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The answer to California's housing crisis is more housing

nytimes.com

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Re: The answer to California's housing crisis is more housing

#141

Post by jogjayr »

maxxxxx wrote: post #76
jogjayr wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There should be incentives for companies to move away from places like SV and NY. There are already tons of incentives and tax breaks like this for companies. Just for a recent example, see Amazon HQ2. Companies also have the added incentive of lower labor costs. It's clearly not enough yet.

"Just for a recent example, see Amazon HQ2." That's a good example actually. It's hard to understand that NYC was offering subsidies to Amazon. NYC doesn't really need more people or more companies.

I meant more in the sense that practically every town and city in North America was throwing tax breaks and incentives at Amazon to land HQ2.

Re: The answer to California's housing crisis is more housing

#142

Post by AnthonyMouse »

taysic wrote: post #132
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The base of the land value tax is the value of the land though. If the land is in the middle of a high population density area then the land is worth more and it generates more tax revenue. The difference between this and property tax is that if you have a 12 story building on one piece of land and a 2 story building on the adjacent one, otherwise identical piece of land, they both pay the same tax, giving the second…

And then what when everything has become skyscrapers? I think it’s perfectly ok that not everyplace wants this end result.

You only do this in the places where you want everything to become skyscrapers. There is no real need for it in Des Monies or other places that already have reasonable housing costs.

Re: The answer to California's housing crisis is more housing

#143

Post by imtringued »

taysic wrote: post #132
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The base of the land value tax is the value of the land though. If the land is in the middle of a high population density area then the land is worth more and it generates more tax revenue. The difference between this and property tax is that if you have a 12 story building on one piece of land and a 2 story building on the adjacent one, otherwise identical piece of land, they both pay the same tax, giving the second…

And then what when everything has become skyscrapers? I think it’s perfectly ok that not everyplace wants this end result.

This is how the problem started in the first place.

Re: The answer to California's housing crisis is more housing

#144

Post by imtringued »

maxxxxx wrote: post #58

I think there should be a national effort to "spread out" the economy and fight the trend towards centralization in a few areas. If you build more housing in CA, even more people will move there and the overcrowding will become even worse. There should be incentives for companies to move away from places like SV and NY. More acceptance of remote work would help too but I wouldn't hold my breath for it.

Tech companies and rich investors don't take much space and you would be hard pressed to find homeowners who would go against their interest and prevent these potential homebuyers to move into the area.

Re: The answer to California's housing crisis is more housing

#145

Post by imtringued »

snidane wrote: post #104
maxxxxx wrote: post #58

I think there should be a national effort to "spread out" the economy and fight the trend towards centralization in a few areas. If you build more housing in CA, even more people will move there and the overcrowding will become even worse. There should be incentives for companies to move away from places like SV and NY. More acceptance of remote work would help too but I wouldn't hold my breath for it.

This is an instance of Jevon's paradox. The more housing you build to meet housing need of people then even more people will come in creating even larger demand for housing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Jevons paradox is a nice example of bikeshedding. It doesn't change the decision making process at all because it looks like this:

supply demand > supply: build less housing

If demand grows faster than supply then it just means that you need to build more housing.

And let's be honest in a world with massive amounts of liquid capital but nothing worthwhile to invest into an infinite money sink that keeps increasing ROI the more you spend on it is actually almost magical and you know what? It's impossible in a world with physical constraints. You just haven't reached them yet.

Re: The answer to California's housing crisis is more housing

#146

Post by imtringued »

epmatsw wrote: post #2

> because developers mostly would build high-end units This is such a frustrating perspective.

Serving the customers who can pay the most first is pretty much what happens in almost every industry but for some magical reason housing is "special". It's probably just that they have let their "customers" wait so much there is now a massive backlog of hundreds of thousands of them and in the current political climate it will take decade to serve all of them.

Re: The answer to California's housing crisis is more housing

#147

Post by imtringued »

ip26 wrote: post #139
dragonwriter wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ok so what you want is subsidized luxury apartments. The main thing that makes an apartment luxury is location and being new; new construction in the Bay Area (except maybe an isolated single unit or small development in a particularly blighted area) is luxury inherently. The only thing that's not is old units, and you can't ramp up the supply of old housing units easily (about the closest is you could do a minimal…

new construction in the Bay Area is luxury inherently The very state of newness is in itself luxury? That's a pretty damning assessment.

Well it is. Leasing a new car is more expensive than buying a used one. But that's not an argument against manufacturing more cars.

Re: The answer to California's housing crisis is more housing

#148

Post by imtringued »

ip26 wrote: post #140
80mph wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not too long ago during the Camp/Paradise fires, just about everyone in northern CA was breathing a toxic cloud of burnt drywall, cars, chemicals, etc. for over a week. Think of the millions of gallons of water wasted, flame retardants dumped, and carbon emissions created. Californians need to live in denser construction near jobs. No more sprawling, low-level construction where fires can easily spread and jump from…

Californians need to live in denser construction near jobs. No more sprawling, low-level construction where fires can easily spread and jump from one building to the next. I don't necessarily disagree with your conclusion, but you don't exactly solve the problem of fire propagation from house to house by putting everyone all into one building. A given suburban house might propagate and burn down. But if a 500 unit ap…

Denser construction is generally more resistant against fires.

Re: The answer to California's housing crisis is more housing

#149

Post by imtringued »

DataWorker wrote: post #18

California has a ‘too many people problem’. Housing is less critical than transportation, infrastructure, fire safety, jobs for all demographic groups (as opposed to tech jobs for well born young white men), and so on. Building housing is like giving candy to calm a child’s tantrum.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19771824

Re: The answer to California's housing crisis is more housing

#150

Post by MagicPropmaker »

friedman23 wrote: post #118
robertAngst wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone explain how/why California has failed government policy? And why more government involvement in sectors would be a good thing? I understand the benefits of central planning, but when I see it fail locally, I wonder if the flaws outweigh benefits.

>Can someone explain how/why California has failed government policy? The proposition system. People in California voted for laws that were in their interest without taking into account (or not caring about) the 2nd or 3rd order effects of the policy. The result is that existing property owners are reaping massive sums of money while the rest are struggling to make ends meet.

This is part of it, the other part is there are too many local governments with the ability to zone! There are so many "Cities" in California. Sunnyvale is a city, Cupertino is a City, Santa Clara is a city (in the county of Santa Clara). Each one gets to zone.
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