Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The answer to California's housing crisis is more housing

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 158 posts

Re: The answer to California's housing crisis is more housing

#41

Post by walshemj »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #16
mabbo wrote: post #4

You can't just demand more housing. You have to make people want it. This is why I'm strongly in favor of taxing land by area. A ten story condo with 100 units takes up as much land as 8 houses with yards. By reducing everyone's taxes then making up the difference via a land tax, you effectively lower the taxes on people using high density land use homes. You make it a more desirable lifestyle. Demand from voters lea…

It may be interesting to make land taxes progressive, rising exponentially based on the value of the land divided by the number of occupants. Three adults sharing a flat would pay next to nothing, but not even Bill Gates could afford to make an inner city skyscraper his home.

And is that 100% a good thing slum landlords will abuse this to avoid paying taxes.

Re: The answer to California's housing crisis is more housing

#43

Post by erentz »

api wrote: post #32

This is true, but I also think the answer is addressing the problem of seemingly all opportunity being concentrated in less than 10 cities. Cities face inevitable scaling limits. There has always been regional inequality of opportunity, but never to this degree. A great way to see the problem is to look at where the top ten most popular early personal computers came from. You will see places like Philadelphia (C64),…

> Cities face inevitable scaling limits.

The scaling limits being reached in CA are completely self imposed ones that have tested to the limit just how far it is possible to sprawl a city. All the way into the central valley it turns out.

> There has always been regional inequality of opportunity, but never to this degree.

This has been happening since people first settled in permanent locations. The trend isn't going to stop and the only way to reverse it would be to interfere pretty strongly with the market. What are you going to do, set up a central government agency that tells citizens where they can and can't live? That says how many "computer companies" are allowed to exist in a city and ban anyone from starting a new one? It's a fair observation but it's a pointless one that distracts from reality and actual solutions.

Re: The answer to California's housing crisis is more housing

#44

Post by walshemj »

dahfizz wrote: post #31
ahelwer wrote: post #29

Have there been any studies examining the impact on the market of banning career landlords and REITs? What happens if you restrict residential housing to being owned by a single person who cannot own anything else in that area, rather than letting capital have the run of the place and treating homes as an investment plaything?

Would this mean no apartment buildings? Many people prefer to rent, and banning that seems a little selfish and short sighted.

Many people have to rent, from a purely economic aspect owning is better than renting - there are social aspects to it as well.

Re: The answer to California's housing crisis is more housing

#45

Post by [deleted] »

mabbo wrote: post #4

You can't just demand more housing. You have to make people want it. This is why I'm strongly in favor of taxing land by area. A ten story condo with 100 units takes up as much land as 8 houses with yards. By reducing everyone's taxes then making up the difference via a land tax, you effectively lower the taxes on people using high density land use homes. You make it a more desirable lifestyle. Demand from voters lea…

[deleted]

Re: The answer to California's housing crisis is more housing

#47

Post by 0xB31B1B »

api wrote: post #32

This is true, but I also think the answer is addressing the problem of seemingly all opportunity being concentrated in less than 10 cities. Cities face inevitable scaling limits. There has always been regional inequality of opportunity, but never to this degree. A great way to see the problem is to look at where the top ten most popular early personal computers came from. You will see places like Philadelphia (C64),…

Strong disagree. Urban aggregation is a global phenomenon in modern times, literally every country is seeing a rise of “mega cities”. It’s because workers are choosing to move to these cities as these cities have more opportunities for workers due to efficiencies of scale. The most dynamic economies are encouraging moving to mega cities (ex: China). Cities might have “scaling limits” but there is no evidence that any city in the world has approached these limits.

Re: The answer to California's housing crisis is more housing

#49

Post by jogjayr »

walshemj wrote: post #44
dahfizz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would this mean no apartment buildings? Many people prefer to rent, and banning that seems a little selfish and short sighted.

Many people have to rent, from a purely economic aspect owning is better than renting - there are social aspects to it as well.

> from a purely economic aspect owning is better than renting

This is not the case in many places, especially the Bay Area.

Re: The answer to California's housing crisis is more housing

#50

Post by dragonwriter »

mabbo wrote: post #15
sbzodnsbd wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is. In my city at least. And at the federal level for landlords as well. My local taxes depend on my land value + my house value. Larger land, (or more desirable) more taxes. In federal taxes, for a rental unit, you get a depreciation expense only on the value of the structure. Not on the land. So more valuable land vs. structure, less federal discount.

> My local taxes depend on my land value + my house value Are they separate line items? Or combined? The difference matters. My condo is taxed based on the whole value of the unit- which is something like 1/2 of the cost of a house in the same neighbourhood, which means I'm taxed about 1/2 of what they are. But I use 1/100th the amount of land they use. Meanwhile, the cost to the city in terms of infrastructure (pipe…

> Meanwhile, the cost to the city in terms of infrastructure (pipes, roads, drainage, etc) is much lower than the houses in the subdivision down the road

The costs in terms of lots of services that aren't physical infrastructure scales with population, though, and for some services (or for adverse impacts that services don't fully mitigate) is also higher, rather than lower, for the same population when density is higher; e.g., crime rates per capita tend to go up with population density.

Post reply on HN