California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build(nytimes.com)

California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/business/economy/housing-crisis-conor-dougherty-golden-gates.html

643 comments

davidw6 anni fa

Getting involved with a local YIMBY group is pretty easy, fun, and one of the best things you can do on several fronts:

* It's good for the economy, as "legitster" points out.

* It's good for the environment if people can drive less (or even walk or bike!) because they live closer to things.

* It's good for the people "on the margins", those struggling to pay rent, or those at risk of homelessness, or those who might like to move to a more productive place for a better job.

It's much easier to make a difference locally: in many places it's not hard to get to know your city councilors, or state reps/senators. One of my prouder YIMBY moments was turning out 5 people on a weekday morning to speak to our state rep, who ended up voting in favor of HB 2001, which legalizes up to 4-plexes throughout most Oregon cities.

buss6 anni fa

Agreed 100%

I'm very involved with YIMBY Action here in SF: I'm on the board of both YIMBY Action and YIMBY Law, and I'm also running for local office in the current election: https://buss2020.org

If you have any questions about YIMBY, send them my way!

tryitnow6 anni fa

I used to be YIMBY, but I doubt more construction would lead to lower costs of living.

When I researched this I couldn't find any strong evidence suggesting that more building would lead to more affordable housing.

You would think that more construction would lead to more affordable housing, but it seems like more construction doesn't just increase supply, it also increases demand, which can offset any price effects from the increase in supply.

This makes sense when you think that similar people want to live in proximity to people like themselves. So if there are more luxury condos in an area that's going to create demand for more high-end retail, which will enhance that neighborhood's appeals to wealthier customers which will then increase demand for more luxury residences.

Vienna and Singapore seems to be cities that have overcome this trend.

So I used to be an enthusiastic YIMBY, but there just doesn't appear to be any concrete evidence that more construction is going to lead to more affordable housing.

Having said that, I do believe we should promote more construction, I just don't think it's going to reduce the cost of living to a sustainable level.

nrp6 anni fa

The YIMBY argument mentioned in the article is that expensive new housing today becomes mid-range and eventually lower-end housing over decades as it ages. If you don’t put units into the front of that pipeline now, nothing comes out of the other end of it later. This seems plausible to me, and there is research stating the filtering effects may happen a lot faster than that on a regional level: https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2019/06/housing-supply-d...

moultano6 anni fa

More than that, "expensive" new housing is typically half the price of the single family homes next to it. It's just marketed as "luxury" because everything is. Typically the people protesting "luxury" housing already live in housing that's more expensive than what is getting built.

The role of new construction in affordability is more direct. The people who live in the shiny new places will just bid up the price of the next best thing if it isn't available, and this ripples down until the people at the bottom are priced out. So by building it, you're preventing other things from being bid up.

davidw6 anni fa

Desirable places are never going to be the absolute cheapest option, for sure, but they could be a lot cheaper. Here are some concrete (ha ha) examples:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/How-th...

https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-...

https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...

barry-cotter6 anni fa

> When I researched this I couldn't find any strong evidence suggesting that more building would lead to more affordable housing.

Tokyo's population has grown 1.5X over the last two decades while rents and property prices have been essentially flat.

buss6 anni fa

There's absolutely zero evidence of "induced demand" for housing. And all available evidence suggests that 1: SF & CA have huge shortages of homes and 2: Building more is a good solution.

Please see this non-exhaustive list of things which all show building more housing leads to housing affordability.

* http://cityobservatory.org/another-housing-myth-debunked-nei...

* https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/12/02/how...

* https://jamesjgleeson.wordpress.com/2018/02/19/how-tokyo-bui...

* https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/How-th...

* https://medium.com/land-buildings-identity-and-values/what-i...

* https://fee.org/articles/why-isnt-rent-in-tokyo-out-of-contr...

* https://www.upjohn.org/research-highlights/new-construction-...

* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/arti...

* https://medium.com/@eddiesun/no-vacancy-the-housing-crisis-l...

* https://twitter.com/noahpinion/status/1165339989774749696?s=...

ScottBurson6 anni fa

While I vigorously support more construction in the SF metro area, I think expectations need to be set correctly as to the amount of construction required to actually bring prices down, instead of just slowing their rate of increase. It's a lot. I don't recall all the numbers, but I believe I saw something suggesting that we need to increase the rate of housing starts by a factor of 4 just to stabilize prices. To actually bring them down would require even more than that. Again, we should absolutely do it, in my opinion, but if we were to only double construction — difficult as that will already be, politically — and prices didn't plateau, people might conclude that it doesn't work. We need to make sure they know what it's going to take.

It's not so much induced demand as it is pent-up demand. Lots more people would already love to live here — indeed, many have moved away solely because of housing costs.

buss6 anni fa

Yes, I unironically want 4 million new homes in San Francisco.

The housing shortage in the Bay Area might be the single largest drag on American prosperity.

bumby6 anni fa

>housing shortage in the Bay Area might be the single largest drag on American prosperity.

Obviously HN skews towards tech but let’s not fall into the trap that SV is either representative or the center of “American prosperity” for the average citizen

xixixao6 anni fa

I think it makes sense. There is absolutely space.

BUT you couldn’t move the people through the city and bay area with current infrastructure.

Money (in big amounts) needs to be taken away from roadwork and poured into public transport.

tmh796 anni fa

moving 4 million people here would create the money to allow the infra changes

jariel6 anni fa

"Yes, I unironically want 4 million new homes in San Francisco."

Why would any SF resident care even a little bit what non-residents think of their housing situation?

"The housing shortage in the Bay Area might be the single largest drag on American prosperity."

Have you considered that someone's home, their life is not a function of 'industrial prosperity'? And that they're not interested in having their neighbourhood turned into a bunch of skyscrapers hosting Facebook Engineers?

It's possible they do - but it's entirely up to the residents to decide.

hedora6 anni fa

It’s also up to the residents to pay property taxes, and owners not to horde empty housing units as investments. Also, I’ve been a resident here for over a decasde, and I’m sick of paying small fortunes to landed gentry.

Bay area housing is a ponzi scheme, and younger families have to choose between their careers and buying in at nonsensical pricing.

Local governments suppress housing starts and intentionally snarl the roads to keep the house of cards standing.

Sooner or later the older residents will be outnumbered by people that moved here, and the reckoning will probably be swift and severe. As you said, it’ll be up to the residents to decide.

A few years back, there were signs in Cupertino saying “no four story apartments”. I agree. If you’re within 0.25 miles of transit, it should be illegal to build (or improve) anything that short. I’m guessing this isn’t what the NIMBYs had in mind though.

dasil0036 anni fa

Facebook engineers are not the ones being forced out of the area.

jariel6 anni fa

Most new housing in the Bay will go to higher than average income earners, not poorer people, unfortunately. The Bay is a very dynamic city there vastly more people who would like to live there than actually do, given the right conditions. The Bay may have to contend with paying 'regular people' simply a lot more and contemplate actually sharing more of that wealth being created.

pmiller26 anni fa

Why do you assume the person you’re replying to isn’t a SF resident? Their profile indicates they are, in fact.

jariel6 anni fa

I'm not assuming the residency of the commenter, my comments are directed to commenters in general. Everyone seems to have a strong view of how many homes SF ought to have, moreover, most are making false assumptions about the nature of the problem, and the unassailable civic virtue of their own motivations without respecting the valid lamentations of 'the other side'.

In particular, tech people, or even the intelligentsia in general, tend to have an odd disregard for cultural issues and tend to see 'housing' as entirely an economic or civic function (i.e. numbers, pricing, density, affordability) while disregarding the nature of the fact that these are communities and homes. (Witness the fact that everyone on this thread, and in most reference articles tend to talk about issues such as 'price')

I watched in my lifetime the city of Vancouver get bulldozed over and replace with a zillion apartment buildings. The money is nice, but otherwise, it's a brutally garish city, the architecture is thoughtless, it's just another 'pop up' city of the theme of the New Millenium / Pacific Rim. It will not age well. What's more - even as Van has evolved towards this super-high density Hong Kong / New York physicality, costs have skyrocketed and affordability has plummeted. This should be of no surprise of course, as almost everyone in the Western world, more density generally implies less affordability and certainly 'less space'. Have a look [1]. Texan cities like Dallas are considerably more affordable and considerably less dense.

Bulldozing most of a beautiful city possibly against the wishes of its citizens to drive some kind of risky civic/industrial experiment is ... an extreme view.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

davidw6 anni fa

This is definitely a fair point. There's also - in my mind, living in a smaller town - the idea that it'd be nice if everyone coordinated to catch up mostly at the same time, so that it's not just Portland or Seattle or Boulder or San Diego or wherever... but everywhere.

BurningFrog6 anni fa

The bigger point is that today allowing housing construction is a burden for cities. You hint that it would be good if all cities shared that burden.

This is especially true in California, due to Prop 13.

If we reformed the relevant rules, so cities profited from allowing new housing, I think a lot would change in this area!

ScottBurson6 anni fa

Yeah, Prop. 13 is such a disaster.

Supposedly, the big selling point was that seniors on fixed incomes were getting priced out of their homes. But that would only happen because they have a substantial, appreciating asset. These aren't poor people who deserve our sympathy; they're relatively well-off people with a cash-flow problem! We could have solved their cash-flow problem without destroying our cities' tax bases by allowing them to defer some of their taxes [0] until their property was sold.

Here's a great article from 2014 that talks about it: https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/

As for cities profiting from allowing new housing, this might interest you: http://www.henrygeorge.org/pcontents.htm

[0] For example, the amount of tax due immediately could be allowed to grow at 2% annually, following the Prop. 13 formula. Also, the tax due at sale could be limited to, say, 70% of the gain on the sale. That limit would probably never take effect, in practice, but I've learned from previous occasions where I've proposed this that people tend to get hung up on the possibility that one might owe more in tax than one stood to make on the sale. In fact, if you run the numbers, it takes some very strange assumptions to make the deferred tax even approach getting that large; but this rule should assuage that concern. (Basically, you'd need several years of strong price growth followed by a sudden, huge collapse.)

hedora6 anni fa

Here’s a simple compromise that most people I know support:

Eliminate prop 13 for all but one property, both for individuals and for businesses. This would eliminate the current tax loophole for investment properties, and demand that tech companies that have scaled to more than one campus pay their fair share to the communities they are located in.

Also, have prop 13 valuations reset whenever the property changes hands (including inheritance, and, for commercial real estate, this would get rid of the “sell via a holding company” loophole).

ericd6 anni fa

Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of “we’ve been building a ton and prices are still high” comments on Nextdoor and heard the same in person. Not sure if it’s all in good faith, but some people at least seem to be persuaded by what you’re talking about.

tmh796 anni fa

the issue is the reference frame. We are building a lot relative to 2009 to 2013, but that time period was a historic aboslute low point in new housing starts, the "boom" that were in now has less new housing production that the majorith of previous "busts" since WWII

ericd6 anni fa

Yep, I think that has a lot to do with it.

davidw6 anni fa

"We've been building a ton" is false though. That's the error there.

DataWorker6 anni fa

You will just increase the number of unaffordable apartments. The added units will come with added traffic from the new wealthier residents, and higher prices on everything. It doesn’t seem like a win to me, unless you have very narrow goals.

imtringued6 anni fa

These "wealthy residents" are poorer in their hometowns. They don't migrate out of fun. In middle of nowhere they may get 40k per year and in the bay area it may be 160k or more.

DataWorker6 anni fa

Your point is the same one I’m making. People come here because FANG and tech generally subsidize that movement. It’s great for tech profits and great for that one guy from Russia or wherever who can make 140k salary, but it’s a net negative for society. The housing crisis is the result. A greedy growth at any cost business culture, not senior citizens trying to avoid displacement in their golden years; that’s what caused the crisis. If those businesses all went belly up like in the dot com bust, we’d have the opposite problem, a housing glut and falling prices. Yet, if you removed all forms of nimbyism, things would remain almost exactly where they are at now. The housing problem is a problem of demand- the whole world can’t move to San Francisco just because that’s what a bunch of tech companies want. Nor can the whole world move to Manhattan or Tokyo or any other place with high housing prices and too many people.

ScottBurson6 anni fa

> The housing problem is a problem of demand

Prices are set by the balance of demand and supply. The demand isn't going away. The supply is what we can do something about.

Even building expensive luxury apartments helps, unless no one can afford them at all (which is not what the builder wants to happen). The people who rent those aren't taking up spaces others could have afforded.

DataWorker6 anni fa

Demand is mediated by policy. Tax corporate real estate to create incentives for companies to locate where it’s beneficial to citizens. That’s one way to better manage demand. And we have to manage demand or we create a lot of failed cities like Detroit. Boomtowns are avoidable with sensible policy. We need those policies to keep people from exploiting humans herd like instincts for profit.

usaar3336 anni fa

> There's absolutely zero evidence of "induced demand" for housing.

There absolutely is. Here's a great paper studying the effect of removing rent control in Cambridge, MA (https://economics.mit.edu/files/9760) which found that rent in non-rent controlled units went up as a result of the removal. The effect is similar to what GP stated -- gentrification causes a feedback loop that can affect all housing.

All said, it is very possible (and I subscribe to the idea) that the Bay Area would not suffer from much induced demand because people are in the area for the economic opportunity, not for local amenities.

tlb6 anni fa

The fact that ending rent control increases prices does not support the claim that building more homes increases prices. They should have opposite effects according to basic supply and demand theory.

usaar3336 anni fa

Ending rent control also should lead to lower prices in non rent controlled housing according to supply and demand.

The sequence of events that lead to a rise in prices are similar - that is there is evidence that more affluent people moving in to a local area can result in rents going up for others in that same area.

cbHXBY1D6 anni fa

A good example is Jerry Brown's 10K Project — his plan to attract 10,000 people to live in downtown Oakland by 2001, which was the cornerstone of his tenure as mayor. The idea was that 10k affluent people would create a positive feedback loop of gentrification. As someone living in the area in the 90s-2000s, I can say it "worked" but at the expense of the working class as Oakland began gentrifying rapidly by 2010.

tlb6 anni fa

Raising the price of one good usually causes the price of substitute goods to go up. For example, if the price of wheat goes up because of import duties, the price of rice will also go up as people switch from wheat to rice.

In the rent control example, many people held on to RC apartments because they were a great deal, even though they weren't where they wanted to live. After RC ended, they moved to apartments they preferred (since there was no longer a big price differential), increasing demand (and thus price) for the originally non-RC apartments.

DataWorker6 anni fa

Agree with points 1 and 2. But build the homes in less dense areas where they be seen by the community as a net positive. Or add to existing density where appropriate. Try to add density in the suburbs is inefficient at best, frankly I’m not sure what it solves.

refurb6 anni fa

For cities like NYC and SF I think it’s clear there is a ton of induced demand.

If housing prices were cut in half in SF you’d see WAY more people moving here.

tmh796 anni fa

Comments above are correct, I'd also add that NYC and SF are "inducing demand" not by building housing, but by building office space at a rate 8x-12x that they are building residential dwelling units. Over the past ~10 years, for every home the SF bay has added it has added office space for 8 jobs. Adding housing doesn't create more demand for housiing, adding more offices creates more demand for housinig.

buss6 anni fa

That's not induced demand, that's a standard demand curve. The price drops and more people buy it.

Induced demand is "adding supply increased the price"

refurb6 anni fa

The best example of induced demand ignores price.

Build more freeways and you get more drivers.

AnthonyMouse6 anni fa

> The best example of induced demand ignores price.

> Build more freeways and you get more drivers.

That's like having a McDonalds without enough cashiers and then saying "hire more cashiers and you sell more hamburgers" is induced demand because the hamburgers cost the same but you sell more of them.

That's not induced demand, you're just changing the price. Having to wait in line (or sit in traffic) is a cost. If you reduce the cost, demand goes up, but that's just ordinary supply and demand again.

jariel6 anni fa

There is no shortage of homes in San Francisco.

Prices are a function of demand and that's it.

Every city has to ultimately decide what kind of community they want to have and then act accordingly.

As SF is an attractive city, every home ever built there will essentially be bought or occupied, there is nearly an unlimited number of people who would like to live there - so it's merely a matter of what kind of density and price they choose to have.

Do they want SF to be a city of skyscrapers, with tiny expensive flats like NYC?

Or a neighbourhood of fairly expensive homes as it is now.

Nobody anywhere will doubt that 'building significantly more homes' will reduce the average cost of homes but ultimately SF residents will decide what they want to do: if they don't want skyscrapers or high-density style buildings, it's their business.

jjeaff6 anni fa

SF is not a neighborhood of "fairly expensive homes". It is a neighborhood of some of the most expensive homes on the planet.

At a median home price of $1.7m, owning a home in SF is reserved for those grandfathered in or the wealthy.

jariel6 anni fa

The homes on Monte Rey are even more expensive but it's beside the point. There is plenty of inexpensive housing in Cali and the US to accommodate most needs.

Everyone deserves 'affordable housing' but not everyone deserves 'affordable housing' in the specific spot they want.

And FYI New York and Hong Kong even more expensive and much denser - should NYC 'triple its density'? Will that make thins better? Or maybe there's something missing from this logic.

woodandsteel6 anni fa

Huh? You mean the present sky-high housing prices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and other cities is not due to a shortage of units?

imtringued6 anni fa

(1)

Reedx6 anni fa

"I won't throw my hands in the air and blame a boogeyman, I won't ignore data because it doesn't fit my ideology...

It's time we stop blaming everyone else and start taking responsibility."

This is encouraging to see. I think Andrew Yang showed there's a real hunger for a solutions and data oriented approach, eschewing tribalism. Although perhaps still in a nascent stage, there finally seem to be signs of an increasing appetite for this.

Good luck!

buss6 anni fa

Thanks! It was a real bummer when he dropped out. I donated to his campaign and have a friend who was organizing for him down in LA. At least he made UBI mainstream!

davidw6 anni fa

Nice work! It'd be fun to have a mini-meetup at the YimbyTown conference this spring; there seems to be an overlap of tech people and YIMBYs.

buss6 anni fa

I'll be there! SF YIMBY will probably put on a happy hour or something

Retric6 anni fa

As much as building housing is promoted, if your adding jobs 1:1 with new housing it’s useless. Are you willing to limit new office space until housing catches up?

mrfusion6 anni fa

Is the movement growing? Do you see a way forward?

buss6 anni fa

We're growing a lot! YIMBY Action just brought in People for Housing Orange County and Peninsula For Everyone as affiliate clubs. We're in the process of expanding into Denver and NYC.

The demise of Scott Wiener's SB50 this year has certainly been a disappointment, but we try not to pin our hopes on any single solution. It took us 50 years to get where we are, and we expect it'll take at least 10 to get out. That will be a combination of local, state, and federal action.

The thing I've learned being involved in SF politics and YIMBY for the past few years is that politicians don't make change. They don't shift the discourse. Instead, it's grassroots movements like YIMBY Action that build a parade that politicians then jump to the front of. (Of course, this isn't true for Scott. He's one of the few true believers!)

We're building a passionate and vocal community that can do the on-the-ground organizing necessary to make politicians court us. The way forward it to continue building a voting bloc. You only have as much power as the people you can turn out to vote.

DataWorker6 anni fa

Then why align with business interests against the interests of individual citizens? You know that most voters are not high paid tech workers frustrated by the lack of luxury mix used lofts. I’m sure with enough pr money from developers you can trick some poor folks into thinking a development boom will help them, but you are betting on ignorance. The economics are very clear; building in the Bay Area cannot lower prices. Build where it makes sense, outside the Bay Area, at a rate that’s optimal for people and the environment. Plenty of room in Livermore for high density, green, lower cost development. If we added a million people to north beach, it wouldn’t be north beach anymore. Is that the goal?

complianceowl6 anni fa

Wow, I just checked out your page. I’m not a Democrat, but I could see myself voting for you.

avocado46 anni fa

Are there any unfair obstacles you face as a newcomer trying to unseat an incumbent?

buss6 anni fa

I'm not sure calling it unfair is necessarily correct, but the incumbents use ballot props to increase their name recognition. It works like this:

- A Supervisor puts a proposition on the ballot - organizations funnel money into the campaign for the ballot prop - then when the ballot prop advertises they include names of the people running for office

It's why SF has _so_ _many_ ballot props: they are the legal way to bypass the fundraising limits we imposed on individual electoral campaigns. Ironically, if we repealed our campaign finance limits, there'd be less dark money and far fewer ballot props.

I don't have a ballot prop to attach my name to, so I have to do old-fashioned campaigning (with some modern, high-tech things, too :)

arthurjj6 anni fa

Anyone in San Diego looking for a group we actually have YimbySD which supports YIMBY candidates in the primaries https://www.yimbydemssd.com/

koonce6 anni fa

I find the inclusion of Olga Diaz in the voter guide ironic, considering she voted against infill apartments because they were "out of character with the space". Gotta love politicians claiming they support something in the same breath as letting you know they voted against it.

https://www.thecoastnews.com/city-council-nullifies-conteste...

windthrown6 anni fa

Thank you!

badfrog6 anni fa

Any tips on how to find such a group? Google is turning up nothing for my city.

davidw6 anni fa

Sometimes people pick other names... maybe search for people talking about housing issues. Not 100% correlated with YIMBY, but people thinking about similar problems: https://www.strongtowns.org/local

Or start something yourself! Where do you live?

mayneack6 anni fa

If you know of initiatives you care about (like SB 50 for example), look for groups pushing that.

If you're on twitter, the twitter networks usually bridge cities. I follow a lot of LA area YIMBY groups, but get some cross pollination from other cities too.

Xelbair6 anni fa

>It's much easier to make a difference locally: in many places it's not hard to get to know your city councilors, [..]

I am not from USA, but over here i did have a 'pleasure' contacting them. They worked actively against communities they were supposed to represent. I am talking about both city councilors, and district ones.

You know whats the best part? you have like 3 options to pick, and they all are exactly the same(cozy job, with limited hours for appointments and ignoring your community)

foxx-boxx6 anni fa

exterrestrial6 anni fa

>It's good for the people "on the margins", those struggling to pay rent, or those at risk of homelessness, or those who might like to move to a more productive place for a better job.

Please cite at lease one example in which this has ever been the case. I do understand the theory behind your argument here, and I assume you are familiar with (leftist) counter-arguments, so this is not an attempt to open a debate. Rather, I want you to be right but until I see some solid evidence I am unconvinced.

>One of my prouder YIMBY moments was turning out 5 people on a weekday morning to speak to our state rep, who ended up voting in favor of HB 2001, which legalizes up to 4-plexes throughout most Oregon cities.

This is a great example of how it seems to me that YIMBYs are anti-NIMBY in the way Democrats are anti-Republican. Time and time again, it appears neither groups are actually doing any thing ‘good for the people “on the margins. Clearly, this policy benefits landlords more than anybody and the implication is that this is besides the fact of lowering rent prices. Fine. But it is not insignificant that all of these efforts primarily promote the perpetuation of rent-seeking.

I watched from the front row as investors bought up Portland. It has been about 6 years since it entered full-swing and rent prices are higher than ever before. This is not good for people “on the margins”. In fact, most of those people were not even on the margins before the investors came in. I am one of them. I should know.

Of course, history is littered with cases of YIMBY theory failing urban housing markets, so please show me an example of where your theories have actually succeeded.

davidw6 anni fa

I think that if you're going to argue that supply and demand are not real for housing, you'd need to supply some good evidence of your own.

There are a lot of ways to build more supply:

https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...

I find the 'Montreal' example the most compelling in that it's fairly "human scale", but tastes vary.

jariel6 anni fa

While I don't doubt that building more homes brings prices down, the real reason housing is cheap in Montreal is because Montreal is poor, has lower immigration, little in the way of industry to attract migrants, language barriers, and it doesn't have a basis of Chinese ex-pats to anchor a lot of foreign buying which is a huge driver of prices in Toronto and Vancouver.

Edit: I should add, I live here and am very intimate with the issue.

Spooky236 anni fa

Rental housing has price floor that distorts the market. Once a property diverges from the requirements of housing subsidy programs, it usually gets abandoned.

In most places new supply is high end and is making more housing available for people who don’t lack access.

davidw6 anni fa

> In most places new supply is high end and is making more housing available for people who don’t lack access.

In most places, new cars are more expensive than used ones, but if you stopped providing new cars, the price of the used ones would shoot up as everyone started competing for a dwindling supply of cars.

Same goes for housing.

Also, it's a longer term process with housing, but 'filtering' is a real thing: https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2016/05/25/housing-does-f...

Spooky236 anni fa

Take a stroll in a prosperous city like NYC and tell me why the market hasn’t filled the empty storefronts.

The reason is that there are implicit price floors through tax policy. It’s cheaper to “lose” money on property to offset taxes on winning properties.

exterrestrial6 anni fa

You can’t compare cars to real estate and property.

For one, most property and real estate appreciates in market value on it’s own. This makes spec construction viable, and why most new apartment buildings in expensive cities are ”luxury” units and rented for very high rates. The owners are happy to let them sit empty and starve the market to max out demand when they know there is enough jobs in the area that people are competing heavily to move there.

