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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

#251

Post by kelnos »

ajross wrote: post #81
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.

That's true, but potentially not enough. The fraction of the population that is renting now is still (by definition in the case of a hot market!) much smaller than the fraction of the demographic that wants to move to the area and needs to be served by a just housing policy.

As a renter who has lived in the bay area for 14 years (last 8 in SF), my interests absolutely align with those of the newcomers who want to move into the area or city. I would love for more supply which would lower the rent I pay, and also make it more financially safe for me to purchase property.

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

#252

Post by closeparen »

epistasis wrote: post #11
coding123 wrote: post #3

And the freeways can support this how?

We really need to stop assuming that people are going to make heavy freeway use, and permit more scalable transit. Run BART the short way between SF and SJ, build many clusters of high density along heavy transit routes. Let the current freeway dependent population continue to use them, but build housing so that people can get to jobs without using single-occupancy passenger cars.

>Run BART the short way between SF and SJ

That sounds miserable. Caltrain has much more reasonable rolling stock (i.e. with seats) for that trip.

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

#253

Post by BurningFrog »

sabarn01 wrote: post #165
TomVDB wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most current home owners have no interest in selling to a developer or developing ourselves. We just want to continue live in conditions that were present when we bought it: a nice house with a garden on a quiet street. Yes, that is selfish, but I'm not going to apologize for not wanting an apartment complex next door. That said, I'm not going to vote against a state level politician who wants to relax zoning laws to…

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

The problem with the SF and the Bay Area is that home owners actually have fairly strong ownership rights to the land surrounding their home. At least in the sense of being able to stop anything being constructed there.

You can think of it as an interesting experiment in collective land ownership.

I'm using "own" meaning "control" here.

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

#254

Post by acchow »

noir_lord wrote: post #156
sampo wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Btw, European Union lets every resident vote in local (city and town) elections. Only for the parliamentary and presidential elections, you need to be a citizen to vote.

Yep, I'm English in England, partner is here Hungarian, she can and does vote in local elections.

Hungary is EU tho. What if you're not an EU citizen?

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

#255

Post by digianarchist »

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…

California tried and failed to pass legislation recently.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/04/26/606151956/cali...

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

#256

Post by BurningFrog »

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…

There is an enormous amount of room to build in the Bay Area. The constraints are political, not physical.

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

#257

Post by kelnos »

api wrote: post #208
ScottBurson wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A complete repeal is politically impossible, but there are two changes that should be made. One, as mentioned above, is to restrict it to owner-occupied residences only. The other is to change the 2% annual increase limit from a limit on the amount of tax assessed to a limit on the amount due in a given year. If the assessed tax exceeds that limit, the locality would receive a lien for the difference, this lien becom…

Personally I think we should just go for the first one, which is why I didn't mention anything else. Proposition 13 limits should be for owner occupied residences only. This would go a long way to fixing the financialization of real estate problem, which is an often under-discussed contributing factor. You'd get a lot less resistance there. You're not messing with cost of living for owner occupied homes, just second…

As a renter, that would be very painful for me, as my landlord would simply pass the cost of higher property taxes directly to me. (My building isn't subject to rent control.) For buildings subject to rent control, I would expect this would just cause landlords to spend less on improvements to the properties.

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

#258

Post by kelnos »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #213
pound wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it a declared right to keep a home in the family? Also why new homeowners not inheriting it are supposed to be paying property taxes in full?

If we're against someone being priced out of their home by taxes, wouldn't we also be against homes being priced out of families by taxes too?

Why? I'm totally fine with a measure that helps keep fixed-income residents in their homes when property taxes would otherwise eat them alive. I see no reason why we need to keep that property tax burden affordable when that resident passes away and the property goes to their heirs, who presumably already live somewhere else, paying taxes they can afford. If they can't cover the newly-assessed property tax on their relative's residence, then they should sell it and stay where they are.

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

#259

Post by kelnos »

TomVDB wrote: post #240
debt wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right, and the parent was specifically pointing out that it's unsustainable to pay that median (the parent used $500k as a made-up but plausible future value).

I'm pretty happy with the salary that I make as a SF-dwelling/working software developer, but I recognize that it's absolutely insane when compared to same-industry salaries in locations with less ridiculous housing markets.

At some point, companies are going to throw in the towel and decide it just doesn't make financial sense to pay their employees that much just for the privilege of being located in the bay area. Then the jobs move away and you end up with a local recession. This will be hard to do initially for companies sized like Google or Facebook, but a ton of smaller companies can open offices elsewhere and slowly transition staff away. They're already doing it, even.

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

#260

Post by cwkoss »

762236 wrote: post #145
pascalxus wrote: post #92

I know we'd all love to fix the bay area housing problem here. The most obvious answer is to increase the supply. But, fixing the zoning laws and allowing developers to build isn't the only thing that's standing in the way. The problems are too numerous to fix: NIMBYs sueing developers, CEQA, Proposition 13, AND don't forget about the underlying labor cost (all our middle class people's aren't going to come back, aft…

For another city to be a plausible substitute for Silicon Valley, it needs California's moonlighting-protection law. Without that, you can't reproduce this environment.

First I've heard of that law, why do you think it is so fundamental?
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