It's getting very difficult to see how California works its way out of this mess. SB 50 like measures can be passed at the local level in theory but if I've learned anything from these fights it's that older, wealthy homeowners will cripple any attempt to do so.
California's housing bill SB 50 has died in the state Senate
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Re: California's housing bill SB 50 has died in the state Senate
#22Well the only solution is a ballot initiative to repeal prop 13. That will change things.
> Well the only solution is a ballot initiative to repeal prop 13. That will change things.
This seems to always be stated as if stating it makes it true. Prop 13 has little to do with high housing prices and a lot to do with getting more revenue for governments.
Prices are influenced by supply and demand. The artificial limiting of supply by all of the governments in California is the biggest factor in why the prices are outrageously high.
Re: California's housing bill SB 50 has died in the state Senate
#23Well the only solution is a ballot initiative to repeal prop 13. That will change things.
No it won't. It would displace even more people.
The only way to get lower-cost housing is to build more housing. It's that simple.
Re: California's housing bill SB 50 has died in the state Senate
#24Well the only solution is a ballot initiative to repeal prop 13. That will change things.
> Well the only solution is a ballot initiative to repeal prop 13. That will change things. This seems to always be stated as if stating it makes it true. Prop 13 has little to do with high housing prices and a lot to do with getting more revenue for governments. Prices are influenced by supply and demand. The artificial limiting of supply by all of the governments in California is the biggest factor in why the price…
Exactly right. And every time a property is turned over, the base tax rate gets reset, plus prop 13 allows for a 2% increase every year. California has the highest sales and income tax (for incomes over $500,000) in the Nation. They don't need the highest property tax, too.
Re: California's housing bill SB 50 has died in the state Senate
#25Well the only solution is a ballot initiative to repeal prop 13. That will change things.
No it won't. It would displace even more people. The only way to get lower-cost housing is to build more housing. It's that simple.
Yes, it will.
One of the problems with housing is that local governments get less revenue from housing than business. That gives them every incentive to approve commercial construction and deny residential.
Take away the financial perverse incentive., and there is a lot of money to be made by approving badly needed dense residential housing near existing commercial buildings.
Re: California's housing bill SB 50 has died in the state Senate
#26Question from an outsider: Is it really necessary to have a state-level bill for this as opposed to county-level? Is the diversity of the localities in the state small enough where such a measure can be decided so centrally? (I admit I haven't read it or saw if it had conditions on population).
All governments want to point fingers. The municipalities get away with murder because of state laws that define "urban growth boundary" regions which essentially state that there cannot be any new urban growth where there are not currently urban areas.
Predictably, the municipalities behave as an oligopoly because they know that people can no longer move just outside city limits, which is what people used to do when cities were behaving badly.
Re: California's housing bill SB 50 has died in the state Senate
#27California has a more principled approach to housing capacity planning called RHNA, in which the state sets a zoning budget (like that proposed by David Schleicher https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/4955/) and then delegates to local governments the responsibility to zone to allow enough houses to meet that budget. Unfortunately, the RHNA has numerous flaws including vastly underestimating the “need,” lax enforcement, and having very long cycles. Scott Wiener has previously addressed the flaws somewhat (SB 35 (2017) and SB 828 (2018)), but there is still a lot that must be done to fix the RHNA; see this good overview for more information and potential administrative improvements (https://law.ucdavis.edu/centers/environmental/files/Elmendor...)
The appeal of Wiener’s SB 50 was that it would have quickly increased the capacity of housing using fairly good heuristics to improve access to opportunity (already residential, near transit stops or jobs, not high fire risk). It’s unfortunate that the state senate doesn’t seem to want to treat the housing shortage with the urgency that it deserves.
Re: California's housing bill SB 50 has died in the state Senate
#28To combat many problems, the government would certainly be helpful, but isn't necessary.
Take climate change. If every corporation took a carbon negative stance like Stripe and Microsoft, that would make a big dent in carbon emissions.
Unfortunately, a lack of housing is a problem that the government created. And it's a problem that only the government, in my view, can really fix.
As long as housing supply is artificially restricted, I don't see how this gets better.
Please let me know if I am wrong.
Re: California's housing bill SB 50 has died in the state Senate
#29Well the only solution is a ballot initiative to repeal prop 13. That will change things.
No it won't. It would displace even more people. The only way to get lower-cost housing is to build more housing. It's that simple.
It’s not that simple because the housing that gets built in areas with the worse affordability crises is high-end stock that gets bought up as an investment or cash store. “The market” has decided that in an era of extreme inequality and stagnant wages that the only way to recoup investment is targeting this segment, leaving everyone else in dire straits.
(Unless you’re talking about the government building massive amounts of social housing to account for the market failure, in which case I agree).
Re: California's housing bill SB 50 has died in the state Senate
#30Well the only solution is a ballot initiative to repeal prop 13. That will change things.
> Well the only solution is a ballot initiative to repeal prop 13. That will change things. This seems to always be stated as if stating it makes it true. Prop 13 has little to do with high housing prices and a lot to do with getting more revenue for governments. Prices are influenced by supply and demand. The artificial limiting of supply by all of the governments in California is the biggest factor in why the price…
Prop 13 has a TON to do with high housing prices, because it eliminates the downside of high housing prices: higher property taxes.
Once higher property taxes are out of the picture, higher property values are purely beneficial for homeowners, which means there's every incentive to vote for anti-housing policies to enrich themselves at the expense of transplants and immigrants.