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The Shame of Palo Alto: An Interview with Kate Downing on Affordable Housing

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Re: The Shame of Palo Alto: An Interview with Kate Downing on Affordable Housing

#151

Post by narrator »

No owner of an oil company wants to live next to a refinery. No owner of an auto plant wants to live next to the plant. In the Industrial era, owners wanted to live far away from where the work was done because it was ugly and polluted. This created the suburban pattern and cheap housing close to work for workers. This is basically Oakland.

Rich Tech entrepreneurs, executives, highly paid programmers, and VCs want to live close to the tech "factory" and they want it to be a nice place. They don't care where everyone else who works there lives, just as long as they don't screw up their nice neighborhood with excess traffic, pollution and density.

It's as simple as that. All this stuff about economic policy and zoning laws and the general decline of western civilization is a whole lot of overanalyzing, IMHO.

Re: The Shame of Palo Alto: An Interview with Kate Downing on Affordable Housing

#152

Post by crdoconnor »

eigenvector wrote: post #137
pif wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which city-state are you talking about, if I may ask?

Most likely Singapore: http://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/181599/ad...

Singapore's house prices have rocketed over the last few years and are getting less and less affordable as a consequence of ZIRP, immigration and dirty Chinese/Indonesian money looking for a safe haven.

The government the subsidies are graded depending upon whether you're newly weds, new immigrants who chose citizenship, age, if you have children, income, etc.

Re: The Shame of Palo Alto: An Interview with Kate Downing on Affordable Housing

#153

Post by Noseshine »

mchaver wrote: post #102
hkmurakami wrote: post #3

It seems that we made a pact with the devil by positioning housing as an investment asset. By doing so, we've encouraged people to commit a very large fraction of their net worth into a rather illiquid asset, tying their financial fates to the future assessment of that asset. As a result, protecting the price and appreciation of this asset has come to overshadow the other crucial roles that housing plays in our socie…

Which countries do you think handle housing well? Any references would be appreciated.

I myself know little about the subject, but since I followed the discussions I noticed the Singapore has been mentioned several times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore

    > The majority of the residential housing developments in Singapore are publicly
    > governed and developed. As of 2013, 80% of the resident population live in such
    > accommodation.
It's been an often used example because it is a market economy, no use pointing to a "socialist" country because nothing unexpected if they let government take care of housing.

I can only point to this example though, since it always seems to come up in these discussions, I cannot evaluate it.

EDIT: Aaaand it's come up in this thread too. Just search for "Singapore" to find the comments.

Re: The Shame of Palo Alto: An Interview with Kate Downing on Affordable Housing

#154

Post by Noseshine »

crdoconnor wrote: post #152
eigenvector wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most likely Singapore: http://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/181599/ad...

Singapore's house prices have rocketed over the last few years and are getting less and less affordable as a consequence of ZIRP, immigration and dirty Chinese/Indonesian money looking for a safe haven. The government the subsidies are graded depending upon whether you're newly weds, new immigrants who chose citizenship, age, if you have children, income, etc.

Question - not arguing, I don't know the subject well: Are house prices relevant for this discussion? According to Wikipedia [0] 80% of the resident population live in Public housing in managed by the Housing and Development Board (HDB). Wouldn't house prices only be of concern to the other 20%?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore

Re: The Shame of Palo Alto: An Interview with Kate Downing on Affordable Housing

#155

Post by pjmorris »

ScottBurson wrote: post #40
StanislavPetrov wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It seems that we made a pact with the devil by positioning housing as an investment asset. That was certainly a mistake, but the much larger mistake was made (and continues to be made) by the FED (and other central banks at the FED's insistence). FED efforts to prop up the housing and equities markets through QEinfinity, Operation Twist, the FOMC, and countless other FED mechanisms designed to prop up markets (and o…

> If not for FED chicanery, housing prices would fall precipitously to meet real demand. Maybe in some places, but I don't think that would happen in Silicon Valley. As the article says, the population of Palo Alto doubles during work days. A lot of those people would rather live there than commute from wherever. Silicon Valley is not a creation of the Fed.

