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Housing in the Bay Area

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Re: Housing in the Bay Area

#81

Post by birken »

sytelus wrote: post #13

I highly doubt this bill would pass without severe modifications. The problem is that we have two groups in population: One who own houses and other who don't. First group don't want new houses and dilute value of their property. Politicans very well knows that making this group unhappy will end their careers. The second group is often in minority outside large cities. This is why its very hard to pass laws that woul…

Around 65% of the population in SF are renters. If it were simply homeowners vs renters, renters would win in a landslide.

Who do you think was pushing for proposition I (an 18 month development moratorium in the mission) to pass? It wasn't homeowners, that's for sure. It was renters living in the Mission who were (not incorrectly) terrified that new development means they will get evicted and displaced.

Why did 60% of SF voters (keeping in mind only 30% are homeowners) vote for Proposition B, requiring a city wide up-or-down vote on all new waterfront development over 40-80 feet? A measure that was also endorsed by multiple major newspapers? Because people are afraid of everything changing too quickly and the nice beautiful waterfront turning into midtown Manhattan.

It's complicated. This isn't homeowners giving the middle finger to everybody else. The situation is more akin to existing residents fighting against future residents. Though whatever the situation is, pointing fingers at individual constituencies instead of trying to understand the problem holistically is not helping anything.

Re: Housing in the Bay Area

#82

Post by colbyh »

carapace wrote: post #65

I'm in favor of how "building in the Bay Area is approved by discretion", I call it having some power over what gets built. "Democracy" y'know? I'm from SF. I grew up here. I'm also a computer nerd. To me, the tech "industry" has been ruining the city I love since the Dot-Com boom. To me, they are an invading army culturally speaking. In a very real sense my home is being destroyed. The saddest part is, this city kin…

scarcity has never brought the price of anything down. your idea only works if the freaks could still live here, which they can't (mostly due to prices). why not support a bill that allows everyone a space?

Re: Housing in the Bay Area

#83

Post by arebop »

foobarqux wrote: post #45
sinak wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source?

Here's one: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/04/mar...

He's saying that land is the actual limited resource and therefore landowners will capture all the value that comes from upzoning. But as-of-right zoning makes it possible to use land much more efficiently than before, because the buy-side of the market really does care about housing units. So while they might still be willing to pay 50% of their incomes from housing, their demand for land will fall as housing units require less land. This will shift the balance of economic power in the favor of residents.

Think of what happened with modern agriculture. Food used to be much more expensive, then we greatly increased yields. People still need food and would be willing to pay more for it, but as the cost of production has fallen, agricultural landowners failed to totally capture the benefits. Instead, society allocated resources that would have gone into low-efficiency agricultural production to other uses, such as industrial goods production.

Re: Housing in the Bay Area

#84

Post by apsec112 »

studentrob wrote: post #77
apsec112 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely democracy. It's just democracy on the state level, rather than the local level. In this case, the state level is appropriate, because San Francisco's policies have an effect on all the surrounding cities, and all the other Americans who might want to live in SF. Would it be "undemocratic" to say that San Francisco can't unilaterally vote to stop paying federal income taxes? In any case, cities will…

> San Francisco's policies have an effect on all the surrounding cities, and all the other Americans who might want to live in SF. You could make that case for all regions of the world. Nobody is completely isolated. We breath the same air and everyone deals with the effects of pollution. It's not a reason to prevent changing existing law.

It's a difference of degree. The effect of most local policies on the region, nation, or world is negligible. The effect of San Francisco's is very large.

See this magazine article on how NIMBYs pushed suburban sprawl on surrounding areas:

https://web.archive.org/web/20001001083046/http://www.sfweek...

See this article, on how restrictive urban land use is estimated to lower America's entire national GDP by 5-15%:

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21647614-poor-land-use...

Re: Housing in the Bay Area

#85

Post by likpok »

apsec112 wrote: post #80
carapace wrote: post #65

I'm in favor of how "building in the Bay Area is approved by discretion", I call it having some power over what gets built. "Democracy" y'know? I'm from SF. I grew up here. I'm also a computer nerd. To me, the tech "industry" has been ruining the city I love since the Dot-Com boom. To me, they are an invading army culturally speaking. In a very real sense my home is being destroyed. The saddest part is, this city kin…

"San Francisco is the largist metropolitan area with the most wilderness/open space around it in the world." This bill specifically applies to development in urban areas only. More development in areas that are already urban will reduce pressure for cities to expand outward, into pristine wilderness. That's why environmentalist organizations like the Sierra Club support infill development: it's a low-water-use, low-g…

> That's why environmentalist organizations like the Sierra Club support infill development

Except the Sierra Club in SF, which strongly opposes dense housing.

Re: Housing in the Bay Area

#86

Post by apsec112 »

carapace wrote: post #65

I'm in favor of how "building in the Bay Area is approved by discretion", I call it having some power over what gets built. "Democracy" y'know? I'm from SF. I grew up here. I'm also a computer nerd. To me, the tech "industry" has been ruining the city I love since the Dot-Com boom. To me, they are an invading army culturally speaking. In a very real sense my home is being destroyed. The saddest part is, this city kin…

"To me, the tech "industry" has been ruining the city I love since the Dot-Com boom. To me, they are an invading army culturally speaking. In a very real sense my home is being destroyed."

