Title assertion stated without evidence in article.
One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation
21–30 of 84 posts
Re: One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation
#22"If it moves, tax it. If it keeps on moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it." - Ronald Reagan Looks like we're well along that curve for housing in CA.
California's property tax is less than half of that of Texas, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Combine that with the fact that CA has prop 13, and one of the highest GDP per capita, and... Does anyone really think it's the regulation that's making prices high?? Sure, they're not helping. But high incomes and low taxes are a recipe for high prices. The only other state with high incomes and this…
California’s income tax is higher than the states you listed - sans NYC with an additional 4.5% city tax on top of state income tax.
Having left California a long time ago the reduction in income tax alone equated to a 10% raise.
Re: One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation
#23This might bite a little harder if you could look in any direction in Los Angeles and not see new construction. The current amount of space occupied by low density housing is something we could improve on but its just that. Occupied! Hopefully all this commercial space rezoned for multi-purpose use (shops on the ground floor, apartments or offices above) will free up some of the low density real-estate but its not ov…
The number of housing starts in Los Angeles right now is basically zero[1]. 30 years ago the pace of home building in LA was three times higher with a population 20% smaller. 1: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LOSA106BPPRIVSA
LA also has some peculiar problems around parking: http://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-f....
LA is basically doing everything it can to NOT build housing, of almost any kind, anywhere. And that's reflected in prices.
Re: One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation
#24Using this database of regulation metadata, https://quantgov.org/state-regdata/ the articles starts out saying that the California Code of Regulations "contains more than 21 million words". Which made me curious: how many words for Texas' code? Answer: 15 million. $ grep '^[[:digit:]]' admincode_california_metadata.csv | cut -d, -f5 | tr '\n' '+' | (cat; printf "0\n") | bc 21172868 $ grep '^[[:digit:]]' admincode_tex…
Next step: programatically determine which state has more "regulation" based on text analysis.
Re: One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation
#25I am curious, would you be supportive of a federal law that takes over zoning if housing prices are more than x above the median income in that area?
IE, take control away from NIMBAs?
Re: One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation
#26I personally feel regulation slows down new construction, but doesn't necessarily increase costs. Dilapidated houses still go for large sums, so I suspect land costs to be a major reason as well. Additionally, lack of contractors is becoming an issue(demand increases, costs increases) with many of them working indefinitely over in fire-ravaged areas like Paradise or Santa Rosa.
If construction takes longer, costs increase. This is indisputable. Imagine you buy a piece of land for $100,000 with the intention of developing it. Until the property is developed and sold, you have numerous carrying costs (taxes, insurance, debt payments, etc.). In California, your annual carrying costs may easily be $8,000-$10,000 per $100,000. If it takes you one year to develop the property, you need to sell th…
Regulations are known upfront. Good contractors and architects know each city's processes and how to navigate through them.
Re: One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation
#27Regulations in California are generally tiresome but it's ridiculous to claim that regulation could be responsible for things like startup stock offerings making local rents double over the course of a few years. Those buildings are already constructed and if you live in them you can observe that no major remodelings or other updates happen during the time period where rents are skyrocketing. The rent boosts when startups and startup employees come to a new neighborhood are a consistent pattern and it kicks out local residents as landlords find ways to evict them to raise prices.
Meanwhile new construction is way more expensive than the existing boosted rent. You can claim regulation is responsible for part of that, but why wouldn't the vendor charge less than the nearby boosted rents to compete? Did regulations somehow literally eat $1500/mo worth of margin? It defies plausibility.
When I moved to the SF south bay area about 10 years ago, my rent was $700/mo. The equivalent is now upwards of $2000. It's hard to imagine policies that could possibly make it go up that high. Imagine if we had rent control...
Re: One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation
#28I am curious, would you be supportive of a federal law that takes over zoning if housing prices are more than x above the median income in that area? IE, take control away from NIMBAs?
Of course not. Why shouldn’t the people who live there be able to decide the character of their city? If the cost of living gets too high either people will move to lower cost of living and companies will follow or the opposite will happen. The United States is a big country with lots of land.
Besides, the federal government is the least representative of people in larger cities. Your vote counts s lot more in rural America and in smaller states partially because of the electoral college and partially because Rhode Island has the same number of Senators as California.
Re: One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
If construction takes longer, costs increase. This is indisputable. Imagine you buy a piece of land for $100,000 with the intention of developing it. Until the property is developed and sold, you have numerous carrying costs (taxes, insurance, debt payments, etc.). In California, your annual carrying costs may easily be $8,000-$10,000 per $100,000. If it takes you one year to develop the property, you need to sell th…
Regulations are known upfront. Good contractors and architects know each city's processes and how to navigate through them.
> Regulations are known upfront.
Ideally, yes. In practice, no. Capricious zoning and development regulators are on the HN front page at least weekly.
Re: One reason for the high cost of housing in California is overregulation
#30Using this database of regulation metadata, https://quantgov.org/state-regdata/ the articles starts out saying that the California Code of Regulations "contains more than 21 million words". Which made me curious: how many words for Texas' code? Answer: 15 million. $ grep '^[[:digit:]]' admincode_california_metadata.csv | cut -d, -f5 | tr '\n' '+' | (cat; printf "0\n") | bc 21172868 $ grep '^[[:digit:]]' admincode_tex…
I think the most important issue in modern governance that nobody ever talks about is the tendency for the number of laws and the size of the legal code to monotonically grow towards infinity