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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

#301

Post by BurningFrog »

jibe wrote: post #98
alasdair_ wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Most of the environmentalists that I know are very much in favor of increasing housing density and reducing commute time in ICE vehicles. Current housing policy does neither of these things.

Most of the environmentalists that I know are very much in favor of increasing housing density as long as it isn't in their neighborhood.

Which is why the system need to be reformed on a statewide level, not by making a special case of every project and every neighborhood.

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

#302

Post by BurningFrog »

yonran wrote: post #115
justinzollars wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They all need to go. Not one is a housing advocate. All spend their energy to limit housing. They say they are for affordable housing, but their mandates are designed to exclude both groups of people and housing.

Not quite all of the BoS. Of the 4 misleading resolutions that the SF BoS passed to oppose SB 827 and SB 50 ( https://sfbos.org/sites/default/files/r0084-18.pdf https://sfbos.org/sites/default/files/r0172-19.pdf https://sfbos.org/sites/default/files/r0541-19.pdf https://www.sfcta.org/sites/default/files/2019-12/R20-25%20S... ), only Sup. Ahsha Safaí and Mayor London Breed (and Jeff Sheehy and Vallie Brown, who are no…

Is there any reason to think they're not reflecting the will of their voters?

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

#303

Post by [deleted] »

jnordwick wrote: post #197
sjg007 wrote: post #14

Well the only solution is a ballot initiative to repeal prop 13. That will change things.

Prop 13 was created because it was forcing people out of their houses because of inflation property values on paper. That is detrimental. You shouldn't scrap it completely; you should limit it to primary residences (spend more than half the year there). That would get rid of some of the worse issues. It shocks me every time I hear fellow left-of-center people talk about scrapping Prop 13, but then also rail against g…

[deleted]

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

#304

Post by [deleted] »

zpallin wrote: post #132
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.

While Environmentalism is definitely classist, and CEQA has played a part in preventing affordable development in cities, there are so many other factors that boiling it down to environmentalism is absurd. If anything, CEQA and other environmental regulations have contributed more to improving the quality of life for working class people and the poor than it has contributed to their detriment. California is the media…

[deleted]

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

#305

Post by anonymoushn »

jnordwick wrote: post #197
sjg007 wrote: post #14

Well the only solution is a ballot initiative to repeal prop 13. That will change things.

Prop 13 was created because it was forcing people out of their houses because of inflation property values on paper. That is detrimental. You shouldn't scrap it completely; you should limit it to primary residences (spend more than half the year there). That would get rid of some of the worse issues. It shocks me every time I hear fellow left-of-center people talk about scrapping Prop 13, but then also rail against g…

Maybe they will be motivated to legalize housing if they are taxed proportionally to the value of their houses.

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

#306

Post by BurningFrog »

roca wrote: post #147
triceratops wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No problem. To an outsider like me, this seems like one of the worst features of Prop 13. Over time it separates people into two classes: those whose family has owned property for a long time, and everyone else who can't afford to buy a house because the taxes are prohibitive. (Even if you're very rich, it will make more sense to rent than to trigger tax reevaluation.) Call it neo-feudalism.

...but even this Prop 13 Landed Gentry has a big problem:

They have to live in their fabulously high priced and undertaxed home to enjoy the benefits. They can't move to another town or maybe not even take a job in the other side of town.

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

#307

Post by MrMoenty »

sbierwagen wrote: post #292
ogre_codes wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think part of the problem of this graph is that it attributes commercial building emissions to the municipalities in which they are placed, even though these buildings might be used by residents and commuters alike.

So if you move into the city instead of commuting, you might be using the same commercial buildings a before, but their emissions are suddenly attributed to you.

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

#308

Post by anonymoushn »

VRay wrote: post #255
atatatko wrote: post #185

Would never accept job offer from the Valley exactly for that reason, unless it's a CEO position. Living in Asia, I can rent a perfect house for about $1000, including utilities and cleaning services. Remote job gives equal opportunities

I dunno man, I ran the numbers and came out WAY ahead in the Bay Area As a senior engineer, I was able to negotiate 150k for remote work (and I'd rent a house house in a nice Midwestern city or a nice apartment in Tokyo for $1200/month) vs 300k+ per year in Mountain View Even with $3000/month rent, $6 gallons of milk, etc, I'm saving up way more money per year for a similar quality of life. Not to mention that I'm ma…

I think you can get about 33% more both in Tokyo and in the Bay Area.

I took the Tokyo side of this trade. I don't think my learning and connections are significantly impeded by being in Tokyo, and my quality of life is leaps and bounds greater.

Examples: Strangers regularly assault or shout slurs at me in San Francisco while I am distracted by trying not to step in the human feces on my way to work. In Tokyo, while I was waiting at a crosswalk in the rain without an umbrella, a stranger placed his umbrella above me. In Tokyo, everyone uses a form of bike lock that's essentially an extra back brake with a combination lock. In San Francisco, I lost my $500 bicycle from inside the trunk of my locked car in a private garage. In Tokyo, I do not really have any reason to own a car.

I will save a little bit less money per year, and I will not get to deduct as much money per year from my income due to theft. I think it comes out alright.

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

#309

Post by zamfi »

sbierwagen wrote: post #292
ogre_codes wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you missed the central point of this paper. It's true that there is an offsetting factor of building energy use vs. VMT, but the reality remains that denser environments, with jobs near residents, emit less per capita -- as that graph you linked to shows.

What's surprising is that at the other end of the spectrum, in rural (not sub-urban) areas, other factors (forests, etc.) combine to cause lower per-capita emissions than suburbs (and in some cases, negative per-capita emissions because of sequestration).

Basically, from a carbon-emissions perspective, post-war suburbs are unsurprisingly worst, rural areas get some help from sequestration in forests (this fact being the contribution of the paper), and dense urban environments are the least-emitting.

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

#310

Post by exjdjeejfh »

girvo wrote: post #273
erik_seaberg wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It all helps. Relieve the shortage in high-income housing, and maybe they'll stop bidding up the prices for (formerly) lower-income housing because they had to live somewhere .

While I don't doubt that is the case, I do think it's offset by the high-income housing people then buying a second or third property as investment (gotta be a landlord, or you just haven't made it, I guess). I wonder if there is real data on this?

This is exactly the problem! People aren't happy unless the housing being built is low income housing. Building materials aren't made out of class concious magic, a premium apartment might be higher quality but the same kinds of contractors can often be used. We can't spite the rich here, we need a solution that leverages the market. Build so much housing for the wealthy that the demand will be insufficient to sustain the supply and then let the builders move on to the middle before finally the lower class housing types. People want to see homeless and poor people being provided for, I get it. But people also want efficient spending and that means supplying the top first to incentivize the builders to move down chain.
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