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The Bay Area’s tech boom in historical and social context

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Re: The Bay Area’s tech boom in historical and social context

#101

Post by rdiddly »

TACIXAT wrote: post #93
rdiddly wrote: post #69

"It illuminates the basic crisis and contradiction of the San Francisco Bay Area, which is an example of capitalism at its most innovative and dynamic, and simultaneously the site of severe inequality and failing public policies and infrastructure." No contradiction there. Inequality was always both a feature and a bug of capitalism. Inequality is kind of the whole motivation for participating in capitalism. People s…

>If you make widgets for $4.50 and sell them for $5 each to a million people You've identified a want and delivered a product to a million people. What is the proper compensation for that? Should people not be allowed to identify wants and address them for profit? I think the error in your view is that any sale is predatory, when in reality both the consumer and seller can profit. One gains something they need or wan…

I'm not trying to outrage you, nor do I necessarily care what's "proper" or "allowed" or "right/wrong" since literally nobody making policy decisions is asking me about it anyway. I'm saying quite literally, and as blandly as possible given my way of talking (and even more blandly after an earlier edit), that in selling to people, you extract wealth from them, which creates wealth inequality. The more you do it, the more unequal it gets. Pretty straightforward, I thought.

Re: The Bay Area’s tech boom in historical and social context

#102

Post by nerfhammer »

dcldcl wrote: post #96
nerfhammer wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this also means that without prop 13 or something like it local homeowners would have every reason to try to keep housing prices at sane levels rather than trying to get them as high as possible, would it not?

What can a homeowner do to keep housing prices low? The only thing a homeowner can do is fight new development, but that isn't the only driver of cost. And depending on the area, fighting new development may not be all that effective.

Fighting new development is the cause of high housing costs in the first place, and they can stop doing that. The only possible way to solve a shortage is to add more of the things that there is a shortage of.

Re: The Bay Area’s tech boom in historical and social context

#103

Post by aphextron »

almost_usual wrote: post #79
aphextron wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can't force people to move this way There's 49 other states in this country where that's exactly what happens every single day. Should the city of Palo Alto subsidize them, too? >Both sides are extreme, comprises need to be made to get anything through. This is just a false equivalence. Prop 13 is the extreme here. There's nothing even remotely comparable anywhere else in the country. Asking people to pay their…

>There's 49 other states in this country where that's exactly what happens every single day. Should the city of Palo Alto subsidize them, too? So there's 49 other states __you__ can move to and not deal with Prop 13? That's reality right now and if you're going to be headstrong that's how the community will respond to your reasoning.

>So there's 49 other states __you__ can move to and not deal with Prop 13? That's reality right now and if you're going to be headstrong that's how the community will respond to your reasoning.

Ah yes, and there's the classic "I got mine, so screw you" mentality of California. What a nightmare.

Re: The Bay Area’s tech boom in historical and social context

#104

Post by lern_too_spel »

slg wrote: post #78
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Barriers to movement causes an inefficient use of housing with respect to commutes and job sites. Someone locked in to a house in Mountain View with a job in SF cannot trade houses with someone locked in to a house in SF with a job in Mountain View - not without a huge increase in property taxes. The redistribution gets rid of a deadweight loss in commuting, easing traffic and transit congestion and allowing more hou…

Sure, but that is just a symptom of the overall problem. We aren't going to get anywhere by just treating the symptoms while ignoring the cause of the problem that there are more people than there are places for them to live.

Repealing Prop 13 also removes another impediment to increasing housing stock. People who already own property and don't feel the effects of quickly increasing property prices will vote against new development more often than people who have to pay higher taxes when property values go up.

Re: The Bay Area’s tech boom in historical and social context

#105

Post by dcldcl »

nerfhammer wrote: post #102
dcldcl wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What can a homeowner do to keep housing prices low? The only thing a homeowner can do is fight new development, but that isn't the only driver of cost. And depending on the area, fighting new development may not be all that effective.

Fighting new development is the cause of high housing costs in the first place, and they can stop doing that. The only possible way to solve a shortage is to add more of the things that there is a shortage of.

Having personally been a couple of city council/planning commissions meeting for a few SV cities, I can tell you the fight isn't always that effective. And the argument against aren't about money, it's about traffic, quality of life, character of the neighborhood, etc.

There are other forces at play when these decisions are made. City councils have an incentive to balance their budgets... they see commercial properties as revenue generators and residential neighborhoods as cost centers.

Look at all the commercial properties that have been built. Most of the larger ones also had substantial objections from the residential neighbors. But that didn't stop them.

Consider this: - If a city council (or whatever government body that allows/disallows development) is ultimately responsible to the voters... - If most of the (eligible) voters are the "have nots" who face scarce housing - Shouldn't this fix itself over time?

