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To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

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Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#121

Post by debt »

sampo wrote: post #25

Just quoting the last paragraph. This is the kind of honesty people need. > Intellectual honesty requires taking numbers seriously. Either we prioritize making the Bay Area affordable for all of us or we don’t. The less housing we build, the more wealth will be trapped in high housing prices. Unless we decide to grow our housing stock to accommodate our economy, we are continuing to choose the interests of those who…

That's correct; the numbers don't lie.

The future of the Bay Area will be outsourcing lower waged jobs that also includes software engineers, QA staff, administrative, etc. to other areas of the state or country where cost of living is less expensive. It's already happening, just ask around.

Again, because the value turned around by SWE peeps etc. for tech companies has an actual cap. You can't pay a QA/SW engineer $500k/year just so they can afford live in the Bay Area. They'd have to be one hell of a QA/SW engineer if that was the case. I just don't think it's worth it for tech companies at some point.

After all that happens, the jobs left here will be primarily managerial; c-level execs, product managers, business analysts etc.

Those too, if the housing situation doesn't improve, will be outsourced to lower cost of living areas as well.

Again, it's inevitable given the numbers.

Much of the wealth being generated in this area is being sunk back into real estate. The high wages in tech in the Bay Area are high because they're subsidizing a corrupt housing market.

Eventually the only people left in the Bay Area will be executives and really high-paid lawyers.

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#122

Post by InclinedPlane »

rb808 wrote: post #8

Because big dense cities like NY are affordable?

Yes, very. NYC isn't just Manhattan, it also includes the other boroughs like queens, brooklyn, and the bronx. Areas that are within commuting distance by public transport of basically anywhere else in the entire city. This is light years different from the situation in SF.

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#123

Post by weeksie »

rmk wrote: post #117
weeksie wrote: post #38

Just a reminder that the growth rates for SF, SV, Seattle, Portland are all pretty puny compared to the growth rates of, e.g. Detroit at its peak. Hell they're not even that crazy compared to growth rates those cities have handled before. People just aren't interested in any perceived threat to their property values so they're strangling growth based on an entitlement mindset. No, sirs and ma'ams, your home's price a…

There are some key differences between Detroit and the Bay Area ( http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=San+Francisco-Oakland-F... ): 1. Less room to spread out in the Bay Area. Detroit does not have many high-rises, and as far as I can tell, it has had a large number of single-family dwellings condemned/abandoned etc. during the recession. Also, Detroit is in a seismically stable zone. 2. Large number of incoming peo…

1. This is not the issue. If it were, suburban low density Palo Alto would be absorbing new people at a fine clip. The problem is the lack of building.

2. This is much closer to the heart of it. Local politics allows homeowners to veto good housing policy in the interest of protecting their investments. However, Detroits expansion had nothing to do with the unions lobbying for housing policy, there just wasn't much in the way of zoning laws and people built where there was demand.

In any case, the only thing that's going to fix the housing crisis over there is zoning reform. Believe me I feel your pain, I live in Manhattan. At least we're doing some building, though not nearly as much as we should. If it were up to me all (most) of the three story sixpacks in Bushwick would be bulldozed for six story tenements.

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#124

Post by rconti »

chroem- wrote: post #119

The housing crisis is fundamentally a transportation problem. The bay area has intentionally made it impractical to own a car, so everyone is forced seek housing within walking distance of a limited number of public transit lines. The "war on sprawl" and lack of affordable housing are two sides of the same coin.

Owning cars is quite practical in the bay area. You might argue that COMMUTING in a car is impractical, but then again, I just commuted 20 miles down 101 in the heart of silicon valley in under 20 minutes this morning, so, I don't know.

I'd say relatively few people commute on the limited number of public transit lines you say everyone has to live near.

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#125

Post by api »

debt wrote: post #121
sampo wrote: post #25

Just quoting the last paragraph. This is the kind of honesty people need. > Intellectual honesty requires taking numbers seriously. Either we prioritize making the Bay Area affordable for all of us or we don’t. The less housing we build, the more wealth will be trapped in high housing prices. Unless we decide to grow our housing stock to accommodate our economy, we are continuing to choose the interests of those who…

That's correct; the numbers don't lie. The future of the Bay Area will be outsourcing lower waged jobs that also includes software engineers, QA staff, administrative, etc. to other areas of the state or country where cost of living is less expensive. It's already happening, just ask around. Again, because the value turned around by SWE peeps etc. for tech companies has an actual cap. You can't pay a QA/SW engineer $…

> Eventually the only people left in the Bay Area will be executives and really high-paid lawyers.