In addition, the markets are tiny compared with cars, which are easy to move to cars to other markets (cities).

allovernow6 anni fa

>In most places, new cars are more expensive than used ones, but if you stopped providing new cars, the price of the used ones would shoot up as everyone started competing for a dwindling supply of cars

An unspoken consequence of cash for clunkers. Practically overnight 100k miles was considered "low mileage", which was ridiculous before people started needlessly trashing perfectly good used cars.

smogcutter6 anni fa

Eh, I’ve heard that before as well but I don’t know if it’s true. By the time the program ended in 2009, cash for clunkers had taken ~700k cars off the market. The same year, about 35 million used cars were sold in the US[1]. Cash for clunkers was a rounding error.

[1] Had a hard time finding statistics for 2009, but it’s in here: https://www.niada.com/PDFs/Publications/2010IndustryReport.p...

Spooky236 anni fa

The 100k mile thing came with the enhanced emission controls in the late 90s.

BurningFrog6 anni fa

New supply in housing shortage area is expensive, for the same reason old housing is expensive there: THERE IS A HOUSING SHORTAGE!

Therefore, if you say it's bad to build new housing if it will end up being expensive, you're really saying there should be no new housing built during a housing shortage...

I find it's often better to think it terms of number of homes and housed people than in prices. If 100 new apartments are built, it's hard to say what will happen to prices exactly. But it's undeniable that there will be 100 more homes, and 200-300 more people can live indoors in that city, than without the project.

mlyle6 anni fa

> In most places new supply is high end and is making more housing available for people who don’t lack access.

vs. the article:

> ... how expensive new housing today would become affordable old housing tomorrow ...

Spooky236 anni fa

With 1-2 family houses, that’s how it works. Not for high density.

For complexes, everything is based on depreciation cycles. Apartments typically get shittier over a relatively short timeframe.

mlyle6 anni fa

> In most places new supply is high end and is making more housing available for people who don’t lack access.

People are outraged when you put apartments and condos in their multi-single-family cities because "lower class" people will move in. Don't those "lower class" people currently lack access to live these places?

tathougies6 anni fa

> Clearly, this policy benefits landlords more than anybody

Well... no. If your SFH zoned lot is now duplex-friendly, it means your house goes up in value because it can be immediately rented out to two people or you can rent it out to another family immediately, without asking anyone, as long as you do the required physical modifications. Now your home value is increased by the amount of revenue (at an appropriate discount rate) it would draw in from two simultaneous occupants in perpetuity, which is always higher than the rate possible from one occupant.

It literally benefits everyone

> Of course, history is littered with cases of YIMBY theory failing urban housing markets

No, it's not. History is a constant example of the success of the free market, which YIMBY's are in favor of, and NIMBY's are against. This is ridiculous.

woah6 anni fa

Wait.. so you are just opposed to people having somewhere to live? You’re saying that more apartments on the market makes prices higher? I don’t think I’m going to be able to follow the logic here.

The problem with the “try to understand NIMBYs” concern trolling in this thread is that there isn’t much to understand. The only common thread in NIMBY philosophy is fear of change, and some mild xenophobia.

I think there’s a lot more common ground to be had with far-left PHIMBYs who want the government to build most housing. At least that’s a coherent philosophy and a proposed solution.

exterrestrial6 anni fa

When investors buy property, they almost always intend to raise it’s value to increase their profit. That’s how this works. They very often tear down affordable units and build luxury ones, because the YIMBY policies peculiarly never take issue with that.

Realize most property and real estate appreciates in market value on it’s own. This makes spec construction viable, and is why most new apartment buildings in expensive cities are ”luxury” units and rented for very high rates. The owners are happy to let them sit empty and starve the market to max out demand when they know there is enough jobs in the area that people are competing heavily to move there.

darksaints6 anni fa

Speaking as the SO of a major property management company exec operating in Portland, no it wasn't a policy that benefits landlords. Not in the slightest. More competition and lower prices are a landlord's and developer's worst nightmare.

And yes, due to the scale of development, rents are lower than they expected when they built. Your prices were gonna go up regardless, and the scale of development that happened actually kept prices down.

exterrestrial6 anni fa

As I said, rents are higher than ever before. Why should renters care if investors are exploiting them for as much profit as they originally wanted to? My point stands: rents are higher than ever before. Not lower.

darksaints6 anni fa

Before rent control passed, this was what was happening.

https://reason.com/2018/10/10/booming-construction-and-falli...

> Portland added 4,419 unit of completed housing in 2016, a slight increase from the roughly 4,365 it added in 2015, which combined is more than all the housing units added in the five years prior to 2014, according to the Portland Housing Bureau's 2017 annual report.

> Year-over-year average rents declined by a full 1.2 percent in the city of Portland, with average rents dropping to $1,140 per month for a median one-bedroom apartment, according to the yearly rent report from Apartment List. It's a similar story in Seattle, with Apartment List data showing rents declining 1.6 percent from where they were in 2017. The median monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Seattle is $1,346.

When you don't build more, rents go up. When you start to build enough, rents go down. It's pretty fucking simple. In fact, it is econ 101.

throwaway342416 anni fa

I'm not sure exactly what you are looking for to be convinced but I'll try.

First of all, for example in the Bay Area there are more people who would like to live there than there are houses, and so the people with more money bid up the price and "win" the house, while the people with less money are priced out and must live elsewhere. Hopefully you agree with this basic premise?

With this model, if there is one less house, one more person will be priced out, and if there is one more house, one less person will be priced out, since the number of houses determine how many winners there will be (and as long as people don't change their minds about wanting to live there if they could afford it).

I've heard people worry about "induced demand", and I agree it's true that there's probably many people that would consider moving to San Francisco from elsewhere if the price started coming down (and of course vice versa), and that that would prevent the price from lowering too quickly. But those people moving free up housing in Austin, Seattle, etc, and there are more "winners" overall.

I think a lot of the people "on the margins" of being priced out in the Bay Area are not on the edge of homelessness - often they are able to move and drive up demand elsewhere. But I do see more and more people living out of RVs and vehicles parked near freeways.

For the price increases over the last couple decades, I think the demand has gone up for most first world cities. I think this is mostly because the industries that are booming are mostly knowledge work, that tends to have a higher specialization of labor so is more naturally located in places with higher population densities that have more liquid job markets (in addition to network effects within certain industries). I think the solution to this is to build more housing in cities but the alternative is lower income workers/industries are displaced and landowners are enriched.

For a specific example of this theory working, Tokyo is subject to a lot of the same economic forces as other first world cities that drive demand up (wrt labor specialization etc). They've managed to keep housing under control, but in order to achieve that they've had to allow almost double the amount of new housing as all of California (despite Tokyo having only around 1/3 the population) [1].

[1] https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-...

exterrestrial6 anni fa

Citing Japan only further proves my point. Property values don’t appreciate the same in Japan because, and one reason is that they don’t have a finance industry that allows them to. Land owners cannot get rich by mere property appreciation like they can here. I definitely think we should imitate Japan more, but this isn’t simply a matter of “allowing more housing”. Acting like that’s all there is to it is disingenuous.

throwaway342416 anni fa

Japan does real estate development with banks and loans like the US does, and interest rates are even lower so it's easier to borrow a large sum of money. Can you explain what you meant about the finance industry not allowing prices to appreciate?

Their zoning is where they have obvious huge differences. The zoning categories are set at a national level and limit how restrictive local cities can be (there's 12 categories based on nuisance level). The higher zoning usually allows lower density also, so cities just start with a little extra zoning headroom that allows them to grow over time. They also automatically permit things that follow zoning. [1]

In the US zoning is more local, often there are many more zone types that are much more restrictive about what they allow (it's more micromanaged and often prohibits things like mixed-use in addition to multi family). In many of the biggest markets even projects that follow zoning are usually not allowed, every project is an individual years long fight. Also in cities like Los Angeles the zoned-for capacity has actually dramatically decreased over time, even as the population grew. [2]

Some of these policies may be a legacy of people deliberately not wanting it to be too affordable, because neighborhoods didn't want low-income people to move in. Of course now in many places even middle-income people can't afford it.

I think, from a social justice perspective, the US policy has been an abject failure. It's increased pollution (from long commutes) and homelessness. It's deprived people of good paying jobs, since they can't afford to move to the locations where they're available. It's squeezed the middle class and enriched landlords, there's even debate that housing may be the most important contributor to wealth inequality. It's anti-environment since higher density has less environmental impact on a per-capita basis. I'm sure there's some upsides, but I can't see any that remotely justify the long-term costs that these policies have brought about.

[1] https://marketurbanism.com/2019/03/19/why-is-japanese-zoning...

[2] https://www.salon.com/test/2015/04/05/the_incredible_shrinki..., graph at: https://www.austincontrarian.com/.a/6a00d8341d04dc53ef01b8d2...

matchbok6 anni fa

Demonizing landlords is not the answer. They did not get us into this mess. It's a distraction. Prices are set by the market.

tmh796 anni fa

In california, landlords largely did get us into this mess though. Like not on an individual scale, but as an organized political constituency they lobbied for the policies that have caused the problems we're experiencing and they're generally lobbying against the solutions.

nerfhammer6 anni fa

It's a distraction in that it may lead to bad intuitions about what to do, like trying to "punish" landlords in some way will somehow make up for something.

tmh796 anni fa

I do a lot of housing policy activism outside my daily work in tech and I entirely disagree with you. On a large scale, real estate associations and "landlord" associations are an incredibly influential lobbying coalition in the state of California, and on the whole, they exert a hugely negative influence o housing policy. I don't think there is any reason to advocate punishing landlords where "punishing" is throwing them in jail, but the problem is that 99% of landlords will say that anything that you might do that lowers the growth in value of their assets or increase taxes on them is punishment, and they lobby in sacramento on that basis. The reality is that most of the policy changes that California needs (zoning reform, property tax reform, vacancy taxes, etc) will have the landlord lobbies against them on the basis that they are "punishing landlords".

On a larger scale, something like 85% of the state legislators in Caliifornia are themself landlords (they own a unit/home that they lease to someone else) and are profiting off the housing crises not just by owning their own home, but by profiting of the exorbitant rents of others. On some level, the housing crises in california is caused by the state legislature fighting for their own class interest and their own personal financial interest as landlords.

ben_w6 anni fa

What happens when the market is prevented from increasing supply by property owners collectively setting rules that prevent sufficient further growth?

I’m not saying this happened in California, but it’s what I think happened in the UK, where I am a landlord.

hodgesrm6 anni fa

In the California case it did happen but the "landlords" are owners of single family homes. Here's a typical example: https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-california-sb50-f...

matchbok6 anni fa

I agree, that's a problem. I would hope that most landlords are good actors, though. (heh)

mlyle6 anni fa

> Clearly, this policy benefits landlords more than anybody

Plenty of people buy duplexes and fourplexes and live in them. They are also housing that is cheaper and can be rented at a lower price.

api6 anni fa

How much do you think rents would have gone up without more housing supply.

hannasanarion6 anni fa

You are absolutely correct that the root cause of the housing crisis is capitalism and the commodification of housing. However, a socialist restructuring of the entire housing market is not likely to happen any time soon.

While we wait for the revolution, we might as well encourage the for-profit developers to build in the least destructive ways, so that less people suffer in the short term from the choked supply and anti-human urban planning that capitalists will exercise if left unchecked.

moultano6 anni fa

> You are absolutely correct that the root cause of the housing crisis is capitalism and the commodification of housing.

Every other commodity in my life, food for instance, is dirt cheap and getting cheaper all the time. Housing is expensive because it is not a commodity. You have to beg the government to allow it to exist.

tmh796 anni fa

You're speaking past each other. In marxist economics literature "commodification" means something is able to be bought and sold, not that it is a commodity in the broader ecconomic sense (an undifferentiated good with broadly elastic demand). "Honor" isn't commodified, "dignity" isn't commodified, "food" is commodified, and "rare collectible art" is commodified.

moultano6 anni fa

Thanks for the clarification. If it's a definition that applies to literally every physical good in a market economy, then it doesn't have much explanatory power to explain why some things are cheap and abundant, and why some things are expensive and scarce.

tmh796 anni fa

yea, I mean there have been large periods in human history in which land was not bought and sold. Many indigenous cultures don't have a strong concept of land ownership. In many modern socialist countries (Singapore, china), you cannot "buy land" you can lease it from the government for a long period of time (usually 99 years). In the united states, "education" is a good/service that transverses a weird line between "marxist commodity"/"non commodity" as we have education as a public good and we also have public schooling.

I want to be clear here that I'm not making any value judgements with my statements about capitalism vs socialism/marxism, and I agree that the "commodification of housing" IMO doesn't explain why its expensive, but to be fair, the people making that argument are generally not making an argument on values (housing aught to be...), and values are kind of a "first principles" type thing that you can't persuade or prove wrong, they just are.

PS, if you're interested in learning more, the wiki article is nice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodification

lopmotr6 anni fa

Actually, a lot of values can be obtained from other, more general, values. Not everything of course or we'd all agree on everything! But I wish people would do this more often when they make arguments about rights and wrongs. Something like "I agree with X because it's a special case of Y which I hold as an axiomatic value". Instead, they just seemingly randomly decide which side their opinion falls on then try to make up random pot-shots of excuses to defend it.

hannasanarion6 anni fa

If housing was not a commodity, then it could not be bought and traded with fluctuations of value and expectations of profit on the part of the owners. The cost of housing would not be a problem if it was priced for the benefit it provides, instead of its profit potential.

moultano6 anni fa

It isn't the price of housing that's the root problem, it's the arithmetic. There aren't enough homes in places people want to live for the people who want to live there. The price decides who gets them, but arithmetic causes the underlying suffering.

If there isn't enough food, someone goes hungry. The price just decides who. If there isn't enough housing, someone has to move out. The price just decides who.

Choosing "who" via a more equitable method than price doesn't reduce the amount of suffering, it just spreads it around better.

nerfhammer6 anni fa

What you're saying is that price isn't the problem, scarcity is the problem. Price is just an inevitable consequence of scarcity – the symptom, not the cause.

kofejnik6 anni fa

yeah, housing should not be a commodity and should not be subject to market forces; instead, a benevolent committee of compassionate people (well-read into marxism, of course) should decide who gets to live where

marknutter6 anni fa

(1)

legitster6 anni fa

There is a study that came out this year that I have been obsessed with: If zoning laws in San Francisco and New York City (just two places!) were frozen in place in 1964, the average American income today would be on average $3700 higher.

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/mac.20170388?fbc...

aresant6 anni fa

Super interesting study and to further clarify:

"Our point is that a first-order effect of more housing in Silicon Valley is to raise income and welfare of all US workers."

tmh796 anni fa

To clarify, the issue is that in the 60's, both cities had much looser zoning and allowed dense housing development. Policy changes in the late 60s and early 70s tightened the zoning/reduced a cities ability to create dense housing.

istjohn6 anni fa

It goes to show that housing is a national issue that needs national solutions. We need federal legislation.

pascalxus6 anni fa

I completely agree with the sentiment to build more, much more housing. But, in order to make that happen, we also need to:

- get rid of or modify zoning laws (at least in places where growth will happen)

- reduce regulations on builders

- ensure that there are plenty of builders for health competition (so that consumers don't get ripped off)

- provide protections for builders from Sue happy NIMBYs (some kind of legal protection that prevents builders from being sued and penalizes NIMBYs that try to stand in their way).

The benefits of building more are so numerous:

- every house that gets built reduces costs for everyone else as well, as the stress of under supply lessens

- it's easier for people to get to work and find work

- easier for companies to higher people

- more jobs getting created, not just from people able to get to work but new jobs getting created from all that construction

- It'll help the environment immensly! Everyday, I see the 580 - 5 lane highway clogged up with cars crawling by at 10mpg, probably getting very low MPG over a very long distance (this is where most of the CO2 pollution is coming from, at least in the US!)

- over the long term even people with houses already will pay lower property taxes (decreasing values reduce prop taxes)

- as the number of average miles driven per commute comes down, there will be less and less traffic.

rndmize6 anni fa

Ahead of most of this, you probably need to remove or heavily adjust Prop 13.

The primary problem, as detailed in the article, is that homeowners have every incentive to be against new construction and no incentives to be for it. If property taxes rose appropriately with property values, homeowners would have an interest in maintaining housing prices rather than doing everything they can to keep them rising.

There's also a range of beneficial secondary effects. For example, I've talked to retired folks that have considered leaving the bay due to the increased cost of living. But because they have owned their house for decades + P13, if they bought a _cheaper_ house elsewhere in CA to downsize, they'd be paying _more_ in property taxes, to the point of the move not being worth the cost. (I believe there's been talk of transferable tax rates to fix this specific problem, or maybe something was even passed, but it just goes to show the distortions P13 has beyond the obvious).

Aligning incentives (where possible) is, imo, almost always a better way to do things than creating a new batch of regulations/laws to deal with a problem.

bcrosby956 anni fa

I don't know a single long time home owner that is NIMBY because they want their house's value to rise. They're NIMBY because they want their neighborhood to stay the same.

> For example, I've talked to retired folks that have considered leaving the bay due to the increased cost of living. But because they have owned their house for decades + P13, if they bought a _cheaper_ house elsewhere in CA to downsize, they'd be paying _more_ in property taxes, to the point of the move not being worth the cost. (I believe there's been talk of transferable tax rates to fix this specific problem, or maybe something was even passed, but it just goes to show the distortions P13 has beyond the obvious).

Tax rates are transferable in the same county, under certain restrictions (less expensive I think). Some counties have deals with eachother to transfer tax rates. I think a big benefit would be to have all counties to be able to transfer rates with eachother.

Another problem with transferable tax rates is most smaller housing units tend to be condos - and all they build new are 'luxury' condos. Even if you could pay for it outright, and get a transferred tax rate, you probably have an insane HOA attached to it. This alone can make it not worthwhile.

But still, I think the best, most realistic way out of the prop 13 mess is to get rid of it for newly bought homes, but allow the transfer rate for downsizing state-wide. And for the love of god, get rid of it from inheritance. Most of these people massively benefiting from it are in their 60s and 70s, so the circle of life will eventually take care of things. If we don't pass something soon the next generation of inheritors will force us to wait another lifetime to fix the problem.

deepakhj6 anni fa

Prop 13 would be easy to fix: 1) Limit to primary residence. 2) Charge market rate tax for everyone but for homeowners that want to defer assess it as a lien on the house that is collected once sold. New homeowner tax will drop once tax revenue is more equitable. Make this deferment income based. 3) Remove from commercial property.

refurb6 anni fa

It’s the inequity of property tax that really burns me.

Just because I bought the same house decades later my property tax is 20x what my neighbor’s is?

Am I really using 20x the resources my neighbor does?

Get rid of Prop 13 and you could probably be revenue neutral and still drop the property tax rate by 50%.

m4636 anni fa

I've been wondering about Prop 13 and I've come to the conclusion it's made california into a big ponzi scheme.

Basically, the new arrivals pay for everything. And new taxes added (such as school taxes) follow the same scheme so that long-time residents pay less there too.

That said, the TRUE beneficiaries of prop 13 are corporations anyway.

mlyle6 anni fa

> I don't know a single long time home owner that is NIMBY because they want their house's value to rise. They're NIMBY because they want their neighborhood to stay the same.

There's lots of people who move into a neighborhood near a airport, landfill, etc, and who over some time living there decide the airport is a big problem because it's holding property values down.

jdhn6 anni fa

>But because they have owned their house for decades + P13, if they bought a _cheaper_ house elsewhere in CA to downsize, they'd be paying _more_ in property taxes,

California homeowners who are 55 or older get a one time chance to sell their existing primary residence, and transfer its property tax assessment to another house[0]. Only catch is that the valuation of the new property has to be equal or less than the property that you sold, but if you live in the Bay Area you probably meet that qualification.

[0] https://www.sfgate.com/business/networth/article/How-to-tran...

hcknwscommenter6 anni fa

"if you live in the Bay Area you probably meet that qualification"

Only if you are leaving the Bay Area. Often, these older houses have a lot of deferred maintenance and the retired seller wants to downsize into something in the Bay Area that is newer build/renovated.

njarboe6 anni fa

And you can't leave the Bay Area as the transfer has to be in the same county in most cases.

masonic6 anni fa

Proposition 5 would have made this fully portable throughout the state and freed up a lot of Bay Area real estate, but it was defeated.

https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_5,_Property_T...

fortran776 anni fa

Correct. There are many people who come on this forum and others specifically to lie about Prop 13. I wonder who they work for? Maybe the teacher's union?

samatman6 anni fa

Not that this detracts from your points, but transportation is responsible for 29% of CO2 emissions[0]. It's the single largest sector, but not a majority contributor.

[0]: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

thedance6 anni fa

In California, transportation by itself is 41% of GHG emissions and oil production and refining are another 11% so it is a supportable statement that transportation is the majority of this state's CO2 production.

https://ww3.arb.ca.gov/cc/inventory/pubs/reports/2000_2017/g...

Denvercoder96 anni fa

The highest figure I could find for oil usage by sector gives ~60% for transport, so even that gives only ~47% of GHG emissions for transport in total. Then start to discount for all non-local transport, and you won't get anywhere close to a majority.

christiansakai6 anni fa

Home ownership generally slows growth for everything else around that area. Every home owner has this "not in my backyard" mentality and will veto any possible developments in their area.

intopieces6 anni fa

If that’s the case - which I don’t doubt - why are we encouraging home ownership at all? One of the key metrics the article presents is the drop in home ownership. Wouldn’t encouraging renters be a potential solution?

int_19h6 anni fa

Because home ownership means greater economic stability for the individual or family owning it, and "we" consists of individuals and families?

intopieces6 anni fa

Economic stability is a necessity for home ownership and is often exhibited by home owners, but home ownership is not a cause nor prerequisite for economic stability. The relationship between the two was muddled in the run up to the last financial crisis- that is, lenders were encouraged to lend to more people to buy houses because it was correlated with economic stability. This is a little like buying someone expensive shoes to make them a better basketball player.

int_19h6 anni fa

I wrote "greater economic stability", not "a prerequisite for economic stability". Would anybody seriously argue that not having to pay rent, and not facing with the possibility of eventually getting kicked out (even with all the protections, this can happen if the owner is taking the property off the market altogether), does not translate to more stability.

intopieces6 anni fa

>Would anybody seriously argue that not having to pay rent, and not facing with the possibility of eventually getting kicked out [...] does not translate to more stability[?]

Paul Krugman does. [0]

Subsidies to home ownership increased economic volatility (people spend more when their house is worth more, spend less when its value decreases); weakened financial services; and made labour markets tend to become more rigid. [1]

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/opinion/23krugman.html [1]https://www.economist.com/briefing/2009/04/16/shelter-or-bur...

thescriptkiddie6 anni fa

Okay thanks, Thatcher.

riantogo6 anni fa

You know why, right?

Fauntleroy6 anni fa

Yeah, we know why. Maybe a basic necessity like housing shouldn't be treated like the damn stock market.

riantogo6 anni fa

That is correct. So people who got into the "stock market" are being protective about their investment. Unless there is a path to offer them relief they will always vote against diluting their hard earned money. Most of the people who didn't get in often approach the problem as, "yeah, screw them, make it good for me", and then act surprised as to why they don't get the votes. But it seems like you understand the issue.

istjohn6 anni fa

And the people who did get in often approach the problem as, "yeah, screw them, I got mine." So we have two groups who have countervailing interests. But of course the property owners have more money--and also time, education, social capital, and so on--so they are the ones who usually win this fight.

Baeocystin6 anni fa

> "yeah, screw them, I got mine."

A more charitable interpretation is that it takes a lifetime of wealth accumulation to be able to buy a home in today's California, and it is not unreasonable to be concerned about the potential of losing your life's single largest investment. Casting them as a cartoon villains solves nothing.

throwaway342416 anni fa

Is it even primarily an economic self interest thing? If they intend to continue living in their current neighborhood it would be hard to realize that home value, although I'm sure there's some people that plan to sell the house and retire out of state.

Increasing density might not even necessarily be bad for property prices (for people who want to sell) since the land might be redeveloped into more than one unit.

I'm sure the economic angle is part of it, but I don't have a good feel for how big a factor it is compared to disliking traffic / change in "neighborhood character" etc.

Baeocystin6 anni fa

I'm sure you're right, in that there are multiple reasons all mashed together. A family that buys in Neighborhood X likely selected that neighborhood because they liked it as it is, so I think it's easy to see why homeowners would be resistant to change, economic or not.

My gut tells me a lot of it is genuinely about the money, though. Of the people I know, most have to spend >50% of their income per month just to maintain a roof over my head. And these are working-professional families, well above median state incomes. That kind of pressure, even under the guise of paying a mortgage instead of renting, is a real stressor.

christiansakai6 anni fa

Yeah. I will do the same thing.

stale20026 anni fa

Of course I know why. People don't like competition.

