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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

#491

Post by jelliclesfarm »

istjohn wrote: post #414
jelliclesfarm wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not easy clearly if it means that someone else has to pay the price of it without any benefit. If you want older people/property owning seniors on fixed incomes to move out, pay them. It’s as simple as that. The truth is that most cannot pay. The value of the dollar they earn is imaginary. The whole system from Wall Street to wages to taxes is a Ponzi scheme. Land has value. Water or access to water has value. I…

Immoral is forcing thousands of people to live on the streets in squalor because people don't like change. No one is calling for Grandma to be evicted. Property taxes for residents could be allowed to accumulate unpaid until sale or transfer of a property.

People don’t have to live in squalor in expensive Bay Area. They can move. But there is a red carpet in Ca for homeless from other states to live because they are the poverty porn displayed to milk more taxes. Oldest trick in the politicians handbook to impose more taxes. It’s always ‘compassion’ isn’t it? The reason to extract more taxes and usually championed by those who don’t have to contribute anything.

So if accumulated property tax will remain unpaid, how does any of it help keep people ‘off the streets and no in squalor’?

What is the Big Plan?

If people are going to be taxed after their death, is it like a death tax? Forced charity?

Theft by proxy? This is literally thuggery. The current youth population and the government are working hand in hand as fellow thugs. And engaging in elder financial abuse.

However, there is a solution. One can impose hefty inheritance taxes. One can impose higher tax bracket for foreign owned properties. I would like to see that rather than citizens turning against citizens of their own country.

Further..has any of the YIMBYs sat in city council meetings and looked at city and county budgets. Or the state budget? There is a LOT of money. There are a lot of infrastructure improvements to be made that will make life better for everyone. And yet Sacramento does nothing.

None of the young non home owning YIMBY professionals ever question that. Perhaps because they have been indoctrinated in public school and taught fake economics. They have literally been hand fed to believe that nanny state is the best and higher taxes will solve everything. Perhaps it is this lack of financial literacy and responsibility that is causing them to be the handmaidens of the govt bureaucracy to act as thugs against middle class senior citizens.

Over crowded schools, inefficient DMVs, pot holes on roads, congested freeways, tolls on every stretch of freeways leading to Silicon Valley..Bart is a joke. Homeless on streets after billions spent. And more density on top of this inefficiency?

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

#492

Post by moultano »

nrp wrote: post #473
tryitnow wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be YIMBY, but I doubt more construction would lead to lower costs of living. When I researched this I couldn't find any strong evidence suggesting that more building would lead to more affordable housing. You would think that more construction would lead to more affordable housing, but it seems like more construction doesn't just increase supply, it also increases demand, which can offset any price effects…

The YIMBY argument mentioned in the article is that expensive new housing today becomes mid-range and eventually lower-end housing over decades as it ages. If you don’t put units into the front of that pipeline now, nothing comes out of the other end of it later. This seems plausible to me, and there is research stating the filtering effects may happen a lot faster than that on a regional level: https://www.citylab.c…

More than that, "expensive" new housing is typically half the price of the single family homes next to it. It's just marketed as "luxury" because everything is. Typically the people protesting "luxury" housing already live in housing that's more expensive than what is getting built.

The role of new construction in affordability is more direct. The people who live in the shiny new places will just bid up the price of the next best thing if it isn't available, and this ripples down until the people at the bottom are priced out. So by building it, you're preventing other things from being bid up.

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

#493

Post by jelliclesfarm »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #429
jelliclesfarm wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They own because they existed. They were born before most of us did..To say that someone doesn’t deserve their wealth they earned in the past because they didn’t have to deal with today’s problems doesn’t hold water. Wealth is a construct built upon the notion of scarcity. One has wealth BECAUSE another doesn’t have it. If everyone had one million dollars, then a million has no value. Imagine I inherited a diamond ne…

In the case of the city/situation discussed in the article -- Lafayette, CA -- would you believe it is unfair to step on the property rights of the landowner who wants to put 300 condos or 44 single family homes on the vacant land? It doesn't matter how the current owner of that land acquired it: for any of us to stop them, would be a gross violation of their property rights. Nobody is saying, just because the land y…

I disagree. There is such a thing as law of the commons and welfare of the commons. Air quality, watershed and conservation of habitat are all part of the commons and its welfare. The erasure is CEQA is a step towards zoning changes and in the destruction of the commons.

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

#494

Post by jelliclesfarm »

kaikai wrote: post #416
jelliclesfarm wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. You can add people. IF they can afford to buy in. Clearly they can’t...that’s not the problem of existing homeowners who aren’t ‘diverse’ enough for the younger generation.

The entire YIMBY point is to allow more dense housing, so that you can in fact move more people into an area to increase diversity, rather than relying on certain populations to get excluded.

You can’t increase density without decreasing the quality of life by apportioning more of fixed or shrinking resources.

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

#495

Post by tayistay »

Lafayette, the town in the article, is nearly an hour away from SF by train. Should we really be building more housing relatively far away from the jobs? The trains and roads are packed. What about focusing on high density housing that's closer to the jobs in Oakland and SF? Isn't it better for people to be able to walk to work or ride a bike?

