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Housing in the Bay Area

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Re: Housing in the Bay Area

#351

Post by retro64 »

danjayh wrote: post #259
jevinskie wrote: post #160

There is so much pressure, career-wise, to move to either the Bay Area, the West Coast in general, or a major urban hub. I honestly like living in a semi-rural part of the Midwest. I like seeing fields and forests while driving to work. If I want to get out to some wilderness, I can do so in 15-30 minutes. I travel in a car that, I feel, offers me freedom. To boot, I have a nice, reserved spot in the garage below my…

With you all the way. I have 11 acres, horses, a goat, cats, a dog, and I live 15 minutes from downtown and 17 minutes from work. This is in a mid-sized midwest city (Grand Rapids, MI). While I realize that I could achieve a substantial pay raise on one of the coasts, a similarly sized plot there would cost millions. I paid under 200k 5 years ago with a 1500sf house on it, and it's still probably only worth the mid 2…

I think this endorsement should be qualified. While it's true there is more space here in GR, there is a reason for that: people leave as soon as they can (for various reasons; the lack of sun (http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ccd-data/pctposrank.txt), lack of opportunity or even this vaguely defined yet very strong pressure to conform to an invisible fence of ideology. Change and outside ideas are slow to take root, to put it mildly.

I have worked in tech here for over 10 years and there are very few jobs. I've already used up Plans A, B and C. My next move will probably be somewhere else (if I'm still competitive). This is where you go to retire, not to advance your career.

Re: Housing in the Bay Area

#352

Post by jedberg »

WildUtah wrote: post #350
calbear81 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of living is definitely infinitely higher than living in the midwest but you certainly can find fields and forests (and actual mountains!) in the SF area. For example, the minute you cross the Golden Gate bridge, you are in Marin County, a county with a rich agricultural history, amazing natural places like Muir Woods (the setting for the ape's home in the latest Planet of the Apes), and 85.5% of it's land p…

Muir Woods (the setting for the ape's home in the latest Planet of the Apes) A Planet of The Apes remake? That's the first anchor you reach for? Muir Woods is the planet Endor!

> Muir Woods is the planet Endor!

True, but in the Planet of the Apes, it's actually supposed to be Muir Woods, so they don't dress it up to look different.

Re: Housing in the Bay Area

#353

Post by ghaff »

grappler wrote: post #210
jevinskie wrote: post #160

There is so much pressure, career-wise, to move to either the Bay Area, the West Coast in general, or a major urban hub. I honestly like living in a semi-rural part of the Midwest. I like seeing fields and forests while driving to work. If I want to get out to some wilderness, I can do so in 15-30 minutes. I travel in a car that, I feel, offers me freedom. To boot, I have a nice, reserved spot in the garage below my…

I have intelligence and programming ability, and a desire to further my career. I want a good high paying job in the epicenter of my chosen industry. I do not want to move to a city where I can't afford to buy a good home within walking distance of my workplace. The world should provide this for me.

I really hope you're being sarcastic.

Re: Housing in the Bay Area

#354

Post by davidw »

timr wrote: post #250
TulliusCicero wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The tech community likes to deflect criticism of their sudden influx of relatively high-income workers and say "don't blame us, it's a supply problem." Well duh, ostensibly high-paying jobs are good, remember? Like, the tech sector is one of the few remaining industries with lots of jobs that pay well, and now we gotta demonize them too? Would it be preferable for everyone to be equally poor? And it obviously is a…

"Well duh, ostensibly high-paying jobs are good, remember?" To whom, exactly? If those jobs are going to people who are moving here from somewhere else, then who benefits? There was a thriving city here long before tech startups came along. The cruel irony of this kind of job growth is that it doesn't benefit the people who are being displaced. I personally think we need a more balanced approach: we need to build mor…

> The cruel irony of this kind of job growth is that it doesn't benefit the people who are being displaced

That's because they're being displaced. Because there is not enough housing.

There are a lot of benefits to being in a wealthy area even for those who are not the ones with the highest paying jobs, as Enrico Moretti explains in "The New Geography of Jobs".

And if you want to see what an actual bad economy does for people.... check out Greece, or even Italy (which isn't nearly as bad off). It's not pretty.

Re: Housing in the Bay Area

#355

Post by BinaryIdiot »

zeemonkee3 wrote: post #309
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you want to live in the past. Unfortunately this is not how life works. The more you try to keep something from happening that is inevitable the less effective your attempts will become until you lose. NYC experienced this yesterday. SF is experiencing this today. Many cities will be experiencing this tomorrow. As population density grows this same scenario will repeat everywhere over the next century. Th…

His point though was that SF isn't particularly suitable as a city for startups; there's no magical "tech gold" that you can't get elsewhere, like West Virginian coal - people go there just to be in the game, because that's where the VCs chose to be. Historical and geographical factors in fact make it a particularly unsuitable place for a bootstrapped startup to exist. The difference perhaps is that although Hollywoo…

> His point though was that SF isn't particularly suitable as a city for startups; there's no magical "tech gold" that you can't get elsewhere, like West Virginian coal - people go there just to be in the game, because that's where the VCs chose to be. Historical and geographical factors in fact make it a particularly unsuitable place for a bootstrapped startup to exist.