Yes, the model is more complicated that this, but I think you get the idea.

This is a long winded way of saying, it's not a case of existing homeowners vs not homeowners. There are other factors at play.

Re: The Bay Area’s tech boom in historical and social context

#106

Post by slg »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #104
slg wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but that is just a symptom of the overall problem. We aren't going to get anywhere by just treating the symptoms while ignoring the cause of the problem that there are more people than there are places for them to live.

Repealing Prop 13 also removes another impediment to increasing housing stock. People who already own property and don't feel the effects of quickly increasing property prices will vote against new development more often than people who have to pay higher taxes when property values go up.

That argument relies on somewhat circular logic. You say one cause is that home owners don't want new housing. You solve that by repealing prop 13 giving them a financial stake in the market value of homes. However, why would the home owners support that repeal if they are against new housing in the first place? Either the home owners are against new housing or they aren't. If your suggestion was a feasible solution to the problem, it would prove that that your proposed cause was not actually the cause of the problem.

Re: The Bay Area’s tech boom in historical and social context

#107

Post by omegaworks »

dang wrote: post #99
omegaworks wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we can't talk on here about how we have a President now that sees fit to strip away people's citizenship? https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/uscis-starting-denaturaliz... We can't talk about how he's rolling back promises to soldiers to score political points? https://apnews.com/amp/38334c4d061e493fb108bd975b5a1a5d How his DHS is conveniently losing documentation on children they've forcibly separated from their pa…

It isn't that we "can't talk on here", it's that threads are flameprone and vulnerable to initial conditions. If the initial condition is, say, a cheap swipe with 'fascist', the discussion is likely to flare into ideological battle. That gets the blood pumping but otherwise benefits no one. Overheated political rhetoric, such as your comment contains, isn't much better. All it generates is more of the same, from peop…

The initial conditions for this discussion were poor, granted, but these are real, tangible concerns. It's not something ideological or abstract for me when people fail to critique systems that can literally drag my friends away from their promising careers in science and technology.

The links I provided were substantiative evidence regarding the present administration's actions. I'll try to attach my substantiative responses to less flame-prone initial conditions in the future.

The tone I struck in the examples you cited was short, granted. I will do better.

Thank you for taking the time to respond.

Re: The Bay Area’s tech boom in historical and social context

#108

Post by sulam »

paulsutter wrote: post #84
sulam wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget older Californians, you can get priced out of your house just from property value increases in the last decade! Also keep in mind that there's no great system for appraising houses. As someone who has bought two houses and sold one, the appraisal system comes down to "can I find a few houses in this neighborhood that have roughly equivalent room count and square footage that have sold in the last 6 months." So…

Actually there are many ways of appraising houses, and they track the market pretty well (own multiple rental properties so I keep an eye on it) > here's no great system for appraising houses

To me a "great" system would be independently verifiable. As in, you appraise your house and you then find you can sell it within 5% of that number. This is not how it actually works, though. The appraisal is often spot on the offer you got for your house, because the appraiser clearly knows the number they need to hit for the loan to go through.

Maybe the system is great for some slice of the market, but for owner occupied detached homes it's pretty shitty.

Re: The Bay Area’s tech boom in historical and social context

#109

Post by sulam »

twblalock wrote: post #42
sulam wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget older Californians, you can get priced out of your house just from property value increases in the last decade! Also keep in mind that there's no great system for appraising houses. As someone who has bought two houses and sold one, the appraisal system comes down to "can I find a few houses in this neighborhood that have roughly equivalent room count and square footage that have sold in the last 6 months." So…

The problem is the last transaction might have been decades ago. This leads to some people paying several times as much property tax as their neighbors who own houses of similar market values, simply because their neighbors bought their homes years earlier. That's not reasonable. It also means you could sell your home, move across town into a home that costs the same as the one you sold, and your property tax could q…

Both of those things sound imminently reasonable compared to the alternatives, at least to me. Both of those things are a product of choices that a market-participant made. The alternative pre-Prop 13 was that a non-participant was financially affected by the behavior of their neighbors. In the scale of reasonableness, this is less reasonable than life under Prop 13.

Re: The Bay Area’s tech boom in historical and social context

#110

Post by sulam »

nradov wrote: post #85
sulam wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor people would be very surprised to hear that they all have washing machines. So would Laundromat owners. They may have TVs, but they can't afford cable so it's OTA only. And while they have a fridge, they can't afford food to put in it. Most importantly the cost for a place to put all these things is completely out of reach to anyone under the poverty line in the SF Bay Area.

You would be surprised how many poor people have cable TV. It may not be financially prudent but some think of it as a necessity.

That's true, cable TV is almost as common as refrigerators.
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