kindatrue

Not mentioned: In America, owning a home is considered the most important investment you can make.

Who would've thought that mindset would lead to unaffordable housing!

Or parents telling their children that they won't be able to live near their parents because... well... investment! Like this guy: https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv/status/999364778907914245

>you have to contend with people playing grab-ass all over the office

???

Do you work at Sterling Cooper Draper?

This is a great time to call out California and its Prop 13 (1978) where property taxes are capped at 1%ish and can grow no more than 2% from time of purchase.

As a result, a new homeowner in Silicon Valley ($1.5M median home price) will pay $16K this year. Meanwhile there's a homeowner in Atherton (where CEOs live) who has a $6M home and pays $3K a year (and their children inherit this rate.)

Disney pays about $0.08/sqft in property tax on Disneyland. The new owner will pay about $7/sqft.

Unsurprisingly, this has caused California schools to get about $9K/child in funding. About the same as Mississippi. But the cost of living/labor is 2x-10x.

Warren Buffett was always amazed at how he paid more in property tax for his place in Omaha than in California - simply because he bought in the right year.

https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Buffett-s-Prop-13-co...

>1.2% annual in my region

What is the denominator? Is it the current market price? The price you paid originally? Something else?

Voters (who generally skew towards homeowners) unsurprisingly hate more housing.

It's like half the tweets on https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv

Also, in California, building more housing is a net negative for city finances due to Prop 13 (1978) passed by citizens.

Err... you may want to visit some more US cities. Eating and drinking out is definitely cheaper in Chicago, San Diego, Boston. Heck, lunch is cheaper in many parts of Manhattan than Soma.

In fact, it has to be that way given the housing/cost structure of the Bay Area and its ripple effects: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/dining/san-francisco-rest...

You'll understand why this is once you watch this 36 second video clip of a guy shouting he will devote his life to stopping 900 homes from being built where an abandoned K-Mart and Circuit City now lay - and how he will succeed just like he's done in the past.

https://twitter.com/cafedujord/status/971633159669338113

"Let's build a new shiny station" (that would make everyone walk even further to transfer to the subways to get them to work) - tons of interest! tons of excitement!

"Let's rebuild 2 tunnels. And maybe build 2 more." (Before they collapse and destroy the economy.) - Boring. Not sexy. No photo-ops.

And that's the problem with humans. :(

But that's the problem - people are excited about building a new station on top.

But people aren't excited about rebuilding the 2 highly damaged tunnels underneath the river (or build some new ones).

Stuff like that is hard to sell because it doesn't capture people's imagination or attention - nor does it provide for great photo-ops. :(

You should probably know that amongst the voting class of the SF Bay Area, "Manhattan" is a four letter word.

The median home price to median income ratio in San Francisco is 10.8x.

In San Jose it is 7.8x.

Nationally, it is 3.8x (5.8x in NYC metro).

http://www.burbed.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/SFvNational...

In b-school Profit=Revenue-Expense was drilled in over and over again.

It's so obvious. But until you realllllly sit down and internalize it... then you can be at peace with the shitty service of Comcast, etc.

In other words: Don't hate the player, hate the game.

Guy Kawasaki once had a post that states the reason why, but in a different angle - it's a post basically on why Silicon Valley is successful:

>>https://guykawasaki.com/how_to_kick_sil/ High housing prices. If houses are cheap, it means that young people can buy housing sooner and have kids. When they have kids, they can’t take as much risk and don’t have as much energy to start companies. (I have four kids—I barely have the time and energy to blog, much less start a company.) Also, if houses are cheap, it’s easier to “make it big,” and you want it to be hard to make it big.<<

Kinda sorta. A consequence of the redlining era in Banking (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining), banks are not supposed to micro-geographically target their advertising. (So... blocking Florida is find 'cuz you don't have offices in Florida. But not buying ads for people in Harlem while you target the rest of Manhattan - not OK.)

So there's precedent for saying that "not including" can be the same as "excluding".

>I haven't heard him repeat it since.

If the dude can afford to hire a $120K/year nanny to teach his kids Mandarin, he can afford to hire a guy to remind him to never repeat that.