I watched the New York Times opinion piece "Liberal Hypocrisy is Fueling American Inequality. Here’s How." [0] recently. This quote sums it up perfectly:
>You cannot say you are against inequality in America, unless you are willing to have affordable housing built in your neighborhood.
Progressive cities should be leading by example, since they have legislative and executive control, but it's especially unsettling to see them take actions that indicate the opposite of the values that they espouse.
> willing to have affordable housing built in your neighborhood.
The problem here is that you can't really build "affordable housing" any more than you can build "affordable cars". At least, not in the way "affordable" is used by progressives.
You don't build affordable cars, you just build cars, which end up becoming "affordable" in the used car market. Ditto for housing.
There have been attempts at building affordable housing at large scale. We've spent the past 30 years tearing down those "projects". Similarly, plenty of countries have tried to build affordable cars, but they're only sustainable by limiting imports as market-rate cars end up being preferable, both new and used.
How about we just let real estate developers build housing. Full stop. We can use policy and public funding to fill in the cracks, but "building affordable housing" doesn't actually make any sense at scale. Not unless you do something like Singapore, which sells their affordable housing, permitting individual purchasers to leverage private market financing. You get significantly more bang for your buck that way as private finance markets have much more money than is available from the government.
Advocating for "affordable housing" is really just an excuse to oppose housing as you can always claim that a project isn't sufficiently "affordable". This is basically how most residential projects end up getting stonewalled.
> You don't build affordable cars, you just build cars
There. You've hit upon the crux of it.
Entirely too many areas of California are opposed to new housing developments because it's going to lower their property values. Period. End of story. They're too fucking cowardly to come right out and say it, which is why I not only have no respect for these people, it's why I call them out on their bullshit - to their face - every single chance I get.
"Doing good" requires sacrifice. Always. Because if it was fuckin' easy, everyone would be a do-gooder. Everyone would be rushing into burning buildings to save someone, diving into sub-zero temperature water through the ice to grab the person who fell in, sacrificing their wealth to make the world better, etc.
Most of these people want to feel good, they don't actually want to do good. Buying a Tesla, installing solar panels, recycling your paper and plastic, donating (usually just enough to offset tax burdens) to charities doesn't make you a good person. YOU have to personally suffer and give up something of significant value - in this case, your multi-million dollar valuations on your housing.
My feeling on this is similar, and I'd take it a step further.
Somebody wants to build some houses in Nimbyville. They developer stands to make money, and increasing the supply of housing will benefit those who want to move there[0] by (presumably) lowering the cost of housing overall.
This is fine, but there's a good chance the people in Nimbyville who own houses will see the value of those houses go down in the event these new ones are built. Or they may be hurt in some other less tangible way, the salient point is that they think it would be bad for them and are willing to expend some effort or forgo some utility in order to prevent the construction. Furthermore and importantly, they current residents have power over the new builds, via city councils and zoning and objections etc.
Hence the free market solution is to buy this privilege from them. The developers can offer to pay the people who stand to lose property value, until the proposition is profitable for the Nimbys. If the price gets too high then it might be worth it to go down another route like legislative change from a higher power like state government, or a PR guilt campaign. This seems to be what's happening now. I wonder though if you couldn't just pay people off? [1]
[0] Even if the housing isn't cheap, since it potentially frees up a cheaper house in the same area.
[1] You may argue that this constitutes rent seeking on behalf of the Nimbyvillians.
Market based solutions are great for fungible things, where it's kind of easy to setup a healthy market, where competition between sellers actively contributes to having better products, that serve the buyers better.
Housing has the big problem that it's a monopsony market. For that actual plot/lot of land there is only one seller.
Yes, nearby plots are kind of fungible, but when the same incentives drive the price up everywhere you run into the problem of having a market in a pathological state. It's impossible to add new sellers, the barriers to entry is too high (eg. you can't create new land there).
This doesn't mean that forcing communities to change is the best solution, but if they want to remain frozen in time they should pay for that privilege. (Eg. they should buy the land around themselves and/or the air rights so they can control new developments to exactly zero, ie. in their case by keeping everything static.)
After all this kind of proscription on change depresses the value of individual plots, because if someone would like to sell their plot they only can sell it to folks who will keep the existing house (or at best build a very similar one there), which is a strictly smaller group of potential buyers, than were new developments allowed.
You make a strong point. I would argue that alternatives do exist in the form of other cities, and certainly jobs and people are (sometimes) choosing to go to e.g. Texas instead of California on the basis of cost.
The fact that the current inhabitants have such control over new construction is something I was taking as fixed, but I wouldn't argue it's healthy.
Finally, as a compromise between paying Nimbys and forcing them to pay, I would be interested in seeing a trial of a kind of mutual auction. For example, a group of residents and a group of developers secretly bid what the project is worth to them (positive or negative) and then the higher bid pays the other party the value of the lower bid. There is probably a name for this, and a theory that shows how to do it properly, but I'd be interested to see if some economic games could reach a better solution (in terms of regret-minimization, for example).
> Hence the free market solution is to buy this privilege from them.
Wouldn't the nimbys hold out for a higher price forever?
That's what happens if you try to build something like a railway: Once you've brought up 95% of the land you need, the owners of the final 5% realise they can demand a huge sum.
Contingent contracts and subsequent graphing could fix that. Ask for everybody along proposed "grid-maps" of territory if they would be willing to sell for a railroad, and how much at an upfront price and make all pending a successful route negotiation. Then it becomes a graphing problem to find the cheapest path which fits the constraints.
>The developers can offer to pay the people who stand to lose property value, until the proposition is profitable for the Nimbys.
That sounds like the exact opposite of what you should be doing!
The fact of the matter is the city has taken without compensation the right of people to build whatever the hell they want on their properties. And your solution to this theft of a private right onto public hands is to not just formalize said theft, but to re-distribute such right to those who never had it in the first place, and who stole it via laws and regulations?
No.
The free market approach is to not interfere in what people can build in their properties. And if a community feels they must interfere, they are welcome to offer the owner of the property payment to purchase that right, which the owner may freely accept of reject.
That is what a free market solution looks like.
Not theft and subsequent redistributing of the proceeds to the thieves.
>The free market approach is to not interfere in what people can build in their properties.
Unless it affects other properties in real ways - not with abstract "property value decrease". If someone emits toxic fumes, that constitutes real damage.
Even that would generally not require removing the right of what people want to build in their land!
You can surely charge people for polluting the air outside their land, or making too much noise in other peoples properties/public land, etc... Without imposing limitations on what people can build.
In the same way you can fine people for littering or putting on loud music in public, you can fine them for doing the same when it's coming out of their property. No need to ban anything outside of the harmful act.
And indeed, such a stance, if applied equally everywhere and across the board, would very much be able to replace the few positive effects of zoning.
For example, instead of having dedicated "industrial districts", simply by enforcing pollution and noise levels on public rights of way you can ensure the harmful impacts of such pollution impact only those who agree to be impacted.
Want to build a loud factory somewhere? All you need to do is buy enough land around it that by the time the noise leaves your property line it's in low enough that its within the same levels as it would be in any residential area.
If you can't afford to buy that much land, you can simply get together with other industrialists and build up a private "industrial area" to make good on economies of scale. Best thing is, since that "industrial area" is entirely privately owned, the general public won't even have to pay for the road upkeep inside it!
The same thing happens with pollution! Feel free to make as many smoke stacks as you want! You'll be charged for every CO2 coming out of your property line! This encourages industrialists to put in carbon capture right at the source!
Careful. I have a strong disagreement with this. Doing good requires doing good in the sense of doing the things that are high impact. Some of those things require personal loss or suffering but it’s not the personal loss or suffering that makes those things into good acts. Also there are many good things that you can do that require less suffering. Ideally we can get both but we shouldn’t glorify suffering at the expense of outcomes.
> Doing good requires doing good in the sense of doing the things that are high impact.
I strongly disagree with that definition. Holding the door for someone is doing good. Picking up a plastic bottle off the street and putting it in a recycle bin is doing good. Doing good does not need to be high impact, or to even directly impact anyone at all.
Well, I have never done good without some degree of sacrifice on my part.
And I thought through it in detail, taking your comment seriously.
Now, at times there is way more reward than sacrifice. And it may be very minor league, but it is there.
I agree with you completely in that the good is all about the target of the good, not our cost of action.
Not all good is high impact too. Just being a good human, holding doors, helping in small ways all add right up to impact the world we inhabit. Broad impact that is catchy. Everyone benefits.
It depends though. If someone grew up in a dense neighborhood then they might not care at all, or they even find the densification of a typical car centric sprawl a good thing :)
"Entirely too many areas of California are opposed to new housing developments because it's going to lower their property values. Period. End of story."
This explanation is commonly repeated, but it rings false, for a couple reasons.
One is that if you ever talk to a NIMBY boomer (or are related to one), you'll very rarely hear them talk about their home value, except in the context of lamenting how their kids can't live near them anymore. Instead, you'll hear them talk about how they'll lose their view if the high-rise goes up, or they'll be in shadow, or that it'll bring in the riff-raff, or the roads can't support more traffic, or how will the school systems cope, or it'll change the bucolic character of the town, or you won't be able to know your neighbors. It's all about preserving lifestyle, not money.
A second is that even if these are bullshit excuses for actually wanting money, their incentives don't add up. The worst NIMBYs are people who intend to die in their home and never move again. Economically, they shouldn't care about their home value, because by the time they can turn it into cash, they'll be dead. A lot of them are even childless, so the "leave an inheritance for the kids" argument doesn't apply.
A third reason is that development usually raises home values. 30 units on a half acre in the Bay Area goes for about $10M; 1 unit on a half acre in the Bay Area goes for about $3-4M. This is how developers profit, and how they can convince homeowners to sell to them in the first place. Upzone a 1/2 acre SFH and the homeowner can pocket a million or two over fair market value, and the developer pockets maybe $3M after construction costs.
A more likely explanation is to a.) take NIMBYs at their word when they say it's all about quality of life rather than finances and b.) understand that development privatizes gains among former and non-residents, socializes losses among current residents, and socializes gains among future residents. When a lot gets upzoned, the people who make a financial windfall are the developer (non-resident) and the seller (former resident). The people who enjoy a better quality of life are the new residents who move in and wouldn't otherwise have a home in a desirable community (future residents). The people who suffer a worse quality of life - for all the reasons listed above - are the existing homeowners (current residents). Guess who are the voters?
Also, the big elephant in the room here is that the denser housing is, the more quality-of-life for people living there is affected by things outside the bounds of their individual property and the more important it becomes for them to have a say in that. YIMBY campaigners can post all the photos they like of high-rises surrounded by parkland to argue that high-density living doesn't have to be a dystopian hellscape, but when the founding principle of YIMBY-ism is that developers could replace those parks with a blank wall blocking out all sunlight to the residents' windows or an art gallery full of visitors looking directly into their lives all day and the residents should have no way of stopping it that's basically just a bait-and-switch. (The art gallery example and the YIMBY reaction to it is something that actually happened in London!)
> This explanation is commonly repeated, but it rings false, for a couple reasons.
Good explanation, thanks.
While often repeated on HN, reality is that existing homeowners have the home to live in it, approximately none of them are tracking prices or caring if it goes up/down. The only exception is the house flippers, but those are a tiny minority.
Even for the rare few who do obsessively track prices, they don't matter because the city planning commissions who approve the permits to building companies are not consulting with any voters on what they do or don't do.
I know some nimby boomers and agree that's exactly what they say but I don't see why they can't move they don't need to be there for economic reasons they could buy 3x the house in some costal town much further from the city. Young people generally want to be near cities because that's where the jobs are.
> but I don't see why they can't move they don't need to be there…
What does it matter? They bought property just like any other person in America. If you work remote does that mean you should have to live in the middle of nowhere to free up space for someone who commutes?
Old people usually need medical care. I see it with my own, she starts the day taking half a bucket of pills lol. Are there care workers or hospitals in the area? Maybe they can no longer drive a car? In which case you're basically stranded in the countryside.
If they're actually boomers, they likely have some kind of social network in their area, they have habits, they have families relatively close, etc. Actual boomers are close to 70yo and that's not the age, where many are ready for a life change. 3x the house in some coastal town they have no meaningful connection to is not going to appeal to a lot of them.
If your position is that a non-resident can come into town and force a long-time resident to have to move out just because they want to take their place, how is that ok?
The people who want to hold the moral high ground have to also accept the suffering and sacrifice that go with it. "Doing the right thing" has a cost to it. That's exactly why I call these people out. They want to be seen as good people, but aren't willing to suffer the burden that goodness requires.
> Isn’t one group bearing the brunt of sacrifice the very definition of inequality.
No, it isn't, because I'm talking about voluntarily sacrificing for your community in the pursuit of a higher good than your own personal enrichment and the enrichment of your children.
> Often times it could be a rich person defending his property name but it could just add easily be a poor family.
Define "rich". Define "poor". When I was a young child, people who could afford to eat three meals a day were "rich". Today, I define "poor" as being unable to eat at a restaurant every day of the week and not being able to afford a first-class flight. It's an ever-sliding scale based on your own income, and everyone's comfortable sacrificing more - or less - than someone else.
The dead simple solution to gentrification (the unfair pricing out of the locals) is to mandate building houses that are basically a strict superset of the already present ones. Which allows the locals to stay in the neighborhood with very similar conditions (eg. similar rent for years).
Naturally this means that developments will be big to absorb these costs.
Because it is pro-social behavior. Same as voting for higher taxes on yourself personally.
In fact, lowering property values is often good for people. It lowers property taxes (well... not in california since they never recompute) and it lowers the price of comps so if you move and buy another house it is largely a wash.
Yes, we've created a system where a ton of people are highly dependent on inflated housing prices and this leads to anti-social policy support so they can keep their wealth. This is a tough nut to crack because people are greedy. But this approach isn't sustainable.
Houses are not just expensive because people are greedy. Nice places are limited, and therefore they will always be expensive. And it is not "greedy" to want to live in a nice place.
That there is a host of other issues in the system is without question.
"Nice places are limited, and will always be expensive."
But the thing is, housing isn't about 'nice places always being expensive' it's about reasonable places skyrocketing in value do the a lack of new or additional housing to accommodate a growing population.
It seems the "reasonable places" are also nice, otherwise people wouldn't be willing to pay so much for them. It's also not the fault of the people living there if the population is growing. Why should they have to accommodate the growing population?
Nice places are also artificially limited by policy supported by people who don't want to see their more-exclusive control over those nice places diminished.
You throw around the word socialism as an epithet but the status quo you are defending is one of the least free markets in the world. Those escalating values are the result of manipulation at every level of government.
I'm just arguing from the principle that people should be allowed to desire certain living conditions and work towards obtaining them. Not saying the current state of affairs is ideal.
Nevertheless it seems OK to me if, say, a city designates some area for building and says "this is for a part of town with lots of parks and only single family homes" or whatever. Then it would be unfair to later come around and say oopsi, now you'll have to accept "affordable" homes in your neighborhood.
Presumably the city sells the land to the builders, and it comes with a certain promise.
Well if the land belongs to the city, they can do with it as they please, including central planning? I'm not saying it is ideal, but I think that is usually how it is done? And if you want to sell land to people to build houses for their family, you better provide them with some incentives, like promising to build schools, sanitation and so on.
It also is not as hopeless as socialism because people are not forced to take the offer. they can negotiate with the city, too. They can even start their own cities.
Because that’s what “affordable” housing is, houses that don’t have high values.
I find it funny that you reference socialism, when these people are limiting property development on land that they don’t own in order to capture higher values by limiting the supply of housing.
Turns out socialism is just anything that doesn’t benefit people who already got theirs.
It just seems that land in general comes with certain promises, like that they won't create a garbage dump in your backyard or a motorway above your house. That and the location is part of what gives a property its value.
It's not socialist to heed contracts. These people are also not "capturing value", they paid for their property and want to preserve its value.
Also, if you don't care about the environment at all, why don't you build your affordable housing in some affordable place (next to a garbage dump, for example)?
What housing contract comes with any stipulation about zoning? The “promises” you talk about are pure imagination. When you buy a house, you buy the land it sits on (and perhaps some level of air rights), nothing more, nothing less.
What you’re talking about is nonsense. The municipality is in charge of zoning and these people are using their political power to enrich themselves, plain and simple.
Also, how is building an apartment building akin to a garbage dump? Wherein my previous statement was it implied I didn’t care about the environment? All we are talking about is allowing new houses to be built where there already are houses…
By environment I mean the location - shops, parks, houses, lakes, garbage dumps.
According to you, if you want to preserve the attractiveness of the location, you are an evil exploiter trying to extract value at the expense of the people.
From that I conclude that you don't care about preserving the value of the location, so you should have no issues with building a garbage dump next to the affordable housing unit. I said build the unit next to the dump, but if it feels better, you can do it the other way round. Build the affordable housing, then build the garbage dump next to it. After all, nobody is entitled to a nice environment to live in, and you wouldn't want to enrich the people living there.
And I am pretty sure the "promises" are not imagination. At the very least, it seems the residents have a say in what gets build, or they couldn't prevent the building of new houses. So "move there, and you'll have a say in the further development of the area" seems to be a promise.
> According to you, if you want to preserve the attractiveness of the location, you are an evil exploiter trying to extract value at the expense of the people.
NIMBYs will often cite property values directly as a reason for their opposition. This isn’t some inference on my part, these are their own words.
It’s one thing to say you don’t want a literal garbage dump next door, it’s another to say you don’t want more houses around because you want to secure the value of your own speculative investments.
Location isn’t fungible, people generally need to be geographically located close to their work, family, etc.
What makes more sense, for the state of California to massively increase teachers salaries just so they can afford a basic house, or allow yourself to have a few more neighbors?
At this point it’s pretty obvious what your answer will be so consider that a rhetorical question.
Ive seen this 'people need to live near work' argument, but I don't know what its based on. If a teacher has to commute an hour, they will commute an hour. If a bartender has to commute, they will commute. Wouldn't it be better to make transportation cheaper and easier to use? That way people could live where they can afford, and still work in another place. I don't understand why people have to subsidize someone living close to their job.
edit: I was a bit blind and didn't realize that my point was made an hour ago (here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29229793 ) already. So I'll change my previous post to ask the following question:
> That and the location is part of what gives a property its value.
Would you support policies that would keep your property from increasing in value? Or at least to keep it from increasing relative to inflation? If not, why not?
It would be weird to make a policy just to prevent people's property from increasing in value, don't you think? Especially if you consider that improving the location (building better roads and infrastructure) would also increase the value.
That would be a typical socialist failure, I think, that would only ensure nobody can have nice things.
I don't think I would oppose policies that help other people, as long as they don't devalue my property (hypothetically, as I don't actually own any real estate).
On the other hand, acting against socially good measures with sole purpose of profitting from them is evil.
>Also even if it sounds good and social, you can also turn it on its head and realize why socialism breeds hopelessness: if you establish a rule that people have to live in properties with low value, nobody will have to hope to ever escape those conditions.
This statement makes no sense. The reason why those properties have high worth has nothing to do with any intrinsic properties or conditions of them, and everything to do with scarcity of housing. You can do world's most unwalkable shoe and it will can the most expensive one if you're well known fashion designer.
No - the initial premise here was that people should have to accept "affordable housing" in their neighborhood. You can build affordable housing elsewhere if scarcity is the problem.
