81–90 of 187 posts
I think everyone's realizing that the solution to various housing crisis is to build more homes for all income levels. Artificially manipulating prices via rent control mechanisms; or only building homes for a specific income level doesn't work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apparently not, because 97% of the NIMBYs are winning.
The instant you sign a mortgage it becomes in your economic best interest to limit the supply of housing. Housing cannot simultaneously be affordable and a good investment. Homeowners on average tend to be more politically engaged, so homeowners dominate state and local politics. As for why every prosperous state doesn't have this problem as badly as California you can add prop 13 which hugely limited property tax in…
Not always. Being able to flip a single family to a developer who is going to build multifamily is often the best return on your investment. The more confidence the developer has that their proposed building will be approved, the higher the price you can get for your lot.
My experience in driving through California's interior doesn't jibe with that headline. When I stop for lunch or a break I like to check out the local real estate scene and its often the case in these cities that there are many houses and other living accommodations available at modest prices. Hard to imagine a city like Mojave not meeting it "goal". Of course if you limit yourself to cities of 1 millions residents o…
So, a couple of questions: 1. What do you consider modest prices ? 2. What exactly do you do to check out the local real estate scene ? Because I recently left California to get off the street after moving around California a bit in search of affordable living and doing like 3 years of research, and my point of view and yours are so not on the same page, they aren't even in the same book.
Modest is $150K to $200K for a home. I get there this way; At a salary of $48,000 / year (take home $38,753) and allocating a bit less than a third of the take home to paying the mortgage that is about $1K/month or, at current interest rates a $150K - $200K house. $48K/year is about 60% of the median salary in California.
As far as checking out the scene I look at things like how many days on the market for properties that are for sale, infrastructure (markets, transportation, nominal weather, services, crime statistics, Etc) all the kinds of things that I normally would check if I were moving there.
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You look at, say, Fresno and there are properties for sale under $200K (although that's below the median of $300K+). I assume those are not the most attractive places but they certainly exist. That's the 5th most populous city in California so it's not exactly the middle of nowhere.
> "... not exactly the middle of nowhere." Anecdotally, a of my friend moved from the Bay Area to Fresno and explicitly claims it's in the middle of nowhere.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The instant you sign a mortgage it becomes in your economic best interest to limit the supply of housing. Housing cannot simultaneously be affordable and a good investment. Homeowners on average tend to be more politically engaged, so homeowners dominate state and local politics. As for why every prosperous state doesn't have this problem as badly as California you can add prop 13 which hugely limited property tax in…
> The instant you sign a mortgage it becomes in your economic best interest to limit the supply of housing. Not always. Being able to flip a single family to a developer who is going to build multifamily is often the best return on your investment. The more confidence the developer has that their proposed building will be approved, the higher the price you can get for your lot.
You profit from this, but at the expense of your neighbors. Imagine the opposite scenario where all over your neighbors do this, but you're the single hold out. Would your home be worth more, less, or the same with twice (or more) the number of people living on the block? Obviously, we don't really know, but the holdout is likely fearful that their property value would go down dramatically.
You can see why people who have $1,000,000 mortgages don't want to see the value of their house fall to reasonable levels, because they'd be the ones taking the six-figure bath.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's unlikely the parents pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits like free schooling for their kids . I think it's a mistake to assign the educational benefits people receive (whatever age they are at the time) to their parents.
I think it's valid considering it's usually parents who pay for their children's schooling if it wasn't free. The benefit here is monetary, not academic.
The first major hurdle is obtaining approval from a Design Review Board consisting of 5 elected board members who subjectively determine if the project is "neighborhood compatible". Even while complying with all zoning requirement for setbacks, building height and envelope, lot coverage, environmental impact, etc, and not requesting any variances, most projects stall here, some for years. The board convenes monthly and invites public participation and comments, and if there is opposition either from board members, or neighbors, you're in a very long and arduous process in getting approval. Common complaints are mass and scale, incompatible architecture, view blockage, noise pollution, excessive glazing, color choices, and the list goes on.
When/if you get through design review, you're then off to coastal commission and building and safety for more review and approvals, and eventually building permits if you make it through it all. The entire process will take many years, and potentially 10s or 100s of thousands in expenses before you even break ground. This is for a single residence - I can only imagine the hurdles and expense for a multi-unit project. So I understand and agree with the state attempting to legislate a reduction on the restrictions and roadblocks that local municipalities impose on residential construction.
This little bit of political sparring was my favorite part of the article: >SB 827, Wiener’s bill to mandate increased density near public transit, was recently the subject of a spat on Twitter between the Senator and former Beverly Hills mayor John Mirisch. Mirisch began his tirade by calling the bill “a bizarre combination of Soviet-style master planning with raging crony capitalism…the urban planning lovechild of…
I've noticed a common talking point among anti-development types is to assert that changing zoning to allow denser housing translates to mandating denser housing, which is obviously ridiculous.
The part about increasing density near public transit was interesting. It's true that high density is a must to make public transit viable. However, I presume there is little vacant land near public transit. In that case, a mandate to increase density would be telling people to demolish and rebuild with higher density than what's there. If that's the case then the comparison to Putin might be justified - and perhaps…