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

Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California

strongtowns.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 256 posts

Re: Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California

#151

Post by wahern »

cwp wrote: post #141
btilly wrote: post #51

I have suggested this before, and I'll suggest this again. The whole problem could be solved if we gave people the choice of voting where they work rather than where they live. Currently every city wants all the businesses that they can get because businesses generate lots of tax revenues. Cities do not want apartments because that doesn't generate revenue, and locals object on the basis of NIMBYism. But when everyon…

I'd rather see the repeal of Prop 13: • more municipal revenue means better schools and infrastructure • better schools and infrastructure would support more development • higher property taxes would remove the incentive to hang on to property forever making it easier to buy and develop property • removing the disincentive to sell property also reduces the NIMBY imperative, since home owner can move to another area i…

Expenditures correlate very poorly with school performance. The evidence seems quite overwhelming.

Which isn't to say funding doesn't matter. Just that it's clear that "investing in our children" through school funding was a dead-end, sort of like expecting increased traffic light expenditures to improve school performance. The primary determinants are economic and sociologic factors in the home.

We need decent schools just like we need decent water & sewage, but we're long past the point where such civic infrastructure is capable of transforming our society. Focusing on these things as agents of change is counter-productive if not destructive.

Re: Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California

#152

Post by eitally »

opportune wrote: post #138
Redoubts wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, the Bay Area shouldn't have municipalities smaller than counties.

I don't know if that level of consolidation is necessary but the core area could definitely be consolidated into like 6-8 municipalities or even boroughs: San Rafael-Sausalito SF + Daly City + Colma + Brisbane + South SF San Bruno - RWC Palo Alto - SV San Jose + Santa Clara and assorted surrounded munis like los gatos. Honestly you could probably include the Palo Alto-SV area with this one if you wanted. No idea how…

Put Menlo, Mountain View & Atherton with Palo Alto and keep it separate as the "mid-peninsula" entity.

Move Sunnyvale, Los Gatos, Monte Sereno and Campbell into the San Jose / Santa Clara group as the "south bay" entity.

Then you have your RWC through San Bruno entity for "north peninsula", and everything from South City through SF get lumped into the "SF" entity. That keeps it relatively simple and puts similar NIMBY categories into like groups (I'm mostly looking at the PA / Menlo / Atherton / Los Altos folks here).

Re: Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California

#153

Post by Kalium »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #80
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Part of the solution is to figure out how to disaggregate knowledge economies. Why so many mostly digital companies insist on in-office work is absolutely beyond me.

I think it's because our telecomm tech still sucks. It's not as good as real life and it has bugs. Until we can smoothly emulate meatspace with VR, I don't think you can replace face-to-face interaction. If you can't do that, then people will still want to be close to jobs and similar businesses, so they'll continue to urbanize in a natural distribution. And even if you had your new VR tech with enough bandwidth to r…

I think that until you're able to emulate meatspace in every aspect with VR, you cannot replace face-to-face.

Economic clusters aren't just valuable for people being in the same office. They produce value because people and ideas meet in bars and restaurants and coffee shops and backyards. All of this is stuff you'd need to replace to "disaggregate the knowledge economy".

This is not something you can accomplish with GitHub and teleconferencing.

Re: Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California

#154

Post by [deleted] »

jkking wrote: post #130
Redoubts wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, the Bay Area shouldn't have municipalities smaller than counties.

This is kind of like what New York did in the 1800s by consolidating all the towns around it into a giant metropolis. And that's clearly what many people wish the Bay Area were today - a giant megalopolis from San Jose to Petaluma. The problem with that is that while it would be a great idea for getting one's way on a given issue, there are a lot of people that don't want to live in that kind of place, and are fighti…

[deleted]

Re: Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California

#155

Post by casefields »

cgriswald wrote: post #133
ketzo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if we're being cynical, you say the second so that people feel comfortable with the first. If you can convince suburbanites that you won't put up a skyscraper next door, you'll have an easier time putting up a 5-story apartment building. Or so my thinking goes, anyway.

People in my neighborhood object to every change even if it doesn’t seem to affect them. They’re mortified when a 5-story building (commercial OR residential) is built downtown when we are ten minutes away and not on a major traffic corridor.

That's because every time you give an inch they'll take a little bit more. So you out up a huge front and the only thing that can be approved are small nimble changes. Plus it's wildly beneficial economically to keep the status quo when it comes to owning a home in the California.

Re: Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California

#156

Post by kansface »

throwawaysea wrote: post #88

It's not peak housing dysfunction, but rather peak entitlement. Why is it important to accommodate people who might want to live in or move to an area despite local incumbents' wishes to not have their neighborhood change? Does everyone have the right to live anywhere they want to live without having to pay the necessary price to be there? For example, does everyone have a right to expect a residence on a Hawaii beac…

> Why is it important to accommodate people who might want to live in or move to an area despite local incumbent's wishes to not have their neighborhood change?