"On the other hand, acting against socially good measures with sole purpose of profitting from them is evil."
What do you mean by "profitting from them"? Is it profitting if I pay more for my house so that my kids don't encounter drug dealers on their way to school? And that would then somehow be evil?
In general it seems absolutely normal to want to protect the value of ones investment. Like if you pay a premium to have a view to the lake. Then it isn't "evil" if you want to prevent somebody to build a skyscraper between your house and the lake.
It would be evil to sell somebody a plot of land with promise of view to the lake, and then build a skyscraper in front of their house to block the view. That would simply be fraud.
We never seem to consider the downstream impacts of our regulatory dogooderism, the end result in my lifetime has been to make life worse for the poor.
In short, you can build affordable cars, by getting rid of the requirements for -
Active suspensions (conservatively an additional 1000 dollars)
Traction Control (though, this is potentially free if the car already has ABS, which should be required)
Side curtain airbags (500 dollars per airbag unit, and each car has multiple units)
Knee Airbags (500 dollars per airbag unit, and each car has multiple units)
Backup Cameras (this alone adds upwards of 1500 dollars to an economy car because of the systemic upgrades that need to be done to the infotainment system)
Eliminating these items would cause few excess deaths, yet would make cars much more affordable for poor people.
There is no reason the Chevy Spark should cost 13,000 dollars for what it is.
>Backup Cameras (this alone adds upwards of 1500 dollars to an economy car because of the systemic upgrades that need to be done to the infotainment system)
I'm sorry, but what?! A backup camera kit is $50 on Amazon[1].
Just because someone can charge you 30x that amount, doesn't mean it costs that amount, nor that it would contribute this much to the cost of the car.
>There is no reason the Chevy Spark should cost 13,000 dollars for what it is.
What's wrong with the Spark?
It competes with Honda Fit, which is better, but also pricier. And it's absolutely worth it.
I think that a new car being 13 laptops worth is pretty damn reasonable.
Do you honestly think a car with that kit from Amazon will pass the NHTSA requirements on backup camera?
Huge part of these costs is the regulatory compliance. Any part on the car is subject of various regulations from safety to after market support to environmental requirements (will your Amazon camera work in 125F ? in -50F?).
I don't see how it follows. We figured how to make rockets a longer while ago it still does not cost $50 to send stuff into space.
If that kit was enough then the manufacturers would just send it together with the car for dealers to install and comply with the regulations for $50 instead.
Yeah, I don’t know about getting rid of those regulations for cars, but it is worthwhile to think about what happens when you get rid of a bunch of regulation for housing “safety.” A lot of housing regulation we have today is mostly to get rid of tenement housing. If cities got rid of minimum apartment sizes and we allowed dorms/flop houses where you get a tiny single room, or a slightly less tiny room for groups, more people could at least cram indoors in much safer spaces than they get out on the streets.
Laws in Californian cities go much further than just blocking tenements though. Just eliminating the cost of litigation and allowing constructions as-of-right would make a pretty big impact. But it politicians really do need to consider whether a law that is intended to help poorer people will actually put more of them out on the street.
I'm not suggesting getting rid of regulation, I'm just suggesting less.
I'm suggesting (for cars anyway) that there is a point where the marginal systemic cost to save a life isn't worth the dollar amount for the safety technology used to save them.
Backup cameras are the best example of this, I'd have to dig thru my comment history, but the mandate of backup cameras adds some huge amount of cost to cars (when totaled), something like 300k or 500k (or more) per life saved, mostly because people are too lazy/busy/distracted to approach their vehicle from the rear and very few lives are saved in real numbers by backup cameras.
These regulatory burdens have hidden costs, and those costs are shouldered disproportionately by the poor.
The same argument applies to housing, the reason only 'luxury' housing gets built, instead of middle income housing, is because only 'luxury' housing has the profit margins to support the protracted development process you have to go thru to build anything.
While yes, it's true that no one builds low income housing, once you have a good supply of new moderate income housing, yesterdays moderate income housing becomes todays lower income housing. But because we stopped building moderate income housing, the progression downmarket just stopped.
Another thing we missed, is the government ripped out a huge amount of low income housing when it closed down the large housing projects in most urban areas in the early 90's, the focus on "affordable" units by private builders, is a wrong-headed approach to get that capacity back.
Backup cameras save lives, but also prevent property damage. And not just to the driver's car, but also to the parked cars they might have otherwise hit. The value of property damage avoided should also be factored into the 'pro' side of the pro/con evaluation.
Safety mandates also help drive obsolescence, which helps car manufacturers sell more cars, which in turn keeps the used car market well supplied. (It's basically a very progressive tax that mostly falls upon the wealthier.) Most safety mandates seem to be largely voluntary, AFAICT--literally, or with deadlines that go unchallenged by the industry--as the regulatory agencies hash out timelines with manufacturers so they can maximize return and minimize cost inflation by letting the features trickle down from luxury models over the course of 5-10 years. IIRC, backup cameras are a great example of this, with companies like Toyota preemptively committing to adding them to all cars across their lineup before (or at least very early during) the industry and regulatory agency negotiations.
I think the most costly safety "taxes" (e.g. impact resistance) effectively just translate to heavier cars. Fuel mileage requirements also had the perverse second order effect of increasing car sizes. These are the closest analog for housing. There was recently a lot of noise about
California requiring sprinkler systems in new single-family homes, but that just ends up increasing costs by like 1% or less. It's de minimis to begin with, and should drop as builders adjust their processes. (I realize these things add up, and I'm not trying to defend the sprinkler mandate, but there are also counterveiling forces--like standardization--which push back in the other direction.) But minimum square footage requirements for units, maximum height requirements for buildings, etc... those go straight to the bottom line of primary costs (property, raw material, and labor) similar to car size and weight. But unlike cars, the health & safety benefit of modern unit size requirements (i.e. the marginal increase over, say, mid-century requirements) is basically non-existent and were in many cases quite literally crafted in the first instance to limit housing supply.
> Safety mandates also help drive obsolescence, which helps car manufacturers sell more cars, which in turn keeps the used car market well supplied. (It's basically a very progressive tax that mostly falls upon the wealthier.)
Yes but these laws cover cars built from X date onward. Are people trading in their Corolla to get a new one because of a safety regulation like a backup camera?
1. Heated seats: 66%
2. Blind-spot monitoring: 60%
3. Front and rear parking sensors: 55%
4. All-wheel or four-wheel drive: 54%
5. Lane-departure warning: 54%
6. Apple CarPlay and/or Android Auto: 53%
7. Power front passenger seat: 52%
8. LED accent lights: 52%
9. Ventilated or cooled seats: 50%
10. Memory driver's seat: 49%
All-wheel drive is classified as a safety feature, which assuming that's how it's perceived, makes safety features 4 out of the top 5 in-demand features.
"Horses were dangerous, would often spook and throw riders - most carriage designs are top-heavy and unstable, I won't even start on bicycles - pretty much anything short of walking is dangerous on some level - even then you still might injure yourself, even severely.
Modern Society lives in a fallacy - that we can somehow, someway engineer danger out of life, that we can eliminate all risk of accidental injuries or death and make everything perfectly safe and sanitary - and in some ways we can, at an ever increasing incremental cost to do so - a cost that is often not justifiable in my humble opinion.
For example, In 2014 the NHTSA required all new cars to be sold with a backup camera - at an estimated cost of up to 143 dollars a car. In 2016 we sold 17,500,000 cars - if you add 100 dollars to the price of each car sold, you're looking at an extra 1,750,000,000 or 1.75 billion dollars, annually - to save 210 lives - in short 8.3 million dollars per life saved - even if you look at just injuries from accidental backing incidents, there were 15,000 of those in 2014 - you're still looking at 116,000 dollars spent per injury prevented - and this presumes this technology prevents every death, and every injury from accidental backing - Is this a worthy expenditure my gut tells me no (but I might be a cold hearted bastard) - I can just think of better ways to spend 1.75 billion dollars in the public good - an education campaign, and requiring a label, or warning sign to flash in the car would cost far less and probably save about as many lives.
Society doesn't think about those things though, we choose the easy, feel-good answer that all lives are valuable - its why for example, we've not even touched on end of life, and when pouring money into someone who may only have 1-2 years left in their natural life - may not make much sense, and I'm not even suggesting I know the answer, I'm just suggesting we start having the conversation instead of taking the easy approach, and immediately passing another law, then patting ourselves on the back for a job well done."
>mandate of backup cameras adds some huge amount of cost to cars (when totaled), something like 300k or 500k (or more) per life saved
That is honestly a lot better than I expected. With infrastructure projects, the department of transportation values each life at $10 million. Also, in an ideal world, I do think that cars should be treated as luxury goods. They pollute a lot and take up a lot of space. Of course, most of the US would need better much better public transit.
Tell that to the poor person who needs one to get to work, the store, or the doctor, see what kind of reaction you get.
It's fine and dandy for all of us who make a high-dollar salary to sit here and moralize, "yes, tax cars more" when we can well pay the higher taxes, and it will relegate the poor to the bus, where instead of a 15 minute trip home, they'll have a 2 hour trip home by bus after 8 hours on their feet at a service job.
Like it or not, much of the world has locked itself into a personal transportation oriented society, where you can transport yourself at your own discretion anywhere you'd like to go whenever you'd like to go there - they key for the future is to make that lifestyle more sustainable for the planet, not to sit here and moralize about it.
Also, I was off with the numbers "For example, In 2014 the NHTSA required all new cars to be sold with a backup camera - at an estimated cost of up to 143 dollars a car. In 2016 we sold 17,500,000 cars - if you add 100 dollars to the price of each car sold, you're looking at an extra 1,750,000,000 or 1.75 billion dollars, annually - to save 210 lives - in short 8.3 million dollars per life saved - even if you look at just injuries from accidental backing incidents, there were 15,000 of those in 2014 - you're still looking at 116,000 dollars spent per injury prevented - and this presumes this technology prevents every death, and every injury from accidental backing - Is this a worthy expenditure my gut tells me no (but I might be a cold hearted bastard) - I can just think of better ways to spend 1.75 billion dollars in the public good - an education campaign, and requiring a label, or warning sign to flash in the car would cost far less and probably save about as many lives."
Yes, that's why I prefaced my statement with "in an ideal world." Obviously we would need better public transit and urban planning before we can tax cars to oblivion. 8.3 million is still less than the 10 million that the DoT prices for an infrastructure proposal will save a life, so I'd still say the money at least wasn't wasted. It's debatable whether it was actually worth it, but consider that if we were purely utilitarian, we would all be like Bill Gates and prioritize eradicating malaria.
The costs to replace everything we have and force people to change behaviors are basically so large as to be impossible to calculate, or frankly pay for. This isn't software where you can engineer your way out of technical debt, the debt is baked into concrete, steel and psychological behaviors. Of those, I'd note the hardest one to change is that last one, it prevents the trillions from being spent to change the first two.
I'd also like to note, it's not a one time charge. It's 1.75b dollars a year ongoing in perpetuity, that's what bothers me, are there not other things we could spend 1.75b dollars a year on, that are more worthy? How many busses could 1.75b dollars a year buy?
In the end, our focus on what people perceive as perfection in urban development, gets in the way of making what we have more sustainable and incrementally better, which costs less, and sees much more immediate results.
>I'm suggesting (for cars anyway) that there is a point where the marginal systemic cost to save a life isn't worth the dollar amount for the safety technology used to save them.
As long as we're allowing regular humans to drive few ton machines freely on the public roads we're very far from this.
Just imagine the guards’ rooms from Squid Game. How expensive would it be to build 10,000 of those for SF’s homeless? They get a desk, chair, bed, shared bathroom, and a door that locks. How can you argue that is worse than what they have now? We agree that the best route to solve the homeless problem is to find homes for them, but liberals believe those homes have to be 600sf+ with a full kitchen and bathroom, laundry in unit, and free gym onsite. Let’s just get them inside with the bare minimum and figure out amenities once they’re stable.
> liberals believe those homes have to be 600sf+ with a full kitchen and bathroom, laundry in unit, and free gym onsite
That's hilarious, because you can look up Gabrunas Hall on Joint Base Pearl Harbor - Hickam on Google Maps and look at the 3 photos some sailor took of those barracks rooms. And what's hilarious, is that Gabrunas was widely considered the nicest Naval barracks at Pearl Harbor outside of the bachelor officer barracks. The room probably isn't even 250 sq. ft. I spent the better part of a year living in that barracks, for the three years I was stationed at Pearl Harbor, and when I wasn't there, I was onboard the USS Honolulu (SSN-718), in which one has no room, period.
In Gabrunas, you shared a kitchen and a bathroom with a roommate who had their own private room as well. Laundry facilities were at the end of each hallway and were shared by everyone on that floor.
If that's a good enough environment for senior enlisted personnel - that is, people who've spent quite a few years in the military, or have advanced quickly (generally E-6 and above), it should damn well be good enough for homeless people.
That's a different story though. The mandates turn these into economy-of-scale problems that should drive the free market to greatly reduce the cost. There is no reason a backup camera should cost 1500.
It changes the radio from something that costs 50 dollars to something that costs 400-1000 dollars, plus the extra wiring and components to make it work.
That’s true in theory but manufacturers don’t offer those radios on any model that actually can be obtained. It’s there so they can advertise an artificially low msrp
You could safely get rid of most of those things if you made the car go no faster than say 25mph. Just put speed limiters on them and the crash speeds will go way down as will the design requirements.
Amen. The purity tests that “Affordable Housing” is subjected to inevitably leads to failure.
Build housing. Build too much of it, to the point where it’s hard to sell and you have to lower the price to find buyers. That’s it. Housing is a supply problem. The housing crisis isn’t happening because houses cost $2,000,000, it’s happening because there are a dozen buyers ready to pay that amount for it.
The only nit I have (and I think this is actually what you meant) is we must build more housing. I say this because often people think it's good to tear down an old house and build a new one. That isn't helping things (and I'd argue actively hurts things).
> Build housing. Build too much of it, to the point where it’s hard to sell
Why would someone build too much housing that makes it hard to sell? Government incentives? (I agree with the want, I don't know how the free market would do it on its own without incentive, when there's already lots of incentive to have not-enough-housing.)
They won’t. However, it will get built as long as there’s a profit to be made. And it’s more profitable to build a 2/3/4/5/6-plex on a single lot than an single family unit. It’s just not legal in most places. Make it legal and the development will come. Every house replaced with a 6-plex is an excellent increase in density. The government can even optionally add a land value capture requirement to one or more of the units to make it permanently affordable to low income workers.
This has been happening in China for over ten years, and housing has only been getting more expensive in the process -- even while much of it remains empty, waiting to be sold to a higher bidder.
Yes, it will all collapse someday, maybe soon. But as long as housing is treated as an investment, it can remain unaffordable in the face of supply surplus.
>Investors will buy out everything, and outbid anyone else in the process.
Investors need a cash on cash return above their hurdle rate. When they can't hit that they'll liquidate, even at a loss, to move on (like Zillow just did).
I'm not sure where these cartoonish views come from. Investors aren't looking to make bad investments just so they can cackle at all the poors they're hurting from their underwater Bond villain lair.
In the wealthy suburbs of Texas with houses averaging 4000sqft with swimming pools @ $1+M you can find, right next to them, trailer parks where you can see mobile homes of $50k. You can also find huge apartment buildings (easily with 500 units each) with rents ranging from $600 to $1200 for a two bedroom.
The liberal states would never allow this to happen.
> In the wealthy suburbs of Texas with houses averaging 4000sqft with swimming pools @ $1+M you can find, right next to them, trailer parks where you can see mobile homes of $50k.
You literally described where I live - Keller, Texas.
I bought my home January of this year for $319,000. It's now appraised for about $400,000. Literally across the street from the exit of my subdivision is a trailer park. It's a damn nice trailer park, but it's still a trailer park.
Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade, and Fidelity moving near here and establishing their enormous campuses has been a godsend for property values, but there's already additional massive housing developments being built to support all the people that are moving into this area, which is obviously great, as you point out.
Another benefit of zoning absence is that Schools in Texas are less divided between poor peoples schools and rich peoples schools.
In this day that our society fabric seems much broken, I think that using schools as equalizers is super important. Rich kids get reality checks early on, so that they don’t get things for granted. Poor kids get a high bar to compete with, and avoid the poverty spiral.
There are mobile home parks in silicon valley next, right next to houses worth way more than $1 million. Pretty sure you would find mobile homes next to $4 million houses. There is a mobile home park in walking distance to Google HQ.
Those are probably mostly for legacy reasons since land is so expensive now.
There aren't that many mobile home parks in wealthy areas of SV. I'd say there are more RVs parked on the streets of PA, MV, RWC than there are units of mobile home parks in the area.
And while there may be a few $4M near mobile home parks, this is far from the norm. Most $4M homes are surrounded by $2-5M homes — few even have $1M homes nearby (maybe just a few teardown properties tied up in probate).
There's a lot in Mountain View. I suspect OP is thinking of:
https://goo.gl/maps/5ggcFTpAvAjzQYFg8, within walking distance (1/4 mile) of the GooglePlex. I actually know a couple Googlers that live there to save money.
https://goo.gl/maps/78XupGGy8bsSzW6m6, 2 on either side of Sylvan Park. The houses around Sylvan went for $3M pre-pandemic and are probably significantly more now.
>There aren't that many mobile home parks in wealthy areas of SV
There are some... Buena Vista Mobile Home Park is right off El Camino in Palo Alto. I grew up with a friend who lived there in a normal family and went to Palo Alto High.
Admittedly, I don't know what a standard number of mobile homes is for comparison.
Right across the road is my subdivision. There are homes here selling right now for $525,000. 1 mile up the road, $650,000. 1 mile down the road, $700,000.
>How about we just let real estate developers build housing. Full stop. We can use policy and public funding to fill in the cracks, but "building affordable housing" doesn't actually make any sense at scale.
The worst part of this is that 'affordable housing' requirements in SF have turned into a tax on new housing that just prevents both from being built (e.g., 'Oh you want to build a 500 unit building that just barely pencils? Well, unless you can also build 75 affordable units, that lots just going to sit empty, isn't it?'. It's one of the greatest examples of perverse incentives in the history of time.
>How about we just let real estate developers build housing. Full stop. We can use policy and public funding to fill in the cracks, but "building affordable housing" doesn't actually make any sense at scale. Not unless you do something like Singapore, which sells their affordable housing, permitting individual purchasers to leverage private market financing. You get significantly more bang for your buck that way as private finance markets have much more money than is available from the government.
An excellent point.
This was successfully done with Mitchell-Lama[0] housing, which provided more than 100,000 housing units (both rental and cooperatives) in New York.
This program was begun nearly 70 years ago and has been quite successful.
Unfortunately, similar programs have not been implemented elsewhere and the rate of new Mitchell-Lama housing development has slowed to a standstill.
Revitalizing Mitchell-Lama and creating similar programs elsewhere could spur development of lots of "affordable" housing.
Sadly, governments in the US seem to be more interested in maximizing real estate values than in housing its residents.
I should have included mention of this type of development in my previous comment[1] about revitalizing small towns. I'd posit that such programs could be quite helpful in those types of efforts too.
> Sadly, governments in the US seem to be more interested in maximizing real estate values than in housing its residents.
