411–420 of 622 posts
Part of this is tying property taxes to real property values (yes I know SF's hands are bound by CA law and prop 13 in particular). These days I live in NZ here rates (the local name for our property tax equivalent) are determined by relative property values. Effectively the City decides it needs to raise $N this year - your property tax will be the fraction of this determined by the value of your land divided by the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Housing can be affordable while going up in nominal terms. Housing cannot be affordable if it goes up in real terms though. In an ideal world house prices would increase 1:1 with wage growth from an affordable baseline. There are 2 ways to fix it: either crash the market or introduce policies which will cause either stagnation or below inflation growth in housing prices for at least 20 or 30 years.
> In an ideal world house prices would increase 1:1 with wage growth from an affordable baseline. There's only one way to do that - a command economy, with all housing owned and doled out by the government. That just doesn't work, anywhere, ever. You have to work very hard to ignore the fact that some places are more desirable than others to live in, and sometimes those desirable places change. Also, different people…
The city officials are asleep at the wheel. Blame it on remote work and pandemic as much as you want, but the reality is that the city was in decline even before that. It is too expensive to live in the city. It is too expensive to commute to the city. It is too expensive to feed yourself in the city. Crime is rampant. Drug use and filth is everywhere. Most importantly city has been hostile to tech and business owner…
Drug use isn't associated with crime and filth until we make it so via harsh city policies. I would, however, like someone to clean the 4 different instances of poop I saw on my 3 block walk this morning.
It absolutely is. The more addictive and mind altering a drug is, the more it contributes to users who contribute to crime and filth. Forget drugs, even high alcohol consumption is directly related to more crime and filth.
This is a labour union issue and not a prop 13 or even a NIMBY issue. https://sfstandard.com/housing-development/labor-unions-have... Those commenting here don’t understand how labour unions in CA have the Senate and Assembly by the balls. As long as the public keeps focusing on imaginary enemies amongst themselves and we keep lobbing ‘prop 13’and ‘nimby’ balls at each other, we lose. Nobody here on HN is going to be…
> is meant for affordable housing and to move vote banks from other counties We have this in New York. It's far from as cancerous as the situation in California. When Marc Andreessen is talking about building housing in California while screaming about it in his backyard, you have the poster child for the problem [1]. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-18/atherton-...
We just have to build another city with great infrastructure and network it to other cities when we have an influx of population due to jobs or organic population growth.
It’s like how they say.. When there is a surfeit of sardines, we buy more cans to fill..we don’t not overstuff the same limited number of already overstuffed sardines to deal with the abundance. Our schools, our public transport, our roads, our hospitals, our basic facilities are all over stretched because we keep stuffing the same cities with more and more people.
In America, everyone deserves to live in sustainable housing. And high density isn’t sustainable. It is a cope when resources are limited and population surges. The demand for high density in the Bay Area is artificial and politically motivated. This will implode. Time will tell that I am right.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but I don't think SF is an exception here. The whole Bay Area is a NIMBY nest that looks frozen in time with infrastructure similar to what was in Europe in the 1950s. That's how my SF neighbor pays 30x less property tax than I do though, so there's that. Too much local democracy: "I don't want someone in Sacramento deciding for me" is how you end up with this expression of pure individualism, where Atherton res…
> The whole Bay Area is a NIMBY nest The whole every urban area of North America is a NIMBY nest. Pretty much every city is stuck with swathes of land zoned only for single family homes, with any density needing development agreements and land use change hearings and etc. Some cities are less geographically constrained (more sprawl is possible) or slower growing (the zoning changes can accommodate the growth) but the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> is meant for affordable housing and to move vote banks from other counties We have this in New York. It's far from as cancerous as the situation in California. When Marc Andreessen is talking about building housing in California while screaming about it in his backyard, you have the poster child for the problem [1]. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-18/atherton-...
Cities should have capped populations for efficiency. There has to be high income, medium income and low income housing ratio to have a balanced and economically diverse population. We just have to build another city with great infrastructure and network it to other cities when we have an influx of population due to jobs or organic population growth. It’s like how they say.. When there is a surfeit of sardines, we bu…
On almost every measure, high-density housing is less energy and resource intensive.
> cities should have capped populations for efficiency
This is rationing. China is trying it. Agglomeration effects are real, so this will always turn into a political exercise around allocating people to more and less desirable places, and thereby pruning their opportunity set.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Drug prohibition clearly leads to crime. Drug users would rather use drugs than commit crimes, but paying for a drug habit when drugs are expensive and you have a hard time holding down a 9-5 job (usually due to mental illness) forces people to do things they don't want to do. Ending prohibition and diverting some resources from police to mental health and preventative services is just a sensible thing to do.
Ending prohibition would, at best, depress prices and increase use. You don't need to legalize the use or sale of methamphetamine or fentanyl or crack to offer more mental health and preventative services.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Housing is an investment that should only go up in price" will eventually kill any market It doesn't have to. Housing can be affordable while going up in nominal terms. Neither do I think most San Francisco homeowners think about housing supply strategically. They're pissed off about a specific view being blocked. Or construction noise. Or their area's average rent going up. (?!?) Alternatively, they're comfortabl…
> Housing can be affordable while going up in nominal terms. Housing cannot be affordable if it goes up in real terms though. In an ideal world house prices would increase 1:1 with wage growth from an affordable baseline. There are 2 ways to fix it: either crash the market or introduce policies which will cause either stagnation or below inflation growth in housing prices for at least 20 or 30 years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This theory falls down when you look at murders. They're down with all the others on that link, and they're highly unlikely to go unreported.
Being murdered isn't what most ordinary citizens (and voters) are worried about. There is no reason to think that murder and arson rates are correlated to everyday property crime rates. Put another way, the guy stealing your catalytic converter isn't doing it because he's afraid to kill you or burn your house down. He's doing it because he has every reasonable expectation of getting away with it and getting paid for…
Catalytic converter thefts are up everywhere, though. Not just in liberal bastions, but in places like Arkansas and Mississippi, too.
Cops saying "if you just gave us more money and toys, we'd stop crime" is a claim that should come with significant evidence to accept.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cities need social services to work, because of the density of people. It is a problem when my neighbour is crazy and screams for 18h a day when we live on top of each other in a city. It isn't when we live in the middle of no where and are separated by 50miles. Only America is specifically designed to prevent any sort of social services, because people have the freedom to come into town to use those services and the…
Cities already make visitors pay. First there is usually a higher sales tax. Furthermore, many cities have additional taxes on lodging and entertainment. These taxes are quite substantial. Furthermore look at decaying cities in the 70s. The cities weren't subsidizing surrounding areas by providing services. Instead, many businesses and services straight moved out of cities to surrounding areas. So did many people. It…