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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

#441

Post by joe_the_user »

Article: "Hitting that number will require building more everything: Subsidized housing. Market-rate housing. Homes, apartments, condos and co-ops. Three hundred and fifteen apartments on prime parcels of towns like Lafayette."

I feel weird sort of agreeing with the wealthy home owners in outlying small towns. Why should the state adopt a "more of everything" policy? The American and California model of low-density suburban building is completely broken and "more of everything" is basically saying more of the same. A higher density approach with the building concentrated in the centralized cities and perhaps some of the "towns" surrounded by city (Menlo Park or Brisbane).

I mean, it's obvious false that "more of everything is the only way to meet the goal". Of course, you could build that much housing in higher density urban areas.

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

#442

Post by lopmotr »

irq11 wrote: post #158
notJim wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh the classic NIMBY move, whether it's homeless folks or just people who want bike lanes: "These people aren't from here!"

I’m not a “NIMBY”, but I believe the YIMBY moniker is counter-productive to your cause. It automatically frames the question in a sophomoric way, where the “other side” is an evil force to be mocked and dismissed. In reality, there is no such thing as a “NIMBY”, just a collection of people with differing - often rational - interests concerning any given project. Until and unless you address these interests, calling p…

The essence of NIMBYism is wanting to make the value of your own property increase, not by adding any value, but by restricting others from competing with you. That's a net harmful behavior so I think it's fair to describe it as "an evil force to be mocked and dismissed". Kind of like if Google lobbied the government to ban search engines which weren't Google Search. People would see that as evil too.

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

#443

Post by wilg »

Koremat6666 wrote: post #303

Either ways my recommendation is to make a informed choice of NIMBY vs YIMBY. It appeared so far that NIMBY is winning and large number of people support NIMBY. This need not be because all these are evil people who oppose three points but might have legitimate reasons for their stand. Make an informed choice rather than blindly picking sides.

You can make the wrong choice for legitimate reasons as well as illegitimate ones.

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

#444

Post by buss »

mrfusion wrote: post #329
buss wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed 100% I'm very involved with YIMBY Action here in SF: I'm on the board of both YIMBY Action and YIMBY Law, and I'm also running for local office in the current election: https://buss2020.org If you have any questions about YIMBY, send them my way!

Is the movement growing? Do you see a way forward?

We're growing a lot! YIMBY Action just brought in People for Housing Orange County and Peninsula For Everyone as affiliate clubs. We're in the process of expanding into Denver and NYC.

The demise of Scott Wiener's SB50 this year has certainly been a disappointment, but we try not to pin our hopes on any single solution. It took us 50 years to get where we are, and we expect it'll take at least 10 to get out. That will be a combination of local, state, and federal action.

The thing I've learned being involved in SF politics and YIMBY for the past few years is that politicians don't make change. They don't shift the discourse. Instead, it's grassroots movements like YIMBY Action that build a parade that politicians then jump to the front of. (Of course, this isn't true for Scott. He's one of the few true believers!)

We're building a passionate and vocal community that can do the on-the-ground organizing necessary to make politicians court us. The way forward it to continue building a voting bloc. You only have as much power as the people you can turn out to vote.

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

#445

Post by rowborg »

joe_the_user wrote: post #441

Article: "Hitting that number will require building more everything: Subsidized housing. Market-rate housing. Homes, apartments, condos and co-ops. Three hundred and fifteen apartments on prime parcels of towns like Lafayette." I feel weird sort of agreeing with the wealthy home owners in outlying small towns. Why should the state adopt a "more of everything" policy? The American and California model of low-density s…

It's a fair point. What makes Lafayette a good place to build without increasing sprawl or traffic that it is right on a BART line. "More of everything" should probably be caveated with "more of everything near public transit".

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

#446

Post by earhart »

FWIW - I’d love to see increased density where I live in Seattle, but the people who support it seem to ignore all the other stuff that has to go with it - e.g. more school capacity, better transit, requiring parking in new developments because people still have cars and the on-street parking can’t scale to meet new developments...

Bringing that stuff up gets me called a NIMBY; it sometimes seems like anything that might make it more expensive for developers to build more housing is a crime against humanity. :-/

It sometimes feels like all we’re really doing is enabling developers to mine our quality of life for their own profit, without actually creating enough housing to make a dent in the problem.

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

#447

Post by majormajor »

kelnos wrote: post #352
majormajor wrote: post #66

Earlier 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? 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-…

> 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. The way I look at it is that the incumbents are there due to mostly accidents (of birth time/place) or of luck. Why should newcomers be disadvantaged due to accidents and luck? Land is a finite resource, desirable land even more so. This is why we hav…

> The way I look at it is that the incumbents are there due to mostly accidents (of birth time/place) or of luck. Why should newcomers be disadvantaged due to accidents and luck?

Most things are accidents of time/place/whatever. Including whatever resources those newcomers are bringing to a city. Is migration and density growth a strict good? A strict bad? Somewhere in between? Lots of ink have been written on that, I'm fairly personally neutral, but I'm very skeptical of the "this is a simple problem with a simple solution" crowd. I'd love to see a decentralization of high-end high-paying jobs. Right now if I wanted to live back near my family, I'd have to work on problems that are less interesting to me for quite a bit less money.

There's nobody exactly being unselfish in this debate... People who want more density or to save their own money argue one way. People who want to live a (different) way argue another... it's basically all wants considering we have so many other cities in the country with plenty of space.

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

#448

Post by AnthonyMouse »

dv_dt wrote: post #424
hodgesrm wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's resistance to change but economics are far more important and explain the consistent opposition across the state. It's not as simple as sell your house and make a profit, then find something nicer. If your neighbors sell first to the developer of the N-story apartment building it can drop the value of houses around it. Also, buying a house in California resets your property taxes to current property value (a…

How does Prop 13 make it hard to sell your home? It only affects the owners property taxes but not the property buyer's. At the time of purchase, there's no delta to the buyers taxes vs a property that was taxed at a full market rate assessment the whole time.

Affecting the seller's still creates a delta because the seller is also a buyer of wherever they're going to live next. Causing the new place to have much higher property tax than the existing place makes it harder to leave the existing place. And then fewer people do it, even if they e.g. don't need a place that big anymore.

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

#449

Post by infecto »

Fuck California and fuck the Bay Area.

Just a bold statement. I wish for change but i don't see it happening. I love the weather, love the environment and sometimes love the people here but after living here for a number of years, I am started to not understand it. I pay pretty high taxes to live here. We have the most embarrassing property tax laws that include business property. I walk to work and walk through so many homeless camps filled with poop, trash and needles. Many of our communities have failing roads, some of the worst I have experienced in the world. The roads have started groups such as "pot hole vigilantes". In most of the communities I never see a police presence. We say we are green and love the environment but we have made little progress on public transportation since the 70s. I mean hell, we cannot even get a quick rollout of new BART cars. So we want to hate on building new roads but we have no new public transportation. I am starting to run out of reasons to participate in California.

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

#450

Post by usaar333 »

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…

Well, Bart is opening in San Jose this year. Caltrain is electrifying which will enable much lower headways.

If you focus on dense developments near them, that goes a long way.

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