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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

#121

Post by apparent »

Schiendelman wrote: post #120
apparent wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Supreme Court, nine white guys... ignored that finding when overturning the appellate court decision. Higher courts are allowed to overturn lower courts. That's kind of the whole point of the hierarchy. But regardless, that case was from 100 years ago. Are you saying that the reason people enact zoning laws now is the same? I love living in a suburb and would be equally displeased whether my neighborhood turned…

Of course you would. That's why it sticks around, because you get regulatory capture. It's the same reason we don't let a CEO write the rules for regulating their own company's competition. That's another more modern reason why it is unconstitutional, it just hasn't been challenged.

Perhaps I have a different understanding of "regulatory capture" than you do. To me, it means that the regulators are captured by the entities they are supposed to be regulating. It often happens when the main job prospects for people in an industry are either as regulators or in industry. If an oil company offers jobs to policy maker whose boss gets voted out of Congress, they can "capture" the regulators, who won't want to kill their golden ticket.

I'm unclear how this applies to zoning rules voted on by the people who live in an area. There is not an intermediary "zoning regulator" who is capturing anyone. Similarly, there is not a constituency that is being "captured" inappropriately. It is literally just a group of people deciding how they want to live.

If this is regulatory capture, then so is having laws against automatic weapons and speeding.

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

#122

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

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…

> and reset upon sale of the property

So glad Oregon doesn't do this. We cap property tax growth by 3%/year, and it doesn't reset upon sale.

Resetting upon sale just creates so many problems.

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

#123

Post by Schiendelman »

apparent wrote: post #121
Schiendelman wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you would. That's why it sticks around, because you get regulatory capture. It's the same reason we don't let a CEO write the rules for regulating their own company's competition. That's another more modern reason why it is unconstitutional, it just hasn't been challenged.

Perhaps I have a different understanding of "regulatory capture" than you do. To me, it means that the regulators are captured by the entities they are supposed to be regulating. It often happens when the main job prospects for people in an industry are either as regulators or in industry. If an oil company offers jobs to policy maker whose boss gets voted out of Congress, they can "capture" the regulators, who won't…

The harms potentially caused by shooting someone or hitting them with your car at high speed are not the same as someone building something next to you that you find aesthetically displeasing. Can I ask you to step back and think about the fact that you just made that comparison?

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

#124

Post by pfannkuchen »

dlcarrier wrote: post #76

I've met multiple people who commuted to the peninsula via airplane, because it was much, much cheaper than living there.

I know someone who did that in the 90s to Palo Alto, even though he could have stretched to afford a house there back then. If he had he would be in a much better position today.

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

#125

Post by bombcar »

scoofy wrote: post #110
Schiendelman wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It takes an awful lot of incentives to knock down a "usable" structure. I'd love to build higher-density right here, right on my lot, but unless I squeeze something in on the same lot, I'm out $150k just to start. $150k covers quite a bit of gas to the lot 2 miles away that's empty.

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

#126

Post by bombcar »

apparent wrote: post #87
bombcar wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If SF wants to be New York of the East, let them be so. Everyone else can move literally anywhere else in the country, which is big.

Agree, but I think you mean NYC of the West , not East.

Of course I meant ... East Asia ... it's not that I'm tired enough that I forgot what coast SF is on ...

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

#127

Post by [deleted] »

archagon wrote: post #112
jrowen wrote: post #34

Comparison is the thief of joy. I know plenty of people who live in SF on much lower salaries. Acting like you need AI bucks to survive is out of touch with the reality of the common man. A household that earns nearly 400k talking about "I'm not completely hopeless" is shameful. Take some lessons from people who earn a lot less and are more happy.

Seriously. I live in SF with a combined household income that's far less than that and have a pretty lavish lifestyle, eating out every day and whatnot. What are these people spending their money on? > But she said she saw the strain on friends who were earning below $200,000, for whom rent, utilities and groceries consume nearly everything that comes in. Let's assume $4000/m rent, $200/m utilities, eating out for $3…

[deleted]

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

#128

Post by xnx »

scoofy wrote: post #91
apparent wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should people also be allowed to move into neighborhoods that are zoned as suburban (not so much in SF as in nearby areas), and have them remain that way? I get the libertarian impulse to let people do what they want with their property, but it seems like part of that freedom should be the right to move into areas where there are zoning restrictions.

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…

> Growth has to happen in the long run.

This is not sustainable. The good news is that, due to demographic shifts, we might have a glut of housing in 20 years.

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

#130

Post by pandaman »

Volundr wrote: post #90
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…

> We've conflated having a home with a financial asset. And it's a really, really shitty one. My house has roughly doubled in value since I bought it, but in practice that's useless to me. I can't claim that value without rendering myself homeless. If anything it reduces my mobility by making it harder to move, since I really need to coordinate the sale of my current home with buying the new one to help absorb that $…

> I can't claim that value without rendering myself homeless.

Are you using some peculiar definition of "homeless" as someone who does not own real estate, like in Elon Musk had been homeless when he sold his California houses?

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