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To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

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Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#141

Post by alangpierce »

refurb wrote: post #115
alangpierce wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people I know in San Francisco don't own cars and certainly don't make use of freeways as part of their commute. With high-density cities and good public transit, you really have much less need for cars. Also, given that cars are inherently dangerous, cause environmental harm, and take up a lot of space, it seems like it's in the public interest to discourage car ownership/use.

Most people I know in San Francisco don't own cars You must not know a big cross section of people then. Maybe in the downtown core, but a trip across the city will show very little available street parking and most houses with garages filled with cars. It's a small minority of the city that don't have cars.

Yeah, I certainly don't claim that the people I interact with are representative of San Francisco as a whole. From some article I found from a few years ago[1], the vast majority of new residents don't have cars, but overall about 30% of total residents don't have cars. Most of my coworkers don't live downtown, and they get to work using BART, Muni, bus, or bike. When they need to get somewhere not on public transit, they use Lyft or Uber. In both of the two places I've lived in SF so far, I roomed with two other people, and none of us wanted the parking space, so we rented it out to someone else.

My point is that in many cases, there exists a reasonable city design and style of living where car ownership feels unnecessary and is better seen as a luxury than a right. Certainly there are many situations where car ownership makes sense, but I worry that people are sometimes too attached to the idea of car ownership and either incorrectly view it as a necessity or assume that everyone else needs a car as well.

[1] https://sf.streetsblog.org/2014/08/15/car-free-households-ar...

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#142

Post by irq11 »

eecsninja wrote: post #94

Let's not forget this article from a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501 The great irony is that there are plenty of people in the SF bay area who think Tokyo is more expensive than SF just like it was decades ago, even though it's not true anymore.

Tokyo is still very expensive relative to Japanese incomes. Is it more expensive than SF on an adjusted basis? Hard to say, but it’s not as clear as you’re asserting.

If anything, magacities like Tokyo and London show us that you can build like crazy, and still end up a very expensive place to live.

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#143

Post by alexhutcheson »

weeksie wrote: post #38

Just a reminder that the growth rates for SF, SV, Seattle, Portland are all pretty puny compared to the growth rates of, e.g. Detroit at its peak. Hell they're not even that crazy compared to growth rates those cities have handled before. People just aren't interested in any perceived threat to their property values so they're strangling growth based on an entitlement mindset. No, sirs and ma'ams, your home's price a…

I think it's also clear that Detroit is not a growth model you'd want to emulate. With the benefit of hindsight, it's clear that Detroit ended up with way too much low-productivity infrastructure that the current residents of the area can't afford to maintain.

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#144

Post by plussed_reader »

ajross wrote: post #67
charlesdm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who could have guessed, policy makers that serve the hand that feeds them?

Actually no, or not the way you mean. This is a legitimate moral trap: the "policy" at hand is construction permitting and land zoning, and those are almost exclusively local laws and regulations set at the city and county level. Those governments, by design, serve the interests of their local citizens. That is, the population they serve is inherently skewed toward existing property owners. You can't fix this by comp…

Funny you should mention Palo Alto, but here is a direct example of the effects of SB35 wrenching control in just the manner you described:

The Law: https://therealdeal.com/la/2017/10/05/will-new-california-la...

The Effect: https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/04/02/community-reacts-to-d...

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#145

Post by 762236 »

pascalxus wrote: post #92

I know we'd all love to fix the bay area housing problem here. The most obvious answer is to increase the supply. But, fixing the zoning laws and allowing developers to build isn't the only thing that's standing in the way. The problems are too numerous to fix: NIMBYs sueing developers, CEQA, Proposition 13, AND don't forget about the underlying labor cost (all our middle class people's aren't going to come back, aft…

For another city to be a plausible substitute for Silicon Valley, it needs California's moonlighting-protection law. Without that, you can't reproduce this environment.

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#146

Post by CountSessine »

weeksie wrote: post #84
marcell wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, sirs and ma'ams, your home's price appreciation isn't a right Doesn't increased density help property values? If I can build a high rise on your 1 acre plot of land, its value should go up.

Depends! Increased density should drive up the price of land. However, if you are in a neighborhood of single family homes and a huge multi family building is constructed on your block, your home price will go down because there will be enough supply to meet demand, taking pressure off the single family homes. If you are in an already dense city and regulations are relaxed so that more high rises can be built in more…

a huge multi family building is constructed on your block

which is why NIMBYs should at least be in favor of gentle density - duplexes and triplexes, small walk-ups, etc. But they fight those like the end-of-days too.

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#148

Post by makomk »

kyledrake wrote: post #62
epistasis wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that it's a California wide problem, though I think the cause is slightly different in different parts of the state. What do you mean by: > The bigger government is the first one messing up housing. Do you mean that State policies are the ones messing up housing? I think that Prop 13 and CEQA get named sometimes for stopping housing development, but a far bigger hurdle are the local zoning policies, and the v…

Seconded opinion for strong regional government with zoning control. If the property owner fiefdoms aren't going to address the problem, it's time to take solving that problem away from them. To give an example of how bad this is, the city of Atherton has sued Caltrain 7 times over the electrification project, the latest one related to (wait for it..) the use of 5 45 foot poles instead of 10 35 foot ones. https://www…

Wait, the fact that local residents can't even use the big ugly mass transit line going through their neighbourhood is meant to make them somehow more sympathetic to it?

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#149

Post by conanbatt »

chroem- wrote: post #119

The housing crisis is fundamentally a transportation problem. The bay area has intentionally made it impractical to own a car, so everyone is forced seek housing within walking distance of a limited number of public transit lines. The "war on sprawl" and lack of affordable housing are two sides of the same coin.

More investment into transportation will accelerate the demise of san francisco.

It can only be funded by higher sales taxes that workers pay, that end up rising the value of land and thus rent. It falls doubly on workers and renters.

Re: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

#150

Post by matte_black »

sampo wrote: post #25

Just quoting the last paragraph. This is the kind of honesty people need. > Intellectual honesty requires taking numbers seriously. Either we prioritize making the Bay Area affordable for all of us or we don’t. The less housing we build, the more wealth will be trapped in high housing prices. Unless we decide to grow our housing stock to accommodate our economy, we are continuing to choose the interests of those who…

At what point though can we declare the choice has been made and just lean in to whatever conclusion has been decided?

It seems like we’re always stuck in an indecisive state of choosing between the interests of the wealthy and the interests of the struggling, and we can never get out unless we make the “right” choice (which is always implied to be the interests of the struggling)

Maybe the choice has already been made, and people just don’t like the outcome. What then? Barring a massive catastrophe or economic downturn I don’t see the Bay Area housing problem getting better in my lifetime.

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