Lower rents, and having more affordable housing is obviously something that a person who profits from higher rents, would want to prevent.

quotemstr6 anni fa

Another beneficial change would be repealing proposition 13. Because proposition 13 essentially bans property tax increases for property owners, it creates a perverse incentive to drive property values as high as possible with restrictive zoning. Without proposition 13, property taxes would rise along with the land's economic value, creating an additional incentive for property owners to let the market naturally shift land use to higher-density housing.

danans6 anni fa

There is an upcoming ballot initiative to repeal the commercial side of prop 13:

https://edsource.org/2019/school-groups-explore-15-billion-t...

bcrosby956 anni fa

Yeah, but I feel like any removal or reduction of prop 13 should be used to help reduce California income taxes, which is abnormally high due to prop 13, not spend more money on stuff.

danans6 anni fa

This repeal effort is specifically motivated by the desire to increase education funding, not to reduce income taxes. It may also have the Georgist side effect of pushing more expensive commercial property into productive uses vs idling as financial instruments.

I'm not saying you have to agree with that cause, but if lowering state income taxes is your goal, then there are plenty of groups in CA advocating for that whose cause you can join.

However, I'd guess that due to political realities, most of them also oppose repeal of proposition 13 also, so you might have some challenges building a movement around that.

bcrosby956 anni fa

My goal is for California to have a more stable revenue story so the state doesn't enter crisis mode every 10 years. California revenue is volatile because of the heavy reliance on income taxes, which are volatile due to the stock market. Property taxes are a much more stable source of revenue to rely upon.

Backing out prop 13 to fund certain ventures is just going to create even more problems down the road. Revenue will still be volatile. Then in the next downturn education will get screwed again, like what happened in the last recession. And you won't have prop 13 to back out anymore. It will be permanently fucked. Maybe the state will bump income taxes even more to fund things.

So more volatile revenue for the state to rely on. More fun times ahead!

danans6 anni fa

> California revenue is volatile because of the heavy reliance on income taxes, which are volatile due to the stock market. Property taxes are a much more stable source of revenue to rely upon.

If that's true, and more of the education budget is funded from property taxes, then how can the following be true:

> Backing out prop 13 to fund certain ventures is just going to create even more problems down the road. Revenue will still be volatile. Then in the next downturn education will get screwed again, like what happened in the last recession.

A recession will hit everything, but if property tax revenues are earmarked for education, its funding should be less volatile than more income tax dependent programs.

[deleted]6 anni fa

RangerScience6 anni fa

There's good reasons to keep part of it. I figure: You get to have the Prop 13 effect on one property - notionally, your home, but since it's difficult / gameable to determine which place is "your home", fuggedaboutit, and just say "pick one".

Because yeah, it'd suck to lose your home that you're supposed to own because your neighborhood got pricey.

Obi_Juan_Kenobi6 anni fa

There are reasonable ways to protect people from property-tax shocks. Prop 13 is about as dumb a mechanism you could design.

6gvONxR4sf7o6 anni fa

>There are reasonable ways to protect people from property-tax shocks.

Such as?

rcpt6 anni fa

This is the best summary I know

https://taxfoundation.org/property-tax-limitation-regimes-pr...

davidw6 anni fa

I think your point is an important one to consider and mitigate if property tax reform ever comes to the west coast (Oregon has a similar system). However: giving people an incentive to make sure their neighborhood doesn't get too pricey (build more!) is probably not bad, either.

mlyle6 anni fa

Lots of states have regimes where you can defer (often interest-free) the amount of property tax increase above a certain limit to time of sale. This may be a better way to handle it than what California does.

That is, if your property tax was $10,000 last year when you bought, and would increase to $12,000 this year, the state would give you an indefinite, interest free loan for $1500 or whatever secured by the property.

RangerScience6 anni fa

Hmm. I like the sentiment, but I'd be worried about the implementation (sounds like complex tax math) and with potential downsides (make less money when selling could lead to selling less; I can imagine a housing bubble popping and you end up under water due to owed taxes when the property was worth more).

Although, if other states do it, should be data to talk to those predictions...

mlyle6 anni fa

> Hmm. I like the sentiment, but I'd be worried about the implementation (sounds like complex tax math)

You already need to keep track of two assessed values for prop 13, along with history for catch-up basis increase. All you need to keep track of here is original tax rate (to know the maximum for this year) and deferred amount.

> I can imagine a housing bubble popping and you end up under water due to owed taxes when the property was worth more

No one's guaranteed to make money on every asset.

RangerScience6 anni fa

> No one's guaranteed to make money on every asset.

There's a difference between "I have lost money on this thing" and "I owe more because I sold this thing".

By a house (debt-free) for $100, and, say, tax of $1. Something happens for a decade, so it's worth $1000, tax of $10 per year for 10 years; $90 is deferred. Later, thing un-happens and more, now house is worth $60, with $90 in deferred tax, so if you sell it... you end up owing $30, for a net loss of $70, instead of the $50 in loss on the asset?

...or is there something I'm getting really, really wrong?

Seems simpler (and safer) to say property tax doesn't change (instead of accumulating interest-free debt), and profit from selling is capital gains, but I know jack shit about this stuff and am willing to be wrong.

mlyle6 anni fa

> By a house (debt-free) for $100, and, say, tax of $1. Something happens for a decade, so it's worth $1000, tax of $10 per year for 10 years; $90 is deferred. Later, thing un-happens and more, now house is worth $60, with $90 in deferred tax, so if you sell it... you end up owing $30, for a net loss of $70, instead of the $50 in loss on the asset?

Takes a long time to get to these situations without crazy valuation swings (+900%, then -94%?) and under 2%-ish tax rates. That would be a net loss of $130, too.

> ...or is there something I'm getting really, really wrong?

Pretty much. In most property tax regimes, it's the parcel itself that has the tax owed, and the assessor doesn't/can't go after past owners. Most mortgages are recourse-free, too-- it may be bad for your credit to not pay, but they take the property and don't come after your other assets.

There's a societal benefit, here, too, BTW. If you have a property that's worth $10M to others, but you employ it for a use that's worth $100k to you... accruing tax on the $10M encourages you to make a transaction that will leave the property better employed.

[deleted]6 anni fa

myvoiceismypass6 anni fa

How does one “lose their home” if the value (to resell to others) goes down, but they aren’t moving & still living there?

panopticon6 anni fa

> it'd suck to lose your home that you're supposed to own because your neighborhood got pricey

This would imply that the value goes up (location, location, location). That would cause property taxes to increase and may drive people out that can't afford to stay.

mlyle6 anni fa

They're saying that if the value goes up you can have to pay increased property taxes that you now can't afford.

rcpt6 anni fa

It's really not a bad problem to have.

mlyle6 anni fa

As a purely economic position, sure, it's not awful... But if you're going to chase retirees out of communities they've lived their entire life that's kinda unfortunate.

rcpt6 anni fa

Meh. We chase old renters out all the time and they don't get hundreds of thousands of dollars in windfall profits along the way.

jimmaswell6 anni fa

So the existing homeowners on retirement income/stuck in a job that pays a certain rate who can't afford the raised tax rates get kicked out to the street?

bluGill6 anni fa

Prop 13 also has the perverse incentive that once you are in you should vote for tax increases and high spend policies - you won't have to pay for them.

I'm surprised Republicans have not latch onto this as a reason to repeal it - they already like to point out it is easy to spend other people's money as an argument against socialism.

tathougies6 anni fa

There are no republicans in california. Like, the CA republican party is completely defunct at this point, and I am a (former) California republican; now a republican in another liberal state.

bluGill6 anni fa

That is something local Republicans need to fix...

_fq4v6 anni fa

Yes, I don't disagree, and am not asking for 'help'.

The comment above wrote

> I'm surprised Republicans have not latch onto this as a reason to repeal it - they already like to point out it is easy to spend other people's money as an argument against socialism.

I pointed out that there is hardly any Republican leadership in California that would be able to latch onto this issue and amplify it. My observation was an explanation for the dearth of republicans against this issue, not a request for assistance.

fortran776 anni fa

I am a registered republican, and I live in 94087

tathougies6 anni fa

I'm not saying individual republicans dont exist (I was one), but the party organization is non existent. In many local races theres not even a republican candidate or if there is, they're off their rocker (in marin, one had a whole section on the dangers of radio waves).

masonic6 anni fa

So you're the one!

fortran776 anni fa

To be honest, I'm a Democrat at heart. I just got tired of them taking my vote for granted. I know the Democrats will win, and I _usually_ vote for them.

VintageCool6 anni fa

Donald Trump received more votes in 2016 from California than any other state except Florida and Texas.

prewett6 anni fa

Republicans are also against more taxes, so increasing property taxes isn't very appealing. Plus, the Republican area of northern California (the "State of Jefferson" area) isn't very wealthy, so I think people fear they won't be able to afford paying any more money.

Lendal6 anni fa

This story reminds me of when I was a kid and the school bus would come. Often there were no seats because every seat was taken--one kid each. There was plenty of room there, but the kids who got on the bus first would ban together to prevent new kids from sitting.

Today these kids have grown up and own homes in the suburbs. New kids need to move in, but the kids who got there first refuse to let them build. That's what this story is about.

riazrizvi6 anni fa

I'm a renter but please, this is about families protecting the value of the primary asset that they hope to live on in retirement. Home assets don't skyrocket in value when there is lots of supply. If we frame this thing as reasonable-needs-of-renters vs unreasonable-wants-of-homeowners, then everyone is going to remain at loggerheads.

logfromblammo6 anni fa

The house that the owner lives in is not an asset. It's a durable consumer good.

Wanting your home to appreciate in value forever is like expecting your 20-year-old car to sell for more than its sticker price. It really only works for art installations, created by a collaboration of architect, engineer, and builder, with some living space inside.

Framed in these terms, most families do not have any significant assets, and a hefty chunk of their resources dedicated to maintaining their gigantic shelter-providing consumer appliance.

korethr6 anni fa

> The house that the owner lives in is not an asset. It's a durable consumer good.

Thank you. I had already figured that considering one's house to be an asset is the wrong way to think about it, but lacked the words for how to then accurately describe what it actually is. "Durable consumer good" captures what a house is and does much better, IMO.

Getting this attitude more widespread is going to be difficult, sadly. The land that the house rests upon absolute is an asset, and the house thereupon can't be readily decoupled from the land (trailers and double-wides not withstanding). Thus conflating the actual asset, the land, with the consumer good it is presently being used to produce, the house, is a reasonable mental shortcut.

logfromblammo6 anni fa

The location is an asset. But it's one whose value is largely dependent on the value of other nearby locations, and its connectedness to them. As that is something the owner cannot do much to influence individually, that's more a speculation than an investment.

I don't think the US will even be able to start on a tear-down-and-rebuild attitude until there is already a sufficiency of housing. As it is now, it appears to be in a cycle of new development, then decline, then revitalization, where redevelopment only occurs when property values in a place have already collapsed, and ruined those who weren't able to move before the wave hit.

sjg0076 anni fa

The house sits on land and that is in a good school district or otherwise desirable location. That is worth something to someone and why properties become more valuable. When land and development is constrained you have to go up to support the density or out. All new communities are basically townhome communities across the US except in some places where land is not constrained... even then the homes are very similar and sit next to each other. It increases the affordability.. This makes existing homes on larger lots worth more b/c you get space despite needing to remodel the 1960s decor. But you get a nice view.

riazrizvi6 anni fa

So you're saying that a house is not a good investment? That despite a trend in increasing property values over the long term, as we have seen in the data since .. the beginning of cities, that a price correction is coming where homes will return to ... prehistoric levels? I don't see it. Instead look at a sample of home prices in the last twenty years in the Bay Area for example, and graph it against the value of a sample of cars bought in 2000.

I suppose it's no surprise that tax laws everywhere do not classify homes as durable goods that depreciate in value.

trianglesphere6 anni fa

It's the distinction between the building and the land. Buildings usually depreciate over time, but the land appreciates. In the bay area, the value of the land is significantly more than the building which is why so many people tear down houses and rebuild. Where land is cheaper people don't tear down and rebuild houses that have more life in them when they buy a house.

Residences are mainly exempted from depreciation, but commercial real estate is allowed to be depreciated because buildings do have a useful life.

njarboe6 anni fa

Although recently in the Bay Area construction costs have skyrocketed so much that in the last 5 years my home replacement cost (for insurance) has about doubled causing the land value to actually drop.

JMTQp8lwXL6 anni fa

Housing returns are so location dependent it's hard to generalize if housing is a "good investment". Historically, buying in the SFBA clearly netted a good return, but what about Flint, Michigan? On the whole, re-invested dividends in an S&P index fund would have better returns than nearly all housing markets -- about 11% annually. The math is more nuanced, since homes mortgages require interest payments, but also offer leverage (only ~20% down payment).

unishark6 anni fa

I think the point of the argument is that this trend is abnormal, and the increases we see are the result of (decades of) govt policies distorting the housing market.

nomel6 anni fa

I think it's silly to try to separate the home from the land it sits on, unless you're suggesting that people buy homes with nothing beneath them.

m4636 anni fa

"Do you get to the Cloud District very often? Oh, what am I saying, of course you don't."

jsharf6 anni fa

If I'm not mistaken, most of the value of the home in places like the Bay area is not the house itself, but the land it sits on. In that case, it's super reasonable to expect it to appreciate in value, just like any other commodity. Arguably more so.

_arvin6 anni fa

Location, location, location.

jariel6 anni fa

The house is absolutely an asset and it will appreciate in completely different terms than a car.

Land entails a totally separate kind of economics than 'durable goods'.

Possibly, the physical home itself might be considered a 'durable good'.

ianmcgowan6 anni fa

Wait, what? My regular family house in the Bay Area has almost tripled in 20 years. I'm not banking on that for retirement, but homes can definitely appreciate in value.

lthornberry6 anni fa

See my comment above, but the economics of increasing supply are actually much more nuanced, and the majority of current owners would probably not see the value of their assets eroded.

riazrizvi6 anni fa

I think this is the best point to shout out, in the Bay Area. Show how building projects can alleviate supply concerns for demographics who can't afford your suburban home, and how the increase in population will still help your home price because it will make your fat suburban land parcel look even more exclusive. Everybody wins something.

avocado46 anni fa

Rent seeking is bad for society, by economic definition. People relying on appreciating prices of their homes instead of investing into their productivity growth indicate a bug in the system that needs to be fixed (via increasing supply and possibly LVT).

starpilot6 anni fa

Since when is homeownership a requirement for retirement savings? What about IRA's, 401ks? That they chose to stake so much on a more volatile asset is not the fault of the people around them. Should cities sacrifice their urban well-being, pushing people out on the streets and guaranteeing lower-income people can never live there, for the sake of some elderly residents who put their eggs in one basket?

bbarn6 anni fa

Investment in the market is incredibly volatile compared to real estate. That's why it's called "real" estate.

throwaway1007736 anni fa

You think that because there isn’t a ticker to tell you your home price every moment from 930-4pm on business days.

tathougies6 anni fa

No, it's not. In 2008 we saw that that is really not the case. Housing is awful because it's relatively difficult to find an owner and transaction fees are extremely high.

xamuel6 anni fa

That analogy isn't exactly accurate. To make it accurate, the kids sitting in the current seats would have to have paid a significant amount to purchase those seats. Also, throw in some kids who, for neurological reasons, become extremely distressed if they're forced to sit next to very loud kids. Because of this, they (or their parents) made a big sacrifice to secure single seats for them at great expense.

collias6 anni fa

You're right, and I feel like this is something that is frequently either downplayed or willfully ignored.

If I live in California where home prices are sky-high, and I've saved up for nearly a decade for a house, why would I be willing to allow legislation that would likely devalue my biggest asset (by far) that I saved and sacrificed so diligently for?

This is a legitimate question, not trying to be a jerk. I'm genuinely curious what the argument against this is.

lthornberry6 anni fa

Increased development wouldn't necessarily devalue you asset, particularly if it's a single family house or a condo in a relatively low-density development.

Right now, the high cost of housing in the Bay Area is largely due to a couple of factors: 1 - high cost of labor. Rezoning won't change that. 2 - restrictions on right to build. Rezoning will reduce this. 3 - high cost of land. Rezoning will increase this, by making it possible to build more units of housing on a given area of land.

For most current homeowners, it's likely that 3 will outweigh 2. Developers will buy up some portion of single family housing stock (and low-density multifamily stock) to rebuild the lots with denser housing. That process will both increase demand and reduce supply of those types of housing, resulting in price increases.

At the same time, the average unit of housing will cost less, because there will be many more condos/apartments available. Owners of high-density condos would be the most vulnerable to seeing their asset values decrease. However, building big condo buildings is still going to be a complicated endeavor, so price adjustments will happen slowly over time. No one's going to get hosed, although their asset prices might go up more slowly over time than otherwise, or even be eroded by inflation in the long term.

At the same time, many of those condo owners will still come out ahead. They may be able to upgrade to a nicer condo than they otherwise could have afforded. They may also benefit from the second-order effects of lower average housing prices, in the form of reduced costs for non-housing items. If they run a business, it will be easier for them to attract and retain workers. Schools and other public services will also be better able to attract and retain quality staff, at a lower wage bill. Etc.

collias6 anni fa

This is the type of detailed reply that I come here for, and definitely has reframed how I think about this situation.

Thank you!

joefkelley6 anni fa

The tough thing is of course you are right. It's obviously in your best interest to vote against new housing if you own a house. But it's not in society's best interest.

tathougies6 anni fa

But it's really not. Homelessness and destitution also reduce property value. Lots of people leaving California because it's so awful.

kofejnik6 anni fa

> But it's not in society's best interest.

1. why are you so sure? What makes you an authority on the whole society's interests? 2. even if so, are you saying that collective interests trump individual rights? This is socialism 101. Government will decide who should live (and work) where, and who should own what.

joefkelley6 anni fa

1. I am not sure. This is all just my layman's interpretation. I'll admit I could be very wrong and have no expertise. I'm just discussing. 2. No, in general I believe there's a difficult balance to be struck between individual rights and collective interests. I tend to lean more toward individual rights actually.

I would love it if local governments would stop restricting the rights of local developers and allow the free market to determine what is built where more often.

tathougies6 anni fa

> If I live in California where home prices are sky-high, and I've saved up for nearly a decade for a house, why would I be willing to allow legislation that would likely devalue my biggest asset (by far) that I saved and sacrificed so diligently for?

Rezoning would not devalue your house. You'd get more money for it in the long run. Better yet, you'd be able to instantly become a landlord (convert your house into a plex) and move somewhere else that satisfied your desire for a single-family home. Or you'd be able to market to a developer.

Plus, if you just kept living in your house, the value would go up anyway, as it always does.

lazyasciiart6 anni fa

Same reason people are willing to argue for any tax raises that will cost them money? Because they think the value of a functioning society is greater than the value of the personal assets they will lose.

i_am_nomad6 anni fa

Except the school bus is a public good. Are you saying that we should reframe housing as a public good as well and provide it as such?

nostrademons6 anni fa

There's no need to assume this. Even if you treat land & housing as a private good, you're entitled to decide what you do with your own land. You're not entitled to decide what other people do with their land. Zoning laws, development restrictions, and HOAs violate this principle - they give existing homeowners a collective power to decide what other homeowners can do with their private property. This makes housing a weird sort of public/private hybrid where you have the private right to protect yourself from change but also the public right to prevent change within your neighborhood, which biases everything towards the status quo.

(Importantly, no such restriction exists on population: within the U.S. at least, nobody has the right to prevent their neighbors or fellow citizens from having kids, while they do have the right to prevent their neighbors from building more housing units. There's an inevitable mismatch between reality here...)

makomk6 anni fa

Which is the fundamental problem with the whole YIMBY business: solving California's housing crisis requires dense housing, which is much more severely affected by what other homeowners and land-owners do than low density housing with large plots. The only way to avoid loud music blaring from the neighbouring units all day and night, or someone building a wall right in front of all your windows and removing all daylight, or an art gallery setting up shop across the street with an endless stream of visitors looking right into your home, or any of the endless other possible issues is through collective control over what others do with their property. Making everyone personally own the land needed to stop this happening is so inefficient that anything denser than American-style suburbs is impossible.

So long as this idea is a a fundamental plank of YIMBY-ism, all of the pretty claims about how high-density living doesn't have to be a dystopian hellscape are literally worthless, because every one of them relies totally on things outside the residents' control that the YIMBYs will be first in line to try and destroy.

jbattle6 anni fa

(3)

marcell6 anni fa

It’s pretty simple. If I own property, I should be allowed to build a home for myself on it, subject to relevant zoning. You, and adjacent property owner, should not be able to deny my private property use.

Yet this is not the case in California.

nradov6 anni fa

That is the case in California. If you own property zoned residential and apply for a fully compliant building permit then it will almost always be approved (although fees may be high). Developers and property owners generally only run into long delays and battles with neighbors when they request variances or zoning changes.

moultano6 anni fa

Oh, my sweet summer child...

https://twitter.com/eean/status/1228182747149025280

https://twitter.com/neversassylaura/status/96939949395841843...

https://reason.com/2019/01/16/san-francisco-property-owner-f...

I could go on for days.

Lendal6 anni fa

This particular story is about a development which did comply with existing zoning but the neighbors try to stop it anyway, forcing local govt into a negotiation.

If you look at the photo of the lot you can see why: Beautiful rolling green hills. They didn't own the lot so they didn't have any right to stop the development. Nevertheless that's human nature.

That's why I chose the school bus example. You're supposed to get the part of the seat that your butt sits on, not the whole seat. But from childhood to adulthood, people just never change.

sjg0076 anni fa

It'll be approved although sometimes you get neighbors who would get upset that your house shades their lawn. Typically you want to design your house to be compatible with the neighbors and the neighborhood. Los Angeles is an exception generally which is amazing b/c you get these great wonders of architecture that appear out of nowhere. These tend to be on bigger lots though.

cnst6 anni fa

> In backing every single project in the development pipeline that day, Ms. Trauss laid out a platform that would make her a celebrity of Bay Area politics: how expensive new housing today would become affordable old housing tomorrow, how San Francisco was blowing its chance to harness the energy of an economic boom to mass-build homes that generations of residents could enjoy. She didn’t care if a proposal was for apartments or condos or how much money its future residents had. It was a universal platform of more. Ms. Trauss was for anything and everything, so long as it was built tall and fast and had people living in it.

What a great article, I'm glad that not all is lost in SF Bay w.r.t. the housing crisis.

TBH, I'm amazed how the above points seem so controversial in SF Bay. It's as common-sense as it gets. Build more, always. Denying market-rate housing projects because they don't have income-restricted units doesn't help anyone in any way; I'm all for free-speech and stuff, but anyone who's trying to argue any such points that interfere with adding more capacity to the market and which make zero economic sense should be escorted out of the meetings.

[deleted]6 anni fa

danbmil996 anni fa

Go ahead and build, but make damn sure you are being rational about people's behavior when it comes to driving and transit.

My ex moved into a condominium complex that has exactly zero parking spots or loading docks for visitors, and no parking for half a mile in either direction. It's an absolute total fail. Neighbors rat on each other to get each other's cars towed because they get so upset. It's literally impossible to have a party there or even invite friends over because they simply cannot park and there is no transit available anywhere near there. There aren't any bike lanes either because it's a financially strapped city and the complex is near the border of a rich city that explicitly does things to make it harder to get between the two townships.

I'm just saying, both hands have to know what each other are doing and people have to make rational decisions at the municipal level.

jseliger6 anni fa

What's the name of this mythical city?

If the condo complex is sufficiently unattractive, few people will want to live there, and prices will fall to the point where buyers or renters accept the low price and the associated hassle. That's a market decision. If the condo complex is, let's imagine, 50% lower than market, then maybe people will accept the parking situation.

and there is no transit available anywhere near there

Then residents might try demanding it from the city government.

You may like this: https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/193... book.

driverdan6 anni fa

Sounds like your ex didn't do proper research to understand what they were getting into. If they needed a place with parking and/or easy public transit access they shouldn't have bought that condo.

jsharf6 anni fa

I think YIMBY is about city restrictions and ordinance. This sounds like the private building developers just wanted to save money and cheaped out on building additional parking space. Unless the city itself imposed a restriction on parking

That being said, I'm not aware of any YIMBYish laws that outright restrict parking in residential areas. The only thing equivalent I can think of is the Market street law in SF, but that's not a residential area, so it actually makes sense.

tathougies6 anni fa

So the wonderful thing is that your ex can sell their condo, take the money and move elsewhere. That is the beauty of a free market. And the absolute magnificence of section 1031 of the IRC.

WhompingWindows6 anni fa

Wow, seems like there was a leaps-and-bounds approach instead of an incremental style with that building. Their rationale may have been to think of a car-less society?

foota6 anni fa

...Bellevue?

lazyasciiart6 anni fa

I don't think you can physically get half a mile away from the nearest available parking in Bellevue.

foota6 anni fa

That's true, guess that shows you which side of the lake I live on :)

uniformlyrandom6 anni fa

How about we talk about building infrastructure? The whole Bay Area is building like crazy, and yet the roads are getting worse (more building? more traffic lights!). Public transportation is a big joke around here. Caltrain from South San Jose to Mountain View? We have the tracks, we have the train... the train just does not go this route on weekends.

We have the same situation as a startup focused on developing a product. We have abidance of developers, and very few infrastructure engineers. When we start deploying what we have built, we are going to have a bad time.

rjkennedy986 anni fa

Show the stats that Bay Area is building like crazy. I am so sick of people saying things like New York and Bay Area and California are building like crazy. No they are not. There is not one stat that shows that. Period.

bryanlarsen6 anni fa

"In fact, Toronto currently has more cranes in the sky than New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle and Boston combined."

https://www.blogto.com/real-estate-toronto/2019/07/toronto-c...

