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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

#81

Post by mahyarm »

coroutines wrote: post #74
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…

Prop 13 is really great and really bad. My grandparents own a home in Livermore they've had from 1925. Livermore is now a very costly place to live in, and modern property taxes would make it impossible for them to live in a city they saw grow up around them. I do think Prop 13's protection should be eliminated for businesses - most definitely. If you're a landlord, perhaps it would make sense to allow up to 2 x Prop…

Then make prop 13 a 65+ only law that can only apply to your main residence.

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

#82

Post by Maarten88 »

I visited San Francisco last week (for the Microsoft Build conference).

Having read here on HN about the housing problems and high rents I was surprised to see quite a lot of poorly maintained buildings, if you go a bit outside the centre. From my perspective, there seems lots of room for building and improvement. They could take down blocks and build more densely while improving quality. As in all US cities, a lot of room is used by cars.

Looking at my hometown Amsterdam, there are places like Java Eiland, (https://www.amsterdam.nl/javaeiland/) an old harbor dock where they built 8500 high quality appartments housing 18.000 people, on an area of only 1.3km x 130m. I think solutions like that could work in San Francisco too.

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

#83

Post by joshrotenberg »

mahyarm wrote: post #19
ryguytilidie wrote: post #7

Biggest issue for me is public transit. If BART was more reliable/faster, it would be easy for people to live in Berkeley, Oakland, San Leandro or anywhere along the line. I actually bought a house in Richmond because it was cheap and I could BART into the city. What was once a 30 minute ride usually takes a little over 40 now. We really need to fix transit in the bay area. More ferries would be great imo.

Ferries are even slower and less reliable in my experience. If you didn't live where the track died, then you would still say BART is more reliable. I've noticed BART is less reliable in the edges vs the core of SF, berkeley and downtown oakland

I ride (and complain about) BART regularly to/from SF from the Berkeley/El Cerrito area. The truth is that it's still pretty reliable, though having lived where I am now since 2004 the decline in reliability and increase in crowding clearly isn't going to stop.

One alternative is AC Transit's transbay service, which I swore by for many years. Unfortunately the increase in road traffic has that option declining as well.

There has been talk in the past about a Berkeley Marina/Albany Bulb ferry, but to my knowledge there are no current plans. I haven't ridden the ferry many times from other places, but I'd like to think that having that as an option would get a decent amount of ridership as well as possibly reduce the load on the roads and tracks.

The lack of any ferry service connecting the East Bay between Jack London Square in Oakland and Vallejo is pretty surprising. Judging from the fact that a morning commute-time BART train starting in Richmond is typically standing room only by El Cerrito Plaza (third stop on the line), I'd say the demand for alternatives is definitely there, so there must be financial/political/engineering reasons that there are no ferries from other parts of the East Bay.

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

#84

Post by slyall »

wernercd wrote: post #70
BurningFrog wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...the houses would almost all be built for the very well off. The amount of houses you'd have to build before you started constructing truly affordable housing is immense. This is a common mistake. In reality, all added supply brings down price levels across the board.

But you completely ignore the "time and amount of houses it would take" aspect. If you can only build 10 houses, and make 10% commission... are you going to build a shack? or are you going to build mansion? The houses that get built, if the gates were to open wide, would all start off on the high end... while that would start a downward pressure, it would still be a very long time before those who can afford $200k fo…

You are missing the point. Houses for poor people are almost never built, instead poor people live in 50 year old places that were built for the rich or middle class.

What happens is that 10 people move into those new places and 10 people move into their old one and the vacancy works it's way down the line. Eventually some guy down the bottom gets slightly cheaper rent or a better place.

Imagine that instead 100,000 high-end apartments were built in the Bay Area. None of them will have poor people move into them but instead places like (to quote elsewhere in the thread) "downtown PA (university Ave) its right around $2800-3000 for a 1 bedroom, for places with 20 year old appliances and no upgrades." might now be $1000/month cheaper and affordable by somebody on a lot lower income.