This is the real crux of it from what I've read. Housing can either be affordable, or an engine of wealth creation, but not both simultaneously. Guess which politicians and our laws pander to?
And which one makes sense to do as costs go up… property taxes fund things. If you build a $100,000 home it’s hard to charge $8,000/year in property taxes on it.
>And which one makes sense to do as costs go up… property taxes fund things. If you build a $100,000 home it’s hard to charge $8,000/year in property taxes on it.
That's true. However, if you build a $5 million apartment building with 15 apartments on 2 or 3 lots (or even just one) the same size as that $100,000 house, you could charge significantly more and it would be perfectly viable.
What's more, you could house 15-20 times more people.
And the places[0] where a whole house costs $100,000 aren't the places we're talking about.
And those places certainly aren't the ones where increasing the density of housing will do much good.
Note the distribution of median house prices in the site I linked. The really expensive places are clustered around densely populated urban areas (and ski resorts in Colorado).
Increasing housing density to match the population density makes a lot of sense there.
Longer term (as I mentioned in another comment[1]), building out infrastructure and housing of all types in poorer, low population density areas can make them more desirable and provide an economic boost, while taking pressure off more densely populated areas.
Only because we have decided to consume 16,000 a year in city service on that same house, and finance the rest with the urban development Ponzi scheme.
I suspect the appetite for suburban living would dry up if we all paid the actual maintenance costs of those streets, water and schools on a land-value basis
You can design affordable zones by allowing mixed use, allow "middle" housing with 2-12 units per building,removing parking minimums and giving buses dedicated lanes.
You can't reduce inequality if every house in an area is the same size. You need to mix single family houses with duplexes, quadplexes and buildings with more units.
In an area like that you can live without a car and don't have to giving up much freedom. This alone frees up a few 1000 Dollars per year. A bonus is that you don't bankrupt a city if you build like this.
> You don't build affordable cars, you just build cars, which end up becoming "affordable" in the used car market. Ditto for housing.
The problem I see with this analogy is that housing is an investment (which is part of the problem when you want to build affordable housing), but cars are not. I don’t think anyone decides to buy a “used house” vs a “new house”. Houses are houses, you buy the one you can afford.
Houses do not go up in value. It is the land. Land should go up in value if the city or town develops. Housing prices can still remain stable if you are allowed to break it down and built something denser. Tokyo is an example where housing prices are far more stable compared to the west despite being the most populous metropolis on earth.
But the land goes up in value because it is all single family homes so it becomes a limiting resource.
If you put up high quality high density apartment complexes next to Caltrain stations land cost would go down. Which is why the voters do not want that under any circumstance.
Land cost still goes up as density increases. A 30-unit multifamily building on a half-acre goes for $10M+; the same lot with a SFH would go for about $3-4M. Even subtracting out structure value, dense housing is worth significantly more on a per-acre basis. This is how developers turn a profit, and how they get SFH owners to sell to them in the first place.
Land cost per unit goes down as density goes up, because the amount of land used by each unit goes down. That 30-unit apartment building uses about 700 ft^2/unit, at an amortized cost of about $600K/acre. The SFH uses a 1/2 are (20,000 ft^2), at an amortized cost of about $6M/acre.
My point is that right now there can only live x amount of people close to FAANG headquarters due to traffic and SFH. If significantly more people could live here the value of the remaining SFH would go down, at least I think so.
My theory is that SFH value is high because some people just want to live here, and some people want a SFH, and some want to invest. For the first group other forms of housing would be OK, and when they stop competing for SFH value at some point it stops growing so insane. At that point the third group might quit as well.
I am not talking about land value/unit, but land value on average in the bay area. Or other places with zoning restrictions.
A house isn’t an investment, it’s a depreciating asset just like a car. Land is the investment. You can witness this phenomenon every day just by driving around residential neighbourhoods: people tearing down newly purchased houses and building new ones on the lot. What did they spend all that money on if they were planning to tear the house down from the outset? It wasn’t the building, that’s for sure.
I don't think it's true. Value of materials depreciate, but good luck finding a builder who would rebuild the same house for the same price it cost 10 years ago. Labor and new materials go up in value, and new regulations add costs too. There are exceptions, like those you've described, but those are exceptions.
When the land value is high enough relative to the structure, the costs to tear down and build are a footnote. It makes sense to tear down and get exactly what you want.
A house has a lot of raw material, most/all of which is getting more expensive. Even if labor were free (if you do all yourself) and the land is in a location that has not appreciated at all in a decade, building a new identical house still takes a lot more money than 10 years ago, just on materials alone.
That’s a mixture of inflation (in the price of building materials) and cost disease [1] (for the labour). A lot of other things have gotten way cheaper (computers, TVs, etc) because of advances in technology whereas houses have not. It still takes roughly the same amount of labour for framers, drywallers, painters, and roofers to build a house today as it did 20 years ago but the cost of living for all those workers has gone up so you need to pay more for the same amount of work. This is not labour going up in value, it’s labour going up in price.
On the other hand, an old poorly maintained house is worth a lot less in real value terms than a brand new house on the same lot. This is why houses are a depreciating asset. That may be hard to see, though, because the land may be going up in value a lot more than the house may be declining. And of course, just like a car, if you maintain a house and keep it in good shape you can preserve more of its value.
The building itself, on an individual basis, depreciates over time. The investment component is about the land, or more accurately, the volume of space above (and to a certain extent below) the surface that is inescapably necessary for human existence, which can be enclosed by walls and a door for additional dignity.
The problem is that people have confused speculation and investment frankly. An investment generates value over time. Speculation is based upon an asset's value appreciating. When dealing with "pures" look at how they would perform in a hypothetical long term stable priced market.
I don't think that's relevant at all - yes, there are cars which do actually appreciate and you can make profit on them - I'd generously estimate that's like 0.0001% of all cars on the roads though.
Similarly, I'm sure there are houses which actually depreciate from the moment they are built - weird unusual houses with guaranteed structural issues the longer they stand, I'm reminded of a house mentioned on HN, which was built entirely underground and which started leaking everywhere after ~20 years. That house was basically worth maybe 1/10th of the original price because it was so hard to sell.
Only if you already bought and are selling today. If you are buying today you should assume. The chip issues will be solved in a few months and cars return back to normal.
I am not sure we will go back to normal that quickly however.
We may see a permanent change in used car value perception. A lot of people just got a look at how generally great the value proposition has become over the years of ongoing improvement.
And unlike cars, houses aren't supposed to depreciate in value to become affordable, so you have to bake affordability into the initial planning requirements (or have those on lower incomes live a very long way away)
Houses do depreciate in value. In Japan houses depreciate to 0 after 30years. Land on the other hand under the current system only goes up. Don't confuse the two.
The distinction isn't applicable to people trying to find affordable housing in the real world, because you can't live in the house without paying freehold or leasehold costs associated with the land underneath it. You can't get a free place to live in Tokyo just because a lot of structures there were built 30 years ago. Deterioration just makes housing more expensive because you'll have to rebuild
A car originally sold for $50k will usually be affordable to someone with less than $10k to spare after 15-30 years, so a supply of expensive new cars leads to affordable cars coming on the market eventually. But $500k houses won't become more affordable in future years.
You can’t be serious? You analogy is very flawed. A better analogy is affordable house and affordable transportation. Guess what? It’s call mass transit. It’s called planned communities. And yes, affordable cars can be made. Americans bitched and moaned they couldn’t. The Japanese are their lunch.
Leaving something up to developers resulted in McMansions. This has been studied a lot and the results are clear.
One, directed policy is the fastest way to affordable housing.
Two, affordable doesn’t mean slums. This isn’t Section 8. This is the government setting policy that dense housing needs to be build near transit centers. Wow. What a concept. I would take it a step further and require certain building practices that increase the expected lifespan of the condo. It can be done without looking like a 70s prison.
Stop letting people build anywhere without penalty. Have defined city limits with dense housing and transit / walk ability to go with it.
So many things you can do we don’t do. More people should live aboard.
Quick note: right now, most of the high-cost areas being discussed have zoning rules prohibiting dense housing near transit centers. Defined city limits come with restrictions on how densely housing can be built.
So the starting point isn't introducing density requirements, it's simply removing density restrictions.
In a situation where housing supply is well below demand, obviously developers are going to prioritize the most profitable projects, i.e. “luxury” housing, as long as the imbalance persists. Since economists estimate the Bay Area needs to expand housing by 50% just to keep prices stable, that’s not happening anytime soon.
One of the most powerful tools is Scott Wiener’s SB35, which basically allows a developer to just ignore all the obstruction from NIMBYs and cities if the development has a certain proportion of affordable units (every building has its less desirable units, so they are it), as used here:
Obstructionism uses stalling tactics to make developers give up because their costs keep running while nothing happens. While a unit with 50% affordable housing may not be as profitable as a 100% market rate one, the option value of not having to deal with the red tape and rank hypocrisy is so high I expect it will be used increasingly, and there will probably be NIMBY efforts to overturn SB 35.
50% affordable housing in a single area is a model most cities have moved away from. There has been a substantial effort to distribute affordable housing geographically to reduce the clustering effects that lead to high crime and gang formation. This flies in the face of that.
I’m not saying it’s ideal, but in the face of entrenched NIMBYism, often masquerading as high-minded progressivism, something is better than paralysis.
You can let real estate developers build full-stop, but the town/city/state has to be prepared.
Schools need to handle
capacity, traffic routes need to be reimagined, law enforcement and other public services need to be made larger.
Oh yes. And build code enforcement needs to be on top of things.
Something like duplexes are really good, though. Aside from the headaches inherent to condos/HOAs, they don’t really drag down the value of properties.
There is one issue with the developers - they have less incentive to build enough homes to actually drive down prices via market forces because it means less profit for them.
If all red tape were removed, it would take years and years to bring down prices if you are just relying on private developers. It would happen eventually, but would take a very long time.
One possible solution here is for the government themselves to get involved and build homes, this will bring down prices much more quickly. Not as welfare or "low income" housing, but as an actual market intervention. This happened in Australia in the mid 20th century and had good results.
Developers are not a unified cartel, in fact they can be very far from it.
The problem is that developable land supply in expensive metros has become so small that a few large developers can corner the market; however, historically a good portion of housing stock comes from conversions or developments built by small time landlords (to go from one units to three on a plot of land, as an example). There was an article recently on how a lot of the new ADU units recently are actually being built by the homeowners who currently live on that land. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/business/economy/californ...
> There is one issue with the developers - they have less incentive to build enough homes to actually drive down prices via market forces because it means less profit for them.
People were building their own homes for centuries before there were "developers". I would argue that over-regulation has made it extremely difficult for small builders or family builders to attempt to build their own homes. Only large corporations with a legal team can run that gauntlet.
If regulation were reduced, we'd probably see a lot more small time builders, or people taking classes to learn how to build their own homes, cooperatives being set up (possibly organized through Y Combinator startups dedicated to that) where people could Amish-style bring a community together to build homes.
> they have less incentive to build enough homes to actually drive down prices via market forces because it means less profit for them
If a developer can replace a $5mm house with a 30-unit tower of $500,000 apartments, that's good business. Of course, if you put ten years of planning commissions and environmental reviews in between, the cost might need to be $1mm. And if the neighborhood blocks the building because it changes the character of the neighborhood, the entry cost will remain $5mm.
You state "let real estate developers build housing. Full Stop."
Using your car example, if we allowed auto-makers to do anything they wanted, FULL STOP, well...fuel standards would be much lower and we'd have even more work to do on carbon emissions. Furthermore, when you look at most of the massive cars built today, the majority of trips will have on average maybe 1.2-1.5 people in it. Most people choose their cars selfishly, with little regard for local emissions, asthma, emphysema, or the broader climate.
Should automakers be making these huge cars, unregulated and unfettered? Wouldn't it be better for the untold billions of people not yet living, if we put into place guidelines and rules to limit the inefficiency of laissez-faire vehicle production?
Now, let's think of housing. Does it make sense in San Fran to build more single-family homes, when the footprint of where houses can be built is so limited? Or, does it make sense to have 3-5 family units, allowing less-rich or less fortunate individuals to still buy in to the market? Will the developers that you're "just letting" do whatever they want build these more useful domiciles? Or will they build luxury homes for the rich with higher profits based on higher prices?
I think individuals owning pieces of the city is a luxury. It makes more sense to me to have 3-5 family units, or small condo or townhouse buildings. Will those be built by the laissez-faire free market? The outlook is not good.
The problem IMO is that "affordable housing" has become synonymous with "subsidized, below market rate housing". And of course that's extremely costly.
We're 1) not allowing ways to make housing cheaper and 2) not allowing building more. Which are the real ways to solve the problem sustainably.
Have you ever checked the paperwork required to actually ‘buy’ (really only rent most of the time) below market rate housing? It’s a nightmare. And even then, of course there is a lottery.
It seems like an excuse for paperwork and corruption, not a real attempt to house people and give more business to preferred vendors.
... or within an hour or two drive of those specific areas, which ends up being huge chunks of the state of California (and others), specifically anywhere within reasonable driving distance of the good jobs.
If only one or two cities were doing this, it wouldn't be a big deal. But almost all of them are.
There is such a thing as lot size and footprint in real estate and things are dramatically more affordable if they are built on 1/4 of the land. People used to live in small tenements but we’ve zoned such property out of existence. Just because people think 1500ft is a need these days doesn’t make it so.
> How about we just let real estate developers build housing.
Then you will end up with a situation like in Munich, where land is so expensive that the resulting housing is only affordable for the select few (20.000€ per m² in the former Paulaner brewery [1]).
The result of that is gentrification, aka low-wage employees getting priced out of the city - and the final result of that is effectively class warfare: the poor are stuck in substandard living situations (e.g. lower availability of public transport, lower available internet speed, lower availability of medical services, entertainment, ...) and have to waste hours each day on commuting on top of work, whereas the rich elites live a segregated life in luxury.
You are right. I don’t think people mean Cabrini Green when they say affordable housing. They mean 1000-1500 square foot normal houses, condos, and apartments, built in sufficient quantity to satisfy demand.
As it stands many California cities do not allow anything to be built at all or make it so hard that it can only be profitable to build higher margin luxury housing.
Definitely. Either you need more supply or less demand, and as we are making more people, demand is only going up in the near to medium term.
That said, whenever social housing comes up, I hear a lot about social housing in Austria and how it could be a model to follow. But I don't know the details.
> and as we are making more people, demand is only going up in the near to medium term.
Birth rates are below replacement in the US (and basically every other high income nation). What's driving demand is rural to urban migration. The 20 or so major metro areas are where all the good jobs are, so that's where people are going. This is one of the most powerful forces in the US post WW2, and is driving many of our political and economic failures.
>What's driving demand is rural to urban migration.
Then why is housing also rapidly increasing in price in rural areas?
(It's a rhetorical question - it's interest rates, speculation, and some city people wanting 2nd homes... the point is that urban migration is not the biggest issue regarding this current increase)
I wonder what percentage of USA used cars end up going overseas. I was in Tbilisi, Georgia (the country) a month ago and saw a car with a sticker for an auto dealer in Chattanooga, Tennessee (the US state).
Last I knew, Tennessee was one of the few states that does not do car inspections and didn't have mandatory insurance for a long time. Places like that encourage lots of beaters, of which I am a fan, being rather poor.
There's something else: all of what you say is true if and only if the governement doesn't do anything. In France we have subsidized HLMs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLM), and every city is supposed to have a certain percentage of habitation buildings be HLM, or pay a fine. I don't know if this system could be applied in the USA, though I could see progressives asking for it.
>How about we just let real estate developers build housing. Full stop.
I agree with the sentiment but you can't just let them flood in and completely remodel the neighborhood. Zoning has to be changed incrementally so that people get to adjust to the changes slowly otherwise they become full blown NIMBYs that reject everything.
> The problem here is that you can't really build "affordable housing" any more than you can build "affordable cars".
But you can? There wouldn’t be affordable taxis in Russia if there were no Kia Rio. You can’t just flood the market with government-mandated Mercedeses and expect good things to happen.
When I was in Russia I recall seeing "Chery" (Chinese car brand) as well at the very low end. I'm almost certain that one doesn't meet crash test or other requirements for the US market.
The article talks about a new statewide law, that prevents local zoning from banning duplex homes where single family homes are built.
So in the car analogy, this is like forcing all family cars to be minivans. Minivans are great, but they're clearly an added expense for a singleton or smaller or poorer family that would otherwise buy something smaller.
So, you are fairly directly creating "affordable" (relatively) housing by passing this law.
But, you seem to be turning this around and fighting against such laws. Isn't this contradictory?
They aren't forcing any single property to be a duplex. Instead they are preventing a ban on allowing the property to be a duplex. The property owner can still choose to build a single family home at their discretion.
The comparable car example would be preventing a local ordnance that bans minivans. The car buyer can choose a car or minivan based on their discretion if such a ban is prevented. Some localities don't like minivans for whatever reason and would like to ban them, thereby forcing everyone to buy cars.
> The problem here is that you can't really build "affordable housing" any more than you can build "affordable cars"
Of course you can. Ever been inside a commieblock in a former Soviet Union country? They're actually pretty sustainable and efficient, and were relatively cheap to construct. They're also ugly and lack natural light, and the stairwells reek of cigarettes etc. etc..
We haven't been tearing housing projects in the US down because they aren't sustainable, but because people don't like living in them, and they tend to have high crime rates. Since the Reagan administration we've decided the market can provide better options, and essentially banned new public housing. But has it provided better options? Does it feel like this is working?
The argument of the YIMBY/"fix zoning" team is that our current regulatory environment restricts what the market is allowed to provide.
Based on what I've witnessed in my NEC metro neighborhood, this is correct: politicians gain favor with their constituents by fighting tooth and nail against anything that would add neighbors. I see two primary approaches: directly restrict the housing units allowed on a given property, or increase the minimum space allowed by requiring a dedicated parking spot. Since fewer units have to pay for the overall land and construction costs, unit prices go up.
The market is delivering exactly the results that the government requires of them.
From your description, it sounds like the market is delivering the desired results within a given neighborhood, but failing to solve a tragedy of the commons between neighborhoods.
Right, I guess that's my central point. Capitalism is great for a lot if things, but "public-private partnerships" have proven worse than just letting public goods (like low income housing) be public.
I'm not sure you're using "affordable" the way it's used in California these days, though.
Affordable housing doesn't exclusively mean "the projects". It's also used to mean a certain percentage of units in a market-rate building will be designated as affordable. I believe in CA that means that renting/owning it can cost no more than 30% of household income for a renter/buyer that meets certain income requirements. It has nothing to do with the "used market". In many municipalities, there's a minimum affordable percent required by law for new development.
> You don't build affordable cars, you just build cars, which end up becoming "affordable" in the used car market. Ditto for housing.
This comparison is kinda weird, since nearly all cars depreciate in value, and quickly, while traditionally property values generally trend upward, modulo financial crises and large recessions.
> Not unless you do something like Singapore, which sells their affordable housing, permitting individual purchasers to leverage private market financing.
That's a thing in CA as well; it's called a Below Market Rate Ownership Program. If you poke around on Redfin or Zillow, you can often see listings that seem exceptionally low for the property and location, but when you read the description, they'll always mention "BMR" and "meeting income requirements".
