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Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence

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Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence

#71

Post by gnashville »

baron816 wrote: post #9

Why 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 popu…

Even with increased density, the bay area's freeways and transit systems are already jammed up. All those people would have a hard time getting anywhere.

Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence

#72

Post by codemac »

johan_larson wrote: post #11
bllguo wrote: post #2

So 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 !

Zoning laws. And existing owners who staunchly oppose increasing density by building larger buildings. A lot of people who bought their single-family homes years or decades ago now live in appealing low-density neighborhoods with home values that are sky-rocketing. They don't want their neighborhoods to change into concrete canyons, and the ever-rising values of their homes fund their retirements very nicely. They th…

The people who bought their houses 30+ years ago I really feel for. The change the area is experiencing is brutal, and imagine if everyone just kept asking you why you don't sell and move away from the very place you built?

It's futile for them to fight things, and honestly it ruins a lot of people's lives that they do. However I completely understand why they would push back on density, most people don't have to deal with growth at these types of numbers over their lifetime.

Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence

#73

Post by Futurebot »

xienze wrote: post #17
hx87 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like many other problems in California, this one can be largely traced back to a single source: Proposition 13

Which was created to combat the problem of grandma kicked out of her house because she can't afford her property taxes. How do you get around that?

A compromise solution is to give people fully-paid relocation / temporary housing (e.g., putting them up in a hotel room), then guaranteeing them an apartment in the new housing development at their old price. Very small price to pay for a potentially massive number of units.

Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence

#74

Post by shaftway »

Johnny555 wrote: post #15
baron816 wrote: post #9

Why 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 popu…

I think it's because they are so attached to their cars, and more density brings more traffic. Especially when starting with a low-density neighborhood that's poorly served by transit and everyone that lives there is tied to their car. Places like NYC, London, and Paris have great public transit systems, it's easy to live there without a car, but much harder to do that in spread out Silicon Valley, even if you live n…

Regarding the crime issue, high density of people paying $3000/mo for an apartment attracts crime from outside the immediate vicinity. You've basically put a good amount of wealth in one place, and added more people. That makes crime more likely to be lucrative, identification harder, and escape easier.

Also, I know construction in my area has significantly impacted traffic. I leave for work before 7 AM, so I don't see it as badly, but when I leave at 8 AM, my typically 15 minute ride to the BART station can take over an hour. Most of the traffic is spillover from parents dropping kids off at school. I shudder to think of what it'll be like next week after school is out.

Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence

#75

Post by dragonwriter »

skewart wrote: post #33
dragonwriter wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, I know the reason is to prop up the value of their homes Yes, but not in the way you expect, which is why your comparison fails. In many cases, its not to prop up the market value of their homes, but the features of the community which supports the personal value they place in their homes: its "I live here, and I'd like to keep it the kind of place it is that led me to choose to live here".

The desire to keep a city looking the same as it was decades ago does seem to be a powerful motivator for a lot of anti-housing people. It's always seemed a little perverse to me. Cities are dynamic, constantly changing organisms. Trying to keep a city from changing over decades is like forcing a 9-year-old kid to wear diapers and sleep in a crib because you liked the way it was as a baby and you never want it to cha…

> Cities are dynamic, constantly changing organisms. Try to keep a city from changing over decades is like forcing a 9-year-old kid to wear diapers and sleep in a crib because you liked the way it was as a baby and you never want it to change.

Well, except that cities, even if viewed as "organisms", aren't people, they serve people, and its quite natural for people to want them kept in the state that they feel best serves their interests.

Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence

#76

Post by johan_larson »

pjlegato wrote: post #32
adrianratnapala wrote: post #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…

Construction workers already cannot remotely afford to compete in the Santa Clara / SV housing market, and they haven't been able to for a very long time. Construction work is also short-term and temporary in character. That is not the issue. Not everything that happens is a hidden plot against the long-suffering proletariat by the evil, scheming bourgeois. The issue is what happened in Mountain View with Google, and…

You'd think at some point salaries would climb high enough -- driven by housing costs -- that it stopped making sense to hire people in SV. But that hasn't happened yet, at least not for programmers.

Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence

#77

Post by archagon »

hx87 wrote: post #66
archagon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any argument that boils down to "grandma should move to make room for the techies" lacks perspective and will never gain any political traction. Moving is not just something you "do" after building a life somewhere for 40 years.

As I mentioned, she doesn't have to 'move' except in the most technical sense--she can take house a home equity loan (made possible by the house's appreciation) and convert her house into an apartment by adding another floor or converting a garage or by demolishing the house and building an apartment block in its stead. She can continue to live in one of the units, probably the first floor, and benefit from a reliabl…

Speaking as a "technie" myself, I feel no one really addresses the undercurrent of entitlement to live in the city. Maybe I'm wrong, but I get the sense that a lot of the housing discussion in the tech community boils down to "but... I really want to live in SF for cheap". From what I understand, it's very common for programmers to live in the (very expensive) city and commute down to the South Bay for work. That's not a pattern borne out of necessity.

Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence

#78

Post by zardo »

dragonwriter wrote: post #67
pj_mukh wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's gotta be a way to economically make a lack of density untenable. Urban sprawl is a threat to the environment, we talk about charging a tax on Carbon, what about on Urban Sprawl? P.S: Not saying a carbon tax is the best idea, but urban sprawl (like carbon emissions) have a negative impact on the environment but zero impact on maximizing capital gains. They two must be tied somehow.

> Urban sprawl is a threat to the environment, we talk about charging a tax on Carbon, what about on Urban Sprawl? A carbon tax (as long as cars use energy derived from sources covered by a carbon tax, whether that's fossil fuels directly or electricity produced in some share by burning fossil fuels) is a tax on urban sprawl, since urban sprawl forces longer trips and less-fuel-efficient transportation.

Although it's only a major tax on the commuters, those that live in the area that needs more housing don't have any reason to change their behaviour.

Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence

#79

Post by hx87 »

pjlegato wrote: post #68
nwah1 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that taxes on land value have no deadweight loss, unlike all those others. And property taxes fall heavily upon land values.

The question was simply about how it could be guaranteed that grandmas can't be priced out of their own houses in conditions of sharply rising property values, not about optimal tax structure in general.

Quite simple, really--allow grandma to take full advantage of rising property values by adding apartment units to her existing house.

Re: Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence

#80

Post by Futurebot »

archagon wrote: post #77
hx87 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I mentioned, she doesn't have to 'move' except in the most technical sense--she can take house a home equity loan (made possible by the house's appreciation) and convert her house into an apartment by adding another floor or converting a garage or by demolishing the house and building an apartment block in its stead. She can continue to live in one of the units, probably the first floor, and benefit from a reliabl…

Speaking as a "technie" myself, I feel no one really addresses the undercurrent of entitlement to live in the city. Maybe I'm wrong, but I get the sense that a lot of the housing discussion in the tech community boils down to "but... I really want to live in SF for cheap". From what I understand, it's very common for programmers to live in the (very expensive) city and commute down to the South Bay for work. That's n…

You chase everyone out it means:

- Service workers (everything from baristas to cops to teachers) either disappear or have to deal with punishing commutes

- Brain drain. When even people making a decent salary get pushed out, it's bad for cities (http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/05/26/silicon-valley-e...)

- Many people believe living in the place one was born/grew up in should be a right. That's a value difference. Markets do not get to dictate everything if we don't allow that.

Luckily, the market does have a solution to the housing problem itself: build a lot more of it, and prices will drop.

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