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

81–90 of 158 posts

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

#81

Post by mixmastamyk »

robertAngst wrote: post #67
njudah wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TLDR: The government is deeply involved in housing and development, as the government controls what can be built and where. This is an effort to loosen government controls by limiting local governments ability to restrict housing development near transit hubs. Specifically, the state government is attempting to restrict local governments' ability to create limits on housing density in certain areas.

This is quite an interesting take, your state government is fighting local governments? This is truly another dimension of the More/Less government dichotomy they teach you in school. Btw, it seems the local governments are quite Anti growth? Am I understanding that correctly?

Yes, and not just in CA.

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

#82

Post by ironmagma »

maxxxxx wrote: post #58

I think there should be a national effort to "spread out" the economy and fight the trend towards centralization in a few areas. If you build more housing in CA, even more people will move there and the overcrowding will become even worse. There should be incentives for companies to move away from places like SV and NY. More acceptance of remote work would help too but I wouldn't hold my breath for it.

Cities are popular because they are relatively efficient. You can build more towns and suburbs but they will be underserved because of the many pipelines a state has to manage that cities will receive priority for — road maintenance, DMVs, shipping hubs. If you live in a town and need any of these, you might have to travel a long way just to get your needs met.

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

#83

Post by cf »

robertAngst wrote: post #60
dyeje wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, in my experience, true. I live in an up and coming suburb of Detroit and every new apartment / condo building is incredibly skewed towards the high end. In fact, a huge development project is going on in the downtown area currently. One of the requirements of the project was to set aside a certain percentage of the new units as affordable housing. When the developer was asked about the affordable housing at a…

> I live in an up and coming suburb of Detroit and every new apartment / condo building is incredibly skewed towards the high end. >new And what happens to the old units? They are sold and rented to the non-super wealthy. I also live in south east michigan and my neighborhood is undergoing gentrification, they are tearing down 1000 sq ft homes and replacing them with 3500 sq ft homes. What is the problem? I couldn't…

Old units in many places are frequently renovated and re-sold to upper-middle class and wealthy tenants. The end result is an erosion of housing stock for average and low-income residents.

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

#84

Post by ip26 »

kradroy wrote: post #66
temp99990 wrote: post #46

There is so much wasted/poorly optimized land in SF. I cringe whenever I see the massive surface level Safeway parking lot in Duboce/Church.

They should tear down the Fed Mint building behind that Safeway and turn it into housing. I don't even believe that branch does anything other than print proofs. A waste of space, but it's not happening during this presidency for sure.

Organizations that live on indefinitely- governments, universities, churches- don't give up land almost as a rule. One or two hundred years from now, they might really need this or that plot, and it could be nearly impossible to acquire then.

One easy to appreciate example are universities & other schools holding (& sometimes leasing) land adjacent to them. If they didn't, in the distant future if they need to expand, some scalper or holdout could cause large problems.

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

#85

Post by Gh0stRAT »

robertAngst wrote: post #67
njudah wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TLDR: The government is deeply involved in housing and development, as the government controls what can be built and where. This is an effort to loosen government controls by limiting local governments ability to restrict housing development near transit hubs. Specifically, the state government is attempting to restrict local governments' ability to create limits on housing density in certain areas.

This is quite an interesting take, your state government is fighting local governments? This is truly another dimension of the More/Less government dichotomy they teach you in school. Btw, it seems the local governments are quite Anti growth? Am I understanding that correctly?

Correct. The city council is elected by residents of the city, and land owners have a strong financial incentive to elect representatives who will limit housing. (The shortage drives-up their property values)

You might think that renters living in the city would eventually outweigh the landowners and elect council members in favor of new housing, but instead SF passed a rent control measure which prevents the current renters from feeling the sting of the housing shortage so they aren't strongly incentivized to vote for more housing either.

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

#86

Post by ip26 »

ironmagma wrote: post #82
maxxxxx wrote: post #58

I think there should be a national effort to "spread out" the economy and fight the trend towards centralization in a few areas. If you build more housing in CA, even more people will move there and the overcrowding will become even worse. There should be incentives for companies to move away from places like SV and NY. More acceptance of remote work would help too but I wouldn't hold my breath for it.

Cities are popular because they are relatively efficient. You can build more towns and suburbs but they will be underserved because of the many pipelines a state has to manage that cities will receive priority for — road maintenance, DMVs, shipping hubs. If you live in a town and need any of these, you might have to travel a long way just to get your needs met.

Yes, but we have 4,000 cities in the US, yet only something like 1 first class tech hub and two second class tech hubs.

If we veer into market theory for a moment, it's better for everyone if there are many cities that are competitive places for technology companies.

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

#87

Post by mabbo »

eveningcoffee wrote: post #28
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.

It sounds nice until people are forced out of their homes because suddenly the area becomes hip.

That's going to happen to areas no matter what. There is very little you can do about that.

What we can do is increase housing supply so that prices of all homes are lower.

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

#88

Post by esotericn »

How does ownership of apartments work in California?

In the UK, owning a flat is decidedly inferior to owning a house. In large blocks you will almost always have a leasehold, which almost always means being subject to a whole host of onerous conditions from the actual building's owner.

Share of freehold arrangements exist in smaller properties like old converted houses. But that only increases density slightly, and these sorts of places aren't really built any more; new developments are usually huge tower blocks or little houses.

I'm looking at buying a place soon and will be going for a small freehold house simply because that's the only way to actually own property in the UK as far as I can tell. I've wasted far too much time on attempting to negotiate sane leasehold conditions.

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

#89

Post by ip26 »

sanderjd wrote: post #77
maxxxxx wrote: post #58

I think there should be a national effort to "spread out" the economy and fight the trend towards centralization in a few areas. If you build more housing in CA, even more people will move there and the overcrowding will become even worse. There should be incentives for companies to move away from places like SV and NY. More acceptance of remote work would help too but I wouldn't hold my breath for it.

I'm really curious about the pros and cons here. Neither way seems obviously better than the other. Why is concentration worse than distribution? Why is distribution better?

Concentration begetting more concentration combined with an unwillingness (don't underestimate SV's ability to dig in its heels) to develop leads to a real estate black hole for dollars, where an ever increasing portion of wealth is diverted to the competition for a place to live.

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

#90

Post by 0x445442 »

erentz wrote: post #43
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 goin…

> What are you going to do, set up a central government agency that tells citizens where they can and can't live?

I didn't see api suggest government intervention. I imagine at some point, if FAANG doesn't adjust the wages for their direct, local employees or start to contribute more to supporting service sectors then they'll be forced to decentralize.

I see no insurmountable reasons preventing Google spreading to Wichita, Akron or Chatanooga, the employees just need to start demanding better living conditions. That said, it seems like younger folks want to live in environments more like Tokyo than Des Moines.

Post reply on HN