Right. It's a creation of the DoD [1]. The Fed just supplies the extra money for VC's and home loans.

[1] https://steveblank.com/secret-history/

Re: The Shame of Palo Alto: An Interview with Kate Downing on Affordable Housing

#156

Post by EliRivers »

Noseshine wrote: post #154
crdoconnor wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Singapore's house prices have rocketed over the last few years and are getting less and less affordable as a consequence of ZIRP, immigration and dirty Chinese/Indonesian money looking for a safe haven. The government the subsidies are graded depending upon whether you're newly weds, new immigrants who chose citizenship, age, if you have children, income, etc.

Question - not arguing, I don't know the subject well: Are house prices relevant for this discussion? According to Wikipedia [0] 80% of the resident population live in Public housing in managed by the Housing and Development Board (HDB). Wouldn't house prices only be of concern to the other 20%? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore

Of that 80% who live in HDB flats, the ownership rate is not zero percent - it's 95% [0].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore#Ow...

Re: The Shame of Palo Alto: An Interview with Kate Downing on Affordable Housing

#157

Post by davidw »

prostoalex wrote: post #84
vadym909 wrote: post #29

I'm surprised that none of the YCs startups have tried to solve this problem. People really want 'affordable housing' and YC's motto to its startups is to 'make something people want'- so what gives?

Does the problem scale beyond Palo Alto and San Francisco? Do residents of Topeka or Detroit have similar issues with housing affordability?

Yes: California is exporting a steady stream of people to Oregon, which displaces locals and irritates some people. We're not building fast enough either and may simply not have the capacity, short term.

Re: The Shame of Palo Alto: An Interview with Kate Downing on Affordable Housing

#158

Post by dekhn »

lindenksv1 wrote: post #111
dekhn wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean, "allow people to build housing on land that they own". What land? The cost of building housing in PA is marginal to the land costs.

You can only build multifamily housing in 3% of the city. It's illegal everywhere else. You can't build more than 3 stories in most places - it's illegal. The supreme cost of housing here comes partially from the fact that you can only build a tiny number of units on land that could otherwise hold much more. So you split the cost of land among, say, 5 condos, and not 20. If you're paying 1/5 of the cost of the land a…

I'm fine with increased density housing in the peninsula. But, this is mainly going to help developers (who are already rich). You'd have to build skyscrapers not multifamily units to address this problem (the area is intensely hot).

Again, my only beef is on the $150K quote from your interview (and your requirements for "walkable to downtown" and "kids can bike on the street"). I think your argument would be much stronger if you backed off on that, and cited a more reasonable compromise (living 30 minutes from PA).

Re: The Shame of Palo Alto: An Interview with Kate Downing on Affordable Housing

#159

Post by dekhn »

lindenksv1 wrote: post #111
dekhn wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean, "allow people to build housing on land that they own". What land? The cost of building housing in PA is marginal to the land costs.

You can only build multifamily housing in 3% of the city. It's illegal everywhere else. You can't build more than 3 stories in most places - it's illegal. The supreme cost of housing here comes partially from the fact that you can only build a tiny number of units on land that could otherwise hold much more. So you split the cost of land among, say, 5 condos, and not 20. If you're paying 1/5 of the cost of the land a…

Palo Alto traffic is already really, really dense. Building a lot more housing, even if it's close to downtown/transit, is going to increase traffic tremendously. In addition to building this housing, the city would need to improve its road throughput. This probably would have to include removing the various one-way barriers in the city that currently preclude optimal traffic flow.

Re: The Shame of Palo Alto: An Interview with Kate Downing on Affordable Housing

#160

Post by Retric »

mjmahone17 wrote: post #95
Retric wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Local government costs also go up as population increases.

The relationship is not usually linear, though. With density comes efficiency in services. Though some of that efficiency is eaten by the additional cost of doing the work.

Not really teachers are linear with population size. An overpass is vastly more expensive than a stoplight and still cheaper than a subway system.

So, yes for small changes to population size a city need not spend more an can simply degrade services slightly, but doubling population size quickly gets really expensive.

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