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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

#81

Post by pjlegato »

johan_larson wrote: post #76
pjlegato wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They believe (rightly or wrongly) that the added costs are worth the benefits from the network effect of being in the region, around lots of other tech people.

Many of them are starting to build satellite offices in other places.

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

#82

Post by vonmoltke »

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?

If it was primarily to protect those on fixed incomes, why does the cap also apply to commercial and non-owner-occupied property?

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

#83

Post by archagon »

Futurebot wrote: post #80
archagon wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 differ…

Will highrises and density bring rent down? I think it's been shown that the number of houses needed to actually do that is enormous. In practice, what's likely to happen is that the city will fill up with even more of the well-off. (That is to say, people working in tech.) In a decade rent might come back down, but by then all those groups will be long gone anyway.

Personally, I don't have any vested interest SF housing, as it's really not one of my favorite cities. But I keep thinking of what I would do if this was happening to a city I did actually love and live in, and I think in that situation I would be more sympathetic to the NIMBYs than the newcomers. I don't think there's any moral imperative for cities to keep growing.

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

#84

Post by ojbyrne »

jandrese wrote: post #25
johan_larson wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is also one of the big reasons California can have such an enormous theoretical tax base, but still manage to run a massive deficit. You can bet there would be more pushback on those skyrocketing home values if people had to pay the taxes on them. Its too late for a lot of people in the valley, they couldn't afford to pay anything close to what their homes current access at. It is the epitome of Got Mine, Fuck You…

While the point is somewhat valid, California hasn't had a budget deficit (let alone a "massive" one) since 2012.

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

#85

Post by Vraxx »

dragonwriter wrote: post #75
skewart wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I think this metaphor might actually be able to be stretched a little more. Even as an organism purposed only to serve us, the fact that us humans change means that we're likely to be better served by something that can change with us. Just because you liked it as a baby and think it is best able to suit your needs as it was, doesn't mean that it won't be better suited to serve your needs as a functional adult.

I think people are afraid of change, not because they know it is not in their best interest, but mostly because they aren't sure, so the status quo seems to be the safer option. It's why humans are averse to change in a lot of scenarios, we sometimes have a little bit of trouble with the long term perspectives.

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

#87

Post by sigusr1 »

archagon wrote: post #45
hx87 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She can take the payout and buy some place more affordable, perhaps even an apartment in the building that replaces her house. Not the best outcome for her, I'm sure, but beats the hell out of starving municipal and state governments of revenue, broken infrastructure, and forcing everyone else to pay extortionate rents and mortgages just to live there. If the law allows it and the regulatory compliance costs are low…

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.

I feel like any solution that thinks supply and demand shouldn't affect housing is missing some sort of perspective itself.

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

#88

Post by hx87 »

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…

It is a necessity, because the rest of the Bay Area has even higher housing costs--at least the parts that aren't subject to terrible commutes, which are in large part caused by Proposition 13 starving governments of revenue. They don't want to live in SF for cheap, but they do want to live in SF for not-soul-crushingly-sums-of-money. Wanting to live where you work is certainly not an entitlement, at least not more than wanting your neighborhood to look the way it did 30 years ago forever and ever.

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

#89

Post by mc32 »

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…

Also because they were there "first". That goes for suburbanites as well as gentrifying creatives, as well as the poor people creatives displaced and the subsequent hipsters and then the professional types who flood the streets with thousand dollar strollers.

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

#90

Post by raldi »

xienze wrote: post #5
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 !

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?

Places like this: http://missionlocal.org/2016/01/community-meeting-on-new-sf-...
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