Toronto prices are crazy, so Toronto isn't building enough, let alone the major coastal American cities.

likpok6 anni fa

The bay area is building, but very unevenly. SOMA has a bunch of visible construction, as do certain places along El Camino. That can give the impression of building like crazy even when the reality is different. The other problem is the bay area only does megaprojects, so the little building it does is the extremely disruptive and visible kind.

tathougies6 anni fa

> only does megaprojects

That's because only megaprojects can afford to overcome all the regulatory and neighborhood hurdles.

Do you think the average homeowner trying to become a landlord by converting their home into a duplex has enough money to pay for both sides of a law suit, as this developer had to?

samspenc6 anni fa

I'm not sure about the Bay Area, but at least for New York, it looks like building is picking up: https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-sees-biggest-home-buil...

"Despite a weak outlook for residential real estate, the number of building permits issued in New York City for new homes surged last year to the highest pace since 2015. It was the second-highest total since the end of the last big building boom in 2008. Permits for 26,547 units of housing were issued in 2019, about 27% more than the year before ..."

rjkennedy986 anni fa

So New York is building a lot because they are building more than any time since 2015? Almost as much as they built in 2008? Is this a joke?

KptMarchewa6 anni fa

It apparently has over 8 million units: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

So this is not even 0,5% of overall units.

wpasc6 anni fa

I don't think new york should be lumped in with california in that measure.

This site shows active construction in new york: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/buildings/html/nyc-active-major-...

bobbydroptables6 anni fa

It's really hard to wrap your head around whether a city is building a lot by looking at a raw number. But fewer than 7,000 building permits in a city of 8 million is frighteningly little.

You need to compare it to population growth, decades of building backlog, job growth, etc.

throwaway1007736 anni fa

New York City has been losing residents for some time. This is not a supply and demand thing as much as easy money policy chasing hard assets. I’ll have to dig it up the numbers, but Manhattan many condos are vacant, and have been bought by foreign money who don’t live in nyc or investors looking to park assets.

bobbydroptables6 anni fa

It's a complex problem but the value of NYC real estate for foreign investors assumes scarcity of NYC real estate.

Foreign money or no, if you have a very desirable city with a growing job market and stagnant construction, prices will appreciate. I would challenge you to find a single counterexample

Foreign money doesn't help prices but it's more a symptom of our problems than a cause.

Also, NYC population is not declining. I wish. There have been some stagnant years but nowhere near enough to compensate for 50 years of underbuilding.

irq116 anni fa

New construction in New York can have hundreds of units. I don’t know why you would automatically assume that 7,000 is a “frightening” number.

bobbydroptables6 anni fa

I probably could have made my comment clearer. I'm not assuming anything. It's well documented that NYC is building frighteningly little housing per capita.

I was just pointing out the the linked post shows how NYC construction is stagnant, not "active". It was unclear if he meant "active" as in "they're building a large quantity" or as in "currently happening".

shuckles6 anni fa

New York built fewer new homes per capita than the Bay Area for half the years in the last decade.

xvedejas6 anni fa

I'm not sure that the roads really support more peak traffic at this point. Rather, we can reduce the traffic and train crowding by building more housing near jobs so that workers need not embark on 50+ mile super-commutes each day.

Housing _is_ infrastructure, and it's the piece of infrastructure we're most sorely missing.

rhinoceraptor6 anni fa

Adding extra lanes to a road just increases the amount of people driving on them, instead of easing traffic. So I would bet the same is true of public transit.

bluGill6 anni fa

That is only indirectly true. I know of rural roads in the middle of nowhere that wouldn't get any more traffic from adding more lanes. It is only true in the city because there is unmet demand to get places at in some amount of time, and so adding lanes allows some of that unmet demand to become met demand.

Of course adding enough lanes to meet demand is not worth the cost. However the induced demand argument is wrong, it is a cost benefit calculation: will the additional people who are able to get someplace be worth the cost to add the lane.

Transit does have the same problem, but transit can scale much better in a given amount of space. A bus every 5 minutes can handle more traffic than a lane filled with cars - assuming the bus doesn't compete with the cars. You can run a bus every 3 minutes, and if that isn't enough a train every 45 seconds holding 5 times as many people as the bus. If that isn't enough - okay, it is time to build another track for the train, but that is a huge number of people (ie a good number would find their life improved by a track on a slightly different route that)

dredmorbius6 anni fa

Transit doesn't suffer congestion to the extent private autos do, and is centrally managed such that effects can be minimised.

Mind: shared rights-of-way modes (busses, streetcars, LRT) can be impacted by private ve traffic, but contributes little to that itself.

Fixed-track systems (Muni Metro) can have coordination delays if multiple routes join.

dsfyu404ed6 anni fa

> So I would bet the same is true of public transit.

It is very true but the point of adding capacity (to any form of transit) isn't to reduce congestion at peak hours (that congestion is bounded by what people will tolerate) it's to allow more trips to happen with equivalent congestion thereby increasing the total number of trips and/or decreasing the duration of the congestion.

maccam946 anni fa

True, traveling on public transit is just more efficient in terms of space and energy.

xvedejas6 anni fa

Right, so you reduce crowding by shortening trips, not by adding service. Ideally we do both and get lots of people using public transit for short trips.

rayiner6 anni fa

Yes, but it moves more people. Driving doesn’t need to compete with public transit for speed—transit is immensely slower than driving even in places with excellent transit.

jsharf6 anni fa

This is actually a very American misconception of public transportation. If you're in an area with excellent public tranportation (London, Barcelona, Montreal), it's actually much faster (I've traveled to these places and tried it).

Even in SF, there's some places where public transportation is faster. But in very very limited situations because SF transportation is horrible. But an express Caltrain is often much faster than driving MTV-SF if there's any traffic. With all the (super delayed unfortunately) infrastructure projects going on (new SF subway being installed, Caltrain electrification), things will hopefully get better...

8ytecoder6 anni fa

This is not universally true. My BART commute is faster than driving. Both office and home are walkable from a train station and the frequency at my station is pretty good.

bluGill6 anni fa

Transit is much faster than driving if it wants to be. Airplanes normally reach 1000km/h (if you are rich you can do the same but very few are this rich). Even if we limit to ground based transport, most drivers on the autobahn self-limit themselves to around 130km/h, trains routinely go 250km/h (only a few routes, but the ability is there to do it safely).

nerfhammer6 anni fa

er, what? the NYC subway for example is vastly faster than driving.

rayiner6 anni fa

Not unless your starting point and ending point are very close to a subway station and you don’t have to make any transfers. I use to commute from 88th and broadway to 45th and Lex. It was a bit over 30 minutes by subway, more like 25 minutes driving. In the evening, if I was leaving work late, it was like a 20 minute cab ride.

thedance6 anni fa

I think you have it backwards. We squander the capacity of our main commuter railroad (BART) by surrounding it with dispersed neighborhoods. We need to build dense transit villages around the rail stations we already own.

zamfi6 anni fa

> We squander the capacity of our main commuter railroad (BART)

Out of curiosity, do you ride Bart at commute hours? At 5pm, the platforms at Embarcadero and Montgomery are dangerously packed. I didn’t think there is much excess capacity for commuting.

All other times? Absolutely yes.

manfredo6 anni fa

You're putting the cart before the horse. More commuters creates more ticket revenue, which gives BART more resources to expand capacity. They're not going to expand capacity until there's more demand.

thedance6 anni fa

BART ridership is currently maxed out in the peak direction at peak hour, and carries triple the design number of passengers. They don’t need to expand, they need to profit from the currently underused directions (eg berkeley to Fremont).

manfredo6 anni fa

Transit reacts to changes in transportation demand, it doesn't set demand. How do you envision BART would profit from underused directions? Put out ads encouraging people to take these routes for fun?

As I said, pointing out that transit systems are at capacity is not a valid reason to block development. Transit systems always try to operate at capacity because excess capacity means suboptimal allocation of resources. There's no reason to increase capacity until there's demand for that capacity.

thedance6 anni fa

The people profit, not BART itself. BART is infrastructure. Like the fire department, it is not intended for it to be internally profitable.

The way the people profit is you put homes in the places that have lots of jobs, mostly so that people can just walk around but also to benefit from people filling up the reverse direction on BART. In places that have mostly homes you buld jobs instead. For places without an abundance of either, such as Orinda and Lafayette, you build both.

It's total nonsense that we build a railroad to a place like Lafayette, but that city has had the same population for 50 years. This goes triple for Berkeley, which has THREE subway stations and the same population it had in 1950! We should expect that adding billions of dollars of infrastructure also adds lots of people.

zamfi6 anni fa

> Transit reacts to changes in transportation demand, it doesn't set demand. How do you envision BART would profit from underused directions? Put out ads encouraging people to take these routes for fun?

BART could encourage commercial development, instead of residential development, on land it owns near transit stations.

nradov6 anni fa

Any possible increase in BART ticket revenue would be a drop in the bucket for the capital funding necessary to significantly increase system capacity. The popular routes are already at capacity so they would have to build more tracks and stations. This would cost hundreds of billions of dollars mostly from federal and state budgets. The planning, land acquisitions (eminent domain), environmental reviews, legal battles, and construction would take decades. We can complain that this is unreasonable, and that it ought to be cheaper or faster. But that's the reality and it isn't likely to change.

zamfi6 anni fa

> You're putting the cart before the horse.

I'm not, let me explain.

> More commuters creates more ticket revenue, which gives BART more resources to expand capacity. They're not going to expand capacity until there's more demand.

BART needs money to expand, and this money is not going to come from commuters. Why?

First, "expand capacity" can mean two things:

1) Buy and/or run more trains on existing tracks, serving existing stations.

2) Build more tracks and/or stations.

For 1), BART already operates at or nearly at maximum physical capacity at commute hours in the peak commute direction: there is not headroom in the Transbay tube to add more trains at rush hour, at least for trips between SF and the East Bay. BART could earn more revenue from more commuters that are not on the peak lines -- but building more housing in the suburbs will not provide this.

For 2), this money comes from the capital budget, not the operating budget. BART fares provide about 70% of the operating costs of BART. There is no profit, no money left over to go to pay for more tracks or stations. That money comes from voters who approve bonds or other sources of funding for this constructions. More commuters will not provide this either.

We need to expand BART, and we need development -- these two go hand in hand!

thedance6 anni fa

A fun fact is that BART has 48 stations.

aggie6 anni fa

> The whole Bay Area is building like crazy,

I'm wondering what your frame of reference is here. As someone who has lived in the Bay Area for most of my 30 years, and lived in Atlanta for a couple years recently, where they are actually building like crazy, the Bay Area seems to be at a total standstill.

zamfi6 anni fa

> We have the tracks, we have the train... the train just does not go this route on weekends.

This is the easy one to fix — when there is demand, they can just run more trains.

Much harder is the transbay commute at rush hours. There is almost no spare capacity, and it’s not clear how those extra thousands of people in Lafayette will make it in to SF every morning before we build a second transbay tube for Bart — and that’s at least a decade away.

I say this as someone who loves development: for the Bay Area to significantly increase its population, we need a ton more transit and we need to start building it now.

bluGill6 anni fa

The problem is they need to create the demand. Anybody who wants to get around and checks transit knows it isn't an option so they find an alternative. If CalTran wants to be useful transit for more than commuters (My understanding as someone not in the area is CalTran runs only a few trips during rush hour - if I'm wrong that invalidates some of my reply...) they need to run more service for a while so people start to think they can count on it.

zamfi6 anni fa

Lots of people take Caltrain to commute, and commute trains are often standing room only.

But almost no one takes Caltrain at non-commute hours.

bluGill6 anni fa

I just pulled up the schedule, just looking at the schedule I can confidently tell you that the only people taking CalTrain are going to work or have no other choice: From 10-11 am there is 1 stop at most stations/direction. Trains and buses that only run once an hour midday exist only for those who have no choice: those unable to drive (generally disabled - blind). You need to run at least every half an hour to even think about getting people who are not going to work. People going to work generally can adjust their schedule enough to make hourly work and once they figure it out they don't have to think about it again. Also those going to work generally have very heavy traffic as the alternative.

If you want a train/bus to be used by people who have a choice you must run not less than ever half hour for 16 hours a day. The more often you run the more people who will ride, up to about 5 minutes where everybody knows you can just show up and get on. (unfortunately the amount of extra riders you get from coming more often isn't linear so you sometimes cannot justify coming more often by the amount of extra riders you get)

Note, there is a 2 year lag between changes in routes/schedules and riders figuring out the new routes. I think Caltrain could get a lot more non-commute hour riders by coming more often but if you push them to make sure you make everybody aware that it will be 2 years before there is a change.

skybrian6 anni fa

I generally agree, but it seems like jobs should also be moving away from the center? If there are a lot of commuters in Lafayette going to Oakland then the transbay tunnel wouldn't be relevant for them, but there would need to be capacity for local trains.

Or if the jobs were in the other direction like Walnut Creek, it would be a reverse commute.

notJim6 anni fa

Isn't SF building two new subway lines right now? I agree it should be faster and better, but I don't think it's true that nothing is being done.

Also, in this case, they have the infrastructure, the NIMBYs are just hoarding it to themselves, as they do in Berkeley as well.

xvedejas6 anni fa

SF is building one new subway, and its ride-able underground portion will be just over one mile long. I agree it's something being done, but it's such a small drop in a large bucket of needs. We shouldn't wait for a public transit silver bullet to bring people to jobs, we need more housing near jobs so that people aren't forced to commute across the region.

WhompingWindows6 anni fa

Couldn't people just work remotely and then get together for occasional retreats or all-day meetings? It seems that coders could have their own offices at home and just occasionally use transport to get to work.

Apes6 anni fa

End the landed gentry by repealing Prop 13, and I'll take arguments like this seriously. Otherwise it just sounds like the priviliged wanting to have their cake and eat it too.

ryandrake6 anni fa

Not to mention water, sewer, electrical capacity, schools, parks, police and fire services... You can’t just plop a 100-unit apartment down and then say you helped with the housing problem.

thedance6 anni fa

The reason Bay Area cities can't afford their water and sewer and roads is because they are not dense enough. Apartment dwellers demand far less water, and drive on roads much less than people who live in detached homes. Density is the _solution_ to infrastructure funding.

notJim6 anni fa

> Apartment dwellers demand far less water

It is also obviously far cheaper (and better for the environment) to water a single building than to water a bunch of dispersed SFHs.

bluGill6 anni fa

Long term you are correct, but in the near term the current water system needs to be upgraded to pipes large enough to get water to the new apartment before the apartment can go in.

thedance6 anni fa

You can get developers to build the infrastructure and finance it on their future taxes. You wouldn't believe the incremental tax from building real buildings in the Bay Area. In one particularly egregious case a single apartment building replaced several detached homes that were paying a total of $1200/year in the city of Berkeley. The apartment building pays over a million dollars per year.

stale20026 anni fa

How do you even think this stuff gets upgraded in the first place?

What happens, in every city, is that more housing gets built, then the infrastructure system starts to get closer to capacity, and then the infrastructure gets upgaded.

Saying that they should upgrade all the infrastructure first, before there is any demand, is the same exact thing as saying that it should never be upgraded.

Because the infrastructure isn't going to be upgraded if there is no demand for it yet.

bluGill6 anni fa

Or the city an decide that the cost of upgrading are more than the future values of the additional units and not upgrade. Some upgrades in capacity have significantly higher costs than others. If the current system is the largest that can physically fit on the land the city owns they need to buy more land first. If they won't get a lot of new development it is better to stay just below capacity.

The above doesn't apply to the cities in CA we are talking about: there is plenty of demand. It does apply to some semi-rural small towns.

stale20026 anni fa

> If they won't get a lot of new development it is better to stay just below capacity.

If a developer comes in and says "Hey I want to develop in this area", it is a contradictory response to say that this development should be prevented, because there is not enough demand.

If a bunch of developers are trying to build houses, then by definition, we are in a situation where there is demand.

This supports my point even more, because I was saying that the developers should build first, and then if the infrastructure starts to hit capacity, THEN the infrastructure should be updated.

Don't build the infrastructure first. Instead build the housing, and fix any problems that come with it.

Also, this is how all this infrastructure gets built in the first place, also. The developers, who are building the buildings, will upgrade the infrastructure as part of the process of building the buildings.

bluGill6 anni fa

You are assuming linear costs. However they are not. The system is good for 1 development at no extra cost, but the second goes over capacity and so they have to tear down the old system and build a bigger one. The new one is good for not 1 more development but 100 - which might or might not come. If it comes good, but if you just have the 1 development everybody is on the hook to pay it off, not that one development.

stale20026 anni fa

> but the second goes over capacity

This is not how "capacity" works.

It is not that there is some constant limit to something, and everything is 100% fine as long as you are under capacity, but breaks entirely when you go over capacity.

Instead, capacity is flexible, and there are costs to it being flexible.

Instead, capacity is something that you start bumping up against, and this starts to cause problems. And the more that you bump up against capacity, the more problems that you get.

So, if you are only slightly over capacity, it means that, your roads will be a little bit congested some but not all of the time, or the town will have to purchase a little bit of energy from the town next over (or raise prices a little bit during certain times of the day to reduce demand), or a school will have a little bit more people attending it than previously intended, or you'll have to pay the police overtime hours more often.

And when these problems get big enough, THEN, people will decide that it makes sense to upgrade the network.

That solves your step wise function, that you are talking about. "Capacity" is actually pretty flexible. And you don't have to do some maximum upgrade, if you go over it. You can instead wait until you are over capacity enough that it makes sense to do the upgrade.

bluGill6 anni fa

Capacity of a water system is a big deal. You cannot go over capacity without serious health risks. There are a few temporary storage solutions that you can use cheaply, but if you cannot treat all the sewage that comes in over the course of a day you have to release raw sewage somehow.

For drinking water you can do lawn watering bans to get capacity. For roads rush hour lasts longer. However there are still limits that you may not to run up against. If your traffic is already bad you might not be able to build more roads where they need to be (either you tear down something historic, or you have to build overpasses). If you are a small city you may have traffic problems while not having enough population to get your transit system in shape.

stale20026 anni fa

The problems that you are talking about can be fairly linear, though.

For example, for things like water, a city can increase the price of water, to reduce demand, especially for commercial usage.

> However there are still limits that you may not to run up against.

The limits are much further out than you'd think. And systems are often build with a large buffer, to handle spikes and increases anyway.

By the time you get close to hitting the true limit, you would have enough pent up demand that you can just spend the money to upgrade the system.

And the people who are building the new buildings, can also just find it as well.

This stuff happens all the time. Cities run up against limits all the time, and the world does not fall apart.

Instead, they implement stop cap measures, that work, and builders fund upgrading the system as they build new things.

Stuff is also often planned out for a long time.

tathougies6 anni fa

So typically, developers pay the fees to develop water, sewer, and electrical capacity, and sufficiently large developments must pay for parks and even schools. Property tax pays for fire service.

Source: schedule fees for various bay area cities on new construction.

fortran776 anni fa

The answer _is_ building more. (I'll say this before the people on Hacker News who are opposed to all private property suggest that "prop 13" is the problem. It's not.) The problem is they don't build enough. Build build build!

They need the California State Government to overrule local zoning limits. We need to allow dense housing near rail lines and major roads. And I think that anywhere a single-family detached home currently exists, a 2-family home should be allowed.

Build more housing! It's that simple. Prices will fall fast.

notJim6 anni fa

> They need the California State Government to overrule local zoning limits

Yes, California and other places with housing problems need as-of-right policies as the article suggests. It's not simply zoning, it's removing all ability of local governments to hold things up, because people will use absolutely anything they can grab onto.

From a philosophical standpoint, people are sometimes uncomfortable with the idea of pre-empting local control—after all, don't they know better? But as the article points out, it's a coordination problem. There is a certain cost [1] to be paid in building housing, unfortunately, and you need a higher-level (in this case, state-wide) view to distribute that cost fairly.

> And I think that anywhere a single-family detached home currently exists, a 2-family home should be allowed.

Make it more like 4–8 (but maybe limited to 3-4 stories), and I'm in.

[1]: As the article points out, however, we think far too often only about the costs. I for one would welcome more neighbors.

tomatotomato376 anni fa

I don't understand though how the state government will be expected to implement this different than the local government; they both draw from essentially the same voterbase that is hostile toward the upzoning as the majority of the state population resides in those large cities anyway. The only real difference is that you'll also have a population of rural voters observing from the sidelines as they have no investment in the issue of high-density zoning

notJim6 anni fa

The difference is turnout. It's way easier to turn out for one single election (electing someone who will pre-empt this NIMBY nonsense) than it is to turn out to dozens of local meetings most people don't even hear about where these projects are discussed. Historically, the only people who show up to those meetings are the NIMBYs. There was a meeting in my city about housing and transit. On Thursday. At 2pm. How many people are gonna show up for that?

bluGill6 anni fa

The edges. There are people who want to live in the city who are forced to live outside (a suburb) who cannot vote in the local election but can vote in the state election. Also rural farmers do not like seeing their neighbor's land turned into a subdivision (this is a form of NIMBY of course - more than a few of them lost bids to buy the subdivision and keep farming it), so those on the edges are also likely to vote this way

aty2686 anni fa

I'm from Texas, and I don't understand the stigma against developers building more housing. It drives down prices, and increases competition. Why would California citizens ever be against this?

Edit: The reason is because homeowners are competing with developers, so their own asset depreciates when supply increases. I was just thinking from the perspective of renters.

compiler-guy6 anni fa

If you own a house, you don't want the prices to be driven down.

If you had an idyllic childhood in a sleepy town not unlike Mayberry, it is entirely reasonable to want the same things for your kids.

None of that is realistic anymore--the world is a changed place. But these are not irrational preferences to have.

toasterlovin6 anni fa

> None of that is realistic anymore

It's not realistic when you have unrestricted immigration, as the US states have between each other.

xamuel6 anni fa

Or you could have PTSD or just vanilla noise-sensitivity and just living in a quiet neighborhood could be extremely important to you. You might have made very significant personal sacrifices to afford to move to a suburb for exactly this reason. Should you just be forced to go live in the woods as a hermit, cast out by society?

kelnos6 anni fa

Well, unfortunately, yes. I don't want to sound heartless, but sometimes the needs of the many do outweigh the needs of the few. This isn't "tyranny of the majority" here.

It's incredibly selfish to use PTSD or noise-sensitivity as a justification for contributing to a situation where tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people have 3-hour commutes when they could otherwise live closer to work.

bluGill6 anni fa

If the city up zones your suburb can empty out making things better for you. It is only those who like their level of busy not far from downtown that will get pushed out.

SlowRobotAhead6 anni fa

>making things better for you

Ah, surely there is nothing open interpretation there.

driverdan6 anni fa

You can sound proof a home. It's very common in NYC. Not everyone can live where they want. That's life.

wedn3sday6 anni fa

It drives down prices. When you bought a house back in 2008 for $300k and now its worth $2M you really dont want anything to touch your nest egg. Its NIMBYism at its finest. Everyone says, "just build affordable housing!" Just as long as its not in _my_ neighborhood.

mateo4116 anni fa

> When you bought a house back in 2008 for $300k and now its worth $2M

Do you have any examples of this? The Bay Area housing market has had a nice run, but it hasn't grow 666% percent in the last 12 years.

nostrademons6 anni fa

It's exaggerated in timescale and returns but not by a huge amount.

Condos I saw for $400K in 2010 are going for about a million. Homes that were about $1.1M in 2010 are about $2.4M. The sibling comment describes homes bought for $500K in 2000 that are now $2M; this is not out of line with what I'm heard from some founder friends I have that are pushing 50. IIRC my wife's parents bought their home for $130K or so back in 1986 and it's now worth $3M.

wbronitsky6 anni fa

FWIW, Personal anecdote:

My parents bought a house on the Peninsula in the SF Bay Area for $500k in 2000 and it is now worth at least $2m.

mateo4116 anni fa

True, but that's 400% over a longer time period.

aty2686 anni fa

That makes sense, I didn't differentiate between renters and and home owners. I guess that's what this debate comes down to.

majormajor6 anni fa

It really wouldn't. Not any time soon. A developer being able to build a 4-unit place on top of a single family home would increase the value of that land cause now they can sell it to four times as many people.

So it's gonna be that much harder for a "regular" person to buy anything in the short term.

pound6 anni fa

not sure what exactly is 'short term' here, but simple example re. supply and demand and prices:

1) there is a 100 single family homes somewhere.

2) there are 300 people looking who need to live in that somewhere

3) on top of 100 single family homes now we have 400 units built

..

Can it be that price of the units for sale may get reduced for competitiveness?

majormajor6 anni fa

The price the NIMBY in the parent's example would care about is the price of the SFH they already owned. That price goes up - it's now harder to find SFHs, and the land value is also increased because it could be turned into 4 units that will add up to more value than the prior 1.

https://www.latimes.com/business/real-estate/story/2020-01-3...

Here's an agent discussing this happening right now:

> Traditional sales comping remains relevant, but it should no longer be the single factor when determining price. Recent legislation allowing additional dwelling units (ADUs) is a game changer, as savvy investors and agents understand that accurate comps should now include not only neighborhood sales prices but also potential revenue from future ADU development.

> Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a slew of bills that will allow property owners to build a backyard home of at least 800 square feet or convert a garage, office or spare room into an additional living space. Single-family zoning effectively evaporated on Jan. 1 when the new laws went into effect.

If NIMBY's only cared about money this would be a fucking gold mine for them.

bluGill6 anni fa

The hassles of having tenants make it not worth the extra income for a lot of people who would only have one. There are real examples of tenants destroying a place and moving out leaving the landlord a large cost to fix the place up. There are real examples of tenants using various discrimination and tenant rights laws on false claims to get months of cost free living. I make no claim as to how common it is, but if you are landlord stuck with the evil tenant it doesn't matter if is only 1 in a million who is that evil.

majormajor6 anni fa

Sure, in this scenario the "protecting their property value" person would just cash out and sell to the developer who's gonna be good with tenants and is willing to pay more since it's no longer single-family-restricted.

But the opposition to upzoning here in LA and the Bay Area is largely coming for qualitative reasons instead of quantitative reasons. And that's lost when you reduce your argument to "they only care about their property values" so you lose any chance to convince them...

kelnos6 anni fa

Flip it on its head a bit.

Let's say you live in a neighborhood of mostly single family homes. A new law is passed changing the zoning to allow higher density, and other barriers to building up are reduced or eliminated.

A few people near you sell their homes; they're bulldozed and are replaced with multi-family units. Sure, over the short term, your home value might drop because of greater supply helping to meet demand.

However, over the long term, or even medium term, two things may happen:

1. Your home value goes up because single family homes are less available, and are more desirable.

2. Your home value goes up because developers want to buy your home in order to build a multi-family dwelling there.

Meanwhile, more people are able to live nearby, more affordably, likely cutting down their work commute and increasing their quality of life. I guess the incumbent owners really are that selfish that they fight tooth and nail to prevent others from increasing their quality of life.

goatinaboat6 anni fa

Its NIMBYism at its finest

People whose wealth is in company stock say that people whose wealth is in other asset classes should give it up, for their benefit.

How about we pay for all this new housing by a 90% tax on RSUs? No?

kelnos6 anni fa

If people are actually investing in housing, then I see nothing weird or hypocritical with wanting the value of those investments to go up.

But a primary home is not an investment. Many many many people mistake it for one, or try to treat it like one, but it's not. Often it works out in the end as if it was one, but it's not. There's a reason why we call non-primary homes "investment properties"... because your primary home is not that.

It's a liability. It ages. It requires costly maintenance. It requires upgrades and renovations. In most jurisdictions you have to pay ongoing taxes simply to own it.

The main reason housing prices often rise faster than inflation is because of scarcity, much of which is often artificial and due to zoning and other legal tricks.

Opposing housing in high-demand areas is one of the most selfish things a person can do.

goatinaboat6 anni fa

But a primary home is not an investment

I don’t know how you can say this because for 9/10 people their primary home is de facto their single biggest asset and a significant part of their retirement planning. This is how it actually is in the real world outside the bubble.

It’s easy to sneer at nimby-ism but what you’re actually proposing is to make ordinary people destitute so techbros can have an easy ride. That’s why voters are pushing back and why tech is hated.

darkwizard426 anni fa

This doesn’t make any sense because owning stock in one company doesn’t prevent another from also rising or prevent ones own company stock from rising.

goatinaboat6 anni fa

In theory perhaps but in practice a) it’s unreasonable to tell people for literally decades that homeownership is the path to security in retirement then move the goalposts and b) tech-driven wealth disparity is fully the root cause of this situation and if it were “corrected” through taxation we wouldn’t even have this problem

darkwizard426 anni fa

It's not unreasonable... it's slowly becoming necessary. Someone will have to eat the bill and it's probably a distributed cost that we have to spread across everyone.

It's not just tech-driven...housing is expensive across the nation and taxing RSUs may help in SF, but doesn't really get to the root of the problem which is zoning restriction, high development costs, increased homeowner rights enabling NIMBYism

manfredo6 anni fa

Remember that many renters (>70% in some cities like San Francisco) have price controls on their rents. If you're guaranteed that your rent will effectively never go up, then you're much more likely to block an apartment complex construction because it'll block your view or "change neighborhood character". Price controls on rents means many renters enjoy privileged status that insulates them from housing costs.

skybrian6 anni fa

Rent control gives people an option to buy future housing at a fixed price, which works much like a property interest.

rossdavidh6 anni fa

Speaking as someone who lived in Bay Area California for a few years, and Texas for several decades now, the first thing to know if that not all California has the same attitude on this, for much the same reason that Waco and Austin have different attitudes on a lot of things. In the Bay Area, there are geographical (water and hills) limits to expansion, whereas in Texas when you build more, it usually is out into the abundant open land at the edge of the city.

Also, it is quite often the case that when you build, it is either: 1) made for high-income dwellers, thus not reducing prices, because the high-income and low-income housing markets are often effectively separate markets, like cars and semi-tractor trailors. ...or... 2) the people living nearby, do think it will drive down prices, including the price of their own house, which is their only effective form of savings. If their $400,000 house becomes a $300,000 house, yeah their property taxes may go down, but they lost $100,000 in savings they intended to sell and live on elsewhere after they retire.

Robotbeat6 anni fa

> 1) made for high-income dwellers, thus not reducing prices, because the high-income and low-income housing markets are often effectively separate markets, like cars and semi-tractor trailors.

This is really a misnomer (and it is the linchpin of NIMBY arguments, especially in the Bay Area). If high income housing is not built, then high income people will inhabit and buy up the middle income housing, who in turn will inhabit and buy up low income housing, if they can find any at all.

You can see this clearly in the Bay Area. You have tiny houses going for like a couple million dollars.

In such an environment it's impossible to build stuff (at least, legally) that ISN'T high income housing as high income people are the only people who can afford any kind of housing in the area.

"But it's only made for high income dwellers." Build a cheap (but code-compliant) 600sqft studio in the Bay Area? Around $900/ft^2 would be the market price. It's only affordable to high income folk. A studio. This 161sqft studio in San Fran is $2300/month: https://www.businessinsider.com/smallest-apartment-for-rent-...

How is it even possible to build housing that isn't for high earners in San Francisco?

The only way to change is to build a LOT more and keep building. Or, I guess, destroy the entire local economy.

bryanlarsen6 anni fa

High end housing and low end housing are not separate markets. If there is an inadequate supply rich people bid up the price of lower end housing.

pound6 anni fa

When there isn't enough housing for high-income buyers in their "separate" market, what happens is that 'separate' low-income market becomes market for high-income buyers to go after.

kelnos6 anni fa

> the high-income and low-income housing markets are often effectively separate markets

That's certainly not true in SF. Housing quality certainly runs the entire spectrum here, but in the last decade I've seen low-income renters forced out of ok-ish buildings, and replaced with several high-income renters who do the roommate thing in order to afford it all.

Over time, even building "market rate" (which some people erroneously call "luxury") housing in SF will start to free up the older housing stock that's being occupied by people who in any other market would be considered high-income, and return that housing to its former middle- or low-income renters.

Regardless, with the exception of subsidized housing, it's not even possible to build low- or middle-income housing in SF right now. If you build anything at any size, it will immediately price out of budget for any low-income renters, and most middle-income renters. Part of that is just because landlords and sellers charge whatever the market will bear (which is a lot), and part is because new housing development gets so much opposition that it costs developers way more than it should to actually complete a project (it can take years and countless lawsuits and legal fees to even break ground), and they need to recoup their costs and make even a modest profit somehow.

d1zzy6 anni fa

> 1) made for high-income dwellers, thus not reducing prices, because the high-income and low-income housing markets are often effectively separate markets, like cars and semi-tractor trailors.

That doesn't seem right to me. Sure, the develpoers will have incentive to build the largest profit earning housing, which right now (because of a huge housing shortage for all pricing ranges) means building high-income housing. But a high-incomer earner that buys those stops competing for the fixer-upper middle income housing so that's good for other price ranges too. What's more, at some point you run out of high-income earners that will buy your expensive newly built property which requires dropping prices on existing built property _or_ starting to build the next most profitable housing, which is less profitable than before but you don't have a choice.

Now arguably, for all that to happen it takes time and the ability to build a large number of housing units, both of which may not be an option so I'm fine as a compromise to require for certain percentages of new housing to include tiers for lower pricing levels, as a requirement for the housing permit.

> 2) the people living nearby, do think it will drive down prices, including the price of their own house, which is their only effective form of savings.

There is a point where, as a society, you need to decide what's more important: giving existing owners 50%+ returns on their property or supporting new families moving in. As usual the answer is somewhere in the middle but I'm willing to bet it would go a lot against the current situation that the existing owners enjoy. After all, owning a house provides a lot of other benefits so as long as the increase in value covers for the cost (interest + taxes + maintenance) it seems fine to me.

jakemal6 anni fa

When developers build high income housing, high income households move to those new developments and reduce demand for the places they vacated, making them more affordable for lower income households.

bluGill6 anni fa

rebuttal https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/7/25/why-are-develo...

majormajor6 anni fa

> I'm from Texas, and I don't understand the stigma against developers building more housing. It drives down prices, and increases competition. Why would California citizens ever be against this?

Also from Texas: In Texas, developers building households generally happens on empty land in the suburbs, or in unused non-residential land.

In LA or the Bay Area, it would happen by replacing single family homes with multi-family housing. Something that would also be anathema in most well-off Texas communities. It's already sprawled about as far as geography permits.

Lots of people don't want to live in those places and would rather keep their existing neighborhoods than invite a lot of new residents and a larger, denser population. Hence their creating those laws.

It's not obvious to me why we should take the desires of the people who want to move there more seriously than the desires of people to keep what they have similarly.

But in that case, we need to stop building a ton of office space in those "full" cities to import a bunch more jobs than we have housing for...

kelnos6 anni fa

> It's not obvious to me why we should take the desires of the people who want to move there more seriously than the desires of people to keep what they have similarly.

The way I look at it is that the incumbents are there due to mostly accidents (of birth time/place) or of luck. Why should newcomers be disadvantaged due to accidents and luck?

Land is a finite resource, desirable land even more so. This is why we have things like property taxes, to reinforce the idea that property ownership is a privilege, and you have to pay for that privilege by contributing to the common good. We have zoning laws to attempt (though we often fail) to collectively make the best use of the limited land we have.

And from the other side, I just see it as just incredibly selfish to oppose reasonable housing development because people don't like change or are afraid that their home's 400% appreciation in value might drop to only 300% or whatever.

majormajor6 anni fa

> The way I look at it is that the incumbents are there due to mostly accidents (of birth time/place) or of luck. Why should newcomers be disadvantaged due to accidents and luck?

Most things are accidents of time/place/whatever. Including whatever resources those newcomers are bringing to a city. Is migration and density growth a strict good? A strict bad? Somewhere in between? Lots of ink have been written on that, I'm fairly personally neutral, but I'm very skeptical of the "this is a simple problem with a simple solution" crowd. I'd love to see a decentralization of high-end high-paying jobs. Right now if I wanted to live back near my family, I'd have to work on problems that are less interesting to me for quite a bit less money.

There's nobody exactly being unselfish in this debate... People who want more density or to save their own money argue one way. People who want to live a (different) way argue another... it's basically all wants considering we have so many other cities in the country with plenty of space.

notJim6 anni fa

It's not just prices, it's also "character." Basically it's about maintaining a small town-ish feel while living right next door to a major city. Frankly I think a lot of it is about parking and traffic.

twiceaday6 anni fa

Because it drives down prices and increases competition. California gets exactly what it functionally wants, not what some people say they want.

kelnos6 anni fa

Yup, and this is what saddens me the most.

I'm closing next week in SF on my first ever home purchase (after renting for 10 years here, and 6 years prior elsewhere in the Bay Area). Sure, I would like for it to be worth more (outpacing inflation) in 10, 20, or 30 years. But I am not buying a lifestyle, or a guarantee of value increase, or a neighborhood frozen in time at this point forever. I'm buying some floors, walls, and ceilings. I'm buying into a community that I know needs to grow and change if it's to survive and flourish.

revscat6 anni fa

Because it doesn’t drive down prices.

JamesBarney6 anni fa

I don't think housing is one of the few (if any) goods where increased supply drives up cost, nor do I think there is any evidence this is the case.

lthornberry6 anni fa

You are eliding two different kinds of goods here: units of housing, and land. The average price of the former would presumably decrease. The average price of the latter would presumably increase, since loosened restrictions on development would make it possible to build more units of housing on a given lot. For current owners of single family houses, it's likely that the land price effect would outweigh the unit effect, although there will be exceptions (the dynamics of exurbs will be different from those of central areas, for example).

aty2686 anni fa

Out of curiosity, what would be a good where increased supply drives up cost? I can't reason any off the top of my head.

caconym_6 anni fa

Induced demand is a thing. Not sure to what extent it applies to housing in any particular market, but any destabilizing effects of rapidly adding more housing should be seen as artifacts of the fact that we've let this problem go unaddressed for decades. People need places to live, and if we don't serve that need then the problems are only going to get worse and the solutions more disruptive.

There are also less visible efficiencies in having people living close to their work, like roads that aren't crammed with cars because people don't have to spend three hours behind the wheel every day getting to and from work, and the additional productivity that comes with all that extra time.

pjscott6 anni fa

Induced demand is where more of some good is supplied, which drives down its price, which increases the amount consumed, which means the price isn't driven down as much as it would have been if there had been no change in amount consumed. (A common example is widening a congested highway: more capacity reduces congestion somewhat, which means that the inconvenience of driving on that highway goes down, so more people drive, so the congestion doesn't go down as much as you'd naively predict.)

What I'm not seeing here is a way for increased housing supply to make the prices go up, as opposed to down, but not as much. Network effects, maybe: increased density of a city could make being in that city more valuable, thus making more people want to live there at any given price, which means that prices would rise.

caconym_6 anni fa

Yes, that's what induced demand is.

In a vacuum, no, I don't think simply adding housing can meaningfully drive up prices. But (as you say) obviously it feeds into organic urban growth, which does increase demand, so you have to keep building housing. It seems that the problem we have in our big tech hub cities is that we let that growth happen for a while and then decided that there would be no more housing.

I can imagine an induced demand effect as whole new classes of people realize that they can actually now live close to where they work, and come flooding back into the city. But like I said, that's an artifact of artificially constrained supply.

erik_seaberg6 anni fa

"Induced" demand is a misnomer for latent demand becoming measurable. It's a signal that a change was good but not enough; backpressure is reduced but not yet zero.

wiremaus6 anni fa

That would be Giffen good, which may not exist at all.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good

ghaff6 anni fa

Not really. Probably closer to a Veblen good (which does exist) but, in any case, those are about increased price driving up demand, not increased supply driving up price.

(I suppose increased supply could drive up price if providing that additional supply increased the overall costs but you'd presumably still be constrained by the overall supply/demand curves of the market.)

aty2686 anni fa

Simple economics tells me it does. Care to explain?

jophde6 anni fa

Best you are going to get on here is something like "increased supply doesn't lower prices in the housing market duhhh" without any actual reasons.

AtlasBarfed6 anni fa

The demand in city is probably inexhaustible practically speaking

The burbs however....

snarf216 anni fa

I'm not saying building isn't the problem but how do you solve for someone who is in a loan at $1.2M and in one year it is worth $500K on the open market due to all the building. This is something that has to happen incrementally and why people dig in so hard. That property is the main store of wealth for a lot of people. The wrong scheme could bankrupt them and destroy their retirement. Additionally, super dense housing will need major updates to public infrastructure to support these new numbers; from roads to trains to schools to hospitals and more. There is a reason that no one has the political will to do such a thing.

fortran776 anni fa

I own a house in 940xx and am all for more building.

It won't bankrupt anyone. If you bought a house you could afford for "x", and you budgeted as if it cost "x", you still have a place to live if you keep paying the mortgage. All your plans remain exactly the same. If the "value" of the house goes down, you'll save on property taxes.

sokoloff6 anni fa

If you scrimped and saved to pull together a 5% down-payment on a "starter house" and new construction nearby takes your home value own by 20%, you're going to be stuck in that starter home for a very, very long time.

bradlys6 anni fa

Can you really even get a house here on 5% down? I presumed anything over $750k would require 20% down immediately (and there's basically nothing that you'd want to own under $1m here). At least - that's what I got told when I talked to a guy at a bank about it.

spankalee6 anni fa

Show me where any house would be worth 40% of its current nominal value because of nearby building. That's completely unrealistic conjecture.

neurocline6 anni fa

My current house is apparently worth $2 million. Even with California construction costs, replacing it with a new house would cost less than $350,000. If someone could build a lot of houses nearby, it would drive the price of my house down to something realistic.

I’m in favor of lots of construction, because it’s the right thing overall. But it would hit me hard. I’m willing to accept that, so I lobby for new construction when I can. I’m just realistic about the outcome.

bradlys6 anni fa

I doubt your place will drop even 20% even if construction goes up drastically. Until it happens - you can't really say your home price would drop drastically.

Realistically, it won't. The new supply will be apartments - not single family homes. It's not like people will all want to sell and move into apartments or that the desire for homes will go down. It just means competition for apartments will improve.

bluGill6 anni fa

Sure it will. Housing is about compromises. If you can rent a 3 bedroom apartment for $900/month would you pay $9000/month (plus taxes and insurance) to buy a house?

The above numbers are realistic. You have a choice to nice 3 bedroom apartments for $900/month in the Des Moines Iowa area. The payments on a 30 year loan for a 2 million dollar house are a bit over 9000/month.

bradlys6 anni fa

Your comparison doesn't make sense. You're conflating multiple variables.

bluGill6 anni fa

I'm conflating multiple variables, but the whole is reasonable. If SF would build enough apartments (starting 20 years ago!) it is reasonable to expect that you could rent there for not much more than Des Moines. Given that lack of space in SF - they are not making more land - owning a place will always be more expensive than renting, but high rise apartments amortize the land costs over a lot of people and so it need not be that much per person. Neighborhood is important too: if you are right next to the big jobs centers you should expect to pay more (in Des Moines downtown apartments run $2000 for a 2 bed room - they have just started building them though so I expect that price to come down in 10 years.)

prewett6 anni fa

I bet your hypothetical developer would price the new houses at $1.9 million (or maybe $2.1 million, because where else are you going to buy a new house?), and they'd sell out as fast as they could build them, netting them a huge profit and hardly affecting your property values. Now if they could build 10,000 houses nearby it might have more of an effect.

lthornberry6 anni fa

Much of your value is in the underlying cost of land. More permissive development rules would increase the value of your land, because it would be possible for a developer to buy it and build more units of housing on it.

sct2026 anni fa

If it makes you feel any better, I live in an area that was built with a mix of SFHs and low rise apartment/condo buildings. The SFH are all $1m+ while condo prices range from $160k for a studio to $500k+ for a new 3-4 bedroom. If you figure that to build a new house they have to tear down an existing house, the minimum price for a new construction SFH or multi-unit is greatly increased.

jophde6 anni fa

(1)

bhawks6 anni fa

Those numbers seem very unlikely. Ignoring that California is a nonrecourse state. If someone ended up owing 1.2 mil on a 500k house, they could walk away and only be out the house and whatever payments they had already made on the loan. The risk of massive correction simply isn't borne by the individual (especially if they've bought the property in the past 5-10 years).

i_am_nomad6 anni fa

“Only be out the house and whatever payments” isn’t negligible in most cases, why are you hand-waving that away?

bluGill6 anni fa

Because if you can walk away from a $9000/month payment into a $900/month rent, investing the difference will make you better off in the long run.

d1zzy6 anni fa

I can see why someone might not want to loose their 40% appreciation of their real estate property but that doesn't make them right.

That is, of course if you change a policy that was primarily designed to inflate housing prices to the stratosphere then it might negatively impact that, but maybe you were wrong to do that to begin with.

ilamont6 anni fa

Build more housing! It's that simple. Prices will fall fast.

How fast, and how much?

svachalek6 anni fa

How much are you building?

pruneridge6 anni fa

Prices will fall fast and congestion will rise exponentially

loansas34246 anni fa

DoreenMichele6 anni fa

Mr. Falk looked at Mr. O’Brien and said, Dennis, look, I don’t even know you, but you have to eat something, even if it’s one grape, before I’ll talk to you. That at least got people laughing, and pretty soon everyone acceded to the bread and cheese and grapes.

The negotiation scene is great stuff. It's gold.

Another very important line:

People have to realize that homelessness is connected to housing prices.

I have been told repeatedly on the internet that the cost of housing has nothing whatsoever to do with homelessness. Homeless people are viewed by many as "junkies and crazies" who just have a personal problem and are not negatively impacted by the housing situation in the US. I've seen people deny that there even is a housing crisis in the US.

[deleted]6 anni fa

pruneridge6 anni fa

What happens when more people move into the area from the rest of the country and start driving to work from their newly built housing units? Silicon Valley has, at best, poor coverage of Caltrain and no coverage for BART in South Bay. If let’s say 10,000 more families move to San Jose into new housing units and they all need to commute to Palo Alto for work, how exactly would they do that without choking up the already clogged freeway network? Caltrain is already packed beyond imagination during rush hour. Each year, the rush hour commute time between Palo Alto and San Jose increasing by 5 minutes and that’s with limited net population growth in the area. Imagine if the population influx increased 2X or 5X. Housing is not an isolated problem. Due to decades of lobbying by the auto industry and a crippled public transportation strategy, what America really has is a transportation and infrastructure problem. Without solving that, the housing problem will never be truly solved and building new housing will degrade the quality of life of everyone in the area - both newcomers and existing residents.

dkhenry6 anni fa

This is the most common argument I hear against building, but I am firmly convinced that the reason you have the commute problem in the Bay area isn't because of the number of people, but because the resistance to building has forced development further and further out.

Consider that there is still housing growth, but its in South San Jose, Morgan Hill, and Gilroy. Those people all have to drive past Los Gatos, Cambell, Cupertino, San Jose, and Sunnyvale to get to Mountain View. All your doing is increasing the amount of Miles people have to drive, and that in term increases the amount of time they spend in their cars, and clogs the roads. If you built houses in Mountain View or Palo Alto, none of those people would be on the roads, and if they were it wouldn't be for nearly as long. You don't have to take my word for it take a look at average commute times in the bay area, those increases aren't due to a 2x increase in Mountain View, its due to a 2x increase far outside with people driving in.

Public transportation is great, but the solution is to build houses near where people work, that means San Francisco and Mountain View.

jayd166 anni fa

The market has shown people are willing to make the commute. Not only would you need to induce the current commuters to move, you also need to ensure they aren't simply replaced by more commuters, which isn't necessarily a given.

aga98mtl6 anni fa

The market has shown that there is extreme demand at the center. We need to build at the center.

There is a fixed amount of people at any point in time in a metropolitan area. Building at the center will not make new people appear. It removes people from the commuting crowd.

Gibbon16 anni fa

Well there is also the issue that the VC's and tech executives would rather workers have to do hour plus commutes to offices conveniently close to SFO and Sand Hill Road than they having to drive out to Vallejo. And much less have live in Kansas city or some such god forbidden place.

dkhenry6 anni fa

That is because at the end of the day VC's want you to spend all your money so they can get more of your ownership. There is no incentive for them for fund companies in middle america where their dollars aren't in such high demand.

mertd6 anni fa

You might have it backwards. Traffic is increasing because we're adding offices but no housing nearby. Therefore people need to pour in from further out. With higher density, alternate transportation options become viable and attractive.

pruneridge6 anni fa

Your argument does not account for people currently outside the Bay Area moving into the Bay Area because of cheaper housing. While people currently residing in far flung places would move closer to their work, the people living in other parts of the country aspiring to live in Silicon Valley would now move to Morgan Hill and Gilroy. Eventually, we will end up with the same housing crunch, except with twice the number of cars on the road.

tmh796 anni fa

If you look at the data for SF, 95% of brand new units are first occupied by people who have lived here for a at least a few years. New housing serves people who are already here.

What causes people to migrate to the bay is the office creation, not the housing creation.

6gvONxR4sf7o6 anni fa

That logic doesn't work. 95% of new units going to existing residents doesn't mean that if I built 100 new units, I only get 5 new houses. Those 95% who move to new units leave their old local places open, which in turn go to god knows where.

tmh796 anni fa

There is a natural population growth in the bay area from people having and raising children here. Our housing growth rate is slower than the rate of children coming of age. The unoccupied units that current residents are moving into can theoretically be occupied by the children of the current residents as they come of age.

koboll6 anni fa

>What happens when more people move into the area from the rest of the country and start driving to work from their newly built housing units?

What happens is they congest traffic far less than they do now, driving from farther-flung places.

usaar3336 anni fa

Well, Bart is opening in San Jose this year. Caltrain is electrifying which will enable much lower headways.

