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How Much Housing Will Be Built?

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Re: How Much Housing Will Be Built?

#81

Post by st3v3r »

dionidium wrote: post #68
rsync wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... a strong desire by incumbents to keep the place the same and not turn it into skyscraper-filled Guangzhou. For a lot of people not building housing is an important priority in their life that they will fight for." Which is totally reasonable . You or I may not like it, or disagree with it, or work against that idea, but it's incorrect to claim that incumbent property owners (anywhere) protecting their perceived…

As I've said before here, it's a totally reasonable thing to desire , if you're an incumbent, but we should be totally unsympathetic to it, anyway.

I'm not really seeing why I should be sympathetic to those trying to go in and drive out the people already there.

Re: How Much Housing Will Be Built?

#82

Post by davidw »

st3v3r wrote: post #80
davidw wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You might equally ask why the tech industry feels the need to be stuck so tightly to SF when it's far more amenable to remote work than most industries. This pops up in every thread about housing. The answer is that there's still a ton of value in being in the same place as other people. Stuff happens faster. Ideas are more easily shared. Spontaneous ideas are born. Of course at a certain point, having to pay someo…

And because of that, people who were already living there should have to move away?

If they bought in, they don't have to. If they had got their act together 20... 40 years ago and got rid of some of the NIMBY stuff causing so many problems there, that would have helped too. If there were enough housing, no one would "have to" move away.

But no, in most western countries, there is no right to live in a city just because you currently happen to live there. If you want to live in an inclusive place with room for everyone, you have to ensure that the right policies are in place. If it's something you care about, you should get involved with these people: https://twitter.com/sfyimby

Re: How Much Housing Will Be Built?

#83

Post by kbenson »

ulfw wrote: post #76
kbenson wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I find amazing is Tokyo. Tokyo, 1945, burned to the ground Perhaps that's the reason why everything works? It was all rebuilt much more recently. Also, to my understanding the Japanese culture doesn't place the same value on historical structures [1][2]. It's much easier to secure right-of-way when there is less importance placed on the actual locations or buildings, or when it's expected it will be torn down…

What 'historical structures' are there in Silicon Valley? The place was a bunch of orchards that were later burned down to make place for random ugly office parks. Let's be honest here.

There are portions of Silicon Valley with quite a bit of history (relatively speaking, as the West coast is fairly recently developed compared to the East coast, much less Europe). For example, San Francisco. See who comes out of the woodwork if you try to replace a chunk of Victorian style homes (the "Painted Ladies"[1]). San Jose has its own historical areas[2], as does Palo Alto[3]. I'm not saying our veneration of our history through structures is necessarily a bad thing, just that if your new city improvement project conflicts with one, you'll likely have a fight on your hands.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Painted_ladies

2: https://www.sanjoseca.gov/Index.aspx?NID=126

3: http://www.cityofpaloalto.org/gov/boards/historic/bldgs.asp

Re: How Much Housing Will Be Built?

#84

Post by ssalazar »

mickrussom wrote: post #18

The bay area. The best, brightest, smartest, pedigreed, hardest working most motivated people on earth. And we cant solve the simplest problems in the Maslow's hierarchy. American Indians solved the housing problems with Teepees and Wigwams - so much for being "smart." There was an article recently where a google employee was living in a 24 ft truck in the google parking lot. This Bay Area mess is a self inflicted jo…

> The best, brightest, smartest, pedigreed, hardest working most motivated people on earth.

Silicon Valley has the brightest minds in software engineering, which is great for building the world's most advanced ad-serving network or behavior tracking. Software is easy. The Bay Area's housing and infrastructure issues require political, social, economic, and engineering management fluency; these problems will not be solved by software engineering. These problems will not be solved by "disruption." These problems are hard.

> And we cant solve the simplest problems in the Maslow's hierarchy.

Maslow's hierarchy seems focused on individual psychology. Solving these problems for 7 million people with different values, cultures, and perspectives is not "simple."

> American Indians solved the housing problems with Teepees and Wigwams - so much for being "smart."

Yeah with a few orders of magnitude lower population and a drastically different standard of living. This is a ridiculous over-exaggeration.

> Tokyo, 1945, burned to the ground, population 3.5 million.

Throwing it away and completely starting over might be the easiest way to fix a metro area's infrastructure issues. But to your point there are also very significant cultural differences between CA and Japan; the present debacle can be blamed in a large part on CA's endemic cultural values.

