This guy has never worked a day in his life.
That's not nice and quite false.
You've been posting many unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. Please stop.
Housing in the Bay Area
111–120 of 407 posts
Re: Housing in the Bay Area
#112This is a contentious issue and in case you are not from SF and wondering why Y Combinator is taking a stand on it, it has to do with the politics of the tech boom. The plain truth is that the housing crisis is a combination of too much sudden demand fueled by the tech boom and too little supply. The tech community likes to deflect criticism of their sudden influx of relatively high-income workers and say "don't blam…
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Re: Housing in the Bay Area
#113I'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…
Opposing the construction of more housing will just maintain/accelerate the rate at which residents of SF will be driven out.
Re: Housing in the Bay Area
#114This is one of the top factors preventing me from moving back to the Bay Area. It's good to know there's at least SOME serious attempt at a solution (even if folks around here are mostly pessimistic.) It still surprises me that an industry that's all about connecting the world through the internet and allowing anyone to work with anyone else on anything says "yeah but you need to work in this small area of the countr…
Somehow the city with the highest average salary/cost of living usually goes unmentioned... Seattle has two huge tech companies, a lot of mid sized tech companies, and a growing startup scene... and it's not that far away from the bay.
It rains too much, like 14 months per year is just rain. And the Seattle freeze...ya, people in Seattle don't like to talk to other people, it is like Northern Europe. /s
We've always made up crazy lies just to keep the Californians away, but ultimately it isn't working. Seattle is a nice place to live/work, and has plenty of jobs for techies.
Re: Housing in the Bay Area
#115This guy has never worked a day in his life.
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Re: Housing in the Bay Area
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does the bill weaken affordable housing demands? And doesn't building more "luxury" condo open more affordable housing stock. This is such a confusing issue, everyone seems to be making sense.
My understanding is the bill has weaker requirements (as little as 5%) on affordable housing than alternatives. Think of cities and negotiating with developers over affordability, and this is a more developer-friendly offer.
I think that is meant to be left to local requirements. Municipality could jack it up to 20% AFAIK.
Re: Housing in the Bay Area
#117This is a contentious issue and in case you are not from SF and wondering why Y Combinator is taking a stand on it, it has to do with the politics of the tech boom. The plain truth is that the housing crisis is a combination of too much sudden demand fueled by the tech boom and too little supply. The tech community likes to deflect criticism of their sudden influx of relatively high-income workers and say "don't blam…
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A 2% chance today, right? Increasing the supply of affordable housing should improve those odds.
What's at stake here is how much affordable housing the city for negotiate for with developers. Critics argue this state bill undercuts the city's negotiating position.
Re: Housing in the Bay Area
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Believable (17.9%) if you are measuring only within the S.F. city limits. San Mateo and Marin counties and the East Bay have huge tracts of open space for metropolitan areas.
Same can be said for the surrounding areas of some of the other cities on the list.
Not Singapore or Hong Kong of course, but those are special cases.
Re: Housing in the Bay Area
#119Apparently not all economists agree that increasing housing supply would make rents cheaper.
Technically increasing the housing supply would make rent cheaper. But realistically it won't because it's not possible to build enough housing to increase the supply enough to tip the scales in demand versus supply.
They start building more and those houses are going to be just as expensive as the existing housing.
Re: Housing in the Bay Area
#120"His bill would make it so multi-family buildings are automatically approved by right as long as they comply with local zoning, and have 5-20% affordable units--the percentage depending on location and subsidy offered."
The problem here is that this leaving height limits in place and could create a rush to impose even more stringent zoning restrictions.
What would be necessary would be legislation that pre-empts both local zoning and other mechanism for a relatively small area to allow the construction of a few high rises without the destruction of existing housing stock.
The ideal of Nimbys seems to be no development and the ideal of developers seems to be building a limited number of ultra-high-priced units in the super desirable places like the Mission. The sane approach would be to allow a series of high rises in Potrero Hill and along the Bay.
This approach sounds like it would simply push-through development according to the developer ideal, which would serve the Nimbys right but also destroy whatever remains of the character of the mission.