> Advocating for "affordable housing" is really just an excuse to oppose housing as you can always claim that a project isn't sufficiently "affordable". This is basically how most residential projects end up getting stonewalled.
The developer and municipality negotiating the final count of affordable units sometimes does slow things down, but that is by no means the dominant cause of stonewalling here.
> How about we just let real estate developers build housing. Full stop.
That would help, certainly, but while studies have shown that just building market-rate housing does help relieve pressure off older & less-desirable housing stock, building both market-rate and affordable housing helps house lower-income folks a lot more, and faster. Consider that an affordable/BMR unit is available to a low-income household immediately after it goes on the market, while building solely market-rate units won't cause older homes to drop in price for some time, especially if the new market-rate housing doesn't cause all demand to be satisfied. (Consider that in places like SF it will take years [decades?] at the current new-building rate to satisfy even mid-pandemic demand.)
To summarize: we need to build a lot more, and we need to build it yesterday. Some of it should be designated "affordable" in order to add some equity to the equation while demand continues to outstrip supply. Existing property values will drop, but I (as a homeowner) will gladly take that hit if it means more people of all income levels can live here and feel secure in their housing.
When I lived in London, I was always impressed that there were "projects" in neighborhoods like Chelsea (possibly the most affluent in all of the UK).
After noticing that striking example, I've begun to see that pattern (although more subtly) in a lot of cities, including my own (Madrid, Spain).
I'm all for building affordable housing, but it seems to me that the idea of building affordable housing close more premium housing has been around for some time, and I'm not really sure what it has accomplished for anyone.
Are there examples of success in doing this, and what can be learnt from past failures?
The main purpose as I understand it is that it allows poorer students to go to the nicer schools. In the US, the schools that are 'good' are all in expensive areas.
"to have affordable housing built" presupposes a statist solution. I am not willing to have affordable housing built as presently defined, due to the amount of tax dollar waste, and actual results that I can see (in Seattle); but I'm totally willing for 90% of all zoning and related (parking minimums/environmental/etc) rules to be abolished, and having the amount of housing increase dramatically via market forces.
Hypocrisy? Perhaps but everyone has their best interests.
I know progressive people who are very particular about choosing a school for their kids. Not too many immigrants or students from "complex" backgrounds. Everyone wants an inclusive society but nobody wants their child to suffer from it in a world where education is a life or death situation.
"nless you are willing to have affordable housing built in your neighborhood."
There is no need for housing to be built in any specific location, or even density.
NYC has tons of density and it jumps from poor to rich. So does London. So does Hong Kong. And it's generally 'unaffordable'.
Paradoxically Texas has no density, and it's cheap.
'NIMBYISM' is mostly an issue for aspirational workers who want to live in aspirational places, but can't afford it - and that's an inherent function of the system: 'aspirational' places are exclusive. There is no escaping that.
Stabilizing housing prices with rational interest rates, tweaking some zoning laws, possibly some subsidies here and there, working with industry, some state level rent control (like Ontario/Quebec it works well) etc..
FYI here are apartments in Ontario, CA, East of LA:
If you want to live in Santa Monica, it's very expensive, it's not the governments job to provide you with that opportunity, it's their job to create a level playing field, to regulate smartly so that things don't get out of hand - not to make it so everyone gets to live exactly where they want.
He said "Texas", not Austin, TX. Not sure why anyone would want to live there anyway... went there to help my nephew move in to his apartment at UT Austin four years ago. Went down there a few times to hang out with him, not fucking impressive. At all.
I'll stick with Fort Worth, and Dallas if I really must.
If you can't afford rent in Fort Worth, drive 20 minutes up the road to Denton. There are 800 sq. ft. apartments there for $695.
At any rate, my personal taste in cities aside, here's the sad truth no one wants to confront: not everyone is going to get to live where they want in life, because not everyone is valuable enough to the economy to make enough money to live in the exclusive places. A cashier at McDonald's will never be as valuable as a developer for a startup company. It's isn't "unfair", it's a function of which adds more value to the market economy.
I know he said "Texas", that's my point. He didn't compare NYC to posh Austin or an upscale sector of Houston, he compared it to an entire state.
You could just as easily say "if the cost of living in Austin is too much for you, there are affordable places to live in New York" meaning North Tonawanda or Syracuse. Ridiculous.
I'm as left wing progressive as they come and I'm disgusted by the so called "liberal" municipal legislations in the Bay Area. Not only they are very conservative, they have an appalling lack of vision and imagination and display a total lack of leadership at every level.
This place with better leadership could be a paradise and we're stuck in a shitty suburb always stuck in traffic where there's nothing to do and bad architecture galore.
I guess people just take it for granted, but can you state a fundamental reason why people should be forced to live next to affordable housing?
What if I pay extra money to live in a nice location, say with an unobstructed view to a lake or whatever. Why should there be a law that decides my neighborhood has to be destroyed for the sake of "equality"?
Does equality (or "non-inequality") mean nobody is allowed to have anything that somebody else doesn't have? Because that sounds like full blown socialism to me.
What about San Francisco - I hear they have many homeless and people defecating on the streets. Should everybody be forced to live on streets with defecating people? What if people pay extra to live in a ice neighborhood?
I think you have to look at that the other way around. Why would you have an inherent right to stop somebody else doing something with their own property just because it happens to be near you?
Ultimately there are no inherited rights, only guns. So I am not sure what argument you are making? I thought you could come up with some fundamental principle, like "human society would be better if we all adhered to this rule, because bla bla and so forth".
As I stated elsewhere, I think communities or governments sell land under certain premises. For example (possibly) that people buying become part of the community and get a vote in further developments. That would be a reason why they would have "the right" to interfere.
You've listed personal actions. Allowing affordable housing to be built is a collective / political action. The equivalent would be something like "you cannot say you are against animal cruelty unless you support legislation against animal cruelty", and I think that's reasonable.
This doesn't really work. Nimby is "I want this, but not near me" but the examples you gave are "I want this but no one is selling this to me." The difference is that in the first scenario someone is presenting a solution and people are saying "no, not like that" and in the second scenario there's no solution presented and people would probably buy them if they existed (or were just as convenient).
I don’t drink coffee for other reasons but I do buy a lot of dark chocolate. Is it a known fact that cocoa is run by child labor? Even fair trade premium brands like Taza? I’m asking because I will give it up if so.
As for textiles, does this mean all/most brands? I think it is worth boycotting brands that have unethical business practices but I didn’t really realize this was still going on in 2021 to a large extent. I know that sounds ignorant but I guess I just never really looked into it and it definitely isn’t shared in my echo chamber.
I used to live across the street from a smaller NYCHA building. 5 stories, probably 20-40 units (new york city housing authority, pubic housing here).
It seemed perfectly fine. I never went in, but the outside was clean, well lit, and well maintained. My neighbors there were just like my neighbors anywhere else on the block.
There's certainly a lot of bad public housing in the us, but that's not an immutable quality of public housing, that's a policy choice made by politicians.
I'm sure it varies by region, but there many places along Appalachia where housing prices are basically the only buffer keeping fentanyl, meth, and guns at a distance. Yeah, it sucks because these are people in desperate circumstances exacerbated by distorted cost-of-living in the first place, but resolving the root cause doesn't magically undo the metastasis of crime and violence.
Edit: I'm not saying that there aren't smart ways to do this, and converting one single-family lot in SF to a duplex certainly doesn't destroy the neighborhood. I am saying that some people have seen things they don't want in their backyard, and some people haven't.
This is one of the worst aspects of American culture, IMO. Instead of tackling the issues of poverty, we just use the market to segregate the poor and their problems. It ends up creating a fractious, rancorous, and mutually distrustful society.
Because these restrictions are a net-negative on the entire economy of the United States. If no metro areas blocked housing between 1964 and 2009, GDP would be 50% higher than it is today. (https://www.nber.org/papers/w21154?utm_campaign=ntw&utm_medi...)
"The authors estimate that if New York, San Francisco, and San Jose had housing regulations—rules about where you can build, how tall you can build, how much parking you need, and so on—that didn’t protect cute houses and instead were equivalent to the median US city in the period between 1964 and 2009, the US economy would be 9.5% bigger right now, or grow 0.21% more annually. That’s would be a big deal for wages, for the public debt, and for prosperity in general." (https://qz.com/402763/new-york-and-san-fransiscos-insane-hou...)
The problem with this is that no matter how much you tell people that they need to live in tiny concrete boxes and like it because it'll make more money for Bezos and co, they're not going to like it, which is why attempts to push it anyway have to be so anti-democratic. Sure, people are all for economic growth if it improves their actual quality of life, but a huge part of that is actually having a decent home and the anti-NIMBY campaigns involve abandoning trying to give that to people in favour of "the economy" and more money for housing developers.
Rent prices in cities where building small apartments is legal indicate that a large number of people want to live in small apartments if it is in a desirable location. For example I share 55m^2 with my wife and we like it. Commutes are short, super markets, cinemas, etc are close by. We don't have a car.
that's actually not small (~600 ft²), being plenty for 2 people (having done this myself), and even a third if they were a child.
without even going tiny home crazy, for a single person in an urban neighborhood, a well-optimized 250 ft² (~23m²) apartment is plenty (i've done this too). if stores are plentiful and close, you don't need much storage, which is how all the excess square footage is eaten up in most homes.
It is small for people buying 200m^2 plus a yard and a garage in suburbia. While I was single I lived on 25m^2 too. I once spent half a year in Tokyo on 5m^2. That was fine too.
That is a stupid (as in based on lack of information and wrong assumptions) take. You can have denser, more vertical housing that is pleasant to live in and very beautiful. Think Paris, or any large Italian city. We have multi story tall buildings with commercial space at the street level, the buildings are usually very nice to look at (better than any single family home I've owned or seen in the Bay Area) and are more conducive to meeting your neighbors and generating a lively community.
They are also better for the environment as they are more energy efficient, produce neighborhood that don't require cars for every errand and reduce the need for expanding the city footprint which lead to public transport being more effective.
That’s been the mentality in SF for years — “we don’t want to become nyc”. And so what happens? Prices skyrocket, the people who made the city interesting and serve its needs are pushed out, and only the rich enjoy it. The young generation as a whole has little hope of home ownership, while the top who work in well paid jobs reap all the rewards. Those well paid jobs are where it’s expensive to live, so it’s a catch 22. It doesn’t create a balanced society, and in fact just further stresses the differences between the haves versus the have nots. At it’s worst the wealth inequality turns into tinder for moving beyond culture wars into actual war or revolution.
The really frustrating part being they don't need to become Manhattan to keep prices under control. If the areas zoned for single family in the Bay had been raised to 3-4 stories and multi-unit 30 years ago you could have tripled or quadrupled the number of people living in San Francisco without the need for any high rises. Human-scale neighbourhoods would still dominate the city. All the growth of the city could have been easily absorbed without high rises if mixed use mid rise development was allowed.
The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, but the next best time is now and California is finally deciding to plant some trees.
But the hilarious part about "Manhattanization" is that these people actually think they'll become the cultural, financial, media, and entertainment capital of the world by accident.
Why do someone need to move to SFO in the first place? Jobs are plentiful nowadays everywhere. So it’s not that for tech jobs one need to move to SFO. Yes one may want to live in Hong Kong , Singapore , Dubai , Mumbai , Paris or SFO but like all over the world certain places have higher per square foot cost than other places.
I'm not so sure. I used to party in SF and it was indeed vibrant, but that was more than seven years ago. The tech scene has pushed all the eclectic, weird-haircut, artsy, broke-but-beautiful, etc, scene to places where it is actually able to function economically, with some people telling me about Brooklyn being a better place for that.
Certainly the last few times I've been there, before the pandemic, it was like entering the matrix, you get on a ferry and you show up at the Ferry Building, and boom, you're inside the internet, you went through the monitor of your computer. Ads for ad platforms everywhere, startup credit cards, everything targeting startup founders, and you know what that means? Fucking crazy abusive inescapable prices. Even at the MacDonald's, my best recollection is $8.30 for a quarter-pounder. No wonder you would get assistance from the City if you made less than $120,000.
Those slums are actually remarkably better than "poblaciones callampa" (shroom villages) that popped up in the middle of nowhere in the rest of South America. Those favelas have water, electricity, and solid brick construction. And they're painted pretty colors, what's not to like? The real slums of the world where people who have nowhere to go come together and squat are really much less comfortable than that.
The youngsters are free to live elsewhere no? I just purchased my first home earlier this year. Obviously I had no choice but to purchase a home in a city/neighborhood I could afford. Why can’t others do the same?
A number of different factors that vary for people depending on circumstances. My wife is in nursing school. Sure, we could move to some rural town in Montana when she finishes, but its not reasonable if the closest hospital is 4 hours away. Some of the more affordable places just don't have good access to jobs people want or are qualified for.
I myself work full time and am going to school for Software Engineering. Right now job prospects in where I would like move don't look great since the last job fair I attended, I got the feeling most companies are planning to axe remote work ASAP. Which then limits my ability to move in the market place for jobs.
Others are free to do the same, except that they have to continue to commute to where the jobs are. If they're lucky they might live on the fringes of BART but increasingly people are just condemned to hours-long gridlocked freeway commutes to get to their $17/hr job in SF. To recover any kind of decent quality of life you're talking about moving to a different region/state.
Firefighters typically work 24 on, 72 off. My family members in firefighting tell me it’s shocking how many of them live in Reno, where they can afford a house. If there is another huge earthquake, they won’t be able to drive in to help.
$17/hr is essentially an unskilled labor rate in 2021. Why not make a move? $15-17/hour jobs are pretty plentiful in other places with a far lower COL than SFO.
Many people have deep ties to a place — as caregivers to aging parents, as members of diaspora enclaves, or as young people willing to struggle through a few years of hardship for the chance of success. Many others have seen the writing on the wall and moved elsewhere, and more power to them. It's a question of whether individual solutions (people can just move somewhere else) compose into societal solutions (we need lots of "unskilled" labor or our cities will collapse into chaos within days).
If you're making $17/hr in an unskilled job in SF, and move to somewhere cheap, you're probably now making $12/hr. Maybe that change is worth it, maybe not.
i live in des monies iowa. the local burger king is starting at 15/hr. if you can live on 17 in SF, then 15 here will seem like riches) i know of plenty of other jobs that pay more as well with little experience needed.
That's great to hear that people are able to earn a living wage where you are.
You cannot live on $17/hr in SF. Your post-tax income wouldn't even cover the the rent of a studio apartment. Not sure how you'd pay for food and transportation on top of that. Let alone actually doing anything fun that would make it worth living here.
That's 40 hrs/wk, of course. Many people end up working twice that, or more, across several jobs, in order to make ends meet here. And at that point I wonder why they stay.
You're a youngster that purchased your first home?
The question is not why others can't; the question is how did you do it.
Please elaborate about your background, education, geography, occupation, whether you have a partner, children, medical issues, and what kind of home you purchased (is this a tent you set up in the woods, or a single-family house), how far it is from work, and how you get there.
Also please include any assistance you got from your family before getting to that point, including contributions to the downpayment, owning property where you could live without paying rent (or allowing you to live comfortably rent-free at their place), co-signing on the mortgage and/or student loans, paying for your education, buying your first car, etc.
Usually, the answer to your question is "because not everyone's parents are well off"; but let's hear your success story.
Can you elaborate and explain this further to a curious non-american?
So, sounds like the problem is in transportation: if train ride from a low-cost area to a high cost area would take minutes and cost almost nothing, then the problems you mentioned would not be an issue, right?
So, why try to fight the laws of economics? Why not let the rich where they want, and let the poor commute to high-job areas by solving the transportation problem?
Why there is so much ado and drama? What am I missing here?
- The basic geography of the Bay Area: it's big, it's polycentric, it's hilly, there's a huge body of water on the direct route between many origin/destination pairs. The train ride can take hours and can actually cost quite a bit.
- America's inability to build mass transit cost-effectively. At this point train rides along BART are mostly between high-cost areas, and discussions of expanding the system even a little more have price tags in the tens of billions, and timelines of a decade or more. Besides, the radius of BART is about as wide as it ought to be — it should be filling in, not sprawling out, and that requires upzoning the areas along the train to be effective.
Various people have proposed it. The most recent one I know of was Larry Page.
It'd never pass environmental muster, though. You've got multiple protected species of wildlife in the marshlands, shipping channels, salt flats, whole cities whose selling point is that every house is waterfront property, etc.
Some of this is ancedotal from a coworker who has a friend who works in a "support role" in silicon valley. That being something like the guy who keeps the AC going, janitor or working in a FAANG coffee shop. While there is some transportation, the issue is, some of this friends in this role, have to take a 1-2 hour commute (using public transit) since they have been priced out that far.
That's what a lot of them do. I live in Gilroy, and my neighbor is an HVAC guy that moved from San Jose to Gilroy, and only services as far north as Morgan Hill.
He has more work than he'd ever be able to fill, but now has the work/life balance to actually see his kids, too.
The neighbor one more house down is a welder, same deal.
The family at the end of the street, another trade, another SF/SJ escapee.
Hell, I work in tech directly, and am pleased to say that 90% of my clients are within a 20 minute drive. I don't earn a FAANG salary, but I don't need to, either, and I am 100% certain (and I say this non-judgmentally, just a statement of fact) that I actually enjoy my daily life more than many of my former compatriots.
Because poor people often live together with our poor people and rely on each other, and the question of "why don't you, your partner, your parents who help you look after your children, and everyone else don't just get a job in the same area that won't pay much less than what all of you are getting now?" has many answers.
One is that minimum wage falling way, way below living wage ensures that the employers can always pay lower for even low-paying jobs.
Another is that perverse zoning laws often don't allow people to work where they live.
Because of NIMBY. Basically the rich people at the city's center won't let regulations pass that would increase density and therefore more poor people living around them. They like the current status quo because "they got theirs". They limit what kind of housing can be built, how tall it can be, etc and price out all but the richest land developers who in turn charge ultra high rent for the limited housing. I don't even think they necessarily need to build "poor" housing as much as loosening regulations and allow other than historic buildings to exist.
> Why not let the rich where they want, and let the poor commute to high-job areas by solving the transportation problem? Why there is so much ado and drama? What am I missing here?
You're missing racism and greed.
"We don't want those people in our neighborhood" has been the reason for not allowing fast, dense, efficient, usable public transit to exist in the US.
As for the basic laws of economics, they explain that the benefits of public transit are a positive externality; and therefore, public transit has to be subsidized by the government to actually serve the needs of the people. "Not on my tax dime!", says the US. "Who would even use this, poor people? Of color, even? Not in my backyard, and not with my taxes!"
In the same breath, we pay for the ever-expanding highway systems which don't solve the problem, but without which all the Teslas and Porsches would not be of much use.
On top of it, the higher-paid peons (tech workers) can get to feel superior to the people they depend on for living (service workers) by wasting fewer hours of their lives in traffic each day.
See comments in this discussion saying "I don't believe anyone is entitled to live within a short commute from work".
San Mateo County rejected BART expansion when it was initially constructed, which means that essentially all suburban rail traffic into San Francisco goes through the same tunnel under the Bay, and trains are regularly packed to the gills already.
You are not missing much, it's a systemic issue of zero public transportation, constantly growing demand, broken housing market, zoning, and decades of scalability problems.
