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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

#111

Post by dsfyu404ed »

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #71
xvedejas wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that the roads really support more peak traffic at this point. Rather, we can reduce the traffic and train crowding by building more housing near jobs so that workers need not embark on 50+ mile super-commutes each day. Housing _is_ infrastructure, and it's the piece of infrastructure we're most sorely missing.

Adding extra lanes to a road just increases the amount of people driving on them, instead of easing traffic. So I would bet the same is true of public transit.

> So I would bet the same is true of public transit.

It is very true but the point of adding capacity (to any form of transit) isn't to reduce congestion at peak hours (that congestion is bounded by what people will tolerate) it's to allow more trips to happen with equivalent congestion thereby increasing the total number of trips and/or decreasing the duration of the congestion.

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

#112

Post by jdhn »

rndmize wrote: post #103
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…

Ahead of most of this, you probably need to remove or heavily adjust Prop 13. The primary problem, as detailed in the article, is that homeowners have every incentive to be against new construction and no incentives to be for it. If property taxes rose appropriately with property values, homeowners would have an interest in maintaining housing prices rather than doing everything they can to keep them rising. There's…

>But because they have owned their house for decades + P13, if they bought a _cheaper_ house elsewhere in CA to downsize, they'd be paying _more_ in property taxes,

California homeowners who are 55 or older get a one time chance to sell their existing primary residence, and transfer its property tax assessment to another house[0]. Only catch is that the valuation of the new property has to be equal or less than the property that you sold, but if you live in the Bay Area you probably meet that qualification.

[0] https://www.sfgate.com/business/networth/article/How-to-tran...

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

#113

Post by nostrademons »

i_am_nomad wrote: post #100
Lendal wrote: post #93

This story reminds me of when I was a kid and the school bus would come. Often there were no seats because every seat was taken--one kid each. There was plenty of room there, but the kids who got on the bus first would ban together to prevent new kids from sitting. Today these kids have grown up and own homes in the suburbs. New kids need to move in, but the kids who got there first refuse to let them build. That's w…

Except the school bus is a public good. Are you saying that we should reframe housing as a public good as well and provide it as such?

There's no need to assume this. Even if you treat land & housing as a private good, you're entitled to decide what you do with your own land. You're not entitled to decide what other people do with their land. Zoning laws, development restrictions, and HOAs violate this principle - they give existing homeowners a collective power to decide what other homeowners can do with their private property. This makes housing a weird sort of public/private hybrid where you have the private right to protect yourself from change but also the public right to prevent change within your neighborhood, which biases everything towards the status quo.

(Importantly, no such restriction exists on population: within the U.S. at least, nobody has the right to prevent their neighbors or fellow citizens from having kids, while they do have the right to prevent their neighbors from building more housing units. There's an inevitable mismatch between reality here...)

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

#114

Post by reading-at-work »

readarticle wrote: post #95
staplers wrote: post #76

Articles like this and the subsequent comments always reinforce to me that the human domain will never, or perhaps can never support wildlife and fauna. As much as we like to grandstand against mass extinction of wildlife and deforestation, we will always cave to economical and social pressures of modern life which almost exclusively require resource extraction and destruction of the biosphere.

There isn’t a single pro wildlife/forest view expressed in this article, what’s being explicitly fought against here by YIMBY, and later Falk, are: ... letters to elected officials, and at the open microphone that Mr. Falk observed at the City Council meetings, residents said things like “too aggressive,” “not respectful,” “embarrassment,” “outraged,” “audacity,” “very urban,” “deeply upset,” “unsightly,” “monstrosit…

> If preserving wildlife and forests can be equated with preserving suburban lifestyles and property values

It can't, and shouldn't, be equated to that. Denser urban living, i.e. building more housing in cities, reduces suburban sprawl. That's a good thing if you care about the environment.

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

#116

Post by bryanlarsen »

rjkennedy98 wrote: post #26
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…

Show the stats that Bay Area is building like crazy. I am so sick of people saying things like New York and Bay Area and California are building like crazy. No they are not. There is not one stat that shows that. Period.

"In fact, Toronto currently has more cranes in the sky than New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle and Boston combined."

https://www.blogto.com/real-estate-toronto/2019/07/toronto-c...

Toronto prices are crazy, so Toronto isn't building enough, let alone the major coastal American cities.

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

#118

Post by pneill »

It's very complicated. People have conflicting ideas - one the one hand, they want affordable housing (ie their rent to go down) or the other, not in my backyard.

Worth a view The Insane Battle To Sabotage a New Apartment Building Explains San Francisco's Housing Crisis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExgxwKnH8y4

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

#119

Post by bluGill »

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #71
xvedejas wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that the roads really support more peak traffic at this point. Rather, we can reduce the traffic and train crowding by building more housing near jobs so that workers need not embark on 50+ mile super-commutes each day. Housing _is_ infrastructure, and it's the piece of infrastructure we're most sorely missing.

Adding extra lanes to a road just increases the amount of people driving on them, instead of easing traffic. So I would bet the same is true of public transit.

That is only indirectly true. I know of rural roads in the middle of nowhere that wouldn't get any more traffic from adding more lanes. It is only true in the city because there is unmet demand to get places at in some amount of time, and so adding lanes allows some of that unmet demand to become met demand.

Of course adding enough lanes to meet demand is not worth the cost. However the induced demand argument is wrong, it is a cost benefit calculation: will the additional people who are able to get someplace be worth the cost to add the lane.

Transit does have the same problem, but transit can scale much better in a given amount of space. A bus every 5 minutes can handle more traffic than a lane filled with cars - assuming the bus doesn't compete with the cars. You can run a bus every 3 minutes, and if that isn't enough a train every 45 seconds holding 5 times as many people as the bus. If that isn't enough - okay, it is time to build another track for the train, but that is a huge number of people (ie a good number would find their life improved by a track on a slightly different route that)

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

#120

Post by notJim »

tomatotomato37 wrote: post #64
notJim wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 investme…

The difference is turnout. It's way easier to turn out for one single election (electing someone who will pre-empt this NIMBY nonsense) than it is to turn out to dozens of local meetings most people don't even hear about where these projects are discussed. Historically, the only people who show up to those meetings are the NIMBYs. There was a meeting in my city about housing and transit. On Thursday. At 2pm. How many people are gonna show up for that?
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