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97% of California Cities Failed to Meet State Housing Goals

thebaycitybeacon.com

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Re: 97% of California Cities Failed to Meet State Housing Goals

#131

Post by hardtke »

Sinnesloschen wrote: post #113
jread wrote: post #88

I've been attempting to get building permits for a small personal residence in a So Cal coastal town for nearly 3 years. The experience dealing with the city has felt very adversarial. The sense I have is that the city and most neighbors don't want new construction, and in that spirit put up as many roadblocks, opposition and red tape as possible to slow you down, and in many cases stop you through attrition. I've se…

You could carefully review your local ordinances, if your allowed to make "improvements" to your house. You could theoretically tear down an entire house with the exception of a single internal wall. Then build you to your desire what you wish around this existing wall. Once enclosed, repair or accidentally knock over said wall and continue building. It's not as nice a starting fresh but it gets around a lot of the s…

This is very common in California because under this scenario your house is not reassessed for prop 13 property tax purposes. Your cost basis only goes up by the dollar value of the improvements (which you can easily understate). If you do a complete teardown, the county reassesses at current market value. A lot of people leave the chimney up because you get the added benefit of getting grandfathered on the air quality ordinances.

Re: 97% of California Cities Failed to Meet State Housing Goals

#132

Post by CptFribble »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #124
ChuckMcM wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both fair questions. 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…

Thank you. My experience has been that people who are more comfortably well off than I am are not really looking very closely at the details of homes when they survey the lower end homes. I have had conversations with people who claim there is tons of affordable housing and they pull up some low priced listing in Detroit, a city in such a state of crisis that a woman created a non profit to pay water bills there. I h…

Thank you for your very detailed thoughts. In your experience, are the barriers to small, good quality, affordable homes mainly market dynamics, or do housing codes and local regulations play an outsized role as has been mentioned in other comments?

Re: 97% of California Cities Failed to Meet State Housing Goals

#133

Post by DoreenMichele »

Joe-Z wrote: post #92
DoreenMichele wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in Fresno for more than 2 years. I spent a lot of time doing research on the internet. I was willing to move anywhere within California where I could afford to buy a house and where I could make my life work without a car. This means, no, it can't be some cabin in the middle of nowhere where you have to drive for an hour to get to a grocery store. I would still be interested in the OPs answer. I wasn't just liv…

May I ask where you ended up? If you're uncomfortable sharing the city, state would be fine. But: Where are the walkable cities in the US? I (coming from Europe) travelled on the East and West coast and both times was astounded by how much US living relies on having a car. I'm myself pretty anti-car-ownership by now, but I think this is much easier to do in European cities.

I am in a small town in Washington state, maybe a couple of hours from Seattle. It doesn't have everything I want, but I am off the street and my life is slowly coming together here.

One of the reasons I ended up here: I had no problem arranging to get here affordably and efficiently via train and intercity bus. Many of the small towns I researched in the western half of the US were a case of "Good luck trying to get there!" and/or would have cost a great deal more just to get there, on the order of two to three times what it cost me for train and bus tickets to get here just for tickets. And the reality is that if you travel for a couple of days or so, you want the sleeper car if possible or to stay at a hotel at some point, etc. Thus,the places that are that hard to get to wind up having additional expenses involved in just getting there.

An additional benefit of that is that I don't feel trapped here. If I want to go somewhere for any reason, whether for travel or to move again, getting out of here without a car is not some intimidating obstacle. I can readily get on an intercity bus and go to a variety of places in this region. I haven't looked into it, but I imagine it would not be too hard to get to the Seattle Tacoma International Airport and, from there, out into the world.

I was a military wife for a lot of years. I like living within a couple of hours of a major city and a major airport. I have not flown in years, but I have friends and family all over the planet and I always keep it in mind that I might need access to the ability to seriously travel.

Many years ago, I previously lived in Richland, WA and its downtown center was fairly pedestrian friendly as well. I don't know how easily you could get there without a car. It did not make my radar for where to go to get off the street.

Re: 97% of California Cities Failed to Meet State Housing Goals

#134

Post by dragonwriter »

phkahler wrote: post #25

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…

> However, I presume there is little vacant land near public transit.

Redevelopment is a thing that happens, and removing barriers to redevelopment for densification will encourage such development compared to the status quo ante.

Re: 97% of California Cities Failed to Meet State Housing Goals

#135

Post by rsync »

maxsilver wrote: post #123
rsync wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I think everyone's realizing that the solution to various housing crisis is to build more homes for all income levels." Of course this is correct. However, it is also correct that many, many of these are badly mischaracterized as "crises". It is not a crisis that you cannot afford to live in Aspen. It is not a crisis that you cannot afford an apartment in the very specific neighborhood in the very specific borough o…

> It is not a crisis that you cannot afford to live in Aspen It is a crisis if you work in Aspen and can not afford to live in Aspen. > It is not a crisis that you cannot afford an apartment in the very specific neighborhood in the very specific borough of New York City that you prefer. It is a crisis to work in NYC and are not be able to afford to live in NYC, which is real situation that actually exists for many pe…

"It is a crisis if you work ..."

No, it's not. It's very inconvenient, certainly. Further, it is completely incompatible with many very fashionable life scripts.