Every city relies on a bunch of cheap labor. Dishwashers, janitors, cashiers, cleaners, landscapers, baristas, gig workers, and on and on. Is it healthy for a city to need all of these people while denying them a place in it? We have this gross dynamic of essentially telling large swaths of people that they're around only to be the help and that they don't belong.
There is a surplus of cheap labor in the United States (at least up until recently), for the amount of goods and services produced. You may not believe it, but it is true. We have people willing to take jobs at low wages (again, up until recently) because of the growth of automation, outsourcing of low wage jobs to countries with even more labor surplus, and immigration. All these things, I will say off the bat, being good things that are producing good for people. (aside from the question, how many people can our planet sustain)
"How can you tell people they are not welcome to live in the cities where they work" is a nice feel good thing to say, but those are feelings. Liberal city people seem to care a lot about feelings. But what matters, and how people actually behave, is what options and choices and reality people have to decide based on. And I might just point out, you probably don't care equally as much about the young families who are in the tech industry who "get told they can't afford to buy a house where they work". Anyway.
No public policy can escape the fundamental demographic truth that we have a surplus of labor, and as cruel as it may sound, as long as people are willing to take the job for less, people will be coming to work in the Bay Area and yet not be able to live there.
Liberal city policymakers believe that forcing cities to pay living wages or mandating housing will "make people feel welcome and that they belong" but there is no escaping these fundamental forces of wage depression due to labor surplus. Then trying to "fix it" by guaranteeing people housing or forcing affordable housing to be true through rent control etc. just creates more unintended side effects elsewhere. It creates housing shortages, sky high rents where not rent controlled, and protects the very NIMBYism that this article is about (where liberal people, believing their responsibility to be fulfilled through tampering with the market, now refuse to give on actual meaningful changes). And most of all, it makes those who had the good luck to get in, better off than those who weren't chosen to receive those benefits.
As much as good intentions are nice, they rarely lead to good outcomes when applied at that level of thinking.
GP posed a question about why affordable housing in any particular place should be a goal. I offered an answer.
The market price of labor, or of anything else, does not come to us as if handed down by God. It is the result of a social calculation reflecting the things our society values and how much it values them. The fact that MANGA engineers are paid more than teachers is informed by how much we've decided teachers are worth. If everybody woke up tomorrow and decided teachers were more important than we thought today, then teachers would probably get paid more. Our societal values feed into our prices. In this way, we are morally culpable for the consequences of this calculation, and it is incumbent upon us to change things of the results are unjust. For example, by taking a bunch of money from rich people and giving it to poor people. Or by creating conditions for widely-available affordable housing. And I'm not just saying we "guarantee" the housing. We have the state go in and build it.
By the way, I live in Seattle, which raised it's minimum wage to $15 a few years ago to much doomsaying. Research after the fact found no effect on unemployment. It begins to seem to me like the style of laissez-faire economics that have dominated politics for decades (which I recognize may not have much to do with academic economics) is full of shit.
And, yeah, you better believe I care about feelings. Feelings are the filter through which all human experience flows. The economy exists for us, not us for it What good is strong growth if the system that brings it about makes us all miserable?
>By the way, I live in Seattle, which raised it's minimum wage to $15 a few years ago to much doomsaying. It begins to seem to me like the style of laissez-faire economics that have dominated politics for decades (which I recognize may not have much to do with academic economics) is full of shit.
Well, in theory if raising the minimum wage did not result in unemployment it means that the real wage that these people deserve is higher than the old minimum wage and that employers abused their powers to pay people less. The abstraction of a free market lets people pretend that violence and coercion do not exist. Safety from those things only exists to a limited degree and only because the rule of law made it possible.
We live in a democratic system in which the rules say when a majority of people (through their representatives) believe that a change to some policy may make things better, the majority can implement those rules.
Now, you can go out and convince people that doing something like this will be in their best long term interests, and by all means do so. We have had campaigns in our history that convinced us in a phase change that, for example:
-- smoking was bad
-- food and drug regulation was effective
-- we should have traffic and road safety standards
-- the list goes on and on
And in many cases, after such laws were passed, everyone realized that yes, it was better and we wouldn't change it back. Let's campaign for higher teacher pay. Yes. Let's advocate and convince people that more housing is needed. Great, I agree. But let the democratic process back it.
Now another way is if you change the rules by which democracy operates to encode a general ability for "enlightened fiat" to enable some group that knows better to decide that the things it favors are positive and should be done even if many / most people disagree. This has not gone so well in the past. Just because you used it in a way that you agree with, who is to guarantee that others with not so good intentions (or even just competence) also pass different laws that aren't so good. As a certain unpleasant senator says, "you may come to regret it sooner than you realize."
What I dislike is when people believe they're right from a moralistic point of view — on a very particular and self-selected cause — take it upon themselves to experiment using other people's lives, and add layer upon layer of tinkering onto the systems by which many people have learned to live effectively, trying to solve certain emotionally-touching problems but creating more as they go because the depth of their solution never keeps up with the depth of reality and exceptions to the solution. Don't discount the fact that the system that we have today produced the greatest prosperity and increase in standards of living for many, many people, before you tinker with it.
I don't disagree that some of your goals may be good. In fact I think climate change may be such a problem that needs fiat to overcome popular will. Or public health crises, for example.
But I don't know all the side effects and unintended consequences. For that reason, I don't support you (for example) just being able to say, "I know this is for the greater good so we should put this exception into place against people's democratic choices desiring not to do that thing." Raising a minimum wage definitely does not rise to the level of governing by fiat. And I don’t know how you decided that one issue was the one to invoke this power on. For now, go out and convince people that they should adopt it by an overwhelming majority. Then I will have no criticism.
If they don’t wish to adopt it, maybe it is the fate of the US that democracy cannot survive into middle age and still make the right decisions when people get old, wealthy, and complacent. But let people decide that America has declined because of it and it’s in their best interest to do so.
People are still coming to the US to work for minimum wage. Why are you second guessing that they find it still worth it?
Finally, your example of Seattle minimum has been shown to be full of holes. Just because Seattle's bubble could do it (so far) and not show noticeable unemployment doesn't mean it holds in general. Just ask everyone whose jobs were outsourced to India whether a lower relative wage provides a large incentive to shift labor away from a place with high costs. It's patently apparent it does have effects.
I don't think the parent was advocating for doing things against the democratic process. Quite the opposite, as statements such as (emphasis mine) "If everybody woke up tomorrow and decided teachers were more important than we thought today" would seem to suggest. Much of your post seems to be attacking a straw man.
I think it's pretty disgusting that we place the economy and capitalism above the emotional well-being of the people. As the parent said, the economy works for us, not the other way around. It exists only insofar as it provides people with prosperity. If it can't do that, then it's useless. Unfortunately the people in power tend to benefit from it the most (or are heavily influenced by people who it benefits most), and many others are taught to believe in the power of capitalism even when it's not in their best interests to do so.
I can't understand how this diatribe is related to housing. The NY times article mentioned by GP shows clearly "liberal cities" don't give a shit about mandating housing anymore than "conservatives cities" do; it's a false choice, Americans as whole want to preserve housing as an investment asset class. Every decision flows downward from there, and any other division is simply a distraction from the actual issue.
Housing may be a basic need, but ample housing with a convenient commute is not. Proponents of change need to do a better job of filtering out their obvious sympathies towards wealth redistribution, and stating the problem more acutely. I'm not here to give every dishwasher and barista a 10-minute walking commute and a living room with a view of the city center.
> "How can you tell people they are not welcome to live in the cities where they work" is a nice feel good thing to say, but those are feelings.
If you need it written in selfish then the issue is that eventually businesses will struggle to attract these sorts of workers and/or those workers will start living rough or sleeping in their car as a workaround. This causes hard to measure inefficiencies or other social problems and this all increases cost to business or other economic or social costs.
The wheels of the economy function much better if everybody has affordable, secure shelter with a reasonable commute. I don't see how its "feelings" state this, its just basic modelling.
>outsourcing of low wage jobs to countries with even more labor surplus,
I have to admit, globalization has winners and losers. The nation as a whole is winning but a small portion is losing out and the worst part is that we blame them for that.
Personally I'd say the problem is if someone is telling you that you are not allowed to build additional housing units on your property.
Zoning should allow for variety and growth. Japan, for example, does a much better job of this than the U.S. Basic residential zoning allows for multi-unit and mixed use buildings. This is more flexible over time. Cities evolve as the decades pass, they need room to breathe. Single family single use zoning doesn't allow this.
It's a major fail when a society can't provide housing for its people. Seems that a lot of Millennials are concerned about this.
Its something that sucks it has to be done a state level. I mean, that is how most decisions are. It sucks any decision sometimes has to be made at the national level. But NIMBYism has a strong influence in municipalities. I would argue, the people who have the time and resources to go to city council meetings and voice their opinions, are the people who are NIMYBYs. Kind of hard to go to city council meetings or have influence if you don't live in the city (think of an outlying town/city of San Fran), or you have to commute 2-4 hours a day to and from work, or your holding down two jobs to keep your head above water.
The problem is that the municipalities are beholden only to the people who live in them, and the people who live in them tend to be pretty selfish when it comes to housing policy. The state can take a bit of a broader view. If it were left up to the municipalities to fix, it wouldn't get fixed.
One could certainly argue that that's fine, and that property owners should get to decide every detail of housing policy for their municipality. I don't personally agree with that, but I can understand the argument.
If the government was restricting the supply of cars / TVs / medicine, etc, causing the prices to be high, you could make a similar argument: why not buy the older car / smaller TV / medicine with more side-effects that you can afford?
That might not be bad advice at an individual level. But it still seems more optimal to allow people to produce more supply, so more people can get what they want and/or spend less of their income to do so.
For housing people generally want access to good jobs, shorter commutes, more space, and lower cost. Those all exist on a spectrum, but more supply would allow, overall, more people to get more of those things.
From a philosophical point of view, there's the question of who has a legitimate interest in what can be built... there's the property owner, the people who own houses in the neighborhood, and the people who work there but commute. There's the people who live in the general metro area, where the overall supply/demand will affect prices.
You could even consider the people left behind by "economic geography" - as fewer people are employed in agriculture etc, there are less jobs in rural areas, and as knowledge work becomes more important more jobs are created in large cities with liquid job markets (which can support greater labor specialization).
I think there's a case to be made that all these levels have some reasonable interest in the outcome and not just the local municipal level. And particularly at the local level there may be some bad incentives - approving more housing may generate local downsides like traffic, while not moving the needle too much on prices which may be determined more by the metro area as a whole.
Housing policy doesn't just affect the people who live in a place, but also the people who work in a place.
Those people still have skin in the game, but they aren't allowed to vote on that place's housing policy. Consider that the cashier at your grocery store might not be able to afford to live in your city, and has to drive an hour each way to work every day. They have no say in that matter.
(And no, they can't just get a job closer to home. There isn't enough demand for grocery store cashiers there for every cashier-commuter, more or less by definition.)
Cities are conducive to human flourishing. It is good for people to have access to them. They can't be made from whole cloth; only a few sites have the potential to grow as cities in the short or medium term. Many people prefer suburbia, and that's fine, but it's not fine that they insist on having their suburbia on the only possible city sites.
I mean it doesn’t NEED to be expensive it just is. The folks living there don’t want to change their local zoning laws. I don’t really feel like I should have a say if I don’t live there.
The burden of proof for an argument should come from the side which is trying to make a change.
I think we take hyperlocalism too far. If Americans shouldn’t have a say in California and Californians shouldn’t have a say in Palo Alto, then why not have each block be sovereign? Or maybe each house?
> If Americans shouldn’t have a say in California and Californians shouldn’t have a say in Palo Alto
"A say" in what subject? Currency used? Sales tax paid? Laws regarding civil rights? Laws regarding non-compete clauses in employment contracts?
We have a complicated legal and governing system that has worked out which subjects are covered at which levels of government. This is pretty much the same with all developed countries. Debating it in black and white terms as you present is not a very reasonable way to look at the issue.
I feel like you're making a related mistake: just because we've worked out which subjects are covered at which levels of government[0], that doesn't mean we've done a good job of it, or that it's actually working.
[0] And I don't think we have! This seems to be a constant struggle, with municipalities suing states, the feds suing states, states suing municipalities...
This extreme of "no zoning" doesn't work because of the negative externalities you can create, affecting your neighbors
Simply put: if you get to build your perfect house, with a nice mountain view, the neighbor west of you could build a building the size of the empire state building, and so does your neighbor east of you. Now you don't have any sunlight. The neighbor south of you could build a smelly & noisy factory, and the one north of you could build a nightclub.
But zoning itself also creates negative externalities.
I think some zoning does make sense. Totally agreed that we don't want a factory and a nightclub right next to everyone's homes.
But I don't believe that anyone is entitled to their view. The idea that you can buy a plot of land and somehow "own" the line-of-sight between that plot of land and a set of mountains that might be dozens of miles away is just unreasonable, and is not in the public interest.
In your extreme example, it would suck to lose that view, but consider that, after those skyscrapers get built, your property value would likely shoot through the roof. Take that windfall and build a new house on some other land with a great view, land that's less desirable for high-density housing.
But since local landowners consistently choose the most restrictive zoning possible to the detriment of society with things like urban sprawl, car-centric development and locking the poor and youth out from economic opportunity local control simply can't continue. It's completely unsustainable both economically and environmentally. Local control means wealthy control.
Yep. Ask people who grew up in suburbia and who have only ever ridden public transit when on vacation what they want, and they'll probably tell you more low density neighborhoods, bigger roads, large shopping centers (but not malls since those became un-cool), etc.
When left to their own devices, these people will inevitably take the worst parts of north Jersey and Long Island and implement them wholesale because it's all they've ever known.
The affordable areas low-wage workers could previously live in just 15 minutes away have gentrified over the years, but local homeowners have no real reason to care that their cashier has a 2+ hour round-trip commute. As long as they can still get their groceries, it doesn't affect them. But, crucially, while the employees have to spend a shit ton of time and money getting to and from work every day and likely spend a fair amount of their paycheck in the city they work in (and pay a fair amount in taxes to it as a result), they have no say in its governance since they have to vote where they're registered to.
Local governance utterly fails in these situations, regional planning requires state involvement when municipalities repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot for decades.
And of course, as we hurtle towards a climate catastrophe, we must not forget that most people who commute long hours to and from work everyday drive cars - single occupant vehicles - because the only other way to get there involves an hour+ Greyhound ride (because they travel between multiple independent transit systems). Regional planning is needed to address these issues; the American worship of single-family zoning completely undermines any progress towards meaningfully addressing climate change.
We’ve known for years US central planning is in fact a kleptocracy [1]. So, “no”. Locals can always throw a monkey wrench in any plan a far off bureaucrat makes for them, irrespective of wealth and power disparities. There are countless real world examples of this.
In addition, why should the wealthy be the only ones to object to high density housing as the one and only prescribed solution to housing affordability? Couldn’t the root of the housing affordability problem lie elsewhere, e.g. in investors who lack long-term residency parking their cash in inflation resistant assets? How about the lack of high speed rail networks, or human overpopulation in general?
My counter argument would be that the policies as they currently stand are policies that affect people who have less legal footing in committing change in that area. Someone who works in San Francisco as a janitor, but lives in San Jose, doesn't get a vote in San Francisco elections. The people who do get to vote are least affected. So now the local problem as external consequences, which kind of punches a hole in it is entirely a local problem. Depending on how far you want to go with considering something local.
EDIT: Another thought. And people the person works in SF, but lives elsewhere, who doesn't get to vote, but still have skin in the game for policy in SF.
People have answered your question but I'll add another aspect: It creates positive feedback loops. The poor get poorer because they have to live where lower paying jobs are. The "rich" get richer because only they can live where the higher paying jobs are. This isn't a society we want.
There needs to be some sort of balance I think. There are limits to either extreme. Imagine if we forced, say, Hawaii to accommodate everyone who wanted to live there? There are limits on the carrying capacity of an area. I would love to let the market sort it out(sans all subsidies, property tax schemes(ahem, prop 13), etc), but I'm afraid the market will push things just to the south of being livable, and we'll build cities with poor quality of life.
That said, ecological concerns will drive more and more of us to the cities, and we need to accommodate those folks. I hope we figure out a way to do it while maximizing quality of life for everyone.
>Maybe I’m missing something. I’m open to new ideas here but I really don’t get it.
Is the concept of "it would take 3 hours one way to commute to work which isn't done remotely" really that hard to grasp?
Or is the concept of relocation being difficult, costing a lot of money, and sometimes not feasible because it means other family members losing jobs too hard to get?
I'm not even getting into the completely ephemeral ideas, like being priced out of the city you grew up in and have family + social connections in. The two above would be a good place to start.
I still say relocate. There’s literally not another option and that’s what I would do.
The alternative is what? Struggle and live in your car for years hoping that state legislation will magically build enough affordable units?
You can’t always legislate every problem away. Life is hard and filled with struggle. I do not buy the idea that anyone is entitled to live anywhere and be able to afford rent and have a short commute. We may as well just ask for a utopia.
Sharing your living space with a dozen people. Either family or random roommates.
What kind of economic background do you have to be asking this kind of question?
> I do not buy the idea that anyone is entitled to live anywhere and be able to afford rent and have a short commute.
I don't buy the idea that anyone is entitled to enjoy the benefits of essential infrastructure (which includes groceries, deliveries, restaurants, stores, etc) if it requires the people that power it to spend hours each day in commute.
>We may as well just ask for a utopia.
High-density, mixed use walkable neighborhoods aren't "utopia", it's how the cities always have been. Suburban cars-first developments and residential-only zoning are not some sort of natural order.
Speaking of cars, without tax-funded highways, the suburban sprawl would not exist.
NYC is far from utopia, but you can rent a studio today within 8 miles of Wall Street for $1400, in a safe neighborhood, next to public transit that will get you there in under an hour, with groceries and restaurants and stores in walking distance.
> Better to fix the supply side than just say "move to texas".
but "move to texas" is a solution. The "fixing supply" hasn't worked, for a long time, so why are people lamenting that instead of making "move to texas" easier?
It's not that increasing the supply "hasn't worked"- we straight up don't do it at all. It's been illegal to build anything besides single-family homes in most of the USA since the ~1950s. See SF, LA, Seattle... hugely popular metro areas where most of the city can only legally be a house.
Single family homes are inefficient! Compare us to Japan or China where density is legal, the difference is night and day.
In addition, it's very exclusionary to tell the less well-off to move away. Why embrace exclusivity when we can build more housing?
"Move to Texas" is a solution in your head, not in real life.
Let's see what one needs to do to move:
You need to find a job in Texas. That means in-person interview for service workers. That means also losing current job, because you need to be away from your job for interviews, and those jobs don't have vacations.
So, to boot, you need:
* Enough money to keep your family afloat while you're looking for a job
* Money to pay for hotel while you're interviewing
* Money to pay for a deposit on a new lease in Texas
* Money to cover breaking the lease in your hometown
* Money to go back and forth and actually move your possessions and family (several thousand dollars to either move things or sell/buy everything)
Oh wait, your service job wasn't enough to provide for your family to begin with. Your spouse had to work too, and either or both of you had a "side gig", i.e. a second job to make ends meet.
New task:
* Have spouse find a job or two in the same area
* Find a second job for yourself in Texas that works with the hours and commute for your first job
* Have money to cover the deficit in the meantime
Oh wait, but you also have children. How do you have kids if you're both working?
