> new housing wouldn't be needed Bay Area housing supply has been growing less than demand for the last 30 years. New housing is needed, regardless of who is employing whom.
California building codes are pretty extreme from what I've seen, they go as far as measuring the pull force required to open a door for example. This seems like a place where a little deregulation would go a long way.
That's a nice idea, but this is a region where the ground you build on is your enemy.
One way to make this better is to support the plan to inline the Capitol Corridor and ACE trains with Caltrain via the unused and abandoned Dumbarton rail bridge [0]. Make sure to tell your elected officials you support this. [0]: http://www.greencaltrain.com/2017/08/dumbarton-corridor-stud...
I wonder what they're doing in other parts of the world where the population is much larger?
This isn't an issue of tech companies forcing anyone out. Bay area municipalities and NIMBY property owners have created a hostile regulatory environment for property developers, leading to a lack of new housing coming onto the market and driving rents upward.
True, but new housing wouldn't be needed if there wasn't such a high influx of people moving into the Bay area. Sure tech isn't the only player in the game, but they're surely one of the biggest. If less people were moving there for high paying jobs - rent wouldn't rise as quickly or as drastically.
Google tried to build housing in the bay area for their employees, and were denied permits by the municipality.
While the rising cost of housing is an easy target, why not put the pressure on the companies that are driving the influx of workers and out of control cost of living? If tech companies are drawing people into cities and forcing out those who keep the city itself operating, why not have them subsidize and improve public transportation? Lower income housing? Encourage more remote work or move their headquarters out of…
Just yesterday I was commenting here on this very situation, but she has already moved her home out of the city in search of less expensive rent. She really should find a job out of the city as well. If the highly paid workers in the city want to buy coffee or sandwiches or whatever, they can pay prices that reflect the true cost of living in the city and not some indirect subsidized price.
Liberals like to talk big about the public transportation, but when it comes time to deliver they follow the unions' script that results in exuberant costs (to build the system and to run it) and extremely poor performance. And as a result the average folks and the poor suffer the most.
I'm not sure if you've ever been to Europe before, where the liberals (and even the conservatives) do public transit right.
While the rising cost of housing is an easy target, why not put the pressure on the companies that are driving the influx of workers and out of control cost of living? If tech companies are drawing people into cities and forcing out those who keep the city itself operating, why not have them subsidize and improve public transportation? Lower income housing? Encourage more remote work or move their headquarters out of…
This isn't an issue of tech companies forcing anyone out. Bay area municipalities and NIMBY property owners have created a hostile regulatory environment for property developers, leading to a lack of new housing coming onto the market and driving rents upward.
That's not the full story. Commercial property is much more profitable for a city than housing, so every city in the peninsula is trying to build office space, and trying to offload the cost of actually housing those new workers onto other cities. The tax code needs to be fixed to realign incentives. One proposal I heard was to make it so that the state shares the income tax of the employees that live in the city with the city. That might disincentivize low income housing, though.
If a municipality decides to open 100 seats of office space, they should be required to zone and approve 100 beds for said workers to sleep in. Otherwise you have the situation where towns like Brisbane can build office complexes for the tax revenue and entirely pass the buck to their neighbors for the cost of housing the new workers.
While the rising cost of housing is an easy target, why not put the pressure on the companies that are driving the influx of workers and out of control cost of living? If tech companies are drawing people into cities and forcing out those who keep the city itself operating, why not have them subsidize and improve public transportation? Lower income housing? Encourage more remote work or move their headquarters out of…
...because these companies can just go somewhere else that won't pressure them, so when cities are faced with a billion dollar tech campus or none at all they often feel like they have to bend. Cities often even cut taxes to see big companies come into town. Capitalism will always win against public infrastructure.
It's not really "winning" so much as finding an economic equilibrium (unless that's what you mean by "capitalism"). I think the problem here is the regulation that prevents the construction of new homes. If you remove that artificial barrier, housing costs could decline. Alternatively, the municipalities could tax the real estate developers who are profiting from the regulation, but if you can get that resolution to pass muster then there probably wouldn't be any regulation to begin with.
> new housing wouldn't be needed Bay Area housing supply has been growing less than demand for the last 30 years. New housing is needed, regardless of who is employing whom.
California building codes are pretty extreme from what I've seen, they go as far as measuring the pull force required to open a door for example. This seems like a place where a little deregulation would go a long way.
Building codes aren't the problem, it's zoning. If a developer had an empty acre in SF or Palo Alto, or permission to replace low rise housing with skyscrapers, they'd build.
The cost of building probably does have an effect on the margin, but it is so much less of a factor than restrictions on what can be built.