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California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

nytimes.com

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Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#141

Post by 8ytecoder »

rayiner wrote: post #102
rhinoceraptor wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding extra lanes to a road just increases the amount of people driving on them, instead of easing traffic. So I would bet the same is true of public transit.

Yes, but it moves more people. Driving doesn’t need to compete with public transit for speed—transit is immensely slower than driving even in places with excellent transit.

This is not universally true. My BART commute is faster than driving. Both office and home are walkable from a train station and the frequency at my station is pretty good.

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#142

Post by Fauntleroy »

riantogo wrote: post #83
christiansakai wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Home ownership generally slows growth for everything else around that area. Every home owner has this "not in my backyard" mentality and will veto any possible developments in their area.

You know why, right?

Yeah, we know why. Maybe a basic necessity like housing shouldn't be treated like the damn stock market.

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#143

Post by bradlys »

neurocline wrote: post #62
spankalee wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show me where any house would be worth 40% of its current nominal value because of nearby building. That's completely unrealistic conjecture.

My current house is apparently worth $2 million. Even with California construction costs, replacing it with a new house would cost less than $350,000. If someone could build a lot of houses nearby, it would drive the price of my house down to something realistic. I’m in favor of lots of construction, because it’s the right thing overall. But it would hit me hard. I’m willing to accept that, so I lobby for new constru…

I doubt your place will drop even 20% even if construction goes up drastically. Until it happens - you can't really say your home price would drop drastically.

Realistically, it won't. The new supply will be apartments - not single family homes. It's not like people will all want to sell and move into apartments or that the desire for homes will go down. It just means competition for apartments will improve.

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#144

Post by bluGill »

quotemstr wrote: post #32
pascalxus wrote: post #22

I completely agree with the sentiment to build more, much more housing. But, in order to make that happen, we also need to: - get rid of or modify zoning laws (at least in places where growth will happen) - reduce regulations on builders - ensure that there are plenty of builders for health competition (so that consumers don't get ripped off) - provide protections for builders from Sue happy NIMBYs (some kind of lega…

Another beneficial change would be repealing proposition 13. Because proposition 13 essentially bans property tax increases for property owners, it creates a perverse incentive to drive property values as high as possible with restrictive zoning. Without proposition 13, property taxes would rise along with the land's economic value, creating an additional incentive for property owners to let the market naturally shif…

Prop 13 also has the perverse incentive that once you are in you should vote for tax increases and high spend policies - you won't have to pay for them.

I'm surprised Republicans have not latch onto this as a reason to repeal it - they already like to point out it is easy to spend other people's money as an argument against socialism.

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#145

Post by dredmorbius »

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #71
xvedejas wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that the roads really support more peak traffic at this point. Rather, we can reduce the traffic and train crowding by building more housing near jobs so that workers need not embark on 50+ mile super-commutes each day. Housing _is_ infrastructure, and it's the piece of infrastructure we're most sorely missing.

Adding extra lanes to a road just increases the amount of people driving on them, instead of easing traffic. So I would bet the same is true of public transit.

Transit doesn't suffer congestion to the extent private autos do, and is centrally managed such that effects can be minimised.

Mind: shared rights-of-way modes (busses, streetcars, LRT) can be impacted by private ve traffic, but contributes little to that itself.

Fixed-track systems (Muni Metro) can have coordination delays if multiple routes join.

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#146

Post by collias »

xamuel wrote: post #99
Lendal wrote: post #93

This story reminds me of when I was a kid and the school bus would come. Often there were no seats because every seat was taken--one kid each. There was plenty of room there, but the kids who got on the bus first would ban together to prevent new kids from sitting. Today these kids have grown up and own homes in the suburbs. New kids need to move in, but the kids who got there first refuse to let them build. That's w…

That analogy isn't exactly accurate. To make it accurate, the kids sitting in the current seats would have to have paid a significant amount to purchase those seats. Also, throw in some kids who, for neurological reasons, become extremely distressed if they're forced to sit next to very loud kids. Because of this, they (or their parents) made a big sacrifice to secure single seats for them at great expense.

You're right, and I feel like this is something that is frequently either downplayed or willfully ignored.

If I live in California where home prices are sky-high, and I've saved up for nearly a decade for a house, why would I be willing to allow legislation that would likely devalue my biggest asset (by far) that I saved and sacrificed so diligently for?

This is a legitimate question, not trying to be a jerk. I'm genuinely curious what the argument against this is.

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#147

Post by erik_seaberg »

caconym_ wrote: post #35
aty268 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what would be a good where increased supply drives up cost? I can't reason any off the top of my head.

Induced demand is a thing. Not sure to what extent it applies to housing in any particular market, but any destabilizing effects of rapidly adding more housing should be seen as artifacts of the fact that we've let this problem go unaddressed for decades. People need places to live, and if we don't serve that need then the problems are only going to get worse and the solutions more disruptive. There are also less vis…

"Induced" demand is a misnomer for latent demand becoming measurable. It's a signal that a change was good but not enough; backpressure is reduced but not yet zero.

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#148

Post by bradlys »

sokoloff wrote: post #124
fortran77 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I own a house in 940xx and am all for more building. It won't bankrupt anyone. If you bought a house you could afford for "x", and you budgeted as if it cost "x", you still have a place to live if you keep paying the mortgage. All your plans remain exactly the same. If the "value" of the house goes down, you'll save on property taxes.

If you scrimped and saved to pull together a 5% down-payment on a "starter house" and new construction nearby takes your home value own by 20%, you're going to be stuck in that starter home for a very, very long time.

Can you really even get a house here on 5% down? I presumed anything over $750k would require 20% down immediately (and there's basically nothing that you'd want to own under $1m here). At least - that's what I got told when I talked to a guy at a bank about it.

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#149

Post by bobbydroptables »

wpasc wrote: post #37
rjkennedy98 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show the stats that Bay Area is building like crazy. I am so sick of people saying things like New York and Bay Area and California are building like crazy. No they are not. There is not one stat that shows that. Period.

I don't think new york should be lumped in with california in that measure. This site shows active construction in new york: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/buildings/html/nyc-active-major-...

It's really hard to wrap your head around whether a city is building a lot by looking at a raw number. But fewer than 7,000 building permits in a city of 8 million is frighteningly little.

You need to compare it to population growth, decades of building backlog, job growth, etc.

Re: California’s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build

#150

Post by manfredo »

thedance wrote: post #106
manfredo wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're putting the cart before the horse. More commuters creates more ticket revenue, which gives BART more resources to expand capacity. They're not going to expand capacity until there's more demand.

BART ridership is currently maxed out in the peak direction at peak hour, and carries triple the design number of passengers. They don’t need to expand, they need to profit from the currently underused directions (eg berkeley to Fremont).

Transit reacts to changes in transportation demand, it doesn't set demand. How do you envision BART would profit from underused directions? Put out ads encouraging people to take these routes for fun?

As I said, pointing out that transit systems are at capacity is not a valid reason to block development. Transit systems always try to operate at capacity because excess capacity means suboptimal allocation of resources. There's no reason to increase capacity until there's demand for that capacity.

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