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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

#191

Post by astrodust »

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…

Completely ignoring the transit issue is remarkable. New York City serves an example of a vibrant and expensive city, but one that has a multitude of options depending on how much you're prepared to commute.

People truck in on a daily basis from New Jersey and Connecticut because there's highways and reliable (enough) rail options.

BART, from all accounts, is a total disaster and is about to completely implode. The rail project through the valley is anemic, completely inadequate for any serious commuter use.

If you can provide more options, stronger links with better commute times, you can live in places farther away without as huge a penalty on your time. It should be practical to live in Oakland and work in San Francisco, the two are so damned close, but it's a nightmare in practice.

Fix that and you're half way to solving this problem.

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

#192

Post by kajecounterhack » 

  I am perceived to be part of the problem.
Not attacking, just commenting: maybe rephrase? I'm similar to you but despite background / origin we're still part of the problem. We are rich enough to live in the mission and shop at bi-rite and we displace poorer folks (who, as you observed, are often from ethnic minorities, with backgrounds different from ours). Having come from modest beginnings doesn't make us less the problem.

That said, I think it does help to make us more aware of how unfair the system is.

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

#193

Post by ant6n »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #167
rsync wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sympathetic to the notion that prop 13 is a massive distortion that is driving all of these problems ... But I have a hard time reconciling that with the relative pricing in other equally desirable coastal areas that do not have prop 13 (or anything like it). I am simplifying greatly, but in a broad sense, SF housing is as expensive as Boston housing is as expensive as NYC housing ... and certain hot-or-not insp…

I'm a life long Californian. I dislike Prop 13 and it's evil sister Prop 58 which allows children to inherit their parents property tax break along with the property. AKA my dad has a house with an assessed property tax value of about $75k, when he dies and my sister inherits it, she'll also inherit the $75k property tax valuation as well. That said I don't think the current issues with housing in the bay area have m…

Or we could just move beyond property taxes as a means of funding municipalities. Trying to tie the market values of one's house to taxation, then trying to untie them from market fluctuation, is simply a poor heuristic for measuring a person's capability to pay taxes. A much better heuristic is progressive income taxes. So here's an idea: make real estate taxes more equal, more nominal, and more predictable long into the future. Then close tax loop-holes and use income taxes on state level to fund municipalities. Nice side effect is that funding could be based on need rather than how rich your neighborhood is, which would improve the equality and fairness in social services provided. And no more moving to the rich suburb because you want your kids to go to a good school.

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

#194

Post by thaumasiotes »

aianus wrote: post #142
Agustus wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your example, the building you describe is a condominium? If so, then what does it matter what your tax bill is and if they are absentee owners; if the owner maintains the property, pays their bills and taxes, then you should be happy to have them. Tax reassessments during the boom of 2001 to 2007 were on track to price a lot of people out of their houses based on their current economic status. Proposition 13 and…

> why would you want the market fluctuations to be able to force an individual to leave their house? To make room for newcomers with higher-paying jobs who, in some sense, 'deserve' to live there more than you do. Unpopular opinion, but that's how we ration every other limited resource; it goes to the highest bidder, not the first mover.

> that's how we ration every other limited resource; it goes to the highest bidder, not the first mover

This is the opposite of the truth. The core of property rights is that just because someone will offer you a "good" price for your trinket, doesn't mean you have to sell it to them. (That would be a chaotic world!) Limited resources are held by their owners, who had them first.

You can argue that housing is fundamentally different from every other kind of property, which justifies forcing people to give theirs up if somebody else wants it more -- but there is no room to argue that that's how we handle other limited resources.