Re: How Much Housing Will Be Built?

#85

Post by dionidium »

st3v3r wrote: post #81
dionidium wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I've said before here, it's a totally reasonable thing to desire , if you're an incumbent, but we should be totally unsympathetic to it, anyway.

I'm not really seeing why I should be sympathetic to those trying to go in and drive out the people already there.

Imagine two extremes, as an illustration:

1. In one city, incumbents rule. Their property values rise to a level that keeps everyone else out. They make all the rules. They were there first and they win. It's theirs and outsiders should respect that.

2. The second city is open to anyone, always changing. Incumbents cannot expect gains by virtue of having been first. Everyone there has the same expectation of benefiting from the city as anyone else. Anyone in the country is free (and able) to make a life there, if they choose.

I know which city sounds better to me. I know which one sounds like it benefits the most people, for the longest amount of time.

Of course incumbents prefer #1. Of course.

But, so what?

Re: How Much Housing Will Be Built?

#86

Post by davidw »

tamana wrote: post #69
raldi wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't need to turn into Guangzhou. We could cut housing prices in half by increasing the supply by 30%, and we could do that by replacing 6% of the city's single family houses with six-story apartment buildings. The other 94% could be left alone, and we wouldn't have to build anything else. Details: https://reddit.com/comments/4lwg49/h/d3qnrsb

You can't try to cut prices in half withoit a story for the people who are going to lose have their investment in real estate (including tax payments on unrealized gains) or they will fight you on it. You need a way to move the windfall profits to the people crushed by regulation changes.

Realistically, all that building is not going to happen overnight, and likely it'll only be enough to stabilize prices, rather than radically drop them.

Re: How Much Housing Will Be Built?

#87

Post by rsync »

natrius wrote: post #60
rsync wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... a strong desire by incumbents to keep the place the same and not turn it into skyscraper-filled Guangzhou. For a lot of people not building housing is an important priority in their life that they will fight for." Which is totally reasonable . You or I may not like it, or disagree with it, or work against that idea, but it's incorrect to claim that incumbent property owners (anywhere) protecting their perceived…

Sorry, it's morally bankrupt. Four middle class families spend more on housing than most Bay Area single-family homeowners. If it were legal for those families to live in a four-plex, they'd outbid wealthy families for that land. The wealthy pay cheaper prices by using the law to prevent people with less money from bidding against them. The wealthy can't actually afford the idyllic single-family neighborhoods they cl…

"Sorry, it's morally bankrupt. Four middle class families spend more on housing than most Bay Area single-family homeowners. If it were legal for those families to live in a four-plex, they'd outbid wealthy families for that land."

Yes, I also wish I had a pony.

Re: How Much Housing Will Be Built?

#88

Post by raldi »

davidw wrote: post #86
tamana wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't try to cut prices in half withoit a story for the people who are going to lose have their investment in real estate (including tax payments on unrealized gains) or they will fight you on it. You need a way to move the windfall profits to the people crushed by regulation changes.

Realistically, all that building is not going to happen overnight, and likely it'll only be enough to stabilize prices, rather than radically drop them.

Indeed; my point was more that even if we decided to build so much new housing that prices fell by half, it still wouldn't bring us anywhere close to Paris, much less Manhattan or Hong Kong.

Since realistically we're probably not going to do even that, fears of Manhattanization are completely unfounded.

Re: How Much Housing Will Be Built?

#89

Post by enf »

foobarqux wrote: post #61
enf wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? The model is nothing but rent=demand/supply with an attempt to figure out what weights go on these parameters. What would you do differently? (Author of blog post here.)

Unrelated: Why is the wages coefficient negative and large in your regression?

I think you're reading it backwards. The coefficients are the exponents that follow the parameters. The large negative one is the housing supply, because prices go down as more housing exists.

Re: How Much Housing Will Be Built?

#90

Post by enf »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #72
enf wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? The model is nothing but rent=demand/supply with an attempt to figure out what weights go on these parameters. What would you do differently? (Author of blog post here.)

It may be that it's just not obvious what the individual rent values are in the model, and that they do go down when the supply goes up. The only numbers visibly shown in the model are the number of units, the tax revenue, and the number of "affordable units"; the model doesn't display the expected distribution of rents, or the actual threshold for "affordable". As a result, it's hard to see how the parameters actual…

Oh, sorry, I thought you meant my (price) model, not the Berkeley (production) model!
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