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In San Francisco, even $180k tech salaries are no longer enough

nytimes.com

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Re: In San Francisco, even $180k tech salaries are no longer enough

#101

Post by scoofy »

Schiendelman wrote: post #99
scoofy wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but not forever!!! Growth has to happen in the long run. We have the same zoning as we did before the people looking for housing were born . We can have incremental changes, or we can have sudden change. It's going to happen predictably or with a ton of political conflict. The better solution is always to allow a self-reinforcing pressure release on housing. I've long said that everyone should be allow, by right…

If you make it slow, you cause the same issues - and then the neighborhood just says "well if it's FOUR generations that's not too bad, is it?" And because the people who don't get to move in later don't get a say... it gets worse forever. It's insidious, but as long as you allow people to regulate how much housing their neighbors can produce, it always gets this bad eventually.

It’s self reinforcing. When demand is highest, building will be highest, and median unit size will increase more rapidly, allowing more building, allowing more units.

The pace is limited, but the URBAN output increases exponentially, which is exactly what we want.

Re: In San Francisco, even $180k tech salaries are no longer enough

#103

Post by Schiendelman »

apparent wrote: post #100
Schiendelman wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoning should always have been unconstitutional, and the court case enabling it proved that. The Supreme Court upheld it a hundred years ago, in 1926, after batting down previous efforts by the same people to explicitly ban black people from neighborhoods. They realized that since black families couldn't afford houses by themselves (they needed to buy houses with two or three families together), they could get around…

What part of the Constitution is violated by zoning laws? I have heard of laws that prevent the construction of structures that shade other properties (skyscrapers) or block views of the ocean. If those are apparently legal, why not a law that says you can't build a big apartment complex that would greatly increase traffic, for example?

See the Village of Euclid v Ambler Realty case, which is what I'm referencing in my long comment. A federal appeals court found that those restrictions were racially motivated and cause racial segregation, which is unconstitutional (and we've studied this to death since to confirm it). The Supreme Court, nine white guys... ignored that finding when overturning the appellate court decision.

Re: In San Francisco, even $180k tech salaries are no longer enough

#105

Post by littlexsparkee »

crooked-v wrote: post #60
orangecat wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's a surprisingly resilient alliance of NIMBY homeowners who understand supply and demand, and "anti-gentification" types who don't.

If it was just self-interest from those homeowners, they would welcome densification because that would make land values skyrocket. You can see some of that already in areas under the recent round of city zoning changes, where housing prices shot up significantly in potentially upzonable areas the second the new law was passed, even with zero actual practical changes so far. To me it feels much more like just a signi…

Rent control is another potent disincentive for change, probably due to fears of OMI/Ellis Act or other downstream effects.

Re: In San Francisco, even $180k tech salaries are no longer enough

#106

Post by Balgair »

d4ng wrote: post #89
Balgair wrote: post #83

Prop 13 y'all https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13 Any discussion of the cost of housing in CA has to include this. Want to know why the property market there is so distorted? It's Prop 13. TLDR: Property taxes only increase 2%/yr (sorta, its complicated) and reset upon sale of the property. So current owners are highly incentivized to stay in place and not move. Supply is held down, so prices…

Maybe trade volume is held down, but why would supply be held down? Surely if someone sells, they buy/rent elsewhere in quick succession?

The house they would be buying would come with a much higher tax bill.

Personal anecdata: My folks bought their house for ~70k, it is now worth ~1.5M. The taxes are about 600/year for them, they have no mortgage, paid off decades ago. If they were to try to buy their house again, it would be ~8k/mo just in taxes and mortgage. Moving out of the metro isn't an option as no medical services really exist outside of metros in CA anymore. Same for many other services.

Many older homeowners in CA cannot afford to live there anymore, essentially. They are in a gap/trap.

Yes, you could revoke Prop 13 and let things adjust, but even incremental steps would cause wild swings in property values as the market readjusted, likely causing knock on economic effects in the whole US economy.

Re: In San Francisco, even $180k tech salaries are no longer enough

#107

Post by tqi »

TSiege wrote: post #2

Everyone I know is griping about the cost of living. There is no easy answer, but the only viable solution is building a lot more dense housing and public transit for said urbanism. Housing being this expensive is a choice. The economy and our society would be much healthier if we decided making sure there was ample housing in high demand areas. We've conflated having a home with a financial asset. We can't have plen…

It's frustrating to see the NYT frame this as an AI vs everyone else story, pitting incumbent renters against newcomers, while landlords literally extract rent.

Re: In San Francisco, even $180k tech salaries are no longer enough

#108

Post by littlexsparkee »

apparent wrote: post #73

> “I thought when I’d make $200k I would be able to basically not worry about money at all,” she said, adding that she and her friends stopped going out to restaurants last year and shifted to potlucks and reality-TV nights. $200k is a lot of money, but I'm glad that when I started making money like that I continued to live my prior life for several years. The savings accumulated during that period has had a huge imp…

They don't have an infinite budget, how could they stop worrying about money? You can pick a few categories to splurge on but demands are unlimited and you could blow through many multiples of that before you run out of thing to buy. My focus when making a similar salary was adding to retirement/savings and giving myself more optionality. What would they do without savings if their job (field for that matter) went away? Any spending above my baseline went towards health (cooking ingredients, kitchen appliances and cookware, bike).

Re: In San Francisco, even $180k tech salaries are no longer enough

#109

Post by Schiendelman »

scoofy wrote: post #101
Schiendelman wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you make it slow, you cause the same issues - and then the neighborhood just says "well if it's FOUR generations that's not too bad, is it?" And because the people who don't get to move in later don't get a say... it gets worse forever. It's insidious, but as long as you allow people to regulate how much housing their neighbors can produce, it always gets this bad eventually.

It’s self reinforcing. When demand is highest, building will be highest, and median unit size will increase more rapidly, allowing more building, allowing more units. The pace is limited, but the URBAN output increases exponentially, which is exactly what we want.

I wish it worked that way, but from my nearly 20 years of urban land use policy study and writing, I have seen tons of evidence that it does not.

The problem is that the most in demand areas get new buildings at 4-6 stories, and then you get locked up - the airspace above them becomes unavailable for 50-100 years, when there was market demand for some taller buildings from the beginning. It's the same "push down and spread out" that causes sprawl, just more localized.

Re: In San Francisco, even $180k tech salaries are no longer enough

#110

Post by scoofy »

Schiendelman wrote: post #109
scoofy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s self reinforcing. When demand is highest, building will be highest, and median unit size will increase more rapidly, allowing more building, allowing more units. The pace is limited, but the URBAN output increases exponentially, which is exactly what we want.

I wish it worked that way, but from my nearly 20 years of urban land use policy study and writing, I have seen tons of evidence that it does not. The problem is that the most in demand areas get new buildings at 4-6 stories, and then you get locked up - the airspace above them becomes unavailable for 50-100 years, when there was market demand for some taller buildings from the beginning. It's the same "push down and…

I mean, yes, when the incentives are the literal opposite of this policy, the the outcomes will be the literal opposite of what we want.

People respond to incentives.

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