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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

#311

Post by zamfi »

jelliclesfarm wrote: post #246
bobthepanda wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bay Area wants the density (and property taxes inflow) They already have sufficient density and property prices to actually invest in infrastructure. The problem has always been Prop 13 and the artificial limits placed on taxes that would otherwise fund infrastructure locally.

It’s not artificial limits. Including special taxes, it averages out to 1.25. It’s on par with other places. What happened was that housing and economy skyrocketed within a very short period of time. Foreigners are allowed to invest in the housing market for speculative purposes. The extra tax income is used to fund public schools. More immigration and younger people having kids. And overall death rate slowing down.…

> Also..why should everyone feel like owning a home is a right? You can always rent.

Or, if you want to buy, buy a condo!

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

#312

Post by [deleted] »

yonran wrote: post #267
baddox wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "re-election" generally refers specifically to an incumbent winning an election, rather than just any time someone wins more than one election.

Avalos is running for the same office that he held 12 to 4 years ago. In San Francisco, BoS members are termed out after 8 consecutive years but can come back after waiting a term.

[deleted]

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

#313

Post by neilparikh »

jelliclesfarm wrote: post #291
neilparikh wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thi…

> 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.

No one's property is taken, they'll just sell it on the market to whoever can pay the most. That's not redistribution, it's called markets (what America is build on).

I think we fundamentally disagree on economics, so I doubt we'll come any useful agreement here unfortunately.

However, one thing I wanted to note is that Milton Friedman, one of the most libertarian modern economists thinks property tax is the best tax [1][2]. If a libertarian economist thinks a policy is good, yet you're comparing the policy to authoritarian socialist countries and re-education camps, you may want to consider that your mental model of economics/definitions of common words is extremely off base from how everyone else uses it. The Conservative Party in UK did the same thing, where they called land value tax (essentially what I'm arguing for here) a "Marxist tax grab", even when Marx opposed it!

In general, using words to mean the exact opposite of what everyone else considers them is not a great strategy.

Even ignoring that, I think claiming that property taxes are the "same thing" as re-education camps is a fairly tone-deaf statement to make (and one most readers would consider wrong), and it only serves to weaken the rest of your argument.

[1]: in his words, the "least bad tax", but that's equivalent, since he considers taxes to be required

[2]: see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS7Jb58hcsc

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

#314

Post by jayd16 »

Gimpei wrote: post #82

The SF board of supervisors has voted on resolutions opposing this bill several times now. If you care about housing and live in SF, take a second look at your supervisor. Their votes may not make a difference with respect to SB50 but they can certainly block housing in the city and too often they do.

>If you care about housing and live in SF [...]

What people don't seem to understand is if you live in SF you probably have housing that's working for you.

Lots of people can't live in that city. Guess what? If they don't live there they can't vote there. I'm not sure why but even as people decry NIMBYism they seem to think there's some groundswell of support that's somehow suppressed.

At this point we should just make Fresno really desirable too or something.

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

#315

Post by Karishma1234 »

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.

Thank you for saying this. Environmentalism is an old fashioned imperialism dressed up in new clothes. "Some" people who think they are better than others decide that "denser" housing is somehow better and when someone disagrees with them obviously those people are too selfish for protecting their own interest and not accepting the vision of these masterminds.

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

#316

Post by kortilla »

danans wrote: post #229
jibe wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it may be selfish, but for environmentalists it is selfish and hypocritical. I'm specifically looking at the wealthy, anti-growth, green community on the SF Peninsula.

You should get to know the other group of environmentalists who aren't wealthy, are pro-density, and are less likely to live in the peninsula (although I'm sure they exist there too). There are a lot more of them, so it shouldn't be hard!

Why? That has nothing to do with criticizing the home owning hypocrites on the peninsula.

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

#317

Post by gzer0 »

pdonis wrote: post #149
gzer0 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, Standard Oil, whose major "crime" was selling oil more cheaply than all of its competitors.

Standard raised prices to its monopolistic customers but lowered them to hurt competitors, often disguising its illegal actions by using bogus supposedly independent companies it controlled [1].

The evidence is, in fact, absolutely conclusive that the Standard Oil Co. charges altogether excessive prices where it meets no competition, and particularly where there is little likelihood of competitors entering the field, and that, on the other hand, where competition is active, it frequently cuts prices to a point which leaves even the Standard little or no profit, and which more often leaves no profit to the competitor, whose costs are ordinarily somewhat higher [2].

[1]. Grayson, Leslie E. (1987). Who and How in Planning for Large Companies: Generalizations from the Experiences of Oil Companies.

[2]. Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States, 221 U.S. 1 (1911).

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

#318

Post by kortilla »

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?

Just keep building. The rich will very quickly stop buying housing as an investment when it stops outpacing the stock market on ROI.

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

#319

Post by veeralpatel979 »

pdonis wrote: post #149
gzer0 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, Standard Oil, whose major "crime" was selling oil more cheaply than all of its competitors.

Didn't they collude with railroads?

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

#320

Post by kortilla »

kunai wrote: post #145
veeralpatel979 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The way I see it, we have two basic technologies for coordinating as a society: free markets, and governments This is smart. I'm stealing this :)

On the counterfactual, it's actually not very smart, and a toxic and myopic view of society. There's an entire spectrum of coordinating collective human behavior that ranges from systems like feudalism to anarcho-syndicalism to mixed economies like those that exist in Scandinavia and much of Western Europe. Government's role is infinitely flexible as a result; it can choose to be as expansive or as minimal as possibl…

Yet public housing is a terrible failure in essentially every city with housing cost issues in the US.
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