Lets accommodate the people who own land, propose building upon it and meet and all relevant zoning codes and regulations but are denied because reasons:

```Marty Medina said he wished an agreement could have been reached which would have allowed the development to advance but he was unable to detail the specific size and scope of a project that he would have supported. “I don’t regret my decision because I have to live with it,” he said. “But I just wished for a different outcome.”```

...

> through use of pejoratives like "NIMBY" serves to distract from the plain truth, which is simply that people are acting in their own self-interests.

The two "selfs" are not the same. The one group is literal millionaires (home owners) while the other is the working poor/middle class who would prefer to avoid 2 hour commutes.

Re: Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California

#157

Post by wardbradt »

throwawaysea wrote: post #88

It's not peak housing dysfunction, but rather peak entitlement. Why is it important to accommodate people who might want to live in or move to an area despite local incumbents' wishes to not have their neighborhood change? Does everyone have the right to live anywhere they want to live without having to pay the necessary price to be there? For example, does everyone have a right to expect a residence on a Hawaii beac…

I am not certain who you are assigning "entitlement" to. I believe you are talking about non-residents who gripe about the Bay Area's laws and policies which protect the interests of incumbent residents to the effect of excluding non-residents by setting an artificially high (financial) barrier to entry. Please correct me if I am mistaken.

I find this position extremely odd. I am unaware of other examples of non-federal (county, city, etc.) US governments and respective constituents opposing non-local residents relocating, for any reason (including "culture/way of life/standards of living"). I have seen this before in the Bay Area--I was refused an apartment viewing earlier this year in San Francisco because I am from New York.

I think this relates to the Constitution's "Privileges and Immunities Clause" [0], which an 1832 federal court case, Corfield v. Coryell [1], ruled that all US citizens enjoy the right "to reside in any other state...; to take, hold and dispose of property, either real or personal; and an exemption from higher taxes or impositions that are paid by the other citizens of the state." I am not aware of any Bay Area laws which explicitly violate any of these rights. However, I do not see how Prop 13, which "prohibit[s] reassessment of value... except in cases of (a) change in ownership," required for non-renting non-locals, "or (b) completion of new construction," [2] i.e. new housing developments, does not indirectly violate non-residents' "exemption from higher taxes." Note that I have zero law experience, I just googled "discrimination based on state of residence."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privileges_and_Immunities_Clau...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corfield_v._Coryell

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13

Re: Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California

#158

Post by wahern »

i_am_proteus wrote: post #70
markbnj wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cities do not want apartments because that doesn't generate revenue The property owners still pay tax on it don't they? I'm sure it is less lucrative per square foot than commercial development, but I assume it is still better than the revenue from the closed furniture store and parking lot, and after all you need people to patronize businesses.

Perhaps it's something to do with how California has lower property taxes (partially due to Prop. 13) and higher income taxes-- but those income taxes go to Sacramento, not to municipalities. In other parts of the country, municipal treasuries grow as volume and prices of residential units grow.

From what I've read municipalities dislike residential because of the increased costs, not because of the poor tax revenue. Both commercial and residential can bring it windfall revenues at today's market prices, and Prop 13 applies to commercial property, anyhow. Residential simply has higher infrastructure costs--schools, heavier water & sewage usage, etc.

Plus office complexes don't enrage NIMBYs the way residential projects do. Dense office space equates with rich commuters; dense residential space equates with young and poor people. So commercial pencils out better fiscally, and politically there's less pushback.

Re: Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California

#159

Post by wahern »

mktmkr wrote: post #145
almost_usual wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purchased in the last 7 years is pretty recent. Most home owners bought 15+ years ago. If you're buying within the last decade you're probably paying a transplant premium.

From 1985 to 2008 the median tenure of a family in a home was 6 years. This figure only started going up in recent years, due to housing crisis. Americans have traditionally expected to move house 8-9 times in their adult life. It is certainly not true that "most" people have tenure of 15 years or more. That is the 90th percentile tenure.

AFAICT those are the national figures from a National Association of Realtors (NAR) report. I can't find figures for California.

EDIT: The closest I could find was an ambiguous stat in a CNN article, https://money.cnn.com/2017/04/27/real_estate/home-prices-sel..., which cites an average of a little over 4 years (2000-20007) that might be for San Jose. However, there's wording that suggests such figures are computed from the tenure of sellers, not across all homeowners, in which case the statistic seem useless (imagine one guy selling every two years and nobody else--that would be a 2-year tenture average but in fact nobody but him is moving). Would nice if the NAR report was freely available.

Re: Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California

#160

Post by cwp »

wahern wrote: post #151
cwp wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather see the repeal of Prop 13: • more municipal revenue means better schools and infrastructure • better schools and infrastructure would support more development • higher property taxes would remove the incentive to hang on to property forever making it easier to buy and develop property • removing the disincentive to sell property also reduces the NIMBY imperative, since home owner can move to another area i…

Expenditures correlate very poorly with school performance. The evidence seems quite overwhelming. Which isn't to say funding doesn't matter. Just that it's clear that "investing in our children" through school funding was a dead-end, sort of like expecting increased traffic light expenditures to improve school performance. The primary determinants are economic and sociologic factors in the home. We need decent schoo…

I'd settle for the same performance without constant hysterical fundraising by the PTA, parents being asked to buy and donate basic classroom supplies and teachers buying stuff out of their own pockets just to be able to do their job.

But really, I just mean "neighborhoods more friendly to kids and parents." School quality is a big part of that, but it's also a matter of finding a good school near your home, public spaces where kids can play etc. SF isn't completely devoid of that stuff, but there's a reason new parents move out to the suburbs. The point is that if we want higher density we need more homes, but we also need more of all the other stuff that people want and need nearby.

Post reply on HN