* Have money to pay for childcare
Haha, of course not. You can't afford that; yours and your spouse's parents were helping out. New quest:
* Also move them to Texas, find places for them to live at, jobs to work at (retirement? Hahahaha), and so on.
But wait! Everyone in your family has health issues, because working those jobs isn't healthy. Your job was crappy, but at least it had health insurance.
* Have enough money to cover all medical expenses out of pocket while you were looking for jobs
Oh, and you're still paying out loans on your vehicle that you need to get to work (and maybe a degree that didn't pan out), plus credit card debt (because you never have enough money to pay it all off)
* Have enough money to cover all the debt that you have because you don't have the money to pay for things that you need to make money
Too bad though, it turns out that you took a risk looking for jobs in a different city that didn't work out. The jobs in Texas that you can find are available because they don't pay enough for the locals to take them. Go figure, minimum wage in Texas is half that of your home state.
Now you're out of money, out of work, without insurance, and with an employment gap what makes it harder to find work.
Having lost medical care, your health issues get worse, making it harder to find work.
So, what exactly should California do to make the above "move to Texas" easier?
One problem is these areas are adding jobs but not housing. SF added 10 jobs for every house they built in the last decade, that gaurantees people want to live there and there wont be enough houses, ergo price increases.
Extreme example, but by pushing to the extreme we might illuminate something. Say you are born in Hawaii. One day you realize you can't afford to live in Hawaii. You're screwed.
Well you see at one time in history colonials came to America, killed and genocided the original land dwellers, kidnapped, raped and enslaved people to work on land furthering their profits, passed on their stolen land and wealth through generations while segregating various groups impacted by their transgressions, and to this day ask questions like you. All the while, many of them own multiple properties, have a plethora of unused land, continually abuse their positions as landlords, drive up housing prices to prices that are not affordable, and try to ensure that land is no longer available to settle for those who are simply looking for the basic necessities of safe shelter in life without trying to find ways to continue to exploit those they consider weak.
> passed on their stolen land and wealth through generations while segregating various groups impacted by their transgressions, and to this day ask questions like you.
Im a first generation American and my mother was a refugee. Get off your fucking high horse and go virtue signal somewhere else.
People like you have no idea how the world works. You so desperately need to be seen as a “good person” it’s pathetic.
> Im a first generation American and my mother was a refugee. Get off your fucking high horse and go virtue signal somewhere else
Im really glad it worked out for her, but that doesn't mean that problems don't exist nor that you or your family didn't contribute to the issue. Many people admire the same billionaires and are "happy" willful slaves. What seems to piss off the happy willful slave more than anything is truth.
> People like you have no idea how the world works.
Apparently you do? Care to explain it to me? Want to tell me that people don't get exploited and they should just change their attitude?
> but that doesn't mean that problems don't exist nor that you or your family didn't contribute to the issue.
Wow that's some incredible mental gymnastics you're performing there. So despite the fact that my family has never "killed and genocided the original land dwellers, kidnapped, raped and enslaved people" somehow my family and I still contribute to the issue.
> Apparently you do? Care to explain it to me? Want to tell me that people don't get exploited and they those that are should just change their attitude?
Sure. Exploitation and market forces are a part of human society. Baselessly calling everybody evil without offering any sort of solution does nothing except help convince yourself that you're some kind of martyr.
People absolutely are exploited in every society that has ever existed. We're talking about the housing crisis in California cities here. People are not entitled to live in the most expensive, overcrowded cities in the world with low rent and short commutes. Somehow you've dumbed down a complicated issue into a blanket condemnation of the entire country.
There is an abundance of work available right now. Many jobs can be done remotely, especially the tech jobs in SV.
> So despite the fact that my family has never "killed and genocided the original land dwellers, kidnapped, raped and enslaved people" somehow my family and I still contribute to the issue.
Yes, that is what I'm saying. Many people participate in this system of oppression without intentionally doing so. It is very difficult to avoid, but even many products that you use and purchase contribute to a system of oppression that in return helps increase profits for companies that were formed by the oppression that I mentioned and who actively lobby and persuade public opinion to continue the oppression.
> Sure. Exploitation and market forces are a part of human society. Baselessly calling everybody evil without offering any sort of solution does nothing except help convince yourself that you're some kind of martyr.
150 or so years ago people would have said, child labor is part of society. Marrying 12/13/14 year olds is just part of society. Blacks not being vote is just part of society.
Do you want to be in the group that excused the behavior, or the group that was opposed to and helped change it?
We're not talking about entitlement here. If you want to talk about entitlement, then look at people who feel entitled to oppress and make life difficult for the minority or those placed into a situation where economically they had a far less chance at being successful, and maybe that had to do with morals... yes, you have the opportunity to get rich in America, but often that comes with sacrificing your morals in order to do so. Are you suggesting somehow that people willing to commit immoral actions to gain wealth are more entitled?
You’re like the caricature of a woke college student. You’re never in a million years going to convince me that somehow I’m responsible for the housing crisis in California.
You have contributed precisely ZERO substance to the topic at hand. Instead of mentioning restrictive zoning and prop 13, you rant about genocide, rape, child labor, and black suffrage.
Do you have any point at all? I suspect you’re just a narcissist who thinks they’re saving the world.
well if you want to dine in a fancy restaurant and shop and hang around in a plush suburb, how can you expect the blue collar workers keeping everything running to have to commute 2 hours for your convenience?
> It's much less of a concern if there's good transit to work.
Even good transit easily creates a 1hr commute each way.
And no city in the US has good transit. NYC has barely adequate transit[1], and even then, the ridership of NYC rail systems exceeds that of the entire West Coast and Midwest combined.
[1]Have fun taking the subway from Bay Ridge to Kings Highway and Ocean Ave. A century ago, streetcars were running across Brooklyn; they were replaced with buses, which sucked then, and suck now.
An interesting story in the two most important Canadian cities in my life, Toronto and Montréal, tell is about density. Toronto is in a gas-fueled affordability crisis, real estate prices have left the solar system. Montréal is starting to heat up but by most metrics is still considered affordable. While there are several externalities (language barrier au Québec, higher paying jobs in Toronto), one of the biggest reasons I've seen cited is the extreme amount of rental apartments available in Montréal. A mass exodus 1980s-2000s with the FLQ crisis, parmis d'autres, freed up tons of buildings from the 60s and 70s which still have not been saturated 'til this day.
The huge selection of functional, old apartment buildings has a price-depressing effect on local real estate. Why would I buy a house for 700k ($3000 mortgage, etc) when I can get a 5 1/2 (3 bdrm) for $1200 a month within biking distance of downtown. Now, while this helps explain the current situation, the lord knows that nobody in their right mind would consider investing in non-luxury apartment/condo towers when they have so many other lodgings suppressing home values. But that's kind of what needs to happen in TO as well, IMO.
The reason why Toronto (and SW Ontario) has seen an increase of housing prices, especially since 2015, is immigration:
> The estimated number of families in the province grew considerably. Between 2010 and 2015, Ontario’s estimated number of families grew by less than 23,000 per year. In 2017, the province added over 50,000 families; in 2018 it added almost 70,000 in a single year.
> Despite this population growth, housing starts hadn’t increased all that much after 2016, staying well below the levels of the 1970s and 1980s:
> A closer view. Between the four years from the start of 2016 to the end of 2019, Ontario added almost 230,000 people to its population each year, over twice as many as in the four period that proceeded it. Despite this doubling, the number of housing units was only 9% greater in that 2016–19 period than in the four years that proceeded it:
No, it shows that a lot of people left Montreal when the major financial and media institutions moved their HQs to Toronto after Bill 101 was passed in 1977.
Land Value Tax is better than the current clusterfuck, but doesn't address the problem of existing residents being priced out.
Property tax / land value tax on primary residence is just rent collected by the government for living somewhere.
That rent shouldn't be higher in lucrative locations. Grocery store employees should be able to live where they work; we should not be pushing them away with higher taxes on top of the pressure the market puts on them.
Perhaps food and shelter shouldn't be taxed altogether. The government shouldn't be collecting a rent on people existing.
That would also make redlining of residential neighborhoods harder, as if will force decoupling of local infrastructure funding from property values.
>It has many loopholes, such as assigning each of your 5 properties to your wife, daughter, aunt, shell company or a dog
Shell company of a dog doesn't have a primary residence.
As for the rest, either they'll have to live there (in which case, it's fair), or they'll go behind the bars for properly tax evasion.
And it doesn't take much to find out that a property listed as primary residence for tax purposes is being rented out. Add some reporting incentives, and hey, that loophole takes care of itself.
Afaik, a crazy amount of rentals is negotiated without a contract so that the landlord avoids regulation and taxes and the renter agrees because they get a discount.
Property taxes are a useful tool against property speculation (which is why China is desperately considering one). Likewise, the fact that property tax is "stepped up" on sale also makes people less willing to sell (because they lose their sweet property tax valuation if they buy something else) and so pushes up the prices on the remaining second houses on the market. Grandma isn't going to move out of her 4 bedroom house because she is paying much less on property taxes than if she downsized to a two bedroom condo in the same area.
as you mention China - the property prices are declining there 3rd year in a row. in lower tier cities more than in Tier A, but also there they decline or stopped climbing.
we will have to wait and see how the common prosperity laws that Xi proposed will further change the life of people - and if they actually work, we must start thinking why WE were not able to do that in the first place with our democratic system that is supposed to represent the people.
Tier 1 cities haven't, but Tier 88 cities have been. Actually, since the red families control most of the real estate companies, they often just prevent you from selling (real estate agents won't show your house) rather than risk scoring a "loss in real estate value." So in China it is better to look at sales volume rather than sale prices.
I think that's intentional. I understand that to combat demographic disaster China has been depopulating the villages in favor of megacities. So tier 88 should get cheaper while tier 1 gets crazy.
Tier 88 cities are hardly villages, they are cities with 1 million or more people. And they aren't shrinking, they are growing as well, most of China's growth will happen in these cities, especially since they are much easier to get hukou in than tier one cities. What good is living in Beijing if you can't send your kids to Beijing schools?
China is looking for a long term solution, not quick fiat fixes from above. Despite all the mistakes they make, the Chinese government isn't dumb, they realize some continuous pressure against speculation in the property market will work better in the long term.
Why would she move into a cheaper place and thus get a higher effective tax rate and pass less advantage on to her heirs?
But the whole conversation about Grandma is stupid anyway. The California Tax Postponment Program allows her to stay in her house, with zero tax pressure, forever. Plenty of states, even high property tax NJ, have something like that and it's just fine.
Brings it into line with all other states in the country which have more sensibly priced housing market. Its crazy that someone who's owned a house in the bay area for 50 years pays a tiny fraction of the neighbor who bought just now. Its certainly one of the reasons CA housing is expensive. If I knew taxes were capped you can pay more.
I can understand you want to reward people who stay in the area for a long time, the reward is too great IMO.
You’d force a lot of older people like my parents out of their homes. Itll eventually generation out over the next 10-20 years by itself, with the exception of commercial properties like Disney. If you make them pay, there’s a chance they just straight up leave.
Good news! California has a system in place in place that addresses exactly this problem: https://www.sco.ca.gov/ardtax_prop_tax_postponement.html
It allows taxes to be deferred and taken out of the estate. Removing Prop 13 would leave this system entirely unaffected.
Your parents, assuming they are old enough to be seniors, will be fine. Your well-founded concern has been heard and handled. You can rest easy, knowing that your parents and other homeowning elders in California will not be forced out of their homes by property taxes they cannot afford.
Wow. Thank you for addressing this in such a friendly way. Every time I point it out I can't help but mock the successful owners but really your way of saying it is more effective
I don't understand. The thing the user was concerned about - their parents being forced out by taxes - is neatly prevented. What have I missed?
Or should I suppose that the goal is not keeping their parents where they are, but instead to inherit a valuable asset at exceptionally favorable taxation?
Then the heirs lose out, they probably won't like that too much, nor will the pending decedents be happy knowing that a big chunk of their estate is going to be seized. I don't see how this is going to really make higher taxes more palatable.
You'll have to pardon me if I have limited sympathy for the ability of the heirs to rich (defined here as multiple millions of USD in value) estates as they clamor to inherit tax rates from before their births. I understand the emotional pain of losing the all-important family home, but I am unwilling to structure public policy around vast tax breaks so that families flush with unearned wealth keep it.
Nobody likes paying taxes. It's literally never a pleasurable or enjoyable experience. Yet it's one that furthers society and allows it to do things like fund schools - a chronic problem in California.
> Nobody likes paying taxes. It's literally never a pleasurable or enjoyable experience.
Not disagreeing with your points, but one major reason that it's "never a pleasurable experience" to pay tax in America is that ideologues deliberately designed the process to be as painful as possible, to give taxation a bad name. Sadly, it's working.
Too bad? Generational wealth transfer is the root of many of society's ills.
If parents bought a home in CA in 1980 for $300k, and then did little more than regular upkeep and minor improvements, and then die in 2021, why should their offspring be entitled to a $10M windfall? They've done nothing to earn it, besides being lucky to be born to parents who were lucky enough to be able to buy housing in an area that they were lucky enough to keep living in when that area became popular.
Ah yes, "derangement". What a way to argue your case. You don't agree with me, so I must be deranged!
No one is an island. They did not achieve their wealth on their own, without benefiting from the commons. Accruing all those benefits to a single family's estate is not in society's best interests.
We already have estate taxes, income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes. We already have collectively agreed as a society that everyone needs to share in the cost of common services and infrastructure. From there it's just a negotiation as to how much. You seem to think people (especially rich people?) should get to pay less. I think they are not paying nearly enough, and have been fleecing the commons for centuries.
The idea that you think anyone who disagrees with your taxation policy is "deranged" speaks volumes.
No, I just think it's a natural for society to encourage its members to invest in the long-term future of that society by way of endowing their children with the rewards of their investment and good fortune. That's a natural and universally understood principle, and it is indeed deranged -- i.e. a deviation for ordinary and healthy function -- to govern as though this is bad for society.
It's quite the uphill battle you've chosen, I hope you keep talking like "parents shouldn't be allowed to privilege their children" is a weird idea.
Anyone who has received the economic and educational benefits of a wealthy family has gained immensely by being heir. Plus the estate itself!
What's being proposed here doesn't stop generational wealth transfers. The suggestion at hand means that the owners of real property in California would have to pay (or defer) an amount of tax that's related to its current value. Inheritors would have to continue this, instead of inheriting a tax assessment from their parents or grandparents along with the ancestral pile.
A family is absolutely allowed to prioritize a child as the target of its earned resources and good fortune and exploitative practice or whatever. Potentially less a cut, because society has agreed to tax large inheritances. The family just shouldn't get to pass down an inherited tax break too. That's aristocratic, which is unacceptable in a free democracy.
I think his point is, you don't get to pass wealth not earned by you to your heirs. You had nothing to do with 300k to 10m appreciation, so you nor your heirs are entitled to it. The appreciation is in land, not in the small improvements to the house. Owners never have influence on the price of land. That is strictly determined by the surrounding dwellings.
> Owners never have influence on the price of land.
One of the most frustrating thing about property tax discourse is that people feel like the fact that they hit the jackpot by accident is grounds for a tax cut. As if getting rich by the work of other is more deserving of a break vs. earning your own wealth.
> Owners never have influence on the price of land. That is strictly determined by the surrounding dwellings.
But then the owners of those surrounding dwellings also had nothing to do with the appreciation of their houses, right? Only the owners of their surroundings added value, and so on. What a contorted argument you'd have to make, to claim that land somehow accrues value due to zero action of the people who happen to occupy it. Land appreciates because of the choices made by the community who lives there, e.g. to attract industry, prioritize certain uses, create or draw desirable businesses, etc.
The choices made by your parents, and the other parents from your previous generation, are almost entirely the reason why a the neighborhood you grew up in appreciates. And they make those decisions for your benefit, because they want to create wealth and community for you.
The responses to my comment confirm that yes, liberals absolutely believe nobody has a right to investment of their parents. What an alienating perspective, I hope you guys run with it and shout it from the roofs.
You're right, it's the community and its actions that made the land appreciate. Surrounding dwellings and their occupants are just a part of that.
You can be entitled to inheriting the value that you and your parents created, wchi you'd somehow have to extract from the surrounding dwellings, the land of which appreciated due to your parents' good actions.
You are not entitled to appreciation of your land, because others in the community are responsible for it.
You essentially have these solutions:
1. let land owners keep the value created by others in the community, which works only if 100% of members of the community have a piece land, and it has to be of equal value. This inevitably eventually results in a feudal system of landowners and serfs.
2. Take the value of land appreciation from your neighbors properties and they take back value they added to yours. In theory this is is the ideal solution, but omits non-land owners who also contributed
3. distribute the value back to the community responsible for creating the value in the first place by equal share using a citizens' dividend collected by land value tax which captures all the misallocated value appreciation
I would defer to no less than a luminary like Thomas Jefferson in my attitudes toward the would-be inheritors of all those million-dollar ranch-style SDUs, who said something along the lines of..
> I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self evident, "that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living": that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.
(Though really, even before I knew of Jefferson's attitudes about inherited wealth, I'd read enough to know that divesting children of unearned windfalls isn't necessarily a bad thing. Can't take it with you, ya know.)
If it encourages them to downsize from their family home after their children have moved out, its a better outcome than having lots of older couples living in 5 bed houses mixed in with families in High Density buildings.
> Yeah, let’s kick old ladies out of their houses so we can get a piece.
If the problem is "kicking old ladies out", why not just allow seniors to defer their property tax, instead of what we have now, where even corporations pay the same fixed tax? Seems a little absurd to give the entire state a tax break for a problem that only effects 10% (at most).
The "old ladies" argument was just a cover for the real reason, and you've been duped.
> I’d like to see an example of increasing taxes on a good or service somehow making it cheaper.
It's fairly well known that a land value tax actually has negative deadweight loss, because it incentivizes more efficient land use. It definitely can't make housing more expensive, since the supply-demand curve remains the same (the supply of land is fixed).
Asking people to pay property tax doesn’t imply “kicking out old ladies” though. Many people who could afford the new property tax (and thus aren’t being kicked out) might choose to downsize anyway to save money.
I care less about the old person being pressured to sell their multimillion dollar house than a poor person stuck in an area with a poor job market because they can't afford to move to a better one. Of course, since the latter is the status quo, people don't think about it as much.
Increasing the property tax would allow California to cut their sales tax, which would benefit lower income people.
Property is not a good or service - it is a finite resource with its own economics. You're making a false comparison and then asking for proof that cannot exist. Not a good look.
I could argue that its causing 70000 people per year to leave California for Texas to pay those increased property taxes. Well, its only an increase in percentage of estimated asset principle, but in actual dollars its still substantially less. 2% of 250,000 is 5000 which is less than 1% of 750000.
Is there even the workers needed to build all these houses we need? We have in my city a plan for a >4000 houses to be built. I asked my brother who is a carpenter how could they do that. He said either a lot of workers and some time or fewer workers and a lot of time. The company he works for already struggles to find skilled workers to build houses so makes me wonder how can we build all these places when it seems the crews are already currently too busy.