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

#85

Post by beatpanda »

marknutter wrote: post #23

The only way to fix the housing market in San Francisco without destroying what people love about living there is to reduce the number of people living in San Francisco. And the most direct and effective way of doing that is to destroy the ridiculous bias against remote working. For all the innovative, intelligent, talented people in the Valley that we haven't yet figured out how to work together to build software wi…

I think you're wrong about this. Low-height buildings are not what I loved about living in San Francisco. I think San Francisco would become a dramatically more livable city if you just replaced some of the single-family homes in the Sunset with triplexes, for instance.

But you're also right that there isn't a defensible reason for forcing so many people to move here to take jobs in the tech industry. Lots of people would live elsewhere and work remotely if they had the chance.

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

#86

Post by Mz »

zt wrote: post #40
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…

(I'm the author) Prop 13 is a problem, no doubt. It would deserve a very long essay -- some of them exist as sub-essays within Kim-Mai Cutler's writings. I tried to focus on policy ideas that, more-or-less, San Francisco could implement themselves.

If you actually want to solve it, you need to think bigger than that. In fact, we need changes all the way up to the federal level. We need to overhaul the entire way that the US handles housing, across the board.

In a nutshell, our current housing paradigm was born of the soldiers returning home from WW2. Thus, the entire infrastructure is geared towards supporting single family homes designed for the nuclear family with 2 parents, a stay at home mom and 2 to 3 kids. Thus, in the decades since then, housing has kind of converged towards that standard while population has diverged away from that norm. We are having kids later, we are living long, we are having fewer kids etc etc etc. We need far more housing geared towards the demographics and lifestyles we currently have, not geared towards the demographic and lifestyle of what, for many people today, is their grandparents in their youth.

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

#87

Post by mikeyouse »

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.

So over 20 years, your property taxes would increase by ~49%. The median sale price in 1996 for a home in SF was $275/sq. ft, today it's more like $1,250/sq ft. 450% appreciation in 20 years, or something like 7x faster than property tax increases.

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

#88

Post by mahyarm »

joshrotenberg wrote: post #83
mahyarm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ferries are even slower and less reliable in my experience. If you didn't live where the track died, then you would still say BART is more reliable. I've noticed BART is less reliable in the edges vs the core of SF, berkeley and downtown oakland

I ride (and complain about) BART regularly to/from SF from the Berkeley/El Cerrito area. The truth is that it's still pretty reliable, though having lived where I am now since 2004 the decline in reliability and increase in crowding clearly isn't going to stop. One alternative is AC Transit's transbay service, which I swore by for many years. Unfortunately the increase in road traffic has that option declining as wel…

Boats are fundamentally slow and cannot dock at the center of a city where most jobs are, but it's edges. Docking and boarding/unboarding is a minimum 5-10 minute process too. A really fast ferry goes at 30 knots, which is around 35 miles per hour. Often ferries are there because building the equivalent bridge or train doesn't meet the cost/benefit ratio, otherwise they are an inferior transportation option.

The reason why there probably isn't any service from jack london square is because it's faster to get to a bart station by bike or similar and then take the BART.

As for vallejo, there looks like there is a ferry service for some reason according to google maps: https://www.google.com/maps/place/38%C2%B005'59.8%22N+122%C2...

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

#89

Post by mikeyouse »

aetherson wrote: post #27
api wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some cases it's cheaper to live in another city and fly to/from SF every single day than to live in SF.

Name some of these cases.

Some employees at UCSF do this -- They can get on a 7-on/7-off schedule, fly in from somewhere more reasonable (often Denver or somewhere in the Midwest), stay on a couch for a week, earn a SF salary then fly back to a $1,500/month mortgage somewhere else.

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

#90

Post by capkutay »

If you care about SF housing, please just show up to Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors meetings. Better yet, start or join a grassroots group of at least 10-15 people and thoughtfully present all your ideas without coming off as insensitive towards the homeless or low-income individuals. There's TONS of room for public input in SF, it's what makes our planning process unique. In many cases, this leads to a deficit in housing because planning is so sensitive to the request of those who actually show up to meetings and make their case.
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