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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

#121

Post by potatoz2 »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #111
yonran wrote: post #27

California 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,” la…

>It’s unfortunate that the state senate doesn’t seem to want to treat the housing shortage with the urgency that it deserves. The state senators are probably making quite a bit of money off this housing shortage that they wouldn't make with an adequate housing supply on the market.

It's much likelier that they are responding to the voters that have the time and money to make their reelection difficult.

Re: California's housing bill SB 50 has died in the state Senate

#122

Post by eli_gottlieb »

matchbok wrote: post #6

What a mess. Sad to see "tenant" organizations yell and scream about gentrification and displacement, ignoring the fact that both of those things are happening right now.

>Sad to see "tenant" organizations yell and scream about gentrification and displacement, ignoring the fact that both of those things are happening right now.

Spicy take: they're fundamentally not mad about those things happening right now, they're mad about those things happening to them right now. California housing advocacy is Winston Smith screaming, "Do it to Julia!" over and over again.

They oppose bills like SB50 because they prefer a zero- or negative-sum solution over a positive-sum solution, which would still allow those people to live near them and "destroy their community".

Re: California's housing bill SB 50 has died in the state Senate

#123

Post by amunicio »

fortran77 wrote: post #93
refurb wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I feel really sorry for the retired person sitting on millions of dollars of equity. Real sob story. Why not just give the option to defer increases in property taxes? It makes zero sense to give tax breaks to people who won the housing lottery.

Well, I don't have the feelings of "envy" that you do. The fact is, there's little he can do with his "millions of dollars of equity" unless he moves far away from family, friends, and social network. It's cruel to force people to move. I'm not envious or cruel, so I support Prop 13.

He doesn't have to move far and away, he can go live to the other side of the San Mateo bridge and pocket at least a million dollars on the house price difference.

And as others have mentioned, there are other mechanisms to defer the tax payment based on the house equity.

The real cruel thing is to lower the bar for the "have" (as in have a house in SV) and higher it for the "have not".

Re: California's housing bill SB 50 has died in the state Senate

#124

Post by eli_gottlieb »

potatoz2 wrote: post #121
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s unfortunate that the state senate doesn’t seem to want to treat the housing shortage with the urgency that it deserves. The state senators are probably making quite a bit of money off this housing shortage that they wouldn't make with an adequate housing supply on the market.

It's much likelier that they are responding to the voters that have the time and money to make their reelection difficult.

Who are also making large sums of money off the housing crisis. I really don't think the State Senators are likely to consist overwhelmingly of renters, anyway: if their property value is appreciating, they're benefiting.

Re: California's housing bill SB 50 has died in the state Senate

#125

Post by dionidium »

Kalium wrote: post #46
pochamago wrote: post #17

The gentrification boogeyman comes off to me as privilege masquerading as the voice of the oppressed. It's regularly used to bludgeon the poor into homelessness, while the areas that are rife with actual gentrification seem to have far more diverse and affordable neighborhoods.

It's a little of both. There are plenty of people who genuinely believe they can help keep gentrification at bay if they preserve the housing approval systems that exist now. In practice that can mean anything from blocking everything to using approvals to extract design and donations to charities. There are also, as you say, those who are quite privileged and wish to preserve that. To them, gentrification is a great…

> There are plenty of people who genuinely believe they can help keep gentrification at bay if they preserve the housing approval systems that exist now

It's a complete reversal of cause and effect. New buildings don't cause demand; new buildings are a response to demand. You can't make the sun shine by passing a law against rain.

Re: California's housing bill SB 50 has died in the state Senate

#126

Post by triceratops »

roca wrote: post #119
triceratops wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until 2018 you could inherit homes from parents or grandparents and keep the original assessed value, but that's no longer the case. So unless the kid is earning enough to pay taxes on a massively appreciated house, they're going to have to sell and/or move away. EDIT: I was wrong about this.

Source for that no longer being the case? My SF housing activist friend says that this has not changed.

You're right. I confused it with something else.

Re: California's housing bill SB 50 has died in the state Senate

#127

Post by sidlls »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #111
yonran wrote: post #27

California 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,” la…

>It’s unfortunate that the state senate doesn’t seem to want to treat the housing shortage with the urgency that it deserves. The state senators are probably making quite a bit of money off this housing shortage that they wouldn't make with an adequate housing supply on the market.

That’s why it amuses me whenever people point to this area as some bastion of leftist politics. This place has a decidedly libertarian tilt: socially permissive and very much laissez fair in many if not most ways.

Re: California's housing bill SB 50 has died in the state Senate

#130

Post by wahern »

zozbot234 wrote: post #78
davidw wrote: post #4

California's housing policy failures have repercussions up and down the west coast. It's sad they didn't follow Oregon's lead and legalize some more diverse housing options.

The real answer is to legalize and tax it. Prop 13 is a huge distortion on the California real estate market.

Prop 13 is a huge distortion to tax and revenue generally, but it doesn't promote anti-development NIMBYism. If anything, Prop 13 should make denser development more tolerable to existing residents as otherwise denser development in their neighborhood would lead to accelerated increases in assessed land values. That's the very reason Prop 13 was enacted in the first place--to improve ownership security in the face of rapid changes in the neighborhood.

The one and only fix for NIMBYism is to remove local control. Cities have every incentive to continue restrictive zoning because the immediate costs are externalized to the larger region, while the benefits--satisfaction of home owning voters who don't want multi-family dwellings in their neighborhood--inure directly to the city leaders. It's a collective action problem. Mandates don't work well because leaders who comply are voted out of office, while those who find loopholes or simply ignore mandates are favored at the polls.

So when politicians complain that SB50 and similar bills remove local control, that's exactly the point. But nobody wants to say that aloud because to most people "local control" is in the abstract a good thing, and losing local control a bad thing.

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