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The answer to California's housing crisis is more housing

nytimes.com

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

#121

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

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

#122

Post by taysic »

epistasis wrote: post #109
dgudkov wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Density creates land scarcity which in turns gives a lot of power to landlords who collect the lion's share or economic benefits created by density. Density should come hand in hand with power-rebalancing measures, e.g. tax property hikes, more efficient zoning, and government-controlled rent, but practically it doesn't happen.

Density is the response to land scarcity that takes away power from landlords, not the other way around. When there's massive land scarcity, but density is not allowed, it gives landlords far far more power than if density were allowed. Land value taxation is one way to reduce speculative land use by landlords, but it's rarely used, unfortunately. And in California it would require overturning Prop 13, a hugely regre…

Focusing jobs in one area reduces competition among landlords while fostering multiple job centers with amenities encourages competition including price competition

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

#123

Post by drfuchs »

80mph wrote: post #114
drfuchs wrote: post #97

And what will be the source of the water for additional California residents to subsist on? We just went through a 7-year drought, and they seem to be becoming more frequent and longer; never mind that climate change is making it all worse, as the snow-pack gets smaller and melts quicker. We can cut agriculture and build more dams somewhere to buffer more snow melt, but these are politically difficult to pull off, an…

Not too long ago during the Camp/Paradise fires, just about everyone in northern CA was breathing a toxic cloud of burnt drywall, cars, chemicals, etc. for over a week. Think of the millions of gallons of water wasted, flame retardants dumped, and carbon emissions created. Californians need to live in denser construction near jobs. No more sprawling, low-level construction where fires can easily spread and jump from…

The amount of water used in fighting fires amounts less than a drop in the bucket (pun intended), so your advice, while perhaps otherwise worthwhile, wouldn't make a measurable difference in the quest to provide sufficient water for population growth.

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

#124

Post by sbzodnsbd »

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…

“The difference matters” I don’t see how, but I don’t fully understand how your assessment works. My city’s assessment is close to the market value [1] for the whole property, so it’s a mute point.

Either way, they do give me a breakdown, which I agree is right (land about 33% of overall value).

Again, for rental properties, there is a disincentive to having low density housing (my condo value in a 20 story building is assessed as 20% land)

[1] close to what I believe I can sell the house for

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

#125

Post by sbzodnsbd »

analog31 wrote: post #25
mabbo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In my locale, assessments are required to be based on market value. The market doesn't assign a separate value to the house and the land.

No but the assessor can - and in every place I’ve owned property, does - give you a breakdown.

Heck, the breakdown is required information in your federal taxes if you want the depreciation expense.

And for all of us who don’t live in crazy-land CA, we have to get assessed since my purchase price (I.e. market value) ten years ago is meaningless today.

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

#126

Post by api »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #47
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…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent

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

#127

Post by sbzodnsbd »

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.

I wasn’t making a value judgement; just stating that my land vale does affect my taxes

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

#128

Post by epistasis »

taysic wrote: post #122
epistasis wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Density is the response to land scarcity that takes away power from landlords, not the other way around. When there's massive land scarcity, but density is not allowed, it gives landlords far far more power than if density were allowed. Land value taxation is one way to reduce speculative land use by landlords, but it's rarely used, unfortunately. And in California it would require overturning Prop 13, a hugely regre…

Focusing jobs in one area reduces competition among landlords while fostering multiple job centers with amenities encourages competition including price competition

What "focuses" jobs in one area though? Is it a conscious choice to place a job in a location, or is it the density of the people and the skills that allows the jobs to exist at all?

The idea that jobs can be placed anywhere flies in the face of pretty much every single city's economic development efforts over the past few decades. It's not realistic, or reasonable.

What can be placed anywhere is housing. The only reason that we don't have higher density is a small number of landowners lobbying to keep everything identical to the way that it was when they moved in, and when they moved in they had just massively changed the landscape from fruit groves to suburban sprawl. They said: change to allow me, but no more. And now they benefit massively by restricting density around them.

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

#129

Post by epistasis »

snidane wrote: post #104
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.

This is an instance of Jevon's paradox. The more housing you build to meet housing need of people then even more people will come in creating even larger demand for housing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Do you have any sort of academic citation that Jevon's paradox applies in any way to housing, or is this just an intuition?

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

#130

Post by kitsunesoba »

Bombthecat wrote: post #65
kitsunesoba wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much easier said than done. For this to happen you’d have to convince multiple companies, hopefully across several industries, to risk opening offices and shops in such towns on nothing but faith that they’ll fill up in a somewhat timely manner, and then you have to convince a bunch of folks to move to these towns. Neither is particularly simple or straightforward. And of course, there also a large portion of people…

I don't think it about people. In my old town a bunch of offices closed and moved to big city. They didn't hire new people. (probably also a way to get rid of old people which didn't want to commute 1 hour to the city) Also : why must it be 4 million city? Shouldn't it a 500k also enough? But right now, even those cities bled people. Moving to big cities.

For my situation at least (and likely for many who move to large cities), more people means more freedom in several ways. Better choice of jobs, often the ability to walk straight out of one job into another, more variety in social circles, more things to do, bigger dating pool, and improved likelihood that people have better things to concern themselves with than each other’s personal lives. It doesn’t come without downsides, but the negatives are comparatively trivial for many.
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