111–120 of 562 posts
Dear SF, More apartments built will not help make housing more affordable for normal people. Learn about the NYC real estate market- even pre covid apartment vacancy was extremely high, and the true numbers are unknown because building developers are manipulating the market by releasing units slowly. With all the excessive inventory in NYC, you'd think that a normal person (defined by median income) could afford to b…
What should we do robbyt?
Dear SF, More apartments built will not help make housing more affordable for normal people. Learn about the NYC real estate market- even pre covid apartment vacancy was extremely high, and the true numbers are unknown because building developers are manipulating the market by releasing units slowly. With all the excessive inventory in NYC, you'd think that a normal person (defined by median income) could afford to b…
What should we do robbyt?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say it’s basically impossible to recreate a dense city based on today’s codes of construction requiring numerous safety/ADA measures in the US. In an existing city, the cost to purchase land and buildings that would need to demolished, rezoned, and rebuilt as a higher density area with accompanying infrastructure is astronomical and wouldn’t be possibly by anyone other than the federal government only because…
Citation needed. The biggest issue with residental construction today is approval process and the amount of land that can be utilized. An unreliable approval process means increased investment risk which keeps away investors. Setbacks and parking space requirements significantly impact the amount of usable living space per acre of land. Both of the above can be addressed by local municipalities. High density dwelling…
Granted, ADA and other upgrades in quality of life are nowhere near the big problem of the cost of reducing lot and block sizes retroactively. The design for cities made for cars and for pedestrians are fundamentally opposed, and cannot coexist.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Over the years I’ve come to the realization that a number of “kitchens” in luxury apartments are clearly designed for making at most breakfast and otherwise looking pretty. It’s not all luxury apartments, not by a long shot, but a surprising number were unusable due to layout mistakes or a complete lack of equipment (on the owners side). The conclusion I came to is that the people who rented these units valued a pret…
Not just new construction. Studio apartments in old buildings have also been retrofitted into 1-bedrooms by gutting the kitchen and carving out one of these crap kitchenettes from the main room, including in a building I used to live in. When I was exploring listings to see how the pandemic affects prices earlier in the year, these “kitchens” I described were also the norm over in the Sunset and Richmond around... Se…
Dear SF, More apartments built will not help make housing more affordable for normal people. Learn about the NYC real estate market- even pre covid apartment vacancy was extremely high, and the true numbers are unknown because building developers are manipulating the market by releasing units slowly. With all the excessive inventory in NYC, you'd think that a normal person (defined by median income) could afford to b…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if land were historically taxed at say NYC rates in SF the supply and demand problem would still rear its head. The problem is artificial supply constraints created first and foremost by zoning and secondly by a myriad of other regulation that infringed upon property rights and adds friction (time, money, risk, all of the above) that prevents people from exercising their property rights. Prop 13 (a monetary ince…
Zoning is a result of NIMBYism. NIMBYism is a result of people who really want to protect the value of their land. Some of these people will be quite desperate to do this because they're highly leveraged. Negative equity is a good incentive to turn up to your local planning meetings and inhibit development.
I think the fundamental problem here is that the people of SV people do not believe in property rights (e.g. the right to develop property you own as you see fit) to such an extent that they are willing to put their money where their mouth is and codify it in the form of (restrictive zoning and other shenanigans that hinder development) even though this inhibits growth and limits their upside.
Edited for clarity
Dear SF, More apartments built will not help make housing more affordable for normal people. Learn about the NYC real estate market- even pre covid apartment vacancy was extremely high, and the true numbers are unknown because building developers are manipulating the market by releasing units slowly. With all the excessive inventory in NYC, you'd think that a normal person (defined by median income) could afford to b…
More apartments built are the only thing to make housing more affordable for normal people. But, when you think of them, you're thinking way too small. You need to think in terms of, like, literally doubling the number of apartments available, and they may then be in reach of normal people once more.
You also need to get yourself together and reverse that trend where your transit system has carried fewer people more slowly for more money since the eighties. (The bus-rapid-transit corridors are a good start, as they're much more transiting for much less money than new subways, but you're still thinking too small, and need to 10x your ambitions.)