California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by nostrademons » Fri, Feb 14, 2020, 7:41 PM UTC

mateo411 wrote: post #53

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.

> When you bought a house back in 2008 for $300k and now its worth $2M Do you have any examples of this? The Bay Area housing market has had a nice run, but it hasn't grow 666% percent in the last 12 years.

It's exaggerated in timescale and returns but not by a huge amount.

Condos I saw for $400K in 2010 are going for about a million. Homes that were about $1.1M in 2010 are about $2.4M. The sibling comment describes homes bought for $500K in 2000 that are now $2M; this is not out of line with what I'm heard from some founder friends I have that are pushing 50. IIRC my wife's parents bought their home for $130K or so back in 1986 and it's now worth $3M.

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

#162

Post by bluGill » Fri, Feb 14, 2020, 7:41 PM UTC

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…

If you upzone far enough builders will fill all the demand for rich apartments, and see the only way to make money is to build apartments for the next level down Some of this is moving the rich to the next style and letting the next level down have their old apartment.

The problem of course is the best time to build affordable housing is 20 years ago. So if you want to really help the poor (as opposed to symbolically helping a few poor while leaving the rest out) you need to go back in time 20 years. You can start today though on a 20 year plan.

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

#163

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi » Fri, Feb 14, 2020, 7:43 PM UTC

RangerScience wrote: post #47

quotemstr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another beneficial change would be repealing proposition 13. Because proposition 13 essentially bans property tax increases for property owners, it creates a perverse incentive to drive property values as high as possible with restrictive zoning. Without proposition 13, property taxes would rise along with the land's economic value, creating an additional incentive for property owners to let the market naturally shif…

There's good reasons to keep part of it. I figure: You get to have the Prop 13 effect on one property - notionally, your home, but since it's difficult / gameable to determine which place is "your home", fuggedaboutit, and just say "pick one". Because yeah, it'd suck to lose your home that you're supposed to own because your neighborhood got pricey.

There are reasonable ways to protect people from property-tax shocks. Prop 13 is about as dumb a mechanism you could design.

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

#164

Post by prewett » Fri, Feb 14, 2020, 7:44 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #144

quotemstr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another beneficial change would be repealing proposition 13. Because proposition 13 essentially bans property tax increases for property owners, it creates a perverse incentive to drive property values as high as possible with restrictive zoning. Without proposition 13, property taxes would rise along with the land's economic value, creating an additional incentive for property owners to let the market naturally shif…

Prop 13 also has the perverse incentive that once you are in you should vote for tax increases and high spend policies - you won't have to pay for them. I'm surprised Republicans have not latch onto this as a reason to repeal it - they already like to point out it is easy to spend other people's money as an argument against socialism.

Republicans are also against more taxes, so increasing property taxes isn't very appealing. Plus, the Republican area of northern California (the "State of Jefferson" area) isn't very wealthy, so I think people fear they won't be able to afford paying any more money.

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

#165

Post by caconym_ » Fri, Feb 14, 2020, 7:45 PM UTC

pjscott wrote: post #67

caconym_ wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, that's what induced demand is.

In a vacuum, no, I don't think simply adding housing can meaningfully drive up prices. But (as you say) obviously it feeds into organic urban growth, which does increase demand, so you have to keep building housing. It seems that the problem we have in our big tech hub cities is that we let that growth happen for a while and then decided that there would be no more housing.

I can imagine an induced demand effect as whole new classes of people realize that they can actually now live close to where they work, and come flooding back into the city. But like I said, that's an artifact of artificially constrained supply.

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

#166

Post by bluGill » Fri, Feb 14, 2020, 7:45 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #152

bovermyer wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

What movie? It sounds vaguely entertaining.

There are probably many from 1950 - 1980 to choose from. I've read many science fiction books from that era where the premise was such a bomb (though the destination was different). I'm not a movie buff, but I'd guess there is a superhero blockbuster with that theme somewhere in there ( Superman?).

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

#167

Post by dv_dt » Fri, Feb 14, 2020, 7:46 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #136

fra wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of us are homeowners. Speaking for myself, I simply believe affordable housing for all is more important than my property value.

If it is only in your backyard it is better for your property value in the long run: eventually someone will offer you a ton of money to replace your house with a large apartment complex. If it is everywhere that can build, than the builders can take whatever property comes up - and because they have to compete with other developers for renters they are likely to build smaller so on both counts property values don't…

That's what I don't understand, increasing density usually means price / sqft for all real estate in the area goes up. I often wonder if the analysis on why people shoot down zoning changes is incorrectly attributed to price or property tax, and is mostly people resisting any change.

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

#168

Post by thedance » Fri, Feb 14, 2020, 7:47 PM UTC

manfredo wrote: post #150

thedance wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BART ridership is currently maxed out in the peak direction at peak hour, and carries triple the design number of passengers. They don’t need to expand, they need to profit from the currently underused directions (eg berkeley to Fremont).

Transit reacts to changes in transportation demand, it doesn't set demand. How do you envision BART would profit from underused directions? Put out ads encouraging people to take these routes for fun? As I said, pointing out that transit systems are at capacity is not a valid reason to block development. Transit systems always try to operate at capacity because excess capacity means suboptimal allocation of resources…

The people profit, not BART itself. BART is infrastructure. Like the fire department, it is not intended for it to be internally profitable.

The way the people profit is you put homes in the places that have lots of jobs, mostly so that people can just walk around but also to benefit from people filling up the reverse direction on BART. In places that have mostly homes you buld jobs instead. For places without an abundance of either, such as Orinda and Lafayette, you build both.

It's total nonsense that we build a railroad to a place like Lafayette, but that city has had the same population for 50 years. This goes triple for Berkeley, which has THREE subway stations and the same population it had in 1950! We should expect that adding billions of dollars of infrastructure also adds lots of people.

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

#169

Post by irq11 » Fri, Feb 14, 2020, 7:48 PM UTC

bobbydroptables wrote: post #149

wpasc wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think new york should be lumped in with california in that measure. This site shows active construction in new york: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/buildings/html/nyc-active-major-...

It's really hard to wrap your head around whether a city is building a lot by looking at a raw number. But fewer than 7,000 building permits in a city of 8 million is frighteningly little. You need to compare it to population growth, decades of building backlog, job growth, etc.

New construction in New York can have hundreds of units. I don’t know why you would automatically assume that 7,000 is a “frightening” number.

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

#170

Post by danbmil99 » Fri, Feb 14, 2020, 7:48 PM UTC

Go ahead and build, but make damn sure you are being rational about people's behavior when it comes to driving and transit.

My ex moved into a condominium complex that has exactly zero parking spots or loading docks for visitors, and no parking for half a mile in either direction. It's an absolute total fail. Neighbors rat on each other to get each other's cars towed because they get so upset. It's literally impossible to have a party there or even invite friends over because they simply cannot park and there is no transit available anywhere near there. There aren't any bike lanes either because it's a financially strapped city and the complex is near the border of a rich city that explicitly does things to make it harder to get between the two townships.

I'm just saying, both hands have to know what each other are doing and people have to make rational decisions at the municipal level.