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California’s affordable housing problem is really a national one

nytimes.com

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Re: California’s affordable housing problem is really a national one

#81

Post by cwbrandsma »

LatteLazy wrote: post #9

It's an urban problem. No one is short of space in bumfuck, nowhere. The jobs are all in cities. Workers need to be in cities. Commuting by car isn't viable on a large scale. Other forms of commuting require investment (building rail etc) and governments won't do that. So house prices spiral.

Where I live used to be bumf*ck, nowhere. Hardly anyone could point it on the map, usually thinking it was in an entirely different part of the country. Even if someone did know of the town, the normal respone was "why would anyone want to live there". Now it is the city featured in this article, and has doubled in size since I've lived here. Even the big town where I grew up, Twin Falls, ID, whose only actual claim to fame is a failed jump by Evil Knievel, has more than doubled in size over the last 20 years.

Re: California’s affordable housing problem is really a national one

#82

Post by sokoloff »

jeffbee wrote: post #68
sokoloff wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Houses are linked to prosperity. I have doubts that children are overall linked to prosperity.

If you believe that fertility is negatively associated with prosperity, then the idea that people will buy these houses because they have children is especially wrong.

I do believe that (see my other response to you). I don't believe that people buy houses because of children. I do believe they want to buy them because of children. I believe they actually buy them because/when they can afford them and prefer to live in a house they own over a rental. (Plenty of people have kids in rental housing, of course.)

Re: California’s affordable housing problem is really a national one

#83

Post by [deleted] »

asdff wrote: post #74
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most cities in the country also have their own housing crises. No they don't. The ones that do are the ones who's housing market is all jacked up by California money that wants off the sinking ship.

The Midwesterner shouldn't fear the Californian. That's a boogyman. The Midwesterner however, should have a real fear of their fellow wealthy Midwesterners, who will go from one house to 2.5 on average after their children come of age and outbid the middle class midwesterner for the limited housing stock available in predominantly single family home cities.

[deleted]

Re: California’s affordable housing problem is really a national one

#84

Post by lisper »

shuckles wrote: post #62
lisper wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> your desire for a quiet suburban neighborhood should not give you the ability to immiserate other people Of course not. I'm not saying I have any kind of right to keep my neighborhood from changing, only that my desire to keep it from changing is not purely financial. (In fact, in my case, it is the exact opposite!)

Fair enough. Steve Waldman described about this mentality pretty well here: https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6287.html This is not as divorced from property values as you believe. The features of suburbs you like such as low-crime (usually coded as "quiet"), amenities, good schools, access to jobs through a quick commute etc. are exactly what give them their high value. However, the single family home subdivision sub…

> low-crime (usually coded as "quiet")

In my case, quiet is not code for low-crime. I meant it literally. I lived for a long time (20+ years) in loud neighborhoods with lots of traffic noise and screaming kids (literally -- one place I lived was next to a house that was used as a day-care center) and mockingbirds which kept me up at night because our house had no A/C so we had to keep the windows open at night. My mantra, literally for decades, mumbled through the mental fog of chronic sleep deprivation, was "I want to live someplace quiet".

> Your suburb isn't going to have decreasing property values without disinvestment, at which point it won't be a nice place to live.

That is far from clear. I don't live in a cookie-cutter-house suburb. I live in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains in what used to be (in the late 1800s) a vacation destination for San Franciscans. If all of Silicon Valley were depopulated I think my neighborhood would still be a perfectly fine place to live.

Re: California’s affordable housing problem is really a national one

#85

Post by rayiner »

People focus on the supply side, which is important, but has anyone looked at the demand side? How do people have so much money to drive up these prices?

I grew up in an 1,100 square foot house, built in 1950, my parents bought for $175,000 in 1989. Today Redfin has it at $660,000. Its a drab house in a drab suburb of DC. It's no boom town--the population of the town has grown just 10% in 30 years. But everyone just has so much more money now (and I guess interest rates are low, so people have a lot of credit).

