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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

#291

Post by jelliclesfarm »

neilparikh wrote: post #285
jelliclesfarm wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry. It doesn’t work that way. You can’t tax people for living in the properties they own. Property taxes are just another way to ensure that one never owns their homes 100%. Leins? Who in their right minds would agree to this? When you want someone to part with their money or wealth, you have to give them a reason to do so. ‘We want what you have’ is not a good reason. It becomes a punitive tax and is based on coe…

> You can’t tax people for living in the properties they own. We have to do this if we want to allocate land properly. Land is an exclusionary good, so one person owning a piece of land means that someone else can't own it. Imagine a society with no property tax. What prevents one (or a few people) from buying up all the land, holding it indefinitely, and then charging arbitrarily high rent to everyone else? Property…

When you want to take what’s someone’s property and make sure you want to ‘allocate’ it to someone else who wants it..it’s called redistribution.

They used to send people to re-education camps to ensure it happened smoothly. We may not have re education camps here in CA but asking senior citizens to accept punitive taxes so they would feel incentivized to move to the country so land can be reallocated is the same thing.

And yes, ‘one or few’ people will buy up everything and hold it. It is the nature of property rights. To have rights over ones own property. If you want to rewrite that, we have to change what America is about..

Being able to live in your property is not ‘using it inefficiently’. Wanting someone’s property ..otoh..is theft.

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

#292

Post by sbierwagen »

ogre_codes wrote: post #248
exjdjeejfh wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Principled is a way of making it sound less terrible than 'restrained'. California is a perfect example of what happens when you let environmentalists handle housing policy, the poor suffer because environmentalism is classism in disguise in these social contexts.

This is literally the exact opposite of what an environmentalist would want in terms of urban growth and planning. Environmentally friendly planning means you have housing near where people work to avoid highly polluting long commutes. The problem is NIMBY bullshit in the purest sense. People will use every excuse in the book to prevent new housing in their neighborhood. While a fair amount of the time environmental…

>Environmentally friendly planning means you have housing near where people work to avoid highly polluting long commutes.

Vehicle miles driven doesn't make as big of a difference as one might expect. A paper[0] I saw linked on reddit had an interesting graph: https://imgur.com/a/n7u8fGH

In this paper, what carbon emissions you lose by not driving you gain from building emissions. Maybe because the study area was New York, with more fuel oil-heated buildings? Presumably, decarbonized heating and electricity generation would make a difference, but New York state already is pretty good by that metric: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/newyork/ (Though nowhere near carbon neutral, or carbon negative, as would be required for keeping global warming to 2C)

---

0: Andrews, C. J. (2008). Greenhouse gas emissions along the rural-urban gradient. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09640560802423780 If you don't want to buy the PDF, then visit the crow site.

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

#293

Post by rconti »

avocado4 wrote: post #109
codemac wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are Napa, Atherton, and Malibu filled with environmentalists? I'm so confused by your reaction, are there specific housing policies that are focused on the environment that have had bigger effects than things like prop 13? or cities with 30k jobs in a year but 300 units of housing (looking at you, mountain view)?

Atherton looks so funny from a satellite: https://imgur.com/a/kKpymj9 You can see the NIMBY lines so clearly.

My understanding (via my wife's family, who have been in Menlo Park for ~50 years) is that Atherton doesn't allow lots smaller than 1 acre.

I live at the yellow star at the top of the map. Needless to say, my lot is vastly smaller than an acre :)

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

#294

Post by rconti »

refurb wrote: post #220
diego wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think that people aren’t moving? Population isn’t decreasing if that’s what you mean, but the Bay Area is a revolving door. I own a condo in San Francisco, and I’ve had five different tenants in eight years.

Yup. Of the 12 people from my graduating class who moved to SF, me and one other person is left after 8 years. Of course plenty more from later years offset that.

From what college? And moving into then out of SF doesn't make the bay area a revolving door.