If you focus on dense developments near them, that goes a long way.

francisofascii6 anni fa

Add bus lanes and HOV lanes which don't require additional lanes and improve efficiency. Charge more per vehicle.

wbl6 anni fa

You can actually hire Germans to run your trains.

xivzgrev6 anni fa

This is a great point, never thought of it that way

When it was Ms. Trauss’s turn to speak, she argued that the entire notion of public comment on new construction was inherently flawed, because the beneficiaries — the people who would eventually live in the buildings — couldn’t argue their side.

earhart6 anni fa

FWIW - I’d love to see increased density where I live in Seattle, but the people who support it seem to ignore all the other stuff that has to go with it - e.g. more school capacity, better transit, requiring parking in new developments because people still have cars and the on-street parking can’t scale to meet new developments...

Bringing that stuff up gets me called a NIMBY; it sometimes seems like anything that might make it more expensive for developers to build more housing is a crime against humanity. :-/

It sometimes feels like all we’re really doing is enabling developers to mine our quality of life for their own profit, without actually creating enough housing to make a dent in the problem.

aabhay6 anni fa

Yes, this is something in dire need of a solution in SF. There are not enough primary schools in the city to support even the people that currently live here (there’s a lottery system where students aren’t even guaranteed a spot in a high school).

I would love to see the city of SF get denser, but building condos isn’t the only answer.

pneill6 anni fa

It's very complicated. People have conflicting ideas - one the one hand, they want affordable housing (ie their rent to go down) or the other, not in my backyard.

Worth a view The Insane Battle To Sabotage a New Apartment Building Explains San Francisco's Housing Crisis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExgxwKnH8y4

DonHopkins6 anni fa

This is what I chant when I'm waiting for my code to compile. I was hoping this was an article about how to make it compile faster.

(Edit: the original title was "Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build Build"! ;)

pixxel6 anni fa

In Steve Ballmer’s voice I hope.

(https://youtu.be/Vhh_GeBPOhs)

neonate6 anni fa

https://archive.md/39Yh4

aSplash0fDerp6 anni fa

As mentioned in the comments, housing/shelter has a different meaning depending on your perspective (renter/owner, single/married, young/old or import/local resident).

Unless we define housing types/building codes for specific subsets, it'll most likely be just more of the same development/investments.

With many major metro areas bursting at the seams, I think they need to break ground on new 21st century cities and identify a way to lower the populations as a solution/initial step, rather than adding more deck chairs to the ship.

This gives the economy a new canvas to work with and the opportunity to move forward 100% with sustainable priciples without being encumbered by the pre-existing conditions plaguing NIMBY strongholds.

With desalination and autonomous vehicles becoming a bigger part of the modern economy, California could build horseshoe/teardrop shaped autonomous highways from the coastline cities hundreds of miles inland that allow modern logistics to fillin the gaps with public transportation and servicing basic needs (water, sanitation, public services) and accomodate new suburban models to house an ever-growing population. Outside of the earthquake zones, the can build the high-density housing they need to solve a good portion of the social crisis.

Extending cities with autonomous loops may not be the best answer, but the existing city planning models need more pioneering strategies if they want to seed future growth.

c0nfused6 anni fa

The answer was and always will be to increase density not increase transit to the suburbs. This is how you get 2 hour commutes. The idea that you are not doing the driving doesn't make a 150 mile commute seem better to me.

You can cap density by height like most European cities do or go up forever like Shanghai. But simply arguing suburbs + highways were the 1950s answer and will be the 2050s answer is missing the point.

aSplash0fDerp6 anni fa

Your "always" statement reeks of a legacy mindset that doesn't have room to explore implementing new technologies/logistics outside of the box as potential solutions and you also appear to be oblivious to the overhanging threat that earthquakes have in long-term planning for high-density housing in California.

Why do you think Cali has not overbuilt skyscrapers to solve the housing crisis? The moneys has always been there to build them. Its probably something obvious huh?

Edit: I'm also in Southern California and am impressed with the sheer number of bungalows that cover the landscape. They would have chosen other alternatives had they been available during the growth boom. I also felt the tremors in July of last year from the quakes 150 miles away and think that is still top-of-mind looking forward.

9HZZRfNlpR6 anni fa

Californians seem like people who would care about co2 and emissions, the only good solution is to build higher and denser, instead of long drives.

aSplash0fDerp6 anni fa

I've spent over an hour going 10 miles on the 405 recently, so hopefully they'll use the autonomous infrastructure to deliver work to the remote extensions/areas as well to turn back the clock on congestion a few decades in the existing cities.

infecto6 anni fa

Fuck California and fuck the Bay Area.

Just a bold statement. I wish for change but i don't see it happening. I love the weather, love the environment and sometimes love the people here but after living here for a number of years, I am started to not understand it. I pay pretty high taxes to live here. We have the most embarrassing property tax laws that include business property. I walk to work and walk through so many homeless camps filled with poop, trash and needles. Many of our communities have failing roads, some of the worst I have experienced in the world. The roads have started groups such as "pot hole vigilantes". In most of the communities I never see a police presence. We say we are green and love the environment but we have made little progress on public transportation since the 70s. I mean hell, we cannot even get a quick rollout of new BART cars. So we want to hate on building new roads but we have no new public transportation. I am starting to run out of reasons to participate in California.

Melting_Harps6 anni fa

> Fuck California and fuck the Bay Area.

I'm Californian (7th generation) born and raised and I had to leave for the aforementioned reasons, I spent a summer in Sunnyvale and I just couldn't cope with the dreariness of it all, (this is also about the time I became really fascinated with the Cyberpunk genre, because I felt it had already happened there).

If I'm honest the Bay area feels the least like the California I knew and love(d). I'm originally from SoCal, but my family is from NorCal (Santa Cruz and San Jose) and its just not worth it. The costs, the traffic, the taxes, the headache of just being somewhere that shutdowns so early but feels like its never dormant. I used to go to San Jose in the 90s and the feel and the vibe of the place is night and day to present-day.

I've traveled all over Europe and lived in Hawaii for a while, and the World is much bigger than California. The one thing California does have above over every other place is the weather, and that's debatable as I thought NorCal weather was far too muggy and sticky for my preference and I lived in Coast in SoCal, and the diverse cultural environment. In OC I can honestly immerse myself in Vietnamese, Laotion, Chinese, Japanese, Korean centric towns within a 45 miles radius all in the same day. Its amazing if you're into food culture, LA is even better, San Diego less so but still good.

Where as if I lived in Germany or Italy, while they have their own regional 'cuccina tipica' it was just not the same at all. And that's what I missed the most when away from California, everything else I can cope with.

With that said, I hate the BART, its gross and a relic of terrible system. It was cool to see it from afar, but having to go from Sunnyvale to the East Bay, to SFO on a regular basis... I'll never see why anyone would do that instead of ride a motorcycle or an EV and drive in the carpool for free if you value your time ad health. I got stuck in SFO on a Sunday for 13 hours because I forgot the BART stopped early.

trimbo6 anni fa

> In most of the communities I never see a police presence.

An SFPD cop told me years ago that they won't get involved because of social media. Social media outrage doesn't care about context, and their job and pension is on the line, so it's just better to do nothing unless someone's in real danger.

Beyond that, the SF DAs haven't prosecuted petty crimes in years. In fact, the new one is not only not going to prosecute, but is saying he wants to simply pay back people for their broken car windows.[1]

It's really going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

[1] - https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/SF-auto-burglary-e...

zionic6 anni fa

Just remember to adjust your voting habits when you inevitably move somewhere else.

gonehome6 anni fa

For clarity the people voting for policies to restrict housing are not the people moving away because they can't afford housing.

There's a class of people that own housing that pay very little property tax because they bought years ago and are protected by Prop 13.

These people vote to prevent building anything because they benefit both from insane house prices and property tax protection.

All the new people live with a handful of roommates and still pay $1400-$2200 in rent.

infecto6 anni fa

Fuck Prop 13. It blows my mind how many long time California people don't even realize prop 13 covers many business properties.

gonehome6 anni fa

For me the individual housing protection is worse than business.

Primarily because the individual housing protection is what causes the incentive problem where people prevent housing from being built.

Companies would benefit from more plentiful inexpensive housing.

My dream bill would be a prop that requires local communities to build X amount of housing (where X is some large number possibly determined in part by the spread between property tax payment and property FMV) every year.

Failure to meet X means that all property owners see a 10% increase in their property tax.

This happens every year with an upper bound on the property tax being the current tax for the FMV of their property.

This is basically impossible to actually pass, but it's what I would do if I was king of Palo Alto, either build the housing or pay the actual cost of your policy.

Maybe one day SB50 will pass - at least that'd be something.

microcolonel6 anni fa

This is the thing that takes so much effort to tell people: if the place you live in is crippled by politics, but you agree with most of your neighbours on who to vote for (the same people for often a decade at a time), then it's time to look inside a bit.

I have met many people who complain non-stop about things, while not being able to name the politician they are voting for in a local or regional election, or even a politician they just voted for in a recent election.

dominotw6 anni fa

looks like you are describing a specific part of 'bay area' . lots of burbs don't have these issues.

illvm6 anni fa

Even Mountain View has these issues. Not to as near of a degree as say SF, Oakland, or Berkeley, but almost all of the above I've witnessed in Mountain View.

So, I wouldn't say OP is describing a specific part. It's rather pervasive all over.

otterley6 anni fa

Why should we pay a heavy price in wasted time and pollution to commute to/from a suburb just so we can avoid the filth and decrepitude?

infecto6 anni fa

I mean I am but I am not? A lot of the people in the safe "burbs" are commuting somewhere. But even then I feel like I could count far fewer safe burbs than what I described above.

Anyway, just because there are some safe burbs does not mean what I describe is wrong. Our roads suck, we have a backwards property tax, its expensive to live in a decent school district and I generally feel pretty unsafe here.

staplers6 anni fa

Articles like this and the subsequent comments always reinforce to me that the human domain will never, or perhaps can never support wildlife and fauna.

As much as we like to grandstand against mass extinction of wildlife and deforestation, we will always cave to economical and social pressures of modern life which almost exclusively require resource extraction and destruction of the biosphere.

papreclip6 anni fa

The haber-bosch process is the worst scientific advance human beings have ever made, much worse than tetra-ethyl lead, CFCs, or the atom bomb. It's not even possible to grow enough food to support the current world population without industrial nitrogen fixation for fertilizer. We've thrown things horribly out of equilibrium by proceeding in this manner and no amount of high density housing, paper straws, or solar panels is going to make things gravy

it's like the bacteria in a biological weapons lab learned how to place orders for and distribute more agar

readarticle6 anni fa

There isn’t a single pro wildlife/forest view expressed in this article, what’s being explicitly fought against here by YIMBY, and later Falk, are:

... letters to elected officials, and at the open microphone that Mr. Falk observed at the City Council meetings, residents said things like “too aggressive,” “not respectful,” “embarrassment,” “outraged,” “audacity,” “very urban,” “deeply upset,” “unsightly,” “monstrosity,” “inconceivable,” “simply outrageous,” “vehemently opposed,” “sheer scope,” “very wrong,” “blocking views,” “does not conform,” “property values will be destroyed,” and “will allow more crime to be committed.”

If preserving wildlife and forests can be equated with preserving suburban lifestyles and property values, then yes, it’s perhaps already lost and we should all be quite sad.

reading-at-work6 anni fa

> If preserving wildlife and forests can be equated with preserving suburban lifestyles and property values

It can't, and shouldn't, be equated to that. Denser urban living, i.e. building more housing in cities, reduces suburban sprawl. That's a good thing if you care about the environment.

tayistay6 anni fa

Lafayette, the town in the article, is nearly an hour away from SF by train. Should we really be building more housing relatively far away from the jobs? The trains and roads are packed. What about focusing on high density housing that's closer to the jobs in Oakland and SF? Isn't it better for people to be able to walk to work or ride a bike?

I'm not asking rhetorically.

subsubzero6 anni fa

Fun Fact: if three cities(San Jose, San Francisco, NYC) in America were to loosen up housing planning rules, America's GDP would be 4% higher, that is incredible in of itself, source: (paywall - https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/01/16/the-wests-bigge...)

Although I think California especially needs new housing, the bay area in particular has a housing issue which is somewhat artificially created due to a number of large (google, facebook, etc) and smaller tech companies requiring a "buts in seat" mentality and a philosophy that all "important" jobs be based in the bay area near their HQ's. Its really quite sad as a job that can be done anywhere is forced to be located in one of the most expensive areas on earth.

JMTQp8lwXL6 anni fa

Prices have hit their limits, and companies are more willing to entertain the idea that qualified talent exists outside of the Bay Area. Remote work is growing, and some portion of that growth is certainly attributable to the Bay Area housing market.

rcpt6 anni fa

Enrico Moretti's research is great. In my opinion it makes a strong argument that the federal government should step in and tear down California's economic wall

joe_the_user6 anni fa

Article: "Hitting that number will require building more everything: Subsidized housing. Market-rate housing. Homes, apartments, condos and co-ops. Three hundred and fifteen apartments on prime parcels of towns like Lafayette."

I feel weird sort of agreeing with the wealthy home owners in outlying small towns. Why should the state adopt a "more of everything" policy? The American and California model of low-density suburban building is completely broken and "more of everything" is basically saying more of the same. A higher density approach with the building concentrated in the centralized cities and perhaps some of the "towns" surrounded by city (Menlo Park or Brisbane).

I mean, it's obvious false that "more of everything is the only way to meet the goal". Of course, you could build that much housing in higher density urban areas.

rowborg6 anni fa

It's a fair point. What makes Lafayette a good place to build without increasing sprawl or traffic that it is right on a BART line. "More of everything" should probably be caveated with "more of everything near public transit".

6gvONxR4sf7o6 anni fa

In this future, is there nowhere for those of us who just want to some damned trees and nature and quiet and dark where we live? You buy a quiet place where you can see they sky, but it gets expensive so newcomers replace it with what you left originally, so you leave again to a quiet place where you can see the sky, but it gets expensive so newcomers replace it with what you left originally, so this time you wise up and move somewhere with likeminded people who zone it for trees and quiet and dark, but then that gets expensive too, so newcomers rally for zoning reform before tearing it all down again...

Different people value density differently, but apparently my willingness to pay a premium to live somewhere with lower density makes me an evil NIMBY.

stewaleex6 anni fa

Tech doesn't need a location, it should branch out, away from stupid policies that drive housing prices up

gdubs6 anni fa

Honest question: how do we address the housing crisis in the Bay Area without turning it into Los Angeles?

manfredo6 anni fa

By building higher density housing, instead of restrictive zoning laws that foster urban sprawl.

themagician6 anni fa

Rezone the area around Golden Gate Park and turn it into a dense metropolis.

You could 10x the density around there and be able to support the population. You’ve got wide streets, services, and it isn’t landfill.

Honestly though, I feel like it isn’t really a crisis. It’s mostly rich people fighting with other rich people over whose backyard to build in. There are no real YIMBYs, just people who want to live in certain areas they don’t currently live in.

Most of the poors have already been displaced. We pretend like they are the focus because it’s good for politics, but the reality is the diversity is already gone.

bluGill6 anni fa

If you upzone far enough builders will fill all the demand for rich apartments, and see the only way to make money is to build apartments for the next level down Some of this is moving the rich to the next style and letting the next level down have their old apartment.

The problem of course is the best time to build affordable housing is 20 years ago. So if you want to really help the poor (as opposed to symbolically helping a few poor while leaving the rest out) you need to go back in time 20 years. You can start today though on a 20 year plan.

thedance6 anni fa

Every property within 1/4 mile of the N-Judah streetcar line should have over-the-counter, by-right zoning approval for 7-story buildings with zero parking and no setbacks.

i_am_nomad6 anni fa

I used to live right near the park, 1/4 mile from the N-Judah. The infrastructure in that area can barely support the housing stock that exists right now.

driverdan6 anni fa

The Bay Area is already like LA. SF has used its land, it needs to build up. The surrounding areas have already built out.

notJim6 anni fa

What does "turning it into Los Angeles?" mean? Everyone replying seems to know what you're talking about, but it's totally baffling to me.

munificent6 anni fa

Huge sprawl and a massively car-focused infrastructure that requires long drive times on enormous multi-lane interstates to get anywhere.

papreclip6 anni fa

There are going to be tradeoffs one way or another.

You can build a bunch of high rises and fill them with people, and private transportation will become impossible. The experience of going to the beach or some hiking spot on the weekend will be degraded. Everyone will be living in a godawful megacity instead of the nice neighborhood they'd rather live in. There's a reason people push back against growth with respect to housing.

The real problem is overpopulation. If you eliminate one negative feedback loop for population growth, you will ultimately run into another one, and all the different kinds of waste we produce (CO2, garbage, light and noise pollution) will only pile up while finite resources in the region (breathing room, nature, water, room on the road and on hiking trails) will be divvied up into smaller portions

bovermyer6 anni fa

Either build very tall, high density housing to accommodate the population... or reduce the population drastically.

A nuclear missile fired into the San Andreas fault, perhaps (this is a movie reference, folks, and not a serious suggestion).

nostrademons6 anni fa

What movie? It sounds vaguely entertaining.

logfromblammo6 anni fa

Superman (1978), starring Christopher Reeve.

It involves Superman traveling at faster than c to save the day, rather than breaking a promise made under duress, which makes flunking ethical calculus into a super-vulnerability.

Movies based on comic book characters have come a long way. And even movies based on DC characters have advanced slightly.

bovermyer6 anni fa

Maybe, but the music from that movie is still iconic; more so than most other DC movies', except perhaps Elfman's Batman theme.

bluGill6 anni fa

There are probably many from 1950 - 1980 to choose from. I've read many science fiction books from that era where the premise was such a bomb (though the destination was different). I'm not a movie buff, but I'd guess there is a superhero blockbuster with that theme somewhere in there ( Superman?).

bovermyer6 anni fa

This is from the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie.

contingencies6 anni fa

Avert global warming and maintain current patterns of SF weather.

_hardwaregeek6 anni fa

Having been born and raised in a major city, I'm certainly biased, but I truly believe that suburbs should go away. Every part of a suburb seems so insular, so wasteful, so outmoded. A one family house requires maintenance, heating and wiring that would be so much more efficient with even the smallest apartment complex. Lawns are ridiculous, especially in the parts of the country where grass is not indigenous. Why the hell are we spending so much water and energy to maintain a goddamn green rectangle?

HOAs don't seem to do much besides execute petty laws. Neighborhoods, while they can be diverse, will never approach a city in terms of allowing people of different backgrounds, races, etc. to interact. There's a particular reason cities vote more democratic than suburbs: It's hard to vote for such hateful policies when you interact with the people effected every day.

I get that there's this nostalgia or rather inertia about suburbs. I get that people grew up in a one family house with a lawn in their nice homogeneous town. But it needs to go away.

sokoloff6 anni fa

"I get that some people like it, but I don't, so it needs to go away."

_hardwaregeek6 anni fa

More like this thing that people like is energy inefficient, produces pollution and leads to more homogeneous, less diverse communities. And therefore it should go away.

bathtub3656 anni fa

Forcing everyone into cities is also a form of homogenizing. The idea that a city mindset is the only one is just forcing people to conform in a different way.

lthornberry6 anni fa

I'd settle for suburban development not being required (through maximum density zoning laws) or subsidized (through disproportionate spending on suburban infrastructure).

greedo6 anni fa

I have a coworker who mentioned that he doesn't think my town needs libraries. "I never use them, so why should my taxes go to supporting them?" Trying to have a productive dialogue with someone who doesn't understand the idea of community can be a challenge.

_hardwaregeek6 anni fa

Oh I don't think communities should go away. Cities can have communities if you build them in the right way. I just think these communities need to evolve from the particular format of a single family house with a lawn, car and garage.

Plus I'm a little perplexed at the library analogy. I'm not saying we need to lower funding or anything. If anything we should be pumping more money into suburbs so that they can build and create more healthy, flourishing communities. These communities should just be built in a way that's space and energy efficient.

greedo6 anni fa

It's the idea that if someone doesn't like something, it doesn't matter if others do.

In my town, a typical midwest college town, we have suburbs, we have more urban areas with smaller/older houses in row neighborhoods. We have apartments galore, and condos in downtown areas. A bit of something for everyone. Expecting a community to "evolve" means losing something of this. Other than young people who want to live in the downtown area, nobody wants to give up their homes. Apartment living is no fun with families.

And this is normal America. These cities can't be re-designed, can't really evolve. New cities, sure. Build them that way if you can (though I think the market won't support it), but expecting existing cities to evolve into urban worlds with no cars, great public transportation, and centrally located jobs and services won't happen in the majority of US cities.

_hardwaregeek6 anni fa

First of all, I get that people like living in the suburbs. But people also like eating beef and like driving Hummers. Unfortunately we need to do less of all of these.

> Apartment living is no fun with families.

That is a gigantic assumption. I grew up in an apartment and it was great. My parents wouldn't trade living in an apartment in a major city for a house in the suburbs for anything. Plenty of families all around the world do just fine in apartments.

I disagree that existing cities can't be redesigned. Sure, we'd need to invest in public transportation. And sure, we'd have to build other infrastructure. But the case in the article is a pretty obvious case for expansion. You have a town that is 30 minutes by rail from SF, an epicenter of insanely expensive real estate, and yet nobody can expand because people are worried it'll destroy their precious suburbs.

nostrebored6 anni fa

'apartment living is no fun with families'

... why?

I've lived in apartments with my family for the last three years. It's honestly been great.

annoyingnoob6 anni fa

I'm all for more housing but we need to make sure we have the appropriate infrastructure to support it, water, sewage treatment, roads, etc.

The city I live in has been growing a lot, but so has traffic and crime.

woodrow6 anni fa

Do you live in California? If so, your city's infrastructure may be struggling due to the county's lagging property tax revenue, which in turn is a result of Prop 13.

annoyingnoob6 anni fa

Not exactly, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mello-Roos

Mello Roos more than doubles my Prop 13 property taxes. My neighborhood gives way more than its fair share. The schools suck, the roads are too narrow, I could go on. Its poor planning and probably out-right corruption.

foxx-boxx6 anni fa

At some point high prices should force companies to move their operations, hence price should drop.

tomohawk6 anni fa

> He had now argued, and paid for, both sides of the same case.

And this is why we need the English Rule. We're the only industrialized nation that does not have some form of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_%28attorney%27s_f...

foxx-boxx6 anni fa

You should always respect people who was there first. When money talks, bs takes the bus: new tenants are needed to support bankrupt pension system anyway.

Even international law admits that.

High cost of real estate should force many people to sell their homes and leave to cheaper places.

dmode6 anni fa

The fact is that American laws and policies are being set-up to serve only constituent - older baby boomers. This is especially true at the local level. I went to a city council meeting for my city, and it was 90% older white folks. Although the city is young and 60% Asian. There was constant stream of anti-development voices, with hardly anyone to counter them. This is almost non representative of the majority view, but younger people with work, commutes, and kids simply cannot attend these meetings. I have heard recently that SF is moving towards a representative focus group model to get community input instead of this random council meetings. That is the path forward. Abandon these open forums that only serves retirees. Increase outreach, create focus groups, and be more representative of the city's makeup

dominotw6 anni fa

depends on who owns the houses. I live in a suburb in bay area where population is almost all house owners are indian and chinese. They have the same preferences as "older baby boomers".

Are you implying that if in your case if they were reversed we would see some sort of different outcomes? Asians are more open to getting their house values going down by new development?

dmode6 anni fa

I am just saying that input should be taken from a population that represents the city by moving away from a process that biases input

downerending6 anni fa

I might be hopelessly naive, but why not do the new growth somewhere else? The BA is pretty obviously "full" already, and adding more housing of any kind isn't going to make it better.

lthornberry6 anni fa

The BA isn't "full" by any reasonable measure. See this list of US cities by population density for comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_d.... San Francisco is 21st on the list, at 17,246 people per sq mi; the next densest city in the Bay Area is Daly City, which is 49th at 13,703 people per sq mi.

By contrast, NYC has 27,016 people per sq mi; the densest suburb of Boston (Somerville) has 18,431; West Hollywood has 18,297.

There's plenty of room for more people in the Bay Area, if denser housing is allowed.

downerending6 anni fa

It's subjective, of course, but when I worked in NYC, I was able to commute from an area with a density more like 2,000 per sq mi. Maybe an hour each way. That's what I think of as "not full".

I believe I looked for something like that in the BA and it doesn't really exist.

ngcc_hk6 anni fa

That is internal struggle. But one must look at any external struggle. If you have people moving in without any means of stopping, just build build build would only help that much

truebosko6 anni fa

https://web.archive.org/web/20200214180644/https://www.nytim...

corentin886 anni fa

Not sure what you want to express with this link?

rhinoceraptor6 anni fa

It gets around the NYT paywall.

jngreenlee6 anni fa

Text please?

glaberficken6 anni fa

https://pad.riseup.net/p/BS4bd3KJQR7-DeHuBI-Q-keep

foxx-boxx6 anni fa

Instead of trying to buy Greenland from wealthy socialist Europeans, Trump should buy some tropical islands, like Madagascar for instance.

California can move it’s operations to these cheaper places.

thenightcrawler6 anni fa

build build build

tibiahurried6 anni fa

eruditegamer4206 anni fa

Kenji6 anni fa

Haha I thought this was about compilation. This headline is how I spend about a quarter of my day.

jaequery6 anni fa

click bait gone wild

Edit: looks like the title changed now

mc326 anni fa

It’s like they wanted to riff on the failed ‘08 candidate for the vice presidency but couldn’t allow themselves to do it.

