Honest question: how do we address the housing crisis in the Bay Area without turning it into Los Angeles?
California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build
61–70 of 645 posts
Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not saying building isn't the problem but how do you solve for someone who is in a loan at $1.2M and in one year it is worth $500K on the open market due to all the building. This is something that has to happen incrementally and why people dig in so hard. That property is the main store of wealth for a lot of people. The wrong scheme could bankrupt them and destroy their retirement. Additionally, super dense hou…
Show me where any house would be worth 40% of its current nominal value because of nearby building. That's completely unrealistic conjecture.
My current house is apparently worth $2 million. Even with California construction costs, replacing it with a new house would cost less than $350,000. If someone could build a lot of houses nearby, it would drive the price of my house down to something realistic.
I’m in favor of lots of construction, because it’s the right thing overall. But it would hit me hard. I’m willing to accept that, so I lobby for new construction when I can. I’m just realistic about the outcome.
Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build
#63How about we talk about building infrastructure? The whole Bay Area is building like crazy, and yet the roads are getting worse (more building? more traffic lights!). Public transportation is a big joke around here. Caltrain from South San Jose to Mountain View? We have the tracks, we have the train... the train just does not go this route on weekends. We have the same situation as a startup focused on developing a p…
I think you have it backwards. We squander the capacity of our main commuter railroad (BART) by surrounding it with dispersed neighborhoods. We need to build dense transit villages around the rail stations we already own.
> We squander the capacity of our main commuter railroad (BART)
Out of curiosity, do you ride Bart at commute hours? At 5pm, the platforms at Embarcadero and Montgomery are dangerously packed. I didn’t think there is much excess capacity for commuting.
All other times? Absolutely yes.
Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build
#64The answer _is_ building more. (I'll say this before the people on Hacker News who are opposed to all private property suggest that "prop 13" is the problem. It's not.) The problem is they don't build enough. Build build build! They need the California State Government to overrule local zoning limits. We need to allow dense housing near rail lines and major roads. And I think that anywhere a single-family detached ho…
> They need the California State Government to overrule local zoning limits Yes, California and other places with housing problems need as-of-right policies as the article suggests. It's not simply zoning, it's removing all ability of local governments to hold things up, because people will use absolutely anything they can grab onto. From a philosophical standpoint, people are sometimes uncomfortable with the idea of…
I don't understand though how the state government will be expected to implement this different than the local government; they both draw from essentially the same voterbase that is hostile toward the upzoning as the majority of the state population resides in those large cities anyway. The only real difference is that you'll also have a population of rural voters observing from the sidelines as they have no investment in the issue of high-density zoning
Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm from Texas, and I don't understand the stigma against developers building more housing. It drives down prices, and increases competition. Why would California citizens ever be against this? Edit: The reason is because homeowners are competing with developers, so their own asset depreciates when supply increases. I was just thinking from the perspective of renters.
Speaking as someone who lived in Bay Area California for a few years, and Texas for several decades now, the first thing to know if that not all California has the same attitude on this, for much the same reason that Waco and Austin have different attitudes on a lot of things. In the Bay Area, there are geographical (water and hills) limits to expansion, whereas in Texas when you build more, it usually is out into th…
High end housing and low end housing are not separate markets. If there is an inadequate supply rich people bid up the price of lower end housing.
Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build
#66The answer _is_ building more. (I'll say this before the people on Hacker News who are opposed to all private property suggest that "prop 13" is the problem. It's not.) The problem is they don't build enough. Build build build! They need the California State Government to overrule local zoning limits. We need to allow dense housing near rail lines and major roads. And I think that anywhere a single-family detached ho…
I'm from Texas, and I don't understand the stigma against developers building more housing. It drives down prices, and increases competition. Why would California citizens ever be against this? Edit: The reason is because homeowners are competing with developers, so their own asset depreciates when supply increases. I was just thinking from the perspective of renters.
> I'm from Texas, and I don't understand the stigma against developers building more housing. It drives down prices, and increases competition. Why would California citizens ever be against this?
Also from Texas: In Texas, developers building households generally happens on empty land in the suburbs, or in unused non-residential land.
In LA or the Bay Area, it would happen by replacing single family homes with multi-family housing. Something that would also be anathema in most well-off Texas communities. It's already sprawled about as far as geography permits.
Lots of people don't want to live in those places and would rather keep their existing neighborhoods than invite a lot of new residents and a larger, denser population. Hence their creating those laws.
It's not obvious to me why we should take the desires of the people who want to move there more seriously than the desires of people to keep what they have similarly.
But in that case, we need to stop building a ton of office space in those "full" cities to import a bunch more jobs than we have housing for...
Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, what would be a good where increased supply drives up cost? I can't reason any off the top of my head.
Induced demand is a thing. Not sure to what extent it applies to housing in any particular market, but any destabilizing effects of rapidly adding more housing should be seen as artifacts of the fact that we've let this problem go unaddressed for decades. People need places to live, and if we don't serve that need then the problems are only going to get worse and the solutions more disruptive. There are also less vis…
Induced demand is where more of some good is supplied, which drives down its price, which increases the amount consumed, which means the price isn't driven down as much as it would have been if there had been no change in amount consumed. (A common example is widening a congested highway: more capacity reduces congestion somewhat, which means that the inconvenience of driving on that highway goes down, so more people drive, so the congestion doesn't go down as much as you'd naively predict.)
What I'm not seeing here is a way for increased housing supply to make the prices go up, as opposed to down, but not as much. Network effects, maybe: increased density of a city could make being in that city more valuable, thus making more people want to live there at any given price, which means that prices would rise.
Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm from Texas, and I don't understand the stigma against developers building more housing. It drives down prices, and increases competition. Why would California citizens ever be against this? Edit: The reason is because homeowners are competing with developers, so their own asset depreciates when supply increases. I was just thinking from the perspective of renters.
It drives down prices. When you bought a house back in 2008 for $300k and now its worth $2M you really dont want anything to touch your nest egg. Its NIMBYism at its finest. Everyone says, "just build affordable housing!" Just as long as its not in _my_ neighborhood.
It really wouldn't. Not any time soon. A developer being able to build a 4-unit place on top of a single family home would increase the value of that land cause now they can sell it to four times as many people.
So it's gonna be that much harder for a "regular" person to buy anything in the short term.
Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build
#69Honest question: how do we address the housing crisis in the Bay Area without turning it into Los Angeles?
Avert global warming and maintain current patterns of SF weather.
Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you have it backwards. We squander the capacity of our main commuter railroad (BART) by surrounding it with dispersed neighborhoods. We need to build dense transit villages around the rail stations we already own.
> We squander the capacity of our main commuter railroad (BART) Out of curiosity, do you ride Bart at commute hours? At 5pm, the platforms at Embarcadero and Montgomery are dangerously packed. I didn’t think there is much excess capacity for commuting. All other times? Absolutely yes.
A fun fact is that BART has 48 stations.