My (bay area) college class was half from CA, half from the northwest. About 50% of those from the northwest moved 'home' after school. Is that a revolving door? Did they get sick of the area? Or did they never intend to stay?

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

#295

Post by dragonwriter »

koboll wrote: post #287
dragonwriter wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This decision is extremely frustrating coming from a legislature filled with landlords. Not only do the people have the power to vote out legislators, in California they also have the power to bypass them and legislate directly. But, while there is broad consensus that housing is a problem, there isn't broad consensus on solutions among the public any more than there is among legislators.

Homeowners are disproportionately likely to vote, so their constituents no doubt agree with them on this issue. The real problem is that when you incentivize and subsidize putting your net worth into a single large investment vehicle, and then let holders of that investment decide how much competition to it will be allowed nearby, it creates a vicious cycle of ever-increasing supply shortage. Eventually, of course, t…

> When the boomers die, renters will be the ones voting.

When the Boomers die, their GenX and Millenial offspring will inherit their homes, oftentimes, in California, without a full-value tax assessment. And, as the relationships between wealth and voting propensity and wealth and homeownersip are both unlikely to switch directions, homeowners will still be overrepresented in the electorate, and there'll be a new generation of the geriatric vampire class of rent-seeking housing-supply hoarders, and a new generation complaining about them.

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

#296

Post by rconti »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #176
majormajor wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxes in CA are far from prohibitive, even with today's prices. The gap between affording something in the first place and being able to cover the tax is not that large. But the base prices are the killer. But that's also largely a factor of mostly high-income people moving in, while mostly lower-income people are moving out. Keep up the business climate that fuels the inward funnel of money, and you'll keep prices h…

My thought on that is prices reflect the ability of people to pay principal, interest, taxes, and maintence. Lower the property tax rate and prices just go up. Difference is taxes go to pay for public goods and services. Principal and interest do not. Prop 13 benefits corporations, long term property owners, and people that inherit property. At the expense of renters, new home buyers, and beneficiaries of public good…

Precisely true. Give a mortgage interest deduction, or lower interest rates? Good news! You can afford more house! _and so can everybody else_

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

#297

Post by [deleted] »

exjdjeejfh wrote: post #76
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…

Principled is a way of making it sound less terrible than 'restrained'. California is a perfect example of what happens when you let environmentalists handle housing policy, the poor suffer because environmentalism is classism in disguise in these social contexts.

[deleted]

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

#298

Post by triceratops »

generalpass wrote: post #258
triceratops wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politicians vote in a way that they think will get them re-elected. They aren't the true opponents of this bill.

Campaigns cost millions of dollars. Where do you think that money comes from? Principles and integrity?

A well-funded campaign is useless against pissed off voters.

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

#299

Post by AmericanChopper »

joejerryronnie wrote: post #289
Twixes wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because that's where the best jobs are. Maybe because that's where they're from and it's not their fault they're getting priced out (gentrification). Maybe because they just really like the place. In any case, you don't get to be a gatekeeper. Cities are public.

If the OP doesn’t get to be a gatekeeper, why do you get to be a change agent?

Population growth is the change agent.

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

#300

Post by BurningFrog »

ogre_codes wrote: post #248
exjdjeejfh wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Principled is a way of making it sound less terrible than 'restrained'. California is a perfect example of what happens when you let environmentalists handle housing policy, the poor suffer because environmentalism is classism in disguise in these social contexts.

This is literally the exact opposite of what an environmentalist would want in terms of urban growth and planning. Environmentally friendly planning means you have housing near where people work to avoid highly polluting long commutes. The problem is NIMBY bullshit in the purest sense. People will use every excuse in the book to prevent new housing in their neighborhood. While a fair amount of the time environmental…

It's not rational environmentalism, but I'm sure a lot of NIMBYs are honestly convinced they're fighting for Mother Earth, and the simultaneous explosive value increase of their home is purely coincidental.

Motivated Reasoning is a hell of a thing!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning

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