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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

#281

Post by allovernow »

davidw wrote: post #227
Spooky23 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rental housing has price floor that distorts the market. Once a property diverges from the requirements of housing subsidy programs, it usually gets abandoned. In most places new supply is high end and is making more housing available for people who don’t lack access.

> In most places new supply is high end and is making more housing available for people who don’t lack access. In most places, new cars are more expensive than used ones, but if you stopped providing new cars, the price of the used ones would shoot up as everyone started competing for a dwindling supply of cars. Same goes for housing. Also, it's a longer term process with housing, but 'filtering' is a real thing: htt…

>In most places, new cars are more expensive than used ones, but if you stopped providing new cars, the price of the used ones would shoot up as everyone started competing for a dwindling supply of cars

An unspoken consequence of cash for clunkers. Practically overnight 100k miles was considered "low mileage", which was ridiculous before people started needlessly trashing perfectly good used cars.

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

#282

Post by stale2002 »

bluGill wrote: post #250
stale2002 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you even think this stuff gets upgraded in the first place? What happens, in every city, is that more housing gets built, then the infrastructure system starts to get closer to capacity, and then the infrastructure gets upgaded. Saying that they should upgrade all the infrastructure first, before there is any demand, is the same exact thing as saying that it should never be upgraded. Because the infrastructure…

Or the city an decide that the cost of upgrading are more than the future values of the additional units and not upgrade. Some upgrades in capacity have significantly higher costs than others. If the current system is the largest that can physically fit on the land the city owns they need to buy more land first. If they won't get a lot of new development it is better to stay just below capacity. The above doesn't app…

> If they won't get a lot of new development it is better to stay just below capacity.

If a developer comes in and says "Hey I want to develop in this area", it is a contradictory response to say that this development should be prevented, because there is not enough demand.

If a bunch of developers are trying to build houses, then by definition, we are in a situation where there is demand.

This supports my point even more, because I was saying that the developers should build first, and then if the infrastructure starts to hit capacity, THEN the infrastructure should be updated.

Don't build the infrastructure first. Instead build the housing, and fix any problems that come with it.

Also, this is how all this infrastructure gets built in the first place, also. The developers, who are building the buildings, will upgrade the infrastructure as part of the process of building the buildings.

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

#283

Post by moultano »

nradov wrote: post #247
marcell wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty simple. If I own property, I should be allowed to build a home for myself on it, subject to relevant zoning. You, and adjacent property owner, should not be able to deny my private property use. Yet this is not the case in California.

That is the case in California. If you own property zoned residential and apply for a fully compliant building permit then it will almost always be approved (although fees may be high). Developers and property owners generally only run into long delays and battles with neighbors when they request variances or zoning changes.

Oh, my sweet summer child...

https://twitter.com/eean/status/1228182747149025280

https://twitter.com/neversassylaura/status/96939949395841843...

https://reason.com/2019/01/16/san-francisco-property-owner-f...

I could go on for days.

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

#284

Post by myvoiceismypass »

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.

How does one “lose their home” if the value (to resell to others) goes down, but they aren’t moving & still living there?

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

#285

Post by kelnos »

xamuel wrote: post #108
compiler-guy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you own a house, you don't want the prices to be driven down. If you had an idyllic childhood in a sleepy town not unlike Mayberry, it is entirely reasonable to want the same things for your kids. None of that is realistic anymore--the world is a changed place. But these are not irrational preferences to have.

Or you could have PTSD or just vanilla noise-sensitivity and just living in a quiet neighborhood could be extremely important to you. You might have made very significant personal sacrifices to afford to move to a suburb for exactly this reason. Should you just be forced to go live in the woods as a hermit, cast out by society?

Well, unfortunately, yes. I don't want to sound heartless, but sometimes the needs of the many do outweigh the needs of the few. This isn't "tyranny of the majority" here.

It's incredibly selfish to use PTSD or noise-sensitivity as a justification for contributing to a situation where tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people have 3-hour commutes when they could otherwise live closer to work.