Ididntdothis6 anni fa

To me it sounds like “developers, developers, developers”

But I am glad that the media is reporting this. California is slowly killing itself with its housing policy. I live in an area where there are only people who are either rich retirees or whose parents have bought real estate before the market went crazy. And these people kill any effort to build more. It’s basically impossible for regular people to live here.

selimthegrim6 anni fa

I thought it was ripping off that Chinese stela inscription that supposedly ends with seven ‘kills’

kempbellt6 anni fa

Maybe they're taking the Steve Ballmer approach to promotion

trevyn6 anni fa

This is what the apocalypse looks like!

jayd166 anni fa

This might be an unpopular question but why is everyone certain that more housing will cut homelessness when these California cities are already quite dense (not the most in the world but more than most of the US)?

Why don't we assume more housing will not simply bring more non-homeless from elsewhere? The homeless are certainly not the most competitive home buyers.

zacksinclair6 anni fa

More housing is not a panacea for homelessness - but supply and demand are real. Increasing supply will decrease equilibrium price; this increase in affordability is one measure (of the many necessary) to help homelessness.

jayd166 anni fa

>Increasing supply will decrease equilibrium price

Hmm but this is not a given is it? I think many would move to SF if housing was only slightly cheaper.

zacksinclair6 anni fa

It is a given and is basic economics. Supply and demand curves certainly apply to housing.

Increasing housing shifts the supply line to the right - which satisfies greater demand at a lower price, all else equal. That is what "many would move to SF if housing was only slightly cheaper" means in economic terms.

Shifting the demand curve to the right is not driven by quantity of housing, but instead by things like quality of life, supply of jobs, etc. Its the difference between the slope of the line and its position.

jayd166 anni fa

>It is a given and is basic economics. Supply and demand curves certainly apply to housing.

Yes but the angle of those curves are important. There are elastic and inelastic demands for resources. There can be unfulfilled demand at the current equilibrium price. Its basic economics.

tathougies6 anni fa

Yes, you are totally right. The homeless issue in SF is one of drug addiction. The issue that housing would solve is exorbitant rents in the area. People aren't homeless because of prices. But people are leaving the area leaving Silicon Valley less competitive.

rb8086 anni fa

Not luxury apartments. Projects. In the 50s and 60s NYC built loads of massive housing projects for the poorest people on welfare. This is something that is needed in California. Most of the homeless can't afford fancy new builds, the state should be building big cheap buildings to house the people who can't afford anything. Say there are 20k units required in the Bay Area, each building can have 20 floors, 25 aprts per floor, that's just 40 buildings, say one in each suburb.

Here are NYC ones, the biggest prjects are 1000-2000 units each https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_Housing_...

x00546 anni fa

Have you seen what happens in those projects? I lived in Chicago and those were not a good place to live because of incredible levels of crime.

What we need is to stop clustering so much around SF and LA. There are lots of places in CA that are basically empty. What we need is more ways for people to make money remotely so they can live in lower density areas and still make good living. High density is not the answer, people need space and we have space.

tmh796 anni fa

The reason we have a housing crises is because people want high density living. Our market crises is a literal refutation of your proposed solution.

x00546 anni fa

What proof do you have for that? Why isn't it more likely that what people actually want is good paying jobs without having to spend 2 hours in traffic every day?

Say you have 2 options, one is to live in a lower density area with plenty of playgrounds for your kids, space to decompress and have fun, and a good paying job that you can do from home or close by.

Option two is being shoved like sardines into a 20 story high density apartment building for the privilege of what? What's the point of high density living? So you can all die from a pandemic faster? Or so you can eat at fancy restaurants unhealthy food?

Are you sure that your bubble isn't shaping your opinion?

tmh796 anni fa

"What proof do you have for that?"

rural areas are depopulating and cities/metropolitan areas are rising in both population and inflation adjusted real estate prices, both in the US and around the world.

Say you have 2 options...

This is a false framing. For most, the choice is between lower density area with a long usually car based commute or a higher density area with a shorter non car based commute. Things become more complicated when you have a life partner and you both have jobs, then you need to minimize the commutes while maximizing the job opportunities for both of you, and that happens best within cities.

"shoved like sardines into a 20 story high density apartment building"

this is also false framing. Some of the highest density neighborhoods in the united states are filled with 3 story buildings, like triple decker homes (ex: somerville MA) that are essentially 5k sqft homes 3 story homes subdivided into 3 units, one on each floor.

"What's the point of high density living"

The point of high density living is that it takes you less time to get to the things you want to do, it allows you to live without using a car to get everywhere, it allows for higher specializations of places, ex higher densities can support a niche board game store and gathering place, it allows a higher group of people to live within your commute shed so that you have more opportunities to make friends.

The past 5000 years of human history has included a nearly universal and constant theme of people moving from the countryside to the city. Post WWII America was a slight abberation from that, but we're back on trend like the rest of the world.

tmh796 anni fa

Yea... there are way more than 20k units needed in the bay area (all 9 countie), its closer to 1m. You need to account for the huge amount of office space growth in the past 15 years and the next 10 years, as well as our historical trend of underbuilding due to regulations for the past 40 years.

zhirafovod6 anni fa

Housing:

* European way - build centrally design urban cities, with infrastructure, schools, public transportation, community spaces, recreation/business spaces.

* American way - let for-profit developers build luxury houses around enormous google/fb/other tech giant campuses, and let struggling communities to figure out how to live with it...

Medical care:

* European way - build an efficient medical system which is paid by taxes, affordable to everyone.

* American way - let medical system to be a for profit business and put a burden of medical insurance for all on the medium income population and let them figure it out

Good news on the housing - the companies reached the plato of the salaries for the bay area employees and many actively moving to the other urban areas which should spread the stress from the bay area. Its is 21st century, and if a company can't establish an effective distributed collaboration processes, it does not deserve to be a leader in high tech space.

int_19h6 anni fa

On healthcare, this isn't true simply because of how drastically different approaches are across Europe. There are countries there that have something a lot like ACA, just better implemented (Switzerland). There are countries with true single payer nationalized systems (UK). There are countries where healthcare is run by a bunch of private non-profit coops for most people, but those who want to can opt out into a fully private system (Germany). These all work much better than what US has, but not all of them are paid entirely or even mostly by taxes.

zhirafovod6 anni fa

yeah, I've exaggerated a bit with the comparison, thanks for correcting. I think it will be right to say, that a decent medical care is a right, not a privilege, in most of the European countries. And the private hospitals come to play when you want a premium services. But even then you know the price list most of the services, or it is all included for a reasonable price.

In either case, I see quite a different approach - attempt to provide social oriented services by just relaying the problems on the working population, instead of owning the problem and solving the proper way.

jelliclesfarm6 anni fa

I have been asking someone..anyone..to give me an example of how building more housing leads to affordable housing. Like in real life..

Every high density over crowded over built city ..and this is global..is unaffordable. It has expensive utilities, higher taxes and bad declining infrastructure that the government can’t seem to replace or upgrade.

We have pestilence, rodent infestations, higher crime, big government and more taxes.

I also don’t understand the fairness of a non house owning young majority with little or no financial intelligence or experience due to being educated by free public education and state nannyship getting to vote on imposing punitive high taxes aimed to displace the very people whose taxes and employment history and financial savvy that actually funded said free public education.

Clearly this means that we have done a bad job of public education using property taxes. In fact, most of the wealth is accrued due to immigrant net worth and who didn’t even avail the free public school education.

Wasting more public money on public education and using property taxes to fund said education is the real problem that needs fixing. There is no end to taxation. Especially because those who are not home owners can force more property taxes on the minority who own it.

Put another way..why should someone who can’t handle their personal finances be allowed to make decisions at govt level. This would never happen with employment. How can the unsavvy have-nots have a say about punitive taxation upon the haves who get to gain nothing from the punitive taxes. This is especially crucial to ask considering that the government in Sacramento has a piss poor track record on managing money and shown a lack of transparency.

tathougies6 anni fa

> Every high density over crowded over built city ..and this is global..is unaffordable. It has expensive utilities, higher taxes and bad declining infrastructure that the government can’t seem to replace or upgrade.

That's not true. Houston and Dallas are big cities without affordability problems. Sunnyvale, CA (quite dense, and becoming more so, but suffering from these NIMBY problems) is one of the safest cities in the country. Well below the average crime rate of many rural towns.

jelliclesfarm6 anni fa

1. [..]In Sunnyvale, CA you have a 1 in 611 chance of becoming a victim of violent crime. Violent crimes include murder, rape, robbery and assault. With regards to property crime, you have a 1 in 62 chance of becoming a victim. Property crimes include burglary, theft and vehicle theft.[..]

2. Dallas and Houston are not in the same category as Bay Area. Texas is not California.

3. Crime in California stats are unreliable due to passing of Prop 47. Crimes are not reported or recorded or booked due to not wanting to incarcerate people. This has actually increased petty crimes all over Bay Area(I don’t know about other cities in CA..I do know about my backyard however)..you only have to subscribe to NIXLE to see that even those reported is increasing.

The cops won’t even come to an ongoing crime scene unless someone’s life is in immediate danger.

Wrt San Francisco..just type ‘Chesa Boudin’ in google news to see what’s happening in San Francisco. This is our lives and our backyards and built upon our tax dollars and work. It’s being auctioned away by those who have no stake and have never contributed to it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_...

tathougies6 anni fa

> Dallas and Houston are not in the same category as Bay Area. Texas is not California.

You're right, they're both much larger cities. The Dallas metro area is the 4th largest in the US, the Bay Area is 12th. So Dallas is bigger.

> In Sunnyvale, CA you have a 1 in 611 chance of becoming a victim of violent crime. Violent crimes include murder, rape, robbery and assault. With regards to property crime, you have a 1 in 62 chance of becoming a victim. Property crimes include burglary, theft and vehicle theft.[..]

According to https://www.areavibes.com/sunnyvale-ca/crime/ you have a 255/100000 (my number is higher than yours BTW) likelihood of being a victim of a violent crime. Nationally, it's 381/100000 or 1 in 263. Thus, sunnyvale is safer. It is known to be safer even since before 2014 when California crime statistics were screwed up. The historical data is available online.

You are a troll.

jelliclesfarm6 anni fa

There is no way I can have a conversation with someone who resorts to childish name calling and making it personal.

I know my backyard. You don’t.

behringer6 anni fa

What?? San Francisco has the worst rent in the world, excepting Hong Kong. It's 600 dollars more a month than the average in New York. 2000 dollars more than Chicago... That's entirely due to the lack of high rise housing.

jelliclesfarm6 anni fa

Or maybe it’s due to lack of income.

How about what do in Singapore? 97% of the population lives in state owned apartments on 99 year leases. Affordable to luxury homes for all income levels.

bbreier6 anni fa

How about some of the much denser megacities? For example, Tokyo, or Seoul? Both are far more affordable than the much less dense first tier cities of the US.

jelliclesfarm6 anni fa

Have you been to either cities?

bbreier6 anni fa

Yes, I've lived in both.

jelliclesfarm6 anni fa

Ok. How do you think they are ‘far more affordable’ than tier 1 American cities?

http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20171119000242

[..] Purchasing a residence in Seoul is now roughly on the same playing field as New York City, where the median price is about 443.4 million won. However, because average income levels in both the United States and Japan surpass Korea, the report states Koreans take on average three to five more years to purchase a house over those in New York or Tokyo.

According to the data, it takes the people of New York an average 5.7 years to purchase a home, followed by 4.8 years for Singaporeans and 4.7 years for Tokyo residents. As for Seoulites, those with an average income of 47.28 million won require some 9.2 years to purchase a home. [..]

How is their population density creating ‘affordable housing’ as you claim?

Re Tokyo: the birth rate is on the decline and in the country side they re giving away homes for free to repopulate it. The public transport is excellent. None of these parameters apply to San Francisco Bay Area.

bbreier6 anni fa

It is true that purchasing a home in Seoul is very expensive, but renting continues to be more affordable than in e.g. Manhattan or San Francisco

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Seoul

A 1 bedroom apartment in the city center is about $742.84 USD per month, compared to $3,472.78 in San Francisco. That amounts to approximately ~33% of average net take home in Seoul vs about 50% in SF.

You are absolutely correct that their public transport is excellent, and not only does that parameter not apply to the Bay Area, it doesn't apply to any city in the United States. San Francisco also has a population density less than half that of Seoul. Population density and infrastructure such as public transportation to support it are a difficult chicken and egg problem, and I don't know how to thread that needle in the Bay Area, even if I strongly feel it is a needle which needs threading.

JMTQp8lwXL6 anni fa

I don't know if this holds water. Boomers who "bought in" during the 70s-80s (when prices were a much lower multiple of the median income) didn't have to make a public discussion of housing, because it was readily available to them. Had in not been affordable to those boomers, would have the silent generation said the boomers didn't deserve housing? As a public policy, it seems prudent to have home prices target some median of the income. If people can afford to buy homes, they are incentivized to stay in the area longer and establish strong community ties. That's why the U.S. Government heavily promoted home ownership post WW2.

jelliclesfarm6 anni fa

They own because they existed. They were born before most of us did..To say that someone doesn’t deserve their wealth they earned in the past because they didn’t have to deal with today’s problems doesn’t hold water.

Wealth is a construct built upon the notion of scarcity. One has wealth BECAUSE another doesn’t have it. If everyone had one million dollars, then a million has no value.

Imagine I inherited a diamond necklace from my grandmother who inherited it from her mother and so on. The original price of it was $200 and today it is worth a million dollars.

Yes, I inherited it. It’s mine. It’s valuable. Because someone else covets such a diamond necklace doesn’t mean that it is unfair that I inherited it.

Most of the YIMBY arguments seems to be based on ‘unfairness’. How is it unfair to hold something of value that others covet? To be punitively taxed on an asset that one owns free and clear just because someone younger doesn’t own it is a gross violation of property rights. It’s also ignorant and misleading. Most of all, it’s immoral and petty.

JMTQp8lwXL6 anni fa

In the case of the city/situation discussed in the article -- Lafayette, CA -- would you believe it is unfair to step on the property rights of the landowner who wants to put 300 condos or 44 single family homes on the vacant land? It doesn't matter how the current owner of that land acquired it: for any of us to stop them, would be a gross violation of their property rights. Nobody is saying, just because the land you currently own is upzoned, that you have to tear down your single family home and put in multifamily housing. To suggest such would be misunderstanding the position held by YIMBYs.

jelliclesfarm6 anni fa

I disagree. There is such a thing as law of the commons and welfare of the commons. Air quality, watershed and conservation of habitat are all part of the commons and its welfare. The erasure is CEQA is a step towards zoning changes and in the destruction of the commons.

JMTQp8lwXL6 anni fa

So if it's fair for you to say "my neighbor should not develop his land" --by virtue of living near your neighbor-- am I not equally valid in saying "my neighbor should be able to develop his land?"

jelliclesfarm6 anni fa

Yes. Exactly. When we all bought in, it was with the promise of a certain percentage for residential zoning and commercial zoning and resource allocation. Any decision should be subject to a referendum of said owners.

It doesn’t make sense for non property tax payers to vote on how tax payers and property owners should be taxed. That’s a form of tyranny. Property rights are important to this country and is foundational to why it was formed.

Erasing CEQA and changing zoning without consent is against the rights of property owners.

Vote on it. Majority decision wins. As long as the referendum is open only to vested interests. Anyone else imposing coercive and punitive taxes and zoning changes is dissolution of property rights.

Why should anyone who has no rights to an asset have a say in how it should be treated?

JMTQp8lwXL6 anni fa

I think you should have to physically own all the surrounding land if you directly don't want it to develop. You weren't promised anything, beyond the agency of your own plot: that's what ownership means, right? The choice do decide its destiny. If you wanted that choice for a full square mile around you, should've bought the land to ensure it never, ever was developed.

> Why should anyone who has no rights to an asset have a say in how it should be treated?

That's my point: you have no rights to your neighbors land. You property rights begin and end at the physical demarcation of your parcel. You never paid for the promise of immutable zoning laws (I would be shocked if your deed made such claims).

I may not agree with your position, but I do definitely understand the thought processes regarding it, which I did not before, and for that I am appreciative.

NoRagrets6 anni fa

But that’s the point. The city’s general plan okays zoning before developments are built. Single family homes bought in to preserve that density to avail the share in resources. The city council is supposed to get people’s input before they change zoning. If property owners want to change it, put it to a referendum, but that never happens. Of course, those who don’t have property want those who have it to part with it so they can own too. The government is just manufacturing drama by pointing to their begging bowl and painting the tax paying citizens as villains. The only beneficiary is the govt and redistribution of income. And twenty years from now, it will be the turn of the Silicon Valley youth who are hoping to displace Silicon Valley senior citizenry because their property is coveted.

It should be by referendum. But this is not what’s happening in California. People should understand how regional governance works. There is no more local governments for cities. ABAG(Bay Area cities need to have mandatory membership) and MTC(metropolitan transport Corp) have been merged. Both are highly inefficient and bought in by the real estate mafia. There is a revolving door for politicians who were elected at city level and in the boards of non profits and housing advocacy groups. They are changing zoning and erasing CEQA without public input.

They are purposely NOT improving transport and infrastructure and increasing density around existing inefficient transport hubs so more property taxes from dense areas can be distributed to the rest of California.

Meanwhile they keep everyone on poverty sustenance and keep high density/high income Bay Area cities unsustainable. Why should they? When it’s easy enough to bleed just a highly productive population for taxes? Meanwhile seniors are hindering and it’s easy to cast them as scapegoats

In this lovely large state, there is enough places to become the next Bay Area..but it’s not happening. If you dig deeper..and I have..you will see that this is all a vile coverup of unsustainable unfunded public sector pension liabilities and backed by unions.

It is appalling the youth clamoring to scapegoat ‘boomers’ and NIMBYs are so easily brainwashed that they don’t ask the right questions. It’s very easy to go all forensic on California budget. I think it’s worth it.

There are laws in place but individual votes have no more value. It’s mob rule manufactured by the government. There is no transparency or accountability.

Not just in America..in every country, the richest demographic is the most vulnerable. Even globally every oil producing country is poor or is ruled by totalitarian govt or has sanctions. In the United States, cattlemen and ranchers and farmers are rich because of land. Guess who is the the most bankrupt today? Land rich and cash poor farmers and ranchers. This is systematic raid on the one resource that can’t be manufactured. Land. You can’t print land, but you can print money. Land is being taken away from those that the PTB who feel like they don’t deserve it. That’s why there are so few people of colour who are land owning farmers. There are so few middle class who own property and it’s made more and more expensive to own property by way of taxes and parcel taxes and supplemental taxes.

It’s driven by fear and uncertainty that is being fed at school. When the govt offers to play nanny and thinks that you can’t manage your assets as well as they can, it’s time to start shaking in your boots with fear.

Koremat66666 anni fa

Either ways my recommendation is to make a informed choice of NIMBY vs YIMBY. It appeared so far that NIMBY is winning and large number of people support NIMBY. This need not be because all these are evil people who oppose three points but might have legitimate reasons for their stand.

Make an informed choice rather than blindly picking sides.

jdc6 anni fa

Why don't you fill us in on what those reasons might be instead of making strawman arguments?

Koremat66666 anni fa

>A straw man is a form of argument and an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not presented by that opponent.

I do not think strawman argument means what you think it means.

I am not even refuting YIMBY argument. I am suggesting that since there is a NIMBY group which has already been successfully achieving their goals and appears to be in minority on HN, everyone should spend some time understanding their arguments as well before supporting YIMBY. Informed choice is critical than mindless support.

I am not even trying to refute YIMBY here. I am only pointing out that HN might be an echo chamber to make an informed choice.

bbreier6 anni fa

Why don't you fill us in on what those reasons might be?

wilg6 anni fa

You can make the wrong choice for legitimate reasons as well as illegitimate ones.

jelliclesfarm6 anni fa

Let me the ask the YIMBY crowd this...what is stopping 2 dozen do you to pool funds together to build a community where land is affordable and have tailored amenities. And you can literally have your own transport to anywhere. Co-Own your shared vacation paradises. Private schools. Incorporated communities. Invest in farms and automation. You can grow your own food and use economics instead of govt bureaucracy to make it all work.

A satellite community of multiple such youthful communities is a win-win for all. That’s what real estate companies do, but they profit enormously from it with little value. They are building on top of existing infrastructure and not passing the monetary benefits of it and pocketing it for their purposes.

I am not being flippant because I have spent a few years on such a model. A community of 6000 can be supported in 600 acres that will actually not only be self sustaining but can also be income producing if you add farms and value added businesses for those who don’t wish full time jobs. There are monetary and communal benefits. There will be less reliance on govt and less wastage of resources.

120 is a good number because it would satisfy the Dunbar number limits. It shouldn’t be difficult to have a nice proportion of ageing, young and middle aged populations for diversity.

It’s just a modern tech supported version of eco villages and ..dare I say..cults. But they fail because they never take the necessary survival factor of monetary stability and most eschew technology. These don’t have to and will be better supported.

istjohn6 anni fa

Because the great value of cities lies in the network effects that arise when hundreds of thousands of people live and work in the same neighborhoods. Ideas cross-polinate, spawn, and mutate creating wealth. And the value produced by a city increases super-linearly, perhaps exponentially, as population density increases. Policies that place artificial limits on city densities choke off that engine of wealth.

It may be possible to create an extremely dense, high population, productive charter city with an enormous investment of capital, but it would be far easier to simply remove the restraints that hold back our existing cities.

jelliclesfarm6 anni fa

It’s not easy clearly if it means that someone else has to pay the price of it without any benefit.

If you want older people/property owning seniors on fixed incomes to move out, pay them. It’s as simple as that.

The truth is that most cannot pay. The value of the dollar they earn is imaginary. The whole system from Wall Street to wages to taxes is a Ponzi scheme.

Land has value. Water or access to water has value. Inherent value. Everything else is value-added. So you have to pay more for a resource that is fixed or shrinking while population increases.

It’s very simple. Buy it off people. OR. It’s far cheaper to add value upon affordable land and water. To not build on something available and abundant and to not ADD value to it is a poverty of creativity and intelligence. To want to evict older citizens or punitively tax them to displace them to take their land and water is not only lazy but also immoral.

istjohn6 anni fa

Immoral is forcing thousands of people to live on the streets in squalor because people don't like change.

No one is calling for Grandma to be evicted. Property taxes for residents could be allowed to accumulate unpaid until sale or transfer of a property.

jelliclesfarm6 anni fa

People don’t have to live in squalor in expensive Bay Area. They can move. But there is a red carpet in Ca for homeless from other states to live because they are the poverty porn displayed to milk more taxes. Oldest trick in the politicians handbook to impose more taxes. It’s always ‘compassion’ isn’t it? The reason to extract more taxes and usually championed by those who don’t have to contribute anything.

So if accumulated property tax will remain unpaid, how does any of it help keep people ‘off the streets and no in squalor’?

What is the Big Plan?

If people are going to be taxed after their death, is it like a death tax? Forced charity?

Theft by proxy? This is literally thuggery. The current youth population and the government are working hand in hand as fellow thugs. And engaging in elder financial abuse.

However, there is a solution. One can impose hefty inheritance taxes. One can impose higher tax bracket for foreign owned properties. I would like to see that rather than citizens turning against citizens of their own country.

Further..has any of the YIMBYs sat in city council meetings and looked at city and county budgets. Or the state budget? There is a LOT of money. There are a lot of infrastructure improvements to be made that will make life better for everyone. And yet Sacramento does nothing.

None of the young non home owning YIMBY professionals ever question that. Perhaps because they have been indoctrinated in public school and taught fake economics. They have literally been hand fed to believe that nanny state is the best and higher taxes will solve everything. Perhaps it is this lack of financial literacy and responsibility that is causing them to be the handmaidens of the govt bureaucracy to act as thugs against middle class senior citizens.

Over crowded schools, inefficient DMVs, pot holes on roads, congested freeways, tolls on every stretch of freeways leading to Silicon Valley..Bart is a joke. Homeless on streets after billions spent. And more density on top of this inefficiency?

zacksinclair6 anni fa

The "BY" in YIMBY is referring to our existing back yards. There's a significant gap between YIMBYs and what you described.

jelliclesfarm6 anni fa

What has a 30 year old contributed that they claim to make decisions for those who are 70. Five years into employment and they expect to own a home? And want to displace retired seniors on fixed incomes who have worked for decades and paid 30 year mortgages.

The value of the house is not in $ but the number of man hours that go into it. Maybe tax the kids and grandkids who get tax free and tax saving inheritances. Property tax is as valorem. There is no value added to a home until it’s sold at the new higher price.

Property taxes are a way for the government to make sure that you never truly own your home 100%. They are not a means for young professionals to avail free public education for their own kids. It’s double dipping since they already availed free education paid for by the very same seniors who paid by taxes to support public schools and build city infrastructure.

I am sorry to know that those who want their kids to be in nice neighbourhoods cant afford to pay rent or pay for private schools, but that’s no reason to promote elder abuse by way of punitive property tax increases to displace them from their homes to build more.

