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$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

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Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#531

Post by baddox »

clairity wrote: post #530
baddox wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LA summers are ridiculously hot, but by all means live wherever you enjoy the weather.

it depends on where you live. the (san fernando) valley and inland are ridiculously hot, the coastal cities not so much. the 10-15 really hot days we have center around august, with some spillover into july and september. but it's nothing compared to texas heat, for example.

Oh yeah, nothing like Texas heat, or even the Missouri heat I grew up with. I could definitely enjoy Santa Monica weather year-round, but I still prefer the slightly cooler San Francisco weather.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#532

Post by gkfasdfasdf »

caymanjim wrote: post #75

It's great that Google wants to increase housing, but is this really going to work? The housing shortage in the Bay Area is not a money problem. If it were possible to build 20,000 houses in the next 20 years, it would absolutely happen without Google's help. The problem with housing there has one simple cause: NIMBYism. SF doesn't want to allow taller buildings and denser housing complexes. It's vastly worse in the…

Maybe they need to build down, not up - subterranean apartment complexes; or a cave system carved into a mountain.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#533

Post by TheCoelacanth »

ummonk wrote: post #427
reaperducer wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with housing there has one simple cause: NIMBYism ... The only solution In the real world, nothing has one simple cause or one "only" solution. The housing problem in California, and elsewhere is complex. This is akin to people who say, "The problem with homelessness there has one simple cause..." and then insert their favorite boogeyman. There are many factors involved, other than NIMBYs, and BANANAs (Bu…

BEAST seems to work though. NYC is amazingly affordable given its population size and economic success. By building skyscrapers everywhere in Manhattan they seem to have made nearby places like New Jersey eminently affordable.

Even Manhattan does not have skyscrapers everywhere. There's a cluster in downtown and a cluster in midtown, but the other three-quarters of the island has relatively short (but still high-density) buildings.

Skyscrapers should be built where they are economically viable, i.e. where the cost of land is extraordinarily high to offset the much higher per-unit cost of construction. They shouldn't be pursued in places where they don't make sense.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#534

Post by eli_gottlieb »

reaperducer wrote: post #365
caymanjim wrote: post #75

It's great that Google wants to increase housing, but is this really going to work? The housing shortage in the Bay Area is not a money problem. If it were possible to build 20,000 houses in the next 20 years, it would absolutely happen without Google's help. The problem with housing there has one simple cause: NIMBYism. SF doesn't want to allow taller buildings and denser housing complexes. It's vastly worse in the…

The problem with housing there has one simple cause: NIMBYism ... The only solution In the real world, nothing has one simple cause or one "only" solution. The housing problem in California, and elsewhere is complex. This is akin to people who say, "The problem with homelessness there has one simple cause..." and then insert their favorite boogeyman. There are many factors involved, other than NIMBYs, and BANANAs (Bu…

Homelessness has exactly one cause: lack of housing.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#535

Post by danans »

derekdahmer wrote: post #529
danans wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's these local city governments like Palo Alto and Mountain View that allowed Google to massively expand without also allowing developers to build housing to support the employees for that expansion. There's probably plenty of blame to go all around. IMO companies like Google (disclosure: I work there) caught on to the magnitude of the problem too late, and when they did, they ran into the local political resista…

Blaming or praising Google is irrelevant. This is simply a response to a broken political system where regional housing supply is wildly inadequate relative to demand. It isn’t the job of a company to provide housing for its employees. In the absence of constraints real estate developers will naturally build to satisfy this demand. However local governments have control over how and if housing is built and have syste…

> This is simply a response to a broken political system where regional housing supply is wildly inadequate relative to demand

Which is why, IMO, the praise for Google on this matter is unwarranted. And it's not the political system that is broken, it's the regressive views of the elected officials and the people who have tended to vote in local elections.

> In the absence of constraints real estate developers will naturally build to satisfy this demand.

We don't need a policy that is absent restraints. We need housing policy with sane restraints, i.e. incremental upzoning planned at the regional level to allow more housing density and building employment centers accessible via transit instead of only cars and private bus systems.

Even public agencies like BART have had to fight at the state level to be allowed to develop housing on their own property.

This isn't really an issue of restraints vs no restraints but rather what the restraints optimize for, and currently they optimize for increasing property values and not providing sufficient housing supply.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#536

Post by partingshots »

m0zg wrote: post #460

$1B/20000 is 50K. That's perhaps enough to build an outhouse in SV, or a tool shed, but not a "home".

I think in this case, this money is not going to be used for building the homes themselves but rather developing the land in partnership with private developers who will then do the actual portion of making buildings.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#537

Post by burlesona »

deepakhj wrote: post #498
burlesona wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m struggling to find a citation for this, so I’ll caveat that this is from memory, but I’m pretty sure SF had had about as many housing starts as the rest of the Bay Area over the last ten years. It’s not nearly enough units, and it’s basically all in SoMa and Mission Bay, but nevertheless the city is doing more than most of the bay. Interesting to note that Mountain View is also trying to pull its weight, per a si…

The western half of San Francisco isn't doing anything. It's a small sliver of SOMA/Downtown which is not enough.

I agree on that point.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#538

Post by pertymcpert »

option wrote: post #228
pertymcpert wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not a better solution, it can help but the you have a ghost town that is the Bay Area it makes sense to make it denser and more like European cities.

Bay Area is not a ghost town, it is already overcrowded

It is. Walk around Cupertino or Sunnyvale. Everything is so far apart, cars everywhere. You can be the only person walking on a block.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#539

Post by pertymcpert »

linuxftw wrote: post #330
pertymcpert wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did those people live before? How did the Bay Area grow to its current size if people kept saying the same thing? "We only have one bus route and a school, how can we grow this place? It's too crowded". Complete BS.

How many is too many then? Clearly any given area has a maximum support capacity for humans. Is it good for the environment or quality of life to keep packing people into mega-cities?

Yes. Urbanisation into massive cities is vastly more efficient in terms of environmental impact than sprawl.

Those people still need to live somewhere, but bringing everyone closer together increases efficiencies by enormous amounts. Cities are the thing helping to save the environment.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#540

Post by foobiekr »

pas wrote: post #517
foobiekr wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current caloric surplus and population is largely supported by a truly outstanding amounts of petrochemicals being used since the start of the "green" revolution.

It's not like zero-carbon agriculture (hydroponics or not) is impossible.

At the current level of productivity I think that’s not true. And human population is set to consume the current surplus.
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