141–150 of 1001 posts
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> The majority of it is not Bel Air... Menlo Park was never a "middle class" town. The 101 was always the (literal) redline. The median household income is $210K [0] and it's the same demographic, unlike historically lower middle class but now upper middle class San Mateo [1]. A Menlo Park home address that is on the correct side of the 101 opens the same doors in the Bay that a Bel Air address does in Los Angeles or…
Which side is the rich side?
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We could but it’s not always just “good” to make things dense. My hometown has had a huge push to add more housing to make things more affordable. What happened? Rents went down for a couple years then right back up. Except now the city has a bunch of more soulless condos and is horribly congested. Sometimes preserving things and keeping them nice and simple even if it’s costs a bit of a premium is better.
Rents went down for a couple years then right back up. Except now the city has a bunch of more soulless condos and is horribly congested. So there were a bunch of people who wanted to live there and now can.
So glad we don't need to re-write the first chapter of almost every economics 101 textbook!
There's loads of other inefficiencies as well. Moving is a huge hurdle. It's difficult to find housing that meets dozens of conditions, and even then you don't respond to supply + demand imagined equilibrium, you pay more or pay less to live near friends or family. It's something you only do a handful of times in your whole life. Trying to use the same analysis as for buying a can of beans is absurd. You might need t…
Maybe if you flood the market with 30% more housing units like Austin you get the Econ 101 effect. On the other hand, apartment owners realized intentional vacancy is a profitable strategy, which alone seems to defy that basic interpretation.
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Well, in Menlo Park they're just flat surface parking lots, not even multi-story structures. The planned development is multi-story housing with parking underneath. To be fair, I am boycotting the (similar) underground garage over at Springline because they're clearly made only for people in Range Rovers or whatever. They have those AWFUL ticket machines, set too far back (to avoid getting hit) and too high to access…
Is the Bay Area really dealing with ticket machines? The global capital of technology? Just bill by plate or something.
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Unfortunately, there's a lot of people -- especially further left -- who fight this kind of reasoning. They insist that the housing market is different , and that just building more private housing won't help. No amount of evidence will convince these people, because they already made up their mind ahead of time: their ideology says the market can't help, so the market can't help, period. Any evidence to the contrary…
Their core argument is that we could increase supply but choose not to, and that we should be maximizing supply (as an ethical and moral mandate, but that is not a tenant of capitalism really) because housing is an essential thing like food and water. FWIW we don't maximize food/water production either for various reasons, which would also drive food/water prices down. Maximizing supply can mean other things than bui…
We kinda do, through farm subsidies.
I'll admit ignorance here, but I've been skeptical of the claim that new construction drives rents down. What I actually see is: a luxury apartment building goes up, surveys the market, and sets its rents 30% higher for the privilege of living in a new building with a gym for dogs or ball pit or whatever. Then the older buildings say, "Well, we can raise our rents 20% and still be the best deal in town," and so on. M…
I think that might not be the right cause and effect relationship. The actual cause is increased demand. This creates both the increased pricing of existing stock and an incentive to build new stock.
I'll admit ignorance here, but I've been skeptical of the claim that new construction drives rents down. What I actually see is: a luxury apartment building goes up, surveys the market, and sets its rents 30% higher for the privilege of living in a new building with a gym for dogs or ball pit or whatever. Then the older buildings say, "Well, we can raise our rents 20% and still be the best deal in town," and so on. M…
They can only get away with that when there is a housing shortage.