However it is trivially solved in any number of different ways (relocation, downsizing, commuting, etc.) and is therefore not a crisis.

A starter home in a downscale neighborhood and a second job were, at one time, life scripts that were enthusiastically embraced as the necessary rungs on the ladder into the middle class. It is hard to believe that a generation later these actions are "unthinkable" and evidence of a "crisis".

Nobody owes you living in Aspen.

Re: 97% of California Cities Failed to Meet State Housing Goals

#136

Post by DoreenMichele »

CptFribble wrote: post #132
DoreenMichele wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. My experience has been that people who are more comfortably well off than I am are not really looking very closely at the details of homes when they survey the lower end homes. I have had conversations with people who claim there is tons of affordable housing and they pull up some low priced listing in Detroit, a city in such a state of crisis that a woman created a non profit to pay water bills there. I h…

Thank you for your very detailed thoughts. In your experience, are the barriers to small, good quality, affordable homes mainly market dynamics, or do housing codes and local regulations play an outsized role as has been mentioned in other comments?

Government policy, tax incentives, zoning codes, and financing mechanisms are a very large part of the problem. This is not just local. It goes all the way up to the federal level.

I wanted to be an urban planner before life got in the way. I have formal education and have done a lot of reading related to this. It is not an uninformed opinion.

Re: 97% of California Cities Failed to Meet State Housing Goals

#137

Post by marcell »

sheepmullet wrote: post #21
marcell wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. The parents of those children contribute to the economy and pay taxes, and by deporting them you are harming the local economy, and also reducing your tax base. Thus the gain will be less than $1200/yr. 2. Some of the kids of unauthorized immigrants are US citizens, if they were born in the US, so your number 12.3% is not accurate. That is the number who's parents are unauthorized. Edit: According to the source yo…

> The parents of those children contribute to the economy and pay taxes It's unlikely the parents pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits like free schooling for their kids. And at the same time by working here they illegally decrease wages and jobs for the most marginalized Americans. > Some of the kids of unauthorized immigrants are US citizens They wouldn't be here in the first place if we enforced our imm…

> They wouldn't be here in the first place if we enforced our immigration laws.

A couple things to consider:

1) This is a nit pick, but remember that many of these children likely have a parent who is a green card holder or US citizen, and another parent who is an unauthorized citizen.

2) More importantly, these children are here, and they are citizens. You can't (or at least, modern societies should not) retroactively revoke citizenship. There are two separate questions here: first is how do we handle/regulate immigration into the country, and second is what do we do about people who are already here? These are related but separate issues. Figuring out how to educate children of unauthorized immigrants is part of the second question.

Edit:

> Not with current levels of funding they [children of unauthorized immigrants] won't [become doctors and lawyers]

It takes time. The America dream works across multiple generations. Studies show that 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants have much higher income than their parents: for example the median income goes from $45k to $58k from 1st to 2nd generation [1]

[1] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/02/07/second-generation-...

Re: 97% of California Cities Failed to Meet State Housing Goals

#138

Post by DoreenMichele »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #91
DoreenMichele wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lived in Fresno. A lot of the stuff under $200k is a trailer, possibly a trailer in a seniors only retirement community. I don't consider trailers fit for habitation and my two adult sons still live with me. This is part of why I want details. I need a house under $100k. After looking at what that kind of money buys in Cali -- anywhere in Cali -- and looking at what it buys outside of Cali, I eventually concluded i…

I can see that you're facing challenges that put you in an untenable situation. And no, I haven't seen any place in California that has any sort of public services and employment prospects and housing where you own the house and land for under $100K.

Thank you.

I don't even need employment prospects. I have alimony and I make my money online. So that wasn't even a factor, and, no, it didn't fly in Cali.

Re: 97% of California Cities Failed to Meet State Housing Goals

#139

Post by amyjess »

gyrgtyn wrote: post #97
amyjess wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Houses under $200K in Bakersfield, CA: https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Bakersfield-CA/3506_ri...

The two best suggestions are Bakersfield and Fresno (edit: or the middle of unincorporated desert LOL) You're telling OP to live in hell and it still costs more than they can afford.

Per Wikipedia [0]:

> Between 1970 and 2010, Bakersfield grew 400% (from 70,000 to 347,483),[33] making it one of the fastest growing cities in California.[17]

It can't be too much hell if so many people want to live there that the population quadrupled in 40 years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakersfield,_California

Re: 97% of California Cities Failed to Meet State Housing Goals

#140

Post by dsfyu404ed »

Sinnesloschen wrote: post #113
jread wrote: post #88

I've been attempting to get building permits for a small personal residence in a So Cal coastal town for nearly 3 years. The experience dealing with the city has felt very adversarial. The sense I have is that the city and most neighbors don't want new construction, and in that spirit put up as many roadblocks, opposition and red tape as possible to slow you down, and in many cases stop you through attrition. I've se…

You could carefully review your local ordinances, if your allowed to make "improvements" to your house. You could theoretically tear down an entire house with the exception of a single internal wall. Then build you to your desire what you wish around this existing wall. Once enclosed, repair or accidentally knock over said wall and continue building. It's not as nice a starting fresh but it gets around a lot of the s…

This only works if you're in a nice neighborhood or well connected. If you're in a part of town that "the powers that be" see as a stain on the rest of the town it usually doesn't work out.
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