While I agree with that I don't see any of that in the parent's post. It's actually pretty frustrating so many VCs insist that companies need to be in SV as there really isn't a real need to be and I know start-ups that would be much happier if they could get VC funding but not be in SV.

Re: Housing in the Bay Area

#356

Post by simonebrunozzi »

This is one of the worst piece of advice, IMHO. Here's why.

1) You can't add housing without adding proper infrastructure (transportation, sewage, power, etc). Adding infrastructure is expensive and takes a very long time. There will be no budget for proper infrastructure increase if the population keeps rising - remember that hundreds of thousands of people work for companies that offshore their taxes.

2) Most people need financial advice on what real estate investment means. If there's another bubble burst, a lot of average income people will have their life ruined. They would have bought an apartment for, say, $1M, with 200k down, only to see its value decrease by 30-35%, essentially wiping out their savings and forcing them into unsustainable debt.

3) I wish there was an easy way to fix the housing problem in SF. There isn't. Let's be realistic about it.

Please don't downvote me just because you disagree with me. Instead, tell me why.

Re: Housing in the Bay Area

#357

Post by davidw »

timr wrote: post #301
BurningFrog wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not in real estate economics. Increased supply leading to higher prices would be something that Economist would crawl over each other to study, if true. So where are these studies? Who are the professional economists who support this view?

Pretty much all of them. Nothing I've said is controversial -- the gains are long-term, but the short-term effect is often just displacement: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/12/the-p... "None of this dismisses the fact that displacement from specific homes happens when low-income housing is literally knocked down to build high-end towers. A good amount of new supply in cities, though, can rise on…

If you're simply replacing cheap housing with an equal number of expensive units, yeah, that's not doing much good. The idea is to add to the total number of units.

Filtering does work, but as you point out, it takes time: https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2016/05/25/housing-does-f...

But just because the best time to build more was 30 years ago doesn't mean now isn't a good time to start.

Also: if you are adding expensive housing it takes some pressure off of the cheaper housing that would otherwise be the 2nd choice of those going into the expensive housing.

Re: Housing in the Bay Area

#358

Post by WildUtah »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #318
vasilipupkin wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SF used to be beautiful. With tons more development, it will just look like Hong Kong/Singapore/Chicago/Manhattan, etc. and that beauty will be lost

I'm not arguing against development. I'm just saying that the iconic look and feel of SF will be lost. Maybe that's inevitable, but it saddens many people

Tokyo and Mexico City have very, very few buildings over five stories and still have double the density of SF. Paris and Barcelona have almost none over seven stories and have four times the density of SF.

So it doesn't have to be high rises and skyscrapers. SF can look like SF and build enough to make living affordable.

Of course, the real problem is the peninsula cities that insist on densities much lower than one third of SF. 80% of buildable land on the peninsula is tied up there being wasted.

Re: Housing in the Bay Area

#359

Post by cynicalkane »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #356

This is one of the worst piece of advice, IMHO. Here's why. 1) You can't add housing without adding proper infrastructure (transportation, sewage, power, etc). Adding infrastructure is expensive and takes a very long time. There will be no budget for proper infrastructure increase if the population keeps rising - remember that hundreds of thousands of people work for companies that offshore their taxes. 2) Most peopl…

> Please don't downvote me just because you disagree with me. Instead, tell me why.

I'll do both, because you are acting like an informed person but wrong about very basic things.

> 1) You can't add housing without adding proper infrastructure (transportation, sewage, power, etc). Adding infrastructure is expensive and takes a very long time. There will be no budget for proper infrastructure increase if the population keeps rising - remember that hundreds of thousands of people work for companies that offshore their taxes.

One, you don't "offshore taxes", you offshore profits. Two, corporations don't pay local taxes based on profits, so I'm not sure what you're on about. Tech workers? They pay quite a lot in local taxes.

> 2) Most people need financial advice on what real estate investment means. If there's another bubble burst, a lot of average income people will have their life ruined. They would have bought an apartment for, say, $1M, with 200k down, only to see its value decrease by 30-35%, essentially wiping out their savings and forcing them into unsustainable debt.

It is not the purpose of an economy to coddle wealthy people with artificial market restrictions, so I don't have any sympathy here. Also, mortgage debt isn't like college debt or credit card debt; it's secured by your house alone. Banks can't go after you for it. All they can do is give you a bad credit score for seven years. Which is bad, but I'm sure people who can afford million-dollar homes can afford to face the consequences of their actions.

> 3) I wish there was an easy way to fix the housing problem in SF. There isn't. Let's be realistic about it.

This isn't saying anything.

Re: Housing in the Bay Area

#360

Post by ghaff »

muzz wrote: post #189
pfarnsworth wrote: post #179

Companies that extract advertising and other revenue from around the world, like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc, should create job centers outside of the Bay Area. This is the only way that house prices will moderate, is if these globally significant companies spread their distribution of money around the country/world. There's too much concentration of money flowing into the Bay Area in terms of revenues, and that…

If it made economic sense for them to create job centers outside of the Bay Area, they would. This gives one an idea of just how great the economic advantage of locating in the Bay Area is.

Or just an idea of how the herd mentality can so utterly overwhelm common sense.
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