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The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

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Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#41

Post by jacobolus »

zt wrote: post #18
ModernMech wrote: post #10

The folly with arguments blaming San Francisco for the problem is the fact that the entire Bay area is priced at an insane level. Take another look at this [1] BART map with corresponding home prices for each stop. Yeah, it's cheaper to live outside of the city, but it's still crazy expensive. The median sale price for a house in Pittsburg is $430,000, with a 62 min commute into SF. If you live 62 minutes outside of…

(I'm the author). You make excellent points, and I don't mean to minimize the regional issues. Sure, if I had a magic wand then I'd increase housing being built across the Bay Area. In fact, I'd like consolidate the jurisdictions in the Bay Area, but that's a whole other argument. I don't quite know how to play out the claim that demand is infinite. One, I don't believe that. And, two, it seems like an argument that…

Kinda off topic in context of this thread, but if you’re organizing panel discussions about this, you should try to get someone from http://www.spur.org in your panel. See http://www.spur.org/policy-area/housing and http://www.spur.org/policy-area/regional-planning

Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#42

Post by zt »

jacobolus wrote: post #41
zt wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I'm the author). You make excellent points, and I don't mean to minimize the regional issues. Sure, if I had a magic wand then I'd increase housing being built across the Bay Area. In fact, I'd like consolidate the jurisdictions in the Bay Area, but that's a whole other argument. I don't quite know how to play out the claim that demand is infinite. One, I don't believe that. And, two, it seems like an argument that…

Kinda off topic in context of this thread, but if you’re organizing panel discussions about this, you should try to get someone from http://www.spur.org in your panel. See http://www.spur.org/policy-area/housing and http://www.spur.org/policy-area/regional-planning

Thanks! I know SPUR well, I'm actually on their housing policy board.

Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#43

Post by seattle_spring »

jjav wrote: post #38
mdb333 wrote: post #28

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_%281... Good thoughts. You failed to mention Prop 13 which was put into place a long time ago and simply doesn't make sense anymore. It's at least part of the reason it is so affordable (in relative terms) for rich people to keep second homes here when they bought them years ago. We live in a building of 60 units where probably at least a third of those are abse…

> are only adjusted upon sale of the property While often repeated, that is incorrect. In reality property tax goes up 2% every year under prop 13.

Which is insignificant compared to yearly property appreciation in the same area.

Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#45

Post by imtringued »

ModernMech wrote: post #10

The folly with arguments blaming San Francisco for the problem is the fact that the entire Bay area is priced at an insane level. Take another look at this [1] BART map with corresponding home prices for each stop. Yeah, it's cheaper to live outside of the city, but it's still crazy expensive. The median sale price for a house in Pittsburg is $430,000, with a 62 min commute into SF. If you live 62 minutes outside of…

It doesn't matter how much housing you build. The landlords will still charge as much as the market can bear.

Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#46

Post by shostack »

runchberries wrote: post #17
ModernMech wrote: post #10

The folly with arguments blaming San Francisco for the problem is the fact that the entire Bay area is priced at an insane level. Take another look at this [1] BART map with corresponding home prices for each stop. Yeah, it's cheaper to live outside of the city, but it's still crazy expensive. The median sale price for a house in Pittsburg is $430,000, with a 62 min commute into SF. If you live 62 minutes outside of…

Yeah. In Palo Alto my crappy 1 bedroom apartment that I was living in 3 years ago was in the middle of suburban jungle (no restaurants or shops for a few miles in any direction) and was $1650. I looked last week and it was $2500. That was a crappy place. If you want to live by downtown PA (university Ave) its right around $2800-3000 for a 1 bedroom, for places with 20 year old appliances and no upgrades. The peninsul…

Can you clarify where in PA you were that had no restaurants or shops for a few miles in any direction? PA is relatively small, and there aren't any apartments further west in the really nice parts. Further east there are still stores and shops and such (albeit not as nice as near downtown).

Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#47

Post by ZanyProgrammer »

refriedbeans3 wrote: post #33
pascalxus wrote: post #29

I agree with the author for the most part: the ideal solution is to build lots more housing - it's the morally and ethically correct thing to do. But, SF lacks the political will to do this and we need to accept that. the 2nd best solution would be to get tech companies out of SF. I hate this solution as much as the author, but I think it's worth considering. There's no reason why tech companies must be in SF, when t…

In theory, this could alleviate some of the issues you are seeing in SF, but in practice this is not something many tech companies founded here would do. Most new tech companies are being started by people already working in the industry, and the industry is located in Silicon Valley, with epicenter now being in SF. So it just doesn't make sense from a competitive perspective for most companies to move out of the Bay…

I've seen recent comments on HN that some people are considering it a sign of shrewdness and intelligence that some companies aren't locating themselves in SF.

Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#48

Post by ZanyProgrammer »

shostack wrote: post #46
runchberries wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. In Palo Alto my crappy 1 bedroom apartment that I was living in 3 years ago was in the middle of suburban jungle (no restaurants or shops for a few miles in any direction) and was $1650. I looked last week and it was $2500. That was a crappy place. If you want to live by downtown PA (university Ave) its right around $2800-3000 for a 1 bedroom, for places with 20 year old appliances and no upgrades. The peninsul…

Can you clarify where in PA you were that had no restaurants or shops for a few miles in any direction? PA is relatively small, and there aren't any apartments further west in the really nice parts. Further east there are still stores and shops and such (albeit not as nice as near downtown).

Like down El Camino towards California Avenue and beyond, I'd think.

Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#49

Post by pascalxus »

johndevor wrote: post #34
pascalxus wrote: post #29

I agree with the author for the most part: the ideal solution is to build lots more housing - it's the morally and ethically correct thing to do. But, SF lacks the political will to do this and we need to accept that. the 2nd best solution would be to get tech companies out of SF. I hate this solution as much as the author, but I think it's worth considering. There's no reason why tech companies must be in SF, when t…

> the ideal solution is to build lots more housing - it's the morally and ethically correct thing to do. What do you mean when you say "morally and ethically correct"?

Food, water and shelter are fundamental human needs that everyone should have. It's wrong for society to deny Shelter to individuals on the grounds of: traffic, population density, and countless other slight inconveniences that are not on the same level as the need for shelter. I say solve Shelter first, then deal with the other problems.

Furthermore, since government owns all the land outside of the zoned areas, they have a responsibility for making sure there's enough land allocated for people to live/house in - CA is doing a terrible job of this. Even in the furthest reaches of CA, housing prices are still almost twice the national average, especially egregious since only 5% of CA land is being used.

Re: The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It

#50

Post by Animats »

"We are on a self-imposed path leading to only one place: a city that is entirely rich and, more or less, entirely white."

Sounds like a plan.

The problem is this. SF is built out; to build something, you have to demolish something first. So the alternative is high-rise housing. High-rise low-income housing, especially high-rise low-income housing, has been a disaster in the US. Chicago had to demolish the Robert Taylor Homes, a mile long strip of high-rises. Here's a list of failed high-rise housing projects.[1] "You can't stack poor people who drink.", as one author wrote.

The boom may be cyclical. SF after the first dot-com collapse in 2001, had low traffic and lots of vacancies. After the 2008 crash, there were tens of thousands of houses in foreclosure and for-sale signs everywhere. That could happen again. Twitter and Uber aren't profitable and are going to get hit by economic reality at some point soon.

[1] http://newsone.com/1555245/most-infamous-public-housing-proj...

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