Critics Blame Airbnb for San Francisco's Housing Problems
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What's missing is any kind of regional government capable of coming up with a housing and transit plan and finding the money to fund it. The result is no new homes in an area that is seeing a huge influx of workers, most of them in tech. Since those workers earn a lot of money, they price out other people.
We know how to build out our cities, but for some reason that is politically impossible in the Bay Area. It's a pretty despicable abrogation of responsibility.
Sausalito doesn't have the infrastructure for high density living, there certainly isn't room for, say, 5x as many people to commute into SF.
A lot more people need to start both living and working in the east bay, it's not tenable for most of the lucrative work to be isolated in downtown SF, leaving vast swaths of the bay area largely vacant during the day, with basically noone able to live near their work in the city.
Those other communities have worries about gentrification and displacement as well, but the bay area as a whole would be better off if growth were spread more evenly.
This is why I oppose the luxury shuttles. If you want to work in Palo Alto, Sausalito, or Mountain View, I think you should live there.
Also, not all of those shuttles are for Apple or Google, and many of them are not going anywhere near SF. They're going to areas of the South Bay where there are no practical public transport options.
Even people that live in or near Mountain View take those shuttles (instead of driving) to places where they work in the South Bay.
Same goes for Santa Clara caltrain and the Fremont BART station. Shuttles go from there to other places too.
Personally, I think the shuttles would have been far less necessary or popular if the California Bay Area had a fast, efficient transport system that actually covered it.
It's no wonder most people want to live in San Francisco, Palo Alto or Mountain View -- those locations all have some of the best public transport options and connections to other forms of transport as well. There are obviously other desirable aspects to those cities as well.
As for your argument that people should live where they work -- there's not enough housing for that. Mountain View alone certainly doesn't have enough space for everyone that works at Google. Likewise, San Francisco doesn't have enough space for everyone that works there.
Oh, sorry, let me correct that, Mountain View has plenty of housing -- if you're willing to pay ~$2700 a month for a two-bedroom apartment built in the 70s, $1.5 million+ for a new house (attached) or $2 million+ for a new, detached house.
So before you grouse about so-called Luxury shuttles, stop and think about what the real problem is.
My 1br in MV is $2700, and it's not even high end.
Companies like Apple opened shop there precisely because at the time it was much cheaper than San Francisco. Cupertino in 1975 was something like Concord or Vallejo today.
As for the shuttles, they are a sign of the profoundly broken nature of the local public transportation infrastructure rather than anything else. If there were a properly functioning integrated regional transport infrastructure, as in, say, Berlin, they would not be necessary at all.
That would require those cities allowing enough housing development to support the growth.
A lot of people don't want to live where their employers are based, and for a variety of reasons. If these folks want to waste two hours of their life each day sitting in traffic, or be shuttled around by their employers like elementary school students so that they can live in a location more desirable to them and their families, who are you to suggest that they shouldn't be able to?
The problem is that the residents of Palo Alto and Mountain View don't want more people to live there.
You can't talk about this stuff without going all the way back to the beginning with the "worm at core" of this issue. California's prop 13 gives homeowners a significant financial incentive to do everything in their power to discourage new housing development in high demand areas like SF and Silicon Valley (all while gutting California's public school system).
So Mountain View/Palo Alto residents and the elected officials that represent them all vote against any significant increase in housing all while approving a ton of new office space which raises the value of their houses by millions. Thanks to prop 13, their property taxes are capped, so that increase comes with zero down side.
Repeal prop 13 and the current housing crisis will go away.
You are assuming people want to work there and that they have a large latitude of choice.
Yes, it's not entirely the same because if you are educated, you do have some mobility and discretion at where you work, but there's much more available affordable housing in SF (all of SF, not just the popular places) then there is between Sunnyvale and SF combined. Just do a search of housing under $2k a month on Craigslist if you don't believe me. Available units for rent doesn't start picking up until you hit Santa Clara or Campbell.
