Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence
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Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence
#2So how does the process of adding housing units work? If there's space as the article claims, and plenty of demand, whats holding things up? Bureaucracy?
I'd like to see reasonable prices sometime in my life !
Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence
#3That's been called the "jobs-housing imbalance" since the 1980s.
Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence
#4So how does the process of adding housing units work? If there's space as the article claims, and plenty of demand, whats holding things up? Bureaucracy? I'd like to see reasonable prices sometime in my life !
This is a complex question, but here are some resources to get started:
http://www.lao.ca.gov/reports/2015/finance/housing-costs/hou...
Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence
#5So how does the process of adding housing units work? If there's space as the article claims, and plenty of demand, whats holding things up? Bureaucracy? I'd like to see reasonable prices sometime in my life !
Well that valley has pretty much every bit of flat land developed, so where are you going to put these high density developments without knocking down existing houses?
Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence
#6i went to school with a lot of wealthy kids from the bay area.
they and their families simply do not want to develop the area any further, in order to keep housing as high as possible and the area exclusive as possible. in private conversation they talk about it openly.
personally i don't think it's much more complicated than that.
Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence
#7So how does the process of adding housing units work? If there's space as the article claims, and plenty of demand, whats holding things up? Bureaucracy? I'd like to see reasonable prices sometime in my life !
Well that valley has pretty much every bit of flat land developed, so where are you going to put these high density developments without knocking down existing houses?
Allow residents of those existing houses to add additional floors, convert garages, add a granny flat, et cetera. Large parts of Boston consist of nothing but 3-story, 3-unit apartments, often with a live-in landlord, and it's quite dense.
Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence
#8i went to school with a lot of wealthy kids from the bay area. they and their families simply do not want to develop the area any further, in order to keep housing as high as possible and the area exclusive as possible. in private conversation they talk about it openly. personally i don't think it's much more complicated than that.
Like many other problems in California, this one can be largely traced back to a single source:
Proposition 13
Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence
#9Why are people so adamantly opposed to density? Well, I know the reason is to prop up the value of their homes, but if you think about places like New York, London, and Paris, that argument doesn't exactly hold. Those cities are incredibly dense and expensive, but people love living there enough to pay the high prices. People who can live anywhere choose to live there. I'm willing to bet that SV could triple its population, and property values would hold or increase. Supply will create it's own demand.
Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence
#10> The really strange thing is that the city's officials aren't being irrational.
As Yglesias is well aware, the city officials are only being rational in a very narrow sense.
A building project can only create as many jobs as it can pay for -- and the workers must be payed enough to buy or rent places to live. What lies behind the claim that it will "create too many jobs" is that the construction workers will compete in the housing market against people that the officials want to protect.
And even that "protection" is only coherent within a mindset where it is somehow evil to build new things, or else the stock of accomodation could be increased.