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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

#231

Post by [deleted] »

weeksie wrote: post #84
marcell wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, sirs and ma'ams, your home's price appreciation isn't a right Doesn't increased density help property values? If I can build a high rise on your 1 acre plot of land, its value should go up.

Depends! Increased density should drive up the price of land. However, if you are in a neighborhood of single family homes and a huge multi family building is constructed on your block, your home price will go down because there will be enough supply to meet demand, taking pressure off the single family homes. If you are in an already dense city and regulations are relaxed so that more high rises can be built in more…

[deleted]

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

#232

Post by jonny_eh »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #173
rmk wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pl…

> 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). I'd put this more on the Bay Area's low population than on the geography.

Plus the myriad of municipalities that all want a say. It's no coincidence that the BART doesn't go all the way down the Peninsula, stopping just before Burlingame. The rich homeowners there didn't want the SF riff-raff coming to their town, therefore commuters are stuck with the Caltrain.

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

#233

Post by ojbyrne »

nerfhammer wrote: post #162
ProfessorLayton wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While there's no denying there's a strong bias towards property owners, it doesn't have to be this way. Renters can and should vote to change policies to favor them. SF is 63% renters! It is unfortunate that the most disenfranchised demographics are the ones least likely to vote/organize.

72% of renters have rent control and thereby have the primary reason to care removed

That seems unlikely - would love to see a citation.

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

#234

Post by dublinben »

TomVDB wrote: post #217
sabarn01 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You own your land not the conditions that surround that land.

That is true, and nobody claimed otherwise. But I can have the desire for the conditions to stay the same.

We have a way for you to express that desire. You can buy the surrounding properties and keep them exactly the same.

See Zuckerberg's purchases in Palo Alto for example.

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

#235

Post by njarboe »

An amazing amount of land opened up in the Bay Area that could have been used for housing developement with the closing of many military bases (The Presidio, Treasure Island, Alameda Naval station, Concord Naval Base, Hunters Point) and the closing of salt production in the South Bay. While a few of these areas are finally seeing some construction[1] 20 years later, the density is often low and the amount of acres set aside for green space seems excessive to me. Treasure Island, for instance, is 465 acres with 300 of those acres as parks. Cargill handed over 15,000 acres of salt ponds to state and federal agencies for wetland restoration in 2002. No housing planned. For comparison all of San Francisco is 30,000 acres.

[1]https://www.bisnow.com/san-francisco/news/construction-devel...

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

#236

Post by traytonwhite »

TomVDB wrote: post #226
CyberDildonics wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not clear here, do you own a townhouse or do you own everything you can see from the townhouse? You don't like the 'look' of 'ugly' building? I guess you better save up for the neighboring lots.

You buy a house in a nice neighborhood with nice single family houses and well kept gardens and very little traffic. You like it that way. You pay a lot for that. You don't like it when some of those houses are replaced by an apartment complex. What is there not to understand?

The part where the person thinks they have some right to tell others what to do with their properly-zoned property while simultaneously refusing to pay for that right?

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

#237

Post by stevenwoo »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #75

Someone who recognizes the opportunity to develop tech centers between the coasts is going to cash in big. Zappos and Tesla seem to have had their fingers on that pulse by settling in the Reno/Sparks area.

Maybe Amazon HQ2 will revitalize somewhere new, but it seems like some of the areas still on the list have pretty horrendous traffic problems now.

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

#238

Post by cjensen »

njarboe wrote: post #235

An amazing amount of land opened up in the Bay Area that could have been used for housing developement with the closing of many military bases (The Presidio, Treasure Island, Alameda Naval station, Concord Naval Base, Hunters Point) and the closing of salt production in the South Bay. While a few of these areas are finally seeing some construction[1] 20 years later, the density is often low and the amount of acres se…

Salt ponds being turned into natural wetland is a HUGE win for the environment, particularly water quality and fisheries. Being entirely mud, they are literally the worst place to build in an earthquake-prone region.

"Affordability" just means a balance between jobs (which produce people needing housing) and the supply of houses. There are TWO ways of fixing supply and demand problems like that. It is insane that the city of Cupertino has allowed the construction of offices for 26K jobs but only has housing for 58K people. It is insane that Mountain View has allowed the construction of offices for 30K jobs but only provided places for 77K people to live. Those two cities and others collect all the sweet revenue and burden the rest of the Bay Area with costs of housing and commuting.

Rather than insisting that cities must build housing, we should insist they balance jobs and homes. I'm angry that my home town, Fremont, had a plan to reserve space for both homes and jobs, but is forced by the state to accept home construction and we have no money to build the schools needed to accommodate the new population.

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

#239

Post by jdtang13 »

shifter wrote: post #186
saosebastiao wrote: post #175

The entire current population of the bay area (~9M) would fit within 165 of the 10,000 square miles of the CSA, if built at Parisian densities. That is less than 2% of the land. This is what boggles my mind: despite such a minimal land requirement, nobody in the entire fucking region will budge. Put it somewhere else, they say. It has become a game of musical chairs where nobody gets up for the next round. State inte…

Or, as the calculus on living in the Bay Area shifts [0], top tier talent starts to direct itself elsewhere. This stems growth in the Bay Area since founding successful companies in lower cost areas will be possible, housing investment slows as a result of that, and the market naturally cools down a bit [1]. [0] Don't fool yourself into thinking that only people without the income or capital to live well in the Bay A…

It's not really about tech companies, although the tech companies don't help. Contemporary conversation about Bay Area housing always makes it sound like some impossible dream that is hampered by hordes of techies. It seems to me that most of those concerns are red herrings; it's actually about zoning, local opposition, and government incompetence. The other HN comment ITT summarizes it pretty well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16970532

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

#240

Post by TomVDB »

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

Yesterday's headline: "Alphabet median pay close to $200k" https://www.investopedia.com/news/googles-alphabet-median-pa...

Those are not all executives and high-paid lawyers.

One of the biggest reasons why a 1300 sq.ft. house in Sunnyvale now sells for $2M is because a lot of engineers are perfectly capable of paying for it.

In my tract, 5 houses out of 35 have changed owners in the past years (it's a neighborhood with lots of first owners who are now in their eighties). I've talked to all the newcomers.

Without exception, they are dual income engineering families who work for Google, Facebook, Apple and some other tech giants.

That's $400k income per year and plenty to cover a $1.725M 30 year 4.1% mortgage payment of $8500 per month.

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