This is why I oppose people who oppose luxury shuttles: Because they should be putting their effort into increasing available housing for everyone in the bay area.
They worked closely with the USG against Occupy Wallstreet (where they were actively working with officials on how to handle the leaders of OWS) they have also been very actively building out a surveillance HQ with pretty advanced monitoring.
I can only assume that they are also a customer of the Stingray cell tower MIMs.
The Domain Awareness Center was originally supposed to be city-wide, but has been cut back to focus only on the port.
Sure, once Silicon Valley fills SF, it can go North and fill-in Marin instead of biting the bullet and building some damn high rises itself. Also, some National Parks need to be developed to feed that Valley-generated housing demand that the Vally itself has no intention of satisfying itself.
The most insane part is that the drive between SF and Palo Alto/MountainView on the MAIN highway (101) is surrounded by miles of uninhabited land. Especially just north of Redwood city.
I have no idea why this is the case. Are they keeping prices astronomically high to preserve marsh fauna?
However, to get that, regional government needs all the other stuff - a housing plan that illustrates why you need to allow people to build near the jobs and so-forth. Given the present environment, they'd probably need a good deal of money for lawyers even once you have a state or regional legal structure giving them authority to override local regulations.
New (expensive) housing is popping up all over Mountain View right now...
It's certainly not a high-rise, but neither the permanent residents of Mountain View nor the city want high-rise buildings.
Quite frankly, I don't think there's sufficient traffic infrastructure in most of Mountain View (certainly in the heart of it) for a high-density apartment building...
The problem is that they do want high density offices, but not high density residences. That just shifts the problem of housing all the workers elsewhere.
There needs to be a regional agency to take charge of zoning. Without that, we just get every city trying to shift the housing elsewhere.
Now don't get me wrong, these are very nice "duplex-style" homes (there's generally 3-5 houses attached together). But these same homes would sell for a fraction of the cost (practically) almost anywhere else in the United States (excluding parts of the eastern US coast).
I live in the Bay Area, but I'm from the midwest originally; four+ years later, I still can't get over the ridiculous cost of housing here.
Perhaps what should really be done is to merge the entire San Francisco Bay Area into a single political unit (the City of San Francisco).
Who do you think is charging those insane rents for a hole in the wall? The people who already live there. Nobody's forcing them to do that.
You also presume that high density housing is inherently bad. Many people disagree with you. Manhattan and Hong Kong have the highest real estate prices on the planet because many, many people want to live there.
The problem is that Silicon Valley cities want high density offices but not high density houses. They reap the tax benefits of having big business in their city, but foist the problem of housing all of their workers off onto other nearby cities.
>Manhattan and Hong Kong have the highest real estate prices on the planet because many, many people want to live there.
And because people use overpriced real estate to launder money.
Unfortunately, the current regulatory climate in SF is 180 degrees opposed to this solution, with NIMBYism run rampant and any improvement or expansion of existing housing stock subject to a thicket of roadblocks and regulations.
Adding insult to injury, they have then made every effort to stall, delay, or cancel the high speed rail segment that was planned between San Francisco and San Jose, leaving only the strained diesel CalTrain and the clogged freeways.
You can't have it all, Silicon Valley; you have to choose. If you want to be a world-class economic engine, you have to accept housing density. Otherwise, we can dig it all up and go back to apple orchards.
I'm surprised, sometimes, with all the perks that Google offers, they don't own an apartment building near the Googleplex. They're already 90% of the way to "company town" status; might as well embrace it.
http://www.mv-voice.com/print/story/2012/07/13/google-housin...
It should be tenable to increase density with the right community support in MV, Palo Alto, etc.. - a regional agreement which is perhaps not as binding as it should be requires those cities to approve housing equal to the population increase of all the office developments they approve.
When Mountain View and Palo Alto approve office developments which welcome 100k new workers and apartments for 20k, they shuck the responsibility for residential civic planning onto SF and surrounding areas and collect the corporate taxes. And fuck them for that.