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

#286

Post by d1zzy »

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…

I can see why someone might not want to loose their 40% appreciation of their real estate property but that doesn't make them right.

That is, of course if you change a policy that was primarily designed to inflate housing prices to the stratosphere then it might negatively impact that, but maybe you were wrong to do that to begin with.

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

#287

Post by davidw »

brobinson wrote: post #242
davidw wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't really care about the skin color of my neighbors. That's a nice sentiment, but if you dig a bit, there are probably reasons why his neighborhood is full of "older white people", and there's a good chance that it wasn't a natural process of sorting. Recommended reading: https://amzn.to/2St6rOM

^ undisclosed affiliate link

Also a link to a site whose owner makes utter gobs of money if that's of concern to people.

I usually get $10 a month or so if I occasionally post a link that I think is highly relevant to a discussion, that I turn around and spend on more books.

Happy to buy anyone a beer with the massive amounts of cash I'm raking in.

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

#288

Post by bradlys »

bluGill wrote: post #199
bradlys wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt your place will drop even 20% even if construction goes up drastically. Until it happens - you can't really say your home price would drop drastically. Realistically, it won't. The new supply will be apartments - not single family homes. It's not like people will all want to sell and move into apartments or that the desire for homes will go down. It just means competition for apartments will improve.

Sure it will. Housing is about compromises. If you can rent a 3 bedroom apartment for $900/month would you pay $9000/month (plus taxes and insurance) to buy a house? The above numbers are realistic. You have a choice to nice 3 bedroom apartments for $900/month in the Des Moines Iowa area. The payments on a 30 year loan for a 2 million dollar house are a bit over 9000/month.

Your comparison doesn't make sense. You're conflating multiple variables.

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

#289

Post by dkhenry »

pruneridge wrote: post #192

What happens when more people move into the area from the rest of the country and start driving to work from their newly built housing units? Silicon Valley has, at best, poor coverage of Caltrain and no coverage for BART in South Bay. If let’s say 10,000 more families move to San Jose into new housing units and they all need to commute to Palo Alto for work, how exactly would they do that without choking up the alre…

This is the most common argument I hear against building, but I am firmly convinced that the reason you have the commute problem in the Bay area isn't because of the number of people, but because the resistance to building has forced development further and further out.

Consider that there is still housing growth, but its in South San Jose, Morgan Hill, and Gilroy. Those people all have to drive past Los Gatos, Cambell, Cupertino, San Jose, and Sunnyvale to get to Mountain View. All your doing is increasing the amount of Miles people have to drive, and that in term increases the amount of time they spend in their cars, and clogs the roads. If you built houses in Mountain View or Palo Alto, none of those people would be on the roads, and if they were it wouldn't be for nearly as long. You don't have to take my word for it take a look at average commute times in the bay area, those increases aren't due to a 2x increase in Mountain View, its due to a 2x increase far outside with people driving in.

Public transportation is great, but the solution is to build houses near where people work, that means San Francisco and Mountain View.

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

#290

Post by moultano »

hannasanarion wrote: post #253
exterrestrial wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's good for the people "on the margins", those struggling to pay rent, or those at risk of homelessness, or those who might like to move to a more productive place for a better job. Please cite at lease one example in which this has ever been the case. I do understand the theory behind your argument here, and I assume you are familiar with (leftist) counter-arguments, so this is not an attempt to open a debate. Ra…

You are absolutely correct that the root cause of the housing crisis is capitalism and the commodification of housing. However, a socialist restructuring of the entire housing market is not likely to happen any time soon. While we wait for the revolution, we might as well encourage the for-profit developers to build in the least destructive ways, so that less people suffer in the short term from the choked supply and…

> You are absolutely correct that the root cause of the housing crisis is capitalism and the commodification of housing.

Every other commodity in my life, food for instance, is dirt cheap and getting cheaper all the time. Housing is expensive because it is not a commodity. You have to beg the government to allow it to exist.

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