Data show rich cities are failing the Bay Area on housing(goldenstatswarrior.substack.com) |
Data show rich cities are failing the Bay Area on housing(goldenstatswarrior.substack.com) |
An acceptable approach would seem to be to have the "center" becoming more dense over time while the outer rings stay less dense.
The problem is that current geography has resulted in natural centers being the ones that refuse to build and that is problematic. Palo Alto and the rest are happy to have Facebook and etc's business but won't make room for Facebook employees.
And the apparently illogical behavior comes out of proposition 13's logic. Cities can tax businesses but property values are immune.
Which is to say that prop 13 needs to be repealed or annulled before any other sort of sanity is going to happen (and maybe that's not happened but, hey, there you go).
People want to live throughout. Not everyone works in the canonical centers. Plenty of businesses are among the other cities too, particularly service workers who can't currently afford to live there. ALL of the cities need to build to keep costs under control. No one has any right to have their town stay small forever.
That's why every city needs to contribute. The ones that aren't are literally leeching off of neighboring cities.
Why does only the center have to take on the burden of becoming 10% more dense? Why can't every city increase its housing supply by 10%?
That's literally not true. Human density can go far beyond what SF has. In fact, you could fit a lot more people in SF with only part of the city getting higher density.
The idea that each city should "do it's part" has no basis in sane urban planing. We know the current distribution of density isn't useful and this more or less just makes it permanent.
What beats me is why Prop 13 applies to commercial properties and investment homes.
The crazy amount of "sleeping rough" homeless mixed with people typing on phones inside their auto driving Teslas going by without lifting an eyebrow. If you are not from the US and have learnt to think that is "normal" it's pretty confronting.
1) As people moved here and got good jobs, made a life for themselves, they (you and I) inevitably become more sympathetic to and desiring of middle class values. Stability, some measure of comfort, concern about taxation, their local neighborhood. It's understandable, it's natural.
Yet this is in conflict (especially when growth needs to happen) with:
2) The people who have not yet moved here (or become voters, or homeowners in particular), don't get to have a say in the policies that govern a place, yet at some point are the ones who have to live within policies that others decide.
So, a lot of the policies around here favor those who "got theirs" already, and there's very little incentive to fix this. Because the people who it benefits aren't here yet!
I think the question is, what do you do about this conflict, and what do you want a region's population/demographic renewal policy to be? How do you turn over property, wealth, a city/region to the next generation in a way that's sustainable, especially if you want it to grow?
Because right now, it's a "here's what I want for me right now" policy landscape. And that favors old people who own houses in the Bay Area to the detriment of young/poor/up and coming people who want to find a place in the area. The only thing to do is wait for the few % of people to die or move out from frustration, and face high housing prices that preserve everyone else's interests.
It gets masked in terms like "neighborhood preservation" or "local control" (or even using some minorities as a headline grabber, when in the end it actually favors mostly the rich property owners).
It's a big problem.
There’s a lot of data here I think is stitched together in support of a presumption presented as a conclusion, but one question:
> According to estimates from the US Census, the Bay Area’s population grew by about 10% from 2010 to 2019 [...] Yet of the ten richest cities of the 101 cities in the Bay Area, not one of them grew faster than 5%.
By how much did the area’s population of the richest grow? That is, if it grew at a rate of 10%, did they move elsewhere? If 5% - is there any point to the rest of the article? If less, wouldn’t astronomical property value explain why poorer groups didn’t move to these specific areas?
As with so many political issues, this is about economic class - and the differences in characteristics between them:
https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/fertili...
Is that the case anywhere in the world? Why single out the Bay Area.
Whereas Stockton is excluded from the Association of Bay Area Governments. The housing shortage in the Bay Area is not accurately assessed, and not accurately planned for.
https://www.sfweekly.com/news/yimbys-sue-for-even-more-housi...
https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...
These standards only seem to apply to America and Europe.
Does anyone have a counterexample outside of America or Europe where the underclass is allowed to live side-by-side with the rich? I've never heard of one but perhaps I'm ignorant. Most countries seem dead-set on rejecting any and all immigrants that don't bring $500k+ along with them.
Feel free to zoom in in any residential neighborhood in San Jose or Palo Alto. You can see 10-20x difference in yearly property taxes payed.
Is it really failing if it’s intentional?