Just make sure the lease includes some clause that requires around 3 months notice if being evicted due to losing your job. If enough employees refuse to use the housing unless they are given those kinds of assurances the employer would have to cave.
Secondly, the analysis that it's a few rich homeowners is not accurate. Since the early 1960s, Silicon Valley has been associated with low-density housing and low-slung office buildings. Which is why the space between SF and San Jose looks the way it does. It's an entire cultural perspective this issue is up against, not just a few homeowners.
only allowed by the main occupant
less than 2 months per year
you must pay tourist tax
you must have permission from home ownership association
your house must be rated safe by the fire department
maximum 4 people
no disturbances of any kind
In practice hardly anyone complies with the full list. All rent-controlled apartments are excluded from short term rental anyway, as are most free-market rental apartments.
edit: removed unrelated rant :)
Rent control artificially limits supply and drives up prices for everyone else. This is one of the few things economists can agree on regardless of political affiliation. This isn't Airbnb's fault.
I think zoning has a lot to do with it. If there is anything that will limit housing supplies its land and zoning.
You need to get the zoning right and developers will show up to build more housing if the rents make it worth it.
Rent control is a way to mitigate social tension enough so the people on Google buses don't end up with their heads on a pike.
If you are or have ever been in the market for room shares in SF, you'll know there are TONS of professional workers making a decent wage coasting on rent controlled leases that have somehow been passed along for years paying way less than they should be.
I also know tons of professionals making 6 figures+ paying way below market. NOT exactly poor people.
How do you think it is for the young kid hired in to work somewhere that has to look for a place in SF while his boss's boss who probably makes 10s of thousands more pays $1300 a month?
But wait, that never happens...rent control is for poor people. Yeah right.
If you force owners to rent to people at rates way under what they should be getting, you're just making the owners pay that subsidy. When those owners happen to own multiple units, and new ones open up...they pass those subsidies on to the new renters.
Perhaps the solution is to spread the economic activity out from where it is concentrated and build more high-density housing near the economic activity despite ensuing NIMBYism.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. In a direct subsidy to low income tenant world, low income tenants would look the same as any others that could pay the rent.
However, when I've rented apartments, many tenants have requirements for who they will rent to (such as income equal to X times the rent) - and so such a direct subsidy program would probably also need some sort of provision that forces landlords to consider such renters "equally." If anything, I doubt landlords would be queueing up anywhere for the right to rent to such people.
In this situation the only way out that makes sense to me is to add more supply by removing some artificial barriers to building.
Unfortunately it's the stories of people who don't need the help getting away with murder (financially speaking) that make the whole system seem arbitrary and unfair.
This is an old Krugman Op-Ed from 2000 that says exactly that.
When the number of housing units is essentially fixed, rent control instead redistributes the profit from rental unit price increases from the property owner to the renter. And in a renter-heavy city, renters prefer lower-quality units they can afford to higher-quality units they can't.
Poor people move too, all the time, for the same reasons as anyone else. They're the ones who get screwed the most by rent control when they do.
When you move into a new rent-controlled unit, you're subsidizing everyone in all the other properties owned by that landlord who moved in before you. Your personal wealth level has nothing to do with it.
Is it advantageous to the rich, so they can get a minimum-wage cleaner who doesn't have to commute in from Oakland? Meh, I don't think it makes a big difference.
Or is it advantageous to the poor, so that they too can stand in line for a $70 bottomless mimosa brunch every Sunday or buy some nice eighteen-buck cocktails? No, that's stupid, the poor would be better off in a poorer city where (a) everything is cheaper, and (b) they don't have to suffer the indignity of being constantly surrounded by people much more successful than themselves.
No poor people live in Beverley Hills, and it works out just fine for them.
