pain of commuting. So rather than staying close to work and building communities where they live, they use the city as a glorified suburb, but with cushy private transportation. There are a variety of things wrong with this, not the least of which is the fact that they reduce housing supply for the natives.
Econ 101 theories about supply and demand don't apply when large external forces are subsidizing the demand side of the equation. One can quite reasonably argue that instead of "building up" (which is expensive and disruptive) SF should just ban the private buses -- it would be cheaper, more natural, and would solve the same problem.
A huge number of people employed on the peninsula would absolutely live close to work and build communities there, if those peninsula cities weren't so hell-bent on preventing dense development. There just isn't the supply there.
And what the f do you mean by "natives", anyway? Native Americans? Everyone else is an immigrant. If you moved here a year before I did, do you have some more legitimate claim to live here? I don't think so.
Of course supply and demand applies to the situation. Your suggestion of banning private buses, while ridiculous, is specifically an attempt to influence demand. Your own suggested solution assumes that the "Econ 101" theory applies.
"The title of this piece expresses a false choice. It's not
meaningful to consider the development of industry separately
from the development of housing for the workers in industry. We
chose in the early 1950s to develop industry in the Bay Area
without regard for where the workers in the new workplaces
would live. Long before the current wave of tech immigrants
reached San Francisco there were people commuting to the Bay
Area from Manteca and Mountain Home and Santa Rosa and Santa
Cruz. Silicon Valley activists raised alarms in the early 1970s
that four new jobs were being created for each new housing unit
that was built. It shows an astonishing nearsightedness that
the people and the governments of Bay Area cities are only now
realizing that this is problematic."
That doesn't seem accurate. Over a third of San Francisco's population leaves town on tech buses?
I presume this means 327,000 car trips per year.