Isn't this just what natives say about every group of immigrants? The West Coast, in particular, has seen this before:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DXu9eKM4kJI/T_D5ucc8SPI/AAAAAAAABK...

Re: Housing in the Bay Area

#87

Post by honkhonkpants »

HillaryBriss wrote: post #62
honkhonkpants wrote: post #40

When I look at this bill I have to wonder if it will really help. Outside of the city of San Francisco itself, almost nothing is being built, because the construction costs are too high. Not the permitting and planning costs, but the actual guys-with-hammers-and-saws costs. For example in Oakland there are number of properties that are fully entitled to build and have been sitting that way for years. So how does Brow…

I have seen hundreds of new apartment and condo units built within three miles of my LA neighborhood in the last four years. Dozens within a half mile. What it has meant so far is additional traffic congestion, increased commute times for everyone, more demand for government education and emergency services and more air pollution. I'm not quite seeing how the government can be taking enough money in to make up for th…

That is one reason why transit-oriented development makes more sense today. We don't want to build a lot of car-dependent neighborhoods because the freeways can't handle it. It is very important today that cities develop in ways that make sense, are sustainable, and contribute to the health (financial and otherwise) of their cities, instead of being maintenance burdens without accompanying tax revenue. In my city of Oakland unfortunately we have both. A successful example would be the Fruitvale transit village (https://critical-sustainabilities.ucsc.edu/fruitvale-transit...).

Re: Housing in the Bay Area

#88

Post by beering »

carapace wrote: post #65

I'm in favor of how "building in the Bay Area is approved by discretion", I call it having some power over what gets built. "Democracy" y'know? I'm from SF. I grew up here. I'm also a computer nerd. To me, the tech "industry" has been ruining the city I love since the Dot-Com boom. To me, they are an invading army culturally speaking. In a very real sense my home is being destroyed. The saddest part is, this city kin…

> To me, they are an invading army culturally speaking. In a very real sense my home is being destroyed.

This is xenophobia in another skin. There are a lot of people who don't want brown people coming into the country and changing the "feel" of their home too.

Anyways, as long as we severely restrict housing, techies will continue to outbid the locals on what remains. Passing this legislation might give the weirdo-freaks a chance to remain in the city.

Re: Housing in the Bay Area

#89

Post by cfallin »

carapace wrote: post #65

I'm in favor of how "building in the Bay Area is approved by discretion", I call it having some power over what gets built. "Democracy" y'know? I'm from SF. I grew up here. I'm also a computer nerd. To me, the tech "industry" has been ruining the city I love since the Dot-Com boom. To me, they are an invading army culturally speaking. In a very real sense my home is being destroyed. The saddest part is, this city kin…

> Also, I hear Portland is nice.

As someone who grew up in Portland [1], I could write a post just like yours, and I'm sympathetic to the frustration...

But I still side with the pro-housing crowd. What are people who seek to move up in life (i.e., take that dream job and build a career), but who happen to have been born in the middle of nowhere, supposed to do? Is it fair to say "hey, my home, don't come here" when a large fraction of the industry is in one place and the individual software engineer has very little power to change that? Yes, long term, we should spread out and build clusters of industry elsewhere, but that doesn't help the fresh college grad today who gets an offer in the Bay Area but can barely afford rent.

[1] and I want to move back someday so please don't ruin it!

Re: Housing in the Bay Area

#90

Post by ktothemc »

carapace wrote: post #65

I'm in favor of how "building in the Bay Area is approved by discretion", I call it having some power over what gets built. "Democracy" y'know? I'm from SF. I grew up here. I'm also a computer nerd. To me, the tech "industry" has been ruining the city I love since the Dot-Com boom. To me, they are an invading army culturally speaking. In a very real sense my home is being destroyed. The saddest part is, this city kin…

San Francisco, and several other American cities, were places for freaks and weirdos in the mid-20th century because of a historical anomaly in which the US federal government deliberately subsidized white, middle-class families into leaving for nearly-created suburbs. This trend began reversing in the 1980s and now land-values in the urban core reflect what is seen in cities all over the rest of the world -- that central areas have higher land and housing costs than the periphery.

It was a great, interesting, trippy twenty to thirty-year period, but it doesn't exist anymore and its loss in the Bay Area was probably accelerated in part because California has such an unusually politicized and unpredictable land-use and development process that has led it to consistently underproduce housing for the last 40 years.

http://www.lao.ca.gov/reports/2015/finance/housing-costs/hou...

The "young Gods" you speak of tend to have higher incomes not just because of the tech industry. They have higher costs because the elder babyboomer Californians rigged and created a system that is so constricted that only the wealthiest millennials can afford to participate in it.

Look at the differences in housing cost burdens based on year of birth here: http://www.lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/120

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