61–70 of 128 posts
Those types of regulations exist in every city. The problem isn't housing, it's transportation. Without the necessary transit infrastructure, it's pointless to just build buildings. It seems as if it was up to the author of this piece, the Bay Area would look a lot like LA. Please, for the love of all that is good, do not make this place like LA.
As a new landlord in San Francisco, I can tell you that the biggest issue forcing this is rent control. The way rent control works is certainly designed to help those in need but instead it creates a artificial demand for affordable housing. Without rent control, the market is free to compete and suddenly open up a ton of bottled up apartments. The issue is, a family on welfare with a income of 40k a year should not…
The way rent control works is certainly designed to help those in need but instead it creates a artificial demand for affordable housing. I am having trouble wrapping my head around this quote. How could this be? Do you mean supply? There is always more demand for a good at lower prices than higher prices. If you took rent control away poor people would still want to live in nice places and pay low rent.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-274.html http://www.nmhc.org/ResearchReport.cfm?ItemNumber=55262
As a new landlord in San Francisco, I can tell you that the biggest issue forcing this is rent control. The way rent control works is certainly designed to help those in need but instead it creates a artificial demand for affordable housing. Without rent control, the market is free to compete and suddenly open up a ton of bottled up apartments. The issue is, a family on welfare with a income of 40k a year should not…
To put it another way, when someone can't afford food, we provide them food stamps, paid for by our shared tax revenue. We don't make grocery store owners grant them discounts out of pocket.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way rent control works is certainly designed to help those in need but instead it creates a artificial demand for affordable housing. I am having trouble wrapping my head around this quote. How could this be? Do you mean supply? There is always more demand for a good at lower prices than higher prices. If you took rent control away poor people would still want to live in nice places and pay low rent.
From the Wikipedia article on price ceilings: "A price ceiling set below the free-market price has several effects. Suppliers find they can't charge what they had been. As a result, some suppliers drop out of the market. This reduces supply. Meanwhile, consumers find they can now buy the product for less, so quantity demanded increases. These two actions cause quantity demanded to exceed quantity supplied, which caus…
Under the price ceiling there is excess demand relative to the supply. This is a no brainer. But excess demand is not the same thing as an increase in demand. If there is an increase in demand why is the demand curve not shifted to the right? The curve stays in the same place.
The Bay Area is one of the most beautiful places in the world, and if they turn it into another Los Angeles I will cry. This country is phenomenally huge and there is no reason whatsoever to live clustered together in vile, concrete scabs. Compact cities are more efficient, but congested urban sprawl is most definitely not. Strict building regulations are part of what make this place productive and desirable in the f…
I would say that building regulations are precisely what is causing the the area to following an LA-style trajectory. San Francisco is one thing, and reasonably dense. But the huge sprawl of Palo Alto, Mountain View, Santa Clara, Cupertino, Gilroy, Los Gatos, etc., is caused by all these communities wanting to be LA-style suburbs with no dense housing, and enacting laws accordingly.
That's because these areas were unpopulated desert or something which got converted into housing.
By contrast, each of the towns in the Bay Area was a standalone town of its own with its own downtown and rail station etc for a long time. Even today, most Bay Area towns are reasonably mixed wrt residental and business.
All (afaik) new construction for about 10 years has been townhomes, not single-family homes, so I'm not even sure this author is correct wrt housing code.
Just my two cents.
I just moved here from Italy, and it's almost impossible for me to get an apartment that's near public transportation. I mean, other than caltrain there's little if nothing public transportation here, and that may be part of the problem too. I certainly can't rent a house in the hills if there's no way for me to get to work from there. I ended up renting from a colleague.
Agreed with you and MJN. The US is in desperate need of investment in public transportation. Europeans have absolutely mastered the art of urban design and public transportation, and I wish we'd learn from their example. But try telling 99% of the US that 1) their shitty sprawled real estate is effectively worthless, 2) their obese asses will have to give up their cars, and 3) we've spent 70 years of infrastructure i…
Are you ready to go grocery shopping pretty much every single day or every other day? Or can you manage to be at home during a 6-hour window for the grocery delivery if you want to shop once a week for that stuff?