I don't think that's sustainable. This is called working your way so far up the supply chain that you pop off the top and fall out.

Eventually the entire supply chain below you collectively asks the question: "Why are we paying these people? What do they do anyway?" Then the supply chain starts looking for ways to wiggle out from under you.

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#126

Post by rconti »

austincheney wrote: post #76

If 60,000 people continue to move from there to Texas every year then 20 years from now when the area has lost over a million residents the housing prices might well flatten organically. This madness is causing housing prices to climb in Texas though.

"Everyone" has been fleeing California for as long as I can remember (and long before myself, my family, and most of my friends all moved here).

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#127

Post by rmk »

weeksie wrote: post #123
rmk wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some key differences between Detroit and the Bay Area ( http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=San+Francisco-Oakland-F... ): 1. Less room to spread out in the Bay Area. Detroit does not have many high-rises, and as far as I can tell, it has had a large number of single-family dwellings condemned/abandoned etc. during the recession. Also, Detroit is in a seismically stable zone. 2. Large number of incoming peo…

1. This is not the issue. If it were, suburban low density Palo Alto would be absorbing new people at a fine clip. The problem is the lack of building. 2. This is much closer to the heart of it. Local politics allows homeowners to veto good housing policy in the interest of protecting their investments. However, Detroits expansion had nothing to do with the unions lobbying for housing policy, there just wasn't much i…

Yeah, I think the way the 5 boroughs are organised is great for New York. People who are okay with high-density housing flock to Manhattan and those that want to have suburbs, leafy streets and green lawns stay in Long Island, West Chester etc. The key enabling factor is the (now decrepit) public transportation system. The Bay Area, again, has nothing like it (once again, possibly due to the crazy geography of the place).

But New Yorkers beware. The Subway is at risk of being destroyed by idiot Cuomo. It's already leagues behind London (which does it cheaper and better), not to mention Tokyo and others.

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#128

Post by chrischen »

chroem- wrote: post #119

The housing crisis is fundamentally a transportation problem. The bay area has intentionally made it impractical to own a car, so everyone is forced seek housing within walking distance of a limited number of public transit lines. The "war on sprawl" and lack of affordable housing are two sides of the same coin.

Forcing people to live near transit is a good thing. The problem is thebat are doesn’t allow building dense hosuing near transit lines (common sense!) and so very few people can actually let people live near transit.

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#129

Post by TomVDB »

lazyjones wrote: post #108

It's the same all over the world. Politicians seem to have too close ties with developers and real estate investors and they put unhealthy zoning laws in effect to drive prices into absurd regions and boost tax income as well. People should contact their representatives and ask them to change this. It worked in Span (admittedly, they overdid it), it would work anywhere. Unfortunately, there's no easy workaround for t…

Are you sure that the zoning laws are driven by developers and real estate investors?

In most Bay Area cities, they are the wishes of the residents who do not want more development.

My neighborhood in Sunnyvale was recently rezoned to be single story only and that process is entirely driven by the residents, not the politicians. It was the 25th neighborhood in Sunnyvale to do so, and it cost around $200 per resident to file an application. No a single resident was against it.

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#130

Post by rubicon33 »

m0llusk wrote: post #79

What is often missing from this discussion is financialization of housing markets. As long as housing units are chips for a game among banks and wealthy patrons it is not clear we will be able to build enough homes to satiate artificially inflated demand.

This. This. This. This. This.

Absent from the vast majority of these threads is the critical component in this "crisis":

Property can be purchased and held onto for purely speculative purposes, thereby draining the inventory pool, and raising the cost of housing for residents of the city.

This has been happening in the bay area for a very long time. Wealthy Chinese investors who do not LIVE in the bay area, have purchased an incredible amount of inventory over the last decade and it has remained vacant / unused.

Of course we need more building, that's obvious. But what we also need is to immediately disallow the purchase of land by foreign entities that is not used for habitation. I have yet to hear a constructive argument for why that shouldn't be banned at a constitutional level. Housing may not be a "right" per se, but it's certainly in the communities best interest to use available housing for that communities interest, not the interest of wealthy foreign investors.

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