There aren't. My fear with the current infrastructure bill is it's a really lousy time for it when there's already a shortage for construction workers. It's what should have been passed in 2010 when construction workers were out of work.
same thing in Germany; unis are flooded but nobody wants to do an apprenticeship anymore.
prices for even the smallest repairs in my flat that i rent have exploded and i have to wait for a long time until they even come.
migration doesn't solve this issue either. I'm volunteering at the local refugee center. while qualified "EU blue card" expats have an academic background and work in offices, the lower qualified migrants who came in 2015+ from Syria and Iraq are not interested in getting an apprenticeship in labor intensive jobs.
My brother, a carpenter, had left germany 5 years ago and migrated to Canada. Life is better there, he says.
To be fair, I'm not sure if the apprenticeship path is even available to immigrants, let alone known to them. They are still nebulous to me, and helping immigrants move here is my job.
Besides, the language requirements for apprenticeships is likely much stricter than for cushy office jobs.
I'm really excited about SB-9 to remove some of my town's ability to slow down and prevent me from merely fixing the house that I have. Unfortunately they're already coming up with ways to resist change - some probably-legal, some probably-not-legal.
They're going to pass an ordinance that tries to apply maximally restrictive rules (e.g., limit homes built to 800 sqft and a single story) to any project they think benefits from SB-9. That's probably legal, even if against the spirit of the law.
They're also going to tack on deed restrictions to limit the newly created parcels to being affordable to the lowest levels of income possible. I'm not sure that's legal, nor how that works mechanically.
The super dumb thing, however, is that SB-9 applies to single unit projects just as much as to multi unit ones. Specifically it calls out "no more than two" units right in the first paragraph of the first section. One is no more than two. I think this hastily crafted ordinance will limit even the town's desired SFH footprint to 800 sqft on qualifying parcels - which is probably about 25-50% of the town. That's absolutely not the intended consequence, but what do you expect of a panicking NIMBY government?
Here's the memo from the interim planning director:
What I don't get about arguments re: single family home prices benefiting from nimbyism, is that it seems plainly untrue. I do agree that that's the perception however.
Very simple example. Say I own a single family home in mountain view. Tomorrow, the zoning changes such that somebody can build a 10 story building on my plot. Obviously the value of the land goes up tremendously, and the incentive exists to sell to a developer to rebuild it.
So zoning for higher density should only improve value of homes.
Or put another way, say there were a SFH with a yard on a plot in the middle of Manhattan. How much is that home likely worth?
Increasing land use rights on a property can only increase the value of that property.
However, increasing land use rights on a neighboring property can decrease the value of the original property. For example, a neighbor might want to use their property to establish a brothel.
Nimbys want to control property that they don’t own. Seems like theft to me!
I think in isolation, allowing construction of a single apartment building in an other SFH neighborhood might push down nearby property values compared to a suburb without the apartment, particularly in places where apartments are stigmatized as being "too urban"
You are quite correct that upzoning everywhere only boosts the value of land by allowing better utilization of it. One possible exception might be that by solving the housing crisis by building enough units to satisfy the regions need, it might push down the value of land, especially in the less desirable periphery where you might have previously had folks paying a lot of money just to get a house somewhere.
> Unless the goal is Corsuscant I don't really see a reason to build up over there.
You are aware there’s a housing shortage in California. Building high density mixed use projects in basically empty places like Malibu would be a great way to help alleviate that shortage. And development will create those jobs. Fundamentally there’s a dynamic feedback loop between population density and employment opportunities. Increasing population creates the need for jobs and those jobs drive further economic growth.
The way you keep your property price up is by not allowing others to build more property around you. When person days - i want to keep my property price up, what he really says is - i dont want more people to live near me.
It is very different from other kinds of values - for example car is getting more expensive if it is fancier/more unique, but its price does not change with production of way cheaper cars , which all can go same places.
This is why insisting on your house keeping same value is very harmful to other people - this can only be achieved by denying these people the place to stay in the same area.
So much for the American Dream, right? Let's dive headlong back into the communal longhouse that is the European continent, where only the wealthy deserve backyards.
The "American Dream" was coined when the population of the US was less than half what it is today, and when significantly more of the population was perfectly happy to live in small towns rather than in dense cities. The US changed; the dream needs to change, too.
I don't think "deserve" is an accurate representation of the situation. People with more money will have more means to increase their luxury. That's been the case as long as we've had money.
Regardless, you're presenting a false dichotomy. There are many great alternatives to single-family homes that need not be communal longhouses.
And if you want a good-sized plot of land, maybe don't move to an urban environment. You can't have everything.
They should try giving incentives to localities that build dense housing. I think NIMBY have a point that if we pick a specific place that place gets screwed with all the negatives of an influx of people, so we either give incentives or force development everywhere. The former just seems easier to do.
There is no reason to suggest increased availability will result in increased affordability. The only way to impact affordability is to lower values, the prices people will sell for.
Housing is a special story. It doesn't behave according to the standard economic theory of equalizing supply and demand like yogurts or bananas.
Housing is strongly inelastic market, meaning you can't increase supply when there is demand easily
The market is essentially stalled. It doesn't 'clear'. People would rather keep it idle out of the market than rent or sell under price. On top of that it has entered a bubble territory recently in which people buy, not based on their value judgment of the property, but because they expect to offload it to someone else in the future with a profit.
Housing is not a 'supply and demand market dynamic, but a 'greater fool' market dynamic.
Housing in CA is also unique in that the combination of refinance rates and Prop 13 make selling your home for the same house right next door a losing proposition. Most long term owners are deeply incentivized by CA’s property tax cap to never sell and if anything take an equity loan / rent it out.
I can’t even imagine the total financial devastation if they suddenly ratcheted up the tax rates via reassessment. It’d be a fire sale for all but the top end of the income ladder.
Housing is not actually that special. It is true it doesn't behave according to the econ 101 model that most high schoolers learn in class, but in econ 201+ classes explain it.
The main difference is that land is the limiting factor or more accurately legally buildable land in this case with zoning.
The network effects of cities increase with density. The more people move there, the more incentive there is for people to move there. The cost of housing is a function of that marginal person who is on the verge of moving there. If I’m on the edge, then all my friends and all my employers move there, then I have even more reason to move there too. When you move there, I’m willing to pay more to move there too.
In other words demand isn’t constant.
As I understand it, it’s an open question as to whether more housing means lower prices via simple supply and demand, or higher prices via network effects.
Exactly. Every person living in a city is a positive externality for the businesses. And every business is a positive externality for the residents. It's a network effect. The more people in a city, the better it is. The people who own empty lots contribute nothing, and their empty lot keeps going up in value.
When you incentivize people to say no to housing because the more they say no, the higher the value of the house, they are going to say no. It doesn't matter how much the state demands. You don't want centralized forces creating a mess, you want decentralized forces. We need to stop swimming upstream.
The only way out of this is to tax the land equal to those positive externalities. The only way out is a Land Value Tax. When you under tax the land, the price of the house balloons. Once you have a Land Value Tax in place and increased housing supply means lower taxes, all the NIMBY's will quickly convert to YIMBY's - it will be a breeze to get new housing built.
On the flip side, though, we've already seen what limited new housing does: much, much higher prices, and people getting priced out of their homes. More housing might not solve everything, but less housing is what's causing these problems.
People won't stop wanting to move here just because housing growth is slow. While the prices are very high right now, there are still enough people who want to move in who can at least vaguely tolerate those prices. That doesn't mean the system is working, though. That just reminds me of the old stock market adage, "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent".
At the risk of being contentious, it may be worth considering that there is no place on earth where the demand to live there is truly infinite. This suggests that demand can be sated and prices brought down with sufficient supply.
Of course, there is such a thing as induced demand for housing. Studies of it show that it's not so strong as to eliminate the effect of adding supply to a tight market.
With these in mind, why would we not expect demand to eventually fall behind supply as California approaches something resembling a healthy housing market?
I will never understand why so many people are absolutely convinced, on the basis of seemingly no explainable evidence, that basic economics doesn't apply to housing.
Because understanding it means their housing price should go down. If they can pretend supply/demand doesn't apply, they can keep advocating NIMBY policies that increase the price of their house year after year.
Yeah, it's weird. If building more housing will cause the value of their neighborhoods to skyrocket, why not do it and make a killing? Are we to believe that their deep sentimentality about neighborhood character overrides any consideration of the supposedly massive amounts of cash on the table?
I find it best modeled as a collective action problem. SF in particular, and California in general, has handed out vetos on housing with a quite free hand.
There are a great many people who have no particular reason to want to change their surroundings. Especially when they are keenly aware of how many of their neighbors will happily shoot down any effort they might make to make a killing.
In short, the massive amount of cash is realistically not on the table in the eyes of many. What they do have is civic pride, property taxes decades out of step, and an ever-appreciating asset. All of which they can reasonably expect to pass on to their children.
So no one wants to enormously increase the value of their ever-appreciating asset by allowing for more housing to be constructed? Because of... civic pride? Really?
I'm a homeowner in a desirable area. In my area I see the urge to veto upzoning and keep the riff-raff out, keep traffic from getting worse, etc. pitted against the desire to increase affordability by upzoning. That opposition of interests makes sense. The idea that I could make a killing from upzoning never occurred to me. It seems very implausible.
People willing to sell and leave are happy to consider it. People who don't want to leave in the near term are very interested in keeping the riff-raff out and thus in fending off structural changes that would let you make a killing. Thus all the vetos that make it easy to keep your neighbors in line should they start thinking about that money. Accusations of greed destructive to the community are easy to level and rarely require much in the way of substantiation.
Upzoning is both a way for you to make a hefty chunk of change and an affordability issue. It's often more difficult to impugn the motives of people seeking to improve affordability, however.
Look at it in numbers, though. A million-dollar property on a large lot could become two duplexes, each unit $300k-$500k. Or a six or eight story building with multiple units on each floor. There's money to be made there for the likes of you and me. Neighbors who don't get a cut but want to keep the riff-raff away would like us to not consider it.
I don’t think that people are denying the economics, only that for high-demand housing the game is different.
The price of housing isn’t completely elastic since for a given area it’s a function of the available salaries in the area. You hit a ceiling where above which there are no buyers and below which you get 20 cash offers the day you list.
So oddly the thesis is that housing prices are actually too low and we’re playing by concert ticket rules. Part of this has to do with the availability of mortgages as a function of income. And that there is so much demand for housing at a given price that any increase in supply we could actually realistically build would just get bought up instantly at the current price and we can’t increase the supply enough to actually drive prices down.
> we can’t increase the supply enough to actually drive prices down.
Well you'll never do it with that attitude!
Seriously, though. Every action taken in the US, other than the government spending trillions of dollars, is so piddly that no one gets to see a meaningful impact of any policy. And so people make up theories unconnected from reality, with no skin in the game, because nothing will ever actually change.
On reflection, I don't think I buy your premises here:
1. Salaries (and spending proclivities) are hardly so tightly banded that X is affordable for everyone who might want to move to an area and X+1 isn't. Tech company salaries alone vary a ton.
2. Housing prices are not set in a centralized way like concert ticket prices.
Those points notwithstanding, I do agree that if there's tons of pent-up demand for a product, tiny increases in supply are not going to change a seller's market into a buyer's market. It may take a lot of supply to overcome induced demand, market psychology and price stickiness, but there is an amount of added supply that would do it. It's just not the case that every rich person in the world wants to move to, say, San Francisco. Once you've built enough, you're going to have inventory that is moving slower than the sellers would prefer, and sellers will then lower price to make that inventory accessible to a wider pool of buyers.
Oh no, there are an incredible number of econ deniers everywhere these days. Every time an apartment building is proposed for a parking lot in California for example, they come out of the woodwork.
Neither will I. The number of people who think you can build an infinite number of homes in a finite space of land, or who are unaware of network effects, is surprising.
Apple can't build an infinite number of computers either. Chiquita can't grow an infinite number of bananas. And both of these companies are deeply networked in the global economy. So what will happen if Apple triples its computer production, or Chiquita triples its banana production? Does the price magically increase like housing does in NIMBY economics?
Hong Kong has cheaper housing while also have 10x as many residents. Same goes for places like Tokyo, Singapore, and Shenzhen. No, you can't create more land, but you can create more housing.
That's the business district, not the residential district. Corporations generally don't lobby against another skyscraper going up next door like "concerned citizens" do.
Moreover, you will find no part of Hong Kong that looks like the photo of SF which I shared.
The argument that that the only reason shenzen housing is cheaper than SF is density is absurd on its face.
If your argument is that we can increase SFs population by 10% to maybe get a 30% reduction in average home price, then I agree. But that doesn’t change affordability.
It is because basic economics is only a crude approximation for real world economics. That's why Economics departments at universities require you to take a few courses after Ec101 before they will give you a degree in the subject.
So after I take many more advanced economics courses, I will understand the unexplainable reason why housing prices will never go down no matter how much supply is increased? And why this conclusion is so certain that there is neither any evidence nor any need for evidence?
> You keep saying this as if supply can be increased arbitrarily. It simply can’t.
True! You eventually run into physical limits of density and what we are capable of constructing. However, this naively seems likely to be far higher than we have now.
Some back of the envelope math is in order, then. SF has a surface area of about 30,000 acres. Kowloon Walled City, a very dense place that actually existed, had between 33,000 and 50,000 people in 6.5 acres. Extrapolating, that puts SF at a possible maximum population of between 152 and 230 million people. That's using construction technology from the 60s and 70s, so we could perhaps do better today.
With this in mind, it does seem likely that the density of the SF Bay specifically and California in general could be reasonably increased. There's quite a lot of room for opportunity to house people between SF's current population of 875000 and a population several times that of California.
> You can increase density for a while, but network effects will keep demand increasing as you do.
Sure! As I touched on previously, induced demand in housing is a very real effect. You're absolutely right. However "any induced demand effects are overwhelmed by the effect of increased supply". https://appam.confex.com/appam/2018/webprogram/Paper25811.ht...
I believe, and please correct me if I am mistaken, that what is described here as induced demand is what you are referring to as network effects.
> Obviously demand is not infinite, but there is no reason to suppose that currently desirable places can be made affordable.
Expensive places have been made less exorbitantly expensive before. That seems like an excellent reason to suppose that a currently desirable place can be made affordable. I understand that this is a matter of opinion on which reasonable people might differ.
>Obviously demand is not infinite, but there is no reason to suppose that currently desirable places can be made affordable.
That's a fair point. But no one (at least not in the comments I've read so far) has discussed the converse: making less desirable places (which are affordable) more desirable.
There are many places which have experienced huge population decreases over the past 50 years or so.
And many of those places are in pretty difficult economic circumstances too.
While many of the most lucrative jobs are in or near urban centers (driving up the price of housing in and around those areas), it's clear that many of those same jobs can be done remotely.
And so what's stopping folks from moving from, say, the New York City area to small towns New York, Pennsylvania or Ohio?
The reasons are several and are self-reinforcing:
1. Large urban areas have lots of economic activity, generally leading to improvements in infrastructure and facilities;
2. Small towns have less economic activity, generally leading to fewer improvements in infrastructure and facilities;
3. Young people flock to densely populated areas because that's where other young people are and where opportunities for economic and career advancement exist.
These (and other) issues lead to the high price of housing in densely populated areas and the slow death of small towns.
So what does this have to do with expensive housing in densely populated areas? A lot.
Improving the infrastructure in small towns (municipal (mult-)gigabit fiber to the premise, fast and reliable rail links to population centers, rezoning to allow more rentals -- both houses and apartments, incentives for small businesses, etc., etc., etc.) could make them much more desirable places to live.
Those, combined with the ability to work remotely, could remedy a significant portion of the housing price issues we face.
If a small town could support remote knowledge workers, other people and businesses would move in to support them.
Over the long term (50+ years), this could significantly redistribute population (and housing) in ways that would be a huge benefit to the economy.
Unfortunately, most people and corporations are only concerned about the next quarter or, at most, the next fiscal year.
There are valid, sustainable ways to deal with these issues, but unless we focus on the medium to long term (10-50 years), it will never happen.
I don't understand what this abstract terminology means. Do you believe it is impossible to build more housing in California? If so, why? If not, what are you talking about?
Suggestions for how a city might arbitrarily lower property values? People are willing to pay $750k for my condo. How does the city convince them they only want to pay $500k?
Well, increasing property taxes or interest rates (or anything else that increased the monthly cost) would reduce the sticker price, but it doesn't by itself make the housing more affordable except perhaps by reducing investment demand.
Increasing property taxes in tandem with larger homeowner's exemptions might be more effective in only reducing investor demand (but potentially might hurt renters to some extent, though renting is a more efficient market...).
But, building more densely is a better solution...
Cut some purchasers out of the market. For eg disincentivise or ban using properties for investment, especially for corporate investors, hedge funds etc.
If there was more supply in your area you may have less success charging 750K and getting a sale in the timeframe you’re looking for. Right now landlords have too much power over renters.
This depends on demand, though. If there are 100,000 people wanting to move there you’d have to build more than 100,000 units which isn’t likely in any US city over a reasonable amount of time.
I mean, the suggestion that was made is that increasing supply doesn't work, so I'm asking what's the alternative plan to lower values without any new building?
Detroit had and continues to have an enormous amount of abandoned, decrepit housing that no one wants to buy. Maybe that's why they have low housing prices. I doubt that the city government had much to do with it.
San Francisco must exist in some sort of twilight zone where there are 1 infinity people that want to live there and if they build 1 infinity houses, all of the houses will cost 1 infinity dollars.
Edit to add: I have no interest in living in San Francisco, so we've fixed the problem. Only 1 infinity minus 1 people want to live there so if you build 1 infinity houses, everybody's house will be worth zero.
> San Francisco must exist in some sort of twilight zone where there are 1 infinity people that want to live there and if they build 1 infinity houses, all of the houses will cost 1 infinity dollars
This is something only you are saying, and it makes little sense.
What is true is that San Francisco has limited space, and so even if density can be increased, a new limit will be reached.
Have you noticed that Manhattan and Tokyo are not meaningfully cheaper than San Francisco, despite being much higher density?
The reason is that building more residences doesn’t make it any less desirable to live there, and even supply is still limited.
I think you're making the mistake of considering only Manhattan?
Brooklyn[0] has a little over twice the density of SF[1], while the median home price in Brooklyn[2] is 40% less than in SF[3].
(Also consider your density numbers are a bit off. NYC[4] overall has only 1.5x the density of SF, and Manhattan[5] has around 4x SF's density. Not sure where you've gotten your housing cost numbers.)
The thing is, I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting we turn SF into Manhattan. You're presenting that as if it's what people want, or if it's the only option.
Even a modest increase in density, nowhere near Manhattan levels, would help SF enormously.
Nowhere have I suggested that anyone wants SF to turn into Manhattan. That seems to be something you are reading into it.
The point is that when you compare the two, it be some clear that that even if you did turn SF info Manhattan, you might get a 10% reduction in prices.
A modest increase in density would have no appreciable impact.
Depending on which estimates you look at, Tokyo is somewhere between 30 to 50% cheaper than San Francisco. It's also a vastly superior city in just about every possible way
Iirc, most cities have not been building enough housing to keep up with demand for a lot of time. Is it really the case that we can’t build to keep up with demand, therefore stopping prices from rising as quickly?
If you add enough housing+residents it will lower the values as the places become overcrowded metropolises less people want to live in.