In that regard, it should be noted that San Francisco's much lauded Below Market Rate (BMR) housing program actually accepts only a tiny fraction of the many eligible applicants, by lottery.[1] The actual impact on the poor at large, or on the social composition of the city, are both marginal. It's a lottery. Running a lottery undoubtedly helps the few winners, but it's not a strategy for helping any significant number of people; it's a strategy for making people feel good about themselves for seeming to help people.
[1] For example, the recent Natoma Family Apartments had 60 units available, and 2,800 eligible applicants. If anything, this is an unusually high ratio for San Francisco BMR projects. http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Affordable-housing-in-...
Honestly, though, I doubt there's all that much risk to this. Maybe even less than renting out to a permanent tenant (who has powerful rights in SF).
Unfortunately, SF seems to be unusually good at passing restrictive laws with low enforcement, encouraging people to test the limits and profit, and making chumps of people who follow the rules. I just paid over $8k for permits (hell, I paid a few hundred in permit fees to replace my windows and furnace with energy efficient ones). In response, SF wouldn't allow me to put a sink in my laundry room "to make sure that I'm not putting in an illegal in-law". Meanwhile, there are illegal in-laws left and right, all done with zero permits, and no apparent enforcement. Here's the thing, I don't have contempt for the law. I think that a structural engineer and licensed electrical work with required firewalls to prevent an inferno that starts in the illegal in-law from spreading next door are actually pretty good regulations.
It sounds like SF may soon allow legal airbnb with some restrictions, but like permits, this will probably be an option to register, pay money, and be regulated vs breaking the law in a nearly zero consequence environment.
Ss I was reading your comment, I was thinking "There are so many unpermitted remodels in SF I wonder why this person actually paid for permits?" If you try to buy a house, I would say every single house I saw in SF had some sort of unpermitted remodelling, and no one cares, not even the real estate agents.
It's almost as if SF likes to penalize the people that follow the law, which is backwards and sad.
City planning is difficult. The engineering itself is actually pretty straightforward for skilled laborers, but that isn't the only thing to it. The problems usually stem from all the buildings being filled with irrational yard apes that hate and fear change, and have an unjustified interest in what their neighbors do with their property.
SF needs a higher density of residental building space. People who live in SF use their political power to make demolition and construction projects aimed at increasing housing density unprofitable, or at least less profitable than similar projects undertaken elsewhere.
Result: housing shortage. Solution: blame AirBnB and continue to ignore the underlying problem.
The critics should be blaming those actually responsible: every person in the Bay Area that has ever opposed new construction, by any means, for any reason.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8120070
[2] http://www.newgeography.com/content/003899-plan-bay-area-tel...
for the period April 2013 through March 2014, total international sales have been estimated at $92.2 billion, an increase from the previous period’s level of $68.2 billion [1]
And according to some reports, 90% of new condos sold in Miami are to foreign buyers.
A soon-to-be-released study by New York consulting firm Integra Realty Resources for the Miami Downtown Development Authority, an economic-development agency, found that about 90% of the buyers of new residential units are from abroad. Despite steadily increasing prices, their appetite doesn't appear to be waning... [2]
Rules for purchasing real estate in the US are generally pretty relaxed, and as wealth grows in the rest of the world, people are looking for places to invest (and probably in some cases "hide") their money. The "premier" cities receive the bulk of that investment.
Tech workers and private buses do make it more convenient to live in SF and I'm sure it helps drive up the cost of renting in the city, but only 7% of the population of the city works in Tech. There are much bigger forces at play here.
[1] http://www.realtor.org/news-releases/2014/07/international-h...
[2] http://online.wsj.com/articles/condo-builders-fuel-land-rush...
There used to be Muni streetcar tracks along Geary, but they became buses long ago. Both are subject to sitting in traffic for long periods.
They have been talking about a Geary Bus Rapid Transit line -- a dedicated bus-only lane. If it works, it'll be better. I am at a loss to explain how the city requires 8 years (and counting) to debate whether to paint "BUS ONLY" on a street.