Invictus06 anni fa

If California were its own country, would it try to build more housing or would it put up a border wall and halt immigration? It's clear to me that Californians would choose the latter, and I don't really blame them. Deep down, everyone hates change, especially the type of transformative change that is taking place in these California suburbs.

What does Lafayette owe the people of San Francisco?--or more accurately, the people that are not from California that chose to move to San Francisco? The revolving door that defines California immigration today, where wealthy young software developers go in and middle/lower class native Californians go out, is what is hollowing out the population, shifting the culture, and causing the homelessness problem, and building more housing isn't going to fix that.

timerol6 anni fa

Building more housing would result in that revolving door just being an entrance. CA would still get the influx of "wealthy young software developers", but would also be able to keep all of the "middle/lower class native Californians," since there would be room for all of the newcomers to live. CA could stop playing this horrendous game of musical chairs, where every techie that moves in displaces a local, and instead have enough room for everyone to live.

Invictus06 anni fa

It's not just building housing, it's building more of everything including transit and infrastructure, as other commenters have noted. Not to mention, housing cannot be built fast enough. See this earlier discussion [0]. And for what? Why should people happily established in a place have to cater to the whims of people that are not in that place? It's like allowing people in India to vote in American elections so that they can lobby for their own immigration rights. It's patently ridiculous on the scale of a nation and it's still ridiculous on the scale of a state.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120479

komali26 anni fa

If they wanted to halt immigration, why would they build a border wall? That would be a highly expensive and ineffective way to halt immigration, for fairly obvious reasons.

logfromblammo6 anni fa

One could halt immigration--or at least the kind of immigration that most anti-immigration people complain about--in a naive and oversimplified fashion by raising the minimum hourly wage of noncitizen permanent residents to the median annual household income divided by 2000 (~$32/h), raising the minimum hourly wage for temporary residents with a work-permitting visa to 125% of that (~$40/h), and raising the minimum wage of persons without any official immigration status to 150% (~$48/h) of that. In order to get a job that pays less, a person would have to show their visa, residency card, or proof of citizenship. For jobs that pay more, who cares, as long as they support local business and pay taxes?

Don't deport anybody. Don't build a wall. Just make any businesses that hire at lower wages, without first verifying citizenship or immigration status, pay the workers all their back wages.

The economics shape and are shaped by human behavior.

komali26 anni fa

Wait I don't get it, why wouldn't everyone just pretend they're undocumented immigrants to get the highest pay?

logfromblammo6 anni fa

Because they would lose the job to someone who can legally work for less.

Invictus06 anni fa

Merely a figure of speech.

i_am_nomad6 anni fa

YIMBY should more properly be called YITBY (yes in their back yards).

fra6 anni fa

Many of us are homeowners. Speaking for myself, I simply believe affordable housing for all is more important than my property value.

notJim6 anni fa

Also a homeowner, and I'm a YIMBY (or PHIMBY) for selfish reasons as well. My neighborhood is mostly old white people, because they bought their houses years ago and stayed put. Not that I have anything against them, but I'd love to have a more diverse, younger neighborhood. More neighbors also means more customers for local businesses, which means more shops and restaurants in walking distance. More neighbors would eventually also mean better public transit, because the ridership would demand it. I think the selfish benefits of more housing are often overlooked due to fear of change.

Swizec6 anni fa

> More neighbors also means more customers for local businesses, which means more shops and restaurants in walking distance

Big reason I moved from Ljubljana, Slovenia to San Francisco. There’s just more stuff here and it’s amazing.

The economies of scale are insane. I have more good restaurants within walking distance now than I used to have in the whole city.

YarickR26 anni fa

FWIW I'm seriously considering doing the reverse. I don't care about restaurants, but cleanness and neatness and uniqueness in Slovenia is something I miss dearly in Cali

Swizec6 anni fa

You know I feel that all the time and then I go back to visit and after two days I’m like “Oh that’s why I left, there’s nothing to do here”

What I miss most is real nature. Trees that are properly green, the changing of seasons, the mountains in the distance. That’s what I miss most. And good european food. Super hard to find in SF

jelliclesfarm6 anni fa

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SlowRobotAhead6 anni fa

>Also a homeowner, and I'm a YIMBY (or PHIMBY) for selfish reasons as well. My neighborhood is mostly old white people, because they bought their houses years ago and stayed put.

Hmm, here I am thinking I don't really care about the skin color of my neighbors. It's none of my business. But, I try and not judge people on immutable characteristics like color and age.

kbenson6 anni fa

GP could likely have replaced "mostly old white people" with "mostly the same demographic", but it doesn't convey the same information, even if you don't assume implied racism as you did.

The important thing being conveyed is lack of diversity, not whiteness. In the United States, saying something is "mostly white people" conveys that other ethnic groups are not present for some reason (whether it be them self-selecting to not participate or because of exclusion). The purpose is almost always to note diversity or lack-thereof, and assume that the person is making a value judgement about the people because their skin is white is to completely miss the point.

For example, if you bought a pack of starbust candies, and they were almost all orange, you might note or complain that they were almost all orange. I would do so, and orange is my favorite flavor of those. The issue is, I desire the diversity of colors and flavors, and too much orange is not as good as what the added variation brings.

So, "mostly old white people" as a negative doesn't mean old people are bad, or white people are bad, or old white people are bad, but that mostly old white people are not as good as a group that has more variation in it. "Mostly" is the word you should be focusing on, not the other ones.

klipt6 anni fa

Although if someone visited a suburban area in Japan and complained that it had "mostly old Asian people", they'd probably be called racist.

kbenson6 anni fa

I think that depends on the context. If I was visiting that neighborhood in Japan to assess whether I wanted to live there, I think it might not come across as racist as much as similar to how I outlined the prior statement, with some variation because Japan is both a much more homogeneous society, and one where the population as a whole is shifting towards being older on average.

I would also argue that a lot of times people are called racist (or called out for saying racist things) these days are likely because people are also less likely to give others the benefit of a doubt for their actions or words. This is likely complicated in that it appears some people that do harbor racist views feel more emboldened to speak them, but I'm not sure how to pick apart how much is one and how much is the other.

lopmotr6 anni fa

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JackFr6 anni fa

Age is very relevant for schools which are typically paid for with local property taxes. If you somehow find yourself moved to a so-called NORC, naturally occurring retirement community, you'll find that older people people with adult children on limited incomes are more reluctant to fund schools than say young working parents.

SlowRobotAhead6 anni fa

You're right. That's a good argument for funding schools with sources besides property taxes. That system intentionally subsidizes renters by getting home owners to pay for schools and tasks people who aren't concerned with the funding to make decisions on it.

edit: YES, it's a nice plan to just raise rent to cover the school taxes. However, unless you are in a popular market, your rent prices may not bear the increase. Example Northeastern PA has cheap rent because there are so many places available, and thus the $4000/yr in school tax portion of the property tax is not able to be passed on to renters.

djrogers6 anni fa

Renters absolutely pay property taxes - just not directly. Every rental unit I’ve ever owned has had the exact same property tax bill as the ones I’ve lived in, and the taxes were paid from the rent collected.

If property taxes increased substantially, I’d have had to raise rent...

foxx-boxx6 anni fa

Property taxes force homeowners to rent their properties in the first place: in 40 years of not renting your property taxes will confiscate it.

lazyasciiart6 anni fa

No they don't.

mlyle6 anni fa

??? Property taxes aren't passed on to renters? Only homeowners pay them, and landlords don't experience them as a cost they need to recover from their tenants?

starik366 anni fa

I think he means that taxes are indirectly passed to renters in form of a higher rent.

SlowRobotAhead6 anni fa

Correct, also in the places that the market does not bear it. If your only concept of renting is in the Bay Area or Brooklyn or some high end captive market, you don't really get that you can't always just raise rent until costs are covered. Most of the country won't bear it so the landlord eats it. I have rentals, I know this first hand.

AnthonyMouse6 anni fa

Real estate is one of the most efficient markets. Landlords all over make approximately the same returns as one another, outside of a handful of places where where people are making (or losing) money from speculation.

What happens when you increase property taxes is that property values go down to compensate; it's less valuable to own when you have to pay more to do it. So in the short term the property tax increase hits whoever owned the property when the rate change was announced. But then it becomes less profitable to own property in that area, so people invest less in building new housing there, or even in maintaining the existing housing. That tends to constrain supply and cause rents to increase until you're back at equilibrium. The long-term equilibrium is based on the relationship between rents and total costs. Property tax is a cost so in the long-term higher property taxes result in higher rents. (This isn't counting the pathological cases where higher property taxes reduce property values and investment and the government responds by further raising property taxes until the locality is in a death spiral. Naturally rents in dying localities tend to go down.)

rcpt6 anni fa

> Landlords all over make approximately the same returns as one another

In California long time landlords get Prop 13 tax cuts. New ones don't. They compete for the same tenants and charge the same rent.

Long time landlords have much bigger profit margins because of that law.

Other states have property tax restrictions but I don't know as much about them.

AnthonyMouse6 anni fa

> In California long time landlords get Prop 13 tax cuts. New ones don't. They compete for the same tenants and charge the same rent.

"Long time landlords" and "new landlords" are not inherently different people, they're the same people at different points in time. It's like saying a landlord which has paid off the mortgage on their building makes more money because they don't have to make mortgage payments. The value of the future reduction in property taxes gets priced into the purchase -- but then so does the cost of higher property taxes at the beginning, since the government still needs a given amount of revenue.

The thing Prop 13 really does is to discourage long-time landlords from selling the property at all, because the buyer will have to pay higher property tax than the seller which makes the property "worth more" to the seller, even if it's otherwise worth more to the buyer. For example, this can discourage development because the existing owner doesn't have the inclination or the capital for expansion but would demand enough for the property that it would make it unprofitable to a third party who would have to pay higher taxes.

CapitalistCartr6 anni fa

I grew up in an all-white town. All-white schools, all-white neighborhoods, all-white businesses. I would not raise my children like that. I made sure my current area was colorfully diverse before buying.

lopmotr6 anni fa

While not America, I live in a minority white suburb. I don't want to have a school-age child here because it's, not coincidentally, one of the poorest places in the city and thus is only in zone for the worst schools. Poor people's kids drag down the quality of their schools. So you have to be careful your diversity doesn't overshoot and end up a ghetto.

d3ad1ysp0rk6 anni fa

Wish I had seen this blatantly gross reply before replying in good faith above...

not_literally6 anni fa

You seem to be misinterpreting what they meant by "old white people" to show this forum (and yourself?) how virtuous you are.

SlowRobotAhead6 anni fa

davidw6 anni fa

(1)

sadproton6 anni fa

Age is the most mutable characteristic I can possibly imagine.

SlowRobotAhead6 anni fa

immuutable: unchanging over time or unable to be changed

Well, crap, that's a fair point... But... You can't go backwards and you can't go forwards any faster than anyone else. You can't change it yourself no matter how hard you try (general relativity spaceships aside of course).

zhoujianfu6 anni fa

What I don’t get is wouldn’t allowing more development in a neighborhood increase property values? Like if your single family home’s lot gets up zoned, didn’t you just hit the jackpot in terms of the land value?

tathougies6 anni fa

Yes, I don't get this. I would love to turn my home into a duplex (probably going to start with an airbnb though due to bad tenant law in our state). Sounds like the best way to go from homeowner to asset owner.

rcpt6 anni fa

Why Are There NIMBYs?

https://www.dartmouth.edu/~wfischel/Papers/00-04.PDF

When all your wealth is tied up in a single leveraged asset anything that might lead to a big change in it is more risk than most people will tolerate.

lazyasciiart6 anni fa

Yes. But you might be irrationally convinced that black people and drug dealers will overrun the neighborhood as soon as an apartment building goes in, and that will make property values decrease instead.

bluGill6 anni fa

If it is only in your backyard it is better for your property value in the long run: eventually someone will offer you a ton of money to replace your house with a large apartment complex. If it is everywhere that can build, than the builders can take whatever property comes up - and because they have to compete with other developers for renters they are likely to build smaller so on both counts property values don't increase as fast.

dv_dt6 anni fa

That's what I don't understand, increasing density usually means price / sqft for all real estate in the area goes up. I often wonder if the analysis on why people shoot down zoning changes is incorrectly attributed to price or property tax, and is mostly people resisting any change.

hodgesrm6 anni fa

There's resistance to change but economics are far more important and explain the consistent opposition across the state. It's not as simple as sell your house and make a profit, then find something nicer. If your neighbors sell first to the developer of the N-story apartment building it can drop the value of houses around it. Also, buying a house in California resets your property taxes to current property value (a legacy of Prop 13).

I suspect it will be hard to solving the housing problem without unwinding Prop 13 and some of the other issues that make it harder for people to sell homes.

dv_dt6 anni fa

How does Prop 13 make it hard to sell your home? It only affects the owners property taxes but not the property buyer's. At the time of purchase, there's no delta to the buyers taxes vs a property that was taxed at a full market rate assessment the whole time.

AnthonyMouse6 anni fa

Affecting the seller's still creates a delta because the seller is also a buyer of wherever they're going to live next. Causing the new place to have much higher property tax than the existing place makes it harder to leave the existing place. And then fewer people do it, even if they e.g. don't need a place that big anymore.

dv_dt6 anni fa

That seems like a stretch, it doesn't increase the market price or the tax on the new property that the seller is acquiring, if anything it lets the owner save more money so they have more options to buy.

AnthonyMouse6 anni fa

It does increase the tax on the new property that the seller is acquiring, because for a given level of government spending, if the government gets less tax revenue from long-term owners they have to get more from newer owners.

It also increases the minimum price the seller is willing to accept for the property, because they won't sell unless the buyer offers enough to compensate them for the higher tax rate they'll have to pay on the new property. It increases the bid/ask spread on long-held properties, so that more often no transaction takes place at all until e.g. the owner dies and the property is sold in an estate sale for less than the owner would have been willing to accept if they were still alive.

spoontoeat6 anni fa

I don't think you understand property ownership in CA. This is most definitely not what happens.

Also to add to this discussion is the various props and "tax treaties" between counties that allow old homeowners the ability to transfer tax basis from their old property to the new one they're buying. But this is a once or twice in a lifetime deal.

dv_dt6 anni fa

No actually prop13 limits both the property tax percentage of market value as well as increase of the tax from year to year.

rcpt6 anni fa

Lots of detail here: https://www.nber.org/digest/apr05/w11108.html

mertd6 anni fa

Not every NIMBY is motivated by greed. Some just want to stay put, pay property taxes like it's 30 years ago and drive to their favorite burger shack in under five minutes. That particular generation also holds on to the doctrine that density is bad for environment.

pc866 anni fa

There's only a generational correlation because the 80 year old retiree is much more likely to own nice property with low property taxes (if you live in a state that only reassesses at sale) than the 28 year old with a young family. Young couples with money can be just as viciously NIMBY-esque as old couples with money.

bluGill6 anni fa

If price goes up or down is complex. In an area that has a small amount of demand stopping building ensures that those who want to live there have to keep bidding higher. If those who want to live there have a lot of money only a few people who want to live there but don't can push prices up greatly. It may well be that the area only needs to build a small number of units to fill demand, and additional units will need to lower prices to get a buyer. Supply is limited of course, but so is demand - I wouldn't take a free house in the Bay Area as my job is several time zones away and so the free house is still a net cost to me (if only to replace the roof ever 30 years)

darawk6 anni fa

That's not universally true though. Many times new development will block a view, or it might run the risk of bringing in "undesirable" groups which would lower property values. There is definitely a long-run argument that values will go up if you increase the power of network effects...but it's always better if the locality next door does it, and not you.

Unfortunately the incentive problem here is real, and there isn't a super obvious solution to it. At least, not to me. Trying to shift the culture and convince people to vote against their own economic incentives is great and all, but I don't think it is destined for success at any significant scale.

Spooky236 anni fa

Its pretty easy, your standard of living declines and sucks.

I grew up in a single family detached home in Queens, NY in the 80s as the shift to bigger condos and rentals started. The newer buildings are almost always shoddy and ugly, and dealing with landlords for property issues suck as compared to the homeowner.

lopmotr6 anni fa

The owner of your detached house would have been very happy though, wouldn't he? The issues you listed wouldn't affect him, but the opportunity to sell to an apartment developer would.

harikb6 anni fa

It doesn't work quite like that. Builders buying livable property and demolishing it make economical sense only in a very very few percentage of homes. My guess is < 2% of entire area we talk about. For the other 98%, it is far far cheaper for the builder to get it rezoned from the goverment.

Remember, we don't have a lack of land. There is plenty of prime, commute friendly, land available in SF-Bayarea and most other CA cities.

Old SFH will get demo-ed and gets rebuilt as SFH - just because bulldozing a $200k+ building + spending $600k to rebuild - can only be justified by a crazy SFH owner who can justify it all in terms of getting his/her dream home.

i_am_nomad6 anni fa

(2)

notJim6 anni fa

Ahh the classic NIMBY move, whether it's homeless folks or just people who want bike lanes: "These people aren't from here!"

[deleted]6 anni fa

irq116 anni fa

I’m not a “NIMBY”, but I believe the YIMBY moniker is counter-productive to your cause.

It automatically frames the question in a sophomoric way, where the “other side” is an evil force to be mocked and dismissed. In reality, there is no such thing as a “NIMBY”, just a collection of people with differing - often rational - interests concerning any given project. Until and unless you address these interests, calling people names and yelling ”just build, dammit!” will not get you what you want.

I think, if you talk to most of these folks, you find that many/most abstractly support the idea that building is required. It’s the specifics where the problems lie, and calling people names doesn’t resolve fundamental issues. This is why the “Yes in your Backyard” line is such a devastating rhetorical criticism: everyone favors development of projects that don’t affect them.

XMPPwocky6 anni fa

"not in my backyard" is exactly what you describe- the stereotypical liberal response of "yes, we should build affordable housing, but not HERE, where I live- put it somewhere else, where I'm not affected by them- can you imagine all the crime that the Poors would bring to such a nice area".

in other words, virtue-signalling about vague, general principles of increased development...buuut when that development actually impacts them, well! That particular project is just flawed for various reasons. The general idea is good! But it won't work here.

It's the equivalent of the boss who totally supports unions but, you know, a union just wouldn't be right for our particular company culture.

So, yeah, "yes in your backyard" is just the original definition of a NIMBY.

davidw6 anni fa

This is an issue that actually doesn't align very well on the liberal/conservative spectrum. Most of the YIMBY folks I've met tend towards the liberal end of things, but there are also "market urbanism" groups out there that are fairly libertarian. I've had great conversations with local politicians of all stripes. There are both liberals and conservatives who are very NIMBY.

In other words, it's not a very useful way to look at the issue in my opinion.

XMPPwocky6 anni fa

Just to clarify- I very much do not mean "liberal" as "the opposite of conservative", here.

Trying to map the high-dimensional "vector space" of political views onto a 1D line is very, very lossy, and definitely not useful outside of the very narrow context of general elections in a two-party system.

krtong6 anni fa

6gvONxR4sf7o6 anni fa

> "yes, we should build affordable housing, but not HERE, where I live- put it somewhere else, where I'm not affected by them- can you imagine all the crime that the Poors would bring to such a nice area".

The caricature doesn't really help things.

irq116 anni fa

Yes In Your Backyard is literally everybody. That’s the point. It isn’t ideological. Most folks love the idea of building when it doesn’t affect their own lives!

Even most “YIMBY” supporters are actually “Yes In Your Backyard”, because nearly everyone has some local environment they want to protect. Don’t want a pork rendering plant or a sewage treatment center or a strip club next door to your home? Congratulations: you’re a “NIMBY” too! It’s a sophomoric epithet that makes you feel good and superior to fling around, but does nothing to convince people who don’t already agree with you.

If you don’t understand this, you are doomed to fail to achieve your goals.

stale20026 anni fa

> just a collection of people with differing - often rational - interests concerning any given project.

Well of course. It does not surprised me that a wealthy landowner would not want competition, and would not want housing to become more affordable.

Just because someone's self interest is rational, does not me that I cannot criticize it.

Creating more affordable housing, and lowering rents, is obviously something that some people out there would not want, because they make money from rents being high.

Kalium6 anni fa

You're absolutely right. People are rarely self-consciously irrationally opposed to any given proposal to build housing. In theory, it should be possible to address any given rational concern!

Too tall? Make it shorter. Not enough public space? Make the area in front of it a parklet! Not enough subsidized housing? More BMR units and a donation to a neighborhood group will solve that one. Doesn't fit with the style or is otherwise ugly? Pay attention and design a building that fits, it's not that hard.

Although there might be tricky ones, like maybe the neighbors have been treating the lot as a park and would like to keep it that way or someone is afraid of losing the all-day sun on their backyard garden. Still, all of these should be solvable in principle, right?

Again, as you wisely point to, all of these possible concerns are individually eminently reasonable and addressable. Certainly insulting the people who are just trying to keep their homes and communities they way they like it isn't going to win them over!

With all that said, might there be problems in aggregate? When people are empowered to throw up essentially arbitrary roadblocks, no matter how reasonable their complaints, the result can be near-infinite stonewalling. This has happened enough that some people have lost trust in the process that enabled good, kind, compassionate people to get their perfectly reasonable concerns addressed.

So perhaps there's some room for subtlety here. How do you think YIMBYs should frame things, to avoid the issues you rightly point to?

irq116 anni fa

Well, I think that pretty much anything is more effective than calling people names. But rhetorically, it’s probably a lot more effective to just be honest about what you want: shared sacrifice for lower rents.

It’s cynical to call it YIMBY, because a) it mirrors the name-calling, and b) anyone who is intellectually honest knows that YIMBY really means YIYBY for most people. So stop it. Own that you want something that will be at least a little bit painful for everyone. Then sell the positives.

Kalium6 anni fa

That's a very helpful insight! Thank you for sharing. I appreciate your positivity and genuineness.

In my personal experience, I've often found it to be extremely difficult to sell shared sacrifice to people who are empowered to refuse to share. After all, why can't this building go in some other neighborhood? Away from them? If you're being honest, it probably can. The next neighborhood over will probably have the same question.

Also, SF has the wrinkle that a lot of people see building housing as pushing up rents, making the framing you suggest very difficult on multiple counts. Attempting to discuss this with people seldom goes as well as could be hoped. This belief seems to have become totemic, making it functionally impossible to discuss.

Perhaps you've had different results than I. I sincerely hope so.

I have found name-calling and coherent branding to be pretty effective at providing people a banner to gather under. It doesn't do anything for those it makes into enemies, but it does something for people who might be your allies. When the NIMBYs are already well organized and Californians For Lowering Rent Through Shared Sacrifice isn't, I can see where someone might make that calculation.

ScottBurson6 anni fa

That's why it's "YIMBY" and not "YIYBY" :-)

lopmotr6 anni fa

The essence of NIMBYism is wanting to make the value of your own property increase, not by adding any value, but by restricting others from competing with you. That's a net harmful behavior so I think it's fair to describe it as "an evil force to be mocked and dismissed". Kind of like if Google lobbied the government to ban search engines which weren't Google Search. People would see that as evil too.

triceratops6 anni fa

NIMBY could also be more properly called "I want to control property I don't own"

sidlls6 anni fa

People who don’t own property are entitled to the same representation, rights, and political activities as those who do. That includes activism and advocacy for housing that serves all the community and not just homeowners.

rowborg6 anni fa

When a developer wanted to build a 5 story condo building on an entire block across the street from the SF property I've owned for the last ten years, many of my neighbors opposed it. I wrote to our building's ownership and told them that we should support that project and that my only question was "can they add a few floors?"

Repeal prop 13 and my taxes will go up enormously--and I'll vote for that repeal at any opportunity.

Some of us do actually believe that the long term common good is worth sacrificing our own personal short term gain.

[deleted]6 anni fa

avocado46 anni fa

Rent seeking is bad for economy, and is antithetical to a free capitalist society.

davidw6 anni fa

Cache invalidation is hard too.

... woosh .... I guess.

darksaints6 anni fa

Fact: No YIMBY, no matter how powerful, can force you to put something in your back yard. They can allow your neighbor to put something in their back yard. You don't own your neighbor's back yard.

hannasanarion6 anni fa

Fact: NIMBY doesn't refer to literal backyards.

darksaints6 anni fa

Of course. Which nullifies any argument about whether it is Yes-in-my-back-yard or yes-in-your-back-yard. You only get to make that distinction if you're talking about your own literal back yard.

notJim6 anni fa

I think this comment is accurate just from a logical standpoint. Backyard has two possible meanings here:

* Literal backyard: in this case, then maybe one could argue that if we accept the premise[1] that YIMBYs aren't homeowners, then they are in fact arguing about other people's backyards.

* Figurative backyard: in this case, then whether someone is a homeowner is irrelevant, because the backyard refers to the general area, shared by all residents.

Of course, as we know from this thread, backyard in [N|Y]IMBY refers to the figurative backyard. Therefore, we must reject the argument that people are arguing over other's backyards.

[1]: As I argue elsewhere in this thread, I don't think we should accept this premise.

jellicle6 anni fa

Civilization is a balancing of competing interests. Your rights in your property are enforced by the community, with limits and conditionally. The community which you are asking to enforce for you has interests too.