Would you get stressed waiting, at least twice a day (leaving from your floor and returning from the lobby), for elevators in a 30-story building? Remember that people in wheelchairs, kids taking their bikes downstairs to ride, workmen w/materials/tools, people moving house, etc. are all going to be using the elevators.
If you're out somewhere and buy anything (in my case, yesterday, it was a new electric toothbrush) that's not groceries or something large, like an air conditioner, you're going to have to lug it around with you until you go home, even if you have several other stops to make or errands to do. There's no such thing as going to your car and putting something in the trunk until later.
Are you ready for even short trips to take much longer? You'll need to get out of your highrise, walk for some time until you get to the public transport pick-up point (bus stop, train platform, etc.), wait a while, ride the public transport (which usually moves slower than a car even if it weren't making a bunch of other stops between your home and ultimate destination's drop-off point), and then, finally, you'll have to walk some more to reach wherever it was that you wanted to go.
If you already live in a highrise, use public transportation exclusively, and don't own a car, then I'm glad that the experience hasn't soured you on high-density living and public transportation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way rent control works is certainly designed to help those in need but instead it creates a artificial demand for affordable housing. I am having trouble wrapping my head around this quote. How could this be? Do you mean supply? There is always more demand for a good at lower prices than higher prices. If you took rent control away poor people would still want to live in nice places and pay low rent.
Check these articles out for some good points http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-274.html http://www.nmhc.org/ResearchReport.cfm?ItemNumber=55262
Quote from NMHC: NMHC is a national association representing the interests of the larger and most prominent apartment firms in the U.S.
Cato is obviously infinitely more reputable than an industry trade group. But lets face it Cato is not exactly an unbiased source for discussion of government policies.
I just moved here from Italy, and it's almost impossible for me to get an apartment that's near public transportation. I mean, other than caltrain there's little if nothing public transportation here, and that may be part of the problem too. I certainly can't rent a house in the hills if there's no way for me to get to work from there. I ended up renting from a colleague.
Agreed with you and MJN. The US is in desperate need of investment in public transportation. Europeans have absolutely mastered the art of urban design and public transportation, and I wish we'd learn from their example. But try telling 99% of the US that 1) their shitty sprawled real estate is effectively worthless, 2) their obese asses will have to give up their cars, and 3) we've spent 70 years of infrastructure i…
As a new landlord in San Francisco, I can tell you that the biggest issue forcing this is rent control. The way rent control works is certainly designed to help those in need but instead it creates a artificial demand for affordable housing. Without rent control, the market is free to compete and suddenly open up a ton of bottled up apartments. The issue is, a family on welfare with a income of 40k a year should not…
This has nothing to do with rent control. San Francisco is just one part of the Bay Area, and the Bay Area is just one part of California. The entire state has high real estate prices, despite pockets of low-priced housing (Stockton, for example). Law of supply and demand: a lot of people don't want to live in freezing Minneapolis or bleak Detroit. Or Mumbai or Monterrey, for that matter. Rich or poor, they would rat…
It's more complicated than that. Prop 13, cities forcing a lack of density and other polices and forces I don't know about push California to it's sky high rates.
I just moved here from Italy, and it's almost impossible for me to get an apartment that's near public transportation. I mean, other than caltrain there's little if nothing public transportation here, and that may be part of the problem too. I certainly can't rent a house in the hills if there's no way for me to get to work from there. I ended up renting from a colleague.
Agreed with you and MJN. The US is in desperate need of investment in public transportation. Europeans have absolutely mastered the art of urban design and public transportation, and I wish we'd learn from their example. But try telling 99% of the US that 1) their shitty sprawled real estate is effectively worthless, 2) their obese asses will have to give up their cars, and 3) we've spent 70 years of infrastructure i…
The point is that there are good reasons why most Americans with the ability to do so choose to live in areas low enough in density that cars work better than public transportation and that America cannot simply copy Europe's urban planning without also copying some of Europe's laws and attitudes regarding individual liberty. (And laws and attitudes are hard to change.)