But somewhere like the SF Bay Area has a loooooong way to go before it gets anywhere near that bad. Relative to most of the nation, it can get heaps worse in terms of crowding and QoL and still look exceptionally good. I don't see prices going down anytime soon, except if something like the homeless problem evolves into a continuous stream of violence and structure fires.
> If you add enough housing+residents it will lower the values as the places become overcrowded metropolises less people want to live in.
Maybe at some extremely high level it becomes untenable but both Manhattan and Paris are very desirable places to live and they have 3-4x the population density of sf.
Right, which means you can effectively ruin SF through the lens of many existing residents, by turning it into a Manhattan, and still not have affordable housing there.
Consider that Brooklyn has over 2x the density of SF, but median home prices 40% less. I agree that turning SF into Manhattan would ruin it in many people's eyes, but turning it into Brooklyn would be... not all that much of a change?
Honestly, California deserves to fail here if they continue to repeat the same ineffectual things while ignoring data and inventing conclusions that have never proven true.
You can increase land value while decreasing housing value. Building high density housing you can build affordable housing on incredibly high land values
Cities and their existing residents have a right to protect the quality of life and neighborhood character they want. They are not obligated to accommodate newcomers and population influxes, nor should they be. Why does every attractive and desirable city have to be affordable or accessible? People need to stop being entitled and just move somewhere else where they can make ends meet, if they cannot cut it in a place that is in high-demand. No one is entitled to live wherever they want at whatever price they want.
> Cities and their existing residents have a right
Palo Alto is a charter city. As such, it has special rights only insofar as those rights are delegated to it by the state of California. California has every right, legally and morally, to change the current arrangement. As things stand today, Palo Alto enormously benefits from economic growth caused, not primarily by its residents and policies, but by the residents and policies of other portions of the state of California. As such, the residents of California have every right to tell the residents of Palo Alto that they must rezone to allow denser housing. The state has the upper hand both legally and morally.
Palo Alto is happy to see the economic benefits of increased commerce to the Bay Area, but it doesn't feel any responsibility to aid in housing the many thousands of new workers that increased commerce requires. A tiny minority of wealthy homeowners benefit at the expense of a great mass of residents. This is not a tenable situation long-term. Small municipalities in the Bay Area cannot internalize the benefits of economic growth while externalizing the costs indefinitely.
> California has every right, legally and morally, to change the current arrangement.
I am not knowledgeable enough to discuss the legal angle, so I’ll set that aside. I disagree on the right claimed from a moral standpoint. It’s dystopian to think that the rights exercised by individuals or individual cities are only delegated to them by higher powers. At best, a situation where local powers are overridden by others at the state level amounts to a tyranny of the majority. In my opinion, locality of power and decision making is important. Palo Alto is not the only city on this continent. People, and companies, can go elsewhere - including into the interior of the country outside of California.
> Palo Alto enormously benefits from economic growth caused, not primarily by its residents and policies, but by the residents and policies of other portions of the state of California.
Another way to look at it, is that residents of Palo Alto made a smart investment, or a lucky one - but that’s okay, and they’re allowed the spoils of that choice. Or maybe they don’t care about those economic benefits and economic change just happened to take place, around them.
> it doesn't feel any responsibility to aid in housing the many thousands of new workers that increased commerce requires.
Why do the residents have a responsibility to aid new workers? If those new workers don’t have a great situation with respect to cost of living in the Bay, they shouldn’t take those jobs. There are many open jobs across the country, in many different locations. If those other jobs don’t provide the same pay or other conditions - well, that’s just life. No one can be entitled to only have a specific job in a specific city.
> This is not a tenable situation long-term. Small municipalities in the Bay Area cannot internalize the benefits of economic growth while externalizing the costs indefinitely.
High prices discourage continued population growth. Companies looking to hire and expand can set up in communities that have room or that welcome growth. Workers will go there, home prices in the Bay will change, the economy will be more distributed, and things will rebalance accordingly.
> Why do the residents have a responsibility to aid new workers? If those new workers don’t have a great situation with respect to cost of living in the Bay, they shouldn’t take those jobs.
That would also work against local landowners' interests, though. If all the new (and potential new) workers decide they are getting a raw deal and live elsewhere, all the economic gains the locals have realized (including their inflated property values) will evaporate.
It seems like landowners want to have their cake and eat it too: reap the benefits of the economic expansion, but not take responsibility for its externalities.
> In my opinion, locality of power and decision making is important.
If you believe in locality of power, why stop at the town level? The property owner is the most hyperlocal possible unit, so they should have the right to build whatever they want on the land they own. They are local to their own property, their busybody neighbors are not.
That’s a reasonable argument. My feeling, which is a bit arbitrary, is that governmental power makes the most sense at the lowest layer (local government) and should be increasingly thin and limited in scope the further it gets from the layer of individuals. This is what allows many people of different backgrounds and perspectives to coexist peacefully in a nation, with local communities that are more tightly knit, while sharing some fundamental rights and very basic services like a military across different communities. Unfortunately the ever-ballooning size and scope of government at the federal and state level has threatened that decentralized notion of sovereignty.
And there's the crux of the problem. You want to base housing policy on your arbitrary feelings, not on things that actually make for good and successful housing policy.
> This is what allows many people of different backgrounds and perspectives to coexist peacefully in a nation, with local communities that are more tightly knit
I'm sure you aren't intending this, but that's just another way of saying that segregation and red-lining should be legal. Because that's the end result when you allow these types of decisions to be made at a local level, without allowing interference from a county, state, or federal government.
The way for people of different backgrounds and perspectives to coexist peacefully is to refuse to allow subsets of those people to impose their values on others.
In what world is a city deriving its charter from the state "dystopian?" Californian municipalities are wholly creatures of California state law. They derive their authority from the constitution of California, which grants them the power to enforce only "regulations not in conflict with general laws." If the California legislature wants to pass a law saying, "No more single-family zoning," the municipalities don't have a special constitutional right to ignore that, any more than they have the right to pass a law saying their residents can't sell a house to a disabled person, or that their citizens don't have to pay state tax.
There are some matters which are of enough interest to the entire state of California that the state narrowly prescribes how local institutions may interact with those resources. One existing example is the issue of water, which, as a scarce resource, is heavily regulated by article X of California's constitution [1]. Among other restrictions, article X straightforwardly makes water distribution a state concern: "The use of all water now appropriated... is hereby declared to be a public use, and subject to the regulation and control of the State." The consequence: if a city wants to pass its own particular water regulation, and the state of California disagrees, the city is out of luck.
Another issue the state might have a compelling interst in is the issue of housing. Like water, housing is a human necessity, and a scarce resource. This is especially true in the Bay Area, which is not contained in a single municipality, and which is thus subject to the rule of a number of governments whose competing and parochial interests naturally restrict housing supply in the entire region. Specifically, every locality wants to house the Bay Area's jobs, but it would prefer that neighboring localities house the Bay Area's people. The state of California is the only legal actor capable of fairly adjudicating this issue in such a way as to further the interests of residents of the entire region. This is why it would be perfectly legitimate for California to write laws forcing Bay Area cities to abandon overly restrictive zoning regulations.
Cities are not entitled to drain away a lot of state or regional tax money to get all the transportation and water infrastructure they want, but then refuse to let anyone live there. That's plainly unfair. Berkeley today has the same population it had in 1950, but in the interim we built all the freeways and subways that Berkeley needed to have a booming job economy. In 1950 Berkeley had zero subway stations and in 2021 it has three subway stations. If Berkeley had wanted to remain at this population level forever, the time to have decided that was half a century ago, before all the investments.
I agree with the sentiment but the Berkeley subway is not a great example. BART was planning to build above grade through Berkeley. Berkeley wanted a subway and had to make up the difference in cost.
The state or regional tax money is the taxpayers’ money - including individual residents and other entities like companies or cities. It’s a rhetorical trick to pretend the money somehow belongs to the benevolent and powerful state, who forcefully collected this money in the first place. As such, I don’t think a city “owes” something back to the state. If the state had certain expectations, the time to have decided that was half a century ago, in the form of contractual obligations.
I don't agree with the person you're replying to, but this is a bizarre take:
> There is no societal problem for which "just move away" is a solution.
Why make such an absolute?
Here are a collection of societal problems where "just move away" would be a great solution (some are dumb, but I think they're still valid):
* The local community has pushed towards street art in local parks. You strongly dislike street art.
* Your neighbours like to get drunk (in a non-violent way) every night. They're not overly noisy, but they have gross yards and you have a level of concern that the drunks will eventually make a terrible choice that impacts you (such as drunk driving into your bedroom).
* Lack of kids. You have a family of 4 and the local neighbourhood is filled with retired professionals with no kids. You want to live somewhere that enables your kids to socialise.
* Wayne, your long term neighbour, is using meth. He's managing his addiction very well, but he openly shoots up in the shed with his roller door open. You don't like seeing needle drug users shooting rock.
You can't tell the poor to "move away" from their place of residence. They mostly can't Even if their neighbor is a murderer.
The nimby situation is forcing the less fortunate people to commute beyond what is humane. A 2 hour commute is not healthy. And they CAN'T move away, mostly.
> There is no societal problem for which "just move away" is a solution.
That's just untrue and useless to claim. It doesn't help the conversation. Moving away can be a solution to a lot of problems. It might not be feasible in all cases, but it would still solve the problem at hand.
I'm not advocating for this at all. That doesn't change the fact it's a solution.
I'm curious which societal problems you think are fixed by moving? Indeed moving can resolve the issue for a given individual but I cannot think of any situation in which moving solves the underlying problem.
None of these are what I would call "societal problems".
2 and 4 are problems with individuals, not a society.
That 1 and 3 are, in your words, "dumb", really does affect their validity. These are things you can live with. Unaffordable rent, not as much.
The problem isn't "My rent is too high", the problem is "The rent is too high everywhere I'd want to live". It's affecting a whole population; that's what makes it societal.
> Cities and their existing residents have a right to protect the quality of life and neighborhood character they want. They are not obligated to accommodate newcomers and population influxes, nor should they be.
A right according to who? Since when is infringing on other people's freedoms and property rights by banning them from developing their own private land, in order to satisfy your own aesthetic preferences, at the expense of making millions people homeless, underhoused, or forcing them to move away from their social and economic networks, a fundamental right?
From a conservative perspective, private property rights reign supreme and you have no right to tell people what they can build on their land. From a progressive, social-welfare-maximizing viewpoint, other people's need for shelter where they want to live supersedes your aesthetic preferences. Regardless of your ideological underpinnings, your brand of NIMBYism is completely indefensible.
> People need to stop being entitled and just move somewhere else where they can make ends meet, if they cannot cut it in a place that is in high-demand. No one is entitled to live wherever they want at whatever price they want.
I'm sorry, who is being "entitled" here:
1. The person who wants to build a multifamily building on the land they paid for.
2. The person who wants to live in the same place they grew up, and where all their friends and family currently are, and who is willing to enter into a consensual commercial transaction with (1) to procure said housing.
3. The busybody who wants to dictate what other people can build and where they can live because they don't like seeing a two-story walk-up down the block from where they live?
You are so warped by your own sense of entitlement that you don't realize you are the one making unreasonable demands of other people, not the other way around, because you see those unreasonable demands as your god given right.
> Why does every attractive and desirable city have to be affordable or accessible?
The only reason why many people have no access to these desirable things is because of bad policy, not because these things are intrinsically scarce. If we can fix bad policy to allow more people to have desirable things, that is good for societal welfare. More good things for more people is good, actually.
So, "I got here first" is the way that we want to manage an increasing population, increasing costs of living, and a shortage of housing in the important cities that are an major source of our national prosperity?
Ah yes, "neighborhood character", that pervasive dog whistle.
For a practical consideration, California might look towards the future and seriously consider the population limits imposed by water scarcity. But even there, sufficient political will and investment could start desalinating out of the readily available ocean. Sure, it's horribly power inefficient, but it's there, and so is abundant solar power potential, meaning that the only final concerns are NIMBY and environmental concerns, of which the latter, at least, are serious (but in the face of water shortages, should be discounted, and if the current long-term drought trend holds, we should probably start assuming shortages and boiling some fish sooner than later).
It’s not a dog whistle - come on, that’s just an incredibly tired way to dismiss arguments one disagrees with by insinuating something sinister. People have a right to protect what they cherish and the communities they’ve helped build. The entitlement of others who want the same doesn’t justify weird and vague labels like “dog whistle”.
Also, NIMBY is a tired and dismissive pejorative. It’s just an ad hominem attack that is fashionable among “urbanists”.
I grew up in a small town in North Carolina. People used to openly oppose the county's (very limited) public transit and would outright say "we don't want n----rs bringing crime to our neighborhood".
Today, people don't say that because they know it'll get them put through the wringer on social media and/or immediately get their opinions discarded. Instead, you hear "keep out the riff-raff," "preserve our neighborhood's character," etc. from the exact same people who previously dropped the N-word like their salvation depended on it.
Same shit, different flavors. Personally, I prefer the former since you get to know exactly who to avoid associating with.
That’s just it - I don’t think it usually means that. However I do think that’s what urbanist activists usually claim it means, because spreading such a claim is a way to demonize others who legitimately value different things from them. For me, neighborhood character means lots of single-family housing, buildings of a few stories at most along arterial roads, ample sunlight at street level, great driving infrastructure (limited traffic and easy parking), lots of greenery, low to no crowding at amenities like parks, knowing my neighbors, and other such factors. These things made my town a great place to live, and subsequently newcomers who wanted the same thing came, until there were too many desiring the same thing. Then they complained about the increasing costs from that demand, and now they demand that the entire city change its character to accommodate them - therefore destroying what incumbents slowly built up and also that which attracted these newer residents in the first place.
I am happy for all of us to have the same thing. But that means distributing the economy among many towns, rather than forcefully turning every thriving town into New York City. That requires time and effort. People cannot expect to get the same thing instantly at whatever cost they can bear. To me, that still feels like entitlement.
I live in San Francisco, so I probably can't directly compare my situation with yours (I assume you live elsewhere, somewhere with even lower density). I moved here 11 years ago, in part because of things that no longer exist here because of rising property costs. I've watched my favorite restaurants, bars, and shops close because they couldn't afford rent anymore. I've seen great people move away for the same reason.
Also consider that last bit: how many people have had to leave your town because newcomers have priced them out? It's not just new people moving in who are upset with higher housing costs.
I like density. We don't need to turn into NYC, at least not into Manhattan. Brooklyn's density allows for a ton of 2- and 4-plex neighborhoods, with some SFHs mixed in here and there. Their density is at least twice that of SF's. If you want to live in an urban environment, it's ludicrous to expect any significant amount of single-family homes. And yet SF has square miles of exactly that.
The thing is, you can't snap your fingers and make housing demand go away. This is the thing that baffles me most about all the opposition to new housing here. It's like people believe that if they just stick their fingers in their ears and yell "NA NA NA NA GO AWAY NA NA NA" for long enough, all the newcomers will just go away. And maybe they will, in a few decades, but the increases in property values will go away with them. Which is funny, because as much as you talk about "character", the main reasons I see people wanting to "preserve their neighborhoods" is to preserve their property values.
I think there is a middle ground between wanting a human-scaled neighborhood with character and beauty that you love and are committed to preserving, and also increasing density by more than the current SFH-only cities with big buildings on large lots.
Your argument is just as tired. It made sense in the boomer days when a good job and hard work guaranteed a home. My dad bought his first for about $6000.
Decades of under building, greed, nimbys and their needed character, have eliminated that guarantee, or even possibility. As well as any tears for incredibly rich obstructionists to progress.
That’s not an unreasonable opinion, but to answer your question “why”, the answer is because a democratically elected state legislature has decided it’s in the best interest of their constituents to make it this way. And state power supersedes municipal power.
Nobody’s upzoned a state over one nice expensive neighborhood but when the crisis starts harming the state economy, then the state legislature obviously cares.
And no one is entitled to continually live in an unchanging, ungrowing, ever-appreciating in value community that is the same as 1970. We all live in a society. Though I am sympathetic to your argument too. Not everyone can live in manhattan and it should be more expensive.
I think that’s unfair. First off, most people I know who are alarmed at the upzoning pushed by activists would also be sympathetic towards the situation you are describing, within limits. The problem is that homelessness activists purposely conflate two very different groups - those who are homeless due to bad luck and those who are simply irresponsible (permanent nomads, drug addicted vagrants, and so on). The latter group needs to face the rule of law and experience consequences, not be coddled and encouraged to live at others’ expense.
It's feels a bit weird to call "getting priced out of your home and out onto the streets due to bad housing policy" as "bad luck".
Sure, there are homeless people who moved here specifically because they know the homeless have a not-terrible deal here (not great, but often better than most other places), but I don't see the evidence that these people are in the majority.
Oh, and consider that a lot of the homeless people who are drug addicts or have mental health issues became addicts or developed mental health issues as a result of their homelessness. You have the causality backwards for a lot of folks.
> not be coddled and encouraged to live at others’ expense.
In SF at least, in many (most?) cases it'd be cheaper for the city to just pay to put people in permanent housing (and for mental health and addiction services), than it currently costs to keep them in temporary shelters, plus the cost to deal with disturbances, jail time, cleanups, drug use, violence, medical emergencies, and so on. But no, we can't have that... can't give people things they didn't work to deserve. We'd rather cut off our noses to spite our faces.
Drug addicts are not irresponsible. They are sick. They can't improve without help: treatment and accompainment. It is a mental health issue. Stop dehumanizing people.
If you push them too hard they will either kill themselves or kill you. It is not a choice.
Opting for low density make no sense if you are worried about forest fires or insufficient groundwater. Suburban houses use more water per person not less compared to urban dwellers.
The forest fires near houses are caused by the low density zoning forcing home builders to build closer and closer to forest fire prone areas.
> At some point high prices are a signal that a city is full.
It can also be a sign of low supply
All I see in San Francisco are three story houses; not a proper subway in sight. People want to have a town house with a lawn in the middle of a city and this is the result.
SF doesn't rely on groundwater. SF water is piped in from the mountains. And it isn't actually at risk of running out. City water needs are tiny compared to what the farms in California use.
SF water is piped in because their groundwater is depleted and they are using other areas water. This led to the shutter of several cities at the time (1900s ish).
While farms do use significantly more water, they also are not in the city and they produce food. Farmers generally feel they should be able to use their water instead of the city leeching it.
The whole problem with NIMBYism is neighbors gaining political power to tell other property owners what they can do with their land. If you're actually for individual liberty over local land use you would be 100% against NIMBYism.
Your "individual liberty" to prevent people from building reasonable amounts of housing on their own land is a pretty shitty liberty that I'm fine with the state trampling. If local control is so important to you then the bluest state in the country is probably not a good fit, Dems generally are not local control maximalists.
I agree with the thrust of your statement, but "Dems generally are not local control maximalists" is true of both parties, who are more than happy to throw their general principles re: local control out the window when a locality passes a law they disagree with.
Just ask anyone in a major city in Texas, where it seems like half the laws passed by the state legislature are there to overturn bills passed by the Austin city council.
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>You cannot say you are against inequality in America, unless you are willing to have affordable housing built in your neighborhood.
Progressive cities should be leading by example, since they have legislative and executive control, but it's especially unsettling to see them take actions that indicate the opposite of the values that they espouse.
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDgcjVGHIw