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California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

nytimes.com

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Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#81

Post by manfredo »

aty268 wrote: post #12
fortran77 wrote: post #8

The 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.

Remember that many renters (>70% in some cities like San Francisco) have price controls on their rents. If you're guaranteed that your rent will effectively never go up, then you're much more likely to block an apartment complex construction because it'll block your view or "change neighborhood character". Price controls on rents means many renters enjoy privileged status that insulates them from housing costs.

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#82

Post by themagician »

gdubs wrote: post #61

Honest question: how do we address the housing crisis in the Bay Area without turning it into Los Angeles?

Rezone the area around Golden Gate Park and turn it into a dense metropolis.

You could 10x the density around there and be able to support the population. You’ve got wide streets, services, and it isn’t landfill.

Honestly though, I feel like it isn’t really a crisis. It’s mostly rich people fighting with other rich people over whose backyard to build in. There are no real YIMBYs, just people who want to live in certain areas they don’t currently live in.

Most of the poors have already been displaced. We pretend like they are the focus because it’s good for politics, but the reality is the diversity is already gone.

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#83

Post by riantogo »

christiansakai wrote: post #41
pascalxus wrote: post #22

I completely agree with the sentiment to build more, much more housing. But, in order to make that happen, we also need to: - get rid of or modify zoning laws (at least in places where growth will happen) - reduce regulations on builders - ensure that there are plenty of builders for health competition (so that consumers don't get ripped off) - provide protections for builders from Sue happy NIMBYs (some kind of lega…

Home ownership generally slows growth for everything else around that area. Every home owner has this "not in my backyard" mentality and will veto any possible developments in their area.

You know why, right?

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#84

Post by pound »

majormajor wrote: post #68
wedn3sday wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

not sure what exactly is 'short term' here, but simple example re. supply and demand and prices:

1) there is a 100 single family homes somewhere.

2) there are 300 people looking who need to live in that somewhere

3) on top of 100 single family homes now we have 400 units built

..

Can it be that price of the units for sale may get reduced for competitiveness?

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#85

Post by bhawks »

snarf21 wrote: post #18
fortran77 wrote: post #8

The 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 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…

Those numbers seem very unlikely. Ignoring that California is a nonrecourse state. If someone ended up owing 1.2 mil on a 500k house, they could walk away and only be out the house and whatever payments they had already made on the loan. The risk of massive correction simply isn't borne by the individual (especially if they've bought the property in the past 5-10 years).

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#86

Post by bovermyer »

gdubs wrote: post #61

Honest question: how do we address the housing crisis in the Bay Area without turning it into Los Angeles?

Either build very tall, high density housing to accommodate the population... or reduce the population drastically.

A nuclear missile fired into the San Andreas fault, perhaps (this is a movie reference, folks, and not a serious suggestion).

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#87

Post by thedance »

themagician wrote: post #82
gdubs wrote: post #61

Honest question: how do we address the housing crisis in the Bay Area without turning it into Los Angeles?

Rezone the area around Golden Gate Park and turn it into a dense metropolis. You could 10x the density around there and be able to support the population. You’ve got wide streets, services, and it isn’t landfill. Honestly though, I feel like it isn’t really a crisis. It’s mostly rich people fighting with other rich people over whose backyard to build in. There are no real YIMBYs, just people who want to live in certa…

Every property within 1/4 mile of the N-Judah streetcar line should have over-the-counter, by-right zoning approval for 7-story buildings with zero parking and no setbacks.

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#88

Post by Invictus0 »

If California were its own country, would it try to build more housing or would it put up a border wall and halt immigration? It's clear to me that Californians would choose the latter, and I don't really blame them. Deep down, everyone hates change, especially the type of transformative change that is taking place in these California suburbs.

What does Lafayette owe the people of San Francisco?--or more accurately, the people that are not from California that chose to move to San Francisco? The revolving door that defines California immigration today, where wealthy young software developers go in and middle/lower class native Californians go out, is what is hollowing out the population, shifting the culture, and causing the homelessness problem, and building more housing isn't going to fix that.

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#89

Post by manfredo »

zamfi wrote: post #63
thedance wrote: post #33

Earlier 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.

You're putting the cart before the horse. More commuters creates more ticket revenue, which gives BART more resources to expand capacity. They're not going to expand capacity until there's more demand.

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#90

Post by skybrian »

zamfi wrote: post #58
uniformlyrandom wrote: post #11

How 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…

> We have the tracks, we have the train... the train just does not go this route on weekends. This is the easy one to fix — when there is demand, they can just run more trains. Much harder is the transbay commute at rush hours. There is almost no spare capacity, and it’s not clear how those extra thousands of people in Lafayette will make it in to SF every morning before we build a second transbay tube for Bart — and…

I generally agree, but it seems like jobs should also be moving away from the center? If there are a lot of commuters in Lafayette going to Oakland then the transbay tunnel wouldn't be relevant for them, but there would need to be capacity for local trains.

Or if the jobs were in the other direction like Walnut Creek, it would be a reverse commute.

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