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

#195

Post by eweise »

Renevith wrote: post #97
Agustus wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your example, the building you describe is a condominium? If so, then what does it matter what your tax bill is and if they are absentee owners; if the owner maintains the property, pays their bills and taxes, then you should be happy to have them. Tax reassessments during the boom of 2001 to 2007 were on track to price a lot of people out of their houses based on their current economic status. Proposition 13 and…

> If you have a job that pays $100,000 and the taxes on your $250,000 house is $7,500 (3% property tax) and the tax quadruples to $30,000 in five years; why would you want the market fluctuations to be able to force an individual to leave their house? I shed exactly zero tears for someone whose $250k property quadruples in value to $1m in five years. Sell the house and dance with joy at your (untaxed!) $750k capital…

Right just move your kids somewhere new and cheap like Fresno because there happened to be a housing bubble where you lived. Houses provide a stable environment for raising families. Why should you be forced out by taxes?

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

#196

Post by [deleted] »

henrikschroder wrote: post #114
Maarten88 wrote: post #82

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 o…

I'm also from northern Europe, and the average housing standard here is absolutely crap compared to where I'm from. For fun, try browsing apartments here on craigslist and you'll get to see the interiors as well. And when you then look at the prices of these things, it all seems like a cruel joke. If you just visited the conference you probably didn't see Mission Bay, but they are doing the same here as in most other…

[deleted]

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

#197

Post by Gibbon1 »

ant6n wrote: post #193
Gibbon1 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a life long Californian. I dislike Prop 13 and it's evil sister Prop 58 which allows children to inherit their parents property tax break along with the property. AKA my dad has a house with an assessed property tax value of about $75k, when he dies and my sister inherits it, she'll also inherit the $75k property tax valuation as well. That said I don't think the current issues with housing in the bay area have m…

Or we could just move beyond property taxes as a means of funding municipalities. Trying to tie the market values of one's house to taxation, then trying to untie them from market fluctuation, is simply a poor heuristic for measuring a person's capability to pay taxes. A much better heuristic is progressive income taxes. So here's an idea: make real estate taxes more equal, more nominal, and more predictable long int…

Personally I think the market price for housing tends to reflect carrying costs. Which is take what a home buy can afford subtract taxes and insurance and that's the mortgage payment. The price is how big of a loan that will buy. So the yin and the yang, lower property taxes and the housing prices rise to compensate. The only difference is property taxes tend to pay for stuff that makes your home intrinsically more valuable. Where your mortgage payment doesn't. (Probably used to before we had national/international banking, but not today)

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

#198

Post by coroutines »

rayiner wrote: post #147
coroutines wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why should we care more about grandparents than businesses?

Personally I would rather have no income tax or property tax - just very high sales tax. IMO, sales tax has a much larger tax base than any of the others - as income tax requires you to have a job/be a citizen; and property tax requires you to... own property.

But that's not the reality we live in.

Property taxes fluctuate too much in California - you might be paying everything you can toward your mortgage to decrease the interest you owe, but still effectively pay the same with rising property taxes. A fixed property tax is really, really necessary.

It's just abused too heavily by corporations...

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

#199

Post by gozur88 »

skewart wrote: post #177
gozur88 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The other option is to ease pressure on home prices by laying down the NIMBYism and letting more housing be built in your community in a sustainable way! That doesn't actually work in the real world. If you live in a desirable area, and you increase the housing supply in such a way that the area is still desirable, as soon as the price drops a tiny bit people move in from the outside and drive it back up again.

That can happen at the small scale - neighborhoods or suburban villages. It doesn't really happen at the city or metro area scale. (If you have evidence of urban areas that have allowed lots of construction during periods of high population and job growth - cities like Dallas, Houston, or Atlanta - and have also seen high housing prices, please share it; I'm genuinely curious). Part of the problem in the bay area is…

It happened in Southern California. In the area where I grew up the cities allowed developers to build hundreds of homes at a time - it's probably four times as dense as it was when I lived there.

Orange groves and strawberry fields and outdoor movie theaters and old military bases were all leveled and turned into housing tracts. But housing didn't get any cheaper - the state added 20 million people from 1970 to 2010, because there were jobs and it had the reputation of being a nice place to live.

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