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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

#201

Post by s73v3r_ »

epistasis wrote: post #11
coding123 wrote: post #3

And the freeways can support this how?

We really need to stop assuming that people are going to make heavy freeway use, and permit more scalable transit. Run BART the short way between SF and SJ, build many clusters of high density along heavy transit routes. Let the current freeway dependent population continue to use them, but build housing so that people can get to jobs without using single-occupancy passenger cars.

"We really need to stop assuming that people are going to make heavy freeway use, and permit more scalable transit."

I don't think we can stop that assumption until we have much better public transit. Cause if the trains aren't running where I need to go, when I need to get there, I have to drive.

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

#204

Post by zkms »

rubicon33 wrote: post #130
m0llusk wrote: post #79

What is often missing from this discussion is financialization of housing markets. As long as housing units are chips for a game among banks and wealthy patrons it is not clear we will be able to build enough homes to satiate artificially inflated demand.

This. This. This. This. This. Absent from the vast majority of these threads is the critical component in this "crisis": Property can be purchased and held onto for purely speculative purposes, thereby draining the inventory pool, and raising the cost of housing for residents of the city. This has been happening in the bay area for a very long time. Wealthy Chinese investors who do not LIVE in the bay area, have purc…

> But what we also need is to immediately disallow the purchase of land by foreign entities that is not used for habitation.

Why limit that to just foreign entities? Also that's trivially bypassable, just get someone to live in the house; it's used for habitation now.

But frankly ending CEQA and capricious zoning boards (and all the other legal authorities/mechanisms that NIMBYs use to delay/obstruct housing) is a far more robust method of killing off this sort of speculative purchasing, since the only reason all this speculative purchasing happens is because there's a gross undersupply of housing and thus prices are guaranteed to increase at staggering rates.

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

#205

Post by davidw »

epistasis wrote: post #42
rb808 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If density increases the people who will benefit the most are current landowners. If you have single family home on a big lot, its value will go up many times if you can suddenly build an apartment building on it.

Yes, in the short term, there are two things that happen: 1) land values go up, 2) housing costs go down. The first may benefit current land owners a lot, but the second is absolutely essential for lower incomes to succeed at all. This is not a zero-sum move, and is fact hugely beneficial to everyone. When there's fixed housing supply, that's when things are closer to a zero-sum economic game.

"Density is how those with less money compete with the rich for expensive land"

http://marketurbanism.com/2018/02/05/density-working-poor-ou...

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

#206

Post by eitally »

alonmower wrote: post #131
Moseman23 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The bay area has forever lost it's ability to produce cost effective housing." Strong statement, if slightly ungrammatical. I think this is a challenge to visionary thinkers and leaders to change the game. Engineering is one part, as is regulatory capture and regressive real estate laws and norms, weak state government in the state, and highly atrophied political participation. What could change that? I can think of…

Ya, as a current renter I've wondered what a giant earthquake would do to housing prices. On the one hand, lots of people lose their investments and are forced to sell their land or take out loans to rebuild. You might be able to buy land or a damaged property for a good deal. Contractors would all be completely overbooked and the price to rebuild would likely be quite high for some time. Some who have never experien…

Contractors are already overbooked. It's nearly impossible to find GCs willing to work on residential projects valued at less than $100k.

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

#207

Post by Cerium »

flanbiscuit wrote: post #184
gojomo wrote: post #106

News from 2029: Skylynr, the 'Uber of nanoassembled highrises', last night replaced 44 San Francisco Victorians with apartment buildings. Reached for comment, SF's Planning Department said the overnight construction violates a city moratorium, to study displacement issues, now in its 14th year. The Board of Supervisors plans to address the issue in an emergency session next Tuesday. A Skylynr spokesperson says over 4…

I believe William Gibson described something similar to the self-building towers in his book Idoru[1]. I think they were called nanotech buildings[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idoru [2] http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=83

Additionally Neal Stephenson describes vertically extruded nanotech buildings in "The Diamond Age".

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

#208

Post by api »

ScottBurson wrote: post #192
briandear wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A total repeal of Prop 13.

A complete repeal is politically impossible, but there are two changes that should be made. One, as mentioned above, is to restrict it to owner-occupied residences only. The other is to change the 2% annual increase limit from a limit on the amount of tax assessed to a limit on the amount due in a given year. If the assessed tax exceeds that limit, the locality would receive a lien for the difference, this lien becom…

Personally I think we should just go for the first one, which is why I didn't mention anything else. Proposition 13 limits should be for owner occupied residences only. This would go a long way to fixing the financialization of real estate problem, which is an often under-discussed contributing factor.

You'd get a lot less resistance there. You're not messing with cost of living for owner occupied homes, just second properties, investment properties, and of course all those foreign cash buyers using our real estate as a money laundering vehicle.

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

#209

Post by raldi »

wahern wrote: post #98
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…

High-rise construction is expensive, but high-rises aren't necessary for density. Wood-built low- and mid-rise is far more cost efficient, especially when you don't require 1-2 parking spaces per unit. The reason why we get too many high-rises and too few low-rises is because of regulatory burden. In particular, the long, drawn-out, and capricious manner in which the laws are administered and challenged. In that kind…

Indeed. I wrote about this a few years ago: http://tinyurl.com/6storySF

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

#210

Post by raldi »

swebs wrote: post #174
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…

Also: It's literally on top of a fault line, most of the land is unsuitable for skyscrapers due to soil liquefaction during an earthquake, 80% of the area surrounding downtown is water >I'm sorry to say it, its time to bail out. We need to start lobbying software companies to get the heck out of the bay area Agreed. SF is just a bad location to build a large city.

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