Re: California’s affordable housing problem is really a national one

#86

Post by asdff »

chasd00 wrote: post #32
LatteLazy wrote: post #9

It's an urban problem. No one is short of space in bumfuck, nowhere. The jobs are all in cities. Workers need to be in cities. Commuting by car isn't viable on a large scale. Other forms of commuting require investment (building rail etc) and governments won't do that. So house prices spiral.

> The jobs are all in cities. Workers need to be in cities. This is beginning to change and the pandemic quickened the pace. If Starlink comes online and works as promised it will further speed up the process. I think there are many people who live in a crowded city only because that's where the office is and would chose to live elsewhere if it were possible.

There are also plenty of people who spend way more than they should on a home in a good school district. In fact, a lot of people opt to trade a good commute to work just for that. It's not as simple as "move to the middle of nowhere." School from home clearly doesn't work for a lot of children, given how many private schools have been skirting the rules and how many parents were/are desperate to find an in person tutor during this pandemic.

Re: California’s affordable housing problem is really a national one

#87

Post by lotsofpulp »

kodah wrote: post #24
sokoloff wrote: post #8

I feel like I got served an appetizer and a small dessert, with no main course in between. California has a housing crisis in some cities. Californians are moving out of those cities. The cities that they're moving into are experiencing an increase in demand (directly restating the previous). That's pushing up prices (not shocking), which is preventing some people with less money from outbidding people with more mone…

> The only thing new I learned from this article is a rough estimate of how much higher an ex-Californian's budget is on average, which was novel but hardly surprising. My story related to this: Californians (and other comparatively rich people) moved to Dallas, TX in droves and outpriced an already saturated housing market. This was happening far before COVID but I think it was really mostly talked about in the circ…

> The outcome is that communities that have seen decades of development will soon price out the resident who paid for its development in taxes only to reward people who are taking advantage of inequality.

Sounds like the plight of poor people from developing/poor nations who have to contend with people from developed/rich nations.

Re: California’s affordable housing problem is really a national one

#88

Post by [deleted] »

shuckles wrote: post #79
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's half a dozen or so big east coast cities that are expensive. Nevertheless you can find $200-400k houses 1-1.5hr out (half that if you're willing to sacrifice having a big yard) and rents are blue collar levels of affordable despite those cities being some of the most expensive (basically second to CA). The "housing crisis" is unique to California and markets that are jacked up by California money that wants o…

Having people drive til they qualify is a sign you have a housing crisis. Give me the name of some cities where home prices have tracked inflation in the last decade. Even better, tell me how Cleveland's suburbs have a land use regime that's any better than California?

[deleted]

Re: California’s affordable housing problem is really a national one

#89

Post by lotsofpulp »

Thaxll wrote: post #76
gonehome wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that the population of greater Houston has more than doubled in 30 years tends to support the idea that they are building enough for growth. This isn't enough to support the idea unless prices have also not climbed. The Bay Area population has dramatically increased and prices have too because building to support this growth has been fought by NIMBYs via bad policy.[0] As a result houses on the peninsula h…

2M for an ugly house from 1940...

It’s $2M for the land, not the house.

Re: California’s affordable housing problem is really a national one

#90

Post by asdff »

imtringued wrote: post #57
AdrianB1 wrote: post #43

Affordable housing is a misleading term used for a few different situations: unless the problem is well defined, there is no proper solution. if affordable means anyone should own a house, no matter the income or lack of - that is utopia. If affordable means cheap enough that lower third income bracket can still afford a house, there are solutions - high density blocks of flats like we have all over in Europe. But if…

You're not supposed to build towers. You're supposed to incrementally upzone neighborhoods over time. detached single family housing to row houses, row houses to 2 story apartment buildings, 2 story apartment buildings to 3-4 story apartment buildings and so on. Building big towers does work, but only if they are surrounded by other, slightly smaller towers.

We are so behind the eightball in regards to how much housing capacity has been built that we really need to drop the 2-3-4 story apartment and go straight to 40 story towers in a lot of places. I think people on this board think we are at some comfortable stasis in housing right now; we are not. Working class families in cities like LA might be cramming five bodies and three incomes in a one bedroom apartment. The tenement conditions made famous by 1800s NYC have never really gone away for the working poor.
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