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Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

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Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#471

Post by mikeash »

ghaff wrote: post #465
mikeash wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like if you want to control what gets built on a certain parcel of land, you should own it. If you want to keep those apple orchards around, make a better offer when a developer tries to buy them out.

As a practical matter that means no one except the very richest could live anywhere and have any control over arbitrary construction happening next door or their neighborhood as a whole. There’s plenty of precedent throughout history of groups taking collective actions based on the will of the majority.

Why should a person have any control over arbitrary construction happening in their neighborhood?

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#472

Post by pjmorris »

nerfhammer wrote: post #381
AndrewBissell wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The runup in real estate prices is fundamentally driven by the huge amounts of money printing by the Fed earlier this decade. The Bay Area has just been the canary in the coal mine on this because the strong job growth and self-injurious housing policies caused the price pressures to show up earlier than elsewhere, but it will become an undeniably nationwide phenomenon soon enough. High real estate prices & rents are…

Why do you need this indirect theory when much simpler numbers like the disparity between increase of population and lack of increase in housing units are available?

What's indirect about the link between money supply and prices?

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#473

Post by nerfhammer »

AndrewBissell wrote: post #458
nerfhammer wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need this indirect theory when much simpler numbers like the disparity between increase of population and lack of increase in housing units are available?

Because there's not the same dynamic at work in other metro areas, like those cited, where real estate prices are also ramping higher.

Are you sure? Have you looked at population growth vs. housing growth in those areas, or how restrictive the zoning is?

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#474

Post by taysic »

CalChris wrote: post #148
oldsklgdfth wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related to prop 13 that is also how golf courses in cali metro areas are able to exist, despite taking up huge swaths of land and having very few members. There was a revisionist history episode on it: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/11-a-good-walk-spoile...

That’s because Prop 13 applies to commercial real estate as well because corporations are people too.

Wow. That makes sense. That explains why so many seemingly infrequently visited businesses still have storefronts in Berkeley. I always wonder how they stay in business. I thought perhaps commercial rent control.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#475

Post by FireBeyond »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #259
whack wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In which of the above 3 categories would you put the Google/Facebook/Apple employees making 200-300k+ per year? I can't speak towards family living, but as a single person willing to live with roommates, you can find pretty nice places in the heart of Silicon Valley for ~$1000/month. Now add in compensation-packages well over 6 figures, brand-name companies for your resume, networking locally with other great enginee…

I paid about $1000/month to rent a house with 3 other roommates in college when you added up all the utilities and bills such, it's surprising to me that you can get a nice place in SV for that! ...oh wait, you mean $1000/month PER PERSON? Ha, no. In Kansas, you can pay $1000/month to own that whole house.

And then you have to find someone willing to rent a $4K/mo property to four college kids...

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#476

Post by captainbeardo »

I grew up in the Bay Area and got a feel for the tech sector up there. People always throw around the "network" argument out there for why they decided to move up. Truth is you can get just as much networking in if you move to an emerging tech hub along with positioning yourself better by more easily establishing yourself/buying cheaper property. I'm looking at you Portland, San Diego, and Denver.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#477

Post by TheCoelacanth »

slezakattack wrote: post #423
cobookman wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After interest deductions on mortgage & property taxes a 1 mil home is ~4000$/month in `rent`. Yes you'd be paying more than 4k but you'd also be taking home more money as well.

I just described a home that is $100k less than the $1MM example. The property tax rate in San Jose is roughly 1.3% of the price of the home you bought it at. So for $1MM, you're looking at $13k in property taxes, not to mention a higher mortgage overall from my example. A quick mortgage calculator tells me that we're adding another $400/mth for the $1MM example. This doesn't include the second mortgage which will ro…

> So, you're telling me that the $1MM home (which will be roughly $5600/mth) will give you nearly $20k in tax deductions

Something like that.

Federally, local property taxes and mortgage interest on the first $1 million of principle for first and second mortgages for your primary residence are deductible from your income. For California, the rules are slightly different, but I think that they are close enough to use the same rules for estimation purposes.

Using the interest rates from your example that would be a deduction of 4.5% * $800k + 6.5% * $100k = $39.7k for the mortgage interest deduction and roughly $12.5k for the property tax deduction for a total deduction of $52.2k. If you can afford a million dollar house, you are probably in either the 28% bracket or the 33% bracket for federal taxes and in the 9.3% bracket for California taxes so that will save you $14.6k-$17.2k on federal taxes and $4.9k on California taxes.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#478

Post by WalterSear »

wavefunction wrote: post #439
tezzer wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I still won't be able to see my kids awake because of a 1.5 hour commute each way, but I'll be able to read the newspaper on the way to work? No thanks.

@Walter Sounds like a terribly inefficient and unsustainable lifestyle. Commuting just for stand up?

Commuting to collaborate with other people face-to-face for half the day.

How is this inefficient, unsustainable?

It provides the combination of private work and group interactions that are parcel of most white collar jobs. The vehicles will be electric, and many will probably spending any idle time at solar farms, to save on energy distribution costs, if they aren't being used as private offices. It is going to allow people to live where the want, and still do they work they want to.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#479

Post by ScottBurson »

lisper wrote: post #399
mixmastamyk wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of space, too many NIMBYs. Just heard a lady in my neighborhood in L.A. complaining about the development of a parking lot and crackhouse into a modern apartment building. Didn’t even bother to argue, sometimes the divide is too great.

And what exactly is wrong with NIMBY-ism? Not everyone likes living in dense cities. I don't see anything wrong with groups of people who prefer to live in less dense development working together to create less dense places to live. The problem is that there are (as I said) more people who prefer to live in less dense development than there is space to accommodate them all. At that point, the market takes over and de…

As long as enough high-rise apartments actually get built somewhere, this is fine. The problem is, the NIMBYs are broadly distributed, and tend to fight such construction everywhere.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#480

Post by captainbeardo »

mabbo wrote: post #78

It seems ironic that the land of self-aggrandizing free market disruption (Uber, AirBnb) seems so against the obvious free-market solution to their problems: increase supply. You have too little of something, and it's causing prices to skyrocket because demand is increasing. So make more of it, reducing the price. I just got back from a visit to the Bay Area. Outside of SF itself, not a single building over 4 stories…

When driving through south bay I noticed several buildings with red rope in place of where they would have another story or two on the building. Turns out the bay area has very strick rules around building too tall and disrupting flight patterns of birds. Probably one of many reasons they haven't built massively upward.
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