Because said cities cannot get enough tax money from property tax (blame Prop 13) so they need to get it from businesses. But then those businesses attract people in the area and then those people need a place to live in but they can't get a place because nobody has the incentive to sell when your tax rate is locked in (well, growing up to 2% per year), on the contrary, you don't want to sell and then buy somewhere else and have to pay more taxes than you were paying at the old place, even if the new place is much smaller.
One of the countless negative consequences of Prop 13.
Stopped reading at this part. What an ignorant thing to say.
These cities DO make it hard to build new housing. There's no question about that. It's an ongoing political issue, and all the reasons listed have been used to attack or defend that policy.
Economics is like the "race by proxy" get out of jail free card.
The prevented BART from going down the peninsula to stop "undesirables" coming to their cities.
They were historically redlined to explicitly exclude any PoC.
They have a deeply ingrained prejudice, which may be less racially motivated now, but to claim that that prejudice isn't present is ignorant.
Even San Jose had police trying to stop BART from reaching due to it allowing the "criminals" from Oakland for some reason using one of the least reliable public transit systems to go to SJ and commit crimes, the flee back to Oakland.
I'm not a housing expert, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.
Middle income cities grow faster because there was more growth in middle income demographics. The most common demographic with a lot of growth is the "senior software engineer" at tech company X. As tech companies exploded, this was the segment that grew the most.
As a result, this is the segment that is most competitive when it comes to housing, because that's where all the people are. This "middle class" income bracket for housing in the Bay Area translates roughly to the $1.25m to $2.5m range for single family home purchases depending on whether you have 1 or two tech incomes in the household.
There's no getting around it: wherever most of the people are will be the most competitive for housing, and when it comes to essentials like food and shelter, people /will/ compete. Want less competition? Buy a house in Vallejo for under $1m, or go above $3m, and there will be fewer people in those brackets who can compete with you.
Either increase the supply or decrease the demand, there's no way around the physical reality of housing.
P.S. It never fails to make me pause and think when people accept $200k jobs without asking, or trying to find out: "What's the distribution graph of incomes within a 30-min commute distance of the job, and where do I land on that bell curve?"
That's not true at all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501
We know how to build as much housing as people want to live in. We make building said housing illegal.
This isn’t middle income. Entry level FAANG is already high income, never mind senior software engineer.
Same story for global warming. The current developed nations got rich (and still getting richer) by burning fossil fuels. But the ones that are trying to grow now are stuck.
Four options: 1. We’re doomed and stuck where we are, 2. Power struggle, 3. New tech provides an out, 4. Voluntary improvement via negotiation.
I’m hoping 3 and 4 work fast.
http://editions-hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf
Very depressing take on things, but ultimately I believe it proves that #1 is the only possibility. When it was written perhaps #2 was possible.
I don't think there's really a way forward without torching rule of law. They don't want the place to be amenable to new/young people, and they make the rules.
It's unfortunate that big tech decided to make this place their home, perhaps with covid and remote work it will go back to a dreamy boomer-land.
Currently, not only does the existing homeowner have to pay less taxes (if prices increase over 2% YoY), but later when they sell their house they can cash in the entire difference. That doesn't seem fair if the entire point of Prop 13 was to protect retirees from being kicked out of their house. So instead, make it so that when the house is sold they have to pay in backtaxes all the difference between the FMV based tax and what they actually payed from any profit they are making on the house. Also stop all means of being able to pass the house between generations without re-assessment (that is currently possible in many states in CA).
There are plenty of ways to do things. Oregon just passed a housing law (HB 2001) that re-legalizes "missing middle" housing for instance, by right, in all our cities.
In other words, you take some of the zoning control away from hyper-NIMBY local jurisdictions.
Big Tech was established when much of that area was literally little bits separated by fields and farmland.
I think our living spaces are more important than industry, if we need more housing for Googlers etc. well, there's tons of room in Cali. There are even many areas amenable to more density, it's just not SF or Palo Alto.
I'll bet that in Oakland it's much more possible to build semi-high buildings and fairly dense, modern 4 story buildings for the middle class, it's just that fewer people want to live there.
I wonder if Apple and Google get together and bought a large plot of land south of Morgan Hill, they could build a mini city to house 500K people and frankly run the gauntlet of whatever they wanted in terms of setting the rules, and there are at least 500K migrants who'd be happy to live there.
Imagine 'Facebook Campus' but now, your home as well. What's Orwellian to you and I would probably be fine for others. And of course, less cynically, it wouldn't need to be like that either.
But, they do something similar - they open offices in other cities until the cost of living rises to match San Francisco (see Portland and Seattle). It's just not in California.