I'm not asking rhetorically.

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

#496

Post by tathougies »

jelliclesfarm wrote: post #410
tathougies wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every high density over crowded over built city ..and this is global..is unaffordable. It has expensive utilities, higher taxes and bad declining infrastructure that the government can’t seem to replace or upgrade. That's not true. Houston and Dallas are big cities without affordability problems. Sunnyvale, CA (quite dense, and becoming more so, but suffering from these NIMBY problems) is one of the safest cities i…

1. [..]In Sunnyvale, CA you have a 1 in 611 chance of becoming a victim of violent crime. Violent crimes include murder, rape, robbery and assault. With regards to property crime, you have a 1 in 62 chance of becoming a victim. Property crimes include burglary, theft and vehicle theft.[..] 2. Dallas and Houston are not in the same category as Bay Area. Texas is not California. 3. Crime in California stats are unrelia…

> Dallas and Houston are not in the same category as Bay Area. Texas is not California.

You're right, they're both much larger cities. The Dallas metro area is the 4th largest in the US, the Bay Area is 12th. So Dallas is bigger.

> In Sunnyvale, CA you have a 1 in 611 chance of becoming a victim of violent crime. Violent crimes include murder, rape, robbery and assault. With regards to property crime, you have a 1 in 62 chance of becoming a victim. Property crimes include burglary, theft and vehicle theft.[..]

According to https://www.areavibes.com/sunnyvale-ca/crime/ you have a 255/100000 (my number is higher than yours BTW) likelihood of being a victim of a violent crime. Nationally, it's 381/100000 or 1 in 263. Thus, sunnyvale is safer. It is known to be safer even since before 2014 when California crime statistics were screwed up. The historical data is available online.

You are a troll.

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

#497

Post by jayd16 »

zacksinclair wrote: post #405
jayd16 wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Increasing supply will decrease equilibrium price Hmm but this is not a given is it? I think many would move to SF if housing was only slightly cheaper.

It is a given and is basic economics. Supply and demand curves certainly apply to housing. Increasing housing shifts the supply line to the right - which satisfies greater demand at a lower price, all else equal. That is what "many would move to SF if housing was only slightly cheaper" means in economic terms. Shifting the demand curve to the right is not driven by quantity of housing, but instead by things like qual…

>It is a given and is basic economics. Supply and demand curves certainly apply to housing.

Yes but the angle of those curves are important. There are elastic and inelastic demands for resources. There can be unfulfilled demand at the current equilibrium price. Its basic economics.

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

#498

Post by tmh79 »

moultano wrote: post #412
tmh79 wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're speaking past each other. In marxist economics literature "commodification" means something is able to be bought and sold, not that it is a commodity in the broader ecconomic sense (an undifferentiated good with broadly elastic demand). "Honor" isn't commodified, "dignity" isn't commodified, "food" is commodified, and "rare collectible art" is commodified.

Thanks for the clarification. If it's a definition that applies to literally every physical good in a market economy, then it doesn't have much explanatory power to explain why some things are cheap and abundant, and why some things are expensive and scarce.

yea, I mean there have been large periods in human history in which land was not bought and sold. Many indigenous cultures don't have a strong concept of land ownership. In many modern socialist countries (Singapore, china), you cannot "buy land" you can lease it from the government for a long period of time (usually 99 years). In the united states, "education" is a good/service that transverses a weird line between "marxist commodity"/"non commodity" as we have education as a public good and we also have public schooling.

I want to be clear here that I'm not making any value judgements with my statements about capitalism vs socialism/marxism, and I agree that the "commodification of housing" IMO doesn't explain why its expensive, but to be fair, the people making that argument are generally not making an argument on values (housing aught to be...), and values are kind of a "first principles" type thing that you can't persuade or prove wrong, they just are.

PS, if you're interested in learning more, the wiki article is nice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodification

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

#499

Post by jelliclesfarm »

tathougies wrote: post #496
jelliclesfarm wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. [..]In Sunnyvale, CA you have a 1 in 611 chance of becoming a victim of violent crime. Violent crimes include murder, rape, robbery and assault. With regards to property crime, you have a 1 in 62 chance of becoming a victim. Property crimes include burglary, theft and vehicle theft.[..] 2. Dallas and Houston are not in the same category as Bay Area. Texas is not California. 3. Crime in California stats are unrelia…

> Dallas and Houston are not in the same category as Bay Area. Texas is not California. You're right, they're both much larger cities. The Dallas metro area is the 4th largest in the US, the Bay Area is 12th. So Dallas is bigger. > In Sunnyvale, CA you have a 1 in 611 chance of becoming a victim of violent crime. Violent crimes include murder, rape, robbery and assault. With regards to property crime, you have a 1 in…

There is no way I can have a conversation with someone who resorts to childish name calling and making it personal.

I know my backyard. You don’t.

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

#500

Post by AtlasBarfed »

revscat wrote: post #14
aty268 wrote: post #12

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? 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.

Because it doesn’t drive down prices.

The demand in city is probably inexhaustible practically speaking

The burbs however....

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