Oakland has built less housing per capita than SF over the last 5 years, as mentioned in the article. Appears like a few big projects finished construction and 2019 was an outlier year. The article implies this bounty will continue by citing “15,000 units in development” but doesn’t mention that SF has 4x as many “in development” and many projects linger in that category for a decade and many never get built.
Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell developers they can build homes
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Re: Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell developers they can build homes
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreeing with you: I have friends who work on housing (and related) policies. The stereotype of "Liberal Seattle" simply isn't true. One of our biggest intraparty food fights is the upzoners vs the nimbys. The tortured logic and hypocrisy of the nimbys is maddening. Yes, homelessness and affordability are acute problems, govt should do something, but increasing supply couldn't possibly work. I can't prove it, but I k…
I live in a 75% democrat area (in austin) built in the 60s/70s and the NIMBYs are boomers and are bad. The city council wants to reduce the lot size,parking, and setbacks required for duplexes and triplexes all over the city. They want to increase density for about 100 units along a transit corridor from single family to 4 units, up to 6 with affordable housing. The nimbys are going crazy, talking about lawsuits, pro…
> Im a hardcore conservative and believe upzoning is the best way to solve the affordability problem.
Removing zoning restrictions is arguing for the free market, and for reducing government intervention and in this case, as a liberal, I couldn't agree more. This is an example of government being used as a cudgel of the wealthy to beat back the poor. That's not what I want the role of government to be.
Re: Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell developers they can build homes
#93Not surprising. San Francisco seems to vote more owner friendly vs Oakland which votes more renter friendly. For SF I thought the recent proposition E was encouraging. It reduced zoning requirements on public zoned land for affordable housing. It was first proposition I’ve seen that reduces zoning requirements, it seems like a “toe in the water” for reducing complexity for addressing housing. Of course one might argue fuck toes in water we are in crisis, but given my first statement, I saw it as a trial balloon. Hopefully we see more aggressive measures in next few elections
Re: Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell developers they can build homes
#94I saw this tweet recently, by patio11: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1199366332468224000 "Tokyo has positive population growth of about 100,000 people a year, and rents and home prices are roughly stable for last decade. How? Outconstructing NYC. And LA. And SF. And Boston. And Houston. Combined. Every year."
Tokyo also has mixed-rate zoning and the culture is not built around using a developed proprty to build equity but rather continual reproduction of a living space.
Re: Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell developers they can build homes
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do we want a culture where the poor are living in barely livable wage slave pods At least the poor would have the choice between the barely livable pod in downtown, or a house 2 hours commute away. Currently they can only choose the latter.
You don't really save all that much money by building a barely livable pod vs an actual apartment. The big cost items are kitchens and bathrooms. Those are mostly fixed costs, i.e. it costs the same to plumb a toilet, shower, and sink in a 50 sq foot bathroom as a 100 sq foot one. Only when you get to stupid high real estate cost does a ~300 sq foot pod start making sense over ~600 ft 1 bed or ~1000 sq ft 2 beds. It'…
>It's a bit counter intuitive, but the best way to lower the cost of housing for the poor is to build more housing for the upper middle class and up. They will trade up houses which will increase the supply of used houses driving down their price
The problem is that housing in any location is not a closed system with fixed demand. It is an open system in which increased supply can generate increased demand.
When you build that housing for upper middle class and up, they vacate their homes, the price of their old homes goes down, then upper middle class and up people who previously decided to live in a cheaper area over paying the extreme rent costs move in, the population grows, and the price break never fully flows down market to the poor people in the city. This is why the market approach to building more housing isn't going to solve the whole problem. You need to build new homes at every pricing level and the market generally doesn't do that without the government incentivizing them.
Re: Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell developers they can build homes
#96See also: Friday's “Don’t Blame Tech Bros for the Housing Crisis” column: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/30/opinion/sunday/housing-cr...
Real galaxy brain take there. “Housing prices have always fluctuated, therefore these fluctuations are unrelated to this other highly correlated factor”.
Not that I disagree much with the substance of pointing out Prop 13, etc, but you should also definitely blame tech for loading an entire industry into a metro area.
Re: Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell developers they can build homes
#97The whole topic of conversation around housing affordability is backwards. Specifically, housing affordability is 100%, entirely, a problem of artificial constraints on supply by city councils. (1) Americans consider housing to be an investment. An investment is only an investment if you expect a positive return over time. We generally want that investment to match or exceed inflation. (2) That's antithetical to the…
> (1) Americans consider housing to be an investment. Apparently I'm the lone dissenter on this, but I think for many people this is a side benefit that they may hope for, but the primary objective is simply to own a home that they can live in and raise a family.
I'm with you. Granted, I do consider it an investment in the sense that every month I pay off part of the principal and thus I can get some money back when I sell it whereas I'd get nothing if I was renting but I don't expect greater than inflation appreciation on the house.
However, this could just be because I grew up in Chicago where there is endless farmland that can be developed and thus expecting greater than inflation appreciation on your house is foolish as someone else can just develop some farmland and sell it for the cost of building the house thus forever increasing the supply at the marginal cost of building a house.
Re: Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell developers they can build homes
#98Lacking from the article are the statistics for how affordable those homes are and actual occupancy. Developers overwhelmingly love upselling to "luxury homes" that are kept as investment deeds in someones closet. NYC for example is building new apartments like bloody crazy, none of them are affordable to anyone other than investors.
The price of housing is determined by supply and demand, not the developer.
Building new housing lowers prices for all preexisting housing.
Re: Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell developers they can build homes
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (1) Americans consider housing to be an investment. Apparently I'm the lone dissenter on this, but I think for many people this is a side benefit that they may hope for, but the primary objective is simply to own a home that they can live in and raise a family.
No, OP is painting with an extremely broad brush. There are a lot of reasons to own a home that have nothing to do with its investment potential. I don’t care how much my home is worth because I don’t plan to sell it until I retire.
The problem is that even if it is a minority contingent, it is a loud, high-turnout contingent, and local politicians generally do not want to get turfed out.
It results in farcical scenarios, like homeowners opposing workforce housing for the local school district because the people teaching their kids are too low-income to fit in. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/10/san-jose-trying-build...
Re: Oakland shows how to expand housing supply: tell developers they can build homes
#100See also: Friday's “Don’t Blame Tech Bros for the Housing Crisis” column: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/30/opinion/sunday/housing-cr...
Real galaxy brain take there. “Housing prices have always fluctuated, therefore these fluctuations are unrelated to this other highly correlated factor”. Not that I disagree much with the substance of pointing out Prop 13, etc, but you should also definitely blame tech for loading an entire industry into a metro area.
Sounds like the rhetoric against anthropogenic climate change.