161–170 of 592 posts
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Why wouldn't you take your child on BART? I'm not looking for an argument, I'm genuinely curious. I live in the UK but I've never visited the SF area.
Even 5 years ago I would. But the level of mayhem, filth, and danger on San Francisco public transit is out of control. The BART makes the Tube look like Tokyo Metro.
Great, you can work from. So you take your California money to middle of nowhere and buy a home for cheap. Renovate it and now it’s awesome. However, that local, who isn’t making California money, that is working a local job and making local money and is hoping to move up in housing for their family is priced out because housing pricing has doubled or even tripled. People that wanted to retire to rural or remote area…
1. Housing cannot be both affordable and a good investment. 2. This is how gentrification works. Many of these folks are coming because they’ve been priced out of wherever they’re coming from. 3. Housing can’t be both a right and subject to free-ish market mechanisms.
3. Sure it can. You can have a market governed by supply and demand. Lots of demand? Price increases. Price increases? Incentivises supply. More supply? That's great, it addresses the scarcity and prices will follow-suit.
Poor people priced out who have a right to housing? A rental cap is an intervention that directly impedes the free movement of the price up to a hard cap.
But a housing subsidy for low-income individuals, i.e. more money to spend on housing, does not change the fact that the market is still governed by supply and demand.
Housing prices with rent subsidies can still go up and down depending on demand. But the government taxes the rich, and redistributes money to the poor, allowing their purchasing power in the housing marketplace to be more equal than solely based on their own income.
This, combined with proper zoning laws (set more at a federal level to override local NIMBY powers) and limited red-tape, to allow construction levels to respond to increased prices and actually generate adequate supply, is a market-based system where the poor are getting their right to housing.
What's the alternative?
Besides, there's more housing than ever. The right to housing cannot be spoken about without also saying 'in particular places'. The average household size (people per house) has dropped every decade for a century, and the average home size has increased every decade for a century. The square foot per person has been growing and growing. Whatever housing crisis people talk about, they tend to completely ignore location. Yet you'll find plenty of people who speak about a right to affordable housing in NY or SV when it's a place where incomes are at the top 0.1% worldwide and there's easily 10x as many people (in the country, and 1000x worldwide) who want to live in such cities at an affordable price than there are homes to live. It's impossible to provide a right to housing to all in those locations with any policy anyone on any part of the political spectrum can think of.
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It's like your comment was completely void of any kind of validity and it was easy to immediately look for evidence to the contrary of one of your major points. I'm sure it would be trivial to counter the point around water. Just consider any of the metropolises in the Middle East. In terms of infrastructure, that can be built as well. See literally any other city larger than Bozeman.
Yes. Trivial. “ It has been estimated that between 1975 and 2000 a total of more than US$100bn has been invested in water supply and sanitation, and that a further US$130bn will be needed between 2002 and 2022, corresponding to US$6.5 billion per year or more than US$200 per capita and year.[2] This level of investment in water per capita is among the highest in the world, higher than in the US, the UK or Germany, du…
You’re throwing your hands up exasperated at the costs of building water infra when the peak is somewhere around 1.5% of GDP but then you have housing costs that are rising dramatically faster than wages and everyone’s like “whelp, nothing to done here.”
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Locals wouldn't get screwed if they advocated for better zoning policy and allowed more housing to be built. This doesn't happen because those same locals that are homeowners love the value of their house exploding upwards
Honestly, no. Just because you have a hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail. Complete zoning and policy failure is a uniquely California problem. Nobody has a structural, and likely unconstitutional inequity in taxation that California does. Some rando Bay Area suburb being more expensive than Manhattan is not the same problem.
I actually really want to move to a mountain area that is secluded and has nature with snow. The problem is, it's very hard to figure out where to go when all you've lived is in a city or one state. I've researched a lot of properties on zillow but I have no idea how to investigate the proper area. Maybe someone can give me a tip. I like snow, and I like people, I just want enough space to experiment with my own land…
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Hasn’t exactly been “much to do” in San Francisco over the past year...
I don't think that the experience in the middle of a global pandemic generalizes.
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A lot of people grow up in an Urban environment, I don't really see any disadvantage to it. We get to meet a lot of people and there is always stuff to do. During COVID I am seeing a lot of talk about moving into the countryside with their children, as if their children are sheep which need a lot of open spaces in which to graze. But the will probably get bored and miss their friends, and probably force them to pack…
I raised a child in the middle of a city from age 0-8 and it was great. So much to do! Parks, botanical gardens, playgrounds, museums, swimming pools, fun fares, concerts and so on, all within walking distance or at worst a short bus ride.
Sadly in the US many dense cities have abandoned the things that kids like to do, leaving those who like city things to the suburbs as the best compromise.
I know someone who started a children's museum, when she started the city tried to get her downtown with some nice incentives. She didn't though because there are zero kids who live downtown, and the next ring (in city limits) is either rich no kids, or too poor to afford a to visit. That means everyone who might go is going to drive from the suburbs and so a location with free parking in the suburbs was better able to attract visitors, even though it means half the potential customers will find it too far to drive, the other half will find it more convenient and thus come more often.
I don't know how cities can solve that, but it is a problem repeated in most cities. It didn't used to be that way, cities used to have a lot of people with kids. In general cities have abandoned families as families moved out (you can find lots of people pointing blame as to causes here - I'm not going to speculate), and it will be hard to bring them back. Not all cities have done this as much as others.
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You're seeing negativity because it's getting harder and harder to deny that this "dream" involves the locals getting screwed when tech monopoly money turns their local economy upside down. Sure the guy who had the foresight to start a brewery wins but everyone else loses. You know what the end game of this looks like? It looks like Vail CO, Cape Cod MA, coastal Long Island and CT, the Hamptons, wealthy retirement ar…
Have you lived in any of these places? I grew up in Fairfield County and you seem to greatly exaggerate its dystopian qualities. What's more, industry's flight from the area has nothing to do with folks coming from NYC.
As someone who lived in a small city in the American Mountain West, the boom does have consequences. Sleepy farming towns are becoming endless suburbia, hiking up prices as developers spill over from the Lehi 'Silicon Slopes' area. Midway, for instance, a town on the Wasatch back situated in a location that feels similar to Switzerland, has gone from about 150 diaries to 2, as expanding housing developments buy out t…
> As much as I'd love to work for a FAANG, retire early, and buy a large house in an idyllic mountain town, I'd hate for that same town to loose its historical roots and what makes it that special idyllic mountain town in the first place. It's already arguably happened; fruit orchards and irrigation turns were big part of the milieu in Orem/Provo a few decades back, and they're all but absent now, and in general the…
Though, really, not even that helps because towns can't actually (or really want to in general) arbitrarily prevent outsiders from moving in. So a desirable location just ends up with a different group of people with the money to purchase existing housing.
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Your kids all else equal will be outsprinted by kids who live in more competitive cities. You can decide you don't care about any of that, but understand that type of that decision will ripple through to future generations, e.g. your grandkids will be less educated. The irony is that most educated people living in small towns want to get out, and a generation or two after they do they want to go back. Will the cycle…
> Your kids all else equal will be outsprinted by kids who live in more competitive cities That’s absolute horse shit. And whilst I don’t have any evidence to sprout, I think that those from more diverse and unusual backgrounds are better adapted for modern life. Growing up in a ‘competitive’ city is a licence for blandness (opinions mine)