Property taxes go up in a more sane way, and if you can't afford it, you get it tacked on to the sale of your home at the end...
Prop 13 limits the % you can raise property tax each year, unless they sell the property (at which point the property tax resets to the sale value). That leads to a lot of people not moving and holding onto their old, low tax property.
But it's not sustainable, and imo, downright evil.
There is no amount of money that is enough.
Not spending fast enough? Maybe a high speed train would solve things!
Grew up there. Been traveling country since. Shocking how well states do with a lot less money.
There are vast, open, free spaces for people to build and live in communities as they so choose.
If people want to live in homes and not high rises, it's absolutely their choice, and visa versa. Anyone who wants to live among them, in homes, is free to do that. If they want to live in high rises, they can go to where there are high rises, or where there are those who want to build them.
Also, this sounds a lot like, "As long as you're under my roof you'll follow my rules, young man". Which is not always reflective of a healthy situation.
As long as you agree with the majority of the state, it works out for you, but it's a bold power grab that may not end well in other situations.
Local control in places like Palo Alto is two wolves and a sheep voting for what to have for dinner.
So democracy?
Look at this chart. The majority should not always control the few.
edit: never thought I'd see anti-gay-marriage on HN but here we are.
Also, one of the easiest ways to make people better off is to let them move to where the jobs are. That used to be very common in the United States. That has been stunted in some part by rigid land use laws that pull up the ladder behind the people who got in while the getting was good.
There is a lot of work in economics showing the benefits of clustering, rather than having a talented up and coming person move to, say, Cyanide Springs Oklahoma because it's cheap.
Unless you think living in an apartment with no garage, no yard, no storage, and no way to stockpile food (save costs) is a quality of life increase?
Our children will probably not have children if forced to live this way at this price.
Personally I don't really get it, but I don't live in San Francisco.
That's not true, though.
https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...
> Our children will probably not have children if forced to live this way at this price.
Maybe check out some other parts of the world where this is the norm, and people have plenty of kids, once the pandemic is over.
And it's not a given that that happens in any case. People might not choose to live quite so densely, but if they want to, the option is there.
Look at the 'Montreal' option in that article for instance. That'd add a lot of people without having Big Towers.
And I actually lived in Italy, in a flat, with no yard for a while. It was great - we'd go to the park with my kids where they'd almost always see friends. Way better than our big yard here in the US where "there's nothing to do".
I'm Not from the US, but from a country with overwhelming support for same-sex marriage. I'm also from a country that has a proper democracy where voter turn out is 98+% and first-past the post isn't a thing.
What is the alternative you suggest... you hope you get a ruler who agrees with you? Good luck with that.
The nation is very divided and there's no hope of overthrowing first-past-the-post here.
And when the nation doesn't agree on things, allowing the majority to rule can be terrifying.
I agree democracy has its flaws... but what's the alternative? (This is highly off topic sorry). But complaining that minority rule to protect a "Happy Neighbourhood" is morally equivalent to "gay rights" seems like a dishonest argument to me.
One of the main problems with democracy is that it incentives politicians to buy voters, rather than use principled judgment. Everything becomes "politicking" to the lowest common denominator, because they have the most votes, and are most influenced by emotion.
Every system has it's flaws, and ultimately, I believe the problem is the people, not the government. If people were more principled, they wouldn't be susceptible to this emotional rhetoric. Monarchies are not inherently unjust, although many of them have been.
One additional problem with democracy, at least in the US, is that it sells out to the highest bidder. The masses are easily manipulated with TV and other propaganda, and they are the ones who elect the winner. It's like an oligarchy - the politicans are beholden to big money.
But people blame the politicans, not the oligarchs. They vote out "bad" politicians, only for new puppets to take their place, protecting the true masters (business interests, wall street, etc).
In a true oligarchy, people eventually go for blood. It's a joke to think that the riots on Jan 6th would do anything - kill the puppets, and the puppeteer brings in a new prop.
If you find this topic interesting I highly recommend Plato's Republic available free: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1497
Investment in education solves a lot of the manipulation problem.
You are Using one of the most dysfunctional democracies as your standard and then pointing out how bad that standard is. The US is a pathetic excuse for a democracy. It’s got some really great ideas that are stifled intentionally.
But you haven’t provided an alternative...
And back to the original point... you would like a monarch to rule The Bay Area?
Please don’t stop at Plato, Aristotle expanded on it and specifically made some key observations